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> Illegal construction, encroachment on public land will sometimes get this response.

Illegal construction is rampant in india. Please contextualize the act of bulldozing with the riots that happened. Let's not be blind to the clear use of power and authority to specifically root out people of a certain cast.

The level of politics being played out in India is nearing to the intellect of a badly scripted bollywood movie and people are turning the other way or even worse making excuses for it.


And somewhere else in India, Hindu houses and temples just got bulldozed:

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/bulldozer-razes-300-ye...

> Let's not be blind to the clear use of power and authority to specifically root out people of a certain cast.

I hate to remind you of this basic fact that religion != caste (spelled with an "e").


And bulldozing happens in non Muslim areas as well. Sometimes even middle class homes illegally built. Just as cities in the US clear homeless encampments.


"who destroyed government or private property during a protest, strike or riot, and that if necessary, the property of the accused would be seized and auctioned to recover the money" — Narottam Mishra, Home Minister

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61042315.amp

If you’re a Muslim living in an illegally-built home and you were _accused_ of being involved in riots, they will bulldoze your life.

The extremists argue that this is well-deserved. Even if you agree with that, why should an entire family living under a shared home suffer for the actions of one person? They’re not just forcing “rioters” to be homeless, they are ruining the lives of uninvolved people. Where will all of the displaced kids go? What would you tell them when they riot because of what was done to them?


> If you’re a Muslim living in an illegally-built home and you were _accused_ of being involved in riots, they will bulldoze your life.

Just like they did with these Muslims and their Shiva temples: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/bulldozer-razes-300-ye...


Demolishing a temple doesn’t justify demolishing Muslim homes. I don’t see what you’re arguing for here.

If I demolished a mosque, would I be allowed to selectively demolish the homes of Hindu rioters?


I'm saying that demolishing happens on all sides; you seem to be willfully ignoring that fact. By showing selective outrage you're showing your bias.


Why should the country suffer the fanatic beliefs of a few rioters, have we not tried to settle that once and for all in 1947 at a huge price.


Why should the country suffer the fanatic beliefs of people with bulldozers?


Rioters and protesters come from oppressed and impoverished communities. Nobody speaks for them. The media speaks for the rich and powerful politicians. It’s weird how the actual victims are portrayed as the wrongdoers here.


Illegal foreign sqatters and people who drive out locals through riots to capture more land through j!had.


Sure, again, context matters. A lot of Delhi, and probably a lot more of Mumbai is just illegal construction, if you were to apply the law squarely, a large part of the cities would be rubble.

You're (perhaps rather knowingly) ignoring the nuance here.


Agreed but this is not unique to the current federal government at all. Whoever is in power at the state or national level has used this power for their benefit.

Case in point, office of a prominent Indian actor was broken by a state government which is the political rival of the government at national level, even after a high court order preventing them from doing so.


I seriously don't want to engage with whataboutry, but I'm going to reply to you with the tiniest hope that you might be willing to listen to reason.

So first, i agree with you that power structures have always taken advantage of their position to shutdown their opposition.

The reason that this has become significant enough in India for someone to take note and take action, is because of the blatant and frequent application of authority in this manner and that too targeted towards a specific community. The scale is enormous and is not showing any signs of decreasing.


> engage with whataboutry,

If you really want to discuss with civility, don't start with an accusation. I agreed with the commenter that there is definitely political motive to these demolitions and it is definitely not right to not follow procedure even if these are illegal. My point is against this belief that this is something recent. It has been always like this, no matter who is in power. It might have increased or decreased; that I don't know without stats. I am old enough to have seen media being used to create narratives like WMD in Iraq to know not to go forward with the narrative pushing in media.

> The reason that this has become significant enough

> The scale is enormous and is not showing any signs of decreasing.

There is also a narrative in media that these communal incidents have increased recently. When I looked at data on this the last time in 2020, the crime record data pointed to much higher rates of communal violence in 80s and 90s than 2010s, so I will not be sure if it has increased or is it just fanned more in media.

I am also aware it can very well be that cases are being registered less that's why the stats seem lower.

> that too targeted towards a specific community

This is something I am concerned about though. There seems to be definitely increase in overt bigotry.


Why would you compare violence from 1980's to 2020? You realise thats a gap of 40 years?

It's almost as if you're trying to find a previous period with same communalism rates going back as far as you need to to prove point.

In terms of trends in the 20th century, there's been a clear noticeable jump after the current government came in, which is what should matter.


> Why would you compare violence from 1980's to 2020? You realise thats a gap of 40 years?

I said 90s too which is a gap of 20 years. I skipped 00s because I don't recall the data completely now, but I will check.

> In terms of trends in the 20th century, there's been a clear noticeable jump after the current government came in, which is what should matter.

