> We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.
I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.
For a while, I worked for a physicist who resembled Feynman in many of his beliefs and behaviors. He once told me about how he changed his writing style over time. In his early papers, he would cite poorly understood theories while assuming that the reader understood them. At that time, he was exhibiting "academic arrogance" and basically looking down upon anybody who could not understand his work. After teaching for a while, he changed his style to use well-understood terms and theories. He had realized that his papers would be more valuable if more people understood them.
We are still in touch, and have learned much from each other.
1. In academia, you need to be exact. You can't use vernacular words with many interpretations. You need to describe as precisely as possible your hypothesis, the methods you used to test it, and your results. Jargon avoids ambiguity.
2. The purpose of a scientific paper is not to communicate it to general audiences. It's to describe, in detail, a study you performed so that others can attempt to reproduce it. The audience of a scientific paper is other scientists in the same field. Communication of the results to a general audience is another matter.
I think the quote implies that Feynman's suggested changes were for marketing materials. It turns out myself and my colleagues were the intended targets of those marketing materials. We ignored them and just benchmarked the system.
In the end none of it mattered because it was next to impossible to achieve significant fractions of the quoted "peak" performance for real world/non-embarrassingly parallel algorithms. Especially with the CM-2 and 64 bit floating point.
1. I think you're describing publishing and not academia as a whole. It's sad that the two have become so intractable in many minds.
2. If you don't ever cater to general audiences your field is less accessible in many important ways. Which seems like intentional gatekeeping given the economic realities of #1.
>I think you're describing publishing and not academia as a whole. It's sad that the two have become so intractable in many minds.
Yes, exactly. I was specifically referring to publishing, because OP was specifically referring to publishing:
> I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.
> If you don't ever cater to general audiences your field is less accessible in many important ways. Which seems like intentional gatekeeping given the economic realities of #1.
I never said to not ever cater to general audiences. I said that catering to general audiences is not the purpose of a research paper. Separation of concerns. Communication to general audiences is still necessary and worthwhile.
In fact, there's a feedback loop between science, technology, and capital. Not communicating results from academia breaks or reduces the effectiveness of this feedback loop. So, yes, you are absolutely correct that academic papers should be communicated to general audiences.
Amazon's book look-up is by ISBN, which is fixed at time of assignment, and would be unlikely to change. You can look up the ISBN on any similarly indexed site.
Wikipedia's Special:Booksources page is one of those, and points at other resources including Google Books, Open Library, Amazon (recursion!), and numerous others:
Side note, the Connection Machine is pretty much the coolest looking computer ever: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/story/73 It looks exactly to me what a powerful and slightly scary computer from an 80's movie looks like.
I mentioned this last time around [1], Tamiko Thiel worked with Feynman and Hillis at thinking machines and is responsible, amongst many other things, for how cool the CM-1 and CM-2 looked.
And it was designed after the T-shirt that feynman wears on one of his most known pictures [0]. BTW: there we still have a nonfunctional CM which we equipped with LEDs to put fun games on it at the CS faculty in Karlsruhe [1]
The blinken lights panel on the original machine was functional, each small cluster of processors controlled one LED and there was a microcode instruction for latching the LEDs.
We found this museum completely by accident on a visit to the US, and it is a delight. When I saw the Connection Machine all lit up, I squealed :)
It seems like the reason it's on like that is because it used to belong to the NSA so they took all the insides out and destroyed them when the machine was donated. The blinkenlights are driven by Raspberry Pis or something similar.
"'Give me something real to do.' So we sent him out to buy some office supplies."
Great moments in management, and proof that Feynman had a well developed sense of humor or this would have been a shorter story. "One of the best minds on Earth just showed up, what do we do?" "We need pencils."
This story is in “surely you are joking mr. Feynman” or “what do you care what does other people think?”.
When they ask him to do something not concrete, that was his answer :) so he was preferring fetching pencils to thinking about applications of some technology…
Every great man that I have known has had a certain time and place in their life that they use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were supposed to and great things were accomplished.
This has inspired me to work harder so that I find myself in such a flow state in either a work situation or a life situation in the not too distant future, say, a decade.
Fantastic post (despite its age and recurring postings on HN, I had not come across it before), and this indeed is a great line.
