9 ms·

The Future of Programming (2013)

225 points by illo 9y ago

macintux 9y ago
One of my all-time favorite talks. The IT industry is pretty bad in general at knowing what problems have previously been solved.
- romaniv 9y ago
  Yeah. Almost every time I watch a Marvin Minsky or Alan Kay video of any kind I'm surprised with info on some awesome technology or research from the 60s or 70s.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    You should also check the systems programming research that was happening on those days, NEWP already had UNSAFE blocks that required "root" blessing to be executed. Or the IBM RISC research using PL/8. And many other examples, lost in research papers from all those companies.
  - skadamat 9y ago
    I think you'll like the discussion he had at CMU a few years back, which focused a lot on the technology side of things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Also for me. When I delve into the digitized copies of these researches, I am always fascinated by the little treasures I find out. And by being old enough to have experimented with some of them it saddens me the amount of left turns we have taken, for some to still be happy with a plain phosphor terminal experience.
- robbrit 9y ago
  In many cases, we have to first acknowledge that the problem exists before we attempt to apply some of these solutions. I've noticed myself seeing solutions to problems that I didn't know I had, only to brush off the solution as though it were only an interesting curiosity with no real practical use. It was years later when I went back to that and realized how useful it could have been.
- fhood 9y ago
  This was one of my professors favorite gripes. He loved to tell stories about how companies would reinvent algorithms (usually multiple times) that had been published in the 70's and 80's
  - zvrba 9y ago
    The problem here is search. The problem may have been solved, but finding the relevant paper is like looking for a needle in the haystack. It doesn't help that terminology has changed during the years...
    - mrec 9y ago
      > It doesn't help that terminology has changed during the years... As has hardware. Trivial example, but linked lists made a lot more sense in the 1970s than they do today.
    - tj-teej 9y ago
      The problem with the solution to the problem of search is searching for the solution to the problem of search?
    - acuozzo 9y ago
      > The problem here is search. And training. I've had to reinvent algorithms I know already exist for my hobby work because they were invented to solve another unrelated problem I'm not familiar with and phrased using domain language I don't know.
  - BjoernKW 9y ago
    Apart from making information easily retrievable, which ironically academia at least used to be notoriously bad at, inventing an algorithm and using it effectively in an application in many cases are two very different matters. These arguments often get handwavy rather quickly. Real-life applications have to accommodate edge cases and non-functional requirements, something a scientific paper doesn't need to account for. That's perfectly fine. It isn't a scientist's job to worry about implementation details but those shouldn't be brushed off lightly either.
- shalabhc 9y ago
  > what problems have previously been solved And we're worse at identifying what the problems actually are.
- pierre_d528 9y ago
  Treasures from Alan Kay and friends can be found here: http://www.vpri.org http://www.vpri.org Do check the STEPS project: a complete system in 10_000 readable LOC. Really exceptional. Bret Victor can be found here: http://worrydream.com http://worrydream.com Friends can be found here: https://harc.ycr.org/member/ https://harc.ycr.org/member/ Make sure to check Alan Kay's answers on Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11
melling 9y ago
We’re still trying to crawl out of the tar pit. https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/design/out-of-the-tar-pit.pdf https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...
bluetwo 9y ago
Was it just me or did the talk not actually cover "The Future of Programming"?
- miguelrochefort 9y ago
  It covered the future of programming from the point of view of the past.
  - platz 9y ago
    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DaysOfFuturePast http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DaysOfFuturePast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism
- Jazcash 9y ago
  woosh
- mrspeaker 9y ago
  It was about "the future of programming" as it should have (or could have) been, as seen from the 70s. "These are some good ideas. It would be kind of a shame if in 40 years [ie, today] we're still coding in procedures in text files in a sequential programming model. That would suggest we didn't learn anything from this really fertile period of computer science [...] The real tragedy would be if people forgot you could have new ideas about programming models in the first place." "Once you grow up with dogma, it's really hard to break out of it".
miguelrochefort 9y ago
Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Commercialization and commoditization: "Why make things better when people don't care?"
