[HN Gopher] John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died
___________________________________________________________________
John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died
Author : jdougan
Score : 962 points
Date : 2024-02-08 02:33 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scanalyst.fourmilab.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (scanalyst.fourmilab.ch)
| jdougan wrote:
| And this time, I have a public link to the announcement.
| dang wrote:
| This is a reference to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39225011, which is still
| relevant, and sad.
|
| Thanks for posting these.
| Qem wrote:
| RIP John Walker. His fourmilab site is a surviving relic of the
| old web. Full of interesting stuff.
| prenoob wrote:
| Used to run his very code to do in-browser js encryption.. RIP
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I recall the small dot-c text file that was passed around, that
| contained his sequence of tests for float integrity on a portable
| C compiler and architecture. It was a gold-standard at the time.
| jdougan wrote:
| It was also ported to a number of languages and used as a
| benchmark.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/ffbench.html
| darkwater wrote:
| Wow! It went down from over 2000 seconds to less than half a
| second, as HW improved. And the last test was ran on a
| Pentium 4. I wonder what are the results on today's HW.
| fallingknife wrote:
| No need to wonder. You can run it.
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/
| darkwater wrote:
| OK, tested the C version on my Intel(R) Core(TM)
| i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz and following the instructions
|
| > Measured run time in seconds should be divided by
| 400000 to normalise for reporting results. For archival
| results, adjust iteration count so the benchmark runs
| about five minutes.
|
| so it ran for 246 seconds (almost 5 minutes) and the
| normalized result is:
|
| 0.000617025
| peblos wrote:
| His Hacker's Diet really helped me out 15 years ago or so. Cheers
| John
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker%27s_Diet
| btilly wrote:
| Likewise, but more like 20 years ago for me. Kept it off for
| many years as well.
|
| I should do that again actually. Gained some weight during
| COVID.
| masto wrote:
| Me too, though it was more like 25 years. If someone asked me
| "who is your hero", I would answer John Walker. To be honest, I
| didn't know all that much about him beyond The Hacker's Diet,
| his own autobiography/Autodesk File, and the stuff on his web
| site circa 15-20 years ago. But the things I did know seemed
| admirable:
|
| * He was an engineer's engineer, and when his company became
| successful, the impression I got was that he stayed one.
|
| * The Hacker's Diet is a good example - approaching weight loss
| as a problem to be solved the same as any other: by learning
| what's known about it and using empiricism and data.
|
| * As far as I can tell, at some point he decided he had
| achieved all the money he needed so he went off to Switzerland
| and became a sort of mad scientist, pursuing whatever
| interested him for the rest of his life. Including things like
| the hotbits random number generator, where he installed a
| radiation source in his basement and used it to serve random
| bits up via a public web API.
|
| None of us are perfect, and it's best not to know too much
| about one's heroes, so I didn't. I looked up to the John Walker
| in my mind as the person I want to be when I grow up, and this
| sad news hits hard.
| paulpauper wrote:
| It's basic CICO, from having skimmed it. The problem is this
| type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing. CICO is
| hard to maintain. Eventually willpower fails and gradual
| overeating begins, leading to surprisingly large and abrupt
| weight regain. Being persistently hungry all the time just
| sucks.
|
| Some of the stuff is possibly wrong, like this
|
| _There 's a lot of nonsense floating around regarding
| exercise and weight control. The only way to lose weight is
| to eat less than your body burns. Period. Exercising causes
| your body to burn more, but few people have the time or
| inclination to exercise enough to make a big difference. An
| hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are
| you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just
| to burn off that extra burger?_
|
| There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising
| raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows
| the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated
| later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a
| 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will
| still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.
| peblos wrote:
| Didn't want to delve into it in the original comment but
| what you mention is correct and is one of the reasons I
| mentioned how far back this was.
|
| I haven't read Herman Pontzer's recent research, I'd equate
| to becoming a more efficient runner; as efficiency
| increases energy demands are reduced.
|
| Some of today's research just didn't exist when this was
| written. Of course, some of the advice was already
| debatable by the time I got to read it in the mid-late
| 00's, but that can be said for a lot of health and fitness
| advice even today.
|
| I didn't follow it proscriptively. What it did do was give
| me a different approach to tackling it as a problem and was
| the first resource I had read that helped in that regard.
| Everything else was very much eat less of this and more of
| that
|
| Like thread's asking which book/resource to use when
| learning to code, there are many good examples out there.
| Not all are perfect, and some are occasionally wrong but
| like that example, this was the one that stuck with me.
| zikzak wrote:
| Something most people miss, as it is only briefly
| mentioned, is he was eating on big meal each day after
| work. That's basically like 20/2 intermittent fasting. It
| definitely would have had an effect on his metabolism and
| insulin resistance. It's not a dictum, he just gives an
| anecdote and mentions it.
|
| I was reviewing HD a few years ago to see if it still
| held up against current, prevailing wisdom and noticed
| this. Kind of blew my mind.
| kiba wrote:
| _There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising
| raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows
| the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are
| negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a
| 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will
| still get a net 400 gain, or close to it._
|
| You could achieve a constant NEAT by having a daily step
| goal or some prescribed amount of activities outside your
| exercise routine. I am supposed to do 2 hours of exercise
| per day plus give or take 10K steps. This can easily make
| me extremely active by American standard.
|
| Now, surely your BMR will compensate, but probably only to
| a certain point.
|
| In the end, it's probably easier to just eat healthy and
| eat less rather than trying to increase your caloric
| expenditure, but that's also rather hard to do for a
| variety of reasons.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Also, regular exercise will have more benefits than just
| increasing your caloric expenditure. It keeps your muscle
| mass from deterioriating as you age.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| "Supposed to"? Is this a lifestyle/athletic goal, or a
| medical recommendation (or something else)?
| masto wrote:
| There's a time and a place, man. Well actuallying on an
| obituary isn't it.
| gumby wrote:
| > CICO is hard to maintain. Eventually willpower fails and
| gradual overeating begins, leading to surprisingly large
| and abrupt weight regain.
|
| The key difference, for nerd hackers, is the floater/sinker
| graph and the average. Some apps do this these days, though
| it seems to be less common than it was a few years ago
| (e.g. Withings and Apple no longer present their data that
| way).
|
| So as long as the sinker is below the trend you will lose,
| at some rate. You don't have to be starving yourself unless
| you have a fetish, just stay below the trend line. When you
| have a spurt of enthusiasm you can drive yourself lower;
| when you are finding it hard, just try to stay below trend.
|
| It's a manual form of gamification.
| tpm wrote:
| > So if you do a 400-calorie run
|
| That's not enough, the energy will be provided by glycogen
| stored in muscles and fat stored in the liver and those
| will be restored quickly. What happens if you do a 3000
| calorie bike tour is the interesting question.
|
| Exercising raises metabolism at least during during the
| exercise (anything different would be a physical nonsense)
| - the issue is not exercising enough.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >It's basic CICO, from having skimmed it. The problem is
| this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing.
|
| I couldn't disagree more. THD is not really a diet, it just
| explains the baseline facts of weight loss and enables you
| to choose whatever diet that works for you. It takes the
| mystery out of it. You may gain weight one week and lose
| weight the next, but you will know why.
|
| The hackers diet makes a very convincing argument that any
| diet that works is in fact "CICO in disguise". The key
| point being that "Calories in" is not whatever is printed
| on the box, it is instead /what your body has absorbed from
| it/.
|
| So for example when you eat 3000 calories of salmon in
| bearnaise sauce as part of your Atkins or whatever and you
| lose weight, clearly your body is not absorbing 3000
| calories (for whatever reason). If you follow the hacks in
| THD you will discover this, and any other effect various
| foods have on /you/. It will also help you discover if a
| 400-calorie run actually works for you or not.
|
| I am very thankful to Mr Walker for writing THD. He gave me
| the tools to "fix myself" when I notice that I have put on
| a few, and I have used those tools successfully many times.
| graphe wrote:
| > The problem is this type of diet has the greatest
| likelihood of failing. CICO is hard to maintain.
