rpm4321

I would normally never post something from the NY Post on HN, but my jaw dropped when I made it about 5 paragraphs down and read this:

Swartz was also an avid Internet activist, who pushed to make web files open to the public. He opposed the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” which keeps hackers from swiping web content such as music and movies.

But that mindset got him into trouble in June 2012, when federal officers arrested him for allegedly downloading academic journals on the subscription-only website JSTOR.com.

Unfortunately, propagandizing SOPA is nothing new for NewsCorp, if you remember the dozens of pro-SOPA articles and editorials in the WSJ at the time, but I still can't believe that their editorial marching orders would extend to an obituary.

I'm very skeptical of this recent emphasis on the theory that our complete sensory experience has to be simulated (or replicated via robotics) in order for a strong AI to learn.

All you need to do is read a bit about Helen Keller to know that language should be a sufficient window into our world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller

Hey Paul, thanks for responding.

Just in case you’re interested, this Time cover story on him from a couple of years back actually does a reasonably good job on the broad strokes: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.... as does this NY Times one: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html - there's also this intro by Peter Norvig to a Google Talks event with Ray from a month ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4

The basic idea is that exponential growth in tech will result in strong AI, advanced nanotech, biotech, and neural interfaces that will lead to a near utopian civilization (if things go smoothly) in less than forty years. As outlandish as it seems, he actually makes a fairly convincing, well-researched case, and has had a pretty impressive career as an inventor and tech prognosticator. Needless to say, he’s a very polarizing figure.

The notion is that they have a "monopoly" on search, and therefore have an unfair advantage in that they can promote their products over those of their competitors in their search results.

As a simplistic example, say some grandmother suddenly decides she would like to check out this "social networking" business she's been hearing so much about, and types that term into Google. The Feds and anti-trust advocates are saying that it should be illegal for Google to return a link to Google Plus above a link to the much more popular Facebook.

Personally, I think it's an outrageous overreach. I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, but if I was an MS shareholder I would be livid with the government for basically hobbling them over a decade ago. Nearly every insider who goes on the record about their recent troubles says that that was the beginning of the end for them, and I believe it. Imagine having to worry about not just what your competitors are up to, but also how the government will react to nearly every step you take.

The notion of monopolies in Tech is pretty farcical given how quickly the landscape changes on its own and how quickly seemingly invincible incumbents are displaced, but especially so when you are talking about websites like Google and Facebook that have no real barriers to entry beyond brand recognition, customer goodwill, and the quality of their product.

Hey jacques_chester, fair enough. It obviously wasn't only you who assumed that, because unfortunately the post was flagged. In retrospect it was obviously the S word that did me in, but it really didn't seem out of line compared to the dozens of very popular, slightly-NSFW titles I've seen on HN over the years.

Anyway, I've reposted it with a safer title in case you want to chime in on the debate. Hopefully it takes off again because I really would love to hear PG's take on the whole thing:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006328

Boy, I don't remember ever seeing a comment war escalate and de-escalate so quickly. Maybe there's hope for the Middle East after all. ;)

"No Guilty!" - Unfrozen Caveman Judge

Edit: Shucks, this is a lot less funny now that the title has been changed from "On Anti-Trust Issue, Google Found No Guilty" ;)

Yeah, because it's perfectly logical that I would engage in a multi-thousand word, multi-month debate:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4923914

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5003916

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4791558

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4851307

all as preamble in my master plot to... ??? wait, what is it exactly you're accusing me of again? "Trolling"? - or was I just after those whopping 7 karma points this whole time?

In all seriousness, I've wanted to post this Ask PG for a long time, and I used the debate from the article earlier today as an excuse to write it. I've read pretty much every word both Kurzweil and PG have ever written, but they've never really crossed paths as far as I'm aware. PG's a very pragmatic, no-nonsense, deep thinker, and my guess is he'd be skeptical, but it's too bad this post didn't take off because I really would have loved to read his take on it.

Maybe I should have said 'full of crap' or 'full of it'. Didn't mean to offend your virgin eyes. ;) PG-13 titled posts are nothing new to HN, so I really didn't think I'd be making waves.

Did you even read my comment? I'm genuinely very interested in PG's take on this, and it was inspired by a protracted debate from earlier today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5003916

Also, in my opinion "full of shit" accurately reflects the opinion of the majority of the anti-Kurzweil people on HN. It's an example of the sort of middlebrow dismissal that typifies a lot of the comments at the link above. That's what I'm trying to get at - whether HN really thinks Kurzweil deserves these sorts of knee-jerk, absolutist reactions, one way or the other.

