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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

This was 1959. Cold War in full swing, WW2, Korea a recent memory for many,

And today is the greatest time to be a programmer in the history of the profession. If ninjas and rockstars and brogrammers are part of it, it's certainly better than building war simulations and calculating civilian casualty rates in the case of mutually assured destruction in order to advance your profession and provide for your loved ones.

Those were not halcyon days for mathematicians, physicists and engineers. I'll take the juvenilization of the profession instead.

I think the early, mid 90's were a lot more interesting time to be a programmer than now, just before the Internet explosion. Back then, a bigger percentage of the focus was on using computers to do something, solve a problem directly (as opposed to implicitly) and the computers were actually getting powerful enough to do things on a cheap basis.

People's cat pictures were a vanishingly small portion of the landscape.

As an example, cheap computing power is one of the reasons that while at the beginning of the 90's, nuclear power was considered a money losing proposition by electric utilities and everyone was trying to get out from under them but by the end of the decade, all the utilities were hanging on to their nukes for dear life and trying to figure out how to extend their licenses/service life.

Now, a much bigger percentage of the focus is simply getting information out of one spot, tranporting it to another, dolling it up w/some marketing glitz.

That's not to say that the cool stuff isn't still going on, but that it is a smaller percentage and the profession has been dumbed down significantly (hence brogrammers and all).

Things that weren't in the mid 90's: stack overflow, google, gmail, google docs, os x, github, git, torrents, and basically every tool I use to make things with my computer (besides bash).

No I don't want to go back.

Yeah, back then you actually had to read documentation (yes, it existed) and more or less know what you are doing. Copy/paste coding and questions from colleagues like "How to connect to datbase, pls help urgently!" were unheard of.

You are certainly welcome to your opinion, but it's unfortunate that you seem so heavily defined by your tools (especially when they aren't even one's you've written).

I agree with your sentiment, but it's plain ignorance to believe that those "war simulations" or any other software developed by the military is always intended to raise the kill count and not prevent casualties. To make my point, I would bet the invention of C made the military more effective in some fashion or other, but that's only a consequence of solving the more basic problems C was intended to address. I think it's hard to argue that the problems IBM was solving, or those that the military solves, are really any different in that respect. They solve one problem and then the solution can and will be adapted for other purposes, and it's often hard to judge whether that's a net good or not.

The mathematicians, physicists, and engineers of that era helped to preserve the survival of our civilization so you could have the luxury of being an idealistic pacifist.

Some of them worked for Nazi Germany or Stalinist regime or horrific Japanese medical "science" / torture so not all of them were working for freedom. Scientists sometimes say that science is neutral, and it's up to society to use the results wisely.

I appreciate that scientists don't always have freedom of choice under a brutal regime.

I was talking about American scientists ("our civilization"), though the other western allies would qualify as well. Sorry about the confusion.

EDIT: My reply sounds bickering. Sorry, it isn't meant to!

Stalin was a western ally. Stalin was, without doubt, evil.

German scientists worked for the US; they were recruited through Operation Paperclip.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip)

There's interesting stuff about President Truman's anti-Nazi directive (tl;dr: Don't use scientists who were (or were supportive of) Nazis) and the way that was ignored.

> Stalin was a western ally.

No he wasn't; he was just an ally. The term "western allies" excludes the Soviet Union, that's why I intentionally chose it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Allies

German scientists that helped the US, to whatever extent they helped the US, did help to preserve our civilization, even if they tried to destroy it during the war. But let's ignore them; I'm talking about the thousands of American scientists and engineers worked on defense applications in the 20th century, and to some extent about those of Britain, Canada, France, and so forth.

You assume that idealist pacifists could only exist in the current civilization and not any other.

"We will bury you" - Soviet dictator Kruschev, addressing a gathering of Western ambassadors in 1956, 3 years before this ad.

When a man with his finger on the button of half the world's nukes says things like that, you damn well better put your best minds to work figuring out how not to let it happen.

The nuclear balance of power in '56 (and indeed well into the 60s) was very one sided - this, after all, was the time of the fictitious "bomber gap":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap

The Soviets were, with some justification, terrified of a US first strike at the time.

The original quote: "Like it or not, but the history is working on us. We will attend your funerals".

You are still implicitly going with the idea that someone has to defend the current civilisation on behalf of inferior pacifists who won't.

What if there's a peaceful answer which sacrifices way of life instead of human life? Would supporting it be "luxury"?

Setting aside the fact that almost nobody would have agreed to it, surrendering and living under communism would have sacrificed human life as well, just as it did for every other communist country.

It's rather hard to be an idealistic pacifist if you're within living memory of WWII, though some people surely accomplished it. It's especially easy in this day and age to mentally evade the notion that force is sometimes not only justified, but necessary and morally obligatory. It would not have been so easy to do so during the era that countries like Germany, Russia, and Japan were invading neutral countries and mass-executing their citizens.

And so goes the populists and idealists, union makers and Jeffersonian/latent new dealers. Do not think for a second that the intellectuals that we hold in high esteem made the world better unilaterally. They were but cogs in a greater machine, and their opportunity to "preserve the survival of our civilization" was at the behest of greater men that navigated the reality of politic.

Where do you think most of the research funding an AI and ML came from?

At my first job we did some work in expert systems and Ai(applying it to engineering problems) and one guy moved from those projects because of his concerns sbout the source of the funding.

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