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Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond (1983) [video]
- croes 4y agoPrevious discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24341229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24341229
- pvg 4y agoAnd those from 6, 9 and 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12130933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12130933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5045842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5045842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3655886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3655886
- lelandfe 4y agohttps://youtu.be/3N_ywhx6_K0?t=33 https://youtu.be/3N_ywhx6_K0?t=33 Hopper on Letterman
- dominotw 4y agoSo sharp and quick witted at that age.
- sbarre 4y agoWhat a great interview
- shakezula 4y agoSo interesting to hear the street-level policy effects of the Carter administration talked about like this. It adds something intangible to this video.
- tomwheeler 4y agoIt's too bad that talk shows aren't like this anymore. The Letterman producers from the 1980s deserve kudos for finding interesting guests (not only Grace Hopper, but also Isaac Asimov, Doc Edgerton, Don Herbert, and plenty of others). Aside from Neil deGrasse Tyson or Dr. Fauci, it's pretty rare to see a scientist on a late night show now. For all the empty talk about the importance of STEM, it's pretty unlikely that you'll see a pioneer of computer science.
- KerrAvon 4y agoThe flip side is that this was the _only_ place you ever saw them. It's not difficult to find endless videos of Neil deGrasse Tyson or Dr. Fauci on YouTube today. In the 1980's, you didn't see people like Grace Hopper or Asimov _at all_ except for this sort of appearance on a talk show or maybe something brief on PBS if you were lucky to catch it at the time it was broadcast.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 4y agoThat's true, and there were only the three commercial networks and PBS (as of the 1970s) on which to catch appearances. Radio was somewhat more open, and Asimov writes of hearing (and not recognising) his own voice coming from the radio in his autobiography (his wife clued him in). That said, I just searched Invidious for any appearances of Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most notable current science fiction authors, on any of the late-night shows (Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon) ... and there's nothing. Though tons of other videos featuring KSR: https://yewtu.be/search?q=%22kim+stanley+robinson%22+%28kimmel%7Ccolbert%7Cfallon%29 https://yewtu.be/search?q=%22kim+stanley+robinson%22+%28kimm...
- zahma 4y agoThe fastest reactions in our body (hydride shifts, very small rearrangement of atoms to maximize charge stability) take a mere picosecond. This nanosecond is 1000 times longer than a picosecond. Try to imagine that the molecules in your body are spinning at crazy frequencies and rearranging themselves incessantly at that speed.
- wiredfool 4y agoI had a genuine Grace Hopper nanosecond from when she visited my high school. Sadly lost now.
- _benj 4y agoI loved this! It ties so well the another comment about the speed of computers on the front page: > On a 3GHz CPU, one clock cycle is enough time for light to travel only 10cm. If you hold up a sign with, say, a multiplication, a CPU will produce the result before light reaches a person a few metres away. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31769936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31769936>
- jbandela1 4y agoThe foot has been criticized for being an arbitrary measurement with no real relation to a repeatable physical distance. However, it turns out that a foot is within 2% of the distance light travels in a nanosecond! Because of this, the foot becomes really convenient when talking about latencies. For example, if something is 6 inches away from the cpu on a motherboard, the lowest possible latency to reach that is 0.5 nanoseconds. Time to push for the adoption of feet everywhere /s
- doliveira 4y agoReminds me of the whole "Fahrenheit is awesome because 0°F is too cold and 100°F is too hot" (BTW, for me 0°C is too cold and 40°C is too hot)
- 8note 4y agoCelcius is nice because -30 is the limits of cold that I want, and +30 is the limits of hot
- chrisseaton 4y ago> For example, if something is 6 inches away from the cpu on a motherboard, the lowest possible latency to reach that is 0.5 nanoseconds. Isn't that going to be insignificant compared to everything inside the computer on both ends?
- mlonkibjuyhv 4y agoNot if you're making computers.
- dredmorbius 4y agoTo expand on this: if you're designing / building / assembling a computer or cluster, and components are 6" apart, then the minimum latency for communicating between those components is 1 nanosecond. Given clock speeds of multiple GHz, that means spending an entire clock cycle or more simply communicating between components. See also the case of the 500 mile email: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html (A Sendmail misconfiguration resulted in a maximum response time of 3 milliseconds, or roughly 500 miles of travel at the speed of light. The observed behaviour was that a uni campus computer could send email only within a 500 mile radius, as noted by the statistics department.)
- mcdonje 4y agoThat was charming. Great demonstration of scientific communication. Great visualization.
- paganel 4y agoSometimes I forget how militarized the computer industry used to be, probably still is, in one way or another. For every Stallman and Aaron Swartz there’s a Grace Hopper dressed in military attire while talking about computers. Sad, too, that I haven’t seen any news in here today about Assange’s extradition to the US, at least not on the front page.
- LanceH 4y agoI saluted her once. No idea who she was, she was an old lady standing at a bus stop on base, wearing an odd (dated) uniform with an unusual rack of ribbons.
- dougmwne 4y agoI love this so much. Computing is right up against the limits of the universe and seeing that your 4 ghz processor has a cycle time of about 7 light-cm shows you exactly how close we are to that limit. Looking at the computing time spent on accessing a remote server 8000 km away also keeps things in perspective.
- lordleft 4y agoCan we take a moment to acknowledge her incredible presentational ability? She was charming, wry, slightly subversive, and still conveyed a really cool scientific concept in one brief talk.
- corrral 4y agoI've noticed that the prep-school-to-Ivy pipeline is great at producing people with that quality. I just checked and, sure enough, that's exactly what she did. [EDIT] The quality of being a confident, engaging conversationalist and presenter, I mean. For her it was The Hartridge School and then Yale. Hartridge, in its modern form as the Wardlaw-Hartridge School, runs a bit over $40k/yr by the time you're nearing the end, down to about $16k for pre-k, though many won't be paying full sticker price.
- bsder 4y agoCharming, wry, and slightly subversive is all her personality. However, more than a few people who have been on the receiving end would argue with you about "charming" and "slightly". Presentation ability, however, was learned and practiced a lot. She used to make all her subordinates give oral reports weekly on written articles she would pass out and then discuss as a group. If you committed any of various presentation sins, you had to dump a quarter into the penalty jar. Her subordinates got very good at presentations.
- mywittyname 4y agoThis is the first time that I've ever heard her speak. I have to say, she's amazingly charming and charismatic.
- johnsanders 4y ago"...we should hang one over [programmers' desks], or around their necks so they know what they're throwing away when they throw away a microsecond." Relevant forty years later.
- ajdude 4y agoThat line really stuck with me
- nosefrog 4y agoMy grandfather got his PhD because he lost an argument to Grace Hopper because she had a PhD and he didn't. He was working for the Navy at the time, and he wanted to use a higher level language for some operating system they were building. Grace Hopper thought that higher level languages were only suitable for business applications, not other computing purposes where performance was more important. This is a link to a paper he wrote about one of the first cross compilers that they had built: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/367436.367477 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/367436.367477
- stefantalpalaru 4y ago