[HN Gopher] Bill Manning has died
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Bill Manning has died
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 88 points
Date : 2020-01-27 06:45 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com)
| hinkley wrote:
| Some stand-up comic in the 90's had a joke to the effect of:
|
| And when you hit a certain age, your friends start playing a game
| called, "Guess Who Died?"
|
| This seems like the year when all the DotCom era kids start
| playing the game.
| tempsy wrote:
| Anyone else disturbed that mods erased every post on Kobe
| Bryant's death yesterday? He was a national figure that
| transcended just basketball, if that was the issue.
| m_ke wrote:
| I was considering bringing this up as well. All of the Kobe
| related were getting flagged and killed:
| https://imgur.com/NHWUzBw
| thosakwe wrote:
| Firstly, Rest In Peace, Bill Manning. Gone too soon.
| Condolences to his family.
|
| As for Kobe, TBF, it wasn't the mods, but the users (via
| flagging). That being said, that definitely rubbed me the wrong
| way. There were at least 3 posts I saw completely wiped out
| within minutes.
| bitwize wrote:
| Kobe Bryant raped a woman. That may have had something to do
| with it.
| irrational wrote:
| The fact that you are being downvoted is very disturbing.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kryogen1c wrote:
| since this is explicitly against site guidelines... no, not
| particularly.
|
| Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports,
| unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
| Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If
| they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
|
| If you want to learn about Kobe, tune into literally any other
| news outlet.
|
| edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| majos wrote:
| Just last week Terry Jones' obituary received hundreds of
| upvotes here and in many other places.
|
| I guess users are flagging Kobe but not Terry Jones because
| they like Jones more. But this is explicitly what flagging is
| _not_ supposed to be about.
| samatman wrote:
| Terry Jones was a member of Monty Python, which gave us the
| word "spam" for unwanted email, and the Python programming
| language.
|
| I would call that sufficiently on-topic, personally.
| rvz wrote:
| > If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
|
| Now that's what I call nonsensical. By that logic with the
| recent Cambridge Analytica scandals, the US and China trade
| wars, etc have all been top on HN and covered on the news,
| meaning that HN broke their own rules.
|
| Perhaps when the UK decides to use or ban Huawei for its 5G
| technology, as soon as it mentions the UK PM's name, I won't
| be surprised if this gets flag/dead quickly.
| samatman wrote:
| May I suggest reading the paragraph as a whole statement,
| rather than a series of isolated sentences which must each
| stand on their own?
|
| That would be the good faith thing to do.
| tempsy wrote:
| "Most" is not "all."
|
| The fact that the biggest basketball player in a generation
| died is arguably a "new phenomenon."
|
| There's plenty of stories that are upvoted that are covered
| by the news. It's not really just about learning that he died
| so much as having a thoughtful conversation around him and
| his legacy from this community's perspective.
| m_ke wrote:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fa
| l... https://hn.algolia.com/?q=has+died
|
| Actors and Musicians dying doesn't get flagged.
| buserror wrote:
| Sorry but being from Europe, and not interested in TV
| sports, I didn't even know who he was. At all. I understand
| why they were flagged for that reason.
|
| _Sometimes_ I see <xxx> has died and it's clearly
| technology related, and I will click the link, and discover
| that this person was great even if I never knew their
| names, and I feel enriched.
|
| I certainly wouldn't feel enriched being led to a
| basketball website.
| quercus wrote:
| There we go, the condescending attitude towards sports.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| I don't think there's anything condescending about it.
|
| This just _isn 't a sports site_.
|
| Observing that fact doesn't suggest or imply that sports
| are bad in any way.
|
| If you posted Bill Manning's obituary to a bunch of NBA
| fan sites, the users of those sites would no doubt
| consider those posts off-topic, and they'd be right in
| doing so. But that wouldn't make them "condescending
| toward computer science".
| gdy wrote:
| What's wrong with condescending attitude towards sports?
| quercus wrote:
| I noticed it too and it definitely took my respect for this
| community down a notch. There is an unfortunate air of
| condescension towards "sportsball" in the tech world.