  - continuational 9y ago
    Oh, people do care. Programmers are expensive, and making them more productive means more money for the bottom line. It’s just that we don’t know how. Even designing a good text based language is very challenging, and in no way a solved problem. Something graphical and interactive has a much larger design surface, and is thus even harder to get right, especially for general purpose programming.
    - quantumhobbit 9y ago
      I don’t know that the people making the decisions care all that much. Even though programmers are expensive, most managers seem to prefer to hire a dozen programmers where far fewer would get the job done if given access to better tools. They look better leading a bigger team regardless of the teams output. The incentive exists for the shareholders, but they are not the ones making hiring decisions and choosing tools for programmers to use.
- brudgers 9y ago
  We consume software very differently, because the we includes people like us...by which I mean that statistically to many decimal places nobody had access to software in the 1960's and in the 1970's the people who had access to software were all out in the long tail of standard deviations of a Bell Curve. In terms of creating software, in the 1960's most was being written in Assembly and if it was written in a higher level language that language almost certainly contained a large proportion of vendor specific instructions or was entirely proprietary or machine specific. That didn't change much in the 1970's and it was only at the end of the 1980's that language standards could practically mean portable code across vendors and platforms.
shalabhc 9y ago
Bret Victor is now at HARC (https://harc.ycr.org/member/ https://harc.ycr.org/member/) which has an interesting list of projects.
symstym 9y ago
I think this attitude of "we solved these problems decades ago!" is rather naive and sometimes arrogant. I think it's a fantastic talk, and that Bret Victor and Alan Kay are geniuses. But I feel that they both promote the idea that we definitively solved all these important computing problems years ago, and that people are just too clueless/resistant to catch on. Yes, I agree that many good ideas have been culturally "forgotten". But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product. Their attitude is comparable to someone saying "oh I invented the WWW in 1985 but nobody would listen to me", or "oh I invented Twitter before Twitter but users weren't enlightened enough to appreciate it". Almost all good ideas were already had before, but they are worth comparatively little, and unlikely to catch on, until they are reified into something that people want to use. I agree with them that probably more people should be working in certain areas (e.g. new ways of programming). But if they really had it all figured out, then why haven't they themselves made the amazing new programming language that we all use? What if it's the case that some of their ideas are good in theory, but are hard to translate into a usable product? Most people accept that execution>>idea in the world of startups, but don't acknowledge that the same may apply here.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  > comparable to someone saying "oh I invented the WWW in 1985 but nobody would listen to me" I hear there's a guy that invented EMAIL..
- shalabhc 9y ago
  > But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product. I think you're overestimating the market's ability to select good ideas and specifically, promote long term scientific advances. A lot of variables affect what succeeds, e.g. marketing, coincidence, network effects etc. You cannot leave everything to the market (i.e. what people adopt) and expect great science to come from it. Many times, great science (and maths) comes from the compelling drive of people to discover and create something new. These talks are encouraging that kind of research, and I don't see them saying they 'have it figured out', but rather pointing out ideas they think should be explored more extensively.
sbov 9y ago
Some of the "better programming" stuff exists, programmers just don't program them because you don't need them for it. Parallel programming didn't matter as much as long as clockrates continued to scale with transistor count. The disconnect is a relatively recent phenomena (last 10 years). There's also lots of tools beyond raw threads+locks these days.
pknerd 9y ago
Using slide projector in 2013. Daring.
- hacym 9y ago
  I am pretty sure that was a conscious decision based on the subject matter.
  - evv 9y ago
    No kidding! My favorite moment is at the beginning when he introduces the talk, then pushes the slide up to reveal the date :-D
- pknerd 9y ago
  I was not trolling rather appreciating that he did not go with the flow.
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  That was part of his delivery. He presented like in the 70's to make a point. Even his design is retro.
fasquoika 9y ago