|
| CICO is hard for people who are fat or who will become fat.
| It is not true it is hard. It is poor impulse control, not
| lack of willpower.
|
| > There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising
| raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows
| the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are
| negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a
| 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will
| still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.
|
| Nonsense, this is a lie to make obese people not exercise.
| Anyone who has exercised knows this is fake news. By
| perpetrating fake "science" you are also a source of
| demotivating people to improve. It is disgusting to post
| this. Look at a runner, your fake "science" busted. The
| Hadza are as genetically removed from other humans as
| possible (including their distance from other African
| peoples).
| hobabaObama wrote:
| For anyone wanting to read this book
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/introduction.html
| fermentation wrote:
| Anyone else feel a little weird reading the section about
| exercise?
|
| > You exercise because you'll live longer and you'll feel
| better.
|
| It's a little depressing that despite a good diet and
| exercise, he had a slightly shorter than average lifespan.
| When I put in the effort to eat well and exercise, I know I
| certainly have the mindset that it will extend my life. I
| hope that at the least he felt strong and healthy.
| jdougan wrote:
| He died from an accident. Stairs can be hazardous.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Source?
| jdougan wrote:
| Private forum post at Scanalyst. I accidentally posted a
| ref on HN to it earlier not noticing it was not public.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thanks.
| paulpauper wrote:
| no cause of death is given. people who are healthy can
| still die early from accidents
| swader999 wrote:
| How functional you are in later years certainly correlates
| to exercise and diet.
| 38 wrote:
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker's_Diet
| paulpauper wrote:
| it even has a wiki devoted to it? Seems a tad overdone but I
| guess it meets the criteria of notability.
| snthpy wrote:
| Same here. Thank you John!
| AdeptusAquinas wrote:
| I was put on it by nuwen.net, went from 110 to 80 some 15 years
| ago, changed my life. RIP
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Long before I had heard of Autodesk, I came across John Walker's
| site in the late 90s because he was the author of Speak Freely,
| an early Internet voice chat program.
| eelstretching wrote:
| Speak Freely was the best, and saved me literally thousands of
| dollars when I was a post-doc in Australia and my fiancee was
| still in Canada. I once used it to help with an interview of
| wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann and an Australian
| journalist and had to fix an endianess issue to do it.
| jim_lawless wrote:
| I was particularly fond of his ATLAST Forth-like programming
| language.
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/
|
| Rest in peace.
| 1337p337 wrote:
| I loved that language. I actually forked it, used it for a lot
| of stuff, bloated it (started by just trying to port to x86-64,
| ended up with a mini-FORTH with regexes, FFI to C, etc.). I
| still use it every day, though mostly for doing math in hex.
| mxyzptlk wrote:
| Another atlast fan here. I used it as an extension language for
| SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) and wrote games for the GP2X
| handheld in a Forth-like language. Everything should be
| scriptable.
| gregw2 wrote:
| His story of the beginnings of Autodesk ("The Autodesk File") is
| very interesting and contains a number of lessons:
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
| xtracto wrote:
| This snippet is amazing and hilarious at the same time:
|
| >The game has changed. In 1977 this business was fun--the
| sellers and buyers were hotshot techies like ourselves,
| everybody spoke the same language and knew what was going on,
| and technical excellence was recognised and rewarded. Today,
| the microcomputer industry is run by middle manager types who
| know far more about P/L statements than they do RAM
| organization. They are the people who determine whether you
| succeed or fail, and their evaluations are seldom based on
| technical qualities. Hence, the first thing any venture in this
| field has to be is businesslike.
|
| I felt that way in the early 90s with PCs programming and late
| 90's with the Internet. Once the "suits" take over, things get
| boring for us techies.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's like that saying, "nobody goes there any more. it's too
| crowded"
| dcminter wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22
| foofie wrote:
| > Once the "suits" take over, things get boring for us
| techies.
|
| To be fair, "suits" are a sign of success and growth. Once
| your company is large enough to be just a single team, and
| starts requiring too much time to keep track of all things
| happening and what each employee thinks and does, managing
| becomes a dedicated job and delegating management requires
| dedicated managers.
|
| Also, I think that point of view is through rose-colored
| glasses. One circle of hell is comprised of being managed by
| an awkward antisocial techie.
| MetalGuru wrote:
| Although rare, there are managers who are both technically
| competent and good at managing people (disparate
| skillsets). I think a manager who knows nothing about tech
| is often as destructive as a technical manager who's bad at
| people management. There just seems to be more of the
| former
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I would say that if someone is supposedly good at people
| or managing, but bad at tech and therefore bad at
| managing tech, then they are not good at people or
| managing.
| lukan wrote:
| "One circle of hell is comprised of being managed by an
| awkward antisocial techie."
|
| And heaven is, competent techies, who know and trust each
| other and know the mission - and need not being managed.
| docmars wrote:
| Right? Do passionate hobbiests really need non-tech
| managers if they're successful?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Rose or not. The current future of suits letting go of
| valuable talent to get a 0.2% higher quarterly earnings
| statement sure doesn't appeal to me. At least if some power
| hungry techy rants at me there's usually some technical
| fault I made instead of simply being a pawn on the board.
| There's nothing to learn or reflect on in a layoff.
| Ccecil wrote:
| This is very much how I feel about the RepRap/3d printing
| community.
|
| Must be a common pattern in tech.
| evaneykelen wrote:
| I've read it at least twice over the years and its descriptions
| of hard-learned lessons, sales tactics, product decisions,
| hiring, management structures, internationalization, funding,
| dealing with partnerships, and chasing and reaching break-even
| are very much applicable to today's startups. Some paragraphs
| in the book even sound like PG whispered advice in John's ear
| but obviously the rise of Autodesk predates YC by decades.
| jdougan wrote:
| I'd say the odds are good PG had read it. It has been on the
| Web since the mid 90s.
| evaneykelen wrote:
| You noticed my insinuation :-)
| agumonkey wrote:
| RIP, Autodesk (the company) was such a big name in my early years
|
| I never saw early autocad, here's demo
| https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Apb5ayyCHaE
| 1-6 wrote:
| It still is. Any serious CAD user knows that there's nothing
| that comes quite close to AutoCAD after all these years (even
| with all the pork introduced by new developers).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)
| eggspurt wrote:
| We need to put some work into this...
| defrost wrote:
| Takes me back.
|
| One of my earliest "big" gigs for good money was a mid 80's use
| of the newly released AutoLisp(?) to generate non standard (for
| the day) engineering forms for computational analysis.
|
| The architects made a bit of a wild sketch for a big
| international mega millions build contract, the engineering crowd
| made it work - the architects got a fancy award, we got a thank
| you bread and cheese thing with drinks.
|
| (And paid .. that counts.)
|
| R.I.P. John Walker - https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/
| tralarpa wrote:
| This is a little bit weird:
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/noEU/
| defrost wrote:
| Perhaps, but certainly consistent. John was famously not a
| fan of large government, be it the USSR, the USofA, or the EU
| - a believer in small government and prepared to sell merch
| to just that end.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| What's weird about having strong opinions about the European
| Union?
| walthamstow wrote:
| I guess it's tongue in cheek, and it is funny, but some of
| what is written is a bit weird.
|
| "anti-democratic ... empire at the expense of the natural
| rights, individual liberty, local autonomy, and cultural
| diversity which made Europe the wellspring of Western
| civilisation."
|
| Firstly, I wouldn't call Mesopotamia and the eastern Med
| Europe exactly.
|
| Secondly, lot of cultural and scientific advances that did
| happen in Europe were under (among others) the Roman, Holy
| Roman, British and Spanish Empires, which are exactly what
| he is against!
|
| It's also weird that he thinks the EU "began to sprout" in
| 2003, a decade after Maastrict.
| cnasc wrote:
| Is Mesopotamia typically considered the "west?"
| walthamstow wrote:
| Latin and Greek are both successors to the Phoenician
| alphabet. The Phoenicians settled parts of modern day
| Europe and brought their alphabet and other technologies
| that they inherited from Mesopotamian civs. The Greeks
| would have been nowhere without Babylonian maths and
| astrology.
|
| West and East is very grey though. I've made a
| distinction that I'm happy with, and pointed out why I'm
| not happy with John's.
|
| What do you think?
