GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree
github.com
github.com
Including texts in Finnish and Hungarian almost ensures that parts of the archive will be lost 1000 years from now. Even if those languages are alive in 1000 years, the likelihood that interpreting period Finnish and Hungarian from 2020 will be possible is far smaller than the likelihood that interpreting period English from 2020 will be possible.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng...
The only ones that maintain any significant population that can use them are those that are liturgical languages (e.g. Latin, Hebrew, Classical Greek, Classical Arabic, Sanscrit, ...)
Even if diversity of language is a principle that you adopt while creating this, not every single item in the database can be a Rosetta Stone-style snapshot of the state of human language in 2020.
If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.
See the problem ?
Keeping as much linguistic data as possible is beneficial. Intentionally curtailing is criminal.
> Being trained as a historian, the idea of throwing away original texts in favour of translations because they're not in « the right language » is hurting my soul.
> If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.
Yeah, exactly. The GP has it bass ackwards. If you have concerns like the GP about intelligibility, then include both the original and the translation. That way even if Finnish and Hungarian go extinct and the archive is recovered, those parallel texts can be used to recover the Finnish and Hungarian languages themselves.
And I'm sure someone who is reading this is questioning the value of even preserving the Finnish and Hungarian languages when you've already captured the "knowledge" in English. All I have to say to that is future linguists will probably be very frustrated with losing two non-Indo-European languages to study, just like we're frustrated that we can't read Etruscan writings anymore.
Can we kill this fucking meme? The fact that you spent $150k to be told to read books is irrelevant.
English translations are more likely to be unencumbered by copyright, and US copyright is often shorter (or more specific) than in other countries which can apply separately to translations. You can see this on https://babel.hathitrust.org/ where English translations are available but, say, Spanish editions are only available for search—you can't read them.
And because there are a lot more scholars using English, English translations tend to be more numerous and higher quality and more available than the original language. You see this a lot on Project Gutenberg where there's a super polished English translation and a non-existent or crappy original-language transcription.
For example, can you get a Spanish copy of "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" for this without legal issue? Maybe Harper Perennial was willing to cooperate with their English edition and others weren't? I don't think things are as obvious and straightforward as we like them to be.
I've run into all of this while "remastering" old Spanish works. English dominates culture, and not in a bad way. The only reason some new editions/transcriptions of old non-English works exist is because an English-speaking scholar was interested in it or a professor remastered an illegible edition to teach his Spanish language class. And now it's the only version of that work that's not behind a paywall. And you'll have to re-transcribe a messy scan of a book from the 17th century if you want a digital copy in the original language.
Anyways, has Github stated why it's English-only? Did they not have a good reason or are we just guessing that they didn't know that other languages are important (like we, HNers, people of culture, know)?
But i have a problem with the lack of representation of great books and cultural achievements/standards that are not anglo-centric at all.
I miss a lot of great works of the human kind.
This is so important that they should have specialized people to curate that list and not just get "the list of great books that are on the top of your head when you only have an average capacity to do so".
Where is Cervantes, James Joyce, Kafka, Rimbaud, Pessoa, Homer, Goethe, Proust, Shelley, Voltaire, etc..?
It doesn't need to be that much inclusive of course, but it would be cool if it was a small window to the broader human soul instead of a subjective perspective that seems to be missing a lot of the common ground that helped to shape the civilization the way it is.
It's a bit unfortunate that they use the word "human" so expansively when the scope is so limited, it's true. But it's a new project, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that that's meant to reflect the project's aspirations. Even if the reality, after only a few short months, doesn't quite achieve it. Tech culture is supposed to value iteration, and accept that things won't necessarily get it all right on the very first try.
A more constructive way to make sure other cultures are reflected would be to say, "Hey, this is a great idea. But looks like you're only covering Anglophone sources right now. Can we help by contributing additional sources?"
Picking on the word human just seems nit-picky, like someone's not woke enough to use a more inclusive term.
A little bit like how the final stage of Major League Baseball's playoffs are called the World Series, even though 29 of the teams are based in the USA and the 30th plays in a stadium ~25km outside the USA. I imagine that is at least a little bit irritating to professional baseball players from elsewhere in the world.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=467571...
