As you become successful in your field (or wherever), and further internalize the habits that are necessary to be successful, it's clear that many of these things are easy to do, it's just that people don't want to do them.
In other words ... it's obvious that many people don't want to be successful, and if they were to introspect deeply, they would see this clearly. In fact what they want is to be somewhere comfortable in the middle of the herd, not having to do too much work.
Most people want to be comfortable, not 'successful' in a way that requires ambition. But many people are brainwashed enough by the rhetoric of success that they don't realize it's not what they want.
There's also something I haven't figured out yet. Every time I give advice, I get a number of responses from people with self-defeating attitudes, explaining how this advice can't possibly apply to them because blah blah blah. These people build up belief structures that are obviously intended to keep them mired in their current situation, smelling of low self-esteem and defeatism. "Obviously" it's better not to be stuck in these belief structures, yet people will defend them vigorously, and in some cases fiercely. I don't yet fully understand why, except maybe that if someone believes there is a solution to their problem, then it must be their fault that they haven't solved it, and/or that there will be a clear failure that is their fault if they attempt to solve it.
it seems somewhat unlikely. let's follow the trail
the existence of bell characters, of course, predates gordon bell's existence itself (they're in the ita2 baudot-murray code from 01932, two years before his birth) so what we're discussing is specifically the assignment of the ascii bell character to the control character corresponding to bell's middle initial
it was already ^g in 01963 according to tom jennings's excellent history https://web.archive.org/web/20100414012008/http://wps.com/pr...https://landley.net/history/mirror/ascii.html#ASCII-1963 and at that point bell had just started working at dec three years before. however, he was working on serial communications at dec, and had just been doing research at mit, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if he, or friends of his from mit or dec, were to sit on the ansi (then asa) committee
mackenzie's 'coded character sets' from 01980 has a chapter 13 about ascii https://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Mackenzie_CodedC... but unfortunately it doesn't go into any detail on the composition of the asa committee. note that mackenzie was the ibm thug who invented ebcdic and spent the 60s and 70s trying to kill ascii, so he devotes most of the book to glorifying that catastrophic error; the book is from 01980, the year before ibm shipped its first ascii-supporting equipment, the ibm pc. it's reasonable to see jennings's account as a violent reaction against mackenzie's book, writing the malignant influence of the punched-card codes out of history entirely, though, as we'll see, the original draft of ascii was designed by a punched-card man
bell's oral history interviews https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270203... don't mention ascii or asa or ansi, so he probably wasn't on the committee, but if it was a connivance by a friend of his, it would be easy to imagine him deliberately not mentioning it
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/363831.363839 is an early (01965) publication of what eventually became ascii-1967, but it doesn't list the subcommittee members; the subcommittee seems to have been x3.2 at that point, though the 01963 document was called x3.4-1963
http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/06/1963.idg/ says the original proposal was submitted to ansi (though other sources say ansi didn't exist yet) by bob bemer of ibm in 01961. i thought it would be interesting to see if it already had ^g for bel, because bemer would be unlikely to know bell at that point
in 02002 bemer wrote a 52-page history of ascii himself called 'a story of ascii' https://archive.org/details/ascii-bemer which includes a survey of coded character sets from 01960, including the character set used on the 'lincolnwriter' at mit, where bell had been working, and the pdp-1 for which bell designed the uart, as well as another 40 or so. so it wasn't like there was no contact. as it happens, neither of those two character sets includes a bell character
the bell character appears in the first version of the ascii proposal in the leftmost column of table 3 on page 17 — but at position 10, from which it was moved to its current position of 7 (^g) after four revisions (iso/tc97 wg b, 01962 may 4, following x3.2/1, which was 01961 september 18). his only comment on why they moved all the control characters around was, 'the controls were regularized and grouped to 7 transmission controls, 6 format effectors, and 5 device controls; the improvement from the haphazardness of the previous proposals is quite apparent.' this was shortly before ibm sent him to the penalty box for promoting ascii, leading to him quitting to go to univac
at that point there was still disagreement about whether to start the alphabet at the beginning of a 16-codepoint 'column' or, as is done today, one character later, so that a corresponds to 1, b corresponds to 2, etc. so assigning bel to 7 could have ended up with it being ^h. (i'm not clear on whether the ctrl key existed yet, but i'm pretty sure bit-paired keyboards did, on the teletype.)
unfortunately bemer is also largely silent on the membership of the committee, though he does mention particular members from time to time. unless i've overlooked it, he doesn't mention anyone from mit or dec. the iso meeting was an international thing, with delegations from the us and various european countries, and thus seems particularly unlikely to have redesigned the character set to honor a dec engineer, who the committee members would think of as an american engineer
so it's probably just a coincidence, but the evidence i've been able to turn up is not very conclusive
How people view the "slant to the politics here" is determined by (1) their own political slant, and (2) how intensely they hold it. This is one of the most reliable phenomena on HN; there are countless cases going both ways.