Personally, I think the ideas are serious and deserve some thought and consideration. As I mentioned above, I'm fairly sympathetic to them long-term, but a bit skeptical short-term.

The headline is also obviously a bit of an attention getter, sure, but I'm certainly not a Karma Farma'.

I really wish you would read my comment further down the thread about not being a Kurzweil fan boy (I've copied it below for your convenience.)

Kurzweil's theories deserve scrutiny and thoughtful criticism, just not the emotional middlebrow dismissal you're engaging in - to borrow PG's favorite expression.

I guess it's possible that Kurzweil is The Talented Mr. Ripley of the technology world, and that your "horseshit pattern recognizers" are just that much more astute than those of Gates, Page, Brin, Minsky, Norvig, Wolfram, Kamen, Reif, etc., but I hope you'll understand if I'm leaning a bit more towards their take on this one.

Also, I realize endtime is about to jump in here any minute now with his Argument from Authority wikipedia link, so I'll freely admit that given imperfect information, yes, I'm allowing people I respect, who are extremely knowledgeable about the relevant subject matter, and in many cases have worked closely with Kurzweil (Page, Wolfram, Gates, Norvig, Reif, George, etc.) - to help confirm my own fairly well researched opinion.

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Honestly, I think you're barking up the wrong tree here. Even his strongest critics generally concede that he's a brilliant man who has contributed significantly to technology.

Please understand, I'm not a Kurzweil fan boy. I do think a lot of his conclusions are inevitable in the long term - say 100 years out - but I'd guess it's 50/50 whether or not his timelines are too optimistic to benefit any of us here personally.

What I'm reacting strongly to here is the knee-jerk dismissal of his credentials and accomplishments by some on HN due to their incredulity towards his later ideas. It doesn't encourage an informed debate, and quite frankly smacks of a religious or political argument - which admittedly many of his supporters are just as guilty of.

Eh, I'd tend to agree with you in general, and that was probably the weaker of my arguments, but the recipient list is pretty impressive: Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Gates, Jobs, Wozniak, David Packard, etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Medal_of_Technology

It's definitely not a Cracker Jack prize.

He's also racked up a pretty impressive list of Inventor of the Year and Lifetime Achievement awards from more technically astute sources like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_kurzweil - under Recognition and awards

I guess the main point I was trying to make is that he's definitely not this dilettante interloper that some of the more off-base commenters are alleging here.

Go to the 'Life, inventions, and business career' section here, as well as the overview section:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

Honestly, I think you're barking up the wrong tree here. Even his strongest critics generally concede that he's a brilliant man who has contributed significantly to technology.

Please understand, I'm not a Kurzweil fan boy. I do think a lot of his conclusions are inevitable in the long term - say 100 years out - but I'd guess it's 50/50 whether or not his timelines are too optimistic to benefit any of us here personally.

What I'm reacting strongly to here is the knee-jerk dismissal of his credentials and accomplishments by some on HN due to their incredulity towards his later ideas. It doesn't encourage an informed debate, and quite frankly smacks of a religious or political argument - which admittedly many of his supporters are just as guilty of.

God damn it... Not this again.

=================MY PREVIOUS POSTS=================

I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology.

He was on the ground, getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton.

As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and the seemingly sci-fi things they were now capable of.

"Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!"

"Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!"

"Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!"

"Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!"

I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs.

===========================================

In addition, I'd rank Minsky, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Peter, Norvig, Rafael Reif, Tomaso Poggio, Dileep George, and Kurzweil's other supporters as much more qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, than Kurzweil's detractors like Hofstadter, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Gary Marcus. It seems that Hofstadter is the only one of that group who is really qualified to render a verdict.

http://howtocreateamind.com/

=====================================

Here's Peter Norvig himself on Kurzweil:

“Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.”

and him effusively praising Ray at a Google Talks event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4 - @1:25

You may be right, but I can't help but smirk at the thought of PG or Buchheit downloading and installing the Bing Toolbar ;)

Eh, I'm pretty sure you should still feel violated. The fact that they are parsing your private documents for information that they can use to help another business unit is really sketchy. It would make me wonder what else they are scanning my data for.

Personally, I'll never use an MS cloud service because of this anecdote - not that it was that likely to begin with.

Hi Ivan, glad to hear it. You can count on my purchase.

Regarding pricing, yeah, you probably want to go cheaper than your print version. Maybe $19 or $9, depending on how much profit you are expecting to make on the physical copies.

To be honest, you're probably best off a/b testing the price, as it can be very surprising how consumers will react to various price points. I've seen situations were significant price hikes result in much higher sales, presumably because of the implied value of the product.

