4 ms·

MIT, you know I love you guys. I have a tremendous amount of respect for you and your work, and you haven't yet eroded the good will you got for helping to revo

MIT, you know I love you guys. I have a tremendous amount of respect for you and your work, and you haven't yet eroded the good will you got for helping to revolutionize computing on multiple occaisions, and also for establishing Switzerland, and thus being responsible to some degree for Hacker culture, and a whole other wide variety of important work, and the Lisp languages (including Scheme) as we know them to today. However, if you talk about how you've made significant advances to the state of the art in a field, and talk about a really cool project you made with this advance, and you do not tell us how you did it and link the git repo, than I don't care. Software is a collaborative effort. If you don't tell us how you got a result, or only give general overviews, then we have to re-discover it, re-implement it, and/or re-solve all the problems you solved. if you've made advances and do not disclose them in detail, than you are holding us back. and if your implementation is encumbered, write one that isn't, and give us it. Either way, if anyone claims to have made amazing advances in a certain field, the first question you should be asking is, "where's your code."

vmarsy 10y ago
a quick google search for "PACT 2016 Milk MIT csail" would give you the link : http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2967948 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2967948 It was actually discussed here 2 days ago and the mods changed the current link to the acm.org pdf : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12495898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12495898
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  I did look, I didn't find it. Thanks for the link, though. They still should have published the code...
chrisseaton 10y ago
> for establishing Switzerland Huh? I know you can't mean that the American university MIT established the European country of Switzerland, so what do you mean? And how did that create hacker culture?
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  The AI Lab was commonly nicknamed Switzerland, as it was a neutral party between MIT's CS laboratories after they split into two.
  - hga 10y ago
    Not the AI Lab, but Sussman and company's group that sort of stood between the AI Lab and the Lab for Computing Science (LCS), which did more classical types of CS. E.g. artifacts that came from the AI Lab included the Lisp Machine and it's Ethernet style Chaosnet, while LCS was working on a token ring network and aside from their Nu machines and the NuBus, adopted by Apple, never made their own workstations. Or Maclisp (I think at some point) and Scheme, vs. CLU. Other things that came from LCS include RSA and the X window system (the latter due to a weird VAX 11/750 config that DEC created so it could donate them to MIT without suffering (much) from the GSA "Most Favored Customer" requirement to give the Federal government the best price you gave anyone else). After some point Sussman and company created their own informal? unit which stood apart, getting their money from the NSF and using Scheme, and doing their own things, "Switzerland, Armed but Neutral", staying above/aside from the fighting between LCS and the AI Lab. Which as I recall hearing, was only resolved when the head of LCS died (but not before unduly influencing the architecture of their new and highly dysfunctional building), and the head of the AI Lab, who'd saved it when other AI Labs like Stanford's legendary one died, became the head of a combined Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory AKA CSAIL. All the above is 2nd hand but from reliable sources, and remotely after mid-1991.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Ah, thanks. Sorry. I always confuse AI and Switzerland, as both derived from project MAC. Both were important, and are generally more famous than LCS, although LCS was arguably more influential. It doesn't help matters that Switzerland was sometimes called project MAC, which was the original name for the collective. To further confuse matters, https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ is the Switzerland website, and it looks like Switzerland is kind of still going, even after the CSAIL merge. Unless the site's just outdated, which is also a possibility.
monfrere 10y ago
Calm down, it's a press release written by PR professionals, not the researchers. Others here have linked to the paper. But I would agree with you that code in academic research needs to be shared more. I haven't searched very hard, but if the code for "milk" is public, these researchers don't seem to have put it in an obvious place.

vmarsy 10y ago

a quick google search for "PACT 2016 Milk MIT csail" would give you the link : http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2967948 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2967948 It was actually discussed here 2 days ago and the mods changed the current link to the acm.org pdf : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12495898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12495898

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I did look, I didn't find it. Thanks for the link, though. They still should have published the code...

chrisseaton 10y ago

> for establishing Switzerland Huh? I know you can't mean that the American university MIT established the European country of Switzerland, so what do you mean? And how did that create hacker culture?

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
The AI Lab was commonly nicknamed Switzerland, as it was a neutral party between MIT's CS laboratories after they split into two.
- hga 10y ago
  Not the AI Lab, but Sussman and company's group that sort of stood between the AI Lab and the Lab for Computing Science (LCS), which did more classical types of CS. E.g. artifacts that came from the AI Lab included the Lisp Machine and it's Ethernet style Chaosnet, while LCS was working on a token ring network and aside from their Nu machines and the NuBus, adopted by Apple, never made their own workstations. Or Maclisp (I think at some point) and Scheme, vs. CLU. Other things that came from LCS include RSA and the X window system (the latter due to a weird VAX 11/750 config that DEC created so it could donate them to MIT without suffering (much) from the GSA "Most Favored Customer" requirement to give the Federal government the best price you gave anyone else). After some point Sussman and company created their own informal? unit which stood apart, getting their money from the NSF and using Scheme, and doing their own things, "Switzerland, Armed but Neutral", staying above/aside from the fighting between LCS and the AI Lab. Which as I recall hearing, was only resolved when the head of LCS died (but not before unduly influencing the architecture of their new and highly dysfunctional building), and the head of the AI Lab, who'd saved it when other AI Labs like Stanford's legendary one died, became the head of a combined Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory AKA CSAIL. All the above is 2nd hand but from reliable sources, and remotely after mid-1991.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Ah, thanks. Sorry. I always confuse AI and Switzerland, as both derived from project MAC. Both were important, and are generally more famous than LCS, although LCS was arguably more influential. It doesn't help matters that Switzerland was sometimes called project MAC, which was the original name for the collective. To further confuse matters, https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ is the Switzerland website, and it looks like Switzerland is kind of still going, even after the CSAIL merge. Unless the site's just outdated, which is also a possibility.

monfrere 10y ago

Calm down, it's a press release written by PR professionals, not the researchers. Others here have linked to the paper. But I would agree with you that code in academic research needs to be shared more. I haven't searched very hard, but if the code for "milk" is public, these researchers don't seem to have put it in an obvious place.