Edit: here's what I mean about examples going both ways. In this corner:
"overrun by fascist trolls", "bubble of ignorance and right-wing terrorism", "mostly middle class white male libertarians", "chilling effect on discourse from leftists", "definite right-libertarian bias", "Dang has gone to great lengths to ensure that only far-right [etc.]", "Anything critical of the far-right tends to wind up flagged", "The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively", "cesspool of terrible far-right ideas", "Nazism is pretty popular on HN", "HN has had a problem with bigotry and white supremacy for a long time", "a forum made up of primarily right wing users", "very CLEARLY pro white supremacist", "forbids saying anything against the R Party", "commentary which questions capitalism or america is verboten", "Non libertarian views are not tolerated", "a very specific techno-libertarian Silicon Valley type outlook", "excessively pro-capitalist and woefully dismissive of social justice", "utterly filled with alt-right scum", "overly capitalist ideological Silicon Valley moderation", "the hivemind's right-leaning, libertarian political mindset", "rampant right-wing / libertarian / crypto-fascist", "insurrection apologists in your disgusting community", "HN is a right wing cesspool", "HN as a whole has a conservative tilt", "right-libertarian-leaning HN", "leans right-wing politically, under the guise of being apolitical", "has HN ever been anything other than right-leaning?", "HN has always been pretty far to the right", "entirely filled with right-wing to far-right sheltered techbros", "You simply cannot criticize capitalism", "Can you imagine the kind of slime this forum is managed by?"
and in this corner:
"HN socialist apologia", "the mods are SJW", "socialist-leaning mods" ,"Hacker News the SJW Hole", "you can't be anti-liberal here", "radical leftists appear to have taken control", "tends to be more liberal so you will be downvoted", "a liberal echo chamber identical to all other social media", "this SJW cesspool", "it's ALWAYS the case in HN that any opinion that's not 100% politically correct && strictly SJW standard compliant is suppressed", "HN in turn, are left leaning, socialist Democrats", "you fucking insane sjw", "leftist filter bubbles", "left-wing propaganda", "leftist totalitarianism prevalent on HN", "anti-western and extremely anti-capitalist", "Dang is a totalitarian liberal thought policeman", "banned every single prominent right winger", "extremely left-winged", "most people on HN are liberals", "socialist hell-hole", "this site leans left", "leftist bots", "always politically left", "skews quite left", "Obviously this website is rigged for the liberal agenda", "the level of wokeness is just absurd", "leftist ideological echo chamber", "run by radical leftists, so no surprise", "You aren't allowed to go against the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party", "ideas here are ignored, down voted, flagged, shadow banned if they question the left ideology", "a very anti-libertarian echo chamber", "a heavy socialist lean, you are not allowed to have a differing perspective", "only liberals are allowed to express their political opinions on HN", "capitalism bad", "flaaaaaming, communist level liberal", "shows how much of a leftist website this is", "dang is an SJW cunt"
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Making people constantly worry that what they're doing could be "bullying", could also be bullying. It doesn't eradicate the core problem, it exacerbates it.
Society is a messy place - and has and always will have roughness where its edges meet. Some entertain an understandable fantasy that a perfect one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, that will make the messiness go away, is to be found in trying to force other people to do something different. Ie, by bullying them.
That's not where the solution is found. It's just the same problem repeated back.
I've been bullied, and it absolutely does not happen anymore. The bullies didn't change - I did, and I'm much better off for it. To put it another way: I hold the power.
When enough people realise that, that's when these problems end. If you look throughout history, nothing else works - it just leads to more bullying back and forth, and eventually, war.
Zucker is right, one component of this is not taking ones-self too seriously - the one thing uniting all bullies, all those who commit atrocities, is they take themselves too seriously. They are incapable of accepting the possibility they could be wrong. So high they elevate themselves on a pedestal of self-righteousness in service of some ideal utopian vision that they eventually lose all compassion and ability to empathise. This prevents the realisation of any such vision.
If anything, it's laughable.
Being able to laugh at ourselves is not just important, its essential. The current state of the world is testament to that. Granted, at the other extreme, where comedy knows no bounds and anything can be called funny - even watching people suffer - is just as bad.
