5 ms·

What a weird, bitchy article. Knuth might be wrong but I gave up.

by oh_my_goodness 8mo ago

the-grump 8mo ago
Same reaction. I can't even say the author is correct/wrong because I couldn't get through it.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- benreesman 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Razengan 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - benreesman 8mo ago
      A PhD caliber thesis with devastating epistenics about failures that have claimed conservatively a dozen lives is going gray on an 18 year old account but this shit is fine. @dang, I'm now threatening to buy a massive oppo campaign with immaculate data and OpenAI's fundraise hanging by a thread. Fix it or I'll fix it.
      - benreesman 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        dang 8mo ago
        Would you please stop posting like this?
        benreesman 8mo ago
        If you read this and mount a credible objection that can't be addressed by tweaks to methodology, then I will leave the site forever. But the asymmetry of the power of selective participation is tyrannical: you engage when you like, your silence is a moral victory by default, and I'm the senior community member by a lot. https://github.com/b7r6/cassandra-dissertation https://github.com/b7r6/cassandra-dissertation 6 kids dead, not counting Suchir. Engage constructively, substantial ly, and in public, or deal with my press releases. The data shows black holes in comments and submissions that correlate with Altman. I ran it on myself to not fix anyone. There are other search parameters that are worse, it's open source, proven in lean4 to a growing degree, and you win by making an argument, not being an unclected apparatchik.
        benreesman 8mo ago
        This time silence looks guilty, because this time I brought the corpus and the math. The burden is on you now to show you're not a parrot for goons.
        dang 8mo ago
        Ok, this is not good for anyone, so I've banned the account until we have some reason to believe that things have stabilized. I know it may be hard to believe right now, but we appreciate you and your contributions. We can't have users going on tilt on Hacker News though. As I said, experience has taught us that it's not good for anyone.
        the-grump 8mo ago
        It's good to see just how far we can push the mods here until we finally face consequences! Thank you for keeping this place healthy day after day after day.
        benreesman 8mo ago
        No, I will continue to raise the alarm bells until YC affiliated companies and executives stop getting sued for manslaughter or it's moral equivalent. Profanity is not ugly, ugly is ugly and you back Insta cart slave labor practices with bipartisan objections of disgust.
musicale 8mo ago
Here is my TL;DR and interpretation: 1. Knuth laments the lack of technical ("internal") history of computing, which traces the evolution of technology and ideas, and should be of great interest and benefit to practitioners. 2. Historians typically focus on their domains of expertise - social history, culture, economics, politics, personalities, etc. - and tend to write non-technical ("external") history of computing. 3. The people who have the relevant technical expertise - practioners, researchers, and scholars within the computing field - are qualified (in terms of technical understanding at least) to write this technical history, but have basically zero economic incentive to do so. There is no reward for industry practitioners to write the technical history of computing, and there is little to no reward for computing researchers or scholars either. And of course if one is (or becomes) an expert in computing, there is no economic incentive to become (or remain) a historian. 4. Nonetheless, there is in fact a small (and hopefully growing) group of scholars who seem to be interested in investigating the technical history of computing (and according to the author "holistic" history which includes multiple aspects.)
- musicale 8mo ago
  I tend to agree with Knuth - technical history is extremely valuable to both practitioners and researchers in computing, and there isn't enough of it. While it is understandable that computing practitioners and researchers want to look forward to the next "new" thing rather than backward to "old" things, ignoring computing history means that we are often reinventing the wheel, repeating old mistakes, etc., all while lacking an understanding of how and why things are the way they are today. And perhaps missing out on a great deal of fun and intellectual engagement as well. Fortunately is some activity in terms of writing up and analyzing the technical history of computing, and I certainly appreciate the work of the CHM, journals like Annals of the History of Computing, the work of retrocomputing hobbyists, and the work of the scholars mentioned in the article. But (as the article notes) there are few economic and career incentives - in history or in computing - to produce this important work. The article validates Knuth with these statements: > For different reasons, outlined below, neither group has shown much interest in supporting work of the kind favored by Knuth. That is why it has rarely been written. > Most of this new work is aimed primarily at historians, philosophers, or science studies specialists rather than computer scientists > Work of the particular kind preferred by Knuth will flourish only if his colleagues in computer science are willing to produce, reward, or commission it. The second part of this last sentence isn't wrong, but sidesteps the first point. One might similarly criticize history departments for failing to reward or commission technological literacy.
benreesman 8mo ago
[flagged]
rramadass 8mo ago
Yep, a very badly written article. I made a full pass but was annoyed with the author's contention that "History of History of Software" (WTF does this even mean?) should be treated as seriously as "Computer Science" itself. While there is some logic in saying "Computing" involves "Computer Science + all its various usages in various domains" focusing on the latter (ancillary) and not the former (primary) is certainly "dumbing down" as Knuth correctly takes issue. A good parallel would be a "Scientific Theory" and its "various realizations in various domains". This, for me, was the final validation that this article is not to be taken seriously; In his paper, Campbell-Kelly offered a “biographical mea culpa” for his own early work that he now reads with a “mild flush of embarrassment.” He came to see his erstwhile enthusiasm for technical history as a youthful indiscretion and his conversion to business history as an act of redemption,

