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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

by jmstfv on 9/7/24, 7:20 AM with 49 comments

• by largbae on 9/7/24, 5:10 PM

  > We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

  I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.

• by dredmorbius on 9/7/24, 4:25 PM

  This is an HN perennial favourite, with 39 submissions. Among the significant discussions:

  8 years ago, 32 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12283614>

  8 years ago, 61 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762614>

  3 years ago, 49 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28981275>

  14 years ago, 46 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079473>

  6 years ago, 33 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18987188>

  11 years ago, 11 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5660763>

  10 years ago, 23 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8681061>

  14 years ago, 23 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1205500>

  16 years ago, 15 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191212>

  15 years ago, 10 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723361>

  16 years ago, 12 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311454>

  17 years ago, 5 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834>

• by matt2000 on 9/7/24, 2:36 PM

  Side note, the Connection Machine is pretty much the coolest looking computer ever: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/story/73 It looks exactly to me what a powerful and slightly scary computer from an 80's movie looks like.

• by delichon on 9/7/24, 3:00 PM

  "'Give me something real to do.' So we sent him out to buy some office supplies."

  Great moments in management, and proof that Feynman had a well developed sense of humor or this would have been a shorter story. "One of the best minds on Earth just showed up, what do we do?" "We need pencils."

• by bhasi on 9/7/24, 4:56 PM

  Loved this line:

      Every great man that I have known has had a certain time and place in their life that they use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were supposed to and great things were accomplished.
  

  This has inspired me to work harder so that I find myself in such a flow state in either a work situation or a life situation in the not too distant future, say, a decade.

• by andrewgleave on 9/7/24, 8:51 PM

  """But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool."""

  This is why he is spoken of with such reverence and why his insights have profoundly impacted both scientists and non-scientists alike. Few Nobel laureates have achieved such popular influence.

• by W-Stool on 9/7/24, 3:13 PM

  Many, many years ago I saw a Connection Machine running. Let me just say it was not a machine that you just walked by. "What the hell is that thing?!?" was more like it.

• by fsckboy on 9/7/24, 8:00 PM

  Brewster Kahle's wikipedia page says that straight from undergraduate "he joined the Thinking Machines team, where he was the lead engineer on the company's main product, the Connection Machine, for six years (1983–1989)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle#Life_and_career

  this statement has to be wildly exaggerated, it was a hardware project and he was a green software "kid". Anybody from Thinking Machines know what his actual job was?

• by chris_wot on 9/7/24, 2:08 PM

  I love to see the equation he came up with…

• by gxd on 9/9/24, 11:28 AM

  I always loved the design of the Connection Machine... So much that I was inspired by it for creating the very first screen for my company's new game: https://www.galantrix.com/blog/20240830/

• by smarks on 9/7/24, 4:33 PM

  Note the date line on the article:

      Published on Sunday, January 15, 01989  •  35 years, 7 months ago
  

  Specifically, the five-digit year! Also the explicit listing of the age of the article. Most sites have a “human readable” or “friendly” date such as “published yesterday” but only for recent dates. Some sites, such as news sites, add a warning if the article is more than say five years old. Here, it’s as if they’re proud of the age. Since this was published by the Long Now Foundation it seems likely these were done deliberately.

• by breck on 9/7/24, 3:20 PM

  Danny Hillis wrote The Pattern on the Stone, one of my favorite books of all time, so I was very excited to see this essay.

  Wow, I was not disappointed.

• by rbanffy on 9/7/24, 12:14 PM

  It was posted many times in the past and I never mind seeing it again - the discussions are always worthy, and there's always a batch of HNers who never heard the story.