
HARC - sama
https://blog.ycombinator.com/harc
======
sgentle
So, if I understand this correctly, it's the latest in a series of attempts by
Alan Kay to find the right home for his vision of a new Xerox PARC. That began
with VPRI (NSF funded), then CDG (SAP funded), and now HARC (YCR funded).

As I understand it, VPRI wrapped up because they ran out of money. I wonder
what caused the move away from CDG?

Regardless, I hope he succeeds before we run out of four-letter acronyms
funded by three-letter acronyms.

(Edit: CPRG -> CDG, my bad)

~~~
mflindell
I don't think they ran out of money, from the final report is sounds like they
just finished the research project. VPRI is just moving to ycom now.

------
ozten
Last week VPRI[1] published the final "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of
Programming" paper[2].

Although it is 2012, it had been unavailable publicly until now. A great way
to catch up on how FONC ended. It was worked on by many individuals being
cited as part of HARC.

[1] [http://vpri.org/html/writings.php](http://vpri.org/html/writings.php) [2]
[http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf)

~~~
e12e
Thank you for pointing this out. I hadn't read the last one, and was actually
wondering if they'd just shut down, without concluding in some form or other.
Love this stuff:

"This brings forth fanciful and motivational questions about domain areas,
such as (...) "How many t-shirts will be required to define TCP/IP" (about 3),
or all the graphical operations needed for personal computing?" (about 10)."

[ed: Actually thought the pdf deserved a submission of its own, lets see if
other people think so too:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325)

]

------
jwise0
On the one hand, I'm happy to see visionaries like Vi Hart and Bret Victor
(and presumably the others who I don't know of their work, but can only
imagine to be quite good) supported to do the work that they do.

On the other hand, I am a little concerned to see InfoSys joining the fray
here. InfoSys, to my understanding, are basically the face of H-1B abuse. So
I'm happy to see these people funded, but it's a little harder for me to cheer
when the funding comes from such a questionable source...

~~~
vadym909
Would've expected YC to know this. Infosys hogs half the highly skilled worker
H1b quota every year at an average salary of $80K in effect denying many
startups and founders the ability. [http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-
Sponsor/Infosys/1088782.htm](http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-
Sponsor/Infosys/1088782.htm)

They probably file 60K H1bs if they ended up getting 30K in the lottery.

~~~
benatkin
Aren't they also pushing to increase the quota? And isn't increasing the quota
a good thing?

~~~
vadym909
For one company to take up 50% of the really scarce H1b quota (65,000) is just
not fair. To do it to get a lil lower cost worker is inexcusable.

I have no issue with Infosys's offshoring- only their unfair gobbling up of
the H1b visas.

~~~
keht
Everyone from the Army, to the Govt, to Apple, to your medical insurer, to
your bank have been using those workers. Maybe it will make you feel better if
they all worked for 100 different Indian firms, but this is just more
efficient. The bodyshops face stiff competition from each other to
consolidate. The fact that Infosys has survived 20 years says something about
the company.

~~~
vadym909
/s You need to be the worst offender to survive

------
tylercubell
As a layperson, I have almost no idea what any of this means.

> 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.

Isn't this what the internet is for? What's new?

> Our shared vision of technology combines an expansive long-term view with a
> strong moral sense. We look to the distant past as well as the far future.
> We reject the artificial boundaries created between the humanities, arts,
> and sciences. We don’t always agree on what is good or evil, right or wrong,
> but we use these words seriously and are driven by them.

This is so vague I have no idea how you can attach any meaning to it.

> We are focusing on areas where we believe the structures created today will
> have the most impact on the future, and that can most benefit from having
> dedicated resources outside the for-profit world. At the moment, these areas
> include programming languages, interfaces, education, and virtual reality.

So you're gathering a group of smart people together to do non-profit research
in a few select fields with the goal of improving humanity?

~~~
shadowfiend
> What's new?

[http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/](http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/)
is probably a good starting point for what is yet to be done regarding seeing
further and understanding more deeply.

> This is so vague I have no idea how you can attach any meaning to it.

Are you concerned that this isn't externally measurable? I don't think it's
meant to be.

> So you're gathering a group of smart people together to do non-profit
> research in a few select fields with the goal of improving humanity?

Well, as a layperson it seems like you figured out exactly what all of this
meant...

------
amasad
I'm excited to see what comes out of this. The area I'm hoping they'd look at
is programming. There hasn't been any big ideas in programming in a really
long time. Languages are rehashes of the same features with slightly different
configurations and incremental improvement in performance or tooling.
Programming interfaces are stagnant too -- Smalltalk's interactive devlopement
environment is still the sci-fi version of what most people think programming
could be.

