Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | nappy's comments login

Agreed. It's an excellent book. But perhaps a little long if you are purely interested in computer history and want an introduction in a shorter volume. I recommend these two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...


Not sure about academic history, but in a single volume, this does a good job on early 20th century computer history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory


I don't recommend reading this. There are many gaps and a lot of important history missing, including:

1. Computation before ~1800. Abacus, Napier's Bones, Slides rules, Pascal's Calculator, motivations from celestial navigation and astronomy.

2. Modern analog computers ~1900-1950. The author seems to refer to them as "math machines" and leaves it at that, without exploring much deeper than that they were used for besides calculating firing solutions for artillery. I think the author lacks a solid grasp of how mathematical tables were used from 1614 onwards, and that analog computers were used to create much more accurate and complex tables which could be used for more accurate firing solutions. And for other purposes as well, beyond code-breaking.

>"It's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that early, pre-general purpose computers (~1890-1950s) weren't computers in the way that we think about computers today. I prefer to think about them as "math machines"."

>"But subsequent machines were able to do math. From what I'm seeing, it sounds like a lot of it was military use. A ton of code-breaking efforts during World War II. Also a bunch of projectile calculations for artillery fire."

3. Poor description of the advent of electronic computers.

>"Then in the 1940s, there was a breakthrough.[10] The vacuum tube took computers from being mechanical to being electric. In doing so, they made computers cheaper, quieter, more reliable, more energy efficient, about 10-100x smaller, and about 100x faster. They enabled computations to be done in seconds rather than hours or days. It was big."

It was certainly a breakthrough, but the idea that computers immediately became quieter, cheaper, and more reliable is false. They were much larger, initially, compared to analog computers of the era. By almost any measure, they were also much less efficient with energy, though this may depend on what sort of calculations you are doing - I'm less sure of this.

4. Incomplete and incorrect descriptions of programming languages and the history of digital logic. No mention of information theory and Claude Shannon, digital circuits.

This is a poor analogy that misleads a reader who is unfamiliar with programming languages, it obscures the abstraction:

>"Think of it like this. It's translating between two languages. Assembly is one language and looks like this: LOAD R1, #10. Machine code is another language and looks like this: 10010010110101010011110101000010101000100101. Just like how English and Spanish are two different languages."

5. Lack of understanding of digital hardware.

The author never describes why or how vacuum tubes and then transistors allowed computers to use logic that is both digital and electronic.

The author jumbles a lot of ideas into one and does not seem to understand the relationship and distinction between the evolution of transistor technology (point-contact -> BJT -> FET -> MOSFET) and the creation of integrated circuits.

>"Before 1966, transistors were a thing, but they weren't the transistors that we imagine today. Today we think of transistors as tiny little things on computer chips that are so small you can't even see them. But before 1966, transistors were much larger. Macroscopic. Millimeters long. I don't really understand the scientific or engineering breakthroughs that allowed this to happen, but something called photolithography allowed them to actually manufacture the transistors directly on the computer chips."

6. Lack of historical context. No mention of the motivations for creating the vacuum tube or transistor: amplification and switching for use in telegraph and phone networks. No mention of the role the US government played beyond the 1860 Census, no mention of continued investments motivated by the Cold War, Apollo Program, ICBMs, etc. They briefly cover artillery firing solutions and mention code-breaking.

7. Over reliance on LLMs to research and write this.

Hard to take a history which includes this seriously:

>"And from what ChatGPT tells me, it's likely that this would have been an investment with a positive ROI. It'd make the construction of mathematical tables significantly faster and more reliable, and there was a big demand for such tables. It makes sense to me that it'd be a worthwhile investment. After all, they were already employing similar numbers of people to construct the tables by hand."

>"Anyway, all of this goodness lead to things really picking up pace. I'm allowed to quote Claude, right?"


> [In the 1980s] Microprocessors started to replace integrated circuits.

Author implies (in the quote above which occurs after the discussion of the invention of personal computers) that the early personal computers from the 1970s did not use microprocessors. This of course is false: All the early "personal computers" used microprocessors. For example the IMSAI used an 8080, the Apple II used a 6502, and the TRS-80 used a Z80. Microprocessors -- which were never intended to be the basis for entire general-purpose computers -- were repurposed for exactly that application by visionaries like Woz. Microprocessors made personal computers possible.

It would be more correct to state that in the 1980s microprocessors began to replace integrated circuits in mini and larger computers.

A subtle related point is that it would be even better to point out that by "integrated circuit" above the author really means discrete small-scale integrated circuit. All microprocessors are integrated circuits, but not all integrated circuits are microprocessors. Microprocessors are large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits or nowadays very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits.


There is a lot that is wrong in this article. Broad overviews are useful to people new to a topic - this would only mislead and confuse people.


> It was certainly a breakthrough, but the idea that computers immediately became quieter, cheaper, and more reliable is false. They were much larger, initially, compared to analog computers of the era. By almost any measure, they were also much less efficient with energy, though this may depend on what sort of calculations you are doing - I'm less sure of this.

