Ask HN: Will there ever be an eHarmony for finding friends? - <AUTHOR> From what I know, eHarmony asks you a long list of questions, and then tries to match you up with people they think you would be a good romantic match with.
Not sure how well the above works, but I always thought a similar thing that applied to finding people whom you would click as friends would find many applications:
Moving to a new city, moving into a new apartment complex, starting a new job, starting college, going on a cruise with a ship full of people you don't know, etc.
I guess there are websites that help you expand your network of friends, but as far as I know, no website runs a test that is analogous to the one on eHarmony.
My questions are:
1) Do you think that a questionnaire + algorithm could ever be developed to find people that you would click with as friends, or are human nature and human interactions too complex and unpredictable?
2) Assuming such an algorithm is possible to develop, would it get traction, would people use it, would people pay for it? <comment><USER3> 1) The former.

2) Not easily. The biggest problem is that the people who most need help finding friends are the ones you least want to find on a friend-finding site. Every dating site seems to be drowning in this problem, which means they have to resort to scam techniques and exploiting new, naive users as much as possible. OkCupid is the only exception that I've seen. Hard to say whether you can replicate what they're doing (that is, not sucking) in the Platonic realm.

<comment><USER4> OkCupid gives 3 ratings: a Match percentage, a Friends percentage, and an Enemy percentage. Isn't the op's idea already rolled into this?

<comment><USER5> It'd just mean using the matcher on people you wouldn't romantically pursue. I think there's too much of a stigma of okc being a _dating_ site, so that people think using it as a friend finder would be weird.

<comment><USER6> People use okc to make friends all the time. This problem is pretty much solved for the 18-30 set. Now, how do you make friends in your 40's 50's or 60's is another problem.

<comment><USER7> They should re-brand it or do a spin-off if that's the case. OK Cupid, just sounds like a dating website, and I'd assume someone with a profile on that site is merely looking for a partner.

<comment><USER6> Why rebrand? Guys and gals you don't have sex with are friend zoned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The algorithm is quite doable. A good-enough algorithm would be fine -- I have higher standards for those I exclusively date than for those I grab an occasional beer with. An opportunity to meet some new and interesting people would be great.

The viral loop probably lies in encouraging people to sign their existing friends up so that we can better classify the kind of people a user gets along with. I think people would use it, given that it had some mild game mechanics and some real social benefit. I'd push hard against making it in any way useful for dating and hookups at first, otherwise it would quickly get a stigma.

I had an interesting chat with some salesguys a couple of months ago, where we talked about an application that lets you say, "I'm in Denver on a layover for four hours. I'd love to grab a beer with somebody who sells into the enterprise software space and has some time to chat." That's one possible revenue source. Permission marketing is another one.

If I were to go the social-media-startup-route, this is the problem I find most interesting.

<http://www.njl.us/social-networking-but-the-other-way-around>

<comment><USER9> I've seen people on twitter with a lot of followers doing the "I'm in such and such for 4 hours lets meet" invitation, though of course that only works for people with a lot of followers. So I think there is an opportunity there.

<comment><USER10> That would be a great feature for Foursquare. They could add a profile for users, and let you opt in to sharing that with other users who have checked in at a certain place. It could be interesting to see who's nearby with a similar collection of badges and interests.

<comment><USER11> Meet Gatsby does this with foursquare (<http://meetgatsby.com/>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One problem that springs to mind is that while a romantic relationship is usually one-to-one, a friendship is often part of a circle of friends - <USER2> if you'd get along well with somebody on their own, there's no guarantee you'd fit comfortably with all their friends, to say nothing of whatever group dynamics might be involved.

If there was an eHarmony-style site for friendships, it would probably involve mining social networks like Facebook for more information than just a simple personality quiz.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe I'm old-fashined, but "a site for making friends" sounds a bit creepy to me. I would expect it to be populated by crazies mostly, so not very attractive.

A slightly different approach could be to have a site or sites for people with some niche interest to meet each other. I don't know, carpentry hobbyists or amateur blues players. It seems that Meetup already covers this? Maybe you could see if there are some niches that are not covered well enough by Meetup, and focus on these.

