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

A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

prog21.dadgum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 80 posts

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#41

Post by bwarp »

eterps wrote: post #33
bwarp wrote: post #27

A complete understanding if you ask me is one which requires no impenetrable "black-box abstractions" to be substituted in the abstraction hierarchy. In the case of a CPU, you would have to have a full gate level understanding of it and an understanding of how the gates operate. To be honest, the "complete understanding" died way before the original post. It was the moment that they started building computers with in…

Will the game be changed once again when 3D printers will be able to print circuits?

Not until the printers can make their own CPUs and complex parts such as threaded rods. That is a long time off.

3d printers are supposedly promoted as printing themselves i.e. as self-replicating. They are not. They print a small fraction of their own non-complex parts.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#42

Post by JulianMorrison »

gaius wrote: post #35
JulianMorrison wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mainly because DOS couldn't do anything. If you want to reproduce the capabilities of DOS - single tasking, single threading file and screen IO in text or simple non-windowed graphics - you really wouldn't need to learn much more nowadays.

A lot of people did a lot of real work on DOS (or CP/M, or whatever) systems. And they knew a lot more than today's Ruby On Rail For Dummies crowd.

Not comparable. The then-contemporary equivalent to "today's Ruby On Rails For Dummies crowd" was hobbyist BASIC programmers.

The modern day equivalent to people making DOS jump hoops would be professional C++ games programmers.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#43

Post by gtani »

DanBC wrote: post #16
Spearchucker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, I disagree. Such a complete understanding is eminently possible. It is as easy to understand as any other complex system. You work at a high level of abstraction to understand the breadth of complexity, and then work down into the component level to understand the depth of complexity. Rinse, and repeat for every subsequent level. The caveat is that it takes time and dedication. I can't comment on whethe…

Clifford Stoll, in "The Cuckoo's Egg"[1] describes the hardest interview he ever had. The interviewer asked "Why is the sky blue?" and then, after Stoll gave his answer, asked "Why?" This process repeated several times, until Stoll was describing in great detail some advanced physics and chemistry and math. In that spirit: Please could you describe electron and hole flow in semiconductors? Why? Why? Why? There's lots…

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606653

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#44

Post by gaius »

bwarp wrote: post #40
gaius wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the original ARM was designed on a BBC Micro + 6502 Co-Pro. Amazing what "real work" you can get done on one :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History

I was the proud owner of an ARM copro [1] many years ago (I still have the Master it was plugged into) and the first Acorn RISC machine (an A310 with 512k RAM if I remember correctly). They were and still are extremely powerful and productive machines. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro_expansion_unit#ARM_Ev...

Returning to your original post,

We really are building things with too deep abstraction hierarchies causing knowledge to be divided

Abstraction is necessary, true, but it's not clear to me what the abstraction-level we have now really gets us. In other words, say we had a BBC micro with a 2Ghz 6502 in it. What productive computing tasks that we do now could it not do? Or let's imagine an Atari ST with a 2Ghz 68000, to get us a little more memory. What could it not do, that we need to do now? I'm struggling to think of anything.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#45

Post by epscylonb »

haraldk wrote: post #34

In our society, my take on this is that one shouldn't try to understand everything. We get smarter as a whole if different individuals focus on different areas. I'm not saying no one should collaborate, but 6 billion jack-of-all-trades, master-of-nothing simply is not smart enough to care for the next billion. Read "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr, it discuss this very topic. Humanity had the the same discussion when…

I agree, but apparently we are in the age of the polymath.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#46

Post by bnegreve »

Well, on the other hand, if you know a bit about hardware, it is fairly easy to build a simple yet fully functional processor from basic components, implementing an OS with most common features and a compiler with advanced error checking and an optimizer is also doable. You probably need to be familiar with math as well. Now anyone with this knowledge can become very expert in whatever field he is interested in. Why would you know everything, from electrons to software ?

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#47

Post by suprgeek »

A complete understanding is no longer necessary. It never was. Think about any time in history where a complete understand WAS necessary. -

Now we come to the question of when a complete understanding was Possible. As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. Fewer and fewer people knew the internals of the most complex invention of humanity (computers). I think at some point in the IBM PC age, the number of people with a complete understanding dwindled to zero.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#48

Post by js2 »

I learned on an Apple II. It came with the necessary manually to almost fully understand it, including a hardware manual that included a schematic of the motherboard. As I recall, the ICs were treated as blackboxes by that manual, but barely so. By the Apple IIe, I think this level of documentation had been dropped by Apple, but they were still at least making an effort to explain the inner workings of the machine:

http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Manuals/de...

Ch 4: The Inside Story.

When you connected your disk drive to your Apple IIe, you popped the top and got your first look at the integrated circuits, or chips, inside the computer. In this chapter, you'll learn what some of the chips do, and how they are used to process your data.

...

It's interested that the more complicated the computer got, the more sparse the end-user documentation became.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#49

Post by Confusion »

bwarp wrote: post #27

A complete understanding if you ask me is one which requires no impenetrable "black-box abstractions" to be substituted in the abstraction hierarchy. In the case of a CPU, you would have to have a full gate level understanding of it and an understanding of how the gates operate. To be honest, the "complete understanding" died way before the original post. It was the moment that they started building computers with in…

Then blacksmiths in the Middle Ages did not 'understand' the forging of swords. Only modern materials science allowed us to 'understand' why forging creates harder metal.

This is a semantic discussion about the meaning of 'understanding': does it mean you can globally explain how the system works and could come to understand the smallest detail of every part? Or does it mean you understand the smallest detail of every part?

The latter is a nonsensical definition: if that is the case, then nobody understands processors, because nobody understands transistors, because nobody understands quantum mechanics, because nobody understands why the fundamental forces act in certain ways. Nobody understands Newton's laws, nobody understands where babies come from and nobody understands what it means to perform a 'computation'[1].

Of course, that means the former was also a nonsensical defintion.

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#50

Post by mark_l_watson »

The article talks about what I would call "pre-emptive understanding," but what about "just in time understanding?"

Have a good general understanding of a platform (all the way down to hardware, if you wish) and know where to look when either curiosity or need arises.

Post reply on HN