i don't understand this response. are you truly unaware that the truths of many policies are "verifiable" but not practically verifiable until many many years after they are implemented. again - this is the whole point of the study of history.
Obviously it isn't legit to use multiple accounts like this. I've banned this one. If you don't want to be rate limited on HN, we're happy to take off the penalty whenever anyone sincerely wants to use HN in the intended spirit.
If you keep breaking the site guidelines with your main account, we're going to have to ban that as well.
>I don't know what it is about science fiction and fantasy authors in particular - maybe it happens in other fiction genres too and I'm just not aware because I don't read them as much, but a lot of them seem to succumb to extremist (usually right-wing authoritarian) politics
i don't know about fantasy but for sci-fi i think it's obvious: it's because a technocracy inevitably becomes a fascist dictatorship. that's why the nazis were heavy on industry and eugenics ("science" is the ultimate moral authority and all that). it's also for example why the mcguffin in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is so plausible (it was hydra whose aim was to use an ai to a-priori adjudicate who was guilty etc).
why writers in particular? not sure. probably having something to do with feeling confident in their ability to create fictional worlds and translating that into some kind of presumption of ability to govern real worlds.
Edit: lol no responses only downvotes. Don't point out flaws in technology ideology or else people will get bad. Lol
I can see how an obsessive focus on science and technology as ends in themselves could lead to their promotion over other values. An overt emphasis on science and technology could lead to the dismissal of other human emotional needs, or to downplaying the importance of emotional skills or interpersonal relationships.
It could also be that personality traits that correlate with obsession with science or technology could also correlate with obsession on rigour, rules and control in other aspects of life.
So I think I understand where the connection comes from, and it probably wouldn't be difficult to find examples of individuals in whom there is a connection.
However, I think you're somewhat off about technocracy inevitably leading to fascist dictatorship, and especially regarding your example of the nazis.
Focus on technology and industry fit the nazi agenda well, of course. They needed both as means for their war machine. The emphasis of economical power in general probably wasn't bad for their agenda either, because economical security has a lot of power in the minds of people. (That's true even generally, but especially in Germany at the time; there was huge economical turmoil in Germany prior to the nazi regime, so emphasizing industry and economical stability would have been very useful for getting popular support.)
I think authoritarian governments and leadership like to turn the tools they need to extend and maintain their power into virtues or moral duties. This can be work, industry, or anything that promotes social pressure towards obedience and respect for the ruling authority. The same goes for anything they can use to get what they want, but power and control are a great part of that.
The means may thus be presented as morally desirable ends, along with any personal obsessions of the leadership, of course. The leadership itself may even like to believe in the virtuousness of their means; if, for example, science or parts thereof (e.g. genetics, or at least a selective understanding of it) can be seen as support for something they want either as personal obsessions or as a means for control (e.g. eugenics could be both), you can be pretty sure that support is going to be turned into a part of the ideology even if the true motives come from elsewhere.
So while technocracy might be one very useful tool for an authoritarian dictatorship, there are many other dynamics in play. I'm not really sure fascist dictatorship is an inevitable outcome of a technocratic mindset when that outcome also has so many other necessary constituents (which generally have to do with group dynamics and other social psychological stuff) and actual causes.
Among the technocratic, there are also lots of people who are very individually minded, and certainly not in favour of an authoritarian dictatorship. Whether individualism taken to an extreme is pro-social either is another thing, but I'm not at all surprised if drawing a direct line between technocracy and the nazis yields downvotes at HN.
>In an August 2013 essay Card presented as an experiment in fiction-writing called "The Game of Unlikely Events",[173] Card described an alternative future in which President Barack Obama ruled as a "Hitler- or Stalin-style dictator" with his own national police force of young unemployed men; Obama and his wife Michelle would have amended the U.S. Constitution to allow presidents to remain in power for life, as in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Hitler's Germany.[174][175] Card's essay drew extensive criticism, especially for its allusions to Obama's race and its reference to "urban gangs
Further down in this comment chain I posted a link to a literary essay that enders game is about fascism. I got heavy downvotes. I'm sure that by quoting this paragraph from wiki I will get more downvotes. People are in denial about their heroes.