I actually clicked "Buy Now" before I realized this was a physical textbook and cancelled. To me, it's almost inexcusable to market this sort of text to this type of audience and not have a digital copy.

Shouldn't the barriers to entry be much lower for the author to get this out electronically?

I see that the author is responding to comments here, so if you're like me and will buy it if it comes out electronically, please let him know in the comments that he can count on your purchase.

I'd love to hear some opinions from anyone with speech recognition experience on how this stacks up to the commercial alternatives.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I was wondering if anyone on HN has any experience moving from the US to Canada?

I'd like to live in Toronto at least for a couple of years, but I'm not sure how involved the redtape would be, especially because I'm a freelancer and I won't really have a Canadian employer, clients, or a business purpose I can claim for my residency.

Now do Netflix! ;)

Can someone chime in with how Pycharm compares to Komodo Edit - or maybe just if you've had a positive/negative experience with Pycharm?

I'm starting to get a little frustrated with Komodo, and I remember liking a very brief Pycharm demo I tried a few years back, but I'd love to hear an HNer's opinion if you happen to use it day to day.

It seemed to have a pretty good reputation back then, but one of the concerns I had was hearing something on HN about it occasionally "optimizing" or making modifications to your code unilaterally.

Thanks in advance.

Bit of a tangent, but I'm wondering if anyone here has had any luck with Cython?

I'm starting to run into some performance bottlenecks with Python, and so I'm just now looking at Cython, PyPy, Psyco, and... gasp... C.

From what little I've read, Cython is supposed to be as easy as adding some typing and modifying a few loops here and there, and you are in business.

Yes and no. I believe 10 years is obviously a bit much in this case, but if you tweak the variables a bit, this sort of thing can be tantamount to a sexual assault.

Imagine it's your sister or girlfriend involved, and the pictures are splashed across Facebook by an ex-boyfriend.

In this case, the victims are certainly less sympathetic, but the principle is basically the same.

It reminds me a bit of this Hunter Moore business: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890088

I couldn't agree with you more. I'm a programmer with a fair amount of experience managing graphic designers, and I have a pretty good eye for design - if I do say so myself ;)

After not having personally touched any frontend code for a number of years, I recently found myself in the position of having to personally bootstrap an important side project - backend, frontend, design, and mobile - all on a miniscule budget.

The process she outlines so closely mirrored my own that I'm still not entirely convinced she didn't have a hidden camera in my office. This post would have easily saved me weeks of fumbling around, false starts, procrastinating, and looking around for the appropriate resources and frameworks. In my opinion my end product looks much more polished, but she was clearly just putting together a simple demo to support the text, and her design quality is easily sufficient to test out a minimum viable product. Of course, once you get some traction and have a budget to hire a designer, you should because design is sacrosanct blah, blah, blah, etc, etc.

But if you're a programmer on your own with no budget, just trying to get your idea out into the world and not embarrass yourself, this could be invaluable.

First of all, I would strongly encourage anyone who is interested to check out Kurzweil's 2009 predictions in his 1999 book Age of Spiritual Machines, rather than this Wikipedia synopsis. It puts his predictions in a much more accurate context. You can view much of it here: http://books.google.com/books?id=ldAGcyh0bkUC&pg=PA789&#...

Kurzweil also does a reasonably unbiased job of grading his own predictions here: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Fari...

Quite a few of your statements relate to technological adoption vs. technological capability, such as everyday use of speech recognition and ebooks. I clearly stated that Kurzweil is not perfect at predicting what technologies will catch on with consumers and organizations, nor is anyone for that matter. To me, and to most of the people reading this, the most interesting aspect of Kurzweil's predictions is always what technological capabilities will be possible, rather than the rate of technological adoption.

Some of your other statements conflate science fiction with what Kurzweil does: "There have been predictions of self-driving cars for more than half a century. It's in Disney's 'Magic Highway' from 1958, for example." Similarly, most of your other points attempt to make the case that because nascent research projects existed, all of his predictions should have been readily apparent. I'm sorry, but this is pretty much the same hindsight bias displayed by gavanwoolery and Kurzweil's worst critics. Basically, Kurzweil's predictions are incredulously absurd to you, until they become blindingly obvious.

You can point to obscure German R&D projects all you want (and who knows how advanced that prototype was, or how controlled the tests were), but I was blown away by the Google self driving car, as were most of the people on HN based on the enthusiasm it received here. I thought it would take at least a decade or so before people took it for granted, buy you've set a Wow-to-Meh record in under a year.

