Wolfram's ego has always been the most off putting thing about him and his project. I was quite disappointed by the lack of Clojure relevant material in this Keynote and the unabashed emphasis on himself and his product.
On the contrary I wonder what he would have been capable of if he was not such a doucherocket. Man’s clearly a genius but how much? Could he have taken a real crack at AGI instead of homework helper pro?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but this reads to me like you were trying to get a rise out of him and succeeded... it's posing a question that includes the assertion that he's hypocrite (talk on oss virtues -> own software not oss) live in front of an audience.
Asking about a perceived inconsistency isn't always "trying to get a rise out of someone". It's absolutely wild to me that people are saying that posing this question is implicitly bad faith, or trying to "humiliate" Wolfram or whatever.
And like, while I generally think OSS == good, there's lots of software that I think doesn't need to be (or even shouldn't be) OSS, but I have coherent reasons for that.
insults aren't an argument, if Wolfram doesn't want to get called out for being a hypocrite a good solution is to not be a hypocrite. The fact Wolfram had no actual answer beyond an insult and dodging the question is pretty telling
Insults are justified if some dick is asking a question trying to get a rise out of him. There is ZERO need to answer questions of that nature.
As self absorbed as wolfrsam is it's obvious what's going on. There is NOTHING hypocritical about it. He wants to profit off of his own wolfram language. But at the same time he appreciates the ideals, benefits and other great things that come out of OSS.
It's like the video game industry. Let me put it this way, if Closed source didn't exist video games at the triple A level likely wouldn't exist. If open source didn't exist, linux likely wouldn't exist either. Both are good.
But I don't have to explain this to you. We all are aware of this on some level. Everyone and I mean everyone literally knows what I just said.
Wolfram talking about the good parts of OSS doesn't justify some ass hole from the audience subtly trying to call him a hypocrite with a targeted question like that because BOTH closed source and open source are good. Wolframs response was justified there was no need for him to spend extra time explaining something that's totally obvious to someone who not only already knows the answer but is only asking the question for nefarious reasons.
Well he could answer with whatever his reasoning is that may or may not align with the things you suggest. People take that seriously, including me.
Or he could be rude and all I hear is "because I'm a hypocrite and not a great guy."
You can answer to justify your decisions without being a jerk. Even if it's a jerk trying to get a rise out of you who does it. If you're the honored guest speaker with everyone competing to kiss your wealthy, famous backside your jerkdom isn't really equivalent to a student asking what appears to be a stunningly obvious question that we don't even know how it was phrased.
But maybe I'm so naieve to have seen people respond in a reasonable way to aggressive questions from the floor often enough makes me think it's the right way to go.
> Well he could answer with whatever his reasoning is that may or may not align with the things you suggest. People take that seriously, including me.
He could've but the GP knew he was starting shit by asking that question. Don't expect people to take the high path when you're trying to mess with them. Seriously, if a cop is about to arrest you and you spit in his face don't be surprised when the cop knocks your teeth out when nobody is looking.
>You can answer to justify your decisions without being a jerk
Definitely. The problem here was GP was being a jerk and trying to make wolfram look bad by inciting a reaction. He succeeded but who really is the true ass hole here?
>But maybe I'm so naieve to have seen people respond in a reasonable way
Sure those people who respond that way are socially savvy. They know how to manipulate the situation to make themselves look good. Wolfram CLEARLY is not that type of person. But does that make him an ass? Nah. Shutting down a jerk who asks a insidious question like that is not the best response but it's an appropriate one. An eye for an eye.
>1)Stephen Wolfram is not a police officer and has not been spat at in the face.
That's right I hold stephen to less of a standard than police officers. Police officers should uphold a law and stay neutral. If you're not a police officer and someone insults you, there's no need to stay neutral. A retort in return to an insult is 100% viable.
>2) You don't know the tone of the question and neither do I. The question is obvious and expected and deserves an answer in such a context.
The true intent of the question can be deduced from the content of the question itself. The tone is irrelevant in that case. The answer to the question as I repeatedly said is obvious so the question was asked not for an answer... the question was asked as a deliberate attack. That is the only logical explanation given that the answer to the question is 100% known by the asker.
An attack DOES NOT DESERVE an answer.
In fact any additional tonality that went along with the question would be manipulative. The asker can use deceptive tonality to disguise the question as innocent but we know clearly from the content of the question that it is an attack despite the tonality.
Everyone and I mean everyone knows why mathematica and windows is closed source. There is ZERO need to ask such a question; that is unless your intentions are insidious.