I've met a few people who overdo this, though: they try to map everything new to a past success situation, but sometimes this is obviously a bad idea/poor match. So great people also have an internal compass that tells them "this situation is _different_."
I aspire to work with people that carry the ambition to seek such seminal events in their lives (rather than "business as usual" and finishing early), events that are worthy of serving as such reference points later. Life is short, and you only have one, so you had better not waste it.
"""But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool."""
This is why he is spoken of with such reverence and why his insights have profoundly impacted both scientists and non-scientists alike. Few Nobel laureates have achieved such popular influence.
Many, many years ago I saw a Connection Machine running. Let me just say it was not a machine that you just walked by. "What the hell is that thing?!?" was more like it.
Brewster Kahle's wikipedia page says that straight from undergraduate "he joined the Thinking Machines team, where he was the lead engineer on the company's main product, the Connection Machine, for six years (1983–1989)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle#Life_and_career
this statement has to be wildly exaggerated, it was a hardware project and he was a green software "kid". Anybody from Thinking Machines know what his actual job was?
I have no idea but I have a suspicion that Thinking Machines was a company where the most senior people had “scientist” in their title rather than “engineer.”
It’s been an unresolved topic in the Talk page for that article since 2019:
The article also states that he was "lead engineer on the Connection Machine", the main product of the company. Given that he had just graduated with a bachelor's degree and the high profile startup was filled with PhD engineers and managers with experience... it's just not possible. Possibly, he was lead engineer on WAIS. 98.13.244.125 (talk) 02:54, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
First of all, being a "kid" doesn't mean you can't engineer hardware - didn't he graduate with a degree in computer engineering? Second, lots of people have gone from hardware design at their career start and into software later. The main hardware designer of the 3DFX chips does Java stuff now.
thinking machines was extremely well financed and cutting edge research and attracted very high powered people deeper into their careers, like for instance Feynmann. The fact that a kid can found a company does not make it likely a kid was running this enterprise
Having looked into it, there's some circumstantial evidence that it was a variation of feynman's path integrals, which is sort of a technique for summing fields representing all of the possible pathways possible in an interaction and weighting their probabilities.
I always loved the design of the Connection Machine... So much that I was inspired by it for creating the very first screen for my company's new game: https://www.galantrix.com/blog/20240830/
Published on Sunday, January 15, 01989 • 35 years, 7 months ago
Specifically, the five-digit year! Also the explicit listing of the age of the article. Most sites have a “human readable” or “friendly” date such as “published yesterday” but only for recent dates. Some sites, such as news sites, add a warning if the article is more than say five years old. Here, it’s as if they’re proud of the age. Since this was published by the Long Now Foundation it seems likely these were done deliberately.
It was posted many times in the past and I never mind seeing it again - the discussions are always worthy, and there's always a batch of HNers who never heard the story.
I've read the story a few times before, but am thankful for the reposting because I've actually been trying to figure out how to build a quantum physics simulator and was most recently stuck on how field interactions / Feynman diagrams came into play. Lo and behold the snippet on path integrals around the lattice, from Feynman himself solving the same problem!
> We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.
I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.
For a while, I worked for a physicist who resembled Feynman in many of his beliefs and behaviors. He once told me about how he changed his writing style over time. In his early papers, he would cite poorly understood theories while assuming that the reader understood them. At that time, he was exhibiting "academic arrogance" and basically looking down upon anybody who could not understand his work. After teaching for a while, he changed his style to use well-understood terms and theories. He had realized that his papers would be more valuable if more people understood them.
We are still in touch, and have learned much from each other.
1. In academia, you need to be exact. You can't use vernacular words with many interpretations. You need to describe as precisely as possible your hypothesis, the methods you used to test it, and your results. Jargon avoids ambiguity.
2. The purpose of a scientific paper is not to communicate it to general audiences. It's to describe, in detail, a study you performed so that others can attempt to reproduce it. The audience of a scientific paper is other scientists in the same field. Communication of the results to a general audience is another matter.
I think the quote implies that Feynman's suggested changes were for marketing materials. It turns out myself and my colleagues were the intended targets of those marketing materials. We ignored them and just benchmarked the system.
In the end none of it mattered because it was next to impossible to achieve significant fractions of the quoted "peak" performance for real world/non-embarrassingly parallel algorithms. Especially with the CM-2 and 64 bit floating point.
