My guess is Craig Silverstein, as he mentioned that Larry and Sergey might have worked with him at Stanford.

Yeah from description def sounds like him. He was on the way out when i joined but he was probably more active when this was written

I am planning to learn how to write better. I am starting that by maintaining a stream of consciousness personal daily log. Also get more practice by commenting on Hacker News :)

The analogy of the question "What is life?" with "What is a computer?" bring up interesting parallels. The author defines a computer as any device that has transistors, RAM, etc that is, the computing substrate. But there were devices that didn't use transistors, but used vacuum tubes or mechanical gears (like Babbage's Analytical engine), which I think are still computers. We have some good theoretical model of computers: like Turing machines. One possible definition of a computer is any device that is Turing complete.

I wonder what such a theoretical model of life would look like.

The analogy goes deeper. Most of us are familiar with the spirit-soul-body concept. Descriptions of the three are very similar to concepts in CS: spirit is the algorithm or an idea - in this sense the spirit is immutable and the same for all devices, soul is the software - it's mutable, implemented in a particular language or framework and generally strives to be a perfect reflection of the spirit, and finally the cpu itself with all the machinery running electrons is the body - it's run by that almost immaterial soul, although no part of that machinery, not even a single electron, is a part of the soul. The connection between the three can be easily understood by CS folks, but is a great mystery for uninitiated (i.e. those who can't code).

There's even a striking analogy of good an evil. "The evil is affirmation of disorder" (Eliphas Levi) and that is bugs and poor chaotic design: software that embraces this disorder, gives up liberty and reason (aka the good) and becomes evil, for evil has neither liberty nor reason.

I'm sure The Matrix used this very analogy.

How would you get the distribution from the sum of numbers individually?

I believe the parent meant breaking it down as "if you earn $100k, add 10 slips that each have $10k on them". The number of slips will be more than the number of people in the room, but that's fine. It's less practical than the "seed + pass round" method that someone else recommended imo (due to handwriting notability), but still works in a more technical sense.

You're right, you can't, I was looking at the problem posed by grandparent comment of getting only the average.

You don't count the slips of paper in the hat. Instead you count the number of people who put in slips of paper.

That will give an average, but it won't give the distribution (min/max/etc)

|Q-Z| is countably infinite, but |Q| = |Z|. There are countably infinite rational numbers that are not counting numbers, yet there are exactly as many rational numbers as counting numbers.

Change List: internal Google lingo for what is more commonly known as patch, diff, or pull request in the Open source wold.

You might find the last section "Sleep spindles and intelligence" in https://www.tuck.com/sleep-spindles/ interesting.

It's easy to transfer to transition to the manager ladder by becoming a TLM (Tech Lead Manager) once you are L5 or higher.

Headspace app has worked well for me too. I have been using it for more than 3 months, meditating for 20 mins every day and I feel calmer throughout the day.

There are broadly speaking two kinds of meditations: focussed meditation and awareness meditation.

I heard a useful analogy of the mind being like an elephant that wants to wander around on its own.

In focussed meditation, we try to focus your attention on our breath, or some point inside our body or an idea. We tie the elephant with a rope to a pole. If it wanders too far, we tug it and bring it back to the pole.

In awareness meditation, we just observe where the elephant roams wherever it wants. That is more like leisurely mind wandering.

I'd like to recommend "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa John Yates. Besides the elephant analogy, there is much actionable advice on meditation to be found in that book.