|
| Pity, there was an interesting discussion to be had about the
| decision to fly the helicopter into bad weather.
| pushpop wrote:
| Peer moderation is abused on this site and it's getting
| steadily worse. I'm on the verge of giving up on HN entirely,
| just like many of my other professionals I personally know
| already have done. Ultimately it will be HNs loss because the
| quality of content posted will decline.
| snapetom wrote:
| I'm not.
|
| Look, I'm the biggest old-school, anti-analytics sports nut out
| there, but I come to HN for my fix of tech news. I'll go to
| reddit for more general news.
|
| What does disturb me is the trending towards reddit-like
| standards here on HN. There seems to be more downvoting of
| legitimate questions these days and an increase in cheap
| comments like "Trump sucks!" for easy points. What I loved
| about HN initially was the civil discussion that arose from
| comments as opposed to just burying them. HN is a good
| environment to raise questions or points you don't understand
| without groupthink hostility.
| mysterydip wrote:
| All the HN obituaries I've seen did something related to
| computing, science, business, startups, etc. like the rest of
| the news. Did Kobe do anything in those areas?
| m_ke wrote:
| He had an investment firm and a media company.
| (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bryant-stibel-
| invest... https://granitystudios.com/)
|
| There's plenty of other posts about artists, authors,
| musicians and actors passing away that weren't flagged. https
| ://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=has+died
| majos wrote:
| Just last week a Terry Jones obituary received hundreds of
| upvotes, and I'm not aware of any contributions he made to
| "computing, science, business, startups, etc.".
|
| I'm not saying Terry Jones obituaries should have been wiped
| too. I'm saying there's a weird editorial double standard
| here.
| quercus wrote:
| Exactly. It's totally subjective. My speculation is that
| the personality type that is drawn to moderating a public
| forum like this is low on the kind of self-awareness that
| could distinguish personal bias from the written rules of
| the community.
| jedberg wrote:
| > and I'm not aware of any contributions he made to
| "computing, science, business, startups, etc."
|
| The name of one of the most prolific programming languages
| in the world, Python, is because of Terry Jones. That was
| his contribution and why he was relevant.
| majos wrote:
| So if I can produce evidence that a famous computer
| scientist likes Kobe, that's all it takes?
| jedberg wrote:
| If there were a programming language called Kobe or
| Mamaba, sure.
| pushpop wrote:
| That's tenuous at best.
|
| The reason it was "relevant" is simply because there's
| more Monty Python fans on here than basketball fans.
| Which is fine if we're talking purely about +votes but it
| doesn't justify flagging a submission.
| the-dude wrote:
| I find your hijacking of this thread offensive and rude. This
| thread is about Bill Manning, who has died.
|
| You have not even mentioned him.
| dang wrote:
| Mods didn't touch any of those posts. Users flagged them.
| tempsy wrote:
| Ok - but does that actually go against site guidelines?
| dang wrote:
| I think the flags were consistent with the site guidelines
| insofar as this is a celebrity story that is (presumably)
| all over TV news, and not primarily driven by intellectual
| curiosity. I realize that there's a perfectly legitimate
| counterargument, and I don't think you're wrong. It's just
| that the community center of gravity seems pretty clearly
| elsewhere, and I don't see a compelling reason to override
| it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Not if enough users consider it off topic, per HN
| guidelines.
| jascii wrote:
| Maybe there is a little bit of solace in knowing that in some
| sense he lived more in his too short life then most of us will in
| our full-length ones.
| tabtab wrote:
| Re: _...we called Bill "the bad idea fairy". He always brought a
| slightly-off-kilter view of technical problems, which triggered
| endless discussions of fascinating, if usually implausible,
| alternatives._
|
| I've been "accused" of similar. Although, I can't claim I'm as
| successful as Bill. I tend to ruffle sacred cows. It's not like
| I'm trying to agitate people, I just view the world a bit
| different from established opinions.
|
| For example, we have dynamic programming languages, but not
| dynamic RDBMS (that use SQL or a close variation). Why not?
