Grace Hopper Lecture
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited for her vivid illustration of orders of magnitude in latency, and as an example of a great computing pioneer as teacher.
What it is
A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2017 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends bch · 2017-03 · on “How much your computer can do in a second”
Hard to believe there are 124 comments here and nobody has brought up Grace Hopper's talk[0][1] yet. With good humour she gives a example of what various devices' latency are, and a simple tool to comprehend the cost and orders of magnitude. [0] short - [LINK] [1] long - [this video]
Cites inflatableDodo · 2019-08 · on “Welsh Wikipedia gives me hope”
>Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such marginal areas as multilingual programming. This is not at all the impression given by Grace. Also, I'll note this explanation makes no logical sense given that it was the first demo to management of something that management had already told Grace she wouldn't be able to do at all. If they were concerned at the waste of time and energy, they would presumably have stopped her when they believed that what she was working on was never going to work, rather than requesting the removal of a feature that had been implemented in the first demo.
Cites throw0101a · 2021-12 · on “I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]”
> Light is slow, not exactly 1 foot per nanosecond but it's a reasonable mnemonic. "Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond" is a good illustration of this (segment is only 2m): * [LINK] * [LINK] Full lecture: * [this video]
Cites adityaathalye · 2026-07 · on “The Beam Engine”
Excellent work, glinscott. Thank you for sharing! I am about to send this to all my pals who are parents to schoolkids (um, and also pals who are still, like me, basically a schoolkid :p XD). Building things up from first principles, and ideally also tactile / visceral examples, is my absolute favourite genre of explanations. Alas, a rarefied genre, because it is so much harder to do well (without doing disservice to the learner's intellect and ability) than expert talking to (presumed) expert. So thanks for contributing to it. People like George Polya [0], Richard Feynman [1], Grace Hopper [2] are exemplars of this tradition. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [this video] (And I too try in my own meagre