
The HARC First Year Report - fniephaus
https://harc.ycr.org/reports/
======
GuiA
It is my understanding that HARC has stopped funding Victor’s [1] and Hart’s
[2] research.

Is that accurate? Have other groups in the list suffered from the same fate?
If so, how does that fit within HARC’s long term research strategy? These sort
of initiatives rarely bear fruits in a single year.

[1] [http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/](http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/)

[2] I was at Dynamic Land earlier this week, and they said they were closing
down for the winter, actively looking for funding, and not reopening if they
cannot provide said funding.

~~~
RubenSandwich
I'm struggling to see how why Dynamic Land would be no longer be funded by
HARC. Doesn't it fit the HARC goal of: "HARC’s mission is to ensure human
wisdom exceeds human power, by inventing and freely sharing ideas and
technology that allow all humans to see further and understand more
deeply."[1] pretty well?

Maybe HARC is just a year-long thing? If so Bret/Dynamic Land team can you
please put up a Patreon account and let us fund you. I will gladly give money
to you as it is the most human form of computing I have ever seen and would
like progress on it to continue.

[1] [https://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/)

------
westoncb
Realtalk/Dynamicland is fascinating to me, though there's something about it
which I haven't been able to get over, which is: how can it provide the kind
of generality we're used to in computing without giving some set of re-
combinable primitives? In other words, something like pixels where the
primitive thing is simple and easy to configure algorithmically, and yet the
range of configurations is vast enough to represent a large fraction of human
imagination.

I love 'being in the world' as opposed to sitting statically at a desk—but I
would need something that could give me the similar feeling of vast
possibilities when I consider what I'd like to build next.

I wonder if some kind of re-combinable primitives for representation are part
of the plan, or if it's an explicit aim of the project to avoid them—a kind of
stance against abstraction, reduction, and uniformity. That's part of why it's
so fascinating to me: I can't see a general enough system being built without
that—but if it were to succeed, I'm fairly confident it would be one of the
most interesting systems I'd ever encountered :)

Edit: I should add: this is from what little I actually know about it. I've
just seen a few few videos, read the blurb from the article, and read another
article on the laser socks project which talked some about Realtalk.

~~~
skadamat
Highly recommend Bret's 2 talks for context:

[1] Seeing Spaces:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klTjiXjqHrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klTjiXjqHrQ)
[2] Humane Representation of Thought:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOdP2Bmieg&t=1913s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOdP2Bmieg&t=1913s)

~~~
westoncb
I saw them both a while back, and reviewed the poster for Seeing Spaces just
now. However, I haven't been unable to find anything that addresses the issue
I brought up.

I agree very much with most of the general principles Victor talks about (you
can see my own extensive work on making program behavior visible here[0] for
example)—but when it comes to the space concept, I have difficulty finding
something _concrete_ about how the space would be used beneficially. I get the
flavor of this idea that your workspace should be 'extension of your body',
but at this point, years after becoming familiar with it, I'd like to get more
concrete on the subject. Dynamicland/Realtalk certainly are more concrete—but
my thoughts on it are reflected in my first comment.

[0] [http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd](http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd)

~~~
DaniFong
visit and donate. they need help.

it's foolish to speculate on the possibilities of a new medium on this
extraordinarily limited medium. i can't even embed images here.

~~~
westoncb
I'm pursuing similar lines myself, and am only able to work in spare moments
due to lack of funds, so I'm in no position to donate.

> it's foolish to speculate on the possibilities of a new medium on this
> extraordinarily limited medium

I'll be happy to be shown otherwise, but I haven't yet found any counter-
example to the idea that the 'verbal medium' is sufficient to describe any
principle. So my original question still remains: is there some principle
which would allow them to achieve similar generality to traditional computing
without using some kind of re-combinable primitives?

Edit: to be more specific: without that, how could this ever compete with AR?
People could build their own spatially interesting, room-scale workspaces
without having to find physical materials to build every application out of.
The fact that it can deal with actual physical things has an appeal to it, but
I can't see any way of escaping the tradeoff of a massive loss in generality.

