mhewett

5 ms·

1.
by mhewett 2y ago
I was working at IBM in Boca Raton in 1990-91 when OS/2 was being developed. Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag
2.
by mhewett 3y ago
My wife worked at Boeing for seven years in the 1980s, in management. We tracked down her pension recently, hoping for a huge payout after it had been invested for 35 years. It turns out that she will get $96/month. We are very disa
3.
by mhewett 3y ago
I stand corrected. My offer still stands.
4.
by mhewett 3y ago
The CEO who presided over the fall of Yahoo received $40 million in compensation. I'm advertising here that my fee for doing the same job is only half that amount.
5.
by mhewett 3y ago
One comment from his thesis advisors on AM was that they couldn't tell which part was performed by AM and which part was guided by Lenat. I think that comment holds for both AM and EURISKO. In those days everyone wanted a standalone
6.
by mhewett 3y ago
Lenat was my assigned advisor when I started my Masters at Stanford. I met with him once and he gave me some advice on classes. After that he was extremely difficult to schedule a meeting with (for any student, not just me). He didn&#x27
7.
by mhewett 4y ago
I once owned a 1.5 acre property that had approximately 1.4 acres of English ivy on it. It was horrible; the ivy is, by all practical means, impossible to kill. An area covered with a tarp for two months looks exactly like an uncovered ar
8.
by mhewett 4y ago
I've been through changes like this several times and the SURE indicator that big changes are coming is when the higher-ups say "Nothing will change". Seriously. I actually think that, below the CEO level, the managers are e
9.
by mhewett 4y ago
Not everyone. Everyone I know loved it.
10.
by mhewett 4y ago
It would take him 5-10 years to become a competent programmer. Does he want to finally achieve stability in his career at age 70? I would suggest that he become a business advisor to small companies. His expertise is invaluable and he cou
11.
by mhewett 6y ago
I once called a travel agent to book a flight to San Jose (California). She mis-heard me as wanting to go to Santa Fe (New Mexico). She called me a few days later in a panic, saying "Sorry, I accidentally booked you a flight to San J
12.
by mhewett 6y ago
In the article it says that Dijkstra didn't use a computer, TV, or cell phone.
13.
by mhewett 7y ago
I was a computer operator in the late 1970s and I used to read ComputerWorld which was the biggest enterprise tech "journal" (actually a newspaper) of the day. In the late 1970s they had a number of articles commenting on the nee
14.
by mhewett 7y ago
The Warren Abstract Machine has a bunch of Prolog-related opcodes mixed in with a bunch of opcodes for maintaining linked lists and other data structures. Once you figure that out the WAM becomes slightly easier to understand.
15.
by mhewett 7y ago
"nautical miles from radians" has to be one of the most esoteric functions built into any language.
16.
by mhewett 8y ago
Ummm, on a farm you milk the cows and gather eggs and move the herd BEFORE breakfast. Then you tend to the crops for several hours before lunch, if you have lunch.
17.
by mhewett 8y ago
History. In the late 1970s you could get 17% return on your savings account and mortgage rates were well above 10%. People still bought houses.
18.
by mhewett 9y ago
I've been trying for several years to determine the company size at which we will be forced to turn our understandable site into marketing buzzwords and incomprehensible sentences. 50 people? $5 million/year in revenue? What is
19.
by mhewett 10y ago
Can you add one column to the table: a brief description of the service? Thanks for collecting all the information.
20.
by mhewett 10y ago
Latest information is that there were at least two, maybe three waves of immigration from Asia. There were probably also small numbers of people who made it from Polynesia to South America.
21.
by mhewett 10y ago
When I was growing up, Nightfall was considered to be the greatest SF short story ever written. I'm not sure what the current ranking of it is but it is well worth reading.
22.
by mhewett 10y ago
That's a very good observation. I grew up on the line (in Topeka). I believe it is roughly where Western expansion had reached at the time the transcontinental railroad was finished. I don't know if correlation equals causation
23.
by mhewett 10y ago
Join a bowling league and see how many people struggle to add 15 to a score by hand. Seriously.
24.
by mhewett 10y ago
Some possibly useful advice: if I'm at a conference and someone I sort of know says, "This one speaker is being an ass. He's pestering me about another speaker." I'm like, "yeah, yeah that's part of bein
25.
by mhewett 10y ago
The one thing that makes LISP great is the "functions are data" formulation. Many of the "current best paradigms" of Computer Science are actually fads. LISP was a fad of the 1980s. Java was a fad of the 1990s. NoSQL da
26.
by mhewett 10y ago
I've seen this as common usage in India. In America it would be more common to say "share her knowledge..."
27.
by mhewett 10y ago
As an older guy who has been through a number of these economic cycles, my feeling is that this will be a mild recession. Nothing like 2000 or 2008. (I'm not always right about the economy but I did correctly take my money out of the
28.
by mhewett 10y ago
The Wikipedia entry for Jef Raskin has further discussion of "Notzo Basic". It was a project by Jef that was never completed.
29.
by mhewett 11y ago
Before anyone believes the hype, they should read all the MIT research papers from the mid-1990s that mention the term "emergent intelligence". This was one of the biggest wastes of research money in the history of AI.
30.
by mhewett 12y ago
For those of you trying to represent this, it will be important to explicitly represent context. A fact exists only in a context. The above statement is a good example. Another is, "Bill dreamed that he thought his dog was playing i

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