from Hacker News

At Dynamicland, the Building Is the Computer

by swannodette on 9/18/19, 6:46 PM with 31 comments

  • by honkycat on 9/18/19, 8:26 PM

    I feel like this kind of work is extremely important.

    I always say that if someone figured out how to write better software faster, they would be a billionaire.

    I see project after project turn to mush and go south, people writing the same stuff over and over again. I see brilliant people botch projects and struggle to do the work of a programmer. I see weekly data breaches exposing my personal information to whoever wants it.

    To me, there is only one conclusion: Software is too hard to write. It is too hard to write robust large-scale systems. It is too hard to write secure software. There is DEFINETELY a ton of progress to be made in this area of research.

    ...in the mean time, I'll keep on cashing my paychecks.

  • by devinplatt on 9/18/19, 11:21 PM

    > By May 2016, Kay was able to charm Y Combinator’s president and A-type startup whisperer Sam Altman. They created Human Advancement Research Community (HARC) inside of YC Research and absorbed the CDG researchers there. Altman generously agreed to fund HARC out of pocket while they waited for other promised funding to come through.

    > That arrangement lasted a little over a year. In July 2017, just a few months after HARC moved into a beautifully renovated building in old Oakland, Altman abruptly defunded the lab.

    > It’s unclear why he pulled the plug. In his Y Combinator annual letter in February 2017, he said that the work coming out of Victor’s lab “remain one of the new technologies I think most about.” But a person close to Altman told me that by July his excitement had shifted from HARC to OpenAI, another YC Research project where he is now CEO. Amidst the ashes, a burned-out Kay left for London, and the research groups disbanded.

    I was so excited when HARC was first announced. It's great that they were funded for an extra year, but it's really too bad YC couldn't keep funding Bret Victor's lab :(

  • by pkkim on 9/18/19, 8:07 PM

    I was lucky enough to visit Dynamicland at one point. The computing environment they had set up there was interesting. Programs are stored on a central server, but are executed by putting a printout of the code (with colored dots around the edges serving as a barcode) on a tabletop that has a camera and a projector above it. I/O between programs happens by putting cards next to each other. The programs also affect what the projector displays on the board, but the only persistent state is the presence and position of cards on the table.

  • by miki123211 on 9/18/19, 9:29 PM

    I love the motivations behind the idea, but not the idea itself. I think there's a better way. Dynamicland undoes half the progress we've made in the last few decades, particularly when it comes to inclusivity. The amazing thing about computers is their ability to convert information between representations at will, and to transmit them anywhere, instantly. This is crucial for accessibility. Not being tied to a single representation means you can access and manipulate information with any method you want. It might be a touchscreen, a keyboard and a program that reads information aloud for the blind, or a voice recognition / eye tracking system for those who can't use their hands. With Dynamicland, you need to manipulate physical objects directly. If, for some reason, you're unable to do so, you're completely locked out. Contrary to what the article says, I think Dynamicland could strengthen the young white male living in California programmer culture even more. The beautiful thing about computers of today is the ability to learn and hack on programs, for anyone, anywhere. Open source even allows anyone to contribute, and being an OSS contributor gives you an advantage when trying to find work. Remote work is also becoming more and more pervasive, enabling people from poorer countries to work in tech without physically moving somewhere else. Dynamicland makes all of that significantly harder.

    A better idea which might solve some problems it aims to solve, without sacrificing inclusivity, might be going back to the Unix tools philosophy. Tools should do one thing, do it well and do it only. They should also work well with other tools. The design of smartphone operating systems forces apps to do the exact opposite. They're sandboxed and prevented from accessing most features of the OS, as well as from communicating with other apps effectively. That forces developers to put more and more features into their apps. It also gives many opportunities for corporate lock-in and user-hostile tactics. The Unix philosophy would alow anyone to contribute something, no matter how small or insignificant. There should be some verification, of course, probably similar to what Apple does. Forcing all the tools to be open source wouldn't even be such a bad idea after all. They wouldn't be big apps, just small things scratching small itches, so there would be no big investment needed to develop such a tool. I think such an approach would let us create a much more vibrant and user friendly ecosystem.

  • by brian_herman__ on 9/18/19, 7:44 PM

    If you guys like dynamic land you guys should check out: https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2414

  • by michannne on 9/18/19, 9:59 PM

    >If we want a future where everyone can program as easily as drawing a map on a napkin, where the full power of computing is available to more than just professional programmers, we may need to reimagine programming itself.

    Seems like they're trying to achieve two incredibly difficult, dubious and complex goals at the same time, which doesn't usually work out in the end

  • by steveeq1 on 9/19/19, 5:37 AM

    Does anyone on this list work at dynamicland?

    I tried to visit last time I was in San Francisco and it turns out this thing is closed to the public. The guy who answered the door says he's not sure when the next open house will be, no one is answering the "contact" page and I'm not getting any email announcements on it either.

    Is there ever going to be any "open house" when any joe schmoe is able to visit?

  • by ranie93 on 9/18/19, 7:43 PM

  • by mruts on 9/18/19, 11:59 PM

    “Our mission is to incubate a humane dynamic medium whose full power is accessible to all people.” Kind of ironic when they don’t even release the source code. I guess by all people they mean people who stop by Oakland for a couple hours.

  • by mruts on 9/18/19, 11:50 PM

    This is pretty cool, but, like, what’s the point? What problem is this trying to solve? How does printing hello world out of a printer with dots on it help us at all? Why would we want to align pieces of paper in order to do IO? How is this supposed to change the world like PARC or Bell Labs?

    Don’t get me wrong I would love to play around with stuff. But that’s what it is, playing. Do you think any of the people who work there when working on a personal side project are like: “I can solve the problem of <foo> by printing out sheets of paper and organizing them on a table!” I would hesitate to call this project masturbation, but it comes close. Or just call it art, that would be fine too (just don’t pretend it’s going to matter all that much).

  • by Animats on 9/19/19, 3:42 AM

    It's skeuomorphism to the max.

    Although if somebody got a decent web page design tool out of it, it might be worth it. The HTML/CSS/Javascript crowd has managed to turn a visual problem into a really ugly programming problem.