What a weird, bitchy article. Knuth might be wrong but I gave up.

the-grump 8mo ago

Same reaction. I can't even say the author is correct/wrong because I couldn't get through it.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
benreesman 8mo ago
[flagged]
- Razengan 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - benreesman 8mo ago
    A PhD caliber thesis with devastating epistenics about failures that have claimed conservatively a dozen lives is going gray on an 18 year old account but this shit is fine. @dang, I'm now threatening to buy a massive oppo campaign with immaculate data and OpenAI's fundraise hanging by a thread. Fix it or I'll fix it.
    - benreesman 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 8mo ago
        Would you please stop posting like this?
        benreesman 8mo ago
        If you read this and mount a credible objection that can't be addressed by tweaks to methodology, then I will leave the site forever. But the asymmetry of the power of selective participation is tyrannical: you engage when you like, your silence is a moral victory by default, and I'm the senior community member by a lot. https://github.com/b7r6/cassandra-dissertation https://github.com/b7r6/cassandra-dissertation 6 kids dead, not counting Suchir. Engage constructively, substantial ly, and in public, or deal with my press releases. The data shows black holes in comments and submissions that correlate with Altman. I ran it on myself to not fix anyone. There are other search parameters that are worse, it's open source, proven in lean4 to a growing degree, and you win by making an argument, not being an unclected apparatchik.
        benreesman 8mo ago
        This time silence looks guilty, because this time I brought the corpus and the math. The burden is on you now to show you're not a parrot for goons.
        dang 8mo ago
        Ok, this is not good for anyone, so I've banned the account until we have some reason to believe that things have stabilized. I know it may be hard to believe right now, but we appreciate you and your contributions. We can't have users going on tilt on Hacker News though. As I said, experience has taught us that it's not good for anyone.
        the-grump 8mo ago
        It's good to see just how far we can push the mods here until we finally face consequences! Thank you for keeping this place healthy day after day after day.
        benreesman 8mo ago
        No, I will continue to raise the alarm bells until YC affiliated companies and executives stop getting sued for manslaughter or it's moral equivalent. Profanity is not ugly, ugly is ugly and you back Insta cart slave labor practices with bipartisan objections of disgust.

musicale 8mo ago

Here is my TL;DR and interpretation: 1. Knuth laments the lack of technical ("internal") history of computing, which traces the evolution of technology and ideas, and should be of great interest and benefit to practitioners. 2. Historians typically focus on their domains of expertise - social history, culture, economics, politics, personalities, etc. - and tend to write non-technical ("external") history of computing. 3. The people who have the relevant technical expertise - practioners, researchers, and scholars within the computing field - are qualified (in terms of technical understanding at least) to write this technical history, but have basically zero economic incentive to do so. There is no reward for industry practitioners to write the technical history of computing, and there is little to no reward for computing researchers or scholars either. And of course if one is (or becomes) an expert in computing, there is no economic incentive to become (or remain) a historian. 4. Nonetheless, there is in fact a small (and hopefully growing) group of scholars who seem to be interested in investigating the technical history of computing (and according to the author "holistic" history which includes multiple aspects.)

musicale 8mo ago
I tend to agree with Knuth - technical history is extremely valuable to both practitioners and researchers in computing, and there isn't enough of it. While it is understandable that computing practitioners and researchers want to look forward to the next "new" thing rather than backward to "old" things, ignoring computing history means that we are often reinventing the wheel, repeating old mistakes, etc., all while lacking an understanding of how and why things are the way they are today. And perhaps missing out on a great deal of fun and intellectual engagement as well. Fortunately is some activity in terms of writing up and analyzing the technical history of computing, and I certainly appreciate the work of the CHM, journals like Annals of the History of Computing, the work of retrocomputing hobbyists, and the work of the scholars mentioned in the article. But (as the article notes) there are few economic and career incentives - in history or in computing - to produce this important work. The article validates Knuth with these statements: > For different reasons, outlined below, neither group has shown much interest in supporting work of the kind favored by Knuth. That is why it has rarely been written. > Most of this new work is aimed primarily at historians, philosophers, or science studies specialists rather than computer scientists > Work of the particular kind preferred by Knuth will flourish only if his colleagues in computer science are willing to produce, reward, or commission it. The second part of this last sentence isn't wrong, but sidesteps the first point. One might similarly criticize history departments for failing to reward or commission technological literacy.

benreesman 8mo ago

[flagged]

rramadass 8mo ago

Yep, a very badly written article. I made a full pass but was annoyed with the author's contention that "History of History of Software" (WTF does this even mean?) should be treated as seriously as "Computer Science" itself. While there is some logic in saying "Computing" involves "Computer Science + all its various usages in various domains" focusing on the latter (ancillary) and not the former (primary) is certainly "dumbing down" as Knuth correctly takes issue. A good parallel would be a "Scientific Theory" and its "various realizations in various domains". This, for me, was the final validation that this article is not to be taken seriously; In his paper, Campbell-Kelly offered a “biographical mea culpa” for his own early work that he now reads with a “mild flush of embarrassment.” He came to see his erstwhile enthusiasm for technical history as a youthful indiscretion and his conversion to business history as an act of redemption,