> And disappearing is the default, natural state of things.
Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy. The same is not the case for information disseminated in a controlled manner from privately owned servers.
> If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".
> If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.
Thankfully, the generations who produced and preserved knowledge on paper, clay and stone before the onset of digital technology - that is, every generation of humans that has ever lived, except ours - did not think of books and libraries as throwaway pamphlets. And it would take more than an arbitrary interchange of modes of cultural production to argue that we should be doing otherwise in the technological circumstance we find ourselves in.
The "tyrants of the server" are not thinking of server-centric aggregation and dissemination of as a performance put on for a limited time: they are betting on it as the future of all human literary activity. Google doesn't want to read you a paragraph, take your money and say goodbye; it wants to swallow all the world's books and information, chop it to tiny pieces, store and own it forever, and extract the maximum profit from each tiny piece, without having you pay a penny. And it wants you to come back for more. The persistence of the server-centric model of content dissemination is not an accident; it is dictated by the political economy of the web brought about by the Googles of the world.
"Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy."
Only the ones that have survived. For every book or tablet we have, there are certainly tens of THOUSANDS of which every copy ever published has been lost - most of those are ephemera that wouldn't mean much to us anyways, but the lost also include things that would be nice: the majority of Livy, any of the original source material for the Gospels, etc.
Even considerably more modern material has been vanishing at a significant rate; for instance, most of the output of the silent film era has already been lost.
I wonder if you are familiar with Bret Victor's elaborate criticism of Khan Academy's live coding environment. This effort looks like it could really benefit from its insights.
While an inline interactive Scheme interpreter does make the SICP examples easier to follow and play with, it doesn't by itself make the content more understandable and learnable.
A "learning environment for SICP", with the principles of learnability and understandability in Victor's article applied, would be very beneficial for present day learners. It surely is a lot of work, but would be an interesting route for your project to take.
I've definitely read that particular link and thought hard about how SICP should be written for a live coding environment. I don't think either the original SICP or Bret Victor will be the last word on this matter.
In Bret Victor's terms, the scheme used in SICP has very little "vocabulary" to learn to read. The first section (which I linked) uses only arithmetic functions and `if` to teach you, well, how to program. And the "show flow" examples emphasize mutation of variables through time, while scheme uses recursion in place of loops. I think something that shows the function calls explicitly would be good, or at least something that shows the flow of function call (like the DrRacket debugger).
At the risk of generalizing, Bret Victor deals with things like graphics, animations and simulations, while SICP treats programming like a branch of pure math, and it's not straightforward reconciling the two.
Yes, the specific example scenarios that Victor has used are hard to directly reconcile with what SICP is doing. But, that the examples are oriented towards graphics and animation has only to do with the fact that the immediate target of his critique in the essay is Processing and a particular live coding implementation of it. I was thinking more in terms of applying the principles of learnability that he has put forward, and are manifest in the examples he has cited (Logo, Smalltalk, etc.), "how exactly" admittedly being an open question.
One thing I'm more or less certain about is that it would entail less live coding, and more stepping through visualized execution states (perhaps similar to pythontutor.com's visualizer).
I will be going through SICP with these in mind in the following weeks/months; I will keep you posted if I end up with notes that I think you might find useful.
No, there aren't "people"; there is "a person", me. Just one person.
Everyone else is speculating on how the poor little "Googler"'s life is destroyed by a naive peaceful protest, derailing the issue with anti-left wing jokes, suggesting that "Googlers" carry weapons, and so on.
HN at its best: when its ideological toe is stepped on. popcorn
Why shouldn't googlers carry weapons? Everyone has a right to self-defense, and certain recent actions at least hint that googlers may be at an increased risk of being attacked. Choosing to carry a weapon is just being prudent.
That kind of egalitarian viewpoint is alien to these protesters. They are entitled to attack this individual because he is powerful and wrong, and they are powerless and right. You're thinking "no punching" and they're thinking "punch up, not down."
A group posts pictures of your house, your name, and detailed descriptions that attempt to dehumanise you and paint you as some supervillain.
Would I feel threatened and oppressed if I was the target of that? Yes. I'd probably make sure I had weapons in the house.
My lunatic meter went off time and time again while reading their flier. I would not for a second trust that there's not at least one crazy guy that decides to take things one step too far in that group.
They state that they chose to block his personal commute not merely protest at his residence. That means they chose to attempt to prevent him from leaving (since once he left he would be out of their control and may well go to work).
If you were someone that needed to go to work, and needed to drop your child somewhere on the way, and there was a large group of people outside your house with the stated intent of preventing you from doing so, you would not feel threatened? I mean sure they are peaceful while you are inside not attempting to leave, but when you try to oppose their goals by leaving, it raises the question of how dedicated they are to their goal, which I believe would make a rational person feel threatened.
If they had not made the point that the purpose of this was to restrict him from going about life then I would be much more willing to consider the view that he should not feel threatened.
So if I hang out in your front lawn and prevent you from leaving your house (in a non-violent manner) with a bunch of my friends, does that make me non-threatening and non-oppressive?
I'm a marxist - certainly not aligned with any right wing libertarians. But right from the headline that article disgusts me.