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| could not tell if this was satire or not. interesting fella
| walthamstow wrote:
| It seems like satire today given what's happened in the
| last 10 years but given it was published 2003, he was well
| ahead of the times and possibly writing with tongue in
| cheek, even if he did believe the thrust of it
| shepardrtc wrote:
| I remember discovering his website in the mid 90's and
| immediately falling in love with all the random stuff he had. I
| had an early laptop back then and took it to my high school
| astronomy club meetups loaded with his astronomy software. We
| were able to use it to help us point this giant clunky telescope
| and immediately I saw what the future would be like with portable
| computing.
| rcb wrote:
| Very sad news. In the mid 90s I used his ATLAST in a commercial
| product and reached out to him for some help. He was very
| gracious. R.I.P John Walker
| HeOwnsTwitter wrote:
| One of my earlier professional programming projects was to build
| a set of custom tools for engineering in Autolisp. Rip Mr. Walker
| havaloc wrote:
| I emailed him once ( without knowing who he was ) about an issue
| with his JavaScrypt tool. Super down to earth. His website is so
| unpretentious I didn't realize he was the founder of Autodesk.
| ResNet wrote:
| I think this is the JS tool mentioned:
| https://bigarrow.tripod.com/js-encr/j4jscrypt.html
|
| His main website is really fantastic, well worth a visit:
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/
| 1-6 wrote:
| AutoCAD is a transformative product and one that really helped me
| appreciate good software design (albeit only seeing it through
| AutoCAD's commandline and AutoLISP). Autodesk has lost a legend
| and his legacy will live on.
| Animats wrote:
| > AutoCAD is a transformative product
|
| It really was. It replaced manual drafting. Drawing revision
| before AutoCAD involved maintaining a master drawing and
| updating it manually with pencils and erasers. Final drawings
| were inked in. Copies were made by running master drawings
| through a blueprint machine. When there were too many
| revisions, someone had to redraw the drawing by hand, and the
| copy had to be checked by hand by a checker.
|
| There were CAD systems before AutoCAD, but they either required
| a more expensive computer than an PC, or they couldn't handle a
| drawing too big for memory. The big innovation in AutoCAD is
| that it had a paging system for working on drawings too big for
| the machine. The code was paged in and out in segments. The
| drawing was paged in and out in sections.
|
| (I did some of the early AutoCAD ports to non-IBM PCs.
| Compatibility hadn't been established yet. Everything needed a
| driver. AutoCAD had "more drivers than Yellow Cab" at one
| point.)
| deltarholamda wrote:
| On balance, CAD has improved the industry for sure. But,
| because I'm old enough to yell at clouds, I would like to
| point out the flip side.
|
| In manual drafting days, changes were hard, as you note. But
| because of that, there was a LOT more pre-planning, because
| once you start putting the Koh-I-Noor to mylar, changes were
| difficult. So you avoided them whenever possible. Architects
| had to sit down with owners and say, "look, past this point,
| you don't get to make changes, at least not for free."
|
| Now, buildings are quite often designed-by-addenda. The due
| date is just a date. You get extra time to actually "finish"
| the job by issuing massive addendums prior to bid. And
| because of that, architects don't make owners sit down and
| tell them everything, so you'll get A/V or finishes or
| whatever really, really late in the design phase. "No
| problem, we'll fix it by addendum."
|
| I am also a bit sad that drafting skills have died out
| somewhat. I've seen some really, really beautiful bluelines.
| I've heard of electrical engineers who would make smiley-
| faces with their homerun arrows. And the process of manual
| lettering is very zen, and teaches people spatial awareness
| like nothing else.
|
| All that said, man alive, I love AutoCAD. Embedding Lisp in
| the program was amazing. The modern thing is now Revit, which
| has some good things going for it as well, but it is not (and
| may never be) anywhere near ACAD for a lot of work. RIP John.
| Animats wrote:
| AutoLISP was put in because it was a memory-safe
| interpreter. Allowing users to extend AutoCAD with C would
| have created a debugging nightmare. AutoLISP could detect
| its own errors without crashing AutoCAD. LISP was the only
| game in town back then for interpreters which could deal
| with variable-sized data.
|
| AutoCAD users were not programmers. Computer knowledge was
| not widespread. Keeping users from losing their drawing
| files, a major long-term asset, was crucial to product
| acceptance. There was a strong "don't screw up" ethos
| within Autodesk. Much of that came from the founders, who
| were mostly mainframe operating system programmers.
| hitekker wrote:
| He parted ways with Autodesk a long time ago but it would have
| been nice for his former company to acknowledge him
| https://www.autodesk.com/
| francisofascii wrote:
| Right. I was looking for a press release or something. Did not
| see one.
| djmips wrote:
| Yeah, that's cold.
| doubloon wrote:
| When steve jobs died people were leaving post its and mementos
| at my local apple stote... which were promptly removed.
| Corporations are completely sociopathic
| eggspurt wrote:
| They still have nothing (as of now)
| https://www.autodesk.com/search?qt=john%20walker&sn=en_US&us...
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Great website. Really enjoyed his writings. RIP.
| interfixus wrote:
| Since I came across it in its very early days, for nearly three
| decades the fourmilab.ch site has been the one constant in my
| weblife. Treasure trove of projects and ideas and book
| suggestions. Eclectic is the word which pops up in my head right
| now and insists on being used.
|
| Had a few email exchanges with the man himself. On randomness, on
| English grammar, on Swedish adventures in The Thirty Years' War,
| on certain politics (where we didn't necessarily see eye to eye
| but where there was plenty of room for civilised discussion).
| Unfailingly polite, informative, entertaining, and of course with
| cognitive ressources most of us can only dream of.
|
| John Walker, thanks for all the effort and the inspiration. I
| shall miss your presence.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I cold called him one day and despite my having been a rando he
| took the time to help me out.
|
| His relaxed view on learning foreign languages (along the lines
| of "as long as you avoid having tonnes of manure dumped in your
| front yard, you're doing OK") was also very helpful!
| orsenthil wrote:
| I have benefited from his "The Hackers Diet" book -
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ and his numerous book reviews.
| He was one of persons who inspired me with his voracious reading
| habit. It was unbelievable to me first. He also led his life in
| his own way, with not many knowing that he was the founder of
| Autodesk. He will remain an inspiration to hackers.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. What a gem !
| tjansen wrote:
| Wow, yes. I first read it 25-30 years ago, and had no idea who
| he was. But it's one of the few books that really changed my
| life.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| This past weekend I noticed I've been logging my weight daily
| on his site (it does a 10 day weighted running average) since
| 2006. I was thinking of sending him an email thanking him for
| the help he provided me. So, a strange coincidence. RIP.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Looks nice! Is the science sound?
| Quekid5 wrote:
| If you mean The Hacker's Diet, then yes. It's just a way of
| doing CICO and weight tracking (+ smoothing to avoid
| demotivating wild fluctuations), so yes.
| p_l wrote:
| For hacker's diet?
|
| Yes, but it's very barebones basics of calorie deficit
| calculations, and do not take into account (very individual)
| differences across the day.
| zikzak wrote:
| Actually, on close reading, you realize he's eating one
| large meal a day and that's it. This is actually
| intermittent fasting "before it was cool".
| p_l wrote:
| Yes, but it's not articulated in detail why and how it
| works.
|
| It's a good start, and for many it will help - hell, it
| did help me just by putting it down in clear numbers that
| ultimately calorie deficit is the crucial thing.
| Asooka wrote:
| > it's not articulated in detail why and how it works
|
| Answering that is a very long and fascinating deep dive
| in human biology with plenty of unknowns. I wouldn't even
| try to summarise as I myself am nowhere near
| knowledgeable enough on the topic. For myself, I've
| noticed that maintaining a calorie deficit is simply
| easier if it's a regular meal and then no meal than if
| it's two half meals.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I can go for days without eating and not think about it
| too much - but as soon as I start eating, I become
| obsessed with food and cannot stop. So if I just eat
| dinner, there's not enough time left in the day to
| overeat.