>Everyone and I mean everyone knows why mathematica and windows is closed source.
Nope. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone knows why any other person has made a complex decision unless they say, and even then we're assuming they're being honest and sometimes people lie for PR! [1]
I'm of the opinion that anyone turning up to speak at a licensing conference and refusing to talk about the licensing of their own stuff is heroically silly. I mean just wow. Anyone not anticipating being questioned about their licensing in an open question time or who can't handle an "attack" at a percieved disconnect between words and actions about licensing at a licensing conference probably shouldn't be there or indeed out in public. Responding with no substance and a personal slur (which is what is reported here, but I haven't confirmed) is really, really, weak and poor at best.
[1] For example Wolfram's company isn't listed and he can't spend the money he has made, making a very different decision framework for him from the CEO of microsoft, beholdent to the board representing the shareholders. Which was also the framework that made Solaris into OpenSolaris, arguably far too late to preserve SUN wealth. These are difficult and complex decisions that people are very sure of and frequently get very wrong even from a pure wealth-maximisation standpoint.
Sure, it may say something about his (in)ability to be diplomatic or emotionally controlled, but someone can rightly feel unobligated to respond to an accusation of hypocrisy in the middle of a q/a
The question seems very reasonable. It's certainly not comfortable, but in this context I would expect an answer definitely (the question was not childish or foolish as far as I can tell)
Indeed the overall project seems quite fine, but I think it has no chance of getting near Wolfram's aspirations due to its closed nature. It's just a really big proposition that couldn't fit a project like this. (If I recall correctly Wolfram described it himself as the equivalent of Google but storing all structured data of the world within). Google can do it because they don't make many promises on their data. But clearly they seem to want to make promises (i.e. structure) the data, so data collection and data cleaning might need manual curation (even with deep learning advances) which is just fit for a communitarian effort. A single company can't have experts in all fields curating datasets of everything, can it? (and if it can, should it?)
I had the same impression; however, after seeing a few livestreams with his employees discussing development, bugs, and design ideas, he does seem respectful and does constructive criticism quite well. I know that's not "closed door" behavior, but seems genuine.
Wolfram definitely has a big ego. It makes him less likeable but none of it justifies what you did.
Knowing what you did... trying to humiliate him in front of a crowd I'm glad he dunked on you. I can't imagine working with some young person who thinks he's smart trying to humiliate and overshadow someone for no reason.
There is nothing Bizarre here. That term is offensive and it's used insidiously in place of calling someone strange or weird. It's a term used to circumvent the rules here at HN, because by calling someone bizarre you avoided a direct insult, but the intent is 100% evident. I hate this political shit. Be straight. Don't play games. I have a different opinion than you. There is NOTHING "bizarre" about it.
I assume that you, like the GP, is human and of average human intelligence. So you can deduce several facts from this scenario. First of all... ALL of the REASONS for why someone would develop closed source software ARE COMPLETELY OBVIOUS. I know about the reasons, you know about those reasons, the audience knows about those reasons and the question asker 100% knows about those reasons. NOTHING needs to be explained. Why does microsoft keep windows closed source? Is the concept really that foreign to you? Why don't you ask that question to the CEO of microsoft? Send him an email because it's something you truly wonder about!
It's so Bizarre that you're not aware of the why windows or mathematica is closed source! See what I did there? Nothing is truly bizarre here it's just me imitating your manipulative language.
No what's really going on is you're taking a side and you're arguing for your team OSS despite the fact that you're aware of the insidiousness of asking this question to wolfram himself. Don't take sides, don't call people bizarre. Stay logical and argue for the situation at hand is my advice to you.
Anyway, From all of this, logically, you can derive the fact that the GP didn't ask that question to ascertain an answer BECAUSE the answer is obvious and HE ALREADY KNOWS THE ANSWER. The only other reason why he would ask a question like that is to start drama. He got drama, but likely didn't expect for the tables to be turned and get his own ass humiliated.
Mr. Wolfram 100% could have responded with the reasons I mentioned and those reasons would have been the better answer it would have made him look more mature and not ignite the wrath of the man who asked the question. But obviously Mr. Wolfram isn't a person I would consider socially savy so he took offense to an insult that was disguised as a question and responded in kind... which is not the best/smartest answer, but an appropriate one.
