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New Book Identifies 26 Lines of Code That Changed the World
- ars 4y agoThe title is from the article but it doesn't match the article. The article describes 26 programs or libraries, not 26 lines of code.
- zaroth 4y agoThey must have opened the libraries with Unix line endings in Windows.
- jvanderbot 4y agoThis is an underrated comment.
- gerdesj 4y agoThat is an overrated comment.
- RheingoldRiver 4y agoIt's the title of the book, too. *You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World." I agree, it's a terrible title, it sounds like a technical book about a single 26-line snippet of code, but it's actually a series of 26 unrelated essays about people & their societal impact, and it's not a technical book at all. TBH though, it sounds like an interesting book, and probably a pretty small time investment. I might buy it despite its dreadful title.
- CalChris 4y agoYes, but the programs were written in APL.
- boosteri 4y ago
- 8bitsrule 4y agoAugust, 1981 Creative Computing article (by J.M. Graetz) on the creation of Spacewar! at MIT starting in 1961. [https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1981-08/page/n70/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1981-08/page/n...]
- sn41 4y agoI strongly miss such magazines. Yes, the web is a great resource for anything you want to know. But there is a curated completeness to such magazines, which I wish current websites had. Even popular magazines (I don't wish to name them) are often just glam. The only magazine/journal I know currently with introductory technical articles worth reading is IEEE Spectrum.
- rootsudo 4y agoThis is sadly the case, I see it too, even with old "underground" zines like 2600. But to be frank, they jumped ship a decade or two ago.
- steveBK123 4y agoSomeone should print these out and bring them to a certain conference room in SF...
- harry8 4y agoExerpt: https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/police-beat-algorithm-lbj-ibm.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/police-beat-algorithm-l...
- bakugo 4y agoThe title had me interested, but skimming through this post and the excerpt tells me that the book is actually just the usual low quality social justice commentary about racism/police brutality/etc. not-so-cleverly disguised as a tech-related book.
- foxhill 4y agocompstat - what i presume you are referring to - demonstrably exacerbates the performance metrics it was intended to improve. it impacts everyone, even today. because it - either by accident or by design - disproportionally targets latino/black men, it is somehow less valid as a critique? please.
- togaen 4y agoIt is perfectly valid, just less interesting as a critique. This is well-trod ground, journalistically. If writing about it were actually going to change anything, it would have already. As it stands, writing about it now is just a shrewd way to sell copy to people who like think that reading about something is the same as “taking action” against it.
- culi 4y agoThere's chapters on the inventions of COBOL and Bitcoin and you're gonna write the whole book off because they included a chapter on today’s surveillance infrastructure and the shoddy crime-data algorithm that laid the cornerstone for said infrastructure? Living life reacting so strongly to things you might not immediately agree with sounds exhausting. Good luck with
- mjmsmith 4y agoReactionary is as reactionary does.
- subradios 4y agoYou can also tell by all the talks about how "human" it is, which is a way tech writers praise each other for writing books about technology that require no knowledge of nor interest in technology to understand. There's also the bit about hoping developers say no to cheating emissions standards. Picking that example and not, say - not assisting the Chinese government in surveilling their citizens shows exactly where the author wants to take these ideas. These themes would be fun to discuss in some environment, but it's pretty clear that the goal is to create a page turner first, push a message second, produce insight last. The author is funded by New America. An organization founded by a lady famous for helping Sandinistas sue the US government to for foreign intervention, then signing off on one of the worst interventions in the Global War on Terror in Libya. It is possible that this is just ad copy for an otherwise good book, but forgive us for assuming that the person passing out christian literature at the party is probably mostly interested in converting new christians.
- tyingq 4y agoThe original context of the "You are not expected to understand this" comment: http://warsus.github.io/lions-/all.html#line2238 http://warsus.github.io/lions-/all.html#line2238 From "A COMMENTARY ON THE SIXTH EDITION UNIX OPERATING SYSTEM"
- homonculus1 4y ago
- layman51 4y agoThis wasn't what I was expecting, but I still was fascinated by that Slate article embedded in the page about the "Police Beat Algorithm".
- ecpottinger 4y agoI have not read the book or even looked at it. As far as I know the only code bases I think as important are: PGP: The code could be printed on a t-shirt and allowed communication that was hard to break. Lossy-Compression: In the 1970s and early 1980s a lot of the work was on lossless compression, but the move to lossy compression made Sound and Video files small enough to move around. Chaos Theory: Applied to weather forecasting and other complex systems. Deep Learning: I do not understand it but it lets data that could not be processed before. What else should I add?
- thedailymail 4y agoDespite all the recent melodrama in the cryptocurrency markets and environs, I think Satoshi's implementation of a decentralized blockchain will be considered historically important.
- Nursie 4y agoIt certainly sparked a multi-year hype and fraud cycle that caused some of the biggest crashes in history.
- edanm 4y agoAbsolutely! Whatever you might think about Bitcoin/Blockchains, Satoshi did solve a very hard CS problem that didn't have a solution before. I'm relatively skeptical of blockchain technologies and don't think they have any real use cases (except cryptocurrencies,) but I think in the long term, there must be some interesting things to do with the decentralization ideas created by Satoshi.
- JoeDaDude 4y agoIn the excerpts I read, I did not see any lines of code, let alone 26.