mtraven

Engelbart not only had amazing vision, he had the ability to turn it into working demos. And he was able to inspire others (at PARC most notably) to work in the same way. His mouse is now everywhere of course, but his more important ideas, eg for tools to support collaborative thinking, still remain to be realized.

The history of Engelbart's approach to HCI (Augmentation of the Intellect, or IA) and its more-or-less friendly rivalry with AI is quite interesting. AI got more of the research money back in the day, but IA seems to have been more generally successful, although not under that rubric. And nowadays, the borders between them are blurring as humans and computation get more closely connected.

Don't think he was ever actually a member of PARC, although his ideas and collaborators certainly inhabited the place.

Not sure that the Media Lab was that cheap, but it did innovate in funding in a big way (by creating industry consortia in sectors that were not accustomed to funding research, like newspapers).

> The magic companies of the last century are the ones who could do both, allowing people to have side projects that don't immediately show commercial promise. Bell Labs was a lot like this. So was PARC. And Google to some degree.

Those past companies could afford to create creative playgrounds because they were monopolies or near monopolies. That is about the only way to create a situation where "nobody is looking over your shoulder". Google enjoyed that status for awhile but now seems to be in fierce competition with Facebook and Apple, so maybe not as much any more.

Jaimie Heywood started his own drug research pipeline to try to cure his brother's ALS. That failed, but the effort has inspired a number of other unconventional research efforts. http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_heywood_the_big_idea_my_broth...

The "Special Agents O’Brien and Bloom" kind of gave it away.

I guess Don Draper was involved in the marketing.

Mercurial is like a git designed for humans. Basically the same design (distributed, branching and merging is very easy) but with slightly higher-level command line options that removes some of the rough edges. I kind of wish it had won over git.

If you're selling something illegal, for instance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)

Mendeley was not a direct threat to Elsevier's business. They aren't a publisher. PLoS (and PLoS's model) is more of a direct threat. Fortunately they are a non-profit which I think makes them immune from takeover.

According to their site the assisted-opening knives are legal in all states, whereas switchblades aren't, so there must be some meaningful distinction (unless the law just hasn't caught up yet).

Gad, can we keep vacuous Dilbert-grade business babble out of here please? "The future of business lies in the shift from a culture of management to that of leadership and it begins with you." Thanks! Happy to know that!

This probably isn't the place to have a debate on Latour, but let me just say that it is possible to read him unsympathetically (as Sokal does) or sympathetically, to try to understand the viewpoint he is trying to get across. I've found it worthwhile to do the latter, but YMMV.

I agree, Latour has always been about bridging those worlds, in his own unique way.

Here's his reply to those who misunderstand him as somehow denying reality: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/70-DO-YOU-BEL...

And, next week he is delivering the Gifford Lectures, which should be fun. There is a webcast: http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2013/gifford-080213

Wow, all that trendy toilet-paper-roll data graphics, and not a single mention of what Symbolics actually did. For that, look here: http://www.smbx.org/

This seems relevant: http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2013/02/eefin-and-hambone-or-what-...

What gives the appearance of some monopoly on genius to the sort of cultural output that is housed in museums and Lincoln Plaza and so on is just this: that brainless one-percenters are spending huge amounts of money to put their names on these monuments, and the brainless bourgeoisie makes pilgrimages to them, spending medium sums of money to have a brush with cultural objects that supposedly edify by their simple proximity. The illusion that genius is stored up in sites of high culture is sustained by capital and by the laziness and gullibility of culture's consumers: all the season-ticket holders, all the dupes of the museums' advertising departments, for their part driven ever further, under the compulsion of capital, to make the Ottoman sultan's throne, or medieval armor, or Greco-Bactrian statuary, look like so many things to buy-- passing them off as a special class of objects, museum objects, that you can buy in a way just by going and standing in front of them.

The author seems to be something of a rightwing crank (see his writings on diversity for example), which of course does not invalidate anything purely technical he writes on statistics, but it certainly lowers my confidence in anything he says. Or, in probabilistic terms Being wrong in one area correlates well with being wrong in others.

I think this is the only MLA style that is tied to the offerings of a single commercial entity. That seems weird to me. Does Twitter own the idea of a tweet or has it escaped into the general culture?

That might win the prize for most ignorant comment ever on HN. While you can level a number of criticisms at Chomsky, lack of mathematical rigor is not one of them. I would assume people here were If anything, Chomsky is guilty of over-reliance on mathematical formalism in his linguistics.

Promote the guy to sales, he's clearly a closer.

$ howdoi turing

$ howdoi solve the halting problem

$ howdoi find the holy grail

I could do this all day.

Very nice. I like the -l feature but wish the link could appear with the normal answer, doesn't seem to be a way to do that.

See SPARQL and the semantic web, though I think the xkcd cartoon is the better response.

The discrete nature of MIDI and its purported effect on music is one of the main example complaints in You Are Not a Gadget, and one of the easier ones to evaluate. Has the richness of music been decreased since the MIDI standard was promulgated, or has it increased?

Music is like many other sorts of human information systems (natural languages, laws, business practices) in that there are various forces both for and against standardization. Standards in music are much older than MIDI; the equal-tempered tuning of the Western scale is exactly a somewhat unsatisfactory compromise forced by standardization.

More here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2010/02/review-you-are-no...

It's actually an indictment of our programming tools that they require one to hold so much of the design context in one's head. If they were better (more expressive, easier to interact with) they would help to solve the problems rather than require superhuman feats of endurance.

pg does mention that succinct programming languages help, which is true, but they don't go nearly as far as they could. Like him, I use Lisp for that very reason, but Common Lisp is 30 years old -- why hasn't the state of the art advanced since then? It's really quite shameful.

Well, I agree that he is about 80% wrong, but I don't think he's a charlatan -- I'm pretty sure he's sincere in his beliefs.

This is pretty much Jaron Lanier's argument in You Are Not a Gadget (reviewed here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2010/02/review-you-are-no... ). They both have a point; systems which reduce human relations to very simpleminded database formalisms cheapen them.

But they ignore that the human spirit is (or so we should hope) strong enough to survive Facebook if it is strong enough to survive the other insults and depredations it has been subject to throughout history. Facebook may slap a reductive meaning onto the word "friend", but I haven't noticed that truly interfering with real friendship.

Nice but it's been done before: http://www.powersof10.com/ and by Charles and Ray Eames, no less.

He gives the game away in the second sentence:

> But greed, in fact, prompts capitalists to seek government guarantees and subsidies that denature and stultify the works of entrepreneurs.

Yes, that is how real, as opposed to theoretical, capitalism works. And communism is all about selfless cooperation in theory, but in practice works out to something quite different.

Speaking of communism and information, I can't recommend too highly the book Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, which is about the efforts by very early cyberneticians in the USSR to create an economy which was managed by information without greed.