> "I'm sure that by quoting this paragraph from wiki I will get more downvotes."
I normally downvote comments that complain about downvotes, but not for quoting well-sourced interesting/concerning background facts about relevant authors.
>I normally downvote comments that complain about downvotes, but not for quoting well-sourced interesting/concerning background facts about relevant authors.
Below I linked to a published literary essay and I got downvoted.
Not by me, though. I think that comment could have used a bit more explanation beyond calling it "nazi apologia" with a link. Like a bit more explanation of what exactly makes it nazi apologia.
Look at the length and substance of that comment of mine and the one that started this subthread. They are similar in length, similar in glibness. I don't know what the score of gop is but it's not grayed out so I'll assume it's higher than the score for mine. What is the difference in the two? Maybe homophobia is more palatable than nazism. Maybe mine accused the reader instead the author (but almost everyone that responded defended card). Maybe Wikipedia is more authoritative than a literary journal.
I don't know. I don't speak for other commenters. Card's homophobia is pretty well documented, however, and from some of the comments to your other posts, I get the impression that the argument that it's nazi apologia is pretty thin. I haven't read the article, though.
tldr; orson scott card is a bigot and ender's game is nazi apologia. if you don't want to read the above it's been written about in numerous places (google "ender's game book fascism").
in your comment, I was pretty sure that there would be a point in the quoted article where the author went from reasonable background/description, to instantly jumping to a completely nonsensical argument, and I was not disappointed.
> The difference between Peter and Ender is not in what they do, but in what they are
What? That's incredibly dumb.
This like saying a serial killer, and someone who shot a person who shot at them first, are the same thing. You can't just ignore context because it's convenient to your argument. By this reasoning, anyone who's not an avowed pacifist -- who wouldn't even fight back against naked aggression -- is equivalent to the worst murderer.
Maybe Ender went too far, but he did act in self-defense, against other kids who tried to maim or even kill him. Peter killed animals because he wanted to. That is nowhere close to the same thing.
Like, does the author of this piece seriously believe that self defense is never justified or something?
> Ender is “kind” and “good” even when his actions seem to belie that characterization.
Ender is ruthless against those who go out of their way to threaten him, that's true enough, but in the context of the story he has an awful lot of threats to his life for a little kid! Brutally fighting back is completely understandable. What else would you even expect him to do, in that situation?
If you're gonna find fault with the story here, pointing out that the adults are all complicit in letting Ender be abused, sure that's bad and dumb. But given that they're doing that, blaming Ender for desperately fighting back is utter nonsense.
>Maybe Ender went too far, but he did act in self-defense
the book is literally about a kid committing genocide and the reasons why he should feel okay about it (ie a pretext). or did you not read it through to the end?
The final battle scene in the book, at least in the old polish release I had, stuck with me for a long time.
Because Ender did the suicide strike thinking it was simulation, and thus he would be finally released from the program as dangerous.
It's literally an attempt to get released from service on medical discharge. He was only told he was operating real world warships after the fact. Before that scene, he assumed (and while there were possible hints, at that point he is increasingly getting less mentally stable) that it was graduate school equivalent of Battle School - as that's what everyone excluding Bean (and that is AFAIK only in the retconny later novels) was told.
To clarify, yes, Speaker for the Dead is the book Card wanted to write, but he found he had to write Ender's Game first to lay the groundwork. And he did. He wrote them in that order (Ender, Speaker). A prequel usually refers to a work produced later that comes chronologically before.
What an author starts spouting completely nonsense arguments, why would I waste my time continuing further?
The author apparently thinks self defense is as bad as killing for the heck of it, if they're that dumb, why would I be interested in their moral judgment for anything else?
Tbh, I think it shows that you went into the link looking for something to fail it over. I don't think the author makes the claim you think they are making.
Yes, I expected that it would make a nonsense argument based on the description of the person linking to it, and that's what happened.
