9 ms·

HARC

415 points by sama 10y ago

apsec112 10y ago
This isn't a judgment of the project itself, but the announcement's wording reminds me of the marketing newspeak from "How to Apply to Y Combinator": "The best answers are the most matter of fact. It’s a mistake to use marketing-speak to make your idea sound more exciting. We’re immune to marketing-speak; to us it’s just noise. 1. So don’t begin your answer with something like We are going to transform the relationship between individuals and information. That sounds impressive, but it conveys nothing. It could be a description of any technology company. Are you going to build a search engine? Database software? A router? I have no idea. One test of whether you’re explaining your idea effectively is to ask how close the reader is to reproducing it. After reading that sentence I’m no closer than I was before, so its content is effectively zero. Another mistake is to begin with a sweeping introductory paragraph about how important the problem is: Information is the lifeblood of the modern organization. The ability to channel information quickly and efficiently to those who need it is critical to a company’s success. A company that achieves an edge in the efficient use of information will, all other things being equal, have a significant edge over competitors. Again, zero content; after reading this, the reader is no closer to reproducing your project than before. A good answer would be something like: A database with a wiki-like interface, combined with a graphical UI for controlling who can see and edit what. I’m not convinced yet that this will be the next Google, but at least I’m starting to engage with it. I’m thinking what such a thing would be like. One reason founders resist giving matter-of-fact descriptions is that they seem to constrain your potential. “But it’s so much more than a database with a wiki UI!” The problem is, the less constraining your description, the less you’re saying. So it’s better to err on the side of matter-of-factness." https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/ https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  Yep, i entirely agree. My only take-away about HARC is they hired 20 "researchers" to maybe make some mockups of ui designs they deem "better" ... "for humanity"?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- runesoerensen 10y ago
  This is an announcement of the collaboration between between YCR and HARC, not a specific project/technology. As stated in the post, "We will share more detail about each PI’s current projects once we settle into our new roles and establish a web presence". You wrote this up within 5 minutes of the announcement. Perhaps you're judging it a bit too early? YCR is about "work that requires a very long time horizon, seeks to answer very open-ended questions"[0] - it's research and shouldn't be judged as a startup/technology company, which seems to be what you're doing. [0]https://ycr.org/ https://ycr.org/
- sama 10y ago
  I think research is really different from startups. That said, I expect that over the next month or two the teams will figure out their general directions, and will share it when they do.
- kragen 10y ago
  Because it's research, they don't know what they're doing until they do it; they just know the direction they're going in. They're betting on people, not projects. If you want more concrete details about what these particular people have done in the past, look at the code and papers they've published as CDG and VPRI. (And PARC, in Alan's case.)
jwise0 10y ago
On the one hand, I'm happy to see visionaries like Vi Hart and Bret Victor (and presumably the others who I don't know of their work, but can only imagine to be quite good) supported to do the work that they do. On the other hand, I am a little concerned to see InfoSys joining the fray here. InfoSys, to my understanding, are basically the face of H-1B abuse. So I'm happy to see these people funded, but it's a little harder for me to cheer when the funding comes from such a questionable source...
- vadym909 10y ago
  Would've expected YC to know this. Infosys hogs half the highly skilled worker H1b quota every year at an average salary of $80K in effect denying many startups and founders the ability. http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Infosys/1088782.htm http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Infosys/1088782.htm They probably file 60K H1bs if they ended up getting 30K in the lottery.
  - benatkin 10y ago
    Aren't they also pushing to increase the quota? And isn't increasing the quota a good thing?
    - vadym909 10y ago
      For one company to take up 50% of the really scarce H1b quota (65,000) is just not fair. To do it to get a lil lower cost worker is inexcusable. I have no issue with Infosys's offshoring- only their unfair gobbling up of the H1b visas.
      - keht 10y ago
        Everyone from the Army, to the Govt, to Apple, to your medical insurer, to your bank have been using those workers. Maybe it will make you feel better if they all worked for 100 different Indian firms, but this is just more efficient. The bodyshops face stiff competition from each other to consolidate. The fact that Infosys has survived 20 years says something about the company.
cpr 10y ago
Most of these luminaries worked at SAP until recently. Are they being spun out into HARC, or are they just collaborating from inside SAP's blue-sky research group? It would be helpful to clarify what their institutional standings are, if we're to understand the full import of this announcement.
- sama 10y ago
  Spun out. They're full time employees of YCR starting a few days ago.
  - anfedorov 10y ago
    Including Alan, or is he still heading VPRI?
aroman 10y ago
Very interesting, and very exciting! How will this relate to VPRI? And are these researchers joining full-time and collaborating together directly, or are they just "part of the project"?
panic 10y ago
I'm excited to see where this goes! I'm curious, though: Alan and gang were already working on many of these ideas under the aegis of SAP's Communications Design Group. What was the motivation behind starting a new project?
DodgyEggplant 10y ago
This is great of course, but then again - it feels like human is the only species on this planet. We really have to start to think as an echo system, especially with technology.
- davidw 10y ago
  > We really have to start to think as an echo system, especially with technology. I know it was a typo, but HN does a pretty good job at being an echo system with technology, at times :-)
davidw 10y ago
