"By 1973, the first volume of the defining work of our craft, “The Art of Computer Programming” had been available in bookstores since 1968, and its first chapter literally consisted of a 100-something page long introduction to various mathematical concepts. Induction, logarithms, series, matrices, elementary number theory, permutations and factorials, Fibonacci numbers, are some of the subjects exposed in those beautifully typeset pages."
"So be it. Education should be far more than preparing employees to be crunched by a machine. It should raise our perspectives and make us dream of a better place for all; not just for a small minority of vocal billionaires. Or at least, a better kind of mathematical education should avoid future generations the dreadful feeling of yet another mandatory, dull, dry, early Monday-morning math class."
"The most important factor blocking the development of telecommuting in Switzerland for the past 20 years were, without any hint of a doubt, hierarchy and micromanagement. To a large extent, for good or worse, most of my managers have always insisted in knowing all of my tasks in excruciatingly detail, and I know many colleagues would agree with me on this matter."
"Lack of trust, and hence lack of true asynchronicity, is the main reason why there are so few software startup successes coming from Switzerland on the front page of Hacker News. Simply put, it is culturally impossible for many firms in Switzerland to have the level of trust required for startups to flourish. There are trusty banks, huge mechanical engineering firms, excellent fine electronics companies; but few, if any, software success stories."
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"And quite an adventure the life of Margittai Neumann Janos Lajos was. A child prodigy, he published his first paper in mathematics before age 20. He was the undisputable champion of applied mathematics in the 20th century. His work yielded groundbreaking advances in theoretical mathematics, quantum mechanics, game theory, economics, fluid dynamics, artificial intelligence, electrodynamics, meteorology, and computing."
"Where will the von Neumanns, the Einsteins, and the Gödels of our age migrate after the SCOTUS overrules democracy in 2024 and Gödel’s Loophole is proven to exist? At this time, the two major powers of our time, the United States and China seem unlikely locations for brains to settle and grow in the long term. Maybe this is the chance of a lifetime for the European continent."
Many open-source communities are, as a matter of fact, strictly unsafe for non-Caucasian males between 25 and 35 years old. And I am not even talking about “rude” behavior (comes to mind the infamous “RTFM or GTFO” or “use the source, Luke” attitudes), but openly hostile acts of incivility that, should they happen in the “real” world, would face immediate reaction from the powers that be.
Online communities, however, are a new far west for many predatory acts.
"And, who knows. Maybe one day, after we have conquered code, we will apply what we have learned by giving away our free labor towards the creation of other common goods, in the real world. Think about it; spending 3 hours a day, but instead of coding, feeding homeless people, planting trees, or helping the elders."
“In short, Google (the corporation) has been feeling lucky for the past 25 years, first by building a genuine ground-breaking product; then by shoveling cash via online advertising; and finally, by facing quite mediocre competition for years.”
“Many current Google engineers will have angrily stopped reading this article when reaching the “lucky” word above and will have canceled their monthly contributions to this magazine if any. So be it. By stating the corporation as “lucky,” I do not mean to say individual engineers are not brilliant. Quite the opposite.”
"No other field of human activity is today as atomized and disbanded as software. No other worker is more prone to harass, dismiss, belittle, and supress unions and unionized workers in their own field of activity as the software worker."
"Let us talk about those at the top; one of their key tenets is the active lobbying, particularly in the minds of younger members of our industry, that unions are a bad thing. Those same young generations, always eager to read Reddit but never Montesquieu or Kropotkin, will grow in their jobs with the idea that the software field is a manly one, where unions are for the weak, which we will not hire, because they couldn't reverse a linked list on a whiteboard, anyway."
"You are a software worker. And you are able to do your job in more or less good conditions only because you are standing on the shoulders of countless others. No, we are not talking here about Open Source. We are talking about the fact that if you have 20 days of holidays, if you only work 5 days a week, if you are able to take some days or weeks off after the birth of your child, it is because some others before you have sacrificed their lives so you can work in decent conditions."