The programmer and the program have never been further away from each other as
it is today. The development environment have never been further away from the
production environment as it is today. And end-user interfaces have never been
as abstracted away from computing as it is today.

If any group can breathe some life into this stagnant area then my bet would
be on this group.

~~~
lewisl9029
Eve [1] is one project I know of that has been trying to tackle this very
difficult problem. The project is led by Chris Granger, whom you might know
from his work on the Light Table IDE [2].

They released a video last year that showcased some iterations of their
prototypes and I found them to be very innovative and promising:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8)

[1] [http://www.witheve.com/](http://www.witheve.com/)

[2] [http://lighttable.com/](http://lighttable.com/)

~~~
david927
Kayia ([http://kayia.org](http://kayia.org), my project) is also approaching
programming from a very different angle. I would like to say that, since a
large percentage of us know that programming is broken, we are supportive,
inclusive and embrace new ideas. We don't.

This industry has become a branch of the finance industry. So instead of
programming being driven by math (e.g. category theory, abelian groups), it's
driven by the market (e.g. time-to-market, what works now).

HARC is a push back the other way, giving space to people who are thinking
about it in the right way, and I applaud that. But we're still missing the
'inclusive' piece of it; until we can talk to each other and listen to each
other, we'll remain frustrated.

------
davidw
Alan Kay? Ok, I'm impressed!

It does sound kind of vague. I hope it's not so open ended that it just means
kind of noodling around with interesting stuff. But hey, Alan Kay's noodling
would still be good, I bet. Interested to see what comes out of it!

~~~
cushychicken
Alan Kay's whole MO is noodling around with interesting stuff, and history
shows it's pretty good when he does.

~~~
davidw
He's also produced a number of working systems though, right?

~~~
lemming
Yes. Object Oriented Programming, for a start. So there's that. GUI's, too.

~~~
alanlit
Well, Simula predates PARC by about a decade, so I'm not so sure about AK
created OOP. As for Windows and such, sniff around YouTube -- that notion goes
back to the late 50's early 60's.

That AK popularized this stuff - sure.

~~~
kragen
Your history is pretty confused, although it has some elements of truth to it.
Let me set you straight.

Although there were graphical displays in the 1950s (some of them being simply
direct displays of the contents of Williams tubes), GUIs as such only go back
to Sketchpad (1961-65, roughly) which sort of had windows, and there were
windows and a mouse in NLS by 1968, but without a GUI. Simula (1967) wasn't
OO; Alan coined that phrase to describe Smalltalk (1971 at PARC, established
1970, which you'll note is less than a decade after 1967, though begun in
1969), which drew inspiration from Sketchpad, Simula, the B5000, NLS, and some
weird magnetic tape format developed by the Air Force where the tape started
with a program that interpreted the rest of the tape, among other places.

Alan and Ed Cheadle actually did a lot of the development of the ideas that
later became OO in the 1966-70 timeframe on a personal computer they were
working on called FLEX.

You can read Alan's account of this history in "The Early History of
Smalltalk", one copy of which is at
[http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html](http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html).

Alan and Dan and Adele and other people on the Smalltalk team deserve a lot of
credit both for developing the ideas of object-orientation but also for
popularizing them, and essentially the modern desktop GUI (mouse, overlapping
windows, icons, WYSIWYG, multiple fonts, proportional fonts, buttons, menus,
drag-and-drop) was developed at PARC in the 1970s, an effort that included the
Smalltalk team but also included a lot of other people working in other
languages.

Of course, much as I detest Steve Jobs, the really powerful popularizing
influences on this stuff were Macintosh and NeXT. (Later, Java.)

------
cpr
Most of these luminaries worked at SAP until recently.

Are they being spun out into HARC, or are they just collaborating from inside
SAP's blue-sky research group?

It would be helpful to clarify what their institutional standings are, if
we're to understand the full import of this announcement.

~~~
sama
Spun out. They're full time employees of YCR starting a few days ago.

~~~
anfedorov
Including Alan, or is he still heading VPRI?

------
nkoren
May I make a human advancement suggestion which has very little to do with
technology?

Teach about cognitive bias. Tech it at a _fundamental_ level -- like, starting
in 1st grade, with annual refreshers thereafter. Give cognitive bias an equal
place at the table alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Many cognitive biases are deeply rooted in biological and social structures --
but with awareness and training, they can be overcome. Without awareness and
training, they can be profoundly destructive, and certainly limit the scope of
human advancement.

So before we start pimping out our metacortexes or whatever, let's see if we
can't overcome some of the less salutary whisperings of our old and honestly
pretty useless reptilian brains. We can be better than that.