That's hilarious. I can't deny that he is incredibly intelligent, but it always makes me think what he could accomplish if he had humility and could get along well with other highly intelligent technologists
The wolfram language is at its core is M-expressions (what John McCarthy originally was going to use to program lisp ) . Also, he saw that symbolic programming languages were something you could productize and he beat out all the lisp machines and kept it as software. He seized the opportunity of making a product that is useful to Mathematicians and basically has a huge vendor lock in from universities. Sage is very far behind as an open source solution.
With the wolfram language he wants to make a larger and larger libraries and try to make it more of a general purpose language but it has similar problems that lisp has but also that it’s really only targeting academia. I tried to use the cloud version but it never was really useful.
With wolfram alpha it was interesting to use but now Google can perform most of what that does now
The biggest problem with the language is that it’s extremely hard to learn and mathematicians are moving off of the platform.
Yeah, Mathematica is basically MACSYMA on steroids. Wolfram is indubitably a genius, and he took it far past what the general research community and even the Lisp research community did. But I can't blame him for choosing to become a billionaire rather than a vulnerable and derided eccentric like RMS. I hope he chooses to share his work after his death.
I totally agree . Mathematica is not just macsyma on steroids its like the Java of symbolic computation. He is literally putting every kind of scientific and or mathematic concept and adding it to the language.
While I would never be one to question the value and power of internet forums to facilitate meaningful social interaction, I do question that this value can (or should) be realized by financial markets. This makes me very concerned that the social capital harbored on the site will be transmutated into revenue via advertising models and thereby be diluted or even extinguished.
As someone who enjoys technology and liberty this is a very disturbing development. We do not have a well diversified portfolio of options of tools and platforms for communication due to corporations monopolizing and conspiring together to concentrate power.
Web is as open and free as it has ever been. Arguably more so given that the barrier to entry e.g. cost for creating and promoting a site has come down. And we have examples such as Parler and TheDonald.win.
You just don't have a right to demand that the Facebook and Apple's of the world help to amplify your voice.
threeseed, I do not believe that you have an accurate mental model of the world or technology and social platforms in particular.
It could be argued that "the web is as open and free as it ever has been", but I do not think this argument could be made honestly. Even though many of the mechanisms for accessing websites exist as they did many years ago, the "surface area" of the internet that most people are able to discover and access is significantly reduced due to search engine algorithms (which are monopolies) and advertisement allowing individuals to pay for traffic and attention. Moreover, in the present moment we are near a peak level of intrusive data collection and surveillance.
Do you truly believe that the web for the average user in 2020 is as free as the web for the average user in 2000? Please give it some thought (15-30 minutes of quiet reflection) and let me know what you think.
>the "surface area" of the internet that most people are able to discover and access is significantly reduced due to search engine algorithms
On the contrary, Facebook promoting incendiary content because people (angrily) highly engage with it vastly increases the surface area of the internet. Fringe sites get much more attention than they ever could before Facebook existed.
Well this is actually somewhat disturbing, but if you think of social media corporations as organisms that are trying to further their own self-interest it does make sense.
In order to protect and preserve their monopolies and undue influence over others, it seems reasonable that they would suffocate and kill any competitors that would threaten their survival. This includes silencing their political rivals in addition to other corporate structures and platforms.
Very disturbing example of censorship and de-platforming. The rationale for permanent ban seems both reactionary and subjective.
The scant analysis provided under the "Assessment" stretches the words and context of the tweet to imbue it with the most uncharitable meaning possible.
This should be dismaying to non-political and political citizens alike, as well as supporters and non-supporters of this individual. I believe this because subduing your opposition with force (whether it be physical or social) is never an honorable way to triumph.
That's not what censorship means. Actual censorship, which was seen in Eastern and Central Europe and some other places during communism meant that you're literally not allowed to say certain things. You'd be prosecuted by the government if someone reported you or the government found out in any way that you were spreading certain kind of "forbidden" ideas. It didn't matter where you said it, when you said it, to how many people you said it, and if you used your own platform to say it or someone else's. It was simply not allowed.
What Americans call censorship is not that. Anyone who is banned from a particular platform still has freedom of speech. They can say whatever they want to whoever they want without the fear of government prosecution. If Twitter bans someone, it doesn't mean that the banned person can't speak somewhere else. Everyone has a right to moderate their private property which includes digital space. Although banned from Twitter and some other platforms, Trump didn't lose his freedom of speech. He can say whatever he wants. It's just that he will need an alternative way to reach a big audience because major companies specializing in providing big audiences don't want to provide him their services.
This seems like a fairly antiquated view that does not map well to the current era or actual definition of censorship (A cursory internet search will help to better inform you as to what censorship entails and what actions may reside within the purview of censorship).
