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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#461

Post by msdos »

alankay wrote: post #158
dookahku wrote: post #146

You invented a lot of what I'm using this very instant to compose this message. I yearn to do great works of engineering and art, which I consider what you have done. How do you come up with ideas?

There's coming up with ideas: learn to dream while you are awake, the ideas are there. There's coming up with a good idea: learn how to not get buried in your ideas (most are mediocre down to bad even for people who have "good idea skills"!) I write down ideas in notebooks to get rid of them. Every once in a while one will capture a different point of view. And, there's the Princeton Tea joke of scientists comparing…

How much impact have actual dreams had in your work? Have you ever gotten ideas or answers in dreams?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#462

Post by alankay1 »

a_c wrote: post #433
alankay wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend Neil Postman (our best media critic for many years) advocated teaching children to be "Guerilla Warriors" in the war of thousands of entities trying to seize their brains for food. Most children -- and most parents, most people -- do not even realize the extent to which this is not just aggressive, but regressive ...

Can you elaborate more on that?

Neil's idea was that all of us should become aware of the environments we live in and how our brain/minds are genetically disposed to accommodate to them without our being very aware of the process, and, most importantly, winding up almost completely unaware of what we've accommodated to by winding up at a "new normal".

The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science "The world is not as it seems". Here, it's "As a human being I'm a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress". Getting aware of how useful cravings for salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, etc., turn into a problem when these are abundant and consumer companies can load foods with them....

And, Neil points out -- in books like "Amusing Ourselves To Death" and "The End Of Childhood" -- we have cravings for "news" and "novelty" and "surprise" and even "blinking", etc. which consumer companies have loaded communications channels with ...

Many of these ideas trace back to McLuhan, Innis, Ong, etc.

Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#465

Post by olantonan »

alankay1 wrote: post #317
olantonan wrote: post #312

Does it suck getting old for you? Do you have stamina to make new stuff? I'm old, very hard to stay on top of all the changes.

It doesn't suck "getting old" -- and you only find out about stamina by trying to do things ... (We are fortunate that most of what is "new" is more like "particular 'news'" rather than actually "new". From the standpoint of actual categorical change, things have been very slow the last 30 years or so.)

About categorical change, I agree... seems like everybody is just busy optimizing stuff invented in the 70s.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#466

Post by alankay »

9erdelta wrote: post #435
alankay wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be the case that people were admonished to "not re-invent the wheel". We now live in an age that spends a lot of time "reinventing the flat tire!" The flat tires come from the reinventors often not being in the same league as the original inventors. This is a symptom of a "pop culture" where identity and participation are much more important than progress...

This is incredibly hard hitting and I'm glad I read it, but I'm also afraid it would "trigger" quite a few people today. What steps can a person take to get out of pop culture and try to get into the same league as the inventors? Incredibly stupid question to have to ask but I feel really lost sometimes.

I think it is first a recognition problem -- in the US we are now embedded in a pop culture that has progressed far enough to seriously hurt places that hold "developed cultures". This pervasiveness makes it hard to see anything else, and certainly makes it difficult for those who care what others think to put much value on anything but pop culture norms.

The second, is to realize that the biggest problems are imbalance. Developed arts have always needed pop arts for raw "id" and blind pushes of rebellion. This is a good ingredient -- like salt -- but you can't make a cake just from salt.

I got a lot of insight about this from reading McLuhan for very different reasons -- those of media and how they form an environment -- and from delving into Anthropology in the 60s (before it got really politicized). Nowadays, books by "Behavioral Economists" like Kahneman, Thaler, Ariely, etc. can be very helpful, because they are studying what people actually do in their environments.

Another way to look at it is that finding ways to get "authentically educated" will turn local into global, tribal into species, dogma into multiple perspectives, and improvisation into crafting, etc. Each of the starting places stays useful, but they are no longer dominant.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#468

Post by jjnoakes »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #451
quantumhobbit wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If it takes me longer to figure out how to use your library or framework than to just implement the functionality myself, there is no point in using the library. Some people claim you should still use the 3rd party solution because of the cost of supporting the extra code you have written. But bugs can exist in both my code and the 3rd party code and I understand how to fix bugs in my code much more easily.

Other points of consideration: My coworkers might not already know some library, but they definitely won't know my library. My coworker's code is just about as "3rd party" as any library - as is code I wrote as little as 6 months ago. Also my job owns that code, so rolling my own means I need to write another clone every time I switch employers - assuming there's no patents or overly litigious lawyers to worry about.…

It's all trade-offs.

If there happens to be a well-tested third party library that does what you want, doesn't increase your attack surface more than necessary, is supported by the community, is easy to get up and running with, and has a compatible license with what you are using it in, then by all means go for it.

For me and my work, I tend to find that something from the above list is lacking enough that it makes more sense to write it in-house. Not always, and not as a rule, but it works out that way quite a bit.

I would also argue that if coworkers couldn't write a library without a prohibitive number of bugs, then they won't be able to write application or glue code either. So maybe your issue wasn't in-house vs third party libraries, but the quality control and/or developer aptitude around you.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#469

Post by tomp »

numlocked wrote: post #240
losvedir wrote: post #168

At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered: * Graphical programming environment (they run the queries from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that) *…

SQL is declarative. Compare: for user in table_users: if user.is_active: return user.first_name; vs: SELECT first_name FROM users_table WHERE is_active It's unfortunate that the order of the clauses in SQL is "wrong" (e.g. you should say FROM, WHERE, SELECT: Define the universe of relevant data, filter it down, select what you care about), but it's still quite easy to wrap your mind around. You are asking the compute…

I fail to see a meaningful difference between these two approaches, especially if we transform the first one in a list comprehension:

    [user.first_name for user in table_users if user.is_active]

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#470

Post by alankay »

randomsearch wrote: post #454
alankay wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more than 23,000,000 books in the Library of Congress, and a good reader might be able to read 23,000 books in a lifetime (I know just a few people who have read more). So we are contemplating a lifetime of reading in which we might touch 1/10th of 1% of the extent books. We would hope that most of the ones we aren't able to touch are not useful or good or etc. So I think we have to put something more than…

General question about this figure, which I've seen before: > read 23,000 books in a lifetime As a very conservative lower bound, a person who lives to the age of 80 would have to read 0.79 books per day, from the day they were born, to reach this figure. Or, to put it another way, who has read 288+ books in the last year? I'm quite sceptical about this figure. Any thoughts as to how this might be possible? Are the p…

Yes, it is possible. It is partly developing a kind of fluency that is very similar to sight-reading music (this is a nice one to think about because you really have to grok what is there to do it, and you have to do it in real time at "prima vista").

Doing a lot of it is one of the keys! Doing it in a way that various short and long-term memories are involved is another key (rapid reading with comprehension of both text and music is partly a kind of memorization and buffering, etc.)

I don't think I've read 23,000 books in 76 years, but very likely somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 (I haven't been counting). Bertrand Russell easily read 23,000 books in his lifetime, etc.

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