The text uses the words "culture", "human history", and "the world/our world". But reading the list of sources included, it seems to mean "the English culture" of US + UK. That's a bit of a shame IMHO.
I am assuming, based on the fact that it's a project by an American company, that this is largely being done by functionally monolingual English speakers. I wouldn't want them to attempt to speak for other cultures. And I wouldn't want to shame them for not attempting to speak for others.
It's a bit unfortunate that they use the word "human" so expansively when the scope is so limited, it's true. But it's a new project, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that that's meant to reflect the project's aspirations. Even if the reality, after only a few short months, doesn't quite achieve it. Tech culture is supposed to value iteration, and accept that things won't necessarily get it all right on the very first try.
A more constructive way to make sure other cultures are reflected would be to say, "Hey, this is a great idea. But looks like you're only covering Anglophone sources right now. Can we help by contributing additional sources?"
I'm all for iterative work. I'm just pointing an issue in the current state of this project. It's a common behaviour from huge and global US companies (GitHub IS huge and global) to kind of forget that other cultural groups exist, I'm used to it. It's a bit dishonest in this specific case because they present the project as a "humanity preservation project".
I haven't read the document but what's wrong with the term "human"? Is there some other intelligent life-form on this planet contributing to technology and software today that I'm unaware of?
Picking on the word human just seems nit-picky, like someone's not woke enough to use a more inclusive term.
My reading was that the complaint was that it implied false inclusiveness, which can come across as solipsistic to those who weren't included.
A little bit like how the final stage of Major League Baseball's playoffs are called the World Series, even though 29 of the teams are based in the USA and the 30th plays in a stadium ~25km outside the USA. I imagine that is at least a little bit irritating to professional baseball players from elsewhere in the world.
Except the World Series is named after the original sponsors of the competition and is not meant to infer worldwide participation. I'm not from the US and I am not from somewhere that plays competitive baseball and I know that,therefore I assume in the competitive baseball world this is known widely enough.
Nah, it being named after the New York World newspaper is just the sports blogger equivalent of an old wive's tale. It really was built off of the US exceptionalism of the gilded age with the idea that nobody could beat the US at it's own game anyway so why bother inviting them.
14 out of 34 of the writers in that list are from places other than US/UK [1]. Even the included works by US/UK authors like Shakespeare and Orwell and Huxley aren't merely Anglophone culture - I'd argue they're a part of human culture. Are films by Kurosawa like Ran (King Lear) and Throne of Blood (Macbeth) any less Japanese because he was inspired by Shakespeare? I'd argue not.
Could they have made a better list? Certainly, and perhaps even they would acknowledge it. Of course we can nitpick - I agree with almost none of the selections related to software. But I think "done" is better than "perfect".
[1] - Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Salman Rushdie (India), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), Ben Okri (Nigeria), Arundhati Roy (India), Umberto Eco (Italy), Haruki Murakami (Japan), Roberto Bolaño (Chile), Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Jung Chang (China)
The "Fiction, culture, and history" section includes a bunch of works written in various languages, but apparently they're using the English translation. Surely the original is more representative of human cultures as a whole than its translation into English (which is more representative of anglophone cultures).
The core of the project is written in English, which is the current lingua franca of the world. If the purpose of the archive is for future scholars to have a corpus of knowledge from our time, then limiting it to one language maximizes the probability that the entirety of the information stored there will be recoverable.
Including texts in Finnish and Hungarian almost ensures that parts of the archive will be lost 1000 years from now. Even if those languages are alive in 1000 years, the likelihood that interpreting period Finnish and Hungarian from 2020 will be possible is far smaller than the likelihood that interpreting period English from 2020 will be possible.
Being trained as a historian, the idea of throwing away original texts in favour of translations because they're not in « the right language » is hurting my soul.
If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.
See the problem ?
Keeping as much linguistic data as possible is beneficial. Intentionally curtailing is criminal.
>> Including texts in Finnish and Hungarian almost ensures that parts of the archive will be lost 1000 years from now. Even if those languages are alive in 1000 years, the likelihood that interpreting period Finnish and Hungarian from 2020 will be possible is far smaller than the likelihood that interpreting period English from 2020 will be possible.
> Being trained as a historian, the idea of throwing away original texts in favour of translations because they're not in « the right language » is hurting my soul.
> If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.
Yeah, exactly. The GP has it bass ackwards. If you have concerns like the GP about intelligibility, then include both the original and the translation. That way even if Finnish and Hungarian go extinct and the archive is recovered, those parallel texts can be used to recover the Finnish and Hungarian languages themselves.