Not only against the analog computers of the era. Early vacuum tube computers were significantly less reliable and less energy-efficient than electromechanical digital computers, like the Harward Mark 1.


seems like the longest thread is Windows by the same reasoning?


But not as a daily driver.

I have had one or more Macs since 1993, I went years without a Windows system. (Servers have been consistently Linux with some Unix and Macs early on).

I probably spent less than a day total with Windows for Work Groups, NT, 98,ME,Vista,7,8,11, etc

Much of my Windows 3 usage was under OS/2 Warp

The above list really about my personal major themes. I already can see major omissions, but Windows is not one.


> "starting at $3,499"

I wonder what the model that you actually want to buy will cost and what average sales price will be.

From the looks of it, I wouldn't be surprised if they sell a "pro" headband like Meta does for the Quest that has a battery pack that does better than the 2 hours of charge with the brick.


why does Knuth think Trump eats Betel nuts? Does he?


The most likely "end game" is not replacing all backend financial systems.


Any benchmarks on this? How long does it take to generate a batch of images, say with steps=100?


On my M1 MAx with 32 GB I'm getting 1.5 iterations/second (ie, ~30 seconds for the standard 50 iterations) using this example: https://github.com/nlothian/m1_huggingface_diffusers_demo


That's pretty good then - on my 3080, I'm getting ~8it/s.


Pure privacy, without limitation, in money transfers would be catastrophic. Despite the consternation of hyperextreme libertarians sitting in their armchairs, the ability for the government to collect tax revenue is a pretty good thing and has broad societal benefits. Also allowing free flow of funds to terrorist groups is bad.


Extremely private monetary transactions may be a net negative, and yet it may be the world we must adapt to, if the ability to do so now exists.

There is always room for “good honest police work”, though.

There are many roadblocks governments could use to slow progress, but I’m not sure this is truly preventable any more than PGP or BitTorrent could have been.

If income tax becomes logistically problematic, there are many other types of taxes that may then need to fill the void.


North Korea already funds it's nuclear program with crypto so it's a bit late for that.

Also despite crypto allowing for pure privacy already with coins like Monero, this hasn't stopped tax revenue. It's not a black-or-white issue, because only a tiny fraction of people will utilise this privacy due to technical hurdles and other limitations compared to paying with cash or card.


There's a reason Monero doesn't show up on exchanges that comply with US KYC rules.


Kraken…?


Nowhere in this blog post: any discussion of money laundering, sending funds to terrorist groups, rogue states. Without mention of any of the legitimate reasons the US government is sanctioning Tornado Cash, this is merely propaganda from a financially interested party.


We should not have our rights removed because other people who break the law might also benefit from. We cannot have a free society if every decision is "Wont somebody think of the children" or "but the terrorists".

Liberty or death: it is not death of the individual but death of society. The resilience of our social structure is dependent on our freedoms.

I cant say how saddening it is to have lived through the crypto wars in the 90s that were so well defended by tech workers, to now see HACKER news commentators fine with massive government overreach in the name of "safety". lol.


When you say "might" - you're aware Tornado was actually used for these things to the tune of at least half a billion dollars?

Basically, the case you're making is: they might have actively aided and abetted nuclear proliferation - but they're technologists, so their actions are sacrosanct and cannot be subject to the usual penalities because we've been ultra smart and managed to create an industry where free speech and money laundering can be switched out at will like in a shell game.


HSBC laundered $881 million for the Sinaloa cartel. How much of that ended up causing human suffering and the loss of life?

The solution must be to ban all banks and cash as they are the instruments that facilitated these transactions.


I am saying the rights of my sister and brothers, friends and colleagues are far more important to me than clamping down on north korean hackers. I would much rather live in a world where we are free to use tornado cash and maintain our privacy in these networks, than live in a world where code can be overnight made suddenly illegal, everyones accounts historically associated with that code blacklisted, the developers then sit in jail for a month with 0 charges against them.

The large majority users of tornado weren't criminals. Tornado devs had worked on compliance tools to aid governments, doesnt matter they get locked up anyway. The treasury has historically only sanctioned people, doesnt matter apparently they can make themselves new powers and sanction the use of code too.


> I am saying the rights of my sister and brothers

Username checkout, is your brother Pinochet?


We remove rights all the time, because bad people do bad things. You have to follow road rules for example, you are not allowed to buy components which could be used to build a nuclear bomb, all countries restrict access to weapons (they just draw the line at different places).

So the argument that we should never use "the terrorists" or "the children" to make policy decisions is overly simplistic. I believe the sort of reasoning is actually counterproductive. Even here on HN many believe a restriction on crypto currencies is justified if it curbs tax evasion, in other words they believe the trade-off between right restriction and societal benefit is worth it. So arguing that we should never use "the terrorists" to argue for restricting rights is very obviously contradicting how we are implementing laws, so it is not convincing. Instead we should argue why the trade-off is such that the argument does not hold in this case.


What right is being removed? And is it protected under law in your jurisdiction?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: