mgunes

Here's one to top that: https://vimeo.com/132951073

> And disappearing is the default, natural state of things.

Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy. The same is not the case for information disseminated in a controlled manner from privately owned servers.

> If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".

> If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.

Thankfully, the generations who produced and preserved knowledge on paper, clay and stone before the onset of digital technology - that is, every generation of humans that has ever lived, except ours - did not think of books and libraries as throwaway pamphlets. And it would take more than an arbitrary interchange of modes of cultural production to argue that we should be doing otherwise in the technological circumstance we find ourselves in.

The "tyrants of the server" are not thinking of server-centric aggregation and dissemination of as a performance put on for a limited time: they are betting on it as the future of all human literary activity. Google doesn't want to read you a paragraph, take your money and say goodbye; it wants to swallow all the world's books and information, chop it to tiny pieces, store and own it forever, and extract the maximum profit from each tiny piece, without having you pay a penny. And it wants you to come back for more. The persistence of the server-centric model of content dissemination is not an accident; it is dictated by the political economy of the web brought about by the Googles of the world.

Non-paywalled copy: http://evgenymorozov.tumblr.com/post/79466871548/my-oped-in-...

Yes, the specific example scenarios that Victor has used are hard to directly reconcile with what SICP is doing. But, that the examples are oriented towards graphics and animation has only to do with the fact that the immediate target of his critique in the essay is Processing and a particular live coding implementation of it. I was thinking more in terms of applying the principles of learnability that he has put forward, and are manifest in the examples he has cited (Logo, Smalltalk, etc.), "how exactly" admittedly being an open question.

One thing I'm more or less certain about is that it would entail less live coding, and more stepping through visualized execution states (perhaps similar to pythontutor.com's visualizer).

I will be going through SICP with these in mind in the following weeks/months; I will keep you posted if I end up with notes that I think you might find useful.

I wonder if you are familiar with Bret Victor's elaborate criticism of Khan Academy's live coding environment. This effort looks like it could really benefit from its insights.

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

While an inline interactive Scheme interpreter does make the SICP examples easier to follow and play with, it doesn't by itself make the content more understandable and learnable.

A "learning environment for SICP", with the principles of learnability and understandability in Victor's article applied, would be very beneficial for present day learners. It surely is a lot of work, but would be an interesting route for your project to take.

"Threatened" and "oppressed", by non-violent assembly and protest? Come on.

No, there aren't "people"; there is "a person", me. Just one person.

Everyone else is speculating on how the poor little "Googler"'s life is destroyed by a naive peaceful protest, derailing the issue with anti-left wing jokes, suggesting that "Googlers" carry weapons, and so on.

HN at its best: when its ideological toe is stepped on. popcorn

When people block Google busses, and break one window of one bus, it's inappropriate violence on par with barbarism [1].

When people peacefully protest a Google employee and try to raise awareness in his neighborhood of his activities that they disagree with, it's individual harassment.

Isn't that just lovely? Hacker News: privileged technologists setting the standards for techno-skeptical protest. Tell us what the proper way to go about it (outside the established means of the sham that is representative parliamentary democracy, of course) is, then.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6951468

Excellent. If engineers and technologists refuse to take personal political and ethical responsibility for the future they help build, they need to be reminded to do so.

We need more of this.

  "It's not true. It's not true. It's not true.
  "...
  "It's old news."

This also sums up how the underhanded defense of the status quo by hiding behind Hanlon's razor has worked in much internet discourse, including HN discussions, on mass surveillance and cryptography so far.

Of course, it's not going to work any longer.

It's not a race issue; it's a class issue. The non-white people that SV companies employ tend not to be the underprivileged people that are driven out of metropolitan areas due to gentrification.

It doesn't take an overtly political article to upset ideological sensibilities. Since technology is inherently intertwined with ideology, it's not possible to have a fruitful discussion on any topic concerning technology (perhaps aside from certain pure technicalities) without stepping on any ideological toes.

No, the only alternative isn't Detroit.

I'm one of those people: I submit that throwing a brick through the back of a bus window is ethically superior to voting or circulating a petition. Please skim my comment history.

And you'll probably be sitting in your armchair nitpicking on the title of another article you didn't read that steps on your ideological toe.

It doesn't take a vast conspiracy to rid prospering metropolitan areas of working class non-white people; it's the business-as-usual of capitalist growth.

In "Pandora's Hope", Bruno Latour goes to great length to attack the artificial subject-object and nature-culture separations that are the legacy of the Cartesian paradigm. It's a highly intriguing book. Here's the foreword, which deals directly with the brain-in-a-vat:

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/70-DO-YOU-BEL...

> WTF does that have to do with anything?

The author has been writing / working on the implications of drone technologies regularly in various contexts for the past few years. He didn't dedicate a separate piece to the Amazon news at the time, and the political underpinnings of drones (which he has most often dealt with in the military context) and extraordinary / unjust rendition are not at all unrelated.

I was commenting in a general sense, on the notion I quoted, of which the current discussion is a mere symptom; not specifically about Amazon or package delivery. Yet the point is: when a technology giant talks about delivering packages in a new and technologically novel, yet questionable way, we shouldn't be talking about delivering packages; we should be talking in a broader sense about the political and economical implications of that new way, and how it's going to affect people in the foreseeable future.

The notion of being unquestioning "champions of the future" is a general trait of most HN participants, and in direct contrast to what you problematize, what I find problematic is the great wave of instant enthusiasm we're seeing among so-called "hackers" for Amazon's stated intentions.

> Aren't we supposed to be the champions of the future?

If you mean as "hackers", to pick a word from the name of this website, who were for a long time, rightly or wrongly, supposed to be conscientious watchdogs of present and future technology, no.

If for no other reason, as technologists who witnessed Stallman, Assange, Bradley, Snowden, so on in their lifetimes, you're supposed to be first and foremost astute critics of the future that dominant forces of the realm of technology such as Amazon are aiming to build. And rather than enthusiastically applaud whatever new and possibly exciting technology they bring to the table that contributes to your present or future paycheck and their private profit, you're supposed to take political responsibility for the future you help build by being their employees, customers and unpaid evangelists.

I don't imply an ideal of neutrality; no online community is ideologically neutral, and neutrality isn't a merit to strive for. It's just that most participants seem to have internalized a supposedly meritocratic "whatever is interesting to good hackers floats to the top" mental model regarding how HN works, when that simply isn't the case. Every online community turns into a self-censoring echo chamber with time, and given its origins and initial purpose, the precise kind of echo chamber that HN has been turned into shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

How HN page rankings really work: you vote stuff up, and then the flag mob and hidden moderators axe right off the front page whatever irritates the pro-capitalist internet-libertarian techno-optimist idelogical sensibilities of the white male Californian HN hive mind even in the subtlest of ways.

For a contrasting perspective to the technology-centric, access-oriented view of "public benefits" that is typically dominant on HN, see the documentary "Google and the World Brain":

http://www.worldbrainthefilm.com/

In the past year, I've emailed info@ycombinator.com about what I thought were perfectly legitimate and thought-provoking, yet not-exactly-in-tune-with-the-HN-hive-mind submissions getting axed off the front page by moderators, on more than one occasion. I haven't received a reply.

The polis; an autonomous, self-governing form of city state, invented around 800 BC.

While that is true, Feldman did encourage people to walk out, do their daily chores, have some fresh air etc. and come back in if they wanted to, in the brief introduction speeches to some of the performances of his longer (5+ hour) pieces.

Here's a thoroughly thought-provoking hour of Feldman in conversation with John Cage on radio, from 1966:

http://archive.org/details/CageFeldman3

I highly recommend listening to the entire series, of which this is part three.

An unreplied comment on a previous submission on HN was questioning the remote feasibility of running TCP over FM with the Raspberry Pi. I too am curious about the state of the art in general, if any, and how it might possibly be exploited for long-range networking between small computers like the Pi.

For those less practically interested in the history of the computation of time, Arno Borst's "The Ordering Of Time: From The Ancient Computus To The Modern Computer" is recommended reading.