And I'm sure someone who is reading this is questioning the value of even preserving the Finnish and Hungarian languages when you've already captured the "knowledge" in English. All I have to say to that is future linguists will probably be very frustrated with losing two non-Indo-European languages to study, just like we're frustrated that we can't read Etruscan writings anymore.
I thought the point of this was to preserve technical knowledge. It's not poetry. You can translate it from language to language and it should all be isomorphic, because there is something measurable and concrete underlying both expressions.
If readability in 1000s of years of time is the goal, wouldn't you want to add as many (common) languages as possible? And for each book add as many translations of them as possible? That way they will be able to read most/all even if just one language survived - irrespective which one.
The only ones that maintain any significant population that can use them are those that are liturgical languages (e.g. Latin, Hebrew, Classical Greek, Classical Arabic, Sanscrit, ...)
That would be an interesting task for some scholars: "We have a bunch of technology literature here, could you translate it for us into classical greek?"
There is a finite amount of space in which to store data.
Even if diversity of language is a principle that you adopt while creating this, not every single item in the database can be a Rosetta Stone-style snapshot of the state of human language in 2020.
I think there's more to the story than just anglocentric oversight.
English translations are more likely to be unencumbered by copyright, and US copyright is often shorter (or more specific) than in other countries which can apply separately to translations. You can see this on https://babel.hathitrust.org/ where English translations are available but, say, Spanish editions are only available for search—you can't read them.
And because there are a lot more scholars using English, English translations tend to be more numerous and higher quality and more available than the original language. You see this a lot on Project Gutenberg where there's a super polished English translation and a non-existent or crappy original-language transcription.
For example, can you get a Spanish copy of "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" for this without legal issue? Maybe Harper Perennial was willing to cooperate with their English edition and others weren't? I don't think things are as obvious and straightforward as we like them to be.
I've run into all of this while "remastering" old Spanish works. English dominates culture, and not in a bad way. The only reason some new editions/transcriptions of old non-English works exist is because an English-speaking scholar was interested in it or a professor remastered an illegible edition to teach his Spanish language class. And now it's the only version of that work that's not behind a paywall. And you'll have to re-transcribe a messy scan of a book from the 17th century if you want a digital copy in the original language.
Anyways, has Github stated why it's English-only? Did they not have a good reason or are we just guessing that they didn't know that other languages are important (like we, HNers, people of culture, know)?
No problem being mostly anglophone centric and english being used as a common ground, otherwise it would complicate too much everything.
But i have a problem with the lack of representation of great books and cultural achievements/standards that are not anglo-centric at all.
I miss a lot of great works of the human kind.
This is so important that they should have specialized people to curate that list and not just get "the list of great books that are on the top of your head when you only have an average capacity to do so".
Where is Cervantes, James Joyce, Kafka, Rimbaud, Pessoa, Homer, Goethe, Proust, Shelley, Voltaire, etc..?
It doesn't need to be that much inclusive of course, but it would be cool if it was a small window to the broader human soul instead of a subjective perspective that seems to be missing a lot of the common ground that helped to shape the civilization the way it is.
Given there are other README files covering a number of other major languages, I think you might be a little harsh. That file is really only meant to cover the Anglophone world and even then is only an initial compilation.
The tech tree isn't translated as far as I can tell. Though my point was that the projects talks in a universal way but the listed sources are really from one cultural group. The translated files are translations of the file "Guide To the GitHub Code Vault" (GUIDE.md), I don't think that's really relevant here.
The solution there is for somebody to contribute a translation, even if they can't contribute a list of sources. TheTechTree.md is comparatively new compared to the other files, as can be seen from the history: https://github.com/github/archive-program/commits/master/The...
The whole premise of slack seems to be “let’s throw away everything we know about effective communication and try again”. That’s how we end up with threads nobody can follow, annoying bots and extensions you can’t mute, and a “knowledge store” that only works if you know who, when, and where something was said.
Every week I have to unsubscribe from the seventy channels and direct message groups I got involuntarily joined to.
If IRC could handle unreliable connections better I think it would absolutely trump Slack.
In general they seem to do a good job of missing out books which cover the mathematical basis of theoretical computer science; if the aim is to provide a starting point for humanity to recover technical knowledge following some disaster, I'd argue that a survey of the past 100 years' research into theoretical computer science is orders of magnitude more useful (who wants to repeat (i.e. waste) another 100 years on the Entscheidungsproblem?) than n different books on specific programming language.
