Top all-time · #4882
J
John F. Sowa
Personal blog · jfsowa.comphilosophyscience
John F. Sowa writes Site Directory, a personal blog at jfsowa.com about philosophy and science. Since 2011, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “Fantastic summary of some of the math pertinent to theoretical computer science.”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
No feed foundVisit the blog
28mentions?
16HN people?
2011–2025first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
John F. Sowa's site hosts papers and essays on knowledge representation, logic, conceptual graphs, ontology, and computing history. HN readers cite them for ideas on knowledge versus wisdom and enterprise software.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Fantastic summary of some of the math pertinent to theoretical computer science.2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-06-15
- /ikl/Stonebraker.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-13
- IBM's future system of the past2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-11-21
What Hacker News says?
> There need not be anything unfamiliar with a metaphor or any explanatory power behind a metaphor The purpose is still explanatory, it's just possible for the explanation to be in terms of perceptions rather than structure: in your example with wife/bright sun the purpose is still to make an identification between two domains, one familiar, one not ("bright sun" is familiar to the reader; author's wife is not), but…
Comment linking /logic/theories.htm
on “Technical debt as a lack of understanding”Submitted Fantastic summary of some of the math pertinent to theoretical computer science. as a story · 158 points
HN discussionI didn't realize it was that big. I found in there this link... http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm ...that illustrates the difference between knowledge and wisdom very well. Soya has a number of wise observations and recommendations that apply in enterprise software projects today. I've seen the same arguments. Just usually not that many at once given the narrow scope of any given enterprise tech. He's defin…
Comment linking /computer/memo125.htm
on “An 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe [video]”Submitted IBM's future system of the past as a story · 72 points
HN discussionTangentially, Peirce has a diagrammatic logical system that's built entirely on conjunction and negation which is isomorphic to propositional logic. He also defined extensions for what we now call predicate logic and modal logic. John Sowa annotated Peirce's tutorial and it's quite interesting[1]. [1] https://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/egtut.pdf
Comment linking /pubs/egtut.pdf
on “LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live with This”Submitted An architecture of diversity for commonsense reasoning (2002) [pdf] as a story · 24 points
HN discussionMight be worth looking at Sowa's Conceptual Graphs. E.g., [1], talks about time, and links to his book. [1] http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/process.htm
Comment linking /ontology/process.htm
on “An Introduction to Knowledge Graphs”Submitted Mathematical Background for CS as a story · 2 points
HN discussionJohn Sowa is a good resource. Here is his annotation of Peirce's tutorial[1]. Another paper explores the influence of EG on Sowa's Conceptual Graphs[2]. I happen to find the juxtaposition of Frege's notation with Peirce's interesting. Sowa's commentary on yet another Peirce manuscript has some fun historical tidbits about the influence of Peirce on the design of SQL[3]. Here is another reference that mentions Peano'…
Comment linking /pubs/csp21st.pdf
on “Who Can Understand the Proof? A Window on Formalized Mathematics”Submitted Semantic Networks as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI don't work in CS. I was surprised when I watched this talk[1] by Michael Stonebraker to learn of the "Diarrhea of Papers" > A PhD applicant who wants to get a good academic job should have ~10 papers > A tenure case should have ~40 papers That alone would push me away from a PhD in CS. In economics, it's closer to what he said was the case when he was new: > I got tenure from Berkeley in 1976 — With about 5 papers…
Comment linking /ikl/Stonebraker.pdf
on “Applying to PhD Programs in Computer Science (2014) [pdf]”Submitted The Law of Standards by John F. Sowa as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFor some more backstory[1] see Sowa, who was also an IBM researcher at the time: George Boole (1847, 1854) applied his algebra to propositions, sets, and monadic predicates. The expression p×q, for example, could represent the conjunction of two propositions, the intersection of two sets, or the conjunction of two monadic predicates. With his algebra of dyadic relations, Peirce (1870) made the first major breakthrou…