Context like this matters.
However my IRC client may still be useful by then
Relevant xkcd : https://xkcd.com/1782/
Every week I have to unsubscribe from the seventy channels and direct message groups I got involuntarily joined to.
If IRC could handle unreliable connections better I think it would absolutely trump Slack.
Could they have made a better list? Certainly, and perhaps even they would acknowledge it. Of course we can nitpick - I agree with almost none of the selections related to software. But I think "done" is better than "perfect".
[1] - Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Salman Rushdie (India), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), Ben Okri (Nigeria), Arundhati Roy (India), Umberto Eco (Italy), Haruki Murakami (Japan), Roberto Bolaño (Chile), Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Jung Chang (China)
- 4 books on SQL but none on key/value, graph, document, time series, bigtable etc databases.
- 3 books on C, 2 on JS but none on Haskell (leading FP language) or Scala (first to bridge FP/OOP).
- None on search engines / algorithms even though it's the most widely used aspect of computing.
- None on anything mobile even though it's the dominant computing platform.
Scala is the leading FP language (thanks to Spark, Kafka, Akka, and other massive projects). And TIOBE puts Scheme and Lisp ahead of Haskell. And Emacs Lisp probably has more installs than GHC.
Why would you guess?
> functional language within programming language research
Why is this [more] important? Why not e.g. Erlang which almost certainly pumps more bits per day than Haskell.
Because I'm basing it on my experience doing research in PLT, but this is of course purely anecdotal and my areas of research interest lie away from the likes of Haskell, so I would not wish to make a false claim by stating it as fact.
> Why is this [more] important?
I never said that it was, only that depending on what is meant by "leading", industry usage might not be relevant. Since Scala is by far the more used language I think it's fair to assume that (without meaning to put words into mouths) the original commenter might have been talking about PLT research as opposed to usage in industry.
If leading refers to overall usage in industry, then sure, it's not really relevant.
Most of Scala is derived from Haskell and even now the ecosystem heavily looks at what did/didn't work e.g. Cats, ZIO.
Scala had a lot of influences, but the first two papers on Scala have references to SML and Ocaml but none for Haskell[1]. Make of that what you will.
> Leading more in terms of influence than usage.
Is Haskell influential? By what metric? Impact factor of papers published?
Here are some features that Standard ML had which were cutting edge:
strong static typing
automatic type inference
exception handling
pattern matching
parametric polymorphism
first class functions
Here are features which Haskell is known for aside from the above:
laziness
strict immutability
do-notation
typeclasses
operator overloading with symbols like +++ and ==<
This is distinct from e.g. Erlang where the features like process management through the supervisor, mnesia, and so on are highly desirable for any developer even if other languages/platforms haven't implemented them as a standard component. (, vs . for line termination, not so much).
[1] https://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/IC_TECH_REPORT_200433...., http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~odersky/papers/ScalableComponent.pdf
/s
I mean there is also programming culture but it's constantly changing, split into a innumerable number of sometimes conflicting variants and is often more like work culture then art. But it's also art, it's complicated tbh. I mean how many opinions are based around what feels nice and/or looks nice instead of what works most reliable and well? Through then this is also where innovations sometimes starts, with libraries which do look and feel nice but do not yet work supper well.
But the 100 Classics approach to media that seems to be showcased in this provisional reamde fundamentally dooms the collection to irrelevance.
It then goes on to list all things created in the 20th century: TCP/IP, ethernet, DNS, HTTP, etc.
Hummm, ok, what about men's role ?
One of the biggest complain women make, is the world keeps reminding them that they are a women. Well this is one of them
> We believe women's unique role in founding and shaping computing and technology deserves its own section.
> <Hidden> And men's role doesn't deserve a section, because literally everything else you read about was done by them. <\Hidden>
I too think, the on-the-nose-ness of communicating women's roles here, is annoying to both men and women of 2020. However, this document is written with societal-recovery in mind. In that case, I would rather it be explicitly mentioned that women deserve just as relevant a role in tech development, lest some post-apocalyptic male-supremacist historian notice that almost everything important in tech was invented by men and postulate that, 'Tech should be the domain of men and only men.'
