MIT, you know I love you guys. I have a tremendous amount of respect for you and your work, and you haven't yet eroded the good will you got for helping to revolutionize computing on multiple occaisions, and also for establishing Switzerland, and thus being responsible to some degree for Hacker culture, and a whole other wide variety of important work, and the Lisp languages (including Scheme) as we know them to today.
However, if you talk about how you've made significant advances to the state of the art in a field, and talk about a really cool project you made with this advance, and you do not tell us how you did it and link the git repo, than I don't care. Software is a collaborative effort. If you don't tell us how you got a result, or only give general overviews, then we have to re-discover it, re-implement it, and/or re-solve all the problems you solved. if you've made advances and do not disclose them in detail, than you are holding us back. and if your implementation is encumbered, write one that isn't, and give us it.
Either way, if anyone claims to have made amazing advances in a certain field, the first question you should be asking is, "where's your code."
Huh? I know you can't mean that the American university MIT established the European country of Switzerland, so what do you mean? And how did that create hacker culture?
Not the AI Lab, but Sussman and company's group that sort of stood between the AI Lab and the Lab for Computing Science (LCS), which did more classical types of CS.
E.g. artifacts that came from the AI Lab included the Lisp Machine and it's Ethernet style Chaosnet, while LCS was working on a token ring network and aside from their Nu machines and the NuBus, adopted by Apple, never made their own workstations. Or Maclisp (I think at some point) and Scheme, vs. CLU. Other things that came from LCS include RSA and the X window system (the latter due to a weird VAX 11/750 config that DEC created so it could donate them to MIT without suffering (much) from the GSA "Most Favored Customer" requirement to give the Federal government the best price you gave anyone else).
After some point Sussman and company created their own informal? unit which stood apart, getting their money from the NSF and using Scheme, and doing their own things, "Switzerland, Armed but Neutral", staying above/aside from the fighting between LCS and the AI Lab. Which as I recall hearing, was only resolved when the head of LCS died (but not before unduly influencing the architecture of their new and highly dysfunctional building), and the head of the AI Lab, who'd saved it when other AI Labs like Stanford's legendary one died, became the head of a combined Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory AKA CSAIL.
All the above is 2nd hand but from reliable sources, and remotely after mid-1991.
Ah, thanks. Sorry. I always confuse AI and Switzerland, as both derived from project MAC. Both were important, and are generally more famous than LCS, although LCS was arguably more influential.
It doesn't help matters that Switzerland was sometimes called project MAC, which was the original name for the collective. To further confuse matters, https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ is the Switzerland website, and it looks like Switzerland is kind of still going, even after the CSAIL merge. Unless the site's just outdated, which is also a possibility.
Last time I checked, which was a few years ago but quite some time after the creation of CSAIL, Switzerland was going strong. Last tidbit was their dismay to discover the very high ceiling of the space they were in was a couple or three inches too short per Cambridge zoning rules to subdivide into 2 levels.
BTW, it's really hard to understate how horrible a building the Strata Center is for the people inside it who are, you know, trying to get work done, in fact, it's akin and often directly an example of the current open office fad.
Or for people trying to get to them, due to it's inherently horrible physical security. In terms of sheer incompetence, though, it's hard to beat creating a loading dock area for mail and freight to replace Building 20's modest facilities that trucks can't actually get into and out of....
After blowing most of almost half a billion on it, MIT has a lot of nerve asking for more money for more buildings.
Disclaimer: big fan of Building 20, which served as an indispensable incubator, and allowed me to set up a student run computer center in 1980, there's no place else in the Institute where that would have been vaguely easy, or probably even possible.
Yeah, it was a nightmare to maintain, and occupied very valuable space on campus, but there's no excuse for not creating another space to serve the same function, modulo the ease of knocking vertical or horizontal holes, and its extremely high load bearing capability (200 lb/sq ft as I recall). MIT simply won't be creating new groups of people in new fields as fast as it used to.
It is notoriously difficult to work in, with way too many open spaces (open in the sense of being public, as well as open in the sense of having random 3-story-high atriums of air above you in some places for no discernable reason) and not enough quiet nooks that are conductive to focused work.
Ouch. Yeah, that would suck. But then, IIRC, people have been saying that X is dimishing MIT's future ability to be MIT since before the death of 6.001. I suspect it's another manifestation of the same kind of human impulse that makes the elders of every generation decry the youth of the next ones. And a bad building design isn't impossible to work around, just very, very, very, very inconvenient.
