rpm4321

I'm reposting this comment I made a couple of months ago. He's no John McCarthy, but he was a true pioneer in the commercial applications of AI:

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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.

DRH?

I think where people get into trouble in this whole debate is by taking one of two binary positions: Climate Change is a fraud, or Climate Change will turn Earth into a Martian hellscape within a century. Both are absurd, and are simply for either PR or negotiating purposes and shouldn't be taken seriously.

It seems to me that the most sensible solution would actually be out of the libertarian playbook: an ironclad 50-year tax holiday on all revenue generated from both the production of carbon-neutral energy and the manufacture of clean energy generating equipment.

You would get a massive investment in clean energy R&D, especially by those who can afford it like Big Oil and OPEC, without the potentially massive drag on the economy that carbon caps or tax schemes would create.

I think this seemingly obvious solution is ignored because free market solutions are anathema to the left, and because the right could give a rat's ass.

"NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!" - No one

Hey, quick question for you. I've got a version of Chrome with JS and plugins disabled that I use for not entirely trusted links. Do you know if there are still some exploits we're vulnerable to, especially on Win? I think I remember hearing a while back that it isn't foolproof.

God, what a great system that was. I was 11 when that thing came out, and after seeing just how great the quality jump was from the NES to SNES (and my half-remembered, dust-covered Atari before that), it suddenly became clear to me just how good video games were going to get in the future.

It was a lesson in Moore's Law that even an 11 year old could understand.

I disagree somewhat. While it's not a traditional 3D printer, it may as well be. It's essentially CAD software for DNA molecules, which automatically outputs self-assembling DNA structures which combine to create the desired formation of molecules.

Also, its creators use the word "print" frequently:

“We can now ‘print,’ molecule by molecule, exactly the compound that we want,” says Steven Armentrout, the principal investigator on the NSF grants and co-developer of Parabon’s technology.

I submitted another article on this a few days ago that has more details:

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

You should put (2004) in the headline, or it'll look like Karma Fishing.

Meh, 58% if you click 'Top Critics' and filter out the blog-spam critics. A solid F+.

Plus all the big national papers: the Times, Post, Journal, and LA Times, plus all the trades: Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly all shat on it, and many of the small local paper reviews that are counted as positive are mixed at best:

"Although never boring and almost continually amusing, Extract doesn't work as a movie because you don't buy a minute of it, even as silly satire."

or

"Extract has some flavor, but the comedic kick is diluted by flat characters and a thin story."

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/extract/critic-reviews

It reminds me of something Tim Heidecker said about the horrible reviews for 'Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie': "If you're a critic and you walk out of a theater wondering what the filmmakers could have possibly been thinking, maybe you missed something?"

You would think critics would give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who made Idiocracy and Office Space, especially considering the critical reappraisal each of them has gotten in the years since their release.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend Judge's 2009 movie 'Extract' with Jason Bateman of Arrested Development.

It sort of inverts the Office Space formula and shows the sometimes taxing, even soul-crushing nature of entrepreneurship.

It seems to follow the pattern of Office Space and Idiocracy in being panned by critics and ignored by audiences at first, and then quickly developing a cult following and being recognized as pretty brilliant.

Maybe not subsections, but allow users to create and up-vote tags on stories, or maybe have a simple dropdown on story submission with a dozen or so tags the submitter could apply. That way you could still narrow your focus when you don't want to miss certain content (ex. #Python, #AI, #Business, etc. at news.ycombinator.com/tagged/Python, etc.), but you wouldn't disrupt the current community feel of HN too much.

Well, yes and no.

You may know that the market wants your product, but the exact feature set and usability requirements are probably still a mystery, and will almost certainly need to be refined anyway after launch no matter how long you preemptively perfect it.

In the rare instance you describe, I would still look to launch quickly, just maybe not recklessly quick.

I was particularly surprised to see how aggressive the TV campaign was. I've seen these all over. They're really running with this thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WIluNt0mvA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_6bSCW_UI0

Not surprisingly, they've apparently hired a former political hack to help run this campaign. It's interesting, because these ads definitely have a dirty politics feel to them:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2012/07/23/can-mark-p...

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/07/19/mark-penn-microsoft%E...

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-03/did-mark-pen...

We should really try and crowd-fund a melt-bot to Enceladus or Europa, or a boat-bot to Titan. They're being criminally ignored by the various space agencies, and all have the potential to host life. See my comment above.