<comment><USER14> looking for other people to pursue shared interests would be one of the main purposes behind "a site for making friends" - at a glance Meetup looks very geared towards structured group activity and less towards "hey judging by your profile/blog we have very similar tastes; fancy a drink?" ad-hoc approaches.

The other completely "non-creepy" case where someone might want to use the site is when they've just arrived in a new city/country (though again there are plenty of expat-oriented forums and social networks) or people that were looking for transitory conversation with likeminded people whilst passing through (essentially couch-surfing without the couch).

yes, you're also going to get the "people who aren't very good at making friends" and the "people that like to exploit the vulnerable", but they haunt the dating sites too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> MeetUp.com does a good job of this, albeit in a different format. Here in Raleigh, you can always find a pick-up ultimate frisbee game, a developers meet-up, or whatever else you're into.

I think the idea has legs, and the fact that people use MeetUp.com is a testament to that. Finding connection is definitely something people want. If the service existed, I'd absolutely try it out.

</comment><comment><USER16> Any such site will immediately be used by people to attempt to find dating partners under the guise of a friendship, defeating the point if it being "friends only". I know someone (female) who recently tried to use the "platonic" section of craigslist to find some new friends, only to find later that all the people who contacted her (a few emails in) started down the path of "I'm bisexual". Some made continual references to how cute she was, but how they understand she isn't into that sort of thing, and would "respect her boundaries"...

<comment><USER17> This. I would add that meetup.com is a fairly decent avenue for making friends. At a minimum, folks you meet will have a common interest, and you'll be less likely to face the problem above (though let's face it, any social activity can manifest this problem.) There are also generalized meetup groups more oriented towards networking or simply making friends, which adequately fill this niche, IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think going college or going on a cruise are that difficult places to meet people. In fact I think that holidays in general and college are easier than every day life since people often have few friends with them and people are more relaxed and open to making friends.

For moving to a new area, I would expect that real life networking events are best around a common interest or joining sports clubs.

I think eHarmony and similar sites are aimed at matching two people together, where as male friendships tend to based around groups of friends, so I'm not sure how you would modify it to fit. Might work for women though.

<comment><USER18> ya. being friends with someone is a social thing. If you can't befriend me in real life, I probably don't want to be your friend. (or rather it just would not sustain itself)

Also, at least guy to guy, you don't really go out looking for friends. That's just weird. You just _happen_ to do stuff and gradually, subtly, you become friends =)

I don't think most people remember how exactly you become friends with your friends. That's indicative imo. A forum for "friendmaking" is just weird.. as in it probably wouldn't _actually_ work due to the dynamics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Music, movies & books are good indicators of taste and therefore you can use them as parameters in similarity search on user-user matrix. It is called nearest neighbors search or clustering in academic jargon and there are many possible solutions, mostly based on some sort of matrix decomposition. Look at this one for example, the winner of Netflix challenge: [http://public.research.att.com/~volinsky/netflix/BellKorICDM...](http://public.research.att.com/~volinsky/netflix/BellKorICDM07.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is interesting, since I've been thinking for a while that your Netflix queue might serve as a decent proxy in tests about whom you might click with (either romantically or just-friends).

If I think of the things my friends and I have in common, of all the aspects of their lives (interests, hobbies, politics, etc) maybe the one where we have most overlap is in the types of movies we like. Maybe this is not supported statistically across the population, but I would be curious to see a study on the correlation between the similarity of two people's Netflix queues and a measure of how much those two people click as friends.

The similarity of the queues is easily quantifiable, but one would have to come up with a quantifiable measure of how much two people click. If they are friends on Facebook, you could see how much they interact: the higher the interact, the higher they click (of course this may not always be the case).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I genuinely believe that you're making a mistake over here; you're assuming that machine learning is a magic bullet that can solve anything. I am afraid that isn't the case. Even for a satisfactory level of functioning you need to factor in these "meta" variables;

\- Emotional stability of the user: You need to be able to judge if the user can form serious long term relationships before recommending him or her.