Yes, I believe it was, but OP was specifically addressing academia:
> I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.
Where were you working at the time?
NASA Ames NAS.
1. I think you're describing publishing and not academia as a whole. It's sad that the two have become so intractable in many minds.
2. If you don't ever cater to general audiences your field is less accessible in many important ways. Which seems like intentional gatekeeping given the economic realities of #1.
>I think you're describing publishing and not academia as a whole. It's sad that the two have become so intractable in many minds.
Yes, exactly. I was specifically referring to publishing, because OP was specifically referring to publishing:
> I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.
> If you don't ever cater to general audiences your field is less accessible in many important ways. Which seems like intentional gatekeeping given the economic realities of #1.
I never said to not ever cater to general audiences. I said that catering to general audiences is not the purpose of a research paper. Separation of concerns. Communication to general audiences is still necessary and worthwhile.
In fact, there's a feedback loop between science, technology, and capital. Not communicating results from academia breaks or reduces the effectiveness of this feedback loop. So, yes, you are absolutely correct that academic papers should be communicated to general audiences.
There were some recent studies on lawyers and "legalese" that suggests people are making things hard to understand on purpose for social reasons: https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study-explains-laws-incomprehe...
You are a wanker.
My favorite is in nutrition research papers when they say something like "At 8am the subjects consumed a standardized breakfast"
This is an HN perennial favourite, with 39 submissions. Among the significant discussions:
8 years ago, 32 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12283614>
8 years ago, 61 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762614>
3 years ago, 49 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28981275>
14 years ago, 46 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079473>
6 years ago, 33 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18987188>
11 years ago, 11 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5660763>
10 years ago, 23 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8681061>
14 years ago, 23 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1205500>
16 years ago, 15 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191212>
15 years ago, 10 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723361>
16 years ago, 12 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311454>
17 years ago, 5 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834>
Equally remarkable: there are Tinyurl links to Amazon books in the post from 17 years ago that still resolve to the books’ page on Amazon!
The remarkable part is that TinyURL still works.
Amazon's book look-up is by ISBN, which is fixed at time of assignment, and would be unlikely to change. You can look up the ISBN on any similarly indexed site.
Wikipedia's Special:Booksources page is one of those, and points at other resources including Google Books, Open Library, Amazon (recursion!), and numerous others:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources?isbn=03933...>
Side note, the Connection Machine is pretty much the coolest looking computer ever: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/story/73 It looks exactly to me what a powerful and slightly scary computer from an 80's movie looks like.
I mentioned this last time around [1], Tamiko Thiel worked with Feynman and Hillis at thinking machines and is responsible, amongst many other things, for how cool the CM-1 and CM-2 looked.
Also, the T-shirts! [2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37688340
[2] https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html
Well, my CM t-shirt is getting somehow worn out, I probably should order a new one.
Ah, I always wondered what t-shirt he was wearing in one of my favourites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
And it was designed after the T-shirt that feynman wears on one of his most known pictures [0]. BTW: there we still have a nonfunctional CM which we equipped with LEDs to put fun games on it at the CS faculty in Karlsruhe [1]
[0] https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html [1] https://www.teco.edu/~diener/
They were apparently influenced by the WOPR from "War Games." Danny Hillis wanted to sell into the Pentagon.
You can get a beautiful poster of it from https://www.docubyte.com/projects/guide-to-computing/ (scroll to the bottom).
I've got docubyte's poster of the PDP-7 and it's great.
The CM-5 did literally make an appearance [1] in Jurassic Park. Not the 80s, but 1993, so close.
[1] http://www.starringthecomputer.com/snapshots/jurassic_park_t...
The blinkerlights panel isn't even functional. But still cool looking .
At the computer museum in Alpharetta Georgia, none of the computers are on but the connection machine panel is on.
The blinken lights panel on the original machine was functional, each small cluster of processors controlled one LED and there was a microcode instruction for latching the LEDs.
We found this museum completely by accident on a visit to the US, and it is a delight. When I saw the Connection Machine all lit up, I squealed :)
It seems like the reason it's on like that is because it used to belong to the NSA so they took all the insides out and destroyed them when the machine was donated. The blinkenlights are driven by Raspberry Pis or something similar.
"'Give me something real to do.' So we sent him out to buy some office supplies."