Unless they have concrete proof that this specific guy have done something particularly bad (and they've not presented any), calling him out by name and with photos of his home is way over the line to begin with.
Not only is it creepy, it is deeply counterproductive and will only serve to alienate people that might otherwise be sympathetic.
What they describe as a "pompous two story palace with stone lions guarding the door" looks to me like a quite average suburban house. Yes, I get that there are people substantially worse off, but they're not getting any sympathy with crap like that.
Further, trying to dehumanise him with their descriptions of him as a "robot" and contrasting him with his child, and their use of words like "evil" ought to make everyone concerned.
This is not progressive. On the contrary, this is moronic petit bourgeois luddites staging ineffective and creepy demonstrations that will achieve nothing but play straight into the hands of their opponents.
It also shows that they fundamentally fail to understand the mechanisms they are fighting. Everyone on the other side will see what they are doing as perfectly reasonable. They are just "hacking the system" and following consequences. The moment they are described as "evil" and faced with personal demonstrations, these guys start creating enemies, when they could instead have searched for partners.
But these clowns use socialist terms while they clearly don't understand much of its basis. Marx, for example, was very clear in his agitation against the kind of moronic vilification demonstrated in this text: The typical capitalist, and those aiding him, according to Marx, is no more evil than the worker he oppresses - capitalist and worker alike for the most part are trapped in the same machine, and have little choice but to stick to their roles: A capitalist that stops exploiting labour will fail, and end up a labourer by necessity himself. Marx was not against the capitalist. He was not even against the capitalist system per se - on the contrary, he realised that for any chance of socialism to succeed, it would be _essential_ to bring about the economic development and automation required to be able to meet the needs of everyone.
In fact, socialism as an idea is a child of the industrial revolution more than anything: It arose out of the hope that the industrial revolution would bring about such wealth that poverty could finally be beaten, Marx held that the capitalist system would play out its role once production had reached such a height that poverty could be eradicated.
Socialism originated as an ideology deeply intertwined with a positive view of technology and automation as tools of liberation. To see these guys play modern day luddites and drag out socialism in the same breath just shows a staggering degree of lack of awareness of history. To see them target individuals rather than the system equally so.
I appreciate the perspective of a person who identifies as Marxist.
I'm not a Marxist but I've been struggling to articulate why I believe this sort of protesting is counterproductive. For one thing, their complaints are not actionable-- they're co-opting a grab-bag of leftist, luddite terminology and the end result rounds down to a primal scream. I don't live in SF, but it seems to me that the horse is out of the barn: SF has changed irrevocably and it will never go back to what it was. I suspect they know this on some level.
A large subset of tech workers have libertarian leanings, to be sure, but there's a strong leftist/liberal bent, as well. More than a lot of other well-off folks, I'd expect tech workers to be allies. Regardless, though, they're/we're not going to consider ourselves evil just because someone says so. The incentives are simple and compelling: we get paid well for doing work we ostensibly enjoy. They want "techies" to go away because we're ruining everything but the only way to make that work at any scale is highly, highly questionable-- shit like violence and/or intimidation, in other words.
I'm sympathetic to the protesters' feeling of disenfranchisement, but it's increasingly difficult for me to remain sympathetic. The top tier tech companies can't undo the last few decades of Bay Area history. Gentrification is not a solved problem, but density seems to be one way to go. That involves compromise. My sense is that these folks feel entitled enough to claim ownership over SF such that I'd expect a rather cool response to compromise.
My wife is from Cuba, I've witnessed first hand what "applied" marxism creates, misery and strife. Let alone places like North Korea etc.. Honest question, how do you cope with the reality vs the ideal?
> My wife is from Cuba, I've witnessed first hand what "applied" marxism creates, misery and strife. Let alone places like North Korea etc.. Honest question, how do you cope with the reality vs the ideal?
IME, self-identified Marxists outside of countries run by Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships tend to view nominally "Marxist" Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships as having roughly the same relationship to Marxism as modern self-identified proponents of democracy outside of Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships have usually viewed nominally democratic Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships like the "German Democratic Republic" or the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" of having to democracy.
Wait, do you actually think DPRK is actually communist? It reads far more like an autocracy to me.
On the other hand, look at the rest of the industrialized world. Almost every industrialized nation has socialized medicine, social insurance/welfare, etc. You're trying to characterize it as a binary when it's a lot more like capitalism in that there's a lot of latitude.
A friend of mine calls this "The Horror". It is in the very application of Marxism that the whole thing falls to pieces. I think Marx was great at analysis, however he didn't understand work or the layers of design and engineering that lies behind the means of production. Also, he was a theorist whose ideas got applied while he was still tinkering with them and pretty much all of his ideas of how to solve the problems he had identified were pretty terrible. The economic questions he posed however, have still not been satisfactorily answered.
> I've heard Marx described as having been great at diagnosis, but terrible at prescription.
Marx and Engels weren't all that bad at prescription -- a substantial portion of the 10 key concrete policies for "advanced countries" in the Communist Manifesto have been widely and successfully adopted in the modern, developed, "capitalist" world.