\- Level of Emotional maturity: Maturity is really different from stability. Stability means that you'll be roughly the same a week from today whereas maturity applies to your ability to handle problems effectively and rise above petty issues.

\- Willingness for Engagement/Commitment: Your users are in a portal, but the levels till which they are willing to use your service vary, and it isn't something you can ask in a questionnaire.

\- Acceptance: This is a part of emotional maturity, but it deserves a solitary mention. How do you judge if someone is willing to accept divergent points of view and learn from things?

\- Perspective: What does the user seek qualitatively in relationships?

I think that one day this might be possible, but you're dealing with one of the greatest unsolved problems we have ever faced. Making a computer understand things.

Further, I believe that even though you might succeed someday it won't work for people all the time. Why? Because emotions are really hard to parse, and what I seek in relationships is far beyond common interests or anything like that. I seek kinship, love and understanding. How can you possibly judge and match that without having some degree of emotional understanding? This is yet again one of those great unsolved problems.

On the other hand, there must be a solution beyond simply matching interests from a long checklist. Maybe you should approach it like Aardvark. You could make a friend of a friend based contextual system. Imagine a giant grid of people remotely connected to each other through friends and you parse the daily routine conversations between users and create a personality profile using current psychometric testing (it's seriously inaccurate, but we need a shot in the dark). After that you offer to match them together anonymously at first (this is important) and then see how they hit off.

Yet again I doubt that it will work at all due to privacy issues and moreover it will be too computationally expensive to justify...

<comment><USER21> Why would you need to go through all of that for a FRIENDSHIP? I don't think you read his post.

<comment><USER20> Trust me I read his post.

Any relationship I engage in I take it very seriously. I want to be there for people and love them. That's what it means for me.

On the other hand, I was trying to list what happens in someones mind when they try to decide if someone should be close to them or not. The list must be pretty inaccurate, but it was more to show a point than to form a blueprint.

P.S. - I know that I tend to take stuff too seriously, but I just need to emotionally connect with people. So, I guess that YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "You can choose your friends and not your family".

1\. I don't think an algorithm could be developed to find friends. On the other hand, I think people make friends on game sites where, they strike out on their own to make friends. Even meet up sites, where you go to play golf with a bunch of strangers or go play chess.

2\. I don't think this kind of site will get traction and people will not pay for it.

eHarmony exists because it makes finding your potential mates easier, it is for people who have given up on bars and friend's recommendation. Yes, there are other ways to meet people but the frequency of finding a good mate will be very less, I think.

I think people just become friends who get along with each other and don't look for friendship actively, like we look for dates on a dating site.

The concept of a site finding a friend has always bothered me, like facebook is trying to find a friend for me or saying "share more info to find more friends"...

The best thing you can do is launch a portal for like minded people to mingle.

Everything cannot be solved by technology.

<comment><USER23> >I think people just become friends who get along with each other and don't look for friendship actively

I think this is right. So the question is can you sift out attributes that identify compatible partners? Or is it more biochemical?

<comment><USER22> Yes, there may be some common attributes and I don't think it is biochemical when it comes to male friends.

I feel that someone can look at the problem differently. To make a site based on a common interest and get people to pay for it. The users of the site will find a way to make friends.

<comment><USER23> What makes you qualified to dismiss the possibility of biochemical effects?

<comment><USER23> for example, tribal identification via scent, status chemicals

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Personally, I lean toward thinking that sort of thing is too complex and unpredictable to determine algorithmically, but then again, dating sites have evidently done well in the last 10 years, and analog matchmaking sites did well before that, so maybe. My problem with solving the friendship/dating problem algorithmically is that it seems like a good answer to the wrong question. My best friends are the ones that I have a ton of shared experiences with (going to high school or college together, knowing each other for 10+ years, etc.), and the best "dates" I've been on have happened serendipitously. I don't know how you'd address those dynamics with something as necessarily superficial as a questionnaire. If anything, I could see a questionnaire being a good screening device for people you almost certainly would not click with, but I think it'd be almost impossible to predict the opposite. Just my two cents, though.

<comment><USER25> On the point about serendipity, there is a dating site called HowAboutWe.com that focuses on spontaneous dates rather than matching.