00s had clearly more terror incidents in India than 10s. There were several major metros and big cities hit with blasts every year. So, one form of communal violence has definitely gone down. Even early half of 10s had much more of these than the latter half. There is a whole Wiki article that lists these incidents, you can have a look at that.


Congress bulldozed a 300 year old temple in Rajasthan [0].

[0]: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/bulldozer-razes-300-ye...


There is a difference between a law in paper and its enactment. There are various laws in the constitution of india that can be conveniently represented to prosecute someone on the basis of their speech. There is significant evidence of such happenings only increasing lately


In my first company i quickly established myself as a good programmer. As a result i was awarded with a tough project on a tough client. What i came across in the code base astounded me. It was a java based code base with everything happening in the constructor of a class. A 3000 line long constructor. I didn't stay with the company for long after that.


My conjecture is that any new form of GI will continue to evolve from an existing branch of sentient organisms. Artificial influence to evolution could be made possible by augmenting a current GI with AI, but i'm unable to comprehend a GI built entirely from scratch.

My argument for this line of reasoning is that the secret sauce of motivation or purpose that is deep down in every "dna" has neither been discovered nor replicable.

This is not a religious but a philosophical assertion.


Hi mkaic, Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I can't say that i don't believe in AGI because i don't think i understand what AGI as an entity encapsulates in terms of it's nature.

I'm unable to cope with equating it to humans because, for example, an AGI at "the beginning of it's origins" does not have same sensory or mechanical organs as the man. So what nature do we think it does possess?

Another question that bothers me is that sentient beings as we know them in the nature, even the most primitive ones, seem to do something based on an innate purpose. I don't think the purpose itself is easy to define. But it certainly seems to get simpler for the simpler organisations and seems to be survival / multiplication at its basest level. What will a complicated entity, that originated with so many parameters, evolve "towards"?

And yet another question i have is around the whole idea of the information available on the internet being a source for learning for this entity. Again to my previous point, is not much of this information to do with the humans and their abode?

Neither am i skeptical nor do i disbelieve in a drastic change of scene. I'm simply unable to imagine what it looks like ...


Trains fares are very low in India. For example you can travel by a sleeper coach from Hyderabad to Chennai (628km) for just $5.38. Unfortunately the low cost reflects in the poor quality of service.


The train fares are not intended to reflect costs; it is a public (well, state) enterprise funded via taxes by the overall economic activity of Indian society.

Which is to say that the quality of service is the result of political decisions at the social level rather than the fares. The fares could well have been 0 with great service, or much higher with the same poor quality.


Ah thanks for clarifying. That does make sense.


The price for the air-conditioned coaches are much higher.


Some of the best preserved literature is religious text. Give humans incentive (evidently faith is a strong contender here) to remember something to the T and it could easily survive all those 500 years and more.


I'm not sure how i feel about the title. But i loved the talk.


As an aside - Is Rich Hickey still not notable enough to have a wikipedia entry? Even the person who has shepherded on this paper has a wiki page.


I've gone ahead and restored the article, but not knowing much about Rich Hickey I hope someone here can edit the article to actually contain some (sourced, i.e. with citations) content, as it's pretty bare right now (looks/looked like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rich_Hickey&oldid...).

The article was created in 2008 and its deletion was discussed and happened in July 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... Someone recreated it (without discussion) in August 2013, and it was reverted to its "redirect" state in January 2014. I suspect that notability has changed now (e.g. Clojure itself is more popular, there are other things, and if nothing else his notability as a speaker is probably worth mentioning) and my guess is that if the article were to be discussed again, it might survive. But this is assuming there is actually content for the article that someone can add to it! Otherwise what's the point of an article about a person that doesn't say anything?

If you look at the other articles mentioned in this thread so far (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Odersky, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Syme, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike) all of them contain some information about their article's subjects, beyond simply mentioning the language they were involved in.

In my experience, adding something well-sourced to Wikipedia is usually a more lasting contribution (probably more people will read it, over time) than comments on HN -- the only downside is that it may get reverted quickly on flimsy grounds and you need some experience to make good edits that will stick.

Edit: Or just mention here what can be added to the article and what the source of each bit of information is, and I'll try to add them!


This is great, thanks for doing that!

It would be great to add this history of Clojure paper. There is also a C++ paper he wrote (http://www.tutok.sk/fastgl/callback.html).

Other things Rich has made:

  - ClojureScript (https://clojurescript.org/)
  - Datomic database (https://www.datomic.com/)
  - edn data format (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) - extensible data notation (subset of Clojure's syntax)
  - Transit (https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format) - format for conveying values between languages
  - Fressian (https://github.com/Datomic/fressian) - extensible binary data notation, used by Datomic
  - REBL (http://rebl.cognitect.com/download.html) - graphical tool for browsing Clojure data
  - Codeq (https://github.com/Datomic/codeq) - Clojure+Datomic application to do code-aware queries on git repos
List of talk transcripts: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/tree/master/Hi...