Why does everyone seem to believe this talk is about the fact that these problems were "solved" decades ago? My takeaway is that, no, these things weren't solved, they were abandoned. We got tunnel vision and decided that a handful of ideas were what programming is, rather than just a tiny subset. This talk isn't about how the early programmers were better at everything, if anything it's the opposite, that we should question their decisions and not take anything for granted. "Do you know why these ideas, and so many other good ideas came about in this particular time period, the 60's-early 70's? Why did it all happen then? It's because it was late enough that technology kinda got to the point where you could actually kinda do things with computers, but it was still early enough that nobody knew what programming was. Nobody knew what programming was supposed to be. And they knew they didn't know, so they tried everything."
- david927 9y ago
  This talk is not saying that these problems were "solved" decades ago but rather, decades ago we had much better instincts and in many ways we were on the right track, and now we're not.
  - fasquoika 9y ago
    Except that the track we're on now was started then. Unix was created during the time period he's talking about. We've just stopped looking at the other stuff. They weren't "on the right track", they didn't have a track. That's the point: they were doing everything
krmboya 9y ago
I've been looking into the linked resources more and more of late and they reveal a perspective of computing research I find I'm really excited about. I wonder how one can start studying and taking part in this direction of computing research.
clusmore 9y ago
Slightly off-topic but does anybody know of other great talks with a quirky theme like this, where the talk is "set" in the 70s talking about the "future" (present)? I'll kick it off by submitting [Growing a Language] (https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0 https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0) by Guy Steele, where he speaks using only monosyllabic words and words he defines in terms of other monosyllabic (or previously defined) words.
- spiralganglion 9y ago
  There's the Gary Bernhardt classic "The Birth & Death of Javascript" https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
CyberDildonics 9y ago
There is a huge disconnect between these flashy ideas and what you can actually use to create software. Showing cool ideas is great, but there needs to be interfaces that scale to complex software and a realistic way to integrate them with languages that already exist. Brand new languages with no eco system and without mature compilers backing them are not going to allow general software to be written in them.
manodocedoceu 9y ago
Finding new semantics for constructing computational logic is certainly a good middle-of-the-road innovation. The philisophical underpinnings of my own research and practice over the past decade are in constant existential friction with many of the most basic assumptions that underlie information theory. I've argued about it on here before. Since I'm terrified of general AI developing under the current power-dynamic, I haven't been too enthusiastic about contributing. That said, a lot needs to be disbelieved-- we need an ideological grass fire on the great plans, of sorts-- before certain types of phenomenon can be reliably conjured through our electrical counting machines. We've mistaken the representation with the thing itself, especially in the 'information sciences.' The idea of 'information' and 'data' as 'packets' presupposes the existence of a physical world composed of neatly delineated objects. While this has been and continues to be a convenient and even useful approximation of reality, it is still that-- a representation. I've never seen this assumption questioned Im CS/IS forums. At this point, it's beyond dogma. The unbelievable volume and density of the knowledge built in the information sciences, all of it sewn into these base assumptions of information theory, generate in the unwitting practitioner a belief considered as a hard-as-bedrock fact, always presumed but never questioned. It's confirmation bias propping up a simulacra of reality. Like physics did last century, our latest IS works (like general AI) are hitting the hard limit on these assumptions. What's next? Try deconstructing it yourself. That's part of the fun, and helpful in the creative process. In the mean time It would be nice to see new ways of visualizing code and code execution, that's probably a good start. Code in Motion – An Interstellar Inspired Visualization for the JVM - https://vimeo.com/96317948 https://vimeo.com/96317948 Code Galaxies Visualization - http://anvaka.github.io/pm/ http://anvaka.github.io/pm/ Binary data visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164166
aws_ls 9y ago
Call me naive, but I listened the entire talk thinking it happened in 1973. Then came back and after seeing the discussion realized its an act. So definitely my wonderment and awe of it came down by several notches, as I could see how every 1/2 minutes I was exclaiming in wonder of how relevant it was to today's time. But of course when you recreate the past in the future, you can be very selective towards ideas/topics which are relevant in some way.