One does not have to prosecuted by the government in order to have their speech censored, access to a public forum revoked, or have their livelihood and career threatened.
There are things you simply cannot say within our society due the fact that they are deemed subversive or improper. This arbitrary ability to ascribe these labels to speech and thereby limit its reach and punish those who speak it is the very abuse of power that is characterized as "censorship".
A government is one institution that concentrates power that can be a censor, but in modern times there are alternative organizational structures that are both powerful and global that can perform the act of "censorship".
> This seems like a fairly antiquated view that does not map well to the current era
It very well could be. I grew up in Croatia, I was born right after Yugoslavia fell apart together with its communist regime, so I might be biased towards what I've heard about those times from older members of my family, my history classes, interaction with peers from both Croatia and other ex-communist countries in Europe through youth exchanges, etc, although I was lucky enough to be born in the right time to not live during that period. I'm pretty sure that my views on censorship, free markets, government intervetion, etc. were shaped by my environment. So every time that I read someone claiming that what we see in the US right now is censorship what comes to my mind is that people in Europe during communism would be happy if if was like that during their times.
Well it is also important to note that censorship is a continuous variable. Censorship can gradually increase over time, and what many people in the US are observing is that even in the absence of any censorship (Note: I do not think there is an absence of censorship), the mechanisms for application of censorship are becoming evermore potent.
Think of it in the language of physics. Regardless of the "Kinetic Energy" of censorship, the "Potential Energy" for censorship in is the US with concentrated power to decide who can say what and effectively remove people from public life and discourse is likely far greater than existed in a country like Croatia (which you believe to have had far greater "Kinetic Energy" than the US has).
If Social media and the news media were not around to radicalize and polarize Americans, this would not have happened along with many other events this year :)
If I were a foreign actor with malign intent towards the US, I would be very pleased with how things are playing out.
1. Corrosion of formerly stalwart American Institutions
2. The majority of Americans being habituated to mistrust their fellow American
3. The ability for a few entities with concentrated power to harness and control the nervous systems of millions of Americans
> If I were a foreign actor with malign intent towards the US, I would be very pleased with how things are playing out.
Then you wouldn't have thought enough about it. Look at what happened when the USSR collapsed: the world became less stable and nuclear tech and scientists found their ways in unsavory countries.
There were some civil wars or frozen conflicts that are still a pain today (Transnitria, breakaway republics in Georgia, the whole Ukraine thing, and more recently Azerbaijan vs Armenia).
When the enemy has nukes you want him to be a known quantity, stable and predictable.
HN discourages the sort of clever-yet-unsubstantial one-liner jokes that earn a lot of karma on Reddit. It reserves the space for thoughtful discussions. Getting rid of the memes simply doesn't fly in other online communities.
I'd also put money on the average age of HN commenter being higher than that of other internet communities.
I know of other rich and healthy online communities, but they are fairly niche.
I also feel the text-only format and less visible “points”/“likes” has something to do with it. It’s harder to be attention-grabbing with just text. In many ways, HN feels to me like an online email thread.
> I'd also put money on the average age of HN commenter being higher than that of other internet communities.
That might be true. However, from my experience maturity is way more important than actual age. Some maturity comes with age, but a lot of it is also individual behaviour in my opinion.
The Overton window is real, but it's fairly wide open.
I could post a pro-socialism argument and get upvoted, I could post a pro-capitalism argument and get upvoted. I could criticize GMOs, or praise them. I could probably defend Trump if I'm thoughtful about it, or decry him.
Can I say "Capitalism/Socialism/GMOs/Trump is dumb" and get upvoted? No. Can I point out problems (or benefits) of them? Yes--so long as I'm not inflammatory about it.
When a post involves gender and/or race, the Overton window is quite narrow. Those appear to be the most controversial with the comments section filled with snark and polemics.
No, not really. You can't 'disagree' with pedophile politician rings any more than you can disagree with the moon landing having taken place. The one is reality, the other is not. That's what the nonsensical stands for.
It is quite interesting what people are willing to believe when individuals in power state these things with great certainty. But personally I prefer to have my fiction and real-world views separated by a healthy dose of skepticism.
Many good reasons are already mentioned, but I also think a big one is because dang is here full time. This is job and he does it well.
Almost all other internet communities have mods that just do it on a volunteer basis. If those communities are big enough to be vibrant, that also means that a couple volunteer mods can't cut it. Luckily YC has the budget for keeping dang around. I would bet this place would be like most other poorly moderated communities without him.
