After 4 1/2 years and 958 posts I have decided to retire from
blogging. No weblog can go on forever and I would rather end on my own
terms than let the blog peter out.
Thanks a lot Lance, I will miss your posts! Your weblog has been a nice way to keep up to date in many subjects of TCS and particularly computational complexity. But I agree with Eldar this was unexpected!
No, Lance, no -- tell me it isn't true! Yours was the first blog I ever read. That familiar puke-green background was my rock, my North Star, in the vast and ever-shifting blogosphere. Your invitation to have me guest-blog gave me my first taste of being flamed by angry commenters -- thereby leading directly to Shtetl-Optimized, where I get to repeat that same masochistic experience every single day.
The burden you've placed on my shoulders -- and Luca's, and Dave Bacon's, etc. -- is an extremely heavy one.
Lance, we will miss you (turn speakers on before clicking the link).
I learned a huge amount from your blog. I came to computer science from a different field, starting (by coincidence) about 4.5 years ago. I managed to pick up most of the subject knowledge I needed from books, papers, the web, other people. Some of the culture I picked up from colleagues.
But I feel like I couldn't have fully made the transition without reading your blog regularly! So thanks!
I've only been lurking here for a year (or was it two?), but oh what an enjoyable year of lurking it's been. So long, and thanks for all the great posts! I hope that Scott, Dave, Luca, and the others will continue your tradition of doling out the advice and the commentary for years to come.
Lance, thank you so much for having had a blog! It was certainly a connecting/venting point for the entire TCS community, and for me a source of inspiring technical highlights, insightful career advice, and TCS community happenings. There's nothing out there to fill that void.
I too was a daily reader of your blog, and will miss it. I am a first year graduate student now, but read your blog as an undergrad, and it influenced me both in my research directions and in my choice of school.
If this sad news is really true, the only thing that could save my day would be to get to know which similar blogs your readers or you have found interesting. (Perhaps one more entry for collecting those? Or will you just abandon us without giving us a map forwards?)
(...Not that any of those blogs could match yours, though!)
Thanks a lot for the blog. I really enjoyed it. I was probably one of the early readers of the blog and learnt a lot about TCS, research and life in general from it. As others said, "Thanks a lot for the fish".
I am really hoping that this is in spirit of what happens on APR-1st. Even otherwise, Thanks.
Amar
I think that it would be a great service to TCS if the archives are not deleted.
So long Lance and thanks for the all the posts. Enjoyed my daily visits here for sure. Thanks again for spending time in helping and encouraging people, in your own way.
What ? Are you sure ? Ok... so... nothing much to say except than thank you very much Lance for all these posts and the helpful presentation of many theoretical stuff over the years. Hope that one day you will decide to "revive" the blog...
As an educated layperson I learnt alomst everything I know about TCS fom your blog. I just want to say thanks for the last 4.5 years. It's been an eye-opener for me!
You used this tool to trigger off popularizing TCS. Because of your blog, you will be remembered by many more than just TCS people. Are you starting any such new hobbies?
I will miss that red "F" amongst my browser tabs, and all the stimulating discussions that went with it. Especially the "Click and Clack of Complexity," Lance and Bill.
Ironic, that at the time when I ought to feel speechless, I choose to make a comment for the first and, presumably, last time. Will the archives at least be available for a while?
While it is impossible to avoid coloring the blog with the personality of the blogger, I must say you elevated this blog to a professional forum for the happenings in computational complexity theory.
Thank you for the good work and I hope that you keep the website so that people may search past postings and links. This would also be helpful if you ever want to return to blogging some time in the future.
I blame it on Google's excessive use of AJAX. That the comment got posted appeared in a small box at the top of the page, which wasn't visible as I had scrolled down a bit.
I hope we will still get “Favorite Complexity Theorems” in some other form if not every month. I have few years of unread entries to enjoy - and read many things over and over again. Thanks Lance.
Shoot! Now I'll have to choose another start-up page for my browser.
Thanks, Lance, for all the thought-provoking posts, and thanks to all the rest of you who commented on them in equally thought-provoking ways. I'm glad to hear the archives will stay up. They'll be a huge asset to the community for years to come.
i am going to repeat what everyone else has been saying here.... i loved your blog. it was one of the first that i ever read.... have been reading it everyday...this was so sudden!! i will miss the blog like a lost friend... hope you start a new concept blog.... thanks for 958 posts!!!
But many thanks, Lance! That was a tremendous contribution you made to the community and to the field. I know I speak for everyone here when I say that we're deeply grateful.
Dear Lance---speaking as a sometime-lurker who regrets never getting active here, many thanks!
An important factor is that Lance (and Scott and Luca and others) have traveled a lot and (thus) have been able to get involved in many current intellectual discussions. More so if you consider getting into lots of e-mail discussion "traveling". But frequent travel on top of blogging is even more a time-investment! I've found it hard to do even one of those, and my re-involvement in the chess world (see my webpage) has vacuumed up much disposable time.
One thing I've always wanted to do, though, is have a "static" blog. By which I mean a series of pages that describe computational complexity theory at the general-science level, e.g. to aspiring high-school students. Some pages on this and the other blogs are suitable for this---can we make a Knuth-like "WeB" of links to navigate them?
In relation to some requests expressed above to have a "community pitch-in" here, a goal such as I suggest might lend more "Structure" to the endeavor...
I did not come by every day but had the RSS feed among my gmail headlines... only a couple of times I felt like participating! To see it optimistically (this time it IS hard), I have quite a few unread past entries to enjoy every now and then.
Thanks Lance! Reading your blog has been a daily pleasure that I will sorely miss. You have brought the theory community together in a way that annual conferences can only approximate. Here's to your fifth decade of favorite theorems...
Thank you for the wonderful blogging! You cannot imagine how important your blog is to students like me who have been fighting to do research in a university with very little theory atmosphere. Your blog let us know about everything from the right way to do research, to how the research community works, and has been extremely informative and helpful. We will all miss it, and so will you! Qiqi Yan
Lance, you should think about making yourself editor in chief of the complexity weblog and turning it into something like Lambda the Ultimate.
Even though you don't have the time/energy anymore to blog on a regular basis, feel free to keep posting your conference overviews and "breaking news in complexity" entries. They are a valuable resource.
Lance, you will be missed. Please do come once in a while to write a post. Take leisure. Write a post or two a month. At least when there is something post worthy happens such as Lance the Great retiring from blogging :)
I feel like one of those runners following Forrest Gump on his long cross country run. You spend three years running alongside Forrest, and then all of a sudden, he just stops, turns around, and says "I'm pretty tired... I think I'll go home now."
Thanks for all the insightful blog postings, Lance. I enjoyed reading it.
oh, not so soon. This blog is one I really liked. I learned a lot from these posts, and had a lot of fun. It's a great pity to learn about this. You've made my day as a bad day!