~~~
Glench
> how could this ever compete with AR?

"How could the written word ever compete with pictograms?" It's a different
medium with real benefits and tradeoffs. Right now for you it's all
theoretical, but one day hopefully you'll be able to see for yourself if the
medium has the time to grow, breathe, expand, and develop. Funding Dynamicland
means that we as a species have the option of seeing how that medium might
work if it was allowed to flourish.

~~~
westoncb
We'll, I wish you guys luck and sincerely hope this removes some desk time
from my life :)

------
bufo
Looks like Bret Victor's paragraph was removed from the page? It still talks
about "6 principal investigators" but lists 5.

~~~
skadamat
Oh weird, maybe it's temporary? That's odd, it was just there a few hours ago.

~~~
kennethfriedman
Doesn't seem like an accident to me.

Here's the archive of the page before the edits:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20171026233121/https://harc.ycr....](https://web.archive.org/web/20171026233121/https://harc.ycr.org/reports/)

~~~
gregsadetsky
Thanks for the link. In that paragraph (the one that was removed), there are
two links to Bret’s website and both of those are now 404 as well... what’s
going on?

[http://worrydream.com/HypercardInTheWorld/videos.html](http://worrydream.com/HypercardInTheWorld/videos.html)

[http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech-
teaser-2017-02-2...](http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech-
teaser-2017-02-25.mov)

~~~
Glench
I assume Bret just didn't want the work to be shown without context yet.

------
azhenley
Why did Vi Hart (the first PI listed) leave HARC? She posted a youtube video
just this week asking for funding through patreon.

~~~
sp332
It was the Elevr team (four people) who lost funding. [http://elevr.com/elevr-
leaving-ycr/](http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/) Vi said they could continue
for $15,000 per month but couldn't find any backers.

~~~
auggierose
Interesting. Is there anything more to the story? Why were they accepted into
HARC, and then let go after such a short period? Has this happened to other
people funded by HARC as well?

------
anoother
Where is Bret Victor?

> Here are year-end reports from HARC’s six Principal Investigators.

Only 5 are listed...

~~~
endergen
That's weird. He was there before.

------
brimtown
The Dynamicland Twitter account has a bunch of fascinating demos of their work
so far: [https://twitter.com/Dynamicland1](https://twitter.com/Dynamicland1)

------
OisinMoran
Just a note that there is an unclosed quotation mark in the "physics" link in
Vi Hart's section, causing it to not show and it also breaks the "hyperbolic
space" link.

Incredible work from an incredible team! Not sure why Bret Victor's section
disappeared.

~~~
robertkrahn01
Thanks!

------
indescions_2017
If there is one common theme. Its "visual programming" ;)

~~~
RubenSandwich
While I know so many programmers are vehemently opposed to "visual
programming" I wonder if we can make programming multimodal. Such as a
programming language that supports both visual and text modes, where both are
first class citizens to the language. This would allow us to use visual tools
to see macrostructure; a place where text falls short. But still let us have
our tools for the micro-editing that is modern programming. I know some work
has been done in this area: [http://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n-
sketch/](http://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n-sketch/).

~~~
Glench
> While I know so many programmers are vehemently opposed to "visual
> programming" I wonder if we can make programming multimodal.

"Visual programming" so far as been about visualizing program's static
structure. Scratch and Labview do this, and this has some advantages,
especially for beginners. But there's never been much advantage in
understanding program behavior from seeing its structure, and I think tools
for understanding program behavior are probably the most effective way of
making all programming better. See my project Flowsheets for some experiments
in this space:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q)

------
zellyn
Wow. Bret Victor's stuff is so incredibly human, and so incredibly useful. I
want it!

------
baybal2
Where is the cat videos website guy who was researching "new types of cities?"

~~~
smikhanov
He runs the show, so he doesn't need to submit any reports