|
| That's why it works for me.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| You might like this talk fwiw:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RuOvn4UqznU
| p_l wrote:
| Reduction of meal count definitely helps in maintaining
| caloric deficit, and even more if like me, you're
| insulin-resistant.
|
| Trying to do classic '5 meals a day', no matter their
| size, ensured I'd end up with completely out of whack
| blood sugar driving me into cravings that ensured there
| was no weight loss, but weight gain.
| chpatrick wrote:
| It helped me a lot too. Rest in peace, John.
| nxobject wrote:
| I hope those who take care of John's affairs will find a way to
| preserve fourmilab.ch (although the Wayback Machine is already
| doing the job, too) - although the site's still up, I worry that
| some direct debit will fail...
| Animats wrote:
| It's being taken care of.
| Xunxi wrote:
| I recently joined scanalyst and binge trawled the site to
| read everything accessible.
|
| It is oasis in the midst of all the internet cacophony and
| I'm glad to 'it's being taken of'
| rurban wrote:
| He was my idol. And during my stint at Autodesk I've always cited
| his Autodesk files. Many didn't like that :)
| forgingahead wrote:
| Fascinating article on his website (there are many!) about a WSJ
| reporter playing a fool during an interview with him:
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/?chapter=chapter2_99
|
| Fake news always gonna fake, eh?
| fragmede wrote:
| > Multimedia being, as of this writing, insufficiently advanced
| to permit me to embed two hours of video in this book.
|
| 1992!
| alliao wrote:
| I saw his article on reversing myopia and followed his advice to
| this day; I hope he doesn't mind me sharing his suggestions!
|
| "I think the next time I go for new glasses, I'll skip the
| progressives (which are extremely expensive) and just get
| reading/computer and driving glasses, each fixed-corrected to the
| appropriate distance. This will probably cut the cost in half,
| and I find that when I'm travelling and wearing the progressives,
| I usually just push them down my nose to read rather than trying
| to read through the lower part, which is pretty wonky (this may
| have something to do with my astigmatism correction)."
|
| amazing human taking time answering rando emails from the
| internet. world would be infinitely better with more like him.
| femto wrote:
| The world's changed since then. If you go to the right online
| glasses providers, you can get progressives for much less
| (<half) than the cost of a pair of single power glasses in a
| high street store.
| noir_lord wrote:
| True but some of what he says still makes sense.
|
| i.e. I'm near sighted now (need reading glasses) and have
| astigamatism (I've always had that but until I needed reading
| glasses I never bothered with glasses so my brain has
| adapted, if I wear lenses that correct for the astigmatism
| everything looks the wrong shape for quite a while before
| eyes adjust then when I don't wear them everything looks the
| wrong shape but the other way so in the end I just went for
| glasses for close vision work (screen/reading) since that was
| less bothersome than "fixing" a problem that isn't really a
| problem).
| gtirloni wrote:
| I'm in the same situation. Astigmatism and really mild
| myopia all my life (got glasses but never really used
| them).
|
| My eyes got really tired a year ago and I got glasses for
| short distances. But now they got much worse and I think
| I'll have to order new lenses.
|
| I was thinking about progressives but it looks like a lot
| of people have issues adapting. Since my myopia continues
| low, I think I'll just focus on the reading glasses for
| now.
|
| Any advice welcome.
| wmertens wrote:
| I got dramatical improvement in my myopia over a few
| months time when I switched to a Paleo-ish diet,
| drastically cutting sugar and supplementing with vitamins
| including luteine.
|
| I no longer needed my glasses to drive or go to the
| movies. Granted it was only -1 but still.
|
| Now a decade on, my diet isn't so clean any more, far
| away details are somewhat blurry but still better than
| they used to be. The biggest impact is the amount of
| sleep I had the night before.
| dnh44 wrote:
| Progressive's are the highest margin lens for both the
| retail store and the manufacturers (Essilor, Zeiss, Hoya,
| Rodenstock, etc). By putting a fancy curve on the back of
| a lens a $1 piece of plastic is transformed into a $500
| piece of plastic. There is a lot of pressure to sell
| progressives. Without the high margins on progressive
| lenses many optical retail stores would not make a
| profit.
|
| Progressives are fine as long as they aren't being sold
| as a lens for all situations. For example a lens that
| would be good for driving or playing golf (using mostly
| distance vision) would be terrible for sitting at a desk
| (using mostly the reading area). Depending on your
| lifestyle there may or may not be a design available that
| is less annoying than just changing glasses. Bifocals are
| even more limited in this respect. This trade-off is not
| related at all to the issue of adaptation which is
| something else.
|
| So the first question you have to ask is if having both a
| distance and reading Rx in the same lens is something
| that is better for you compared to separate distance and
| reading glasses. My monitors are at head height so simple
| reading glasses are the best solution for me when working
| at my desk. If I wore progressives with this setup I
| would have to tilt my head back in order to view my
| monitors through the reading area of the lens which is at
| the bottom of the lens. If I instead worked on a notebook
| computer all day, looking down at a screen, then viewing
| that screen through the reading area of my glasses
| wouldn't be a problem.
|
| I'm currently wearing a pair of fancy fully personalised
| progressives that retail for PS2000 a pair but I still
| use some cheapish reading glasses for working at my desk.
| However to be fair to the progressives I adapted to them
| just about instantly; the design just wasn't suited for
| reading for long periods of time.
|
| The adaptation issue is another issue and another thing
| you should consider. Adaptation refers to the ability to
| become accustomed to the distortion that often exists at
| the edges of progressive lenses. They can make you feel a
| bit dizzy when you first wear them. The general rule of
| thumb is that if you have a small "add" then it will be
| easy to adapt to them but if you have a large add it may
| be difficult.
|
| If your add is small now and don't see the point of
| progressives but are thinking of trying them later as
| your near vision deteriorates you may want to consider
| starting on them early just to make it easier to adapt to
| them later. Otherwise you might get stuck with bifocals
| which make you look old.
|
| Anyway if I had to boil that advice down to just a few
| quick points I'd say:
|
| - If you're planning on using the glasses just for
| working at a desk then I would just get reading glasses
| (that also correct your astigmatism).
|
| - For other situations where you need both distance and
| reading then progressives can be nice.
|
| - If you're not quite sure about progressives but think
| you'll definitely want them later in life then it is
| better to start on them now.
|
| - If you're buying online I would only get single vision
| lenses. To get a nice fit for progressives you need to
| get a bunch of stuff measured that doesn't get put on
| your prescription.
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| It also depends on how old you are and how bad your
| presbyopia is (the condition where it's hard to flex your
| lenses and so change focus from near to far).
| Progressives are great if you do have this condition - I
| have a Costco membership largely to get cheaper glasses
| for this reason...
| AdamN wrote:
| I got progressives a few months ago - going back to reading
| glasses
| kwanbix wrote:
| What options do you use? I know about Zennit but I always
| wondered if there is something better, as my progresive are
| very expensive.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Zeiss & Hoya make good lenses. Both also have expertise in
| photography equipment and they have their own coatings, so
| they're also a plus. Their lenses might not come cheap,
| though.
|
| I also used Japanese Tora and French Essilor Crizal lenses
| (cylindrical, not progressives), and they had good
| resolution with superb coatings.
|
| Currently I'm using a domestic lens with blue filter, and
| my eyes are happier than ever.
|
| My mother uses progressives. A bad progressive is a life
| quality reducing expense, so paying the price for a good
| lens pays in dividends over the short and long run.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >I saw his article on reversing myopia
|
| Where did you see it? I'd like to read it too.
| alliao wrote:
| it's here! https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/health/myopia/
| Asooka wrote:
| In the end he recommends if you need cataract surgery, i.e.