Surprised me too, but most listed books are from traditional publishers, like Elsevier, Springer, O'Reilly, etc. I expected that they'd just ignored books from No Starch, but then there is Randall Hyde's "The Art of Assembly Language".
Scala is the leading FP language (thanks to Spark, Kafka, Akka, and other massive projects). And TIOBE puts Scheme and Lisp ahead of Haskell. And Emacs Lisp probably has more installs than GHC.
Probably depends on the definition of leading; I'd guess that Haskell is probably used more than any other (Turing-complete, to exclude Gallina, etc.) functional language within programming language research, but you're right that in terms of usage in industry etc. Scala is probably on top.
Yes it is, but if "leading functional language" means "on the cutting edge of research into functional languages" then that might well be used to describe Haskell.
If leading refers to overall usage in industry, then sure, it's not really relevant.
Because I'm basing it on my experience doing research in PLT, but this is of course purely anecdotal and my areas of research interest lie away from the likes of Haskell, so I would not wish to make a false claim by stating it as fact.
> Why is this [more] important?
I never said that it was, only that depending on what is meant by "leading", industry usage might not be relevant. Since Scala is by far the more used language I think it's fair to assume that
(without meaning to put words into mouths) the original commenter might have been talking about PLT research as opposed to usage in industry.
Scala had a lot of influences, but the first two papers on Scala have references to SML and Ocaml but none for Haskell[1]. Make of that what you will.
> Leading more in terms of influence than usage.
Is Haskell influential? By what metric? Impact factor of papers published?
Here are some features that Standard ML had which were cutting edge:
strong static typing
automatic type inference
exception handling
pattern matching
parametric polymorphism
first class functions
Basically all of these features are features any compiled language would enjoy today. SML is a very influential language despite not being used much in industry.
Here are features which Haskell is known for aside from the above:
laziness
strict immutability
do-notation
typeclasses
operator overloading with symbols like +++ and ==<
Of these, typeclasses are wicked and influenced Rust's traits (the rest of the language being heavily influenced by [oca]ml). The rest are not even desirable. Haskell doesn't seem very influential in comparison. Maybe it's influential because it warns us to not default to laziness or go full strict immutability?
This is distinct from e.g. Erlang where the features like process management through the supervisor, mnesia, and so on are highly desirable for any developer even if other languages/platforms haven't implemented them as a standard component. (, vs . for line termination, not so much).
Yea, I mean video-games are THE way of software sneaking into culture.
I mean there is also programming culture but it's constantly changing, split into a innumerable number of sometimes conflicting variants and is often more like work culture then art. But it's also art, it's complicated tbh. I mean how many opinions are based around what feels nice and/or looks nice instead of what works most reliable and well? Through then this is also where innovations sometimes starts, with libraries which do look and feel nice but do not yet work supper well.
Not knowing much about archiving, this also struck me as a fairly superficial way to build an "archive" - seems more like an opinionated "best of" than an actually useful archive for future humans. I would like to see an actual OPAC!
> Computers are great, but in a way, so 20th century; it's networked computers which are, at least arguably, the real technical revolution of the 21st.
It then goes on to list all things created in the 20th century: TCP/IP, ethernet, DNS, HTTP, etc.
It's kind of counter intuitive, but writing about women's role in computing directly sheds light on men's role in the same. It is one of those sentences, where what is not said is just as important.
> We believe women's unique role in founding and shaping computing and technology deserves its own section.
> <Hidden> And men's role doesn't deserve a section, because literally everything else you read about was done by them. <\Hidden>
I too think, the on-the-nose-ness of communicating women's roles here, is annoying to both men and women of 2020. However, this document is written with societal-recovery in mind. In that case, I would rather it be explicitly mentioned that women deserve just as relevant a role in tech development, lest some post-apocalyptic male-supremacist historian notice that almost everything important in tech was invented by men and postulate that, 'Tech should be the domain of men and only men.'
I do hope they also talk about the internal culture of nerds, societal-outcasts and less-than-macho men, that shaped tech as we know it. I don't think the uniqueness of nerdy tech culture is explored enough.
I think category 13 should be included in their history/culture category, not a category in and of itself.
This is because it goes contrary to the goal of the project, to “...describe how the world makes and uses software today, as well as an overview of how computers work and the foundational technologies required to make and use computers.” I don’t see how separating top level categories at first from functional differences makes sense to then, by category 13, distinguishing merit from biology. It seems patronizing, and a politicization of something they’re stated aim is to be unbiased and logical.
We should discuss women’s contributions, by all means. But quite frankly I don’t care who makes the contribution, I only care about the impact of the contribution.
