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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of minifying code that is anyways going to be compiled?

People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

George Mallory

Is it carefully minified by hand, or by another program? Because I really, really don't see how calling a minifier is "the struggle of life itself upward".

I agree with Mallory that we make money to live but I also think that modern technological society has turned pursuits into highly specialized perversions that aren't even inspiring any more.

The worldwide coverage of mountain climbing has even turned mountain climbing into a somewhat arbitrary thing in terms of "climbing everests": first it was to the top of the mountain (cool), then it was to the top in a certain time, then it was without supplementary oxygen, then it was climbing all 8,000m+ mountains, then it was doing THAT without oxygen...

At some point it's diminishing returns and becomes stupid -- and results in people just killing themselves, and AI is already on that level.

With every achievement there also comes a responsibility and our society is just achievement without responsibility.

I think you missed the point of the quote entirely. When I do something, I don't do it because nobody has ever done it before. I do it to see if _I_ could do it.

Otherwise nobody would ever run a marathon again.

I didn't miss the point of the quotation. I am not really concerned with your motivations. My point was that Mallory's quotation becomes distorted by technological society to present new challenges that are relatively harmful and stupid, like making a small ChatGPT clone (or even making ChatGPT in the first place).

So while I agree that some people's motivations may be sound, it is how they are applied that is a perversion, and that Mallory's quotation has the germ of a phenomenon that is incredibly dangerous and isn't as deserving of awe as it is.

A person had an idea for something they wanted to do. They set about doing it. They undoubtedly ran into difficulties and had to think about how to solve them. They came up with solutions, probably some of the solutions aren't as elegant as they had hoped for, but they reached something that was acceptable, again and again. And eventually they created something that, to some extent, satisfied them.

That process is the joy.

I just don't see the harm in what this person has done? Envisaging something that could be created, and then creating it, is what life is all about.

I just don't see how words like "perversion" and "distortion" can sensibly be applied to this work?

The entire point is that technology shapes society so that joyful activities are subverted to create perversions like AI. The atomic bomb was an intellectually stimulating joy for many physicists for example. Life is about joy but it must be accompanied by the responsibility to seek joy in activities that don't do harm like AI.

I'm assuming 3000 bytes refers to the uncompiled minified code

Indeed, and the question is why do that? We can count LOCs just fine already.

Because it'd be very hard to compare short program length otherwise? 5 LoC says nothing.

Technically, it depends on the language. I.e. python doesn't have anything like a semicolon to combine multiple statements and assignments per line

But yeah, for C the LOC metric can be gamed to a silly degree

> python doesn't have anything like a semicolon to combine multiple statements

Python does have a "semicolon to combine multiple statements", and has further (lambda f: f(f)) expressions for complex expressions with local names and scopes.

(not that using either for those would result in pythonic code, but it is certainly not missing from the language)

Oh, you're right. I should've tested that before writing my comment. Thanks for calling me out

Yeah but lines in anything should be "lines formatted with a standard formatter", not just "one line with ten thousand semicolons in it".

You also need to define whether the code has to be raw CPU instructions or if it's allowed to use an external library containing all the code humanity has ever produced.

The usual with this is "whatever ships with the language compiler and OS".

What counts as a standard formatter? Python one-liners are Turing complete even without semicolons, evals, execs, and with finite stack depth. E.g. some formatters keep this at one line, while others introduce line breaks https://yonatan.us/misc/bf.html .

What's the point of art?

To complain about it not having any point on Hacker News, thus creating a paradox where the complaint itself becomes the most discussed and engaging aspect of the post.

This is not what HN is for and your comment has no point. (Upvoted.)

That’s craftmanship, not art.

A talk by Brian Eno convinced me that there is no meaningful difference between the two, and I've yet to see a definition of art that does not end up in self-contradiction if we try to make the distinction.

The point of art is the expression of human experience and ability, but it frequently becomes perverted into serving capitalist tendencies. So:

1. Art becomes content 2. Automation to make life better becomes automation for profit 3. Life becomes meaningless achievement

At some point, there is always the counterpoint of balance and we don't have that.

So a standard C program is not art, but if you remove newlines and shorten variable names it suddenly becomes art?

Only if we arbitrarily state this is now art. But you can of course say the same for the standard version. There is even a youngster out there that started a work called "the art of computer programming."

We are definitely legitimate to lament about the good old time when art and mere texnical stuffs were clearly and sharply separated, while this new generation is ruining societies and our glorious civilizations with their careless use of words that mixes everything. Well, at least as legitimate as any old man in traceable history.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28169/what-is-th...

If it's an entry for the IOCCC, yes ;)

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