But then, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
The incubator that was Building 20 was is gone, as far as I know. Many many good things came out of it, some of which got very big, starting with the Research Lab For Electronics right after WWII (it was previously the main building for the "MIT Radiation Lab", i.e. a place to prototype and in some cases build small lots of RADARs). As of the '80s, some of its 3 phase ceiling busbars were still live, one of my favorite professor's coffepot ran straight off one.
That's a relatively subtle thing, but to the extent MIT becomes stolid and not doing new things, becomes more of a place run by consensus and the conventional wisdom, that would be an important thing to look at.
The second is of course the Stata Building. It will absolutely diminish the useful output of what's now CSAIL, if for no other reason than those who need to be able to work without distraction by and large won't be able to in the building. It's the sort of thing that can put a ceiling on the difficultly of projects people will be able to do, if they can't get into or stay long enough in flow.
Obviously people will work around this, using e.g. laptops in quiet places, but collaboration will then seriously suffer if past research on the subject is of any validity (e.g. > 30 feet? or a stairway makes a big difference).
I don't know if anyone was out to get them, it's just that a) people who had weird and very wrong ideas about how to do things, like the head of the LCS, who among many other things tried to physically enshrine a permanent disconnection between CS and AI, b) people who simply didn't give a shit about those who really were going to use it, and/or c) people who were grossly incompetent, were in charge of getting it designed and built, but not the actual "users".
And the screwups are legion. Tom Knight, #1 Lisp Machine designer back in the day and someone who did a lot of important stuff, now a "synthetic biologist" AKA into artificial life, asked for one thing, a floor that sloped to a drain. Which he didn't get. And I now notice as of 2008 he's doing this at a company he co-founded.
I suspect those two fact are not entirely coincidental. And potentially a grave loss to MIT, that part of the future just might not be done there, losing "The Godfather of Synthetic Biology" per Wikipedia is not a small thing.
And I have the tiniest window into CSAIL, and can speak freely about it (my one theoretically vulnerable source isn't really, and hasn't told me anything I can't repeat), there's I'm sure much much more to be told, and sifted through by historians or archaeologists of science someday.
6.001 is a rather different thing, after the dot.com crash, which resulted in a crash of EECS undergraduate enrollment, less than half after being 40% of the student body for decades, people panicked, those with an agenda against Scheme/LISP used the opening, but primarily, MIT decided an MIT EECS degree was going to be a fundamentally different thing.
That doesn't mean they're wrong, just that if you're looking a focus on the 6.001/SICP sort of thing, you might want to look elsewhere, like CMU I think. And maybe this was inevitable, a department like MIT's or UCB's is simply never going to be the same as a CS focused department that didn't grow out of an EE one. And Sussman at least always thought the 2 subjects were both of great importance and should be taught together, he himself just never figured out a way to really make that work, including at least one experimental one year long course covering both prior to the development of SICP and the 4 6.001-4 courses.
But in short, you're saying that MIT may no longer be "where the future happens."
Or maybe MIT is now starting to seriously revert to the mean, some of the future will most certainly happen there, just potentially quite a bit less.
I may have seen some of that in the '80s, certainly the midnight execution of the Applied Biology department by envious chemistry and biology professor administrators was a sign of some sort, especially since the fate of the latter should have been much worse than having their administrative careers ended. The faculty as a whole certainly viewed it as a betrayal, which is was in spirit and "law" (MIT has the institution of the Visiting Committee to keep units of it on the straight and narrow, they were of course ignored in this).
And this is part of a bigger trend, pure administrators are growing in vast numbers in US higher education, their costs are one of the biggest drivers in this clearly unsustainable trend, they're funded by ever more Federal dollars (even if laundered as loans, which the Feds entirely took over in 2010), and from money comes power, they're taking over US universities from the faculty. Who themselves are getting segregated into small numbers of high cost tenured and large quantities of low cost associates who care barely make ends meet, plus the old bane of graduate student instructors who aren't good at it.
MIT, at least for now, is not going to succumb to some of these trends, as long as associate professors are rare exceptions that prove the rule, like SF author Joe Haldeman, for classes are otherwise taught by tenured or tenure track faculty, and adequate teaching ability is required for tenure, as well as the minor detail of being #1 or #2 in your subfield (as judged, in part, by those Visiting Committees).
Similarly, like CalTech, there's a high floor on admitting undergraduates, they've got be able to do one term of the calculus beyond the AP BC sequence, and calculus based mechanics and physics (and chemistry and maybe biology).