There are no communities like this because of Eternal September like phenomena. If HN acquires a million readers tomorrow, it'll be unrecognizable very soon. Nicheness on its own creates valuable communities. Another contributing factor is the 'appalling' UI. I love it, everyone else on HN loves it but an outsider is immediately repelled
> Another contributing factor is the 'appalling' UI. I love it, everyone else on HN loves it but an outsider is immediately repelled
I think it's quite funny that the UI we prefer is so different from the ones we create in our daytime jobs. And it's also very different from the UIs in most "Show HN" posts.
I would be interested to know how many active users HN has, maybe it's because I'm in the bubble but I certainly feel like most people I meet who are "online" already know about it.
I have certainly noticed "ebbs" of an Eternal September vibe here too, but they quickly dispel and the types of comments that come from it get downvoted anyway, so it's not as noticeable.
Regardless, I am so grateful to have a place of meaningful discussion, and of so many different topics.
I think that nicheness strongly correlates with quality, but HN isn’t niche in the same way a forum on a specific topic is niche. Yet HN is still of decent quality. I guess what I’m trying to say is, why aren’t there more of these high-quality yet diverse communities.
Edit: Maybe being high quality and diverse is its niche!
> Another contributing factor is the 'appalling' UI
This was actually my only quibble with HN. I love the simplicity and the fact that HN doesn't suffer from the "obesity" that plagues modern websites, but I felt it could use some features.
For instance, the ability to filter it by time (it does have that filter already for days, months and so on, but not hours), or have an official app for the site could be awesome. Or a notification system. I already solved the first two of these issues by using 3rd party solutions (hckrnews.com and Materialistic) but supporting them officially would be great. I didn't find a solution for the 3rd issue, though; at least not one that I felt was useful.
But others don't feel the same way. When I googled around to see why these issues weren't addressed, the consensus seemed to be that there's no need for it for one reason or another. Oh, well. Other benefits of HN outweigh these minor issues, though. So overall, not that big of a deal for me.
The only feature I'd like is to be able to collapse threads. When there's lots of comments it can sometimes be almost impossible to work out what comment someone is replying to.
Oh, how weird. I've seen that [-] for god knows how long but it never even occurred to me that it would be a collapse button. For me it's in the "wrong" place, I'm used to expand/collapse functionality being on the left of the item to be expanded/collapsed. Thanks for that.
Professional moderation is expensive. Keeping HN as good as it is is literally dang's job, paid for by YCombinator (who benefit from it by using it to recruit and then promote startups).
This makes sense, although it clearly isn't enough to induce HN-like moderation. Surely there are professional moderators on similar platforms such as Reddit (besides just their volunteer subreddit moderators), and there are certainly professional moderators on Facebook as well given their revenue streams. Neither website has arrived at something like Hacker News, at least as I value it. Part of this might be the scale of those websites because it's presumably difficult to scale up moderation teams that require human training.
It is extremely tiring moderating a forum. PG even said it is worst than doing a Startup. And if you have done any sort of public forum moderation, you will know you could get burn out veryquickly.
From ~14 to 23, I volunteer moderated some gaming forums (~300k+ user size).
By and large, it wasn't terrible. Most people are nice and some have bad days.
What it did convince me of was the immense value of (a) down-featuring new users & (b) temp-banning.
Most of the trouble stemmed from either new users (by definition, uncultured) or a small subset of toxic users.
Because ultimately, communities are like biological systems, with far too many processes and independent entities going on to be controlled. In environments like that, toxic behavior can be cancerous by convincing others it's acceptable. And by the time you've found the source, multiple people are already acting like that too. Hate breeds hate.
Burn out is real though, mostly because it's a never ending job, and you tend to see a stream of people at their worst.
So thanks, dang et al. I appreciate you on the job, and I appreciate you more staying on the job.
I assume they meant restrictions or limits are applied to new users. New users could be prevented from creating a new topic or be limited on the amount of comments they can make.
All other communities are money driven ad bloated and later sponsored with bunch of crap products. And motivation is to promote stuff nonstop and moderation allows it. HN doesn't do any of those.
> Why aren’t there more of these communities, and if there is I’d like to know.
Come on, the Internet is vast, of course there are many communities like this one. But most people in those communities, like myself, do not advertise them. We do not want them ruined. You find them either by chance, or by invitation.
I think that the major filter is this: In order to receive the main benefit from Hacker News you will have to expend effort in reading and digesting the content, and engaging in meaningful discussion where possible. There are much better places to gain instant gratification.
