Peter Norvig gave singularity summit talk on exciting work they're doing http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Peter_Norvig_Channeling_the_Flood_... , why isn't that top spot?
HN is kowtowing to the pseudo-brogrammer crowd.
- "curing cancer" has been announced many times, and until now every proposed therapy has had at best limited success
- likewise, "creating ai" has been in the news time to time. We seem to be always on the verge of true ai and the singularity, but it has not happened yet.
OTOH, many people here use gmail - I do, and I have been bothered by this compose thing.
To see the issue actually addressed, with proof, and hopefully with an implementation that I can use in the next few days, is more valuable to me that a potential cancer cure or potential ai - especially since I don't have cancer.
These are worthy goals, but until there is some real advance, why bother?
It's a market economy - someone solving a problem I have is more valuable to me that someone advancing in the resolution of a problem I don't have.
The AI advance is seen as an advance by Peter Norvig (head of Google Research) himself.
Both of them are hacker relevant potentially profitable business with huge upsides. Real advances can be made, especially by the hacker crowd. There's too much of a web 2.0 filter bubble going on here.
If you're more into cooking, it is something we already do with various particles - and with multiple beams to minimize damage to surrouding tissues (google for gamma knife)
It's a good thing Peter Norvig sees an advance. It'd be much better when that feeling is shared by the scientific community.
Real advances can be made, and there is indeed a web 2.0 filter here - much effort being spent on barely interesting things. The human race can do so much better.
But curing cancer, ai, whole brain emulation etc. are topics which will require a long sustained effort - if only because we are constrained by our technology!
It's not a matter of capital - these problems just can't be correctly addressed with our current technology.
It's a good thing if we are making steps in the right directions, but it's very unlikely these problems will be solved very soon, therefore my interest in news about such problems is quite low, even with a deep interest in them!
So I guess it's just natural that other readers find such things even less newsworthy :-(
Anyway, I'm not offended by gmail news, just wanted to get some ultrasound and some ai in there and put things in context.
It's a pain when your carefully curated submissions don't even hit the front page, but you just have to suck it up and move on.