Yeah. My father went to CMU, and told me some stories about a few professors that were... less than enthusiastic about teaching. Like one that was pretty much using the class for his reseach project, and didn't teach the intended subject matter. At all.
Swiss alum here. I've visited semi-regularly, and can never seem to actually find the place in Stata. Tech Square, while not pretty, was functional. Also share fond memories of Bldg 20.
Calm down, it's a press release written by PR professionals, not the researchers. Others here have linked to the paper. But I would agree with you that code in academic research needs to be shared more. I haven't searched very hard, but if the code for "milk" is public, these researchers don't seem to have put it in an obvious place.
It's similar, but a key difference is that Milk is deferring the exact timing of access in order to do a sort. You can build the same thing atop scatter/gather primitives but they don't do that for you themselves.
23 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 68.7 ms ] threadHowever, if you talk about how you've made significant advances to the state of the art in a field, and talk about a really cool project you made with this advance, and you do not tell us how you did it and link the git repo, than I don't care. Software is a collaborative effort. If you don't tell us how you got a result, or only give general overviews, then we have to re-discover it, re-implement it, and/or re-solve all the problems you solved. if you've made advances and do not disclose them in detail, than you are holding us back. and if your implementation is encumbered, write one that isn't, and give us it.
Either way, if anyone claims to have made amazing advances in a certain field, the first question you should be asking is, "where's your code."
It was actually discussed here 2 days ago and the mods changed the current link to the acm.org pdf :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12495898
They still should have published the code...
Huh? I know you can't mean that the American university MIT established the European country of Switzerland, so what do you mean? And how did that create hacker culture?
E.g. artifacts that came from the AI Lab included the Lisp Machine and it's Ethernet style Chaosnet, while LCS was working on a token ring network and aside from their Nu machines and the NuBus, adopted by Apple, never made their own workstations. Or Maclisp (I think at some point) and Scheme, vs. CLU. Other things that came from LCS include RSA and the X window system (the latter due to a weird VAX 11/750 config that DEC created so it could donate them to MIT without suffering (much) from the GSA "Most Favored Customer" requirement to give the Federal government the best price you gave anyone else).
After some point Sussman and company created their own informal? unit which stood apart, getting their money from the NSF and using Scheme, and doing their own things, "Switzerland, Armed but Neutral", staying above/aside from the fighting between LCS and the AI Lab. Which as I recall hearing, was only resolved when the head of LCS died (but not before unduly influencing the architecture of their new and highly dysfunctional building), and the head of the AI Lab, who'd saved it when other AI Labs like Stanford's legendary one died, became the head of a combined Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory AKA CSAIL.
All the above is 2nd hand but from reliable sources, and remotely after mid-1991.
It doesn't help matters that Switzerland was sometimes called project MAC, which was the original name for the collective. To further confuse matters, https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/ is the Switzerland website, and it looks like Switzerland is kind of still going, even after the CSAIL merge. Unless the site's just outdated, which is also a possibility.
BTW, it's really hard to understate how horrible a building the Strata Center is for the people inside it who are, you know, trying to get work done, in fact, it's akin and often directly an example of the current open office fad.
Or for people trying to get to them, due to it's inherently horrible physical security. In terms of sheer incompetence, though, it's hard to beat creating a loading dock area for mail and freight to replace Building 20's modest facilities that trucks can't actually get into and out of....
After blowing most of almost half a billion on it, MIT has a lot of nerve asking for more money for more buildings.
Disclaimer: big fan of Building 20, which served as an indispensable incubator, and allowed me to set up a student run computer center in 1980, there's no place else in the Institute where that would have been vaguely easy, or probably even possible.
Yeah, it was a nightmare to maintain, and occupied very valuable space on campus, but there's no excuse for not creating another space to serve the same function, modulo the ease of knocking vertical or horizontal holes, and its extremely high load bearing capability (200 lb/sq ft as I recall). MIT simply won't be creating new groups of people in new fields as fast as it used to.
It is notoriously difficult to work in, with way too many open spaces (open in the sense of being public, as well as open in the sense of having random 3-story-high atriums of air above you in some places for no discernable reason) and not enough quiet nooks that are conductive to focused work.
It shows every sign of being a two for one own goal in diminishing MIT's future ability to "be MIT".
But then, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
The incubator that was Building 20 was is gone, as far as I know. Many many good things came out of it, some of which got very big, starting with the Research Lab For Electronics right after WWII (it was previously the main building for the "MIT Radiation Lab", i.e. a place to prototype and in some cases build small lots of RADARs). As of the '80s, some of its 3 phase ceiling busbars were still live, one of my favorite professor's coffepot ran straight off one.