Alan Kay? Ok, I'm impressed! It does sound kind of vague. I hope it's not so open ended that it just means kind of noodling around with interesting stuff. But hey, Alan Kay's noodling would still be good, I bet. Interested to see what comes out of it!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cushychicken 10y ago
  Alan Kay's whole MO is noodling around with interesting stuff, and history shows it's pretty good when he does.
  - davidw 10y ago
    He's also produced a number of working systems though, right?
    - lemming 10y ago
      Yes. Object Oriented Programming, for a start. So there's that. GUI's, too.
      - alanlit 10y ago
        Well, Simula predates PARC by about a decade, so I'm not so sure about AK created OOP. As for Windows and such, sniff around YouTube -- that notion goes back to the late 50's early 60's. That AK popularized this stuff - sure.
        kragen 10y ago
        Your history is pretty confused, although it has some elements of truth to it. Let me set you straight. Although there were graphical displays in the 1950s (some of them being simply direct displays of the contents of Williams tubes), GUIs as such only go back to Sketchpad (1961-65, roughly) which sort of had windows, and there were windows and a mouse in NLS by 1968, but without a GUI. Simula (1967) wasn't OO; Alan coined that phrase to describe Smalltalk (1971 at PARC, established 1970, which you'll note is less than a decade after 1967, though begun in 1969), which drew inspiration from Sketchpad, Simula, the B5000, NLS, and some weird magnetic tape format developed by the Air Force where the tape started with a program that interpreted the rest of the tape, among other places. Alan and Ed Cheadle actually did a lot of the development of the ideas that later became OO in the 1966-70 timeframe on a personal computer they were working on called FLEX. You can read Alan's account of this history in "The Early History of Smalltalk", one copy of which is at http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html. Alan and Dan and Adele and other people on the Smalltalk team deserve a lot of credit both for developing the ideas of object-orientation but also for popularizing them, and essentially the modern desktop GUI (mouse, overlapping windows, icons, WYSIWYG, multiple fonts, proportional fonts, buttons, menus, drag-and-drop) was developed at PARC in the 1970s, an effort that included the Smalltalk team but also included a lot of other people working in other languages. Of course, much as I detest Steve Jobs, the really powerful popularizing influences on this stuff were Macintosh and NeXT. (Later, Java.)
lez 10y ago
I especially like the term because it means 'battle' in Hungarian.
vbit 10y ago
Very exciting! How can I join? :D
- the4dpatrick 10y ago
  ^ Ditto
- miguelrochefort 10y ago
  As much as I feel that I'm better qualified for the job than half of HARC's team, I don't think joining would help much. They're 20 people already. There is no way they will agree on a coherent direction, unless it's a weak/safe one. I guess we'll see.
nkoren 10y ago
May I make a human advancement suggestion which has very little to do with technology? Teach about cognitive bias. Tech it at a fundamental level -- like, starting in 1st grade, with annual refreshers thereafter. Give cognitive bias an equal place at the table alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. Many cognitive biases are deeply rooted in biological and social structures -- but with awareness and training, they can be overcome. Without awareness and training, they can be profoundly destructive, and certainly limit the scope of human advancement. So before we start pimping out our metacortexes or whatever, let's see if we can't overcome some of the less salutary whisperings of our old and honestly pretty useless reptilian brains. We can be better than that.
- woodman 10y ago
  A method for overcoming cognitive bias is a technology, in the same way that spoken language is a technology. See formal logic. But if we were somehow, as a species, constrained to doing one thing at a time on the tech tree - then yes, we would do well to max that tech out asap.
- abiox 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases it could be challenging to avoid all or even most of those. i wonder if i just fell prey to one or more.
rjurney 10y ago
Very impressed they hired Bret Victor. His brilliance outpaces anyone else in his field, and he communicates well.
arca_vorago 10y ago
I hope they realize that copyleft and protection of users is a prereq for this bit, "to ensure human wisdom exceeds human power, by inventing and freely sharing ideas". I am waiting for the days when some big names wake up and say "RMS has been right all along, we need to copyleft everything asap!" I'm getting tired of hearing about $NEXTGREATTECH and then finding out it's a SaaS or proprietary etc. Heres to hoping this group does something productive and free as in beer and speech.
phodo 10y ago
First SLAC (homebrew computer club fame more than the linear accelerator part) and PARC (so many innovations... where to start... right, ask Alan!)... and now HARC. In good company!
ozten 10y ago
Last week VPRI[1] published the final "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming" paper[2]. Although it is 2012, it had been unavailable publicly until now. A great way to catch up on how FONC ended. It was worked on by many individuals being cited as part of HARC. [1] http://vpri.org/html/writings.php http://vpri.org/html/writings.php [2] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf
- e12e 10y ago
  Thank you for pointing this out. I hadn't read the last one, and was actually wondering if they'd just shut down, without concluding in some form or other. Love this stuff: "This brings forth fanciful and motivational questions about domain areas, such as (...) "How many t-shirts will be required to define TCP/IP" (about 3), or all the graphical operations needed for personal computing?" (about 10)." [ed: Actually thought the pdf deserved a submission of its own, lets see if other people think so too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325 ]
karmicthreat 10y ago
YC seems to be trying to reach into a number of different areas lately. Maybe they find that they don't have enough innovation walking through their door anymore. Or that they need to go the extra mile to push things forward themselves.
- tacos 10y ago
  I'm bored out of my mind reading HN lately and I'd hope they are, too. (That ad today for the all-girl we-got-board-games thing was just... painful.) So why not keep busy while they wait for the next wave to form? It's a great time to grow other branches.