I do hope they also talk about the internal culture of nerds, societal-outcasts and less-than-macho men, that shaped tech as we know it. I don't think the uniqueness of nerdy tech culture is explored enough.
Better safe than sorry.
I'm not sure why anyone would assume men did all the work, until some patronising head pat of a section is added to show that "women do things too".
This is because it goes contrary to the goal of the project, to “...describe how the world makes and uses software today, as well as an overview of how computers work and the foundational technologies required to make and use computers.” I don’t see how separating top level categories at first from functional differences makes sense to then, by category 13, distinguishing merit from biology. It seems patronizing, and a politicization of something they’re stated aim is to be unbiased and logical.
We should discuss women’s contributions, by all means. But quite frankly I don’t care who makes the contribution, I only care about the impact of the contribution.
Therefore, highlighting an aspect of technology, or a recent advancement based purely off of it being from a man/woman or any number of ethnic/cultural backgrounds, is antithetical to the goal of science being unbiased. Literally the point of the scientific method is undoubtedly to remove biases, and find causality. We’re now introducing a new, subjective factor for what’s deemed a reputable contribution not for the contribution itself, but for what political agenda is aimed to be promoted.
Sure, highlight women’s achievements in the cultural category, especially cases where they were lost in history until recently (Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper). But don’t pretend to be the pinnacle of objectivity.
I’m leading a hardware development project and I made a tech tree for my team- but I had only ever seen them in video games. Would love some professional examples
I think you could use a gantt chart to accomplish the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart
And your comment about the dependencies is still accurate for my team since we have to be efficient about doing the concurrent parts together to make sure we get this product to our client on time.
It's been useful for me to visualize all the moving parts of my project and see options that I have in a way that is familiar to me.
My team is designing a new product for our company. We know what we want the end result to be, but we have several iterations to make on our current product to get there, and each iteration can branch through several paths to satisfy our requirements.
So there's a hardware tree which lists the options we have to upgrade the hardware, a software tree that shows the scope of options we have to improve the software, etc.
The idea is to show the different tasks that need to be done; and which can be done concurrently and which need to be done sequentially to get to our goal.
I showed my team the Factorio tech tree to give them an idea, but I didn't realize people used them professionally.
or how to use that C compiler to bootstrap the rest of the software: https://guix.gnu.org/
Ingredients:
- Soil
- Seeds
- Salt water
- Rare-earth mines
- ???
Thanks!
If it's about "who we were and how we got here" I'm surprised that that there's no Steinbeck.
https://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-Development-Essentials-Man...
That's really unfortunate, as there are a tonne of PostgreSQL books around, many of which are very good. eg:
https://www.amazon.com/Practical-SQL-Beginners-Guide-Storyte...
https://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-Running-Practical-Advanced...
Conversely, the MySQL book right above it in the list seems to be one of the highest rated ones on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Learning-MySQL-MariaDB-Heading-Direct...
As GitHub uses MySQL internally, this seems like favoritism.
Do they hope to redevelop a single standard to rule them all from the books alone?
Since a lot of the culture described later is specifically related to Western culture, I find it interesting that the Bible is not included.
For good or ill, the Bible had a profound cultural effect on Western civilization, and specifically the King James Version on the Anglosphere.
This is the most real case of cultural appropriation in the last decade.
But the corporate smoke screens focus on bogus cultural appropriation and related issues, so this one will yet again go unnoticed.
I'm thinking about updating my OSS licences.
It's OSS, so if you want to do something similar but without GH branding nothing stops you (assuming you have enough cash on hand to pull it all off).
Which is done out of self interest and completely pales in comparison to the time that OSS contributors have donated.
> It's OSS, so if you want to do something similar ...
Yeah, yeah, just because you can does not make it right. See Google groups.
If a company or individual does something just to slap their name on it, so be it.
The combined open source effort vs Github's effort shouldn't be compared as it doesn't make sense. Just like it doesn't make sense to compare the work of a translator vs. the work of writing the original material—the translator is still doing valuable work regardless. The translator isn't "taking credit" for the original work.
You should compare what Github is doing with other endeavors doing the same thing.