Great moments in management, and proof that Feynman had a well developed sense of humor or this would have been a shorter story. "One of the best minds on Earth just showed up, what do we do?" "We need pencils."
This story is in “surely you are joking mr. Feynman” or “what do you care what does other people think?”.
When they ask him to do something not concrete, that was his answer :) so he was preferring fetching pencils to thinking about applications of some technology…
Loved this line:
This has inspired me to work harder so that I find myself in such a flow state in either a work situation or a life situation in the not too distant future, say, a decade.Fantastic post (despite its age and recurring postings on HN, I had not come across it before), and this indeed is a great line.
I've met a few people who overdo this, though: they try to map everything new to a past success situation, but sometimes this is obviously a bad idea/poor match. So great people also have an internal compass that tells them "this situation is _different_."
I aspire to work with people that carry the ambition to seek such seminal events in their lives (rather than "business as usual" and finishing early), events that are worthy of serving as such reference points later. Life is short, and you only have one, so you had better not waste it.
"""But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool."""
This is why he is spoken of with such reverence and why his insights have profoundly impacted both scientists and non-scientists alike. Few Nobel laureates have achieved such popular influence.
Many, many years ago I saw a Connection Machine running. Let me just say it was not a machine that you just walked by. "What the hell is that thing?!?" was more like it.
Brewster Kahle's wikipedia page says that straight from undergraduate "he joined the Thinking Machines team, where he was the lead engineer on the company's main product, the Connection Machine, for six years (1983–1989)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle#Life_and_career
this statement has to be wildly exaggerated, it was a hardware project and he was a green software "kid". Anybody from Thinking Machines know what his actual job was?
I have no idea but I have a suspicion that Thinking Machines was a company where the most senior people had “scientist” in their title rather than “engineer.”
It’s been an unresolved topic in the Talk page for that article since 2019:
The article also states that he was "lead engineer on the Connection Machine", the main product of the company. Given that he had just graduated with a bachelor's degree and the high profile startup was filled with PhD engineers and managers with experience... it's just not possible. Possibly, he was lead engineer on WAIS. 98.13.244.125 (talk) 02:54, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
It’s interesting that the commentator didn’t even consider the possibility that the lead engineer might report to architects and/or scientists.
First of all, being a "kid" doesn't mean you can't engineer hardware - didn't he graduate with a degree in computer engineering? Second, lots of people have gone from hardware design at their career start and into software later. The main hardware designer of the 3DFX chips does Java stuff now.
thinking machines was extremely well financed and cutting edge research and attracted very high powered people deeper into their careers, like for instance Feynmann. The fact that a kid can found a company does not make it likely a kid was running this enterprise
I love to see the equation he came up with…
Having looked into it, there's some circumstantial evidence that it was a variation of feynman's path integrals, which is sort of a technique for summing fields representing all of the possible pathways possible in an interaction and weighting their probabilities.
Sorry to reply to a random comment of yours, but did you ever publish your CM-2 emulator?
No worries; I have not yet.
I always loved the design of the Connection Machine... So much that I was inspired by it for creating the very first screen for my company's new game: https://www.galantrix.com/blog/20240830/
Note the date line on the article:
Specifically, the five-digit year! Also the explicit listing of the age of the article. Most sites have a “human readable” or “friendly” date such as “published yesterday” but only for recent dates. Some sites, such as news sites, add a warning if the article is more than say five years old. Here, it’s as if they’re proud of the age. Since this was published by the Long Now Foundation it seems likely these were done deliberately.Yeah, this is a kind of calling card of the Long Now Foundation. See their landing page: "established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking"
https://longnow.org/
Danny Hillis wrote The Pattern on the Stone, one of my favorite books of all time, so I was very excited to see this essay.
Wow, I was not disappointed.
It was posted many times in the past and I never mind seeing it again - the discussions are always worthy, and there's always a batch of HNers who never heard the story.
I'm one of today's lucky ones, and I really enjoyed the read.
Same here. Great way to wake up.
I've read the story a few times before, but am thankful for the reposting because I've actually been trying to figure out how to build a quantum physics simulator and was most recently stuck on how field interactions / Feynman diagrams came into play. Lo and behold the snippet on path integrals around the lattice, from Feynman himself solving the same problem!