Look, it's them that made the argument. I even quoted the relevant parts. They're clearly arguing that Ender is aggressive and bad because he's violent in response to violence against him. Self defense apparently doesn't count.
If they want to make an argument that makes sense instead, they should do that.
Yes, you quoted a section that describes how the characters in the book view (and struggle with) the fact that the main character kills violently and how that is justified by the different circumstances.
And then somehow claimed that the author describing that means the author thinks circumstances don't ever matter.
Uhh, no. You can even look at other parts of it and see:
> Card thus labors long and hard in Ender’s Game to create a situation where we are not allowed to judge any of his defined-as-good characters’ morality by their actions. The same destructive act that would condemn a bad person, when performed by a good person, does not implicate the actor, and in fact may be read as a sign of that person’s virtue.
"The same destructive act"? Notice again how the author apparently thinks fighting in self defense is the same 'act' as fighting because you want to hurt somebody.
Maybe next up they can argue that target shooting is the same as shooting a person in the face, because either way you're shooting a gun!
> even when his actions seem to belie that characterization.
This isn't just the author asserting how the characters see Ender, it's also clear that the author thinks that "[Ender's] actions belie that characterization". But that's only true if you view fighting back against bullies as not good, if you view self defense as unkind.
Thus, the author's argument is clear: self defense is not acceptable. They won't come out and say it explicitly, because that would make it obvious how dumb the argument is, but that is nevertheless what they're asserting. Instead, they argue it while pretending not to.
Are you sure you're reading the same article? Their argument of "context doesn't matter, only the bare literal act" is quite clear.
Reasons why he should feel Okay with it? He was Tricked into committing genocide, and the story goes on to show that the aliens weren't bad and how the entire war stemmed from the type of misunderstandings that come from interacting with an alien consciousness.
It's far from being a book that advocates for or otherwise encourages genocide
By this reasoning, if tomorrow we found out that the violent video games we've been playing controlled robots somewhere killing real people, that would make everyone who played those games ruthless killers who should at the very least be imprisoned for life, if not executed.
The whole point is that genocide is such a horrible act that while all of the adults are pushing for it, none of them are willing to actually make the call. Ender was manipulated into committing genocide so that the adults could all tell themselves that it was someone else who did it.
And he never feels okay about it. He reaches a sense of peace with the overwhelming guilt, but only by giving his life entirely to that purpose.
The parent comment explicitly says context was ignored. He committed genocide/xenocide because he was literally being deceived and then spends the next 2 books regretting and making up for a move he wasn't responsible for.
The literal example here would be playing any video game but instead of it just being a game you were literally killing whatever the game is about.
In that case, wouldn't you feel that you were wrongly deceived? That you're not truly a killer? But in your eyes and the article's... you absolutely are a killer. 100% responsible and the book is wrong for teaching otherwise.
To me Ender's Game is about how it is almost impossible to not start to love something you know deeply. He couldn't both understand and wipe out the buggers, because understanding them meant seeing their beauty, so he had to be tricked. This touched me deeply.
I found this particular work to be quite balanced. You need to read Ender's Game as a prequel to the Speaker for the Dead where Ender actually grows up.
I think that's reading a little too far into Ender's Game for the average 7th grader... It is a fantastic novel.
The author of the article you posted (who was basing the nazi thing on another author's work) stated this in regards to the "Ender is Hitler" argument, "...Radford’s essay says many things with which I do not agree, and its tone is often intemperate..."
So your bias against Ender's Game is based on a guy who was biased against the very argument that has led to me writing this comment.
I agree. However as someone who read Enders Game as a kid but didn’t know any better I get some folks emotional attachment. I have fond memories though if I read it now there’s a good chance I’d hate it.
Yet I’d recommend those folks who are now adults and cite it as their most influential piece of fiction to go out and read more fiction! :).
Just to be snobby I’ll throw out Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Beautiful and contemplative.
lol hn never fails in it's shallow dismissal of an enormous amount of work: as of right now there's a comment on how this textbook is too shallow (I guess if it were a content marketing medium post it would be much better) and how it can't possibly be substantive because it's written in markdown.
man what a bastion of intelligent discussion this place is.