Comment linking /peirce/ms514.htm
on “Reactive Relational Algebra”Fair enough. I'm a bit of a Peirce fanboy, so there's that. Contemporary Philosophy has more or less utterly abandoned Peirce's chief aims, which were to achieve clarity and distinctness for our conceptions of things. So much so that I'd consider calling someone a philosopher to be at best a back-handed compliment. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware there are philosophers working today who hope for more than the approbat…
Comment linking /peirce/ms514.htm
on “Wikiversity”There's no such thing as no-code, it's just a question of the properties of the coding scheme. For example C.S. Peirce proposed a turing-complete "no-code" graphical logic (aka programming) language[1] in the 19th century. [1] http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/egtut.pdf
Comment linking /pubs/egtut.pdf
on “What will programming look like in 2020? (2012)”The Thousand Brains reference made me immediately think of Minsky's "Society of Mind."[1][2] Minsky's work was quite an insightful perspective on intelligence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind [2] http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Singh03.htm
Comment linking /ikl/Singh03.htm
on “A Browsable Petascale Reconstruction of the Human Cortex”> That could make equations mostly trivial, since our symbols wouldn't be constrained to any particular arrangement in the first place You might find this little tidbit[1] from C.S. Peirce by way of John Sowa interesting then. Existential Graphs (EG) are an unordered diagramatic representation of mathematical logic. And Peirce is the real deal. His more conventional notation was adopted by Peano (who substituted the…
Comment linking /pubs/egtut.pdf
on “Groups underpin modern math”Slightly off topic, but your comment reminded me of Tarski's paper The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics ( http://www.jfsowa.com/logic/tarski.htm ) Basically, it's actually kind of hard to define what true means and Tarski goes through a long discussion trying to pin it down.
Comment linking /logic/tarski.htm
on “In Mathematics, Mistakes Aren’t What They Used to Be (2015)”> It's almost as if wanting a meaningful, intuitive solution prevented me from solving the problem. This theme shows up repeatedly in Dijkstra's work[1]. The symbol manipulation is itself a calculation. As a final influence I must mention our desire to let the symbols do the work —more precisely: as much of the work as profitably possible—. The intuitive mathematician feels that he understands what he is talking abo…
Comment linking /peirce/ms514.htm
on “A Curried Composition Puzzle”> OS/400 -- now called IBM i -- sounds like it was ahead of its time: That's because it's the last remnant of Atlantis. https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html > The IBM Future System (FS) project was a design effort to succeed the IBM S/370 architecture that was adopted company wide in 1971. FS was based on a single-level store with automatic data management. The project is reputed to have cost more than $1B wh…
Comment linking /computer/
on “Getting an IBM AS/400 Midrange Computer on the Internet”Oh, gosh, the usual tokenadult nonsense. I will just counter 5) with http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46... . But if you like a one-to-one correspondence between spoken language sentence structure and the usual first-order logic notation, Chinese is a good place to start. Umm. Wat? Care to elaborate more? Any papers? Also, first-order logic has many grammars and different families of syntax.…
Comment linking /clce/specs.htm
on “Learn Sanskrit Online”Yes, this is a development that has happened over time and has become pretty severe. Michael Stonebraker has written/talked about this in the context of DBMS research, but to me the same issues are applicable to other fields as well. Slides: http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Stonebraker.pdf Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA In short, the incentives/requirements in academia have changed so that producing work…
Comment linking /ikl/Stonebraker.pdf
on “Experience report: It will never work in theory”Peirce is one of the most underappreciated American geniuses. He actually invented the existential and universal quantifiers before Frege, although nobody disputes that both did so independently. Peirce's works are available here: http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/ . I strongly recommend anyone with an interest in formal logic to peruse them. His existential graphs are particularly interesting: http://www.jfsowa.com/peir…
Comment linking /peirce/ms514.htm
on “Charles Peirce and Allan Marquand”
