Disagree, there are thousands of highly experienced and hard-working computer scientists. If we grant that very few of them are the equivalent of Knuth, there must be something else at play.

Most computer scientists I know at that age don’t touch a computer any more and hang with grand kids. That’s not a value judgement - Knuth is impressive but as a human being most people choose their humanity over their careers in some way. Beyond being simply smart and productive knuth is also likely obsessive about his work and his life is warped around it. As long as that works for everyone that’s great. But most people don’t live that life.

> Most computer scientists I know at that age don’t touch a computer any more and hang with grand kids.

That doesn't sound right to me at all. Modern academia is highly competitive, and career academics typically have long working hours.

If they aren't doing programming, that's likely because it isn't relevant to their job. A theoretical computer scientist is closer to a mathematician than to a typical programmer.

> Knuth is impressive but as a human being most people choose their humanity over their careers in some way

We're talking about scientists, not most people.

Getting a PhD is no cakewalk, and there are far more PhDs than faculty positions. You can try being a workaholic, but if your competitors are doing the same, that won't make you stand out.

> obsessive about his work and his life is warped around it

Again this describes every modern scientist. Deep knowledge of one's field, and deep commitment to it, are just table stakes.

This doesn’t describe post tenure academia. You seem to be describing the life of a young tenured track academic.

Additionally while Knuth is clearly an outlier by any measure he’s also an outlier in his celebrity. There are a lot Knuths out there who aren’t well known outside their specialty, or are in industry. He played a seminal role in a field everyone studies in computer science and published a uniquely interesting and continuously revised set of fundamental books in the field. However in my time in academics there were people in say transactional memory for speculative out of order compute whose work powers every machine in use today and they still contribute similarly powerful work. They’re obsessive and very driven by the problem space. But for everyone one of those in academia there are a hundred tenured professors who paper mill their undergrads (generously).

You mention long hours but I said obsessive. That’s orders of magnitude more than working hard. It’s so distorted as to be pathological if they weren’t paid and rewarded for it. Yes many academics are pathologically obsessive. But unless they are bringing in funding or repute to fill a deficit in the department, there’s no work for them in current academic settings.

Finally Knuth isn’t a common occurrence because -he doesn’t bring in money-. Modern academia is oriented towards grant milking. The example of the txn memory guy is interesting because he brings in lots of research funding from intel and ARM and NVidia because his work is very commercial. Knuth - not so much I imagine. He brings repute, but you can only find so much repute with modern academic funding models before they’re a net negative on the department. Knuth is a fossil of a different era in academics (not used as a pejorative).

> That doesn't sound right to me at all. Modern academia is highly competitive, and career academics typically have long working hours. > If they aren't doing programming, that's likely because it isn't relevant to their job. A theoretical computer scientist is closer to a mathematician than to a typical programmer.

This kind of stuff is not useful to be posting where impressionable people (young students) can read it. The truth the majority of academics are managers and delegate hands-on work to postdocs and PhD students. I finished a PhD just last month and I never saw in 4 years anyone on my committee so much as look at code let alone write it (and I was not a theory student). Almost everyone in my cohort would echo this observation.

Actually quick is definitely something that comes to mind. Quick in politics is of course relative, but the speed with which he has enacted major changes (for example marijuana legalization) is pretty quick in the realm of politics when congress is of the other party.

He’s barely able to read a teleprompter, not too confident that Biden himself enacted those changes.

We've had nearly 4 years with no scandals and emerged from the pandemic with the best economic recovery of any country, and despite having no margin to spare in Congress, master legislator Joe Biden has secured massive climate change, infrastructure, and gun control bills, not to mention he's ended our two decade war in Afghanistan and overseen the fastest wage growth of the two lowest income quintiles seen in modern history.

And every time people actually watch him speak (not just a selected clip), there's weeks of coverage about how alive JB seems, not recognizing that all evidence points to that being typical.

> We've had nearly 4 years with no scandals

This isn't the flex you think it is. When the media is lapping out of your hand like a 6 week old puppy instead of doing their fifth estate job, of course there are no scandals.

> and gun control bills,

You mean stripping Americans of their constitutional rights.

> not to mention he's ended our two decade war in Afghanistan.

Which was an unmitigated disaster.

> and overseen the fastest wage growth of the two lowest income quintiles seen in modern history.

Hello inflation.

>> and gun control bills

> You mean stripping Americans of their constitutional rights.

Not that I disagree with you, but when posters like modriano engage in political/partisan commentary on HN, I find it more productive to merely downvote and flag their comments rather than replying and getting engaged in a war.

A dead post makes quite the impression, as this sort of political commentary just generally defeats the quality of discourse on HN (which, you must admit, is much better than many other platforms, and I'd like to try to preserve it as long as possible).

> Biden's been hands-on in his domain for over 50 years, yet "quick" is definitely not the word that comes to most people's mind when they think of him nowadays.

Please don't post flamebaity political tangents on HN.

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is objectively false. It is not a counterpoint, because it's not an argument. It's an extremely subjective claim that is highly contentious (like jedberg's sibling comment[1]), definitely not something that "anyone can identify with" (as the vast majority of people do not know Joe Biden and instead view him through one of a small number of extremely skewed lenses) and clearly in the realm of "off-topic flamebait" that is not appropriate on HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40394477

I’d avoid the Reagan or other comparison as well even if I have medical evidence for their decline as you see with Reagan. In this specific case of Biden there’s not even that so it’s purely a political opinion and it’s definitely bait for flame even if not intended as such.