<comment><USER26> US only (demands Zip code). Shame on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I feel like meetup is a "good enough" algorithm and found many friends when I moved to a new city.

</comment><comment><USER28> There was a site called Simler (<http://simler.com>) that attempted to do this. Its goal was to help you find new people who you might be friends with. It worked similar to Facebook or Twitter, via status updates.

People tagged themselves with dozens or hundreds of arbitrary tags, then their engine would recommend people who share same interests.

The challenge they faced was getting anybody to come to their site. You are not going to get people who feel they are already "friend full" there, which means your percentage of "abnormal" people (hey, I'm one - people who don't make friends easily).

I think the algorithms will be easier to overcome than the problems with the self-selected population.

</comment><comment><USER29> Personally I think the whole eHarmony model is dead (or dying).

I'm interested in people's social interactions and how that is changing with new people growing up with no digital prejudices against technology.

I believe social networking replaces traditional online dating. Especially the younger you get the more true this is. The eHarmony model tends to prosper over inflation of the details you put down.

Okay so the trend that I see happening in younger people is that traditionally Myspace actually took this space for finding new friends online with people under 18 (non-tech). Facebook has a social contract that you typically have to meet the person or heavily been in a person's social circle before becoming friends on facebook.

The site currently ruling making new friends online is Dailybooth and YouTube which is immerensly popular with under 21s. Not only do participants make "online friends" they usually translate into offline friends. I have personally observed a high percentage rate of meetups and "gatherings" with both these communities.

So what makes Dailybooth popular with making new friends. 1) Use of actual photos of the person on a dailyish basis: This allows for people to follow people that they would be generally interested in hanging out with. The use of images from a webcam also means that you can verify the person, that they are real, and again images are a very powerful tool in considering if you'll like the person or not.

2) The details on dailybooth has the standard social networking info and also the location. Dailybooth users when they gather or meet up with one another they tend to take a booth/photo of the meetup each tagging the other people. This drives other people to meetup in groups.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

In consideration of an algorithm I've been meaning to pitch Dailybooth on an idea to populate a user's photo stream with people that you can calculate based on the network graph of who the user has followed/followed back. And based on location, to try and increase the percentage of people making offline friends using the service. Which decreases churn rate and brand value.

So yeah, I'm heavily researching this area right now so if you interested in discussing it further my details are on <http://benreyes.com>

I could talk about this topic for days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting stuff, but you mention under-21s. I think this age group never has that much trouble meeting friends, since they are still in school, see a lot of people, maybe are less picky than older people in who they interact with, etc. So, historically, there isn't much need for a website for under-21s to find friends, but maybe this is not the case with today's youth.

I may be wrong here, but I think any site that would want to attack this problem and find enough people who would use it would have to do it for people who are older than 21, maybe people above 25 or 30? These are the people who move to new cities because of a new job, or move into a new neighborhood because they bought a house, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sexual love is a human need as fundamental as food and shelter.

In America's individualist society, friendship is a "nice to have."

Dating sites get over the hump of "oh my god this is creepy" because their users are desperate. It also doesn't matter how well they work: desperate users will pay money for hope, even if their hope is unfounded.

Without that driving desperation, I don't know that a friend-making site would ever get traction.

<comment><USER31> I've tried match, harmony, yahoo, friendfinder, and tickle. okcupid actually has compatibility testing & matching that seems to work and that does not suck. No one else I've seen has been able to do that. The problem with okcupid, is that it seems that women would rather interact on the site instead of meeting.

<comment><USER23> "The problem with okcupid, is that it seems that women would rather interact on the site instead of meeting"

That's a problem with you, not okcupid.

<comment><USER31> When I go out to events and parties, I get their digits and a date. Perhaps it's my profile.

<comment><USER23> The vibe in your profile or your messages, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is precisely how my friends use okcupid.

<comment><USER32> Are they men or women?

<comment><USER31> Both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Would this be possible as a Facebook app? That would help get past the initial chicken and egg problem any project like this would have.