225 points by illo 9y ago

One of my all-time favorite talks. The IT industry is pretty bad in general at knowing what problems have previously been solved.

romaniv 9y ago
Yeah. Almost every time I watch a Marvin Minsky or Alan Kay video of any kind I'm surprised with info on some awesome technology or research from the 60s or 70s.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  You should also check the systems programming research that was happening on those days, NEWP already had UNSAFE blocks that required "root" blessing to be executed. Or the IBM RISC research using PL/8. And many other examples, lost in research papers from all those companies.
- skadamat 9y ago
  I think you'll like the discussion he had at CMU a few years back, which focused a lot on the technology side of things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8
pjmlp 9y ago
Also for me. When I delve into the digitized copies of these researches, I am always fascinated by the little treasures I find out. And by being old enough to have experimented with some of them it saddens me the amount of left turns we have taken, for some to still be happy with a plain phosphor terminal experience.
robbrit 9y ago
In many cases, we have to first acknowledge that the problem exists before we attempt to apply some of these solutions. I've noticed myself seeing solutions to problems that I didn't know I had, only to brush off the solution as though it were only an interesting curiosity with no real practical use. It was years later when I went back to that and realized how useful it could have been.
fhood 9y ago
This was one of my professors favorite gripes. He loved to tell stories about how companies would reinvent algorithms (usually multiple times) that had been published in the 70's and 80's
- zvrba 9y ago
  The problem here is search. The problem may have been solved, but finding the relevant paper is like looking for a needle in the haystack. It doesn't help that terminology has changed during the years...
  - mrec 9y ago
    > It doesn't help that terminology has changed during the years... As has hardware. Trivial example, but linked lists made a lot more sense in the 1970s than they do today.
  - tj-teej 9y ago
    The problem with the solution to the problem of search is searching for the solution to the problem of search?
  - acuozzo 9y ago
    > The problem here is search. And training. I've had to reinvent algorithms I know already exist for my hobby work because they were invented to solve another unrelated problem I'm not familiar with and phrased using domain language I don't know.
- BjoernKW 9y ago
  Apart from making information easily retrievable, which ironically academia at least used to be notoriously bad at, inventing an algorithm and using it effectively in an application in many cases are two very different matters. These arguments often get handwavy rather quickly. Real-life applications have to accommodate edge cases and non-functional requirements, something a scientific paper doesn't need to account for. That's perfectly fine. It isn't a scientist's job to worry about implementation details but those shouldn't be brushed off lightly either.
shalabhc 9y ago
> what problems have previously been solved And we're worse at identifying what the problems actually are.
pierre_d528 9y ago
Treasures from Alan Kay and friends can be found here: http://www.vpri.org http://www.vpri.org Do check the STEPS project: a complete system in 10_000 readable LOC. Really exceptional. Bret Victor can be found here: http://worrydream.com http://worrydream.com Friends can be found here: https://harc.ycr.org/member/ https://harc.ycr.org/member/ Make sure to check Alan Kay's answers on Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11

melling 9y ago

We’re still trying to crawl out of the tar pit. https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/design/out-of-the-tar-pit.pdf https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...

bluetwo 9y ago

Was it just me or did the talk not actually cover "The Future of Programming"?

miguelrochefort 9y ago
It covered the future of programming from the point of view of the past.
- platz 9y ago
  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DaysOfFuturePast http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DaysOfFuturePast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism
Jazcash 9y ago
woosh
mrspeaker 9y ago
It was about "the future of programming" as it should have (or could have) been, as seen from the 70s. "These are some good ideas. It would be kind of a shame if in 40 years [ie, today] we're still coding in procedures in text files in a sequential programming model. That would suggest we didn't learn anything from this really fertile period of computer science [...] The real tragedy would be if people forgot you could have new ideas about programming models in the first place." "Once you grow up with dogma, it's really hard to break out of it".

miguelrochefort 9y ago

Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.

