Papers like those are the ones that we need to protect our ability to archive and distribute. Not David Geerts's "The Transformative Power of Inspiration" from the current issue of CACM https://cacm.acm.org/careers/the-transformative-power-of-ins.... (I am not making this up.) Thompson was competing with, let's say, Mooers and Schorre; Geerts has decided instead to compete with Jesus, the Buddha, and Norman Vincent Peale, and my brief reading of the article does not offer much hope for his prospects.
It seems safe to say that in 30 or 100 years' time nobody will cite Geerts's article as a turning point in the human understanding of inspiration, so if it's lost due to copyright restrictions, it probably won't matter that much.
At the other extreme, scholars seeking to understand the historical origins of object-orientation or personal computers would be crippled without access to material like Ingalls's paper. I'm not speculating—I'm speaking from experience, because lacking that access, I grew up thinking C++ was object-oriented!
But what do we see on the current version of the Ingalls paper that the ACM's web server just gave me? A note added in 02002 prohibiting public archival and redistribution:
> Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work or personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
I learned OO from lots of great resources, and may have been disadvantaged to have have never read Ingall's paper; which isn't yet cited in Wikipedia's OO page under History.
Anyone can upload a CC-BY article in full to anywhere, and anyone can upload a CC-BY-NC-ND article to anywhere noncommercial. ArXiv only accepts uploads from authors, though.
The "history" section of the Wikipedia article cites Kay's excellent "Early History of Smalltalk" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/155360.155364 which of course does cite Ingalls's 01978 POPL paper, as well as 17 other papers published by the ACM, by my count, more than any other single publisher except Xerox. That section also highlights the ACM conference OOPSLA and cites Borning's "Thinglab", published at OOPSLA. So access to historical ACM papers is extremely important for understanding the history of object-orientation.
And to claim that new articles aren't important or that the ACM will never publish a highly impactful paper again is absurd.
Enjoy your free access to a wealth of human knowledge you played no part in creating, rather than waving a meaningless declaration around demanding more for nothing and demeaning individual authors.
Other authors of research and I are the ones demanding this. We're the ones giving the gift horse in the first place. People who don't play a part in creating human knowledge generally aren't interested in reading papers about how hard-to-use software that's no longer available worked on obsolete computers they don't have access to, especially when the problems that software solved are problems they don't have.
I'm not demanding that the ACM do more. I'm demanding that they do less, by renouncing their right to sue other people for legally archive and redistribute ACM papers, so the ACM don't bear the full responsibility of doing so themselves. That way, I can do more of that wealth-of-knowledge-creating stuff you're so excited about, benefiting the ACM's members. It's a win-win.
It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing. That affects how we write literally every line of code in every language today except maybe assembly. Maybe one of the LLM papers might compete?
On a different note, it seems like you mostly post comments on HN in order to personally attack other commenters, as you are doing here, and to advocate political positions. That isn't what the site is for. If you keep doing it, they're going to ban you.
> It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing.
Ok, disclaimer that I am not a computer scientist (work in semiconductors so only tangentially related). But, this statement has the same "end of history" energy has the famous Philipp von Jolly quote about end of theoretical physics:
"In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes."
I'm not claiming you are saying its end of CS, just the claim that there cannot be a new paradigm discovered in CS doesn't sit right with me.
I think there's an enormous amount that can still be discovered, including new paradigms. I don't agree with Ken Thompson's opinion that people studying informatics today are unlucky because the most interesting stuff is already done.
But I don't think it's especially controversial to claim that Galileo and Newton had more of an impact on physics than Maxwell and Einstein or than anyone since. You could maybe quibble about Gauss and Lagrange, but Kip Thorne and Ed Witten are much more similar to Galileo than Galileo was to Descartes or Aristotle.
You might be able to cause an Einstein-like revolution in informatics—LLMs in particular seem like they have a good chance of doing that. But the field those new paradigms revolutionize will probably be recognizably the field that was largely defined by papers published in CACM in the 60s and 70s.
Also, although this isn't relevant to my thesis that probably nobody will publish such an impactful paper again, the ACM is especially unlikely to. "Attention is All You Need" https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3... got published in NIPS 2017 rather than CACM or even an ACM conference. You could imagine a timeline where CACM was the Cell or Lancet of informatics and published papers like AiAYN instead of "The Transformative Power of Inspiration". But that's not the one we're in.
> Other authors of research and I are the ones demanding this. We're the ones giving the gift horse in the first place. People who don't play a part in creating human knowledge generally aren't interested in reading papers about how hard-to-use software that's no longer available worked on obsolete computers they don't have access to, especially when the problems that software solved are problems they don't have.