Lenin's rewriting of Marx's program to a very different one, with notionally the same end state and, in many cases, similar near term policy changes to be applied in very different contexts, that was supposed to work in conditions which had neither the specific problems Marx's program was designed to address nor the foundations from which Marx's program was designed to address them, hasn't worked out very well, but that's a different issue.
Excellent. If engineers and technologists refuse to take personal political and ethical responsibility for the future they help build, they need to be reminded to do so.
I've never felt the need for a down vote button for a comment on Hacker News until now.
Yes, we should be ethically aware of the tools and products we build, but this is not the way to go about this! Harassing a man at his home like this is unnecessary and aggressive.
Please stop the promotion of individual harassment.
When people block Google busses, and break one window of one bus, it's inappropriate violence on par with barbarism [1].
When people peacefully protest a Google employee and try to raise awareness in his neighborhood of his activities that they disagree with, it's individual harassment.
Isn't that just lovely? Hacker News: privileged technologists setting the standards for techno-skeptical protest. Tell us what the proper way to go about it (outside the established means of the sham that is representative parliamentary democracy, of course) is, then.
"We intend to prevent you and your family from leaving your home" - by what means do these protestors feel acceptable? Verbal? Staring intimidatingly? Pushing his wife back as she crosses the property line? Punching his child? Drawing guns?
When you explicitly state, and act, with the intention to prevent people from leaving their own home, effectively placing them in a state of house arrest, then sorry, your protest is no longer any more peaceful than the force implied by that house arrest.
Hiding behind "raising awareness in the neighborhood" is a disingenuous sham that exposes a duplicity. What relevance has "representative parliamentary democracy" to your argument other than to make you feel martyred?
Remember, you are actively threatening a family that you will not let them leave their home, there is a distinct, and real, fear of how far you will go to do so. For all your "blocking busses, and breaking one window" (carefully emphasized to minimize), there's the Seattle WTO protests and everything in between, and a distinct set of people who -will- resort to violence that constitutes a non-zero threat to this man and his family's well being that you wave away as nothing.
At least have the courage of your convictions and stop pretending it's just some people "raising awareness".
You claim that it's unnecessary and aggressive yet you do not discount its effectiveness. Therefore I'm going to discount your argument. Protest is worth it when its effective. And we're reading about it, so its done its job. Protest need not be cozy, clean, friendly, or Batemanish.
I never claim effectiveness. Reading an article about a protest and a protest causing actual change are two very different things. I don't see what job was done.
Are you seriously suggesting, Citizen, that the same standard applies both to the oppressor and the oppressed? Have a care, Citizen; such regressionist attitudes court accusations of reactionism.
What does left-wing have to do with this?, stupidity doesn't requires a political affiliation. Actually all governements in the world are left-wing by American standards.
In what way - I agree that responding with violence would not be a good first response at some point you do have to take a stand.
Maybe the bus drivers from all the tech company could protest against this threat to their livelihood and stage a drive in and shutdown the city like the french farmers do by driving extremely slowly though the city.
"It's not true. It's not true. It's not true.
"...
"It's old news."
This also sums up how the underhanded defense of the status quo by hiding behind Hanlon's razor has worked in much internet discourse, including HN discussions, on mass surveillance and cryptography so far.
I'm one of those people: I submit that throwing a brick through the back of a bus window is ethically superior to voting or circulating a petition. Please skim my comment history.
Hm, what about lynching a couple of Google engineers? Ethically superior or inferior? If inferior, then why? I'm actually genuinely interested though may sound sarcastic - I'm very curious where people like you draw the line between "good" violence and "bad" violence.
I did have a look at your submission history, thanks, some nice reading there.
Quote from OA
"...one in ten mortgages was foreclosed in San Pablo. At the same time San Francisco’s rate of foreclosure was a mere 2 percent."
Those rates are huge! At the worst of the recession, we hit about one per 300 in the UK, and that was considered bad enough for urgent action to support arrears and find ways for people to restructure their debt.
Its not nitpicking the title. Its nitpicking the argument. While I don't live near San Fransisco and can't immediately relate to the geographical arguments around Philadelphia I have heard the same arguments for the past two decades. Neighborhoods protesting because they are "forgotten" as anyone with the means to do so leaves the mess of crime, drugs, and poor schooling. Then as the neighborhoods are revitalized bringing with them the resource to tackle those problems the same residents complain that they are being displaced and that its just a conspiracy against minorities, and the working man.
Pretending that one can live in a world that isn't deeply political requires a massive amount of privilege, ignorance, or both. Discussing those who are left out or even harmed by the economic and technologic trends that our industry contributes to is a lot more important, valuable, and relevant than reading about some kid's failed startups again and again.
My criticism is of the idea of a "no politics" (overt or otherwise) policy, not you for pointing it out. Said policy on a news site backed by entities with serious capital who work to change the world is troubling.
It doesn't take an overtly political article to upset ideological sensibilities. Since technology is inherently intertwined with ideology, it's not possible to have a fruitful discussion on any topic concerning technology (perhaps aside from certain pure technicalities) without stepping on any ideological toes.