I'm about an hour away from the nearest decent sized city so something like this would be useful for finding new circles of friends in my area. At the moment I meet new friends through existing friends. While I've met many great people this way I do find it's difficult to meet people who share particular interests that my current social circle doesn't have.

</comment><comment><USER34> We're working on it at SimplyAdaptive We call it Inner Space Technologies. Will release a preview in a couple of month and shooting for a working website in 6 month. We're doing out of passion with no external funding at the moment for this project. If interested in collaboration/funding/other details please contact us. <http://www.simplyadaptive.com/ist.html>

</comment><comment><USER35> This would be an incredibly powerful program if you could make it work.

But the "making it work" part is non-trivial.

Sounds like you are missing a hook -- something that pulls more people in

</comment><comment><USER36> I keep bringing this up (I keep my drum on me 24/7), but I run <http://EveryMentor.com/> and we're trying to be something like that but for folks that are looking for a more business aspect. Basically, its a place where you get a workout buddy for work in general. Kinda aimed at startups or single entrepreneurs that don't have lots and lots of contact as is.

<comment><USER23> First of all, lol at the drum visual.

It's amazing how much I can learn about my own craft by critiquing others. I feel like you have wayyyy too much text on your site

That being said, I think your section headings captured the information I needed anyway, so I signed up. Your distance filtering doesn't work. It's sorted alphabetically, not numerically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Hi there. I'm working on something similar. We're not starting out with questions, simply with friends-of-friends whom you haven't yet met, but there are a lot of interesting next steps we are contemplating, that being one of them. Consider signing up for the beta at <http://Kliq.in>; we're launching next month.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm the cofounder of SubMate ( <http://Www.submate.com> ) and we want to introduce you cool new people in your areas based on your commute. For the moment , the website is pretty new but we plan to improve that algorithm quickly to allow you to make new friends !

<comment><USER28> Maybe its just that I'm getting grumpy and old, but I'd lose the "cool" in your pitch. For some reason, with "cool", it sounds almost desperate; without "cool", it sounds interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> as long as it doesn't look desperate (rather than going on eharmony for friends destination site, you'd give a service on your favorite socialnetwork/communities which proposes you //twitter"who to follow") ? For the "algorithm", why not partnering with Hunch a bit? Actually, it may be a good idea if it is an information site(rather interaction site not a match.com w/chat etc): people would just check which profiles around "could" become friends (based on near values/tastes/etc). It gives you an idea of who is around in your new town for instance. So that if you meet them IRL, you can say hello.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to hang out with too many guys/gals who are 'just like me'. Their algorithm would need to account for that or adjust based on user input before the query.

<comment><USER41> You are very correct and most people feel the way you do even if they wont admit it. I have worked at sever large hookup and dating sites and all the problems are the same. The main one called the 90/10 rule is the root of all their problems.

I am building a dating site right now that eliminates this issue and introduces a totally different model.

<comment><USER42> Sounds really interesting! You seem to have some domain expertise as well.

Can I help you out? I've always wanted to do something in the online dating space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I like the idea of organizing and expanding the idea of "Anyone want to grab dinner before the concert?". At least you'd have stuff in common, and you'd avoid the feeling of desperation.

</comment><comment><USER44> Well there is certainly a market for it, there are a lot of lonely people, I doubt the ability of a questionnaire and algorithm to match friends together. There are too many variables.

</comment><comment><USER45> There already is (or...was):

Facebook.

Back in 04 that's how people found friends before they went off to college; they would look people up in their class who had a common interest in music, movies, activities, etc.

</comment><comment><USER46> I have been using EH for 2 months now. Every week I ask myself, "why couldn't this just be for meeting friends?"

</comment><comment><USER47> I know a guy who's working on this: <http://preacquaint.com>

<comment><USER44> He should change the name.

<comment><USER23> But you definitely shouldn't, ever.

