4 ms·

Yes, he could read a spec and I read this before. Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular inci

by mads 10y ago

Yes, he could read a spec and I read this before. Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular incident as anything special. Bill Gates didn't actually do anything except annotate the spec and throw some ideas out there.

serge2k 10y ago
> I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. Except you question his technical ability, ignore/excuse evidence of said ability, and call him a narcissist.
- mads 10y ago
  Yeah well, sorry about that.
cma 10y ago
How about this: > In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of (5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting Not easy to have significant algorithmic-complexity results that have stood as an upper bound for 30 years.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Hey, that's the official name for what I thought of as "aligning a stack of coins". The Google Code Jam qualification round this year included the problem "write a function to report the minimum number of flips necessary to sort a stack of pancakes". I'm not too pleased to see this in the wikipedia page: > The minimum number of flips required to sort any stack of n pancakes has been shown to lie between ~1.07n and 1.63n (exact boundaries: 15n/14 and 18n/11,) but the exact value is not known.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    I read too hastily. Pancake sorting involves sorting pancakes by size using the pancake-flipping operation. The problem at issue was aligning them into the same orientation without regard to size, which is the "more difficult" burnt pancake problem, except that all the pancakes are the same size. I guess for completeness, I should post the solution to the sortless burnt pancake (to me, "coin alignment") problem: Consider a stack of coins, like top-HTTHHTTHTHTTTTTTH-bottom. The number of flips required to align it is equal to the number of transitions from tails to heads or heads to tails as you move through the stack. In the example, we can break the stack conceptually into runs of H TT HH TT H T H TTTTT H, which is 8 transitions. 1. (This number is necessary.) Two adjacent coins which differ in orientation can only be made not to differ by a flip at the position between them. A flip above or below that position in the stack reverses neither or both, which preserves their difference. Stated another way, no flip can reduce the number of transitions in the stack by more than 1. 2. (This number is sufficient.) If you move from the top of the stack down, flipping whenever a transition is encountered, you preserve the invariant that the prefix of the stack above the point you have reached is all aligned. This is one flip per transition, so one flip per transition suffices. If the coins must be aligned to a particular direction, for example heads up, just suffix a coin of that alignment to the bottom of the stack.
michaelt 10y ago
There are a whole bunch of skills that go into being good at delivering working software. One such skill is remembering details of how lots of things work, and especially knowing when seemingly simple things will hit hidden stumbling blocks. Obviously, there are a bunch of other skills required too, and some skills get a lot more respect than others. One reading of the story is that Bill Gates, despite being six layers of management away from 'the coal face' of actually making the date functions work, knew about the 1904 Date System and why it was there; and that he was able to ask harder and harder questions until the project manager looked unprepared because he had a lot of the specific skill of remembering lots of details and stumbling blocks. Obviously, an alternative reading of the story is that Gates didn't know those specifics about date handling in Lotus 123, and he was going to ask about something else (or maybe nothing at all) and it was only by random chance that made it look like he knew about this complicated detail.

by mads 10y ago

serge2k 10y ago

> I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. Except you question his technical ability, ignore/excuse evidence of said ability, and call him a narcissist.

mads 10y ago
Yeah well, sorry about that.

cma 10y ago

How about this: > In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of (5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting Not easy to have significant algorithmic-complexity results that have stood as an upper bound for 30 years.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
Hey, that's the official name for what I thought of as "aligning a stack of coins". The Google Code Jam qualification round this year included the problem "write a function to report the minimum number of flips necessary to sort a stack of pancakes". I'm not too pleased to see this in the wikipedia page: > The minimum number of flips required to sort any stack of n pancakes has been shown to lie between ~1.07n and 1.63n (exact boundaries: 15n/14 and 18n/11,) but the exact value is not known.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  I read too hastily. Pancake sorting involves sorting pancakes by size using the pancake-flipping operation. The problem at issue was aligning them into the same orientation without regard to size, which is the "more difficult" burnt pancake problem, except that all the pancakes are the same size. I guess for completeness, I should post the solution to the sortless burnt pancake (to me, "coin alignment") problem: Consider a stack of coins, like top-HTTHHTTHTHTTTTTTH-bottom. The number of flips required to align it is equal to the number of transitions from tails to heads or heads to tails as you move through the stack. In the example, we can break the stack conceptually into runs of H TT HH TT H T H TTTTT H, which is 8 transitions. 1. (This number is necessary.) Two adjacent coins which differ in orientation can only be made not to differ by a flip at the position between them. A flip above or below that position in the stack reverses neither or both, which preserves their difference. Stated another way, no flip can reduce the number of transitions in the stack by more than 1. 2. (This number is sufficient.) If you move from the top of the stack down, flipping whenever a transition is encountered, you preserve the invariant that the prefix of the stack above the point you have reached is all aligned. This is one flip per transition, so one flip per transition suffices. If the coins must be aligned to a particular direction, for example heads up, just suffix a coin of that alignment to the bottom of the stack.

michaelt 10y ago

There are a whole bunch of skills that go into being good at delivering working software. One such skill is remembering details of how lots of things work, and especially knowing when seemingly simple things will hit hidden stumbling blocks. Obviously, there are a bunch of other skills required too, and some skills get a lot more respect than others. One reading of the story is that Bill Gates, despite being six layers of management away from 'the coal face' of actually making the date functions work, knew about the 1904 Date System and why it was there; and that he was able to ask harder and harder questions until the project manager looked unprepared because he had a lot of the specific skill of remembering lots of details and stumbling blocks. Obviously, an alternative reading of the story is that Gates didn't know those specifics about date handling in Lotus 123, and he was going to ask about something else (or maybe nothing at all) and it was only by random chance that made it look like he knew about this complicated detail.