It is fair to point out this is a product of a highly regarded computer science school.
So the honest question is: should we subject industry e.g. blogs to the same standard as the academy. I would think we should hold academic products to a much higher standard. I do agree criticism should be constructive. (One of PRs for example noted lack of mention of CSP.)
Honestly, for me right now, coming from HN into random places, no I don't have different standards. But in a course having a textbook recommendation, yes, the standards are very different.
Anyway, you are out on a tangent. The work should be judged based on its quality, and for all the dimensions quality has, the presentation format is not one that matters.
Maybe when you're assessing the relative quality we should consider this context with more weight, but should that excuse industry for presenting expertise via a light-weight puff piece PR posting?
>I would think we should hold academic products to a much higher standard
who is we? are you a tt prof at literally the number 1 cs school in the US? are you a reviewer for any distributed journals? the author of this book is a wildly successful researcher. why should i trust literally almost anyone's here opinion over their opinion?
Please don't make this place even worse by adding a supercilious dismissal to a shallow one.
If you think it's possible for a large, public internet forum not to get a lot of ignorant or shitty comments, that's extremely mistaken. What's necessary is for people who know more to post better ones. Since you seem to know more, you should be helping with that, not adding to the bottom of the barrel by dumping on it.
>If you think it's possible for a large, public internet forum not to get a lot of ignorant or shitty comments
why is it that the tech subs at reddit don't have the same kind of policing you practice here and are just as productive? i wonder if it's because community policing is more effective than whatever brand of dictatorial policing you practice here hmmmmmm. the only difference between the moderation here and at reddit that i see is your self-importance and the effect it has on anyone who feels they're part of the same self-important rarefied club.
r/programming, r/math, r/physics, r/compsci. All of them don't have nearly the strict moderation you practice here and all of them are great places to have substantive discussion.
I'm gonna repeat what I've said many times: by enforcing a strict decorum what you actually accomplish, and I mean exactly you dang, is give the air/pretense of intellectualism without any of the substance. Hence the constant barrage of hypercritical (but superficial) disparaging comments. It's like any other system that privileges one type of language - those that can deploy it effectivity feel empowered and emboldened because they feel they are the defacto ethical/just/concordant.
If you wanted proscribe things for the betterment of the community you should proscribe content (e.g. hate speech) rather than language.
edit:
this comment is the exemplar par excellence of what your rules produce:
for many hours it was the highest ranking comment on that post. it is pure invective cloaked in "constructive criticism". it took me pointing outing how absolutely rude it was for it to start bubbling down. i'm not a hero. i'm simply pointing out that it is absolutely necessary to point out when someone is being rude.
I'll take this opportunity to get jupyter advice: one thing I don't understand about jupyter vs jupyterlab is why notebooks in jupyter classic have functioning vim bindings (ie in cells) through the codemirror extension but jupyterlab notebooks do not. in jupyterlab you can have vim bindings in the text editing view but not in the notebook view. for the life of me I cannot understand this design decision. how hard can it be to just leave whatever thing that makes it work in jupyter classic alone so that it continues to work in jupyterlab.
Can you elaborate a little here? I made the switch from classic notebooks to jupyterlab recently and find the bin experience very similar (there's a few subtle differences that I can't remember offhand, but I don't recall having any problems with cell navigation)
cool extension but literally every other use of the term visual debugger refers to a graphical interface for something like gdb (where you have to manually type in commands to set break points, step, continue, etc). so I don't think it makes sense to claim that this is not a visual debugger simply because you've decided to redefine the term to suit your needs (publicizing your extension).
I see two camps here. Microsoft has been calling anything with a GUI "visual" for a few decades (Basic, Studio, C++, FoxPro, ...), so people from industry often use that definition. For people from academia, "visual" has a somewhat different meaning.
Thus, people in one camp see this as the standard name for the feature, and people in the other camp view it as misleading, and a continued diluting of the word in a way which trivializes their research.