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >That ad today for the all-girl we-got-board-games thing was just... painful. To what are you referencing here? I must have missed this story.
    - tacos 10y ago
      "Our backend runs on EBS." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11675171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11675171
      - uola 10y ago
        That's actually far more relevant than a lot of YC startups. Custom packaging is a big trend in Asia and far more evolved than in the west.
- alain94040 10y ago
  I'll take a wild uneducated guess and guess that they are trying to find the next frontier in "idea incubation" while their current product (YC) is on top of its game. So as to not be "disrupted" by whatever is going to replace YC's idea factory, years from now. The iPhone to their current iPod. In that context, advanced research makes sense.
auggierose 10y ago
Very exciting. I wished there would also be room for a group at YCR/HARC working on collaborative theorem proving (CTP) as proposed here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6186 http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6186 :-)
amasad 10y ago
I'm excited to see what comes out of this. The area I'm hoping they'd look at is programming. There hasn't been any big ideas in programming in a really long time. Languages are rehashes of the same features with slightly different configurations and incremental improvement in performance or tooling. Programming interfaces are stagnant too -- Smalltalk's interactive devlopement environment is still the sci-fi version of what most people think programming could be. The programmer and the program have never been further away from each other as it is today. The development environment have never been further away from the production environment as it is today. And end-user interfaces have never been as abstracted away from computing as it is today. If any group can breathe some life into this stagnant area then my bet would be on this group.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Nicely put! Many of us feel the same way: how we are approaching programming through PL today in much of the academic community is contributing to those gaps, not eliminating them. There is also a chance to evolve the topic of programming to one of human advancement (among other things), the old approaches aren't moving things forward so much anyways. See what Bret Victor did with programming topics in just a few short years, I see a lot of potential there!
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  Eve [1] is one project I know of that has been trying to tackle this very difficult problem. The project is led by Chris Granger, whom you might know from his work on the Light Table IDE [2]. They released a video last year that showcased some iterations of their prototypes and I found them to be very innovative and promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8 [1] http://www.witheve.com/ http://www.witheve.com/ [2] http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/
  - david927 10y ago
    Kayia (http://kayia.org http://kayia.org, my project) is also approaching programming from a very different angle. I would like to say that, since a large percentage of us know that programming is broken, we are supportive, inclusive and embrace new ideas. We don't. This industry has become a branch of the finance industry. So instead of programming being driven by math (e.g. category theory, abelian groups), it's driven by the market (e.g. time-to-market, what works now). HARC is a push back the other way, giving space to people who are thinking about it in the right way, and I applaud that. But we're still missing the 'inclusive' piece of it; until we can talk to each other and listen to each other, we'll remain frustrated.
fromthemorning 10y ago
You know what it means when you're full of yourself and you're also full of shit...
tylercubell 10y ago
As a layperson, I have almost no idea what any of this means. > HARC’s mission is to ensure human wisdom exceeds human power, by inventing and freely sharing ideas and technology that allow all humans to see further and understand more deeply. Isn't this what the internet is for? What's new? > Our shared vision of technology combines an expansive long-term view with a strong moral sense. We look to the distant past as well as the far future. We reject the artificial boundaries created between the humanities, arts, and sciences. We don’t always agree on what is good or evil, right or wrong, but we use these words seriously and are driven by them. This is so vague I have no idea how you can attach any meaning to it. > We are focusing on areas where we believe the structures created today will have the most impact on the future, and that can most benefit from having dedicated resources outside the for-profit world. At the moment, these areas include programming languages, interfaces, education, and virtual reality. So you're gathering a group of smart people together to do non-profit research in a few select fields with the goal of improving humanity?
- angersock 10y ago
  I too am a little puzzled. Is there anything more to this than peacocking to show how visionary the YC folks are?
- gordon_freeman 10y ago
  Sam Altman is becoming the best friend of Elon Musk to save the humanity from whatever x,y,z. :)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- abiox 10y ago
  > Isn't this what the internet is for? What's new? hmm, possibly. here i was thinking it was for porn, cat videos, science paper paywalls and ransomware distribution.
- mflindell 10y ago
  The point is to make less laypeople
wirt 10y ago
This is what it looks like when the Valley hits peak circlejerk. Someone should throw together a site that randomly selects between sentences from this, and quotes from HBO's Silicon Valley, and lets you guess which is which.
iMuzz 10y ago
Can someone explain to me what their goal is?
- mflindell 10y ago
  To make people smart enough to know whats good for themselves.
- tristanj 10y ago
  YC is building a research facility similar to Xerox PARC. No specific goals, but I'd assume researchers would be looking at projects 10-20 years out. There are a lot of similarities with this and PARC, they have Alan Kay (former PARC), and even the name HARC is clearly inspired by PARC.
iMuzz 10y ago
Can someone explain to me what their goal is?
imh 10y ago