Once again, I strongly encourage you to fire up Youtube or dust off an old computer, and really try and remember exactly what the tech environment was really like in previous decades for the average consumer. Zip drives, massive boot times, 5 1/4 floppy disks, EGA, 20mb external hard drives the size of a shoe box, 30 minute downloads for a single mp3 file, $2,000 brick phones, jpgs loading up one line of pixels a second, etc.

To be clear, I'm not a Kurzweil fanboy. He's not some omniscient oracle, bringing down the future on stone tablets from the mount. What he is is a meticulous, thoughtful, and voracious researcher of technological R&D and trends, and a reasonably competent communicator of his findings. I'm very familiar with the track records of others who try and pull off a similar feat, and he's not perfect, but he's far and away the best barometer out there for the macro trends of the tech industry. If his findings were so obvious, why is everyone else so miserable at it? Furthermore, his 1999 book was greeted with the same skepticism and incredulity that all of his later books were.

For some of your other points, I've included links below:

Research has been initiated on reverse engineering the brain - Kurzweil was clearly talking about an undertaking like the Blue Brain project. Henry Markram, the head of the project, is predicting that around 2020 they will have reverse engineered and simulated the human brain down to the molecular level:

http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_br...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project

A 1000 dollar pc can perform about a trillion calculations per second. -- This happened. This is also an extension based on Moore's law and so in some sense predicted a decade previous. Pretty much all of Kurzweil's predictions boil down to Moore's law, which he would be the first to admit. I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Autonomous nanoengineered machines have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls. - If you read his prediction in context, he's clearly talking about very primitive and experimental efforts in the lab, which we are certainly closing in on:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/automated-drug-design-using-synthe...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadrian_Seeman - If you've been following any of Nadrian Seeman's work on nanobots constructed with DNA, Kurzweil's predictions seem pretty close

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/101/researchers-cre...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-step-toward-creating-a-bio-robot...

http://www.aalto.fi/en/current//news/view/2012-10-18/

Three-dimensional chips are commonly used. - I guess you could quibble over them being a few years late:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17785464

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384897,00.asp

I don't mean to pick on you (and I certainly didn't downvote you), but you seem like a posterboy for just how easy it is to take inventions and innovation for granted after the fact.

I find it instructive to occassionally go to Youtube and load up commericals for Windows 95, 3.1, the first Mac, etc., or even to dust off and boot up an old computer I haven't touched for decades. Not to get too pretentious, but it's a bit like Proust writing about memories of his childhood coming flooding back to him just from the smell of a cake he ate as a child.

When you really make a concerted effort to remember just how primitive previous generations of computing were, I think it puts Kurzweil's predictions and accomplishments in a much more impressive context.

This was the state of the art PC back when Ray was forming his first companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAhp_LzvSWk

I posted some other thoughts about Ray's track record awhile back:

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I read his predictions for 2009 only a couple of years before they were supposed to come about (which he wrote in the late 90s), and many seemed kind of far fetched - and then all of a sudden the iPhone, iPad, Google self-driving car, Siri, Google Glass, and Watson come out, and he's pretty much batting a thousand.

Some of those predictions were a year or two late, in 2010 or 2011, but do a couple of years really matter in the grand scheme of things?

Predicting that self-driving cars would occur in ten years in the late 90s is pretty extraordinary, especially if you go to youtube and load up a commercial for Windows 98 and get a flashback of how primitive the tech environment actually was back then.

Kurzweil seems to always get technological capabilities right. Where he sometimes falls flat is in technological adoption - how actual consumers are willing to interact with technology, especially where bureaucracies are involved- see his predictions on the adoption of elearning in the classroom, or using speech recognition as an interface in an office environment.

Even if a few of his more outlandish predictions like immortality are a few decades - or even generations - off, I think the road map of technological progress he outlines seems pretty inevitable, yet still awe inspiring.

fMRI is extremely high bandwidth and still in its infancy, and we are currently getting pretty good performance from relatively basic invasive neural implants on the disabled. I've read a couple of interesting articles on breakthroughs regarding the miniaturization of fMRI technology, so I think it's safe to say that keyboards will not be the highest bandwidth interface in the decades to come.

Here's Norvig himself on Kurzweil:

“Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.”

In addition, I'd rank Minsky, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Rafael Reif, Tomaso Poggio, Dileep George, and Kurzweil's other supporters as much more qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, than Kurzweil's detractors like Hofstadter, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Gary Marcus. It seems that Hofstadter is the only one of that group who is really qualified to render a verdict.

http://howtocreateamind.com/

I know. He has DRF, so I was just letting him know about a confusing typo.