~~~
woodman
A method for overcoming cognitive bias is a technology, in the same way that
spoken language is a technology. See formal logic. But if we were somehow, as
a species, constrained to doing one thing at a time on the tech tree - then
yes, we would do well to max that tech out asap.

------
apsec112
This isn't a judgment of the project itself, but the announcement's wording
reminds me of the marketing newspeak from "How to Apply to Y Combinator":

"The best answers are the most matter of fact. It’s a mistake to use
marketing-speak to make your idea sound more exciting. We’re immune to
marketing-speak; to us it’s just noise. 1. So don’t begin your answer with
something like

We are going to transform the relationship between individuals and
information.

That sounds impressive, but it conveys nothing. It could be a description of
any technology company. Are you going to build a search engine? Database
software? A router? I have no idea.

One test of whether you’re explaining your idea effectively is to ask how
close the reader is to reproducing it. After reading that sentence I’m no
closer than I was before, so its content is effectively zero. Another mistake
is to begin with a sweeping introductory paragraph about how important the
problem is:

Information is the lifeblood of the modern organization. The ability to
channel information quickly and efficiently to those who need it is critical
to a company’s success. A company that achieves an edge in the efficient use
of information will, all other things being equal, have a significant edge
over competitors.

Again, zero content; after reading this, the reader is no closer to
reproducing your project than before. A good answer would be something like:

A database with a wiki-like interface, combined with a graphical UI for
controlling who can see and edit what.

I’m not convinced yet that this will be the next Google, but at least I’m
starting to engage with it. I’m thinking what such a thing would be like.

One reason founders resist giving matter-of-fact descriptions is that they
seem to constrain your potential. “But it’s so much more than a database with
a wiki UI!” The problem is, the less constraining your description, the less
you’re saying. So it’s better to err on the side of matter-of-factness."
[https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/](https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/)

~~~
sama
I think research is really different from startups. That said, I expect that
over the next month or two the teams will figure out their general directions,
and will share it when they do.

------
imh
>HARC researches technology in its broadest context, which includes:
technology for communication (from the invention of spoken language to modern
data graphics), intellectual tools (such as the scientific method and computer
simulation), media (from cave painting to video games), and social systems
(including democracy and public education).

In that broadest context, it really seems to lose its meaning. I think a
closer word to that description is "ideas." Why try to cram the word
"technology" into it, when it's such a strech?

------
karmicthreat
YC seems to be trying to reach into a number of different areas lately. Maybe
they find that they don't have enough innovation walking through their door
anymore. Or that they need to go the extra mile to push things forward
themselves.

~~~
tacos
I'm bored out of my mind reading HN lately and I'd hope they are, too. (That
ad today for the all-girl we-got-board-games thing was just... painful.)

So why not keep busy while they wait for the next wave to form? It's a great
time to grow other branches.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _That ad today for the all-girl we-got-board-games thing was just...
> painful._

To what are you referencing here? I must have missed this story.

~~~
tacos
"Our backend runs on EBS."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11675171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11675171)

~~~
uola
That's actually far more relevant than a lot of YC startups. Custom packaging
is a big trend in Asia and far more evolved than in the west.

------
robot
I didn't understand anything from this post.

------
benatkin
The description of what they hope to achieve is vague, in a good way. I'm sure
a lot of people from the rationalist community in the Bay Area, who already
admire YC, will love this.

