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Comment by nyamhap | Hacker News Reader

When was that xkcd posted? - couldn't not find a date.

Since machine vision is such a fast moving field, I think date is relevant for understanding the context of this xkcd. Is image recognition of a bird so inconceivable at the moment? Perhaps the joke now would be - "I'll need one researcher and one year"

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You are taking the xkcd strip very literally instead of understanding the central concept on it.

You comment reminds me of this: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm

I think the central concept is believe a smart engineer when he says something can be done, but not always when he says it can't be done.

I think that it means that thing #1 and thing $2 might appear to be just as difficult to untrained eyes while one would require very little work because of what's already available (libraries, data or whatever) and the other would be a very large task because most of the work hasn't been done yet (but of course a different engineer might be able to find more efficient ways to do things)

Just pointing to the fact that 'Virtually impossible in CS' is a concept that changes over time. The better the context the better the joke.

Yeah, Randy was a bit miscalculating the estimate there. Within a month of that comic, flickr made http://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or...

Within a month they put forth an app, based on work they had already been doing for some time.

With a team of (unknown).

One researcher and a month ( perhaps even less ! ) is more like it..

As pointed out in the hover-text, AI research has been trying to do this since the 60's and it has only been possible recently. That's a lot more than one researcher and a month!

September 24, 2014

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