Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Philosophy of Computer Science

plato.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 102 posts

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#91

Post by xpe »

californical wrote: post #71
xpe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conway's Law is frequently referenced, but the claimed connection is rarely explained. From Wikipedia: > The law is, in a strict sense, only about correspondence; it does not state that communication structure is the cause of system structure, merely describes the connection. Different commentators have taken various positions on the direction of causality; that technical design causes the organization to restructure…

Yeah I think the main idea is that people who like clean organization, boundaries, tidiness, clear responsibilities, etc, will tend to congregate together. And their organizations will be that way, and so will the things they create together. People who like experimentation, chaos, prototyping, flat hierarchies, etc, will also tend to congregate together, and the systems that they build will also have those values. S…

I like the idea of Conway's Law, but I also like to be critical of vague theories. Maybe it is asking too much, but I don't see people using it in a testable way. This isn't just selection or survivorship bias; I think the "law" itself is too vague to admit a true experiment, even an associative one. I'm happy to be shown to be wrong... or that I'm missing the point.

Another way of making this point is: what could make Conway's Law totally wrong? What evidence could do that? It seems like shifting sands -- there is always something that fits the "pattern"; the problem is the pattern is not defined a priori: it feels like getting your organization's palm read.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#92

Post by ibebrett86 »

LeanderK wrote: post #84
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great. My CS degree got me a string of software engineering jobs. Which is fine I suppose, but what I was after was CS.

Also fair but a bit heartbreaking for me. Is this the product of mass academization? The motto of stanford is "The wind of freedom blows", not "mass produce uncritical engineers". A freedom to learn, to develop freely, to learn obscure math and think about the philosophical limits of computer science. I study in Tübingen, Germany and I love it that the top machine learning faculty here is located at a holistic, full…

people can choose how the tone of their education. some people may want brass tacks engineering and to focus on getting a job.. some people may want a philosophical approach... its a good thing that there are lots of diverse mindsets out there.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#93

Post by btilly »

melagonster wrote: post #77
btilly wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emphatic disagreement, at least when it comes to Indo-European languages. The previous translator was effectively unusable. Then suddenly Google Translate became something that would work most of the time. At the least for average users who were dealing with English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, etc. Despite the documented failure modes (and they were many), suddenly it was possible to read articles in other lan…

here is Chinese user, I read this page by Google translate, at least English to Chinese is good for daily use.

I know that they focused on Chinese as a specific problem and have improved. I would expect it to be much better today than it was in 2006.

Part of the problem was that there is a lot less grammar in Chinese than in Indo-European languages. So there are many ways to translate a given Indo-European sentence into Chinese, and you need to understand context on a Chinese sentence to properly translate it into an Indo-European one.

The many ways to translate to Chinese is a problem because Chinese flexibility in word order means that there are many choices of reasonable next word, and they didn't have enough data to tell the difference between a reasonable next word and an unreasonable one.

Going the other way Chinese may not care whether you have one apple or 10 apples, or whether Xi is a man or a woman. But Indo-European languages generally do care. So Google Translate has to guess, and often gets it wrong.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#94

Post by Animats »

bawolff wrote: post #80
Animats wrote: post #4

That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class, which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed. That class was known informally…

> AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed. To be fair, maybe we just haven't thought about it enough.

It may merely be beyond the power of the human mind. That's becoming less of a limitation.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#95

Post by LeanderK »

ibebrett86 wrote: post #92
LeanderK wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also fair but a bit heartbreaking for me. Is this the product of mass academization? The motto of stanford is "The wind of freedom blows", not "mass produce uncritical engineers". A freedom to learn, to develop freely, to learn obscure math and think about the philosophical limits of computer science. I study in Tübingen, Germany and I love it that the top machine learning faculty here is located at a holistic, full…

people can choose how the tone of their education. some people may want brass tacks engineering and to focus on getting a job.. some people may want a philosophical approach... its a good thing that there are lots of diverse mindsets out there.