| a lens replacement, to get a lens focused at reading
| distance. Note that there is progress being made on
| accommodating implantable ocular lenses (also called
| variable-focus) which can shift their focus similar to your
| natural lens. I'm personally keeping an eye out on these
| guys https://ocumetics.com/ .
| swader999 wrote:
| This is interesting, I'm going through an internal debate about
| what type of lense to go with for cataract surgery. The latest
| progressive lenses or just correct for distance and wear
| reading glasses for close in work. I've come to the same
| conclusion, better to go with single lense, rather than the
| progressives.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Progressives just don't make sense to me. I have a pair of
| computer glasses, and a pair of bike riding glasses, and I
| never ride my bike while using the computer. So why would I
| want to have 50% of my vision blurry at all times?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I got bifocals for driving, so that I could read the gps when
| necessary. Turns out it's not really very useful because it's
| hard to "glance" that the gps and get it in the right area of
| my vision to use the "reading" part of the glasses. I
| wouldn't do it again. That being said, having the "reading"
| part of the glasses doesn't negatively impact my using them
| for distance, so I could see the benefit of the bifocal just
| so you always have the reading part available without needing
| a second pair of glasses.
|
| To the best of my knowledge, bifocals are just progressives
| with a distinct line where the prescription changes; instead
| of having an area where it "transitions". They look archaic
| (social concerns, if you care about that kind of thing) in
| exchange for not having a whole area of the lens that isn't
| usable at all.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> amazing human taking time answering rando emails from the
| internet.
|
| Life tip: Most people will do that if your email is about
| something they are interested in and (most importantly) they
| have time. Celebrities are usually off the table (no time for
| all the fan email), but this guy is "just" a retired engineer
| who made a big product and a lot of money. You were also asking
| about some side interest of his, so I would almost expect a
| response.
|
| Be polite and fairly concise (brief, they don't need your life
| story out the gate) on a topic of interest to them and most
| people will respond positively.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >and (most importantly) they have time.
|
| >is "just" a retired engineer who made a big product and a
| lot of money.
|
| Gernerally those 2 go hand in hand. You make something well
| known and they get dozens of emails a day about advice,
| business deals, the usual spam, and more.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| I'm curious about how long have you been trying out his advice
| and if you have seen any improvements in your prescription?
| alliao wrote:
| just over 10yrs and my prescription used to get steadily
| worse due to the 20/20 power yet I stare at the screen (arms
| length) a lot. I was -4.75 and is now -4.25 I'm just happy it
| didn't progress into -10 arena. I have 3 pairs of glasses one
| for everyday (short distance), one for driving, and one
| sunglasses also for driving.
| ephaeton wrote:
| when we get the black line indicating mourning, it would be nice
| to have a link to the respective HN post detailing who's gone. I
| assume the public half mast referes to Mr. Walker, here...
| skrebbel wrote:
| The "X has died" post usually goes to the top pretty fast,
| making it rather obvious.
| ephaeton wrote:
| "usually", "pretty fast" includes "but sometimes not", "it
| takes some time". I've had enough occasions where I saw the
| black label but had no clue what was going on.
|
| Sometimes the post title isn't obvious that a person has died
| either. "Remembering Paul Graham", e.g., isn't so obvious
| (maybe to non-native speakers); and there's various ways to
| word this, ranging from obvious to not.
|
| If HN makes the effort of styling the site, it would be nice
| to include a link to the 'canonical' related thread, IMO.
| cronix wrote:
| I fell in love with 3D Studio in the 90's. It was so intuitive to
| use compared to Lightwave3D for someone who didn't know what they
| were doing, but very curious and wanting to learn. A big
| challenge was getting it to run in windows 3.1 when that was
| released, but it did. Ah, and having to create a RAM drive to put
| the video into so you could actually watch it in real time
| without buffering at 320x200 (i386 days).
| rurban wrote:
| But that had nothing todo with John. He already left before
| Autodesk bought 3D Studio.
| JamieClay wrote:
| FWIW: John left in 1994 (same year I did) and technically
| Autodesk had acquired 3D Studio in 1990, though the Yost
| group was still developing it, so acquired is a generous
| term. The product was sold through Autodesk's dealer
| channels. The branding and marketing was all Autodesk.
|
| John had little to nothing to do with 3D studio however,
| there was a mild competition within the company with two
| different 3D rendering (Autoshade and 3D Studio) products. I
| worked on both, moving from AutoFlix development to helping
| the Yost group test and market 3D Studio.
| DamonHD wrote:
| Ah.
|
| I interacted with him a little for HotBits, and provided my own
| public random number (entropy pool) source for a while.
| zmb_ wrote:
| HotBits is my earliest memory from the Internet after getting
| access as a young kid around 1996. Back in those days computer
| magazines would print website reviews and links, and I found
| HotBits in one of those. It was fascinating to a young kid who
| was into computers and physics.
|
| Over a decade later I read the Autodesk File and it was a major
| inspiration for founding my first startup.
|
| He was an inspiration to generations of hackers.
| bobim wrote:
| Wild to discover he's been living in my area while I've been
| using autocad and inventor all this time. There's even a picture
| of the brass band my neighbour is playing in... Life is strange.
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/images/album/2014-03-14/concert_b_2...
| guerrilla wrote:
| I was looking for a comment like this to verify it was him. I
| met him in the early 2000's when we were travelling to Les
| Trophees du Libre (a free software contest and awards event). I
| think we were both judges. We sat next to each other on the bus
| and he was explaining how he had moved to Switzerland and
| renounced his US citizenship and how I should do so too since I
| moved to Sweden. I remember being confused because he seemed
| way to humble and down to Earth to be the founder of Autodesk.
| bobim wrote:
| From the pictures it seems he was living in Ligneres, a small
| village in the Jura "mountains". For sure you have to be
| humble to live here when you could afford to live in Gstaad.
| It says all about the man and his priorities in life.
| meekaaku wrote:
| I first came to know about Autodesk, when I got to try AutoCAD on
| DOS in mid 90s. It was snappy and fast even on the hardware of
| that era. Pentium had just come out. Later on, did some modeling
| and animation on 3d Studio on DOS.
|
| This was well before Autodesk started buying up all the
| competition.
| joelegner wrote:
| I started on version 10 on DOS around 1991 or 1992. I think
| version 12 was the last one on DOS, and it was so snappy! Never
| been the same since.
| pavlov wrote:
| A 2008 interview with John Walker:
|
| https://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interf...
|
| He was ahead of the curve even on developments that were brand
| new in 2008 like social media:
|
| _"I 'm interested in anti-social networking. I'm interested in
| protecting private data and one's own history in this environment
| of unprecedented disclosure."_ (Part 4 of the interview)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I really love and was deeply inspired by the great work that John
| Walker did with Rudy Rucker on cellular automata, starting with
| Autodesk's product CelLab, then James Gleick's CHAOS -- The
| Software, Rudy's Artificial Life Lab, John's Home Planet, then
| later the JavaScript version WebCA, and lots of extensive
| documentation and historical information on his web page.
|
| CelLab:
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/
|
| https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm
|
| >CelLab History
|
| >(A more detailed history of cellular automata appears in the
| CelLab User Guide.) The first edition of CelLab was developed by
| Rudy Rucker and John Walker in 1988 and 1989 when both were
| working in the Autodesk research lab. The package was to be the
| first title in the "Autodesk Science Series", which would use
| computer simulation to explore aspects of science and
| mathematics. The product was first shipped in June of 1989 at a
| suggested retail price of US$59.95, under the name Rudy Rucker's
| Cellular Automata Laboratory. Rudy went on to complete the second
| title in the Science Series, James Gleick's CHAOS -- The Software
| which used programs developed by Rudy and another Autodesk
| programmer, Josh Gordon, to illustrate aspects of James Gleick's
| bestselling book. CHAOS -- The Software shipped in November of
| 1989. Rudy was working on the third title in the series,
| Artificial Life Lab, and John was developing the fourth, Home
| Planet, when Autodesk's management decided to close the research
| lab and terminate development of the Science Series. Rudy
| finished Artificial Life Lab, which was published as a book plus
| disk by The Waite Group Press in 1993. John released Home Planet
| as a freeware program in the same year, and the current version
| can be downloaded from this site.
