An electronic brain. What would you do with one of those, if you had one? In 1940, you’d probably stick it in a machine of some kind. Not one of Dr. Satan’s recycled Atlantean robots, but something practical. Say a machine that could weld leaf-springs in a Milwaukee tractor factory.
This, really, is about what science fiction writers call “Steam Engine Time”. The observable fact that steam, contained, exerts force, has been around since the first lid rattled as the soup came to a boil. The ancient Greeks built toy steam engines that whirled brass globes. But you won’t get a locomotive ‘til it’s Steam Engine Time.
What you wouldn’t do, in 1940, with an electronic brain, would be to stick it on your desk, connect it somehow to a typewriter, and, if you, had one, a television of the sort demonstrated at the 1939 Worlds fair in New York. At which point it would start to resemble… But it’s not Steam Engine Time yet, so you can’t do that. Although you would, or anyway you’d think about it, if you were a man named Vannevar Bush, but we’ll come back to him later. Vannevar Bush almost single-handedly invented what we now think of as the military-industrial complex. He did that for Franklin Roosevelt, but it isn’t what he’ll be remembered for.
I think it's even more relevant than that. This article pretty much directly inspired Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson, who in turn went on to work on the first hypertext systems (Engelbart on NLS [1] and Nelson on Project Xanadu [2]). Although today's web doesn't quite live up to the standards set for Project Xanadu (it involves microtransactions, link rot [3] prevention, the ability to trace back what links to any given page, transparent creation of compilation documents and other such things) those projects are part of history that led to us being able to have this discussion right now using a HTML-based medium.
Looking back at As We May Think and the systems it directly inspired today may be a way to help us make the internet better. It's not hard to imagine how with a few tweaks Xanadu-like micropayments + trasclusion [4] could a least partially replace banner advertising and help revitalize web journalism by making it not dependant on ad revenue.
When was 'a while ago'? Who is 'we'? And what do you mean by 'agreed'? (Are you part of the site management which had a discussion/decision on these matters?)
None of these are mentioned in the 'Guidelines' linked at the bottom. On the other hand, the guidelines do mention: "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."
I really wish they would incorporate these in the guidelines. I am not a part of the site's management. By "we" I mean the community.
Unfortunately, this was all discussed in an ad hoc fashion in comments to random stories but I'll do my best to find it.
time passes
First, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring is the bot that submits the "Who is hiring?" posts. It started a few years ago as you can see by the registration date for this user. The problem was that these posts generate a lot of upvotes, and people started trying to beat each other to the punch to try to get more karma points. The problem came to a head when multiple "Who is hiring?" posts made it to the front page, which has the obvious negative consequences.
I just spent about 30 minutes searching for the other two discussions and cannot find them (hnsearch, Google, and my own story upvotes proved unhelpful). Best I can offer is this: about two years ago, IIRC, there was a trend to link directly to Wikipedia. The front page was filled with random posts on there, like the one about the illegal numbers. Wikipedia is great, but often times it was not clear why a post was relevant to HN. The conclusion of the discussion was that we shouldn't post Wikipedia articles directly and the trend died down. @gojomo, I wager you have been here long enough to remember this trend, and I'm sure you noticed that one day it stopped. That's probably the best proof I can offer on this point.
Something similar happened with pg's essays. Every time he posted one, it would show up on the front page. At that point someone posted a master submission, linking to all of them, and in the discussion there was agreement that since pg is so well known here and his essays are so closely watched that it is taking away from other stories to post the content that almost everyone will discover anyway. Additionally, this once again lead to karma farming by multiple people trying to post the same essay as early as possible. Interestingly enough, I just tried posting the link to all the essays and the duplicate matching engine let it through, so I wonder what happened to that post (and/or my memory of it). In either case, it looks like this trend is also starting to slowly come back.
Once again, I really wish I could find these discussions and/or compel the site admins to clarify some of these points in the guidelines. Alas, I do deserve the downvotes in my original post for not including any references.
Thanks for explaining. I think it's important to note that any perceived-consensus in some random-thread doesn't mean much - it's not necessarily a real consensus or conclusion, and in any case the actual site managers have their own ideas about how things should work. (And, while they clearly welcome some input, they also seem to frown upon most meta-discussion, complaint threads, coordinated-voting-pacts, and lobbying-polls.)
Personally, the occasional posts of Wikipedia articles and PG essays (even repeats when related to current topics) are valuable to me. I think it'd be a misuse of the 'flag' to suppress these. Of course anyone is free to misuse their click-power like that... I just don't want anyone to misleadingly claim that's a consensus norm, with the vague assertion "we already decided this". That seems like a rhetorical trick.
I don't remember any of those. What I do remember is lots of discussion about flagging instead of posting comments berating a submission for being upvoted.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...