The Ritman library is absolutely wonderful, and open to the public without appointment; if you find yourself in Amsterdam, it's absolutely worth it to go ring their doorbell and look around. It was the highlight of my post-high-school Europe trip.

Thank you for the historical info, and the video; as a big computing history buff, I really appreciate both the first-hand account and the media of the time!

I'm always happy to help. I get a great deal from HN, lots of things to learn and smart people to answer questions. It makes me happy when I'm able to give a return contribution.

If, for some reason, you have further questions, uninvolved@outlook.com is the email address that I hand out in public. I tend to write long posts and replies, so you have been officially warned.

As an undergraduate senior in the CS program at the University of Washington, I can definitely attest to memory management giving the majority of people a really hard time in our required C course. I've only talked to one other person in my cohort that likes programming in C, and unsurprisingly they don't have any trouble with the finer points of it at all.

Greg Egan's Diaspora starts with the details of what it's like for a new AI to be brought into existence in a society of advanced AIs, and jumps off from there. Definitely one of the more original hard sci-fi novels I've read.

Egan is very original and his novels are definitely "hard sci-fi" in that they make you think.

However, I regard him as a bad writer, as his dialogue is very bad, his characters hollow and his plot progression is rather jumpy.

Read him for his stimulating ideas, but not the way he tells the story.

His Permutation City is also good.

Permutation City is probably the best hard sci-fi novel I've ever read.

There was some page towards the end I remember being hopelessly lost and never recovered.

You mean yourself or the plot? I think that in the third act Egan added some weaker elements both as a corollary of the idea being explored and as a way of introducing some traditional action, in a novel that is otherwise mostly the setup of an elaborate thought experiment.

Nonetheless, I think the result is extraordinary, because the problems posed, the paradoxes highlighted, and some brilliant insights, are new and valid outside the fictional world created in the novel.

That's interesting! As a former occult-type guy this was news to me. I can definitely see AC ribbing Waite over this endlessly.

I heard about SDF through telehack, and very much appreciate the similar vibe, to say nothing of the historical provenance of SDF!

My favorite telnet destination, and one of the few net destinations I still visit ~5 years later, is telehack.

telnet telehack.com

I've seen it mentioned a few times on HN, but only intermittently. I know they've recently added a system to exchange files (including BASIC programs, iirc!) with other users, which is pretty cool.

I just finished my undergrad CS algorithms course, and my professor mentioned this book, but we didn't use it. He essentially said that it contains so much material that it's rather all-encompassing as a reference book, but he definitely discouraged it as a textbook for learning as we would in a course. It sounds like you'd likely want to find something more geared towards teaching.

Thank you :) that's reassuring. What do you recommend?

Well, our text for the course was Levitin's Design and Analysis of Algorithms, but I really can't speak to its quality at all - we just used the professor's own prepared information pretty much exclusively. From my brief look through the book, it looked okay, at least!

Alien: Isolation (for which I believe a short, non-publicly-available VR was made) would be an amazing and colossally scary VR experience. The immersion is already incredible just playing on the TV; I can't imagine the tension of trying to hide from the xenomorph only to have that barbed tail shoot through your chest unexpectedly.

Thank you, that seems like great advice. A few of his better known papers are definitely over my head currently, although I'm familiar with the basic concepts at least; but luckily he has some other work that is at least somewhat accessible for where I'm at. I'll keep working through his stuff and come armed with some questions, and as you point out, I can definitely use the practice in being able to read papers well and stay abreast of things.