|
| >The demise of the Science Series orphaned Cellular Automata
| Laboratory, which disappeared from the market in 1994. Rudy and
| John explored the idea of a new edition with several publishers,
| but none seemed to be interested. With the advent of the World-
| Wide Web, software can be distributed at a minuscule fraction of
| the cost of packaged software in the 1980's, so this seemed a
| natural way to get Cellular Automata Laboratory back into the
| hands of creative people interested in exploring massively
| parallel computing. Re-launching a program developed almost a
| decade ago required a modicum of work; a new cellular automata
| simulator that runs under Windows was developed, the User Guide,
| originally a 265 page book typeset using LaTeX, was transformed
| into an HTML document for the Web, and Java was added to the
| languages one can use to define cellular automata rules, being
| ever so much more with-it than Pascal, BASIC, and C.
|
| >So now it's finished, or at least at large again. Ideally,
| CelLab will never be done, not as long as folks continue to use
| it to explore the world of cellular automata and share their
| discoveries with other pioneers on this frontier of computing.
|
| Documentation:
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/
|
| It includes a huge illustrated index and description of many
| different cellular automata rules:
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html
|
| The story about the origins of CelLab is fascinating, telling
| about how Rudy Rucker learned FORTH just so he could program CA
| rules for Toffoli's and Margolus's CAM-6 hardware:
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html
|
| Original Windows product, released i 1989, Autodesk Cellab 1.0 -
| installed files:
|
| https://vetusware.com/download/Autodesk%20CELLAB%201.0/?id=4...
|
| Cellab, Exploring Cellular Automata from DOS era in DOSBox:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=RnZWJV1_wKI
|
| Cellular Automata by Rudy Rucker:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZUzakG3bE
|
| Programming the CAM-6 Cellular Automata Machine Hardware in Forth
| (CAM6 Simulator demo):
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/zm0ggl/programming_t...
| josh_gordon wrote:
| I'm amazed that my beloved CHAOS still runs beautifully on
| emulators like DOSbox. It was the last programming project
| where I could completely roll my own interface - and maybe my
| last really fun one.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Hey Josh! I remember hanging out with you and Laura a long
| time ago in the Haight! Your beloved CHAOS always got an
| undeserved bad rap because it was mistakenly confused with
| KAOS, the international organization of evil bent on world
| domination, out to get Maxwell Smart and Control! ;)
|
| https://getsmart.fandom.com/wiki/KAOS
|
| http://www.wouldyoubelieve.com/phrases.html
|
| Max: Couldn't you just have shushed him?
|
| Siegfried: Ve Don't Shush Here!!
|
| Shtarker: Let me let them have it. Dudududududu (making a
| machine gun noise).
|
| Siegfried: Shtarker, zis is KAOS, we don't Dududu here.
|
| http://www.wouldyoubelieve.com/kaos.html
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3n81Xu-t6o
| maxglute wrote:
| I think I used autodesk software more than anything else except
| Windows, and it never dawned on me it was founded by a person
| with a vision. John Carmack and a lot of ID staff were known
| among gamers of the era, but I don't think I know any CAD person
| who knows John Walker, or graphic person who knows Knoll bros
| behind Photoshop. Made me look up Simonyi who designed Excel.
| Obscure people behind software that keeps the world turning.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh that sucks... John was instrumental in the success of ww.com,
| thanks to him we had speakfreely as the audio layer using the GSM
| encoder.
|
| His 'digital imprimatur' was as prophetic as much as it is still
| relevant today, well worth reading:
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
| jacquesm wrote:
| And just in case you never came across it:
|
| https://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interf...
|
| A great interview with him.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Also The Internet Slum
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/netslum/
| happytiger wrote:
| Safe travels old friend. Thank you for all you did and who you
| were.
| 51Cards wrote:
| I was in high school right at the time the first CAD systems came
| in and our school was the test school for the region. Our older
| drafting teacher didn't want to learn the new system so he asked
| the class who knew "computers". I had had Commodore PETs at home
| for a few years and was teaching myself to code. My hand shot up
| and I was given full access to the new machine to "figure it
| out". It was my first introduction to PCs (IBM XT) and of course
| AutoCAD. I still remember, version 1.17b. I was introduced to
| LISP in AutoCAD, I ended up partaking in regional training for
| the other schools when they got their CAD systems, and then into
| a job working with AutoCAD.
|
| In my 20's I started a company developing engineering and
| architectural add-ons in LISP for AutoCAD, and while we later
| transitioned into a general software house, those will always be
| my roots. John's products changed the direction of my life and I
| wish I had had the chance to let him know that.
|
| When the school region later deprecated that IBM XT 10 years
| later the school asked me if I wanted it. Still have it along
| with the original Kurta tablet and Roland plotter.
| 93po wrote:
| That's a really cool story, thank you for sharing
| jimmydddd wrote:
| Great story and I can relate. In the late '80's I worked as a
| summer engineering intern at a civil engineering company. They
| assigned me to train the crochety draftsmen on AudCAD, but they
| wanted nothing to do with it. To paint a picture, these guys
| were hunching over drafting tables using pencils and erasers to
| draw their drawings, while chain smoking the whole time. An ash
| tray would be placed on the center of the drawing. Needless to
| say, my summer project was not a success! :-)
| disqard wrote:
| (You inspired me to riff on this and extrapolate, so here
| goes...)
|
| Great story and I can relate. In the late '20s I worked as an
| ML intern at a tech company. They assigned me to train the
| crotchety programmers on prompt engineering, but they wanted
| nothing to do with it. To paint a picture, these folks were
| hunching over IDEs using keyboards and mice to type in their
| code, while cursing at the compiler the whole time. An
| internal chat/discussion/meme forum would be open on a
| browser tab on their second monitor. Needless to say, my
| summer project was not a success! :-)
|
| (Let's revisit this comment of mine in a decade or two, if HN
| still exists)
| dekhn wrote:
| Same here, late 80s I took a high school drafting class and
| asked about the PCs in the back, the teacher said "I don't know
| anything about them, they have some software called AutoCAD. Do
| you want to take an elective and learn how it works?" It was
| entirely 2D and I went through all the exercises quickly.
|
| That foundational knowledge stuck with me and although it's not
| my job at all, I use Fusion 360 all the time at home to design
| parts for my self-built microscope and many other things. It's
| a great tool.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| This is a great recollection. I was in high school in the early
| 80s, and I took engineering drafting because I wanted to be an
| engineer. It was all manual drawing lines, lettering, figuring
| out where to center your thing on the paper, no computers. I
| wonder when my school switched to CAD - I could have just
| missed your life story! When I got to college I was a CS major
| and we didn't have to do CAD or blueprints.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I lost weight thanks to trendweight and his 'The Hackers Diet'
| method of weight loss.
|
| I had written him down as potential podcast guest, skimmed
| through some of his autodesk diaries and just never gotten around
| to reaching out to him.
|
| Man, that sucks.
|
| If you want to do his diet: get a smart scale and use
| TrendWeight. It doesn't tell you what to eat, but gives better
| data about whether you are on track or not then anything else
| I've seen. You weigh yourself daily, but only pay attention to a
| moving average and a future projection. That smooths out all
| noise in a scale measurement.
|
| It uses an Exponential Moving Average, which I suspect is the
| real innovation. That smooths out the daily data with the longer
| term trends.
|
| https://trendweight.com/
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| That's interesting, I designed essentially the same system,
| which I have used several times to get my weight back in range.
| The 7-day moving average is what I pay attention to. It has
| fields for notes on food eaten, exercise, and alcohol. The idea
| is to let the feedback of the data influence my behavior,
| rather than being prescriptive.
|
| I knew it couldn't possibly be completely original, but it's
| cool to hear whose thoughts mine shadowed.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Yeah, averages are super helpful.
|
| I wish my smart scale could pull the data from trendweight
| and just say "above" or "below". With the Hackers Diet that
| is all that matters is whether you are above or below the
| trend line.