|
| And we have XML as a fairly flexible meta-standard for data
| structures, but why not something comparable for C-like-syntax
| programming languages? You could roll your own programming
| language without creating a parser from scratch (and hopefully
| mix and match behavior based on "part kits").
|
| Both of these seem like logical extensions of existing tools to
| me, but I get a lot of vague flack. It's like the universe is
| calling for them, not just me, yet nobody cares. It's not
| outright inventing new concepts, it's just taking concepts that
| worked well in one computing domain and applying them to another.
| They might fail, but so might every other IT experiment going on
| currently.
| samatman wrote:
| > _For example, we have dynamic programming languages, but not
| dynamic RDBMS (that use SQL or a close variation). Why not?_
|
| Depending on what you mean, SQLite is exactly this.
|
| It is relational, so one does have to structure tables, but I
| consider this equivalent to naming variables.
|
| Unlike most (all?) other SQL databases, however, the 'types' of
| the data are just suggestions, and have some influence on how
| SQLite stores and retrieves them internally.
|
| But you can put a string in an INTEGER field, SQLite won't stop
| you.
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| Re: mixing and matching parts, you are describing Lisp. And
| probably Racket.
| paulmd wrote:
| > For example, we have dynamic programming languages, but not
| dynamic RDBMS (that use SQL or a close variation). Why not?
|
| JSON datatypes essentially serve that need nowadays. Postgres
| even lets you write queries against them.
|
| Generally, a lot of the value from RDBMS in fact comes from
| strong guarantees that you can make about the data you're
| storing (datatypes, constraints, unique indexes, etc). That's
| what makes them inherently better than MongoDB or whatever. But
| if you really just want a "misc" column (or to use PG as a key-
| value-store) then you can do that with a JSON column.
|
| What use-case are you looking at that wouldn't be solved by a
| JSON column?
|
| > And we have XML as a fairly flexible meta-standard for data
| structures, but why not something comparable for C-like-syntax
| programming languages? You could roll your own programming
| language without creating a parser from scratch (and hopefully
| mix and match behavior based on "part kits").
|
| Well, isn't that lex and yacc?
| warbaker wrote:
| Really tragic. RIP.
| lbenes wrote:
| For anyone wondering who he was or his contributions:
|
| > Manning has been working in the Internet industry since 1979
| when he started working at Texas Instruments and helped in
| building its IP network. After which he joined Rice University
| and made SESQUINET. He played a significant role in the migration
| of MIDNET and SESQUINET from NSFnet regional networks to
| commercial networks.
|
| > He worked on the COREN and CALREN-2 technical committees. At
| ISI he worked in the Routing Arbiter Project.
|
| > Bill has been working with the the IETF and IEPG as an
| individual participant, working group chair, and code developer.
| He specfied the method to add NSAP support to the DNS.
|
| https://icannwiki.org/Bill_Manning
| fanf2 wrote:
| He was also a DNS root server operator for many years (he ran
| b.root-servers.net)
| dghughes wrote:
| Thanks for that.
|
| I always feel bad seeing that someone has died and how
| important they were in computer science but it's the first time
| I've heard of them.
| [deleted]
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's sad that when you google him and you only get results for
| a sports executive.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm always impressed (and admittedly envious) when I see a person
| who manages to get a PhD while skipping the bachelors degree;
| being a dropout I wish I could do that, but of course I didn't
| build TI's IP network or SESQUINET :)
|
| RIP Bill; HN should consider putting a black bar.
| ipnon wrote:
| When I see eulogies like this for people I've never heard of, I'm
| reminded sometimes that everything good in my life that I take
| for granted exists because of someone somewhere just doing the
| best they can. It helps ease the angst.
| bifrost wrote:
| I knew Bill professionally, he was a great guy and we'll all be
| at a loss without him around.
|
| Back in 2003 when I started SFIX he was instrumental in getting
| it off the ground.
|
| I can't believe he's gone.
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(page generated 2020-01-27 23:00 UTC)