Jesus, I'm all for sending out as many missions as Congress will pay for, but another Mars rover? Can't they throw a little bit of money towards sending a melt-bot to Europa or Enceladus, or a boat-bot to Titan already? It'll be 2015 before we even know what Ceres really looks like.

Mars is certainly critically important, but the solar system is a massive place, and with such limited budgets why wouldn't you spend at least a chunk of your resources on explorations that have the potential of finding life in our solar system? We've known about these options for decades, and yet each mission gets scrapped at the last minute. I don't get NASA's priorities sometimes.

Also, in that time frame Elon Musk, China, and even NASA have bounced around various plans for getting humans to Mars. I'm usually an advocate for robotic exploration, but for the deep digging you will probably have to do to find something interesting, it may be better to have boots on the ground (for example exploring for microbial life or fossils below the surface.) It really seems like we're at the beginning of a Mars space race anyway, and this rover will inevitably be cancelled 5-10 years from now in order to focus on beating the Chinese there.

Well, obviously all PCs are Steamboxes, technically speaking. However, if it's a streamlined box that plugs right into a television and boots right to steam, I could maybe see them putting up a stink, even if the branding was sufficiently ambiguous.

The MistBox ;)

I don't know, though. To be honest, I'm kind of shocked no one has tried this yet. It seems like such an obvious winner, even if there is a slight chance you would go to court with Valve.

I think they'll use Martian soil. That's what Elon was planning, and other commenters below speak to its practicality.

My impression was that Curiosity's sensors have shown that the presumed danger of Martian radiation has been greatly overestimated. Unfortunately, I can't remember the sources, but I've read it in multiple places.

Profit?

Would it be legal for someone to manufacture and sell 3rd party Steamboxes, if Valve has no immediate plans to do so?

It seems like somebody like Alienware, or even just somebody on Kickstarter, could put together something impressive at a XBox720/PS4 pricepoint.

Well, this post won't help ;)

In all seriousness, I really wouldn't worry about it at all.

If you're not just being yourself, asking questions with candor when they come up, and chipping in with answers when you can, you're going to miss the point of HN.

I've noticed that the average only updates sporadically - maybe every few days - not after every post. That obviously could have led to the numbers not adding up, in addition to the outliers being tossed, as mentioned by another commenter.

As I mentioned above: PG has made so many unpublished modifications - for obvious reasons - to karma, spam filters, voter-ring detection, I wouldn't put too much stock into sussing out the inner-workings of HN through the original Arc download.

From what I've observed, the greatest factor in post ranking (besides upvotes on the post in question, obviously) is your karma average per post, not your total.

Also, PG has made so many unpublished modifications - for obvious reasons - to karma, spam filters, voter-ring detection, I wouldn't put too much stock into sussing out the inner-workings of HN through the original Arc download.

Thanks for your post, appreciate it. One follow up question if you don't mind? If Ireland ditched its "debts" and left the EU, in addition to the negative credit rating impact, wouldn't it significantly lessen US companies' interest in investing and hiring in Ireland? My impression was that EU membership was one of the primary drivers of this phenomenon, in addition to the tax situation and great workforce.

It appears I was right:

http://betabeat.com/2012/12/anonymous-launches-ophunthunter-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4862779

I'm sorry, but this whole situation - which is not typical HN fare in itself, let's face it - is just such an absurdist farce that no other comment could really do it justice. It really is Simpsons-esque:

Wikipedia -

In 2001, the word "Doh" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary;[8][9] The definition given is:[8][10]

Expressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish. Also (usu. mildly derogatory): implying that another person has said or done something foolish (cf. DUH int.).

The headword spelling is doh, but d'oh is listed as a variant (as is dooh). The etymology section notes "the word appears (in the form D'oh) in numerous publications based on The Simpsons".[8] Eight quotations are cited: the earliest is from 1905; two others are Simpsons-related.

doh!

Wow, Gaelic has to be one of the most unintuitive languages in the world to pronounce.

I've read that word probably a hundred times in various news articles, and always pronounced it in my head as Tao-Seech, which I'm assuming is ridiculous to Irish ears.

I'm a bit interested in Irish culture so I've informally learned some pronunciations here and there to see if I could start to get a handle on Gaelic words: the only pattern seems to be that I'm always wrong :)

Thanks Eoin, appreciate it.