>HARC researches technology in its broadest context, which includes: technology for communication (from the invention of spoken language to modern data graphics), intellectual tools (such as the scientific method and computer simulation), media (from cave painting to video games), and social systems (including democracy and public education). In that broadest context, it really seems to lose its meaning. I think a closer word to that description is "ideas." Why try to cram the word "technology" into it, when it's such a strech?
sgentle 10y ago
So, if I understand this correctly, it's the latest in a series of attempts by Alan Kay to find the right home for his vision of a new Xerox PARC. That began with VPRI (NSF funded), then CDG (SAP funded), and now HARC (YCR funded). As I understand it, VPRI wrapped up because they ran out of money. I wonder what caused the move away from CDG? Regardless, I hope he succeeds before we run out of four-letter acronyms funded by three-letter acronyms. (Edit: CPRG -> CDG, my bad)
- mflindell 10y ago
  I don't think they ran out of money, from the final report is sounds like they just finished the research project. VPRI is just moving to ycom now.
- cycomachead 10y ago
  My understanding is that VP who was championing CDG at SAP left and they didn't have the support they wanted or needed to do research.
krilnon 10y ago
I'm excited to see that Alex Warth is involved with this. In my late undergrad days, I was really excited by his OMeta language. It turned out that I'm actually really bad at writing PEGs (or even ANTLR grammars), so I wasn't the best candidate for advancing OMeta into common use, but the idea is really compelling.
miguelrochefort 10y ago
I can say without the shadow of a doubt that HARC is working on a new language. Not your average spoken or programming language, but a general-purpose and interactive language. A language that can only be communicated through a computer. Text and speech are inherently limited by their linear and one-dimensional nature. Graphics are much more powerful, and leverage high-bandwidth senses. Knowledge will be consumed by navigating knowledge hypergraphs and causational trees (how-why axis). In English, you write everything from scratch. You start with a blank page, then a word, then a sentence. With this new language, you must start with something that exists, some kind of node/edge of the graph. Communication is mostly done by manipulating the knowledge graph. This means that you can't say something that has already been said before. You don't need to provide or explain context. You can instantly see the impact of your thoughts. You can't say incoherent or fallacious things. In most cases, you don't have to say a single thing, as you can find it has been said before. Most decent programming environment provide libraries/modules, auto-completion, and compilation/execution. This new platform brings all these things to communication. We're talking about an universal language here. An homoiconic language, where the distinction between code, data and UI disappears. This is nothing new. People have been talking about this for decades. The most important challenge here is not technical, but social. It is becoming clear that the application paradigm is not sustainable and cannot scale. Personal assistants (Siri, Viv, Cortana, Google Now) and Messaging/Bots (Magic, WeChat, Slack, Microsoft Bots Framework, Facebook Bots Platform) are clear symptoms. Although I've been trying to tell people about this future for more than a decade now, I don't have the resources of track-record to be heard. I am hopeful that HARC will change that.
gnarbarian 10y ago
I don't know about this. The morality stuff sounds like a cult and the rest is so damn vague this whole thing feels half architecture astronaut and half bullshit artist. But since they are YC funded go ahead and downvote me dead for heresy. Edit: Just the result I expected from you asskissers.
- dang 10y ago
  The HN guidelines ask you not to go own about downvotes and not to bait other users into downvoting you. They also ask you not to call names ('you asskissers') in comments. Please read and follow them when posting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- jon-wood 10y ago
  Bringing people together under the umbrella of a very loosely defined goal is what Alan Kay does, and he has a track record of those groups creating big things. The downvotes are the inevitable result of shouting that you'll get downvoted for your opinion.
benatkin 10y ago
The description of what they hope to achieve is vague, in a good way. I'm sure a lot of people from the rationalist community in the Bay Area, who already admire YC, will love this.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
robot 10y ago
I didn't understand anything from this post.
roansh 10y ago
There is a HARC in Amy Tintera's novel Reboot with similar goals. I wonder if they named it HARC because of the novel, or if it's a coincidence.
pcvarmint 10y ago
Not to be confused with another HARC: http://www.harcresearch.org/about/75 http://www.harcresearch.org/about/75
nezuvian 10y ago
off topic, but FYI HARC in hungarian means fight :)
Sicp 10y ago
everyone you meet is "one of the smartest people I've ever met"
tempodox 10y ago
Equating invention of future computing technologies with human advancement is too pompous for my taste. I won't hold my breath.
wiz21c 10y ago
>> Our shared vision of technology combines an expansive long-term view with a strong moral sense. >> > HARC’s mission is to ensure human wisdom exceeds human power, by inventing and freely sharing ideas and technology Free software ? Ahhh nooo, my mistake, YCombinator is funding the project...
edem 10y ago
This somehow reminds me of the Encyclopedia Galactica from the Foundation series.
micheljansen 10y ago
I hope they just give these guys a bag of money and leave them alone to do their thing. They can then connect their work to other guys with a commercial focus where appropriate, without interrupting the flow.
masterponomo 10y ago
I hope they have an airtight written partnership agreement on this thang.
fitzwatermellow 10y ago
I try to make a private study of the global survey of Wisdom Literature in an attempt to distil the essence of what it basically means to live a good life and be a moral person. Everything from Confucius to Aurelius, from Goethe to Gogol. And on and on. Wouldn't it be prudent, whilst you have such an assemblage of noble thinkers, to compile some sort of universal knowledge base of choice epigrams. For the purpose of henceforth explicitly delineating what it means to be "beneficial" and "just" for all future readers to come? In any case, this looks like a necessary and timely line of inquiry and am looking forward to the fruits of these endeavours. Good luck!