That's a relatively subtle thing, but to the extent MIT becomes stolid and not doing new things, becomes more of a place run by consensus and the conventional wisdom, that would be an important thing to look at.
The second is of course the Stata Building. It will absolutely diminish the useful output of what's now CSAIL, if for no other reason than those who need to be able to work without distraction by and large won't be able to in the building. It's the sort of thing that can put a ceiling on the difficultly of projects people will be able to do, if they can't get into or stay long enough in flow.
Obviously people will work around this, using e.g. laptops in quiet places, but collaboration will then seriously suffer if past research on the subject is of any validity (e.g. > 30 feet? or a stairway makes a big difference).
I don't know if anyone was out to get them, it's just that a) people who had weird and very wrong ideas about how to do things, like the head of the LCS, who among many other things tried to physically enshrine a permanent disconnection between CS and AI, b) people who simply didn't give a shit about those who really were going to use it, and/or c) people who were grossly incompetent, were in charge of getting it designed and built, but not the actual "users".
And the screwups are legion. Tom Knight, #1 Lisp Machine designer back in the day and someone who did a lot of important stuff, now a "synthetic biologist" AKA into artificial life, asked for one thing, a floor that sloped to a drain. Which he didn't get. And I now notice as of 2008 he's doing this at a company he co-founded.
I suspect those two fact are not entirely coincidental. And potentially a grave loss to MIT, that part of the future just might not be done there, losing "The Godfather of Synthetic Biology" per Wikipedia is not a small thing.
And I have the tiniest window into CSAIL, and can speak freely about it (my one theoretically vulnerable source isn't really, and hasn't told me anything I can't repeat), there's I'm sure much much more to be told, and sifted through by historians or archaeologists of science someday.
6.001 is a rather different thing, after the dot.com crash, which resulted in a crash of EECS undergraduate enrollment, less than half after being 40% of the student body for decades, people panicked, those with an agenda against Scheme/LISP used the opening, but primarily, MIT decided an MIT EECS degree was going to be a fundamentally different thing.
That doesn't mean they're wrong, just that if you're looking a focus on the 6.001/SICP sort of thing, you might want to look elsewhere, like CMU I think. And maybe this was inevitable, a department like MIT's or UCB's is simply never going to be the same as a CS focused department that didn't grow out of an EE one. And Sussman at least always thought the 2 subjects were both of great importance and should be taught together, he himself just never figured out a way to really make that work, including at least one experimental one year long course covering both prior to the development of SICP and the 4 6.001-4 courses.
But in short, you're saying that MIT may no longer be "where the future happens."
That's quite possible. But at the moment, there's still an abundance of talent there. OTOH, the lack of an incubator is a problem.
I guess what I'm saying is that you might be right, ut the future is pretty hard to predict.
Or maybe MIT is now starting to seriously revert to the mean, some of the future will most certainly happen there, just potentially quite a bit less.
I may have seen some of that in the '80s, certainly the midnight execution of the Applied Biology department by envious chemistry and biology professor administrators was a sign of some sort, especially since the fate of the latter should have been much worse than having their administrative careers ended. The faculty as a whole certainly viewed it as a betrayal, which is was in spirit and "law" (MIT has the institution of the Visiting Committee to keep units of it on the straight and narrow, they were of course ignored in this).
And this is part of a bigger trend, pure administrators are growing in vast numbers in US higher education, their costs are one of the biggest drivers in this clearly unsustainable trend, they're funded by ever more Federal dollars (even if laundered as loans, which the Feds entirely took over in 2010), and from money comes power, they're taking over US universities from the faculty. Who themselves are getting segregated into small numbers of high cost tenured and large quantities of low cost associates who care barely make ends meet, plus the old bane of graduate student instructors who aren't good at it.
MIT, at least for now, is not going to succumb to some of these trends, as long as associate professors are rare exceptions that prove the rule, like SF author Joe Haldeman, for classes are otherwise taught by tenured or tenure track faculty, and adequate teaching ability is required for tenure, as well as the minor detail of being #1 or #2 in your subfield (as judged, in part, by those Visiting Committees).
Similarly, like CalTech, there's a high floor on admitting undergraduates, they've got be able to do one term of the calculus beyond the AP BC sequence, and calculus based mechanics and physics (and chemistry and maybe biology).
But....