| rockdiesel wrote:
| If you haven't heard of it, maybe give MacroFactor a look (not
| affiliated, just a happy user). It is the only food log and
| weight tracker that I've used with success. On the weight
| tracking side, it also requires daily weigh-ins and tracks your
| trend weight over time. Combining that with the calories you
| log, it determines your TDEE and adjusts your calories and
| macros from week to week depending on the goal you want to
| achieve.
|
| https://macrofactorapp.com/
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Very cool. I'll check it out.
|
| The limitation, but also the real benefit of the Trend Weight
| is there is no tracking of food. Each day you can see if you
| are above or below the trend line and how many calories you
| are above or below where you need to be.
|
| It's just the diff, basically.
| specialist wrote:
| Darn.
|
| I never had direct contact with John Walker. Outside of family
| and friends, the Autodesk founders probably had the biggest
| impact on my life.
|
| In 11th grade, I submitted a grant application on behalf of my
| school. I wanted to draw molecules. My teacher (for our voc tech
| program) gave me the blank paperwork and said "go for it".
|
| Some time later, two NEC APC III showed up.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APC_series#APC_III Running AutoCAD.
| On 8" floppy media. The manuals were in 3-ring binders. Hot damn,
| I loved those computers. So much better than the more common IBM
| PC-XT. I'd take portions of the manuals home over night to study.
|
| One of the upgrades featured AutoLISP. Version 2.17b? That really
| lit my fire. Like LOGO turtle on steroids or something.
|
| I eventually published some shareware using AutoCAD/AutoLISP.
| Pretty good money for a kid.
|
| AutoCAD, AutoShade, AutoSOLID, AutoFlix (Animator), HP plotters
| (using drafting pens and inks), transition from sneaker-net to
| LANs... Truly mind blowing stuff. Democratizing all that high-end
| workstation stuff (eg Apollo) for us normies.
|
| Autodesk begat an entire ecosystem from scratch. Dealer channels,
| third party add-ons and utilities, conferences, magazines,
| curriculum, consultants, custom graphics cards (and drivers),
| huge CRTs, crazy variety of input hardware (pen tablets and
| chorded keyboards), etc, etc.
|
| Helluva an achievement.
|
| Thanks John Walker. RIP.
| Animats wrote:
| > Autodesk begat an entire ecosystem from scratch. Dealer
| channels, third party add-ons and utilities, conferences,
| magazines, curriculum, consultants, custom graphics cards (and
| drivers), huge CRTS, crazy variety of input hardware (pen
| tablets and chorded keyboards), etc, etc.
|
| Yes. When AutoCAD came out, personal computers were expensive,
| exotic, fragile devices. Especially when they needed a big
| graphics-capable CRT, a mouse, a pen input tablet, and a large
| pen plotter. Dealers had to be set up to sell and service all
| that gear. An architect whose update device had previously been
| a powered eraser and a blueprint machine needed some
| handholding to computerize with confidence. Customers needed
| someone local they could call when it broke. Much of early
| Autodesk involved setting up that infrastructure.
| chasd00 wrote:
| One of my first "computer" jobs in college was working as an
| AutoCAD draftsman for a tiny architecture firm. My specialty?
| Designing parking lots for various Discount Tire stores haha.
|
| Rest in peace
|
| Edit: you can work AutoCAD crazy fast once you get all the
| keyboard shortcuts figured out
| jabowery wrote:
| Xanadu, folks. It's quite a tragedy that Wired Magazine's article
| failed to uncover the real reason Xanadu failed to become the WWW
| (hence why Smalltalk didn't become the scripting language rather
| than Javascript, etc.).
|
| https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
| djmips wrote:
| What's the real reason Xanadu failed to become the WWW?
| mmcdermott wrote:
| I read a couple of Xanadu papers recently and my conclusion
| is that it failed to get big because it was mostly vaporware
| and when it finally delivered something it was much less than
| the press. The papers are interesting to read, but brilliant
| non-beings will always lose to more pedestrian beings. The
| story reminded me quite a bit of Chandler in "Dreaming in
| Code" by Scott Rosenberg.
|
| Don't get me wrong, if you read Ted Nelson writing about
| Xanadu uncritically, you'll get a tale of utopia denied and
| genius tortured, but the reality seems much more prosaic.
|
| Edit: I should also add that the web as originally built has
| real advantages over Xanadu. In order to implement its
| universal transclusion and DRM (yes, Xanadu had a scheme for
| DRM and micropayments to creators), Xanadu had to be
| centralized. I'd argue this is worse both socially and
| technologically. Adding DRM to the infrastructure of the web
| is something that I would really hate.
| jabowery wrote:
| One man's vaporware is another man's roadmap. Think about
| it like this:
|
| Why was Brendan Eich under such pressure from VCs to throw
| together a scripting language over a weekend?
| jabowery wrote:
| "In order to implement its universal transclusion and DRM
| (yes, Xanadu had a scheme for DRM and micropayments to
| creators), Xanadu had to be centralized."
|
| Fallback positions from the idealized "roadmap" are what
| happens when VCs get involved with a system that offers
| that Zero To One advantage -- but you have to have a One to
| offer the VCs, which Memex didn't. The question then
| becomes how much of your road map can be recovered or,
| perhaps more to the point, do you even _want_ to recover in
| the light of ground truth experience? At present there is a
| lot of potential for Information Centric Networking that
| would be more likely realized in a Ship-Dumbed-Down-
| Decentralized-Xanadu1994 alternative universe than is
| likely to be realized now.
| robjellinghaus wrote:
| I was there (you'll find my name in the Wired article), and
| on the whole I would agree that Xanadu's reach far exceeded
| its grasp. Compared to the simplicity of the http protocol,
| Xanadu's complexity was high enough and its performance low
| enough that there was little opportunity for a genuine
| competition.
|
| But I will say that Xanadu was conceptually not
| centralized; the peer-to-peer exchange of arbitrary
| information at scale was definitely part of the
| architecture. However, the major and systemic performance
| problems entirely prevented any scaling up of the system,
| which effectively means the distributed architecture was
| never proven.
|
| I agree to a certain extent with the Chandler analogy,
| insofar as there was a lot of "architecture astronautics"
| that added complexity to the system beyond the ability of
| the team to manage -- especially given the limitations of
| early 1990s development machines.
|
| One could refer to the article itself for Walker's own view
| of the sad outcome:
|
| 'Rather than push their product into the marketplace
| quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu
| programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.
|
| '"When this process fails," wrote Walker in his collection
| of documents from and about Autodesk, "and it always does,
| that doesn't seem to weaken the belief in a design process
| which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It's always a
| bad manager, problems with tools, etc.--precisely the
| unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible
| in the first place."'
|
| He wasn't wrong. Xanadu tried to leap fully formed into the
| world as a megalithic architecture capable of arbitrarily
| large data structures supporting arbitrarily small
| comparisons and transclusions, and it couldn't compete with
| HTTP's fully open specification and implementations, low
| barrier to entry, and extreme simplicity.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| I appreciate the boots-on-the-ground perspective, so
| thanks for posting! I do want to be clear that I do
| appreciate the research and enjoy reading the papers
| produced by Xanadu. My goal was never to belittle the
| project itself, just talk about reasons for history
| playing out as it did.
| jabowery wrote:
| 1994: In the next room from me at Memex Corp. poor Keith
| Henson was draped over a chair (due to a bad back) working,
| alone, on the C++ Xanadu code to debug garbage collection
| among other things, because the original Smalltalk source had
| been lost. Memex Corp. was early enough in HTTP's development
| of lock-in network effects, that its acquisition of Xanadu
| _might_ yet have turned the tide. Why had the Smalltalk code
| been lost? Well, all I can tell you as that from my work with
| Roger (starting in 1996 on a rocket engine) that my
| understanding of events differs from that reported in Wired
| (and most others including, to some extent, Roger himself)
| and involves some pretty, shall we say, "bad behavior" on the
| part of certain parties that were more than a little partial
| to C++. Since this is hearsay, I won't go into more depth
| stating things "as fact". But it is pretty clear to me that
| the effort and investment put into making HTML, JS, etc. de
| facto standards, combined with Memex's acquisition of Xanadu
| rights (and potential willingness to open up the Xanadu
| protocols and implementation) at that critical juncture was
| fatally hampered by the C++-only handicap suffered by the
| Xanadu source.
|
| Why didn't _I_ step in and help poor Keith? Ever heard of
| Croquet 's TeaTime?