415 points by sama 10y ago

This isn't a judgment of the project itself, but the announcement's wording reminds me of the marketing newspeak from "How to Apply to Y Combinator": "The best answers are the most matter of fact. It’s a mistake to use marketing-speak to make your idea sound more exciting. We’re immune to marketing-speak; to us it’s just noise. 1. So don’t begin your answer with something like We are going to transform the relationship between individuals and information. That sounds impressive, but it conveys nothing. It could be a description of any technology company. Are you going to build a search engine? Database software? A router? I have no idea. One test of whether you’re explaining your idea effectively is to ask how close the reader is to reproducing it. After reading that sentence I’m no closer than I was before, so its content is effectively zero. Another mistake is to begin with a sweeping introductory paragraph about how important the problem is: Information is the lifeblood of the modern organization. The ability to channel information quickly and efficiently to those who need it is critical to a company’s success. A company that achieves an edge in the efficient use of information will, all other things being equal, have a significant edge over competitors. Again, zero content; after reading this, the reader is no closer to reproducing your project than before. A good answer would be something like: A database with a wiki-like interface, combined with a graphical UI for controlling who can see and edit what. I’m not convinced yet that this will be the next Google, but at least I’m starting to engage with it. I’m thinking what such a thing would be like. One reason founders resist giving matter-of-fact descriptions is that they seem to constrain your potential. “But it’s so much more than a database with a wiki UI!” The problem is, the less constraining your description, the less you’re saying. So it’s better to err on the side of matter-of-factness." https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/ https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/

Mithaldu 10y ago
Yep, i entirely agree. My only take-away about HARC is they hired 20 "researchers" to maybe make some mockups of ui designs they deem "better" ... "for humanity"?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
runesoerensen 10y ago
This is an announcement of the collaboration between between YCR and HARC, not a specific project/technology. As stated in the post, "We will share more detail about each PI’s current projects once we settle into our new roles and establish a web presence". You wrote this up within 5 minutes of the announcement. Perhaps you're judging it a bit too early? YCR is about "work that requires a very long time horizon, seeks to answer very open-ended questions"[0] - it's research and shouldn't be judged as a startup/technology company, which seems to be what you're doing. [0]https://ycr.org/ https://ycr.org/
sama 10y ago
I think research is really different from startups. That said, I expect that over the next month or two the teams will figure out their general directions, and will share it when they do.
kragen 10y ago
Because it's research, they don't know what they're doing until they do it; they just know the direction they're going in. They're betting on people, not projects. If you want more concrete details about what these particular people have done in the past, look at the code and papers they've published as CDG and VPRI. (And PARC, in Alan's case.)

jwise0 10y ago

On the one hand, I'm happy to see visionaries like Vi Hart and Bret Victor (and presumably the others who I don't know of their work, but can only imagine to be quite good) supported to do the work that they do. On the other hand, I am a little concerned to see InfoSys joining the fray here. InfoSys, to my understanding, are basically the face of H-1B abuse. So I'm happy to see these people funded, but it's a little harder for me to cheer when the funding comes from such a questionable source...

vadym909 10y ago
Would've expected YC to know this. Infosys hogs half the highly skilled worker H1b quota every year at an average salary of $80K in effect denying many startups and founders the ability. http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Infosys/1088782.htm http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Infosys/1088782.htm They probably file 60K H1bs if they ended up getting 30K in the lottery.
- benatkin 10y ago
  Aren't they also pushing to increase the quota? And isn't increasing the quota a good thing?
  - vadym909 10y ago
    For one company to take up 50% of the really scarce H1b quota (65,000) is just not fair. To do it to get a lil lower cost worker is inexcusable. I have no issue with Infosys's offshoring- only their unfair gobbling up of the H1b visas.
    - keht 10y ago
      Everyone from the Army, to the Govt, to Apple, to your medical insurer, to your bank have been using those workers. Maybe it will make you feel better if they all worked for 100 different Indian firms, but this is just more efficient. The bodyshops face stiff competition from each other to consolidate. The fact that Infosys has survived 20 years says something about the company.

cpr 10y ago

Most of these luminaries worked at SAP until recently. Are they being spun out into HARC, or are they just collaborating from inside SAP's blue-sky research group? It would be helpful to clarify what their institutional standings are, if we're to understand the full import of this announcement.

sama 10y ago
Spun out. They're full time employees of YCR starting a few days ago.
- anfedorov 10y ago
  Including Alan, or is he still heading VPRI?

aroman 10y ago

Very interesting, and very exciting! How will this relate to VPRI? And are these researchers joining full-time and collaborating together directly, or are they just "part of the project"?

panic 10y ago

I'm excited to see where this goes! I'm curious, though: Alan and gang were already working on many of these ideas under the aegis of SAP's Communications Design Group. What was the motivation behind starting a new project?

DodgyEggplant 10y ago

This is great of course, but then again - it feels like human is the only species on this planet. We really have to start to think as an echo system, especially with technology.

davidw 10y ago
> We really have to start to think as an echo system, especially with technology. I know it was a typo, but HN does a pretty good job at being an echo system with technology, at times :-)

davidw 10y ago

Alan Kay? Ok, I'm impressed! It does sound kind of vague. I hope it's not so open ended that it just means kind of noodling around with interesting stuff. But hey, Alan Kay's noodling would still be good, I bet. Interested to see what comes out of it!

