danielam

"Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." (mutatis mutandis)

Etymologically[0]:

> mid-14c., enginour, "constructor of military engines," from Old French engigneor "engineer, architect, maker of war-engines; schemer" (12c.), from Late Latin ingeniare (see engine); general sense of "inventor, designer" is recorded from early 15c.; civil sense, in reference to public works, is recorded from c. 1600 but not the common meaning of the word until 19c (hence lingering distinction as civil engineer). Meaning "locomotive driver" is first attested 1832, American English. A "maker of engines" in ancient Greece was a mekhanopoios.

The original meaning seems to characterize a very specific kind of activity and not what the broad genus "engineer" that we believe today suggests. The growing inclusiveness over time actually seems to suggest that the demarcation between "engineering" and "other arts" is an open question even when posed in historical contexts predating software. The problem of determining whether "software engineering" is engineering is not a problem unique to software development, I think, even putting to one side the numerous cases of what is arguably title puffery.

The ancient Greek "mekhanopoios" is interesting because the ending, "-poios", from "poiesis", refers to making or producing. So the mekhanopoios is someone who produces machines; he does the production. The division of human activity (in relation to knowledge) into poiesis, praxis and theoria seems to give us a good starting point for understanding the myriad activities that human beings engage in because it is a principled classification. But "engineering" seems to have been appropriated for new uses over time for diverse, though not necessarily principled reasons (specialization, analogical similarity, a desire to cash in on established prestige). As a result, at least until the bad appropriations have been dispatched, maybe we cannot expect a crisp taxonomy because the evolution of the meaning of the term has not been principled in the first place.

There does indeed seem to be a connotation of sophistication, specifically scientific sophistication, which is a question of methodology. Even if we accept this definition, sophistication is, of course, a matter of degree, not kind, and what counts as sophisticated seems to be relative to the state of the art. But you could then speak of degrees of engineering. Just as science that is more rigorous and thus more perfect could be said to be more scientific, so, too, we may speak of one field as more of an engineering field than another.

So where does this leave software engineering? If engineering is understood in terms of productive aim achieved by means of scientifically-informed methods, then presumably software is the product, so it's a question of establishing the scientific basis for the field and identifying the "scientifically-informed methods".

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/engineer#etymonline_v_25786

Also, “sram na to” (“I shit on it”).

(Another less vulgar, if somewhat irrelevant, alternative is “ani ziębi, ani grzeje”, or “it neither chills me nor warns me up”).

The choice of Common Lisp is less flattering than one might hope because it was largely the result of familiarity (Carl de Marcken's doctoral thesis was in computational linguistics and he was most comfortable using Lisp). When I asked him (c. 2007) whether he would have chosen Common Lisp again, he said that he wouldn't have and that he would have chosen Java instead. I don't recall any mention of technical reasons during that exchange (maybe static analysis?), but I do vaguely recall hiring considerations.

(Also, while much of the "business logic" was written in Lisp, a good chunk of low-level stuff was written in C++.)

"The search engines run on databases of flights, prices, and seat availability, provided electronically over private networks by the 800 or so airlines of the world. The data is not directly available to the general public and access often must be negotiated with individual airlines. Flight data is updated daily or occasionally more frequently in the case of unexpected cancellations. Prices are updated about ten times a day, and seat availability continuously. A large portion of the flight, price and seat availability data, called published data, is used by all the major search engines, but a significant amount of private data is restricted." [0]

[0] http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...

And the reason for the shift was both political and economic: Verne's publisher was afraid of both losing the Russian market and souring relations between France and Russia, though public sentiment in France leaned in favor of the Poles. In other words, the shift was not Verne's intention.

"Robotnik" is still used in Polish to mean someone who does manual labor and the like. The pejorative "robol" translates as "prole" as in "proletarian".

It better translates as "labor" as in "manual labor", or as "toil".

One element of a feature set that may be used as part of a broader forensic analysis of writing samples...or for obfuscating the origin of one's writing.

This statement is very unsettling.

Are you claiming that any discussion that someone or some group deems "outdated", "conventional" or "unsophisticated deserves to be suppressed on those grounds, and that those who defend such views are to be treated in the manner Stock has been treated?