After a decade of hearing "oh, visual programming, you mean like Visual C++?", I've learned to avoid the word entirely. It's a loaded term.
Every common word that is used as a popular brand name has this problem. I'm getting flashbacks to the 80's/90's and trying to explain my home computer to IBM PC people. "Do you have Windows?" "Well, it's an Apple. There are windows on the screen but it's not Microsoft Windows." "If you've got windows on the screen you can drag around with a mouse, that's Microsoft Windows."
I guess, growing up with Delphi IDE, Visual Studio, Browser Dev Tools and finally Visual Studio Code, all calling their "visual debugger" just a "debugger", I got used to debuggers being "visual" by default.
As Jupyter has very powerful visualizations, I initially thought they somehow integrated their visualizations into the debugger, just to see that it's an ordinary debugger every modern IDE has.
I know a debugger and it's UI is a crazy complicated beast, but I would expect any modern programming language to have such a debugger.
Just because there are text-based browser like lynx, modern browsers shouldn't start calling their products "visual browser", but I get your point.
Sorry for publicizing my extension here. It's free and open source, works with Python and might help a lot of people. According to github insights, traffic decreases whenever I don't publicize it somewhere.
You're not wrong, but Jupyter is terrible for everything about programming except in-document HTML/SVG visualizations of expressions (no support for unit testing, laggy
Ui response to user input, broken Undo/Redo that throws away data, buggy browser based text editing), yet that one thing is worth all the suffering, so we'll take any improvement we can get.
I don't understand why VisualStudio doesn't have LightTable like expression playground yet, but until it does, Jupyter is what we have -- a fancy REPL and document publishing format being abused as an IDE.
this has gotta be the answer. I have the exact same experiences and feelings as you. I always look for basically the cheapest Airbnb and it ends up cheaper by 2-3x than local hotels and I've never had an uncomfortable stay. What I have had are completely normal rooms in working class homes - which is fine because who the hell cares about enjoying the hotel room when you travel!
My impression is that virtually all of the Airbnb complaints (both from guests and from neighbours) relate to "entire apartment" listings and/or the "private rooms" where the owner isn't on site.
There was once a time when most of the listings were for spare rooms in someone's house/flat, and to me that was kind of the whole point of Airbnb in the first place.
Me and my girlfriend like to travel. Sometimes we just like to go away for the weekend (flights are cheap in the EU). Airbnb was a perfect choice. It was cheap, we can meet some locals in their house and get genuine tips only locals know.
Once we stayed in Malmö. The flat was a little bit messy, there were two little (under 10) children in the flat, so it was noisy. In the kitchen there where breadcrumbs everywhere. We still very much enjoyed our stay because the place was cozy our hosts were friendly. This was our "worst" experience when we stayed in a spare room.
In recent years we run into more and more listings where somebody renting out the entire house, each room to a separate individual. Sometimes it is indistinguishable from the former one before you arrive. If I staying at a "hostel" I want my bathroom and kitchen cleaned every day, but most likely I would just choose a real hostel.
I sympathize with the grandparaent comment. The first three aren't exactly unique. Many languages are parallel and portable and productive.
Listing adjectives isn't a "why". A "why" would be: "Chapel is a language built for distributed memory systems. Unlike X or Y, Chapel has first class language concepts for distributed memory management, sharded storage…" etc. etc. (I just made that up.)
Then you know right off the bat whether this language is the one you need for the problem you have.
What you refer to as a silly meme might also be a legitimate critique that surfaces again and again when hackers/engineers build things that solve a problem they have, think it is cool or interesting, but aren't able to communicate the value to others.
It's not unreasonable to ask, at the very least, for a simple "why does this exist?" (An entirely reasonable answer to which might be, "because I thought it was cool!")
«Chapel has the goal of supporting any parallel algorithm you can conceive of on any parallel hardware you want to target. In particular, you should never hit a point where you think “Well, that was fun while it lasted, but now that I want to do x, I’d better go back to MPI.»
https://www.cray.com/blog/chapel-productive-parallel-program...