pishpash 9y ago
Commercialization and commoditization: "Why make things better when people don't care?"
- continuational 9y ago
  Oh, people do care. Programmers are expensive, and making them more productive means more money for the bottom line. It’s just that we don’t know how. Even designing a good text based language is very challenging, and in no way a solved problem. Something graphical and interactive has a much larger design surface, and is thus even harder to get right, especially for general purpose programming.
  - quantumhobbit 9y ago
    I don’t know that the people making the decisions care all that much. Even though programmers are expensive, most managers seem to prefer to hire a dozen programmers where far fewer would get the job done if given access to better tools. They look better leading a bigger team regardless of the teams output. The incentive exists for the shareholders, but they are not the ones making hiring decisions and choosing tools for programmers to use.
brudgers 9y ago
We consume software very differently, because the we includes people like us...by which I mean that statistically to many decimal places nobody had access to software in the 1960's and in the 1970's the people who had access to software were all out in the long tail of standard deviations of a Bell Curve. In terms of creating software, in the 1960's most was being written in Assembly and if it was written in a higher level language that language almost certainly contained a large proportion of vendor specific instructions or was entirely proprietary or machine specific. That didn't change much in the 1970's and it was only at the end of the 1980's that language standards could practically mean portable code across vendors and platforms.

shalabhc 9y ago

Bret Victor is now at HARC (https://harc.ycr.org/member/ https://harc.ycr.org/member/) which has an interesting list of projects.

symstym 9y ago

I think this attitude of "we solved these problems decades ago!" is rather naive and sometimes arrogant. I think it's a fantastic talk, and that Bret Victor and Alan Kay are geniuses. But I feel that they both promote the idea that we definitively solved all these important computing problems years ago, and that people are just too clueless/resistant to catch on. Yes, I agree that many good ideas have been culturally "forgotten". But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product. Their attitude is comparable to someone saying "oh I invented the WWW in 1985 but nobody would listen to me", or "oh I invented Twitter before Twitter but users weren't enlightened enough to appreciate it". Almost all good ideas were already had before, but they are worth comparatively little, and unlikely to catch on, until they are reified into something that people want to use. I agree with them that probably more people should be working in certain areas (e.g. new ways of programming). But if they really had it all figured out, then why haven't they themselves made the amazing new programming language that we all use? What if it's the case that some of their ideas are good in theory, but are hard to translate into a usable product? Most people accept that execution>>idea in the world of startups, but don't acknowledge that the same may apply here.

Chris2048 9y ago
> comparable to someone saying "oh I invented the WWW in 1985 but nobody would listen to me" I hear there's a guy that invented EMAIL..
shalabhc 9y ago
> But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product. I think you're overestimating the market's ability to select good ideas and specifically, promote long term scientific advances. A lot of variables affect what succeeds, e.g. marketing, coincidence, network effects etc. You cannot leave everything to the market (i.e. what people adopt) and expect great science to come from it. Many times, great science (and maths) comes from the compelling drive of people to discover and create something new. These talks are encouraging that kind of research, and I don't see them saying they 'have it figured out', but rather pointing out ideas they think should be explored more extensively.

sbov 9y ago

Some of the "better programming" stuff exists, programmers just don't program them because you don't need them for it. Parallel programming didn't matter as much as long as clockrates continued to scale with transistor count. The disconnect is a relatively recent phenomena (last 10 years). There's also lots of tools beyond raw threads+locks these days.

pknerd 9y ago

Using slide projector in 2013. Daring.

hacym 9y ago
I am pretty sure that was a conscious decision based on the subject matter.
- evv 9y ago
  No kidding! My favorite moment is at the beginning when he introduces the talk, then pushes the slide up to reveal the date :-D
pknerd 9y ago
I was not trolling rather appreciating that he did not go with the flow.
kowdermeister 9y ago
That was part of his delivery. He presented like in the 70's to make a point. Even his design is retro.