Therefore, highlighting an aspect of technology, or a recent advancement based purely off of it being from a man/woman or any number of ethnic/cultural backgrounds, is antithetical to the goal of science being unbiased. Literally the point of the scientific method is undoubtedly to remove biases, and find causality. We’re now introducing a new, subjective factor for what’s deemed a reputable contribution not for the contribution itself, but for what political agenda is aimed to be promoted.
Sure, highlight women’s achievements in the cultural category, especially cases where they were lost in history until recently (Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper). But don’t pretend to be the pinnacle of objectivity.
> If I were a woman, I would hate that shit but it seems like most people who comes up with and support ideas like this are either too stupid or too ignorant to care.
So if they don't do what you would prefer, they're too stupid or too ignorant to care? What about if they're perfectly smart and perfectly aware, and just aren't concerned with doing what you personally want? Maybe you feel differently from most people, which is great and nice and perfectly fine, but you speculating about what you would want if you were a woman isn't exactly a clear indication of what is actually best right now, and what women want.
EDIT: And to be fair, you don't know how you'd feel about this as a woman, because you don't identify as one (presumably).
How often are tech trees used in software development/ project management?
I’m leading a hardware development project and I made a tech tree for my team- but I had only ever seen them in video games. Would love some professional examples
My team is designing a new product for our company. We know what we want the end result to be, but we have several iterations to make on our current product to get there, and each iteration can branch through several paths to satisfy our requirements.
So there's a hardware tree which lists the options we have to upgrade the hardware, a software tree that shows the scope of options we have to improve the software, etc.
The idea is to show the different tasks that need to be done; and which can be done concurrently and which need to be done sequentially to get to our goal.
I showed my team the Factorio tech tree to give them an idea, but I didn't realize people used them professionally.
Usually when joining a fairly technical team, the team has put together "learn these things" to get up to speed. For example, on our team where I am currently, you should be fairly familiar with statistics and maths after the first year on the team.
For us it's less about onboarding to the team and more of what tech do we need to develop for this product to meet client spec. I'm using it more as an organizational tool to structure which tasks need to be done sequentially (i.e. the API needs to be complete before we can test it with the software) and the tasks that can be done concurrently (i.e. the hardware can be developed and tested the same time as the software, up to a point).
And your comment about the dependencies is still accurate for my team since we have to be efficient about doing the concurrent parts together to make sure we get this product to our client on time.
It's been useful for me to visualize all the moving parts of my project and see options that I have in a way that is familiar to me.
How to actually read QR codes, untar/decompress, bootstrap a C compiler and so on is supposed to be part of the index on each reel, but I'd really love to see these instructions! They are mentioned as the "Representation Information" (see https://git.io/JJDLP).
I usually avoid Stephenson (only because it's so wordy and I don't have much free time) and hadn't even read the wikipedia tl;dr of Anathem, but you mentioning it together with A Canticle for Leibowitz caused me to read the first few paragraphs of the wiki page for it and now I'm going to make an exception and find time to read it.
Blood Meridian is an account of how we got here. If civilization falls apart to the extent that they need this resource, they'll at least presumably know how they got there and won't need a fictionalized account of societal collapse.
I am not sure how civilisations thousands of years in the future, with potentially a lower level of technology could be able to decipher the data from the archive, seeing the encoding complexity and the number of steps required. Considering how much money GitHub received from microsoft, I think they could have recorded all uncompressed, engraved in stone...
> In addition to this technical documentation, we have also included a selection of artistic, cultural, and historical works, to help describe the overall cultural context in which this archive was created.
Since a lot of the culture described later is specifically related to Western culture, I find it interesting that the Bible is not included.
For good or ill, the Bible had a profound cultural effect on Western civilization, and specifically the King James Version on the Anglosphere.
Unfortunately for utopianists, self-interest is how things get done that would otherwise never get done. It powers most open source work.
If a company or individual does something just to slap their name on it, so be it.
The combined open source effort vs Github's effort shouldn't be compared as it doesn't make sense. Just like it doesn't make sense to compare the work of a translator vs. the work of writing the original material—the translator is still doing valuable work regardless. The translator isn't "taking credit" for the original work.
You should compare what Github is doing with other endeavors doing the same thing.
Uber like platform needed for the entire software development consulting. Don't say that we have freelancer! Still it has to go a long way to reach this level
The Tech Tree is a selection of works intended to describe how the world makes and uses software today, as well as an overview of how computers work and the foundational technologies required to make and use computers.