It would be such a low hanging fruit to put a concise rationale there. That’s not spoon feeding, but giving a minimal amount of opinionated context so a visitor isn’t completely lost when unfamiliar with the technology.
Surely anyone who works on this project could tell me why it exists, why it's better than rolling slurm/bash scripts. That feels like a bare minimum sales pitch. Instead the homepage is essentially buzzwords with links to watch the talk or read the docs. I'm sure anyone who uses this could say, "well, it makes x task much easier/more concise! This is much more difficult to accomplish using y" or something similar.
I guess a better question would why is it better at those things? A lot of languages claim to be all about performance, scalability, productivity and portability. Those are pretty much what every mainstream language aims for. So why would this be better at those things? Why was it created and what does it do that others can't?
I don't think things necessarily need a reason to exist, but I think asking those questions is still relevant when it comes to a programming language. They are mostly tools used to solve problems, after all.
@mardifoufs: I realize that your point is that the Chapel webpage didn't answer this question clearly / concisely for you and agree that we could and should improve that. The observations in this thread have definitely helped given me insights about how we could position ourselves better for the non-HPC audience (and I already have a longstanding intention to make the code sample on the page more compelling using Asciinema that I need to find the time for).
But to answer your specific question here: I'd say that most mainstream languages (e.g., C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Rust, Swift, ...) don't aspire to scalability in the same sense as Chapel and High Performance Computing want it, in the sense of being able to run efficiently on tens of thousands of processors with distributed memory where inter-processor communication and coordination is required. And even when they do aspire to it, it's rarely through the language itself, but through communication libraries, pragmas, and extensions. The result (in my opinion) is rarely as productive, general-purpose, and performant Chapel achieves.
the difference between your hypothetical tweet and this article is that humble qualifier "I think".
what I've seen hn (and startup culture in general) distort is people's confidence in their own opinions. this is probably because it is repeated ad nauseum that you cannot start a successful startup without being an iconoclastic innovator.
what isn't repeated ad nauseum is that you should save that kind of arrogance for your vc pitch rather than take it on as a mantle.
Linguists call "I think" when used this way a "stance marker"[0]. It's definitely not redundant: it reveals pragmatic information[1] about the context you're speaking in, namely by tempering your stance and revealing your level of confidence in the statement you're making.
"I think" is not always redundant. It serves the same purpose as "in my opinion" or "I'm pretty sure", which is to temper the confidence of the statement or indicate an unverified intuition.
Example:
"Hey, where's the emergency toilet paper supply?" "I think it's in the cupboard under the stairs."
I think (but am not sure!) that this use of "I think" is intuitively obvious to most native English speakers, especially when paired with voice tone.
Obviously, if you're sure that a statement is true, then adding "I think" only weakens your point. Unskilled writers might not know to avoid it in (say) an essay, which may be why you heard that advice in school.
It is not always redundant. It can be used to politely signal that you may be wrong about something you are asserting, even when you are sure about it and everyone knows you are sure. This is especially helpful when you have visible authority over the other parties in the discussion.
I was taught this too, but it was more of a guideline for students who got away with writing basically substandard essays in high school. It was like having to teach Javascript the Good Parts to kids that just started every sentence in a paragraph with ‘I think that ...’.
i meant exactly what i said: it's a humble qualifier . "I think" functions as an admission of fallibility. it transforms a certain claim into a proposition subject to change. its purpose is rhetorical rather than formal.
Quoting the linked article: "I've thought for a long time that, for some types of apps, a Mac app would do as well as an iOS app." Isn't it pretty clear that when he's asserting that the relative downloads of NetNewsWire for iOS vs. macOS "confirms" that thought, he's (a) describing that as his thought, rather than trumpeting it as an immutable fact, and (b) both admitting that this is just one piece of data ("admittedly just one app") and confining even his hypothesis to "some types of apps"?
tl;dr: I get what you're saying, but I think you're giving too ungenerous a reading in this specific case.