<comment><USER44> you don't like <http://shirtlessfriends.com> ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> meetup.com

<comment><USER49> I just joined after meaning to for a while, and it seems awesome. There's a hash run in Hong Kong tomorrow I'm thinking of going to and an entrepreneurs group I made a post to asking who wants to have a coffee in Central/Sheung Wan. I do a lot of my work from a cafe in Central/Sheung Wan anyways, so having someone stop by for an hour to chat would be a cool way to break up the day. Looks like a promising for a way to meet people into cool things, athletics, adventuring, business, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> eharmony sucks. If there were a site to make friends that uses an algorithm similar to eharmony's, it would be a complete failure.

</comment><comment><USER23> Finding friends on the internet is going to become socially acceptable very soon. NicoNaco.com - list your values and get match-ups (e.g, startups, drinking, bowling, politics, dubstep...) I have found that my only true friendships are based around shared values.

</comment><comment><USER51> What? Facebook isn't working for you?

All you can find are "friends" there.

<comment><USER33> Facebook is more for existing friendships, not finding new ones. From speaking with people, it seems most people reject friend requests from people they don't know.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Scaling considerations when building Minimum Viable Product - <AUTHOR>

Every company as they start getting traction faces challenges about scaling databases, scaling website/applications, etc. I would like to ask HN about what was your scalability approach? When building minimum viable product release, did you built it with scalable architecture in mind or rebuild the site ground up once it got more traction? <comment><USER2> Do you need to worry about scaling ? No.

If you can prove your idea, execution, and model, then you will be able to worry about scaling then.

</comment><comment><USER3> Best scaling advice I've ever read:

[http://teddziuba.com/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot- up-y....](http://teddziuba.com/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot-up-y.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a nice article but doesn't help understand what are the options available to people. For the discussion, let's assume , it is just a bad code and has nothing to do with what tools are used. In those cases where it is not easy to go back and fix the code, what are the options people are using?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Scaling to a million page views or so a day is not difficult. With the technologies available at hand there is less need for big hardware to do it. For instance you could grab a few Amazon EC2 nodes, use one as a balancer to the others. Grab nginx for the web server, proxy to your application, varnish for static caching. Alot is going to be determined by the way you access the database, there is no need to go to nosql when mysql can scale beyond your needs. Limit your queries, only select the data you need instead, use indexes, be smart about table structures.

If you ever do get to facebook/twitter like traffic, you'll probably have money and entire ops team to deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Scale is almost always something you should ignore completely while building an MVP. It is trivial to build a web app that can handle enough users to prove the product. There are exceptions, but they're very rare.

<comment><USER6> _Scale is almost always something you should ignore completely while building an MVP_

I disagree. There is no reason you can't build in best practices from day one. You don't have to go overboard thinking about it (since you probably won't need to scale much), but you can plan ahead for it. For example, on most projects I use a PHP framework similar to Symfony that is based on Doctrine ORM and uses Smarty templates. If a project grows, Doctrine lets you easily add memcached for all queries. If it grows more on the data side, I can easily tweak the setup to use master and slave DBs or even a circular replication cluster. If it grows more on the traffic side, I can change a CNAME setting to move static files to a CDN. I can also set up Varnish in front of the app server. I can put a load balancer in front of the app server and rsync the code base across dozens more app servers. All of this can be done simply by tweaking a few config files. Of course 99% of the time I'll just need 1 or 2 servers, but I can scale at will when the time comes.

<comment><USER7> Which framework do you use?

<comment><USER6> I wrote it myself, drawing inspiration from the best parts of Symfony. I use Doctrine for ORM and database abstraction, and Smarty for templates instead of the raw PHP that Symfony uses. I also ditched Symfony's static file caching in favor of Smarty's. I kept basically the same YAML config structure from Symfony...no need to fix what wasn't broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What happens when site pickup and scaling issue becomes real. How would you deal with such situations? Do you rewrite the site or try to keep scaling up as much as possible.</comment>


The stupidity of crowds - <AUTHOR> http://openforideas.org/blog/2017/04/12/the-stupidity-of-crowds/ <comment> mike-cardwell "Lesson two: don't ask people to make decisions they are not qualified to make."

He's implying that certain questions (such as whether or not the UK should be a member of the EU) should be left to the political and economic experts.

What if the political and economic experts disagree with the majority, not just because of their political and economic knowledge, but because they are a very limited demographic and don't even consider many of the things that are important to the people who are not experts in those fields?