And it's a domain entered by those who didn't check themselves at bullying, and went on to atrocity, and progressed to the final stage - sadism - as they push toward an ideal dream of a future perfect, above the reality of the dysfunction that push is creating right in front of them.
> "Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants."
In a popular Alan Watts talk he imagines a dreamer:
"let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today."
In my opinion, The Proper Way To Teach Computer Science was the one area where Dijkstra made his most detrimental contribution, by promoting a particular school of instruction based on strong opinions with weak to no empirical underpinnings.
In _Coders at Work_, Knuth offers a counter-argument that I find compelling:
> Seibel: It seems a lot of the people I've talked to had direct access to a machine when they were starting out. Yet Dijkstra has a paper I'm sure you're familiar with, where he basically says we shouldn't let computer-science science students touch a machine for the first few years of their training; they should spend all their time manipulating symbols.
> Knuth: But that's not the way he learned either. He said a lot of really great things and inspirational things, but he's not always right. Neither am I, but my take on it is this: Take a scientist in any field. The scientist gets older and says, "Oh, yes, some of the things that I've been doing have a really great payoff and other things, I'm not using anymore. I'm not going to have my students waste time on the stuff that doesn't make giant steps. I'm not going to talk about low-level stuff at all. These theoretical concepts are really so powerful-that's the whole story. Forget about how I got to this point." I think that's a fundamental error made by scientists in every field. They don't realize that when you're learning something you've got to see something at all levels. You've got to see the floor before you build the ceiling. That all goes into the brain and gets shoved down to the point where the older people forget that they needed it.
> Peter Seibel. _Coders at Work_
It is clear from the reading the EWDs that Dijkstra considered actually doing something with Computers detrimental to the practice of Computer Science as he conceived it, but the kind of Computer Science he practiced past 1975 or so was not particularly useful to Computer Engineering, because it refused to engage with it, and, as the article points out, it was not even particularly good math, because it refused to engage properly with that field as well.
Mathematics requires creativity. Conjectures do not arise from logic and rigor. If that were the case, they would never be wrong, and thus not require proof. If mathematicians don't come up with conjectures, then mathematics doesn't advance.
A formal system's territory is connected together by rigor; but whence comes the formal system itself? That has to be imagined.
I appreciate the explanation, and as multiple obviously-irritated k8s contributors have come in to counteract my other comments, I admit I have been curious how long HN would be willing to withstand the pressure from beings so highly-regarded and attached to such prestigious institutions. Surely, it is not wise to irritate powerful persons, especially not with semi-credible lambasts that affect an important centerpiece of their corporate strategy (k8s is part of the strategy to transition people to Google Cloud as opposed to AWS).
This is also good supporting evidence for the amount of SV heterodoxy that HN-the-institution is willing to stomach (that topic was broached last time we crossed paths).
Are perennial, cycle-of-life topics not expected to regularly appear on discussion platforms? I find it grating to see "k8s this, k8s that" all the time. Should I register a complaint as well, so that these threads can be killed next time they come up, on the theory that "many are bored" by the topic, based on the existence of my complaint?
Specifically, which things are not allowed to be mentioned in the future? Was it:
point 1, "Please consider whether you need k8s before you use it";
point 2, "Please don't run a database inside Kubernetes";
or point 3, "Yes, the software world is hardly manageable due to the unintended effects exposed by GitHub and friends"?
Which of these is too tedious and boring to express on HN?
I definitely would understand if only the flamebait comment were off-topic'd, as I know that was close to the edge. I'm more worried by the fact that counterpoints that are apparently "boring" or "tedious" justify censorship.
As you become successful in your field (or wherever), and further internalize the habits that are necessary to be successful, it's clear that many of these things are easy to do, it's just that people don't want to do them.
In other words ... it's obvious that many people don't want to be successful, and if they were to introspect deeply, they would see this clearly. In fact what they want is to be somewhere comfortable in the middle of the herd, not having to do too much work.
Most people want to be comfortable, not 'successful' in a way that requires ambition. But many people are brainwashed enough by the rhetoric of success that they don't realize it's not what they want.
There's also something I haven't figured out yet. Every time I give advice, I get a number of responses from people with self-defeating attitudes, explaining how this advice can't possibly apply to them because blah blah blah. These people build up belief structures that are obviously intended to keep them mired in their current situation, smelling of low self-esteem and defeatism. "Obviously" it's better not to be stuck in these belief structures, yet people will defend them vigorously, and in some cases fiercely. I don't yet fully understand why, except maybe that if someone believes there is a solution to their problem, then it must be their fault that they haven't solved it, and/or that there will be a clear failure that is their fault if they attempt to solve it.