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1094855.1094861
|
| I was in a position to resurrect at least _that_ much of the
| original work I'd one at Viewtron Corp. of America based on
| David P. Reed's PhD thesis, and Reed was just down the street
| from us at Interval Research at that time, which rather
| tempted me away from helping Keith, even if I'd been
| authorized to do so, which I wasn't.
| tohnjitor wrote:
| Even after advent of modern parametric modelers like SolidWorks
| and Inventor, AutoCAD is still tremendously useful.
| fghorow wrote:
| My all-time favorite website is his "Bending Spacetime in the
| Basement"[1].
|
| RIP John Walker.
|
| [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar/
| cdelsolar wrote:
| This was amazing. Thanks for that.
| Khelavaster wrote:
| Walker died walking :(
| paledot wrote:
| Usually when there's an obituary on HN, I go straight to the
| comments to read all of the tech-is-a-village "I took his intro
| to computing course at MIT" or "I worked with her at Atari when
| we were 15 people in a basement apartment" anecdotes. It's
| interesting to see that John Walker's legacy here is instead
| defined by his work, his writing, and his correspondence.
|
| (Not to diminish the value of those contributions, of course -
| that's an artifact of the life he presumably wanted to lead. And
| his legacy is perhaps the more durable for it.)
| throwawayaloo wrote:
| I was in highschool (IGCSE) in 1994 and for the final computer
| studies project whereas everyone else made excel calculators and
| "Hello world" equivalents, I nerded out and built a full fledged
| inventory management system for the local Toyota dealership. My
| dad found someone in his office who knew Dbase-4 and autocad and
| spent many weekends with him learning the basics and developing
| my project. It turned out better than expected and the
| invigilator from the GCSE board told my school that I had
| plagiarised the code, that there was no way a 15yo would put that
| much effort into it. Well, I had to write & rewrite the code
| several times because of storage/hard drive issues back then and
| recited some of the code back to the invigilator orally! My CS
| teacher was in complete shock, poor chap! I'll never forget the
| poorly drawn autocad designs for some of the computer parts in my
| inventory system. Thank you John Walker.
| shaunxcode wrote:
| I was gently pushed towards the parenthetical path by a friends
| mother who worked as a autolisp programmer. So I have always had
| a fondness for the realm of Autodesk and thus John Walker.
| karbak wrote:
| "We'll Return, After This Message" is one of my all-time favorite
| short stories:
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html
| thenobsta wrote:
| I've been a happy reader of fourmilab.ch for years. His book
| reviews, the hacker's diet, and his other tools are one of the
| treasures of the internet. Not to mention his creation of AutoCad
| (a tool I loved in high school and college, after his time but
| I'm grateful none the less). RIP, John.
| kimi wrote:
| The site fourmilab.ch has been an inspiration for me over the
| years - the Hacker's diet, retropsychokinesis, countless books,
| his pictures of a nuclear ice-breaker...
|
| I remember 20 years ago or so sending an email for something and
| he replied, very kindly. I printed it and posted on the wall of
| my first office!
|
| RIP "Kelvin".
| bhanu423 wrote:
| I am in tears, hearing these kind words.. I finally have a hero
| that I can look upto.
| walker-rip wrote:
| john walker :(
|
| he wrote a very interesting c extension language at autodesk
| called atlast, wrote a diet guide that's made the front page of
| hacker news countless times, was doing things with neural
| networks on the commodore 64, had libraries to help make c safe,
| put some very cool recipes on his website, and also founded some
| cad company i guess
|
| Edit:
|
| a high-performance version of pg's bayesian spam filter and very
| long story of the things he tried prior to it:
| https://fourmilab.ch/annoyance-filter/
|
| neural network code & explainer for c64:
| https://fourmilab.ch/documents/commodore/BrainSim/
|
| program for knuth-style bible study:
| https://fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/BibleStrat/
|
| copycat but not clone of a just-short-of-modular synthesizer
| before that was a thing (the project he was clean-room
| reimplementing was by harry pyle, designer of the intel 8008 who
| he knew personally): https://fourmilab.ch/webtools/MindGrenade/
|
| a very good primer on probability & stats, with a great
| references section:
| https://fourmilab.ch/rpkp/experiments/statistics.html
|
| massive hypothesis testing via the internet when that was still a
| relatively new thing: https://fourmilab.ch/rpkp/
|
| one approach to avoiding low-quality content on the internet:
| https://fourmilab.ch/documents/strikeout/
|
| recipe collection: https://fourmilab.ch/documents/meals/
|
| reverse engineering a weird californian cheese brand:
| https://fourmilab.ch/chez-nuke/SubMarie/
|
| bending spacetime in the basement:
| https://fourmilab.ch/gravitation/foobar/
|
| the most succinct introduction to rocket science:
| https://fourmilab.ch/documents/rocket_science/
|
| smartalloc: eliminating the problem of memory leaks in c:
| https://fourmilab.ch/smartall/
|
| insanely massive collection of multi-language benchmark results
| (including an implementation of a raytracer in a range of
| languages so large it includes algol-60, pl/i & raku)
|
| a post laying out the exact approach spacex took before musk had
| even started a company:
| https://fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html
|
| he's also the guy who wrote xsunclock
|
| * accidentally skipped the link to the insane multi-language
| (pl/i to raku!) benchmark, even though i mentioned it:
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/ffbench.html
| twic wrote:
| > reverse engineering a weird californian cheese brand:
| https://fourmilab.ch/chez-nuke/SubMarie/
|
| A weird Californian _salad dressing_ brand. His results
| definitely sound quite enticing!
| JamieClay wrote:
| Autodesk used to take off the week of Christmas to New Years,
| called it the 'week of rest' - however most of us in tech new
| that was far from what John would do.
|
| When we returned from that week of analog living, John always had
| some new and exciting code to share (because he never stopped).
| Hypertext, Autoshade and Autoflix, AutoCAD Mac were some of the
| gifts he would showcase after the break.
|
| It was pretty magical. It was very common for John to be at the
| center of anything new and exciting happening there.
|
| He changed my life, without question.
| mikevp wrote:
| _sigh_
|
| I met him briefly at one of the West Coast Computer Faires, in
| the early days of AutoDesk, or maybe pre-AutoDesk.
|
| His name was familiar to me from the infamous "Pervading Animal
| Game" on the Univac mainframes. "Introducing a new way of
| distributing software, Pervasive Release. If someone asks you for
| your program, you can tell them that in all likelihood, they
| already have it." There were a number of other, more serious
| programs in the Univac 1108 ecosystem that had his name on them.
|
| It would be unfair to call this a virus, as it went to great
| lengths to insure that it couldn't do any harm, other than the
| few kilobytes it took up in a "program file". (Think "directory"
| in modern terms.)
| msisk6 wrote:
| I remember getting an email from John in the early days of
| Autodesk.
|
| At the time most developers had Sun workstations and he had
| gotten into all our systems and ran a password crack program
| looking for weak passwords. Our network wasn't attached to the
| outside world yet so most of us had weak passwords.
|
| Mine password was a geologic time era something like "Devonian".
| His only comment was, "No, Jurassic!". The name of his machine?
| Jurassic Sparc.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| John experimented with the Paleo Diet in the 2010's and did a
| book review of the "Paleo Diet" book by Loren Cordain. I emailed
| him and suggested he read a related book, "The New Evolution
| Diet" by Art De Vany. He immediately wrote back a friendly email
| and ended up reviewing that book as well. He mentioned in his
| email that he was only interested in the nutritional aspects of
| the Paleo Diet, as he had his weight control covered by his own
| system, the Hacker's Diet.
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