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Very personal, well written story. Thanks for sharing it. The author frequents hn. I wonder what their take is on this making to hn? At the risk of oversharing

Very personal, well written story. Thanks for sharing it. The author frequents hn. I wonder what their take is on this making to hn? At the risk of oversharing this has so many similarities to my own story, only time shifted a little earlier, pre-web. Most things were telnet,ftp,uucp,netnews. I had read an article in Byte Magazine about the Transputer, so wrote an email, I think this was literally the Unix mail command, I wrote this email to the author and we chatted a bit about the Transputer. I'd stay up late at night, calling into a long distance Unix machine on the internet. It only lasted a couple months until I was busted for the phone charges. You can still basically email/chat with anyone in the world.

maxime_cb 5y ago
I was surprised because when I posted it yesterday, I got a few comments on twitter, but today my inbox was full of comments on the blog post. I was afraid to post a story with many personal details like this, but I figured, I've been self-censoring too much recently. I have a story to tell, and I'm sure many people will be able to relate. I had a similar experience. I watched a YouTube talk about using stacked k-means to do deep learning without artificial neurons (deep learning without neural networks). I found that super fascinating and I had a bunch of questions, so I managed to find the author's email (public because he was an academic) and we chatted about his research for a while. It was amazing being able to talk directly to the researcher.
- sitkack 5y ago
  I was also a single child of a single mother who wasn’t doing well. I didn’t consciously make them same calculation, but did. Continue to make the world a better place by just being you. *edit, We really should foster a better culture of making these kinds of contacts. Even if occasionally we get snubbed I have found most people to be delighted that someone is interestin their work.

maxime_cb 5y ago

I was surprised because when I posted it yesterday, I got a few comments on twitter, but today my inbox was full of comments on the blog post. I was afraid to post a story with many personal details like this, but I figured, I've been self-censoring too much recently. I have a story to tell, and I'm sure many people will be able to relate. I had a similar experience. I watched a YouTube talk about using stacked k-means to do deep learning without artificial neurons (deep learning without neural networks). I found that super fascinating and I had a bunch of questions, so I managed to find the author's email (public because he was an academic) and we chatted about his research for a while. It was amazing being able to talk directly to the researcher.

sitkack 5y ago
I was also a single child of a single mother who wasn’t doing well. I didn’t consciously make them same calculation, but did. Continue to make the world a better place by just being you. *edit, We really should foster a better culture of making these kinds of contacts. Even if occasionally we get snubbed I have found most people to be delighted that someone is interestin their work.