This guy is one of my heroes, I could not be happier. Go him. The H&P book on computer architecture is a book that changed my life. He is like Knuth except that I understand what he says. The Knuth stuff, I get it, it's profound, but I never got it. It was too hard. H&P, they laid it out in ways that I could understand. I'm not stupid but I'm not that smart, I really loved that book, it was written in a way that not so smart people get it.
If there was a way I could say "go you", yeah, I want to do that. He's a great guy, has done great work, go him.
And all that said, I bet this is not a "go him" job, I bet he makes a difference, maybe a huge one, maybe not so huge, but I bet he makes a difference. Let's come back in 5 years, I bet he will have made stuff better.
Can you elaborate a bit? Unsubstantiated drive-by insults aren’t very useful to other readers.
Edit: thanks for the explanation. Note to the several downvoters: you aren’t accomplishing much here by “punishing” innocent unfamiliarity with an in-joke...
It's a joke. Every chapter in the book has a section titled "Fallacies and Pitfalls" describing commonly held beliefs that should be avoided for the topic of that chapter. See for example page 58 here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=cM8mDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...
Can you recommend a book that would serve as a useful prerequisite to CA: AQA? Based on your recommendation, I flipped through the first few pages on Amazon, but it felt a lot like Algebra 2 without knowing Algebra 1.
If you do get around to reading CA: AQA, you can follow along with this Coursera course (it's taught by the professor I had when I took it at Princeton, and he does a great job teaching it): https://www.coursera.org/learn/comparch
I don't have enough patience for courses. I sort of scan the material for what I really need or want to learn and ignore what's not interesting to me. I can make consistent A's with the benefit of Adderall, but I don't feel comfortable with that.
Your recommendation was very useful and interesting to me, and I bought the paperback. I was surprised that it was cheaper to buy a used paperback than to rent it via Kindle for a month.
I found reading the Art of Computer programming books wasn't that bad. If you ignore the quantative analysis for the algorithms and just look into the algorithms themselves then there are a lot of gems in here that you just don't find anywhere else. If you want to learn how to prove the algorithm runtime then there is obviously a lot more to the books, but for finding other algorithms and data structures it is a great tome of options and its organised in a way to just dip into when you have a particular problem.
Don't ignore the books on the assumption its too hard as that wasn't my experience of them.
Are the new editions worth it? My library lets me get an e-book of the 4th edition from 2007 for free, so are the last decade of added material worth buying it?
Computer organization and design was by far my favorite class (at UMich). It really played well to the puzzle of engineering that makes me love the field in the first place.
370, the exams for that course were just a blast, only exams I've had genuine fun taking in my life. Would have done 470 but I graduated a semester early (that and programming languages courses are ones I retrospectively regret not having taken). Computer Organization and Design 4ed was the one at the time I think - it is Hennessy.
I love computer science now a lot more than I did at the time, heh, but that's part of why I bothered finishing early. The professional environment suits me well.
Hennessy was an incredible steward at Stanford, and I'm 100% sure that he will be a difference maker at Alphabet. I don't see him taking the position if he didn't have an incredible vision for the future that he could drive.
The intro to this video talks a bit about his accomplishments as president.
This video is probably more in line with the interests of the community here (Stanford Seminar - Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders: John Hennessy of Stanford University):
I was in the audience when he announced the launching of the Knight-Hennessey scholarship. It was an incredible speech. He was always an incredible fundraiser, but putting together a $750M fully endowed scholarship program is a heck of a way to say goodbye to the university.
"How much influence does a chairman really have on the the vision though? Isn't that more of the CEO's business?"
In an ideal situation the chairman can function as the intellectual sparring partner of the CEO. Not many can do that, as some things cannot be discussed outside of the company personnel, and going downwards in the chain of command always has this gradient of authority which can function as an intellectual inhibitor.
The Chair also acts in the last resort to sack the CEO if the company is going off the rails - soothing which the Chair at HP should have done a few years ago.
His CV page [1] is clean and quite up-to-date. Not sure if he handles the edit himself or not, but I find the page's design clean compared to a lot of the professors' out there.
I just think it's interesting to mention here.
A "Board of Directors" is the executive unit of a publicly owned company [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_company]. It is separate from Google's internal corporate hierarchy.
Weird.. In a time when people are extra tuned to the relationship between technology and society and whether just because we can build something, should we (information bubbles, etc), it's strange that Alphabet would pick someone so out of touch with their impact to the long tail of humanity.
Haha, while I'm happy for him and excited for what this means for Alphabet, I had the same thought. Something tells me this guy would be able to juggle a new edition nonetheless
I have no issues with John Hennessy, but I’m surprised they didn’t give the chairman position to Larry Page, who’s CEO and a Co-Founder. I wonder what’s preventing him from taking over full control...
Together they control over 50% of the voting power. They both own substantial amounts of Class B shares, which aren't available to the public and carry 10 votes per share.
Schmidt has always been one of the people politically greasing the wheels for Google. You most often see his involvement where the politicians are. It very much sounds like in his "technical advisor" role, he'll continue to do that. He said he was interested in 'science and technology issues' and 'philanthropy'. That reads as "politics" to me.