You (and I) are free to publish in venues that meet our requirements.
> I'm not demanding that the ACM do more. I'm demanding that they do less, by renouncing their right to sue other people for legally archive and redistribute ACM papers, so the ACM don't bear the full responsibility of doing so themselves. That way, I can do more of that wealth-of-knowledge-creating stuff you're so excited about, benefiting the ACM's members. It's a win-win.
I am not at all worried about this, and there's no real reason for you to be either (the odds of the ACM library vanishing is almost 0), so it seems like you're being needlessly hostile.
> It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing. That affects how we write literally every line of code in every language today except maybe assembly. Maybe one of the LLM papers might compete?
I'm sorry, but this is absurd. "Attention is all you need" comes to mind as a recent example of a highly impactful paper (not published in an ACM venue, but you're now expanding your claim to the entire field of CS).
> On a different note, it seems like you mostly post comments on HN in order to personally attack other commenters, as you are doing here, and to advocate political positions. That isn't what the site is for. If you keep doing it, they're going to ban you.
The odds of the ACM library vanishing are the same as the odds that you, personally, are going to die: at least 1000:1 in favor.† The only question is whether it happens before the relevant copyrights expire. Anyone who can't convince CloudFlare they're human has already lost access to the ACM library.
I've already addressed your "You are free to publish" argument.
I'm being hostile because your comment, in addition to being factually incorrect in a way that demonstrates your complete unfamiliarity with the subject matter, consisted almost entirely of personal attacks on me. You accused me of "looking a gift horse in the mouth", of playing "no part" in "creating" "human knowledge", and "demanding more for nothing". Now you're implying you thought that was friendly rhetoric? Do you expect anyone to believe that? How stupid do you think other people are?
I already gave "Attention is all you need" as a recent example of a possibly highly impactful paper in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44734480. The fact that it wasn't published in an ACM venue is one of the reasons that the ACM's policy on new papers is relatively inconsequential compared to their policy on existing papers.
______
† I'd say 1:0 in favor, but rationally speaking, we can't completely exclude the possibility that all of this is some sort of hallucination or simulation, or that time will stop tomorrow so that everything that exists at that time will never vanish, and so on. But, under the usual presumptions that the universe is objectively real and everything in it vanishes sooner or later, the ACM Digital Library is absolutely guaranteed to vanish. And if you think it's inconceivable that it will be destroyed by political machinations within a few years, did you predict two years ago that the US would vote in favor of Russia invading Ukraine in the UN?
Not necessarily, various objects can look completely different in different wavelengths and it's not really possible to interpolate without taking a picture of each part of the spectrum.
The quote is confusing, because it's not always clear which Hall brother "Hall" refers to. Edward Hall, who developed the Minuteman missiles, was the brother of Theodore Hall, the spy. After reading the source article: <https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ted-hall-espionage-f...>, I can annotate the quote with first names:
"journalist Dave Lindorff, writing in The Nation on January 4, 2022, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Hall's FBI file in 2021. This 130-page file included communications between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the head of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Gen. Joseph F. Carroll, showing that Carroll had effectively blocked Hoover's intended pursuit of [Theodore] Hall and Sax, probably fearing that [Theodore] Hall's arrest would have, in the political climate of the McCarthy Era, forced the Air Force to furlough and lose their top missile expert, Edward Hall. Carroll, a former top aide to Hoover before he became the first head of the USAF OSI, ultimately allowed Hoover's agents to question Ed Hall on June 12, 1951 (with an OSI officer monitoring the interview). Within several weeks of that session, the Air Force, which had conducted and completed its own investigation into Edward Hall's loyalty (having their own investigators question him four times), promoted him to Lt. Colonel, and later Colonel, and elevated him from assistant director to director of its missile development program. The promotions were a clear slap in the face to Hoover. Ed Hall went on to complete the development of the Minuteman missile program, and then retired."
I think you may have misunderstood the proposal. Your 3rd party library example would have to write `pystd2025::HashMap<pystd2025::U8String, size_t> member;`. Isn't that stable?
From the post:
The sample code above used the pystd namespace. It does not actually exist. Instead it is defined like this in the cpp file:
#include <pystd2025.hpp>
namespace pystd = pystd2025;
I download videos I use for teaching. In future classes, I can still provide students with the video even if it disappears from YouTube. This happens from time to time.
I bet you might run into some interesting problems trying to represent white with two wavelengths. For example, colorblind people (7% of the population) might not perceive your white as white. And I wonder if there is more widespread variation in human eye responses to single wavelengths between primary colors that is not classified as colorblindness but could affect the perception of color balance in a 2-wavelength display.