While this is true for the individual I was still thinking a bit in the stanford-context. It is a world-leading, exceptional university where academic ideals should be lived and passed on. It's fine if you just want to pass some courses to get a job but I don't think those universities are really made for this and should be used in this way. You will never use the proof for the non-computability of the halting problem in a usual job but it's elementary for CS.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#96

Post by californical »

xpe wrote: post #91
californical wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think the main idea is that people who like clean organization, boundaries, tidiness, clear responsibilities, etc, will tend to congregate together. And their organizations will be that way, and so will the things they create together. People who like experimentation, chaos, prototyping, flat hierarchies, etc, will also tend to congregate together, and the systems that they build will also have those values. S…

I like the idea of Conway's Law, but I also like to be critical of vague theories. Maybe it is asking too much, but I don't see people using it in a testable way. This isn't just selection or survivorship bias; I think the "law" itself is too vague to admit a true experiment, even an associative one. I'm happy to be shown to be wrong... or that I'm missing the point. Another way of making this point is: what could ma…

Totally agree. I guess I just like it as a concept because it’s almost a tautology.

Organized people are organized.

People who value short-term experiments will make short-term experiments.

The only part that is palm-reader level is the translation across contexts. And I agree that it’s a terrible law, but probably a decent rule of thumb, that someone who is tidy in one area of their life is likely tidy in others. But yeah, we shouldn’t really look into it any more than that.

It’s like other vague assumptions that our brain makes. Probably correct to some degree sometimes, but not a hard rule by any means.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#97

Post by gwright »

californical wrote: post #71
xpe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conway's Law is frequently referenced, but the claimed connection is rarely explained. From Wikipedia: > The law is, in a strict sense, only about correspondence; it does not state that communication structure is the cause of system structure, merely describes the connection. Different commentators have taken various positions on the direction of causality; that technical design causes the organization to restructure…

Yeah I think the main idea is that people who like clean organization, boundaries, tidiness, clear responsibilities, etc, will tend to congregate together. And their organizations will be that way, and so will the things they create together. People who like experimentation, chaos, prototyping, flat hierarchies, etc, will also tend to congregate together, and the systems that they build will also have those values. S…

I never took it to be about organization vs chaos.

For example, if a team is responsible for two modules of an application they are less likely to create an API because the modules can communicate directly inside the application (i.e. monolith)

If the same two modules are cared for by separate teams, then maybe they end up being two separate API services.

It both cases there is organization, just different types of organization.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#98

Post by melagonster »

btilly wrote: post #93
melagonster wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here is Chinese user, I read this page by Google translate, at least English to Chinese is good for daily use.

I know that they focused on Chinese as a specific problem and have improved. I would expect it to be much better today than it was in 2006. Part of the problem was that there is a lot less grammar in Chinese than in Indo-European languages. So there are many ways to translate a given Indo-European sentence into Chinese, and you need to understand context on a Chinese sentence to properly translate it into an Indo-Eur…

thanks, this make sense. this is why student still can't write English report by it.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#99

Post by [deleted] »

ibebrett86 wrote: post #92
LeanderK wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also fair but a bit heartbreaking for me. Is this the product of mass academization? The motto of stanford is "The wind of freedom blows", not "mass produce uncritical engineers". A freedom to learn, to develop freely, to learn obscure math and think about the philosophical limits of computer science. I study in Tübingen, Germany and I love it that the top machine learning faculty here is located at a holistic, full…

people can choose how the tone of their education. some people may want brass tacks engineering and to focus on getting a job.. some people may want a philosophical approach... its a good thing that there are lots of diverse mindsets out there.

[deleted]

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#100

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

LeanderK wrote: post #84
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great. My CS degree got me a string of software engineering jobs. Which is fine I suppose, but what I was after was CS.

Also fair but a bit heartbreaking for me. Is this the product of mass academization? The motto of stanford is "The wind of freedom blows", not "mass produce uncritical engineers". A freedom to learn, to develop freely, to learn obscure math and think about the philosophical limits of computer science. I study in Tübingen, Germany and I love it that the top machine learning faculty here is located at a holistic, full…

I'm glad you ended up somewhere you can respect.

I won't say I'm stuck with the local university, not exactly, but let's just say that switching costs are high. And I'm mad as hell about the way the place has been gutted of any academic integrity and turned into a job training program.

If the employers want particular skills, they should train people in those skills, not offload it onto the universities.

Post reply on HN