What gender theory posits is controversial, to say the least, and it is itself quite new and highly problematic despite what your claims seem to suggest. Stock is also a feminist which belies the notion that she is defending anything that could conceivably be characterized as a traditional understanding of the subject matter.

> This "verbal, intuitive character" is its biggest flaw: it makes grammar look like it is logic, while it is not.

I don't know if I would say it makes grammar look like logic. Rather, it holds that grammar has a logical structure. You would still need to regiment your arguments in many cases if you wanted to explicitly employ the formalism in question, but this is viewed as faithfully bringing out the essential logical character of a proposition latent in the grammar, not as a replacement of the original proposition with something else. Recall that FOL is completely indifferent to grammar (though apparently this hasn't stopped linguists from using FOL to analyze natural language, something Sommers sees as resulting in a distorted view of natural language).

This was Wittgenstein's first publication, I believe, and it shows. As someone once wrote, not Wittgenstein's finest hour.

> It does not even allow, strictly speaking, to take "Horse is an animal" and derive "a horse's head is an animal's head".

This is because it doesn't permit relations in a systematic way. In FOL, you would express "head of" as binary relations (one for horse, one for animal since you cannot quantify over predicates; you would need a HOL for that). But traditional logic can be extended with relations as Sommers has done in term functor logic.

Interestingly, Veatch argues that FOL cannot tell you what a thing is. If predicates are modeled after relations—and Russell also includes the unary predicate here as a relation between subject and property instead of multiple subjects—then you cannot say what a thing is because relations don't say what their relata are. So you're left with a peculiar situation where individuals are bare particulars which brings up all sorts of other questions.

Sommers and Englebretsen have interesting things to say in response to Russell and Frege as well as their defenders (like Geach and Dummett).

I think you're reading things into what I wrote.

W.r.t. value, the only point I was making is that there is no fact/value dichotomy. It doesn't follow that I am therefore arguing that one cannot make value judgements. On the contrary, if no fact/value dichotomy exists and value is a matter of fact, then it follows that we can indeed make value judgements on par with factual claims.

But what I was addressing in an earlier post was the suggestion that there is a fact/value dichotomy and the notion that problems occur in science when value mingles with fact. I rejected this claim by arguing that there is no such dichotomy and by implication that the diagnosis is incorrect. Questions about corruption are fine as far as they go, but they are not relevant to this thread because they do not address the question of fact/value dichotomy and they presume value judgement.

No, I understood you. What I'm saying is that a) your concern for bad motives is separate from the question of whether science if value-laden (which it is), and b) the question of "what is the correct aim and motivation for science?", meant rhetorically, demonstrates that your judgement about what is a bad motive for entering a scientific field itself involves a value judgement.

The problem of correct motivation (and here I would argue understanding is the aim of science, not fact collection per se) is a separate problem, but it, too, is a matter of value judgement (what is the correct aim and motivation for science?). The concern for corruption cannot erase the essential value-ladenness of all activity, including scientific activity. Science is both shaped by and shapes value judgements and is itself suffused by them. You cannot escape from value. If you judge something to be valuable, you will act and shape reality according to that understanding of what is valuable. This is the essential nature of practical reason. All action is determined by value judgements.

Related article: "Why Science cannot be Value-Free"

https://www.kul.pl/files/57/wydzial/lekka-kowalik/Lekka-Kowa...

(HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28697385)

> This is exactly the source of the trouble. Hearing scientists project their value system onto everybody else destroys their credibility.

> sticking to the facts and avoiding ideology and values

I think a few different things are being confused here, but as far as value is concerned, the choice to do science, to take scientific findings into account and to decide what to investigate are themselves the result of value judgements. There is no fact-value dichotomy. There is no "clean" separation between fact and value (as if value were a dirty word contrary to fact).

This fact-value dichotomy can be tied to the materialist worldview which denies objective value because it presumes a metaphysics that renders the world a kind of theater of senseless extension in space. Any value must therefore be a matter of subjective projection (and therefore delusion, putting to one side materialism's inherent inability to account for subjectivity). But this metaphysics is, to put it gently, problematic. The wish to separate fact from value (which I take to occupy one order, not two) is no doubt further encouraged by liberalism's pretensions to neutrality and the inherent tension within Lockean liberalism between science and liberty.

