
How the hell have you done it? (1961) - merrier
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2018/12/how-hell-have-you-done-it.html
======
dreamcompiler
Western Skies Hotel. Wow. That place was quite an Albuquerque landmark in the
60s. It was one of the nicer hotels on Route 66 and many celebrities stayed
there including JFK. After Interstate 40 was built and bypassed it, it fell on
hard times. It was torn down in 1988.

Sorry for all the New Mexico inside baseball but this brought back memories.

~~~
quickthrower2
I like the phrase “inside baseball”. Not from the US so had to look it up. HN
is all about inside baseball for every topic!

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Jhsto
Kind of like on a related note, I like how the Internet raises the bar. I
guess it only applies to certain kind of people, but at least I am constantly
amazed by the engineering efforts in my field, of which I learn through here.
Just as of today, I felt like I still know nothing, which certainly helps to
keep pushing forward and to excel, even while there's no pressure for that in
my day to day life.

~~~
Swizec
The internet turns the whole world into a village. That means your "next door
neighboor" is hundreds, even thousands, of people.

Hard to compete against that. Our natural impulse, for a certain kind of
person, is to be the best that you know. But when you know thousands? oof

~~~
acqq
Even before today's internet the famous "geniuses" existed and what they were
able to do was not achievable by the ("untrained" or "untalented") mortals.
There are so many examples, but I'll take just one which is, as far as I
understand, indisputable:

[https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/bobby-fisher-
playing-50-opp...](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/bobby-fisher-
playing-50-opponents-simultaneously-hollywood-hotel-1964/)

"At age 20, Fischer won the 1963–64 U.S. Championship with 11/11, the only
perfect score in the history of the tournament."

My programming favorite is definitely:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567)

Knuth writes an ALGOL compiler for Burroughs in 1960.

"don claimed that he could write the compiler and a language manual all by
himself during his three and a half month summer vacation. He said that he
would do it for $5000." "it was taking mortal human beings 25 man-years to
write compilers: not three and a half man-months." "The machine had 4080 words
of memory." He did it. During the summer of 1960, receiving the computer time
as the "third" (after the payroll tasks and when the people developing Fortran
compiler didn't need a computer). "he had been working all summer from cards"
(punched cards -- for this time a normal condition: he didn't have a terminal
to "interactively" develop the program -- he had to punch the cards, one line
per card).

~~~
Swizec
Agree. Those were/are geniuses and it’s relatively obvious that us normals can
but aspire to get there. This is healthy.

Modern social media has the insidious habit of surrounding you with hundreds
of relative geniuses who one-by-one are totally achievable. But as a group
they expose you to tens even hundreds of breakthroughs every day.

Individual breakthrough or achievement may have taken 6 months, but when you
see ten of them per day you start to wonder why you can’t stack up.

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textide
An actor appreciating another actor while realizing he's competing with a
ghost of past accomplishment. That's certain to be true of every young person
in any field; except the appreciation part. That takes some wisdom.

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lsh
Kirk Douglas is still alive, he turned 102 this year. He's the father of
Michael Douglas. Old school Hollywood