fasquoika 9y ago

Why does everyone seem to believe this talk is about the fact that these problems were "solved" decades ago? My takeaway is that, no, these things weren't solved, they were abandoned. We got tunnel vision and decided that a handful of ideas were what programming is, rather than just a tiny subset. This talk isn't about how the early programmers were better at everything, if anything it's the opposite, that we should question their decisions and not take anything for granted. "Do you know why these ideas, and so many other good ideas came about in this particular time period, the 60's-early 70's? Why did it all happen then? It's because it was late enough that technology kinda got to the point where you could actually kinda do things with computers, but it was still early enough that nobody knew what programming was. Nobody knew what programming was supposed to be. And they knew they didn't know, so they tried everything."

david927 9y ago
This talk is not saying that these problems were "solved" decades ago but rather, decades ago we had much better instincts and in many ways we were on the right track, and now we're not.
- fasquoika 9y ago
  Except that the track we're on now was started then. Unix was created during the time period he's talking about. We've just stopped looking at the other stuff. They weren't "on the right track", they didn't have a track. That's the point: they were doing everything

krmboya 9y ago

I've been looking into the linked resources more and more of late and they reveal a perspective of computing research I find I'm really excited about. I wonder how one can start studying and taking part in this direction of computing research.

clusmore 9y ago

Slightly off-topic but does anybody know of other great talks with a quirky theme like this, where the talk is "set" in the 70s talking about the "future" (present)? I'll kick it off by submitting [Growing a Language] (https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0 https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0) by Guy Steele, where he speaks using only monosyllabic words and words he defines in terms of other monosyllabic (or previously defined) words.

spiralganglion 9y ago
There's the Gary Bernhardt classic "The Birth & Death of Javascript" https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

CyberDildonics 9y ago

There is a huge disconnect between these flashy ideas and what you can actually use to create software. Showing cool ideas is great, but there needs to be interfaces that scale to complex software and a realistic way to integrate them with languages that already exist. Brand new languages with no eco system and without mature compilers backing them are not going to allow general software to be written in them.

manodocedoceu 9y ago

Finding new semantics for constructing computational logic is certainly a good middle-of-the-road innovation. The philisophical underpinnings of my own research and practice over the past decade are in constant existential friction with many of the most basic assumptions that underlie information theory. I've argued about it on here before. Since I'm terrified of general AI developing under the current power-dynamic, I haven't been too enthusiastic about contributing. That said, a lot needs to be disbelieved-- we need an ideological grass fire on the great plans, of sorts-- before certain types of phenomenon can be reliably conjured through our electrical counting machines. We've mistaken the representation with the thing itself, especially in the 'information sciences.' The idea of 'information' and 'data' as 'packets' presupposes the existence of a physical world composed of neatly delineated objects. While this has been and continues to be a convenient and even useful approximation of reality, it is still that-- a representation. I've never seen this assumption questioned Im CS/IS forums. At this point, it's beyond dogma. The unbelievable volume and density of the knowledge built in the information sciences, all of it sewn into these base assumptions of information theory, generate in the unwitting practitioner a belief considered as a hard-as-bedrock fact, always presumed but never questioned. It's confirmation bias propping up a simulacra of reality. Like physics did last century, our latest IS works (like general AI) are hitting the hard limit on these assumptions. What's next? Try deconstructing it yourself. That's part of the fun, and helpful in the creative process. In the mean time It would be nice to see new ways of visualizing code and code execution, that's probably a good start. Code in Motion – An Interstellar Inspired Visualization for the JVM - https://vimeo.com/96317948 https://vimeo.com/96317948 Code Galaxies Visualization - http://anvaka.github.io/pm/ http://anvaka.github.io/pm/ Binary data visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164166

aws_ls 9y ago

Call me naive, but I listened the entire talk thinking it happened in 1973. Then came back and after seeing the discussion realized its an act. So definitely my wonderment and awe of it came down by several notches, as I could see how every 1/2 minutes I was exclaiming in wonder of how relevant it was to today's time. But of course when you recreate the past in the future, you can be very selective towards ideas/topics which are relevant in some way.