But I do agree that the actual deciding of policy is not to be left to scientists but to politicians and the like. Scientists are specialists who can supplement our knowledge in specific ways that generalists can then take into account along with other data and understanding when making judgements.

Josef Pieper has written a couple of books ("Leisure: the Basis of Culture" and "Happiness and Contemplation") about solitude and contemplation that are worth a look.

In very specific contexts, computational law can make sense. My company, for example (https://droit.tech/), has had success in the financial regulation space.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

For example, I use a very simple barcode scanning app[0] that exports to CSV.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reading-list-book-tracker/id12...

I don't drink soft drinks generally, and certainly not in those quantities, but I vaguely recall feeling anxious after drinking cola before.

> Therefore something seems wrong about giving caffeine all the blame.

Possibly, but in this case, my primary comparison is between coffee and coffee with l-theanine and that one difference by itself produces a very noticeable difference in effect. I do not know what else in coffee could be producing jitters other than the caffeine. Or what in the cola could perhaps be inhibiting the effects of caffeine.

I can also drink black tea for longer durations than unsupplemented coffee. When I drink green tea, my typical choice is sencha, but it is not nearly as concentrated as the matcha. So I suspect the caffeine is therefore lower than my typical cup of coffee, hence the reduced agitation?

I have. I can drink green tea (including strong matcha), which does contain l-theanine, probably daily, but I cannot drink coffee daily for more than maybe 2 weeks without experiencing adverse affects. Even one cup of coffee can leave me agitated. Supplementing coffee with l-theanine completely eliminates agitation.

This reads the entire file, so for large files you'll likely want something like `less -n +F` if you want to use `less`.

Specifically, I'd add that Aquinas had enormous regard for Aristotle and the pagan philosophers, to the point that he referred to Aristotle with the honorific "the Philosopher".

Please see my comment to trasz.

> ... is, technically, BS. And pretty much all of Aquinas follows this pattern. Which was very highly regarded back then, but now we know better.

You seem confident in that assertion. Care to elaborate, preferably with examples/arguments?

N.b., it's not the first time I've heard such a claim so boldly stated. Typically, dismissive attitudes toward Thomas are rooted in widespread misunderstanding about what he actually argued and on what basis. Feser, for example, recalls how he had held a caricaturish view of some of the most famous arguments Thomas put forth because those caricatures are what are often taught to students of philosophy nowadays, largely because the caricatures have become part of academic received wisdom, not necessarily because of some ill intent.

None of this is to say that Thomas is infallible, just that he is a great teacher. Arguments that rely on the science of his day, for example, may require revision, but his philosophical synthesis, for example, is, at the VERY least, very defensible.

"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Unless I am to read this fragment to mean "gratifying one's superficial fetish for frivolous novelty", why wouldn't this article satisfy this criterion in a general sense? Feser offers an analysis of what he takes to be the moral hazards of the material prosperity, etc of capitalism. If that can't be said to be a topic of interest, then I'm sorry, but IMO, that's an indictment of the accuser, not the article.

I read articles on HN every day that are far less substantive or original than this blog post. Plenty of posts are off-topic if we go by the description above. And articles on the subject of capitalism have been featured on the front page just these last two days which is why I thought this article's publication was especially opportune.

I don't wish to make accusations, but it's difficult not to suspect prejudice.

Concept implies abstraction and the mark of abstract thought is language.

Karl Popper's four functions of language might help here. Language has an expressive function, a signaling function, a descriptive function and an argumentative function. No other animal besides Man shows any sign of the anything but the first two, but it's the second two that require abstract concepts. These animals may very well possess imagination, but imagination is essentially concrete. You don't imagine Triangularity, but rather specific triangles (though in human beings, by virtue of having an intellect, the image of a triangle is "accompanied by" the concept of Triangularity).

I take the quotes around "laugh" to indicate that the word is being used analogously.

Laughter can be caused by the comprehension of an absurdity, a frustrated intention or by something that violates a norm. I would not readily ascribe this sort of comprehension to the aforementioned animals and would be careful not to anthropomorphize other species, as tempting as it might be.