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ur-whale
What is it with theses patent clerks [1]?

[1] https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi/einste...

btrettel
Former patent examiner here. The job of a patent examiner can be quite stressful, and I don't think it's particularly amenable to making breakthroughs. At the end of the day I rarely felt like working on personal projects as I was too drained. Einstein and Goto might have had a lot more energy than I do. Alternatively, it could simply be that the huge number of patent examiners (about 10,000 current USPTO patent examiners from what I understand) means that at least a few of them will do something astounding.
cardiffspaceman
My wife has 28 cousins which I jokingly say means, they include one of everything. Such as airline pilots, or priests.
unwind
Is this a case of nominative determinism [1]?

Haven't read his code, but direct jumps (gotos) are quite common in assembly and can certainly help optimize things some times.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

user-the-name
Not a very good one. The term "goto" is not used in Assembly, usually "jump" or "branch" is used instead. And "Goto" is just a very common Japanese name, and a somewhat mangled spelling in the first place.

In Japanese itself, the connection there is entirely nonexistent.

doall
Since I know some Japanese, I'd like to point out that "Goto" should be pronounced more like "Go-toe"
mauvehaus
Dumb question: in Cryptonomicon, there's a character named "Goto Dengo". Is Goto used as both a first and last name, or is the notion of first and last name something that doesn't map cleanly between English and Japanese?
krallja
Japanese family names go first. e.g., GRAHAM Paul.
dasKrokodil
Respectfully, that's not such a good example, as both of those names can be first or last names. DOE John would be a better example.
coldtea
The example is referring to a certain famous Graham Paul, for which people here are assumed to know what's his actual first and last name.
user-the-name
In Japanese, you write family name first. Sometimes when using a Japanese name in English, you flip them to the English order, and sometimes not.
gbin
This type of talent is extremely valuable. They sometimes show it in the most direct fashion (HFTs, game engines, etc.) but when they are not most of the time companies don't even bother. IMHO We pay the price of that as a consumer every day: PCs take 10s just to start booting a system that takes 2s to load, webpages are just eating your battery life etc.
jl6
PC startup time crosses too many organizational and compatibility boundaries to be amenable to this kind of optimization.
overkalix
On the other hand, you've got a "coder" that doesn't know what LU decomposition is...
plafl
Different people have different ideas of the meaning of "understanding". Take simple concepts like "time" and ask a physicist.
coldtea
So, just like 99.99% of coders, including famous coders whose output and results run circles around many coders who do know what it is?
freemint
This is the first time I was liked to someones post who I was blocked by on Twitter. I wonder how that happened.
pronoiac
If anyone else wondered about the mentioned LU decomposition, Wikipedia says:

> In numerical analysis and linear algebra, lower–upper (LU) decomposition or factorization factors a matrix as the product of a lower triangular matrix and an upper triangular matrix.

> Applications: Solving linear equations, Inverting a matrix, Computing the determinant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LU_decomposition