Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> Consider how difficult it is to get a computer to do anything. To take a simple example, let’s say we would like to ask a computer to find the most commonly occurring word on a web page, perhaps as a hint to what the page might be about.

Um, has the OP ever tried getting a human to easily perform such a task?

View on HN

Pointing out the problems with the proposition just illustrates the author's point about the semantic gulf. It's relatively easy for a human to not only see the problem but to point it out snarkily. But short of singularity we may not see a computer doing so in the near future.

Abandoning meta-snark despite it's pleasures, what is interesting is the way in which the semi-absurd example implied a relevant example which I now realize was why I wasn't bothered by the semi absurdity. I didn't really take the words literally.

What was evoked seems to have been the idea of how unlikely it would be that a computer could read the pseudo code and determine that it found the most frequent words on a page without being given the answer ahead of time.

I wasn't (only) meaning to be snarky, but the proposition he makes is itself a bit of snark and, more to the point, begs the question. If you're assuming that, given a non-trivial webpage, all educated adult humans will agree as to what it's about...well, how can the computational scientist argue against that? If anything, the author himself should be keenly aware of how humans fail at general interpretation, even after having 12 years of education (K-12)...unless he's never had a comments section for his articles.

Meta: your comment finally solidified the proper meaning and usage of "begs the question". I'd sort of understood it, but hadn't seen it used in modern text like that.

I think with that he was trying to show how computers have a hard time finding out what a webpage subject is. Humans have it easy, just read the title of the page or the title of the article.

"In fact, the least commonly occurring words on a page are frequently more interesting: words like myxomatosis or hermeneutics. To be more precise, what you really want to know is what uncommon words appear on this page more commonly than they do on other pages. The uncommon words are more likely to tell you what the page is about."

but realize how long it takes for humans to learn to speak/comprehend complete sentences.. heck to be potty trained even.

>but realize how long it takes for humans to learn to speak/comprehend complete sentences.. heck to be potty trained even.

interesting that a kitten or a puppy gets potty trained much faster than a human child.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com