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cushychicken 10y ago
Alan Kay's whole MO is noodling around with interesting stuff, and history shows it's pretty good when he does.
- davidw 10y ago
  He's also produced a number of working systems though, right?
  - lemming 10y ago
    Yes. Object Oriented Programming, for a start. So there's that. GUI's, too.
    - alanlit 10y ago
      Well, Simula predates PARC by about a decade, so I'm not so sure about AK created OOP. As for Windows and such, sniff around YouTube -- that notion goes back to the late 50's early 60's. That AK popularized this stuff - sure.
      - kragen 10y ago
        Your history is pretty confused, although it has some elements of truth to it. Let me set you straight. Although there were graphical displays in the 1950s (some of them being simply direct displays of the contents of Williams tubes), GUIs as such only go back to Sketchpad (1961-65, roughly) which sort of had windows, and there were windows and a mouse in NLS by 1968, but without a GUI. Simula (1967) wasn't OO; Alan coined that phrase to describe Smalltalk (1971 at PARC, established 1970, which you'll note is less than a decade after 1967, though begun in 1969), which drew inspiration from Sketchpad, Simula, the B5000, NLS, and some weird magnetic tape format developed by the Air Force where the tape started with a program that interpreted the rest of the tape, among other places. Alan and Ed Cheadle actually did a lot of the development of the ideas that later became OO in the 1966-70 timeframe on a personal computer they were working on called FLEX. You can read Alan's account of this history in "The Early History of Smalltalk", one copy of which is at http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html. Alan and Dan and Adele and other people on the Smalltalk team deserve a lot of credit both for developing the ideas of object-orientation but also for popularizing them, and essentially the modern desktop GUI (mouse, overlapping windows, icons, WYSIWYG, multiple fonts, proportional fonts, buttons, menus, drag-and-drop) was developed at PARC in the 1970s, an effort that included the Smalltalk team but also included a lot of other people working in other languages. Of course, much as I detest Steve Jobs, the really powerful popularizing influences on this stuff were Macintosh and NeXT. (Later, Java.)

lez 10y ago

I especially like the term because it means 'battle' in Hungarian.

vbit 10y ago

Very exciting! How can I join? :D

the4dpatrick 10y ago
^ Ditto
miguelrochefort 10y ago
As much as I feel that I'm better qualified for the job than half of HARC's team, I don't think joining would help much. They're 20 people already. There is no way they will agree on a coherent direction, unless it's a weak/safe one. I guess we'll see.

nkoren 10y ago

May I make a human advancement suggestion which has very little to do with technology? Teach about cognitive bias. Tech it at a fundamental level -- like, starting in 1st grade, with annual refreshers thereafter. Give cognitive bias an equal place at the table alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. Many cognitive biases are deeply rooted in biological and social structures -- but with awareness and training, they can be overcome. Without awareness and training, they can be profoundly destructive, and certainly limit the scope of human advancement. So before we start pimping out our metacortexes or whatever, let's see if we can't overcome some of the less salutary whisperings of our old and honestly pretty useless reptilian brains. We can be better than that.

woodman 10y ago
A method for overcoming cognitive bias is a technology, in the same way that spoken language is a technology. See formal logic. But if we were somehow, as a species, constrained to doing one thing at a time on the tech tree - then yes, we would do well to max that tech out asap.
abiox 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases it could be challenging to avoid all or even most of those. i wonder if i just fell prey to one or more.

rjurney 10y ago

Very impressed they hired Bret Victor. His brilliance outpaces anyone else in his field, and he communicates well.

arca_vorago 10y ago

I hope they realize that copyleft and protection of users is a prereq for this bit, "to ensure human wisdom exceeds human power, by inventing and freely sharing ideas". I am waiting for the days when some big names wake up and say "RMS has been right all along, we need to copyleft everything asap!" I'm getting tired of hearing about $NEXTGREATTECH and then finding out it's a SaaS or proprietary etc. Heres to hoping this group does something productive and free as in beer and speech.

phodo 10y ago

First SLAC (homebrew computer club fame more than the linear accelerator part) and PARC (so many innovations... where to start... right, ask Alan!)... and now HARC. In good company!

ozten 10y ago

Last week VPRI[1] published the final "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming" paper[2]. Although it is 2012, it had been unavailable publicly until now. A great way to catch up on how FONC ended. It was worked on by many individuals being cited as part of HARC. [1] http://vpri.org/html/writings.php http://vpri.org/html/writings.php [2] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf

e12e 10y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. I hadn't read the last one, and was actually wondering if they'd just shut down, without concluding in some form or other. Love this stuff: "This brings forth fanciful and motivational questions about domain areas, such as (...) "How many t-shirts will be required to define TCP/IP" (about 3), or all the graphical operations needed for personal computing?" (about 10)." [ed: Actually thought the pdf deserved a submission of its own, lets see if other people think so too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325 ]

karmicthreat 10y ago

YC seems to be trying to reach into a number of different areas lately. Maybe they find that they don't have enough innovation walking through their door anymore. Or that they need to go the extra mile to push things forward themselves.