------
vbit
Very exciting! How can I join? :D

~~~
the4dpatrick
^ Ditto

------
rjurney
Very impressed they hired Bret Victor. His brilliance outpaces anyone else in
his field, and he communicates well.

------
arca_vorago
I hope they realize that copyleft and protection of users is a prereq for this
bit, "to ensure human wisdom exceeds human power, by inventing and freely
sharing ideas".

I am waiting for the days when some big names wake up and say "RMS has been
right all along, we need to copyleft everything asap!"

I'm getting tired of hearing about $NEXTGREATTECH and then finding out it's a
SaaS or proprietary etc.

Heres to hoping this group does something productive and free as in beer and
speech.

------
aroman
Very interesting, and very exciting!

How will this relate to VPRI?

And are these researchers joining full-time and collaborating together
directly, or are they just "part of the project"?

------
miguelrochefort
I can say without the shadow of a doubt that HARC is working on a new
language. Not your average spoken or programming language, but a general-
purpose and interactive language. A language that can only be communicated
through a computer.

Text and speech are inherently limited by their linear and one-dimensional
nature. Graphics are much more powerful, and leverage high-bandwidth senses.
Knowledge will be consumed by navigating knowledge hypergraphs and causational
trees (how-why axis).

In English, you write everything from scratch. You start with a blank page,
then a word, then a sentence. With this new language, you must start with
something that exists, some kind of node/edge of the graph. Communication is
mostly done by manipulating the knowledge graph. This means that you can't say
something that has already been said before. You don't need to provide or
explain context. You can instantly see the impact of your thoughts. You can't
say incoherent or fallacious things. In most cases, you don't have to say a
single thing, as you can find it has been said before. Most decent programming
environment provide libraries/modules, auto-completion, and
compilation/execution. This new platform brings all these things to
communication.

We're talking about an universal language here. An homoiconic language, where
the distinction between code, data and UI disappears.

This is nothing new. People have been talking about this for decades. The most
important challenge here is not technical, but social. It is becoming clear
that the application paradigm is not sustainable and cannot scale. Personal
assistants (Siri, Viv, Cortana, Google Now) and Messaging/Bots (Magic, WeChat,
Slack, Microsoft Bots Framework, Facebook Bots Platform) are clear symptoms.
Although I've been trying to tell people about this future for more than a
decade now, I don't have the resources of track-record to be heard. I am
hopeful that HARC will change that.

------
krilnon
I'm excited to see that Alex Warth is involved with this. In my late undergrad
days, I was really excited by his OMeta language. It turned out that I'm
actually really bad at writing PEGs (or even ANTLR grammars), so I wasn't the
best candidate for advancing OMeta into common use, but the idea is really
compelling.

------
fitzwatermellow
I try to make a private study of the global survey of Wisdom Literature in an
attempt to distil the essence of what it basically means to live a good life
and be a moral person. Everything from Confucius to Aurelius, from Goethe to
Gogol. And on and on. Wouldn't it be prudent, whilst you have such an
assemblage of noble thinkers, to compile some sort of universal knowledge base
of choice epigrams. For the purpose of henceforth explicitly delineating what
it means to be "beneficial" and "just" for all future readers to come?

In any case, this looks like a necessary and timely line of inquiry and am
looking forward to the fruits of these endeavours. Good luck!

------
panic
I'm excited to see where this goes! I'm curious, though: Alan and gang were
already working on many of these ideas under the aegis of SAP's Communications
Design Group. What was the motivation behind starting a new project?

------
micheljansen
I hope they just give these guys a bag of money and leave them alone to do
their thing. They can then connect their work to other guys with a commercial
focus where appropriate, without interrupting the flow.

------
iMuzz
Can someone explain to me what their goal is?

~~~
tristanj
YC is building a research facility similar to Xerox PARC. No specific goals,
but I'd assume researchers would be looking at projects 10-20 years out. There
are a lot of similarities with this and PARC, they have Alan Kay (former
PARC), and even the name HARC is clearly inspired by PARC.

------
lez
I especially like the term because it means 'battle' in Hungarian.

------
pcvarmint
Not to be confused with another HARC:
[http://www.harcresearch.org/about/75](http://www.harcresearch.org/about/75)

------
phodo
First SLAC (homebrew computer club fame more than the linear accelerator part)
and PARC (so many innovations... where to start... right, ask Alan!)... and
now HARC.

In good company!

------
roansh
There is a HARC in Amy Tintera's novel Reboot with similar goals. I wonder if
they named it HARC because of the novel, or if it's a coincidence.

------
wiz21c
>> Our shared vision of technology combines an expansive long-term view with a
strong moral sense. >> > HARC’s mission is to ensure human wisdom exceeds
human power, by inventing and freely sharing ideas and technology

Free software ?

Ahhh nooo, my mistake, YCombinator is funding the project...

------
DodgyEggplant
This is great of course, but then again - it feels like human is the only
species on this planet. We really have to start to think as an echo system,
especially with technology.

~~~
davidw
> We really have to start to think as an echo system, especially with
> technology.

I know it was a typo, but HN does a pretty good job at being an echo system
with technology, at times :-)

------
edem
This somehow reminds me of the Encyclopedia Galactica from the Foundation
series.

------
masterponomo
I hope they have an airtight written partnership agreement on this thang.

------
auggierose
Very exciting. I wished there would also be room for a group at YCR/HARC
working on collaborative theorem proving (CTP) as proposed here:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6186](http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6186) :-)

------
tempodox
Equating invention of future computing technologies with human advancement is
too pompous for my taste. I won't hold my breath.

------
nezuvian
off topic, but FYI HARC in hungarian means fight :)

------
gnarbarian
I don't know about this. The morality stuff sounds like a cult and the rest is
so damn vague this whole thing feels half architecture astronaut and half
bullshit artist.

But since they are YC funded go ahead and downvote me dead for heresy.

Edit:

Just the result I expected from you asskissers.

~~~
dang
The HN guidelines ask you not to go own about downvotes and not to bait other
users into downvoting you. They also ask you not to call names ('you
asskissers') in comments.

Please read and follow them when posting here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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