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

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

dbreunig.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 79 posts

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#51

Post by The_Goonies1985 »

jcranmer wrote: post #18
The_Goonies1985 wrote: post #13

>"Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts, she built her mansion because she liked architecture." That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was su…

> That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house. Some tour guides have gone on record discussing their frustrations with having to repeat known falsehoods to guests. > Visit the house (the tour…

>The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house.

Sure, but we're dealing in oral-folklore that's over a century old here. I don't see any reason to value the earthquake-theory over the ghost-trap theory.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Except, of course, that modern academia is opposed to accepting, or investigating, anything paranormal (see Wikipedia etc).

I first visited the Winchester house in 1985, as a child, and it sure felt ghost infested to me back then. You can't get more scientific than that. My sister (also a child at the time) peer-reviewed my findings.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#53

Post by ericbarrett »

The_Goonies1985 wrote: post #13

>"Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts, she built her mansion because she liked architecture." That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was su…

> the tour is rad

As others have noted, the guides are full of tall tales. I grew up in San Jose and remember when the property next to the Winchester Mystery House was a drive-in theater, and before the House was fire-damaged. The B.S. was well-known even then. My father, who moved to San Jose in the 1950s, even explained it to me as a child after some friends who were into ghost stories told me about it.

I don't know if it's still there, but my favorite part of the site was the detached museum showing some of the earliest pieces developed by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. Easy to miss as it is not part of the house or the guided tour.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#54

Post by positron26 »

tptacek wrote: post #50
positron26 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used a similarly shaped argument with different nouns to highlight the ambiguity, and now you see why that's problematic. Don't just make blind assertions without linking it back to some concrete, at least arguing that some mechanism was *dominant*.

Right, but your similarly-shaped argument is clearly false, and mine clearly isn't. I can see now that you expanded your comment after I wrote my response. Please leave a marker ("later:" or something) when you do that.

[flagged]

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#55

Post by layer8 »

positron26 wrote: post #47
layer8 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. From the essay: “I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals,…

> Unix-philosophy small tools that constitute an important part of the GNU project The statement you chose makes a carve-out for Unix, not GNU. It doesn't support "not really."

What I'm saying "not really" to is the claim that the "cathedral" does only refer to the GNU project and not to proprietary closed source. This is not the case. It refers to certain portions of GNU, as well as to certain segments of proprietary closed source. Neither GNU nor proprietary closed source is a criterion for the "cathedral". The criterion is the size and complexity of the software, independent of whether it is proprietary or not, or closed source or not.

GNU follows the Unix philosophy. ESR wrote The Art of Unix Programming [0] in which he writes extensively about it. GNU was envisioned to be a clone of Unix [1].

[0] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/apa.html

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#56

Post by ghaff »

tptacek wrote: post #44
positron26 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNU didn't kick anything off. It was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing. What was in full swing was Open Source, powered by scratch-your-own-itch. What was taking time was for the business world to learn the lessons by both carrot (Linux) and stick (Unix Wars, vendor lock-in, dozens of crappy competing standards). When Steve Balmer winds up using your language, you moved the ball. Many id…

Huh? GNU absolutely kicked stuff off.

Arguably Linux wouldn’t have happened absent GNU although a lot of people I know argue that BSD would have eventually evolved to someplace like where Linux is today in spite of various legal and community factors holding it back.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#57

Post by positron26 »

layer8 wrote: post #55
positron26 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unix-philosophy small tools that constitute an important part of the GNU project The statement you chose makes a carve-out for Unix, not GNU. It doesn't support "not really."

What I'm saying "not really" to is the claim that the "cathedral" does only refer to the GNU project and not to proprietary closed source. This is not the case. It refers to certain portions of GNU, as well as to certain segments of proprietary closed source. Neither GNU nor proprietary closed source is a criterion for the "cathedral". The criterion is the size and complexity of the software, independent of whether i…

> The criterion is the size and complexity of the software

The criterion is the development process, not the complexity. Linux is complex, but not a Cathedral.

I don't want to split hair with your words more. For context, FSF hard liners since the dawn of the OSI were distorting the meaning of CatB to deflect criticism from themselves. FSF supporters also very successfully promoted "FLOSS" instead of bare _OSS, giving lots of later-comers the illusion that "free/libre" was an expansion pack for OSS when OSS came later, a very intentional evolution of the dogmatic "free" software movement.

The choice of "Cathedral" is an extremely obvious symbol when you consider the Protestant reformation as a defiance of Vatican, an overly central system where decisions can only flow from the top. There are a lot of metaphors ESR could have chosen from, but the "cathedral" rhymed with the undertones of the real tension between the many OSS practitioners who have divers motivations and the FSF's plan to slap GNU stickers on every piece of software on Earth while blessing their own cardinals at the FSF Vatican and excommunicating any dissent. Given that kind of very overt signalling, it's just not defensible to argue any other primary target than the FSF and the overly central development process they were dependent on to maintain control over projects.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#58

Post by ece »

The movie Winchester, book from a local author (https://www.losaltosonline.com/community/santa-clara-valley-...) and going to the tour itself makes me wonder if Sarah Winchester invites the controversy over why she built the house. What would a rich woman during her time do for fame that outlasts her? Chase crazy architecture ideas if you liked architecture maybe. Make it so the home becomes a public place.

The Winchester house a developer builds is only worth something if it delivers tangible value. The market clearly thinks one way, but plenty of people are still skeptical. The cathedral and bazaar delivered value in different ways, and the need came before the solution.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#59

Post by mrandish »

> 1,000 lines of code per commit is ~2 magnitudes higher than what a human programmer writes per day.

Relevant historical context: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

When Apple Lisa managers started requiring weekly line-of-code counts in 1982, Bill Atkinson had just rewritten QuickDraw's region engine with a simpler algorithm that was 6× faster and 2,000 lines shorter, so he submitted -2000 on the form. Management quietly stopped asking him to fill it out.

Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

#60

Post by knollimar »

I don't know if I buy the idea that using the vendor parts as examples given in the article align with the analogy.

Architecture is not that; MEP trades aren't architecture. If she used prefabbed wall assemblies or didn't do her own structural for critical parts the analogy would hold (I so not know if she did or did not either way). Plumbing is a completely separate trade the way trading stocks is separate from computing; it just happens to live in the house.

Post reply on HN