tacos 10y ago
I'm bored out of my mind reading HN lately and I'd hope they are, too. (That ad today for the all-girl we-got-board-games thing was just... painful.) So why not keep busy while they wait for the next wave to form? It's a great time to grow other branches.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >That ad today for the all-girl we-got-board-games thing was just... painful. To what are you referencing here? I must have missed this story.
  - tacos 10y ago
    "Our backend runs on EBS." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11675171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11675171
    - uola 10y ago
      That's actually far more relevant than a lot of YC startups. Custom packaging is a big trend in Asia and far more evolved than in the west.
alain94040 10y ago
I'll take a wild uneducated guess and guess that they are trying to find the next frontier in "idea incubation" while their current product (YC) is on top of its game. So as to not be "disrupted" by whatever is going to replace YC's idea factory, years from now. The iPhone to their current iPod. In that context, advanced research makes sense.

auggierose 10y ago

Very exciting. I wished there would also be room for a group at YCR/HARC working on collaborative theorem proving (CTP) as proposed here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6186 http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6186 :-)

amasad 10y ago

I'm excited to see what comes out of this. The area I'm hoping they'd look at is programming. There hasn't been any big ideas in programming in a really long time. Languages are rehashes of the same features with slightly different configurations and incremental improvement in performance or tooling. Programming interfaces are stagnant too -- Smalltalk's interactive devlopement environment is still the sci-fi version of what most people think programming could be. The programmer and the program have never been further away from each other as it is today. The development environment have never been further away from the production environment as it is today. And end-user interfaces have never been as abstracted away from computing as it is today. If any group can breathe some life into this stagnant area then my bet would be on this group.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Nicely put! Many of us feel the same way: how we are approaching programming through PL today in much of the academic community is contributing to those gaps, not eliminating them. There is also a chance to evolve the topic of programming to one of human advancement (among other things), the old approaches aren't moving things forward so much anyways. See what Bret Victor did with programming topics in just a few short years, I see a lot of potential there!
lewisl9029 10y ago
Eve [1] is one project I know of that has been trying to tackle this very difficult problem. The project is led by Chris Granger, whom you might know from his work on the Light Table IDE [2]. They released a video last year that showcased some iterations of their prototypes and I found them to be very innovative and promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8 [1] http://www.witheve.com/ http://www.witheve.com/ [2] http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/
- david927 10y ago
  Kayia (http://kayia.org http://kayia.org, my project) is also approaching programming from a very different angle. I would like to say that, since a large percentage of us know that programming is broken, we are supportive, inclusive and embrace new ideas. We don't. This industry has become a branch of the finance industry. So instead of programming being driven by math (e.g. category theory, abelian groups), it's driven by the market (e.g. time-to-market, what works now). HARC is a push back the other way, giving space to people who are thinking about it in the right way, and I applaud that. But we're still missing the 'inclusive' piece of it; until we can talk to each other and listen to each other, we'll remain frustrated.

fromthemorning 10y ago

You know what it means when you're full of yourself and you're also full of shit...

tylercubell 10y ago

As a layperson, I have almost no idea what any of this means. > HARC’s mission is to ensure human wisdom exceeds human power, by inventing and freely sharing ideas and technology that allow all humans to see further and understand more deeply. Isn't this what the internet is for? What's new? > Our shared vision of technology combines an expansive long-term view with a strong moral sense. We look to the distant past as well as the far future. We reject the artificial boundaries created between the humanities, arts, and sciences. We don’t always agree on what is good or evil, right or wrong, but we use these words seriously and are driven by them. This is so vague I have no idea how you can attach any meaning to it. > We are focusing on areas where we believe the structures created today will have the most impact on the future, and that can most benefit from having dedicated resources outside the for-profit world. At the moment, these areas include programming languages, interfaces, education, and virtual reality. So you're gathering a group of smart people together to do non-profit research in a few select fields with the goal of improving humanity?

angersock 10y ago
I too am a little puzzled. Is there anything more to this than peacocking to show how visionary the YC folks are?
gordon_freeman 10y ago
Sam Altman is becoming the best friend of Elon Musk to save the humanity from whatever x,y,z. :)
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abiox 10y ago
> Isn't this what the internet is for? What's new? hmm, possibly. here i was thinking it was for porn, cat videos, science paper paywalls and ransomware distribution.
mflindell 10y ago
The point is to make less laypeople

wirt 10y ago

This is what it looks like when the Valley hits peak circlejerk. Someone should throw together a site that randomly selects between sentences from this, and quotes from HBO's Silicon Valley, and lets you guess which is which.

iMuzz 10y ago

Can someone explain to me what their goal is?

mflindell 10y ago
To make people smart enough to know whats good for themselves.
tristanj 10y ago
YC is building a research facility similar to Xerox PARC. No specific goals, but I'd assume researchers would be looking at projects 10-20 years out. There are a lot of similarities with this and PARC, they have Alan Kay (former PARC), and even the name HARC is clearly inspired by PARC.

iMuzz 10y ago

Can someone explain to me what their goal is?

imh 10y ago

>HARC researches technology in its broadest context, which includes: technology for communication (from the invention of spoken language to modern data graphics), intellectual tools (such as the scientific method and computer simulation), media (from cave painting to video games), and social systems (including democracy and public education). In that broadest context, it really seems to lose its meaning. I think a closer word to that description is "ideas." Why try to cram the word "technology" into it, when it's such a strech?