Playlist of many talks on YT: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZdCLR02grLrEwKaZv-5Q...

pre-Clojure projects:

  - http://jfli.sourceforge.net/
  - http://foil.sourceforge.net/


Thanks! I've added most of that (there are no Wikipedia articles for Transit/Fressian/REBL/Codeq, so not sure how to mention those without external links which look weird inline).

Still, an editor who doesn't like the current state could simply revert it, as there are no sources for any of this. Note that the criterion is “verifiability, not truth” — Wikipedia is supposed to be a summary of what has been said about a topic/person in books, newspapers, etc., so even though all of these are obviously true, it would be best to find a source that mentions these things and cite that!

[Similarly, in general, if you are the subject of a Wikipedia article and you find that it has some incorrect information about you, then rather than editing the article directly it is best to get something published or write something yourself—even a blog post—and cite that. :-)]


That's great. Thank you for going ahead with that. I'll try to add some more relevant details with citations over the weekend or atleast put it here. Do you think if we start a new thread, it will gain more traction? Just a thought.


It has been deleted and now his entry redirects to Clojure.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rich_Hickey&actio...


What a hilarious reasoning that editor gives:

> Restoring redirect - I see no evidence that he is notable for anything but Clojure

Redirecting the Wikipedia article for Elizabeth II to buckingham.co.uk. I see no evidence that she is notable for anything but being the British queen.


He's notable as a thinker and speaker about programming, quite apart from Clojure. The idea pool is the same, but that's true of any thinker.

It's a bad argument regardless. Plenty of figures in intellectual history are notable because of one big thing they created, and I'm sure most have Wikipedia pages. Alas I'm blanking on examples just now.


I'm confused by your reply, since we both agree that Rich deserves a wikipedia page.


I was agreeing with you completely!

Uh-oh - is that confusing? That could cause some problems around here...


My post was mocking the wikipedia way, while yours was serious, that's what confused me ;)


By that reasoning, we might as well remove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum.


That is actually a kinda good reason.


Aren't most notable people notable for one notable thing? Sorry, to get into Wikipedia, you'd have to win at least one gold medal at the Olympic games, be elected president of at least two countries, die in no less than 3 battles, AND you have to be the first confirmed case of at least one pandemic.


I think a rule of thumb is that something must have been written that was about you, rather than about your creation or whatever. The idea is that as Wikipedia is supposed to be a summarization of the secondary sources on a topic, there should be some material that would fit only in an article about you, and not in the article on whatever you're famous for. Some interesting examples are in the section about “people notable for only one event”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#... (which is not about people who created something and does not apply here! Just mentioning it for what it shows about interesting aspects of their policy.)


Having created a notable thing is not EXACTLY the same as being notable. Sometimes.


I agree with that. Wikipedia certainly has a page about Kim Kardashian. She is notable. For what? For being notable. Perfect case for Wikipedia.


I never understood the rationale behind the deletion. Being the primary designer of a popular programming language is relevant enough for me.


Definitely. I've come across plenty of Wikpedia profiles that are just self-maintained profiles by hardly known entrepreneurs or startup founders. Ranging from Clojure and Datomic, to his insightful talks on software design, and everything else in between, Rich Hickey's made far more significant contributions to the world in comparison.


Given Wikipedia's bizzaro rules, I wouldn't be surprised for him to get a page as an author of the paper ;-)


What is notable about Hickey besides being the creator of Clojure? Not to say that this alone doesn't make him notable, but I also don't really see the gain in an entry that is just a glorified redirect.


He also created the Datomic database https://www.datomic.com/


All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?


brought good syntax ?


And a pretty but impractical number system.


Didn't he also create ClojureScript? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVooR-dF_Ag?t=180





And core.async, bringing go blocks, channels, and parking semantics to Clojure

https://github.com/clojure/core.async/


I think REBL is actually more of Stuart Holloway's baby, isn't it? They're close, so maybe this isn't so clear.


I also think that it's separately notable that Rich Hickey is a prolific speaker. Granted, he almost always talks about Clojure, but I think a lot of people outside of the language still watch those talks, and it would make a lot of sense to have something to look him up by.


Actually, very few of his talks are about Clojure.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall

I’m sure there are others, they are the first that came to my mind.



An entry in wiki would not just be a recognition of his achievements but also a source for further reach out for his ideas.


If it hasn't been deleted before, be the change you want to see in the world :)


Thank you


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