He stepped down at the end of 2017 in order to focus on his charities(according to the press release). But, his daughter did die last year as well, perhaps that is the cause for him refocusing his life
Could be as simple as when you’re ludicrously rich and have been doing something for awhile you can get bored, especially if you’re not the founder or otherwise heavily emotionally invested in it.
Most likely he was cast aside so Google can cozy up better with the Trump administration. Schmidt was close with the Clinton campaign, which Trump himself noted when they met:
I think he was on his way out to a post in the Clinton administration as Google’s man on the inside. He’s mentioned his political ambitions in several interviews/profiles.
When that didn’t pan out, they didn’t see much use in keeping him around, especially in light of Trump’s penchant for grudges.
Suggesting, as that article does, that dating outside your marriage "in the age of #MeToo and the spotlight on sexual harassment in the workplace, might be problematic for Alphabet" is a heck of a leap. Leading a possibly non-monogamous lifestyle is sexual harrassment/assault? Wow.
I don't necessarily agree but or at all but the downvotes have made this alternative opinion too light to read. Chill out people.
Google isn't some benevolent entity. They've recently been on a hiring spree for Republican lobbyists (which most here consider much more evil than democrats). Personally I think both parties are not that different.
>Personally I think both parties are not that different.
It frustrates me greatly to see comments like this. It's worth taking a moment to even briefly skim the official platforms of the two major parties. They are profoundly different on a enormous range of substantive issues and policies.
Perhaps there are some issues on which the two parties agree, and certainly there are many political positions which neither party represents. That hardly means that the two parties are "not that different."
That's true for many issues like taxes, entitlements, gun control, immigration, healthcare, abortion, environment, etc.
However, it probably fair to say both parties have most candidates skewed to the middle on many of those issues. Lining up strongly with the party on all of those things doesn't win elections usually. And it's also fair to say both parties have members that will betray those base positions for wealth or power.
I can see why someone would call them similar based on frustration with a two party system that rewards moderates.
I kind of agree, in the sense that they are similarly ethical/reasonable. Their platforms couldn't be more different, but I don't see one party being evil and corrupt and the other party being good, which is what often seems to be the opinion online.
It's not about policies. Policies are entirely different but equally self serving.
I'm astounded that there are blacks living in ghettos but Nancy Pelosi shuts Govt down for people who are pondered to by speaking Spanish but paraded as having known no other culture and assimilated.
I don’t mind the downvotes or anything, but it struck me as strange that on the same day that it’s reported Google is pursuing partnerships with an entity as corrupt and demonstrably awful as the Saudi regime, people see this as outside the range of possibility.
Are you serious? Why can't it be that the CEO under performed and couldn't manage their increasing costs to pay Apple and Mozilla. Also, that they can't seem to sell consumer electronics unless they are low margin phones?
Because Schmidt isn't the CEO. (note that I also don't really think its politically motivated either, but that's certainly more likely than thinking that Alphabet is underperforming).
Yep. And as someone engaged in the RISC-V community, I've seen zero evidence of Google involvement outside of Patterson. Normally if they had something brewing, you would start to see signs on the forums, email, or Github.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didnt Hennessy, while President of Stanford, agree to give away university-owned page rank IP to Google for $1mm (a company he was conveniently personally invested in) thereby lining himself up for massive personal gains at the expense of the University?
Right, that's why Google is still paying Stanford for the license, and gave the university shares that were worth $360M in 2005 already? [0]
"In 2012, Google paid Stanford $80,000 for the license, a sharp decline from the $400,000 paid in 201a and only 1/10 of what Google paid in 2010. Since Google began disclosing these payments, the company has paid Stanford around $3 million in licensing fees. Of course, that’s in addition to the $1.8 million shares that Google issued to Stanford, and which the school sold for $336 million in 2005.Google made up some of the difference by donating $3.4 million to Stanford for scholarships and what the proxy describes as “other philanthropic endeavors”, compared with $3 million in 2011."
Stanford sold for an average of $187 per share for the 1.8mm they received. That was years later at the IPO beyond. At the time they received them the value was far far lower (likely on the order of what I suggested). And the license amounts.. the article says it was 80k in 2012. That's an awful licensing agreement by any measure. This is a company that Stanford's own president - a genius by any measure - was an investor in so clearly believed in it's value, and yet he agreed to sell the IP essentially for a pittance to himself.
The annual fees to use the algorithm is probably not substantial and a quirk of the agreement, and the substantial part of the licensing agreement is the 1 million or so shares that they received.
The share grant must have been fairly early on the history of the company (or else Google won't be able to use PageRank, which was fundamental to Google Search), probably pre-Series A. Google itself wasn't worth that much back then, so the 1M shares was probably bigger slice of a much smaller pie that eventually got diluted through later funding rounds.
According to [1], Stanford received 1.8 million shares of Google stock (I'd imagine for PageRank and other rights), and they sold it over time for $336 million.
If there was a way I could say "go you", yeah, I want to do that. He's a great guy, has done great work, go him.
And all that said, I bet this is not a "go him" job, I bet he makes a difference, maybe a huge one, maybe not so huge, but I bet he makes a difference. Let's come back in 5 years, I bet he will have made stuff better.