sgentle 10y ago

So, if I understand this correctly, it's the latest in a series of attempts by Alan Kay to find the right home for his vision of a new Xerox PARC. That began with VPRI (NSF funded), then CDG (SAP funded), and now HARC (YCR funded). As I understand it, VPRI wrapped up because they ran out of money. I wonder what caused the move away from CDG? Regardless, I hope he succeeds before we run out of four-letter acronyms funded by three-letter acronyms. (Edit: CPRG -> CDG, my bad)

mflindell 10y ago
I don't think they ran out of money, from the final report is sounds like they just finished the research project. VPRI is just moving to ycom now.
cycomachead 10y ago
My understanding is that VP who was championing CDG at SAP left and they didn't have the support they wanted or needed to do research.

krilnon 10y ago

I'm excited to see that Alex Warth is involved with this. In my late undergrad days, I was really excited by his OMeta language. It turned out that I'm actually really bad at writing PEGs (or even ANTLR grammars), so I wasn't the best candidate for advancing OMeta into common use, but the idea is really compelling.

miguelrochefort 10y ago

I can say without the shadow of a doubt that HARC is working on a new language. Not your average spoken or programming language, but a general-purpose and interactive language. A language that can only be communicated through a computer. Text and speech are inherently limited by their linear and one-dimensional nature. Graphics are much more powerful, and leverage high-bandwidth senses. Knowledge will be consumed by navigating knowledge hypergraphs and causational trees (how-why axis). In English, you write everything from scratch. You start with a blank page, then a word, then a sentence. With this new language, you must start with something that exists, some kind of node/edge of the graph. Communication is mostly done by manipulating the knowledge graph. This means that you can't say something that has already been said before. You don't need to provide or explain context. You can instantly see the impact of your thoughts. You can't say incoherent or fallacious things. In most cases, you don't have to say a single thing, as you can find it has been said before. Most decent programming environment provide libraries/modules, auto-completion, and compilation/execution. This new platform brings all these things to communication. We're talking about an universal language here. An homoiconic language, where the distinction between code, data and UI disappears. This is nothing new. People have been talking about this for decades. The most important challenge here is not technical, but social. It is becoming clear that the application paradigm is not sustainable and cannot scale. Personal assistants (Siri, Viv, Cortana, Google Now) and Messaging/Bots (Magic, WeChat, Slack, Microsoft Bots Framework, Facebook Bots Platform) are clear symptoms. Although I've been trying to tell people about this future for more than a decade now, I don't have the resources of track-record to be heard. I am hopeful that HARC will change that.

gnarbarian 10y ago

I don't know about this. The morality stuff sounds like a cult and the rest is so damn vague this whole thing feels half architecture astronaut and half bullshit artist. But since they are YC funded go ahead and downvote me dead for heresy. Edit: Just the result I expected from you asskissers.

dang 10y ago
The HN guidelines ask you not to go own about downvotes and not to bait other users into downvoting you. They also ask you not to call names ('you asskissers') in comments. Please read and follow them when posting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
jon-wood 10y ago
Bringing people together under the umbrella of a very loosely defined goal is what Alan Kay does, and he has a track record of those groups creating big things. The downvotes are the inevitable result of shouting that you'll get downvoted for your opinion.

benatkin 10y ago

The description of what they hope to achieve is vague, in a good way. I'm sure a lot of people from the rationalist community in the Bay Area, who already admire YC, will love this.

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robot 10y ago

I didn't understand anything from this post.

roansh 10y ago

There is a HARC in Amy Tintera's novel Reboot with similar goals. I wonder if they named it HARC because of the novel, or if it's a coincidence.

pcvarmint 10y ago

Not to be confused with another HARC: http://www.harcresearch.org/about/75 http://www.harcresearch.org/about/75

nezuvian 10y ago

off topic, but FYI HARC in hungarian means fight :)

Sicp 10y ago

everyone you meet is "one of the smartest people I've ever met"

tempodox 10y ago

Equating invention of future computing technologies with human advancement is too pompous for my taste. I won't hold my breath.

wiz21c 10y ago

>> Our shared vision of technology combines an expansive long-term view with a strong moral sense. >> > HARC’s mission is to ensure human wisdom exceeds human power, by inventing and freely sharing ideas and technology Free software ? Ahhh nooo, my mistake, YCombinator is funding the project...

edem 10y ago

This somehow reminds me of the Encyclopedia Galactica from the Foundation series.

micheljansen 10y ago

I hope they just give these guys a bag of money and leave them alone to do their thing. They can then connect their work to other guys with a commercial focus where appropriate, without interrupting the flow.

masterponomo 10y ago

I hope they have an airtight written partnership agreement on this thang.

fitzwatermellow 10y ago

I try to make a private study of the global survey of Wisdom Literature in an attempt to distil the essence of what it basically means to live a good life and be a moral person. Everything from Confucius to Aurelius, from Goethe to Gogol. And on and on. Wouldn't it be prudent, whilst you have such an assemblage of noble thinkers, to compile some sort of universal knowledge base of choice epigrams. For the purpose of henceforth explicitly delineating what it means to be "beneficial" and "just" for all future readers to come? In any case, this looks like a necessary and timely line of inquiry and am looking forward to the fruits of these endeavours. Good luck!