Considering what he wrote, I would say we need _more_ referendums, not less. So that people can become familiar with their votes having an observable impact on their lives. At the moment, people feel powerless, so when they're given a vote, they're more likely to use it in anger. Give them _more_ decision making power, not less.

<comment><USER2> > _Give them more decision making power, not less._

I can't see this working out at all.

In the 2016 US election 43% of you failed to vote.

For Brexit 28% of people failed to vote. And the younger the demographic, the fewer people who voted.

In Australia where voting is compulsory, we have close to 6% informal votes. Donkey votes are believed to be close to 2%. I shudder to think of the people who vote for Labour or Libs because "their votes doesn't really count anyway".

And you don't have to vote that often! You had one job!

<comment> mike-cardwell My statement was that giving people more referendums would make them use them more wisely, and I gave some reasoning for that.

Your response was that, not many people vote. I'm not sure how that addresses what I wrote?

<comment><USER3> > _giving people more referendums would make them use them more wisely_

Psychology and sociology disagree with you: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue)

The only solution I can think of is to enact a set of laws that _require and enforce_ science and evidence based legislation. However, this is such an affront to all the lobbying groups that even the suggestion of such laws will be aggressively attacked from every direction possible.

<comment> mike-cardwell That link doesn't actually argue either way. It just presents some ideas with lots of "could be" and "under certain circumstances" and "proponents often counter" and so on. No sources.

It does provide one example. But the example has nothing to do with referendums, it's about people being asked to vote on the same sort of question repeatedly in a short period of time.

I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that of an election, so the behaviour may be completely different.

Do you have a better link?

<comment><USER3> There is research into the phenomenon, but since I don't want to even try to link to [ _cough_ s __ __b], I can provide a couple of pointers for further research.

\- 10.2307/2108922

\- (no idea why, but this has no DOI: [http://www.jstor.org/stable/25791895](http://www.jstor.org/stable/25791895))

\- (no DOI either: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379401...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379401000476))

> _I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to > that of an election_

I think you are being somewhat dishonest here, and I would suspect you actually know that. From an individual voter's point of view there is very little practical difference: you are supposed to set time aside to go to the polling station at a given date, and cast your vote on an issue where it is _HIGHLY_ unlikely that you have enough data to make an educated decision.

Referendums attempt to distill a complex issue (or a set of issues) into a binary decision. (I find it relevant that binary option trading is a common source of scams: [http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading- scam/);](http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading-scam/\);) elections attempt to distill a complex set of competing and mutually exclusive issues into a personality contest.

Either way the only repeatibly reliable result is that no matter whose side wins, all the voters will eventually feel they have been shafted.

<comment> mike-cardwell I don't know why you felt the need to call me dishonest.

An election is for choosing who you want to defer decision making power to. Often you only agree with some of the things that person intends to do. The headline actions. And even then, you realise that they may not do some of the things they said they would, and will probably do many other things you never even hear about.

A referendum is about answering a specific question. One you have probably never been asked in your life time. And hopefully one where the result will be an actual thing that takes place, e.g Brexit.

I find it hard to believe that concepts such as voter fatigue would apply equally to those two considerably different things.

<comment><USER3> My apologies for that unclear statement. I meant that in _this particular issue_ , I believe you are not being honest with yourself.

There are several problems with voting fatigue, but chief among them is that the actual effects of the result are divorced from the outcome. It usually takes months, if not years, for a practical change to propagate from election campaigns to reality. (In the off-chance that an election campaign promise is actually adhered to.)

So for most practical purposes a vote taking place has little resemblance to its practical results. We take the expectation of tight feedback loops as a given in UI design. If usability and results from user actions are not coupled, the user will get confused, irritated and eventually will just give up. Why would we expect voting to be any different?

It's not just the vote itself that is causing fatigue, it's also the insane mental overload of having to deal with and the need to make sense of the constant (mis)information deluge. For months on end, as a voter you are supposed to digest a barrage of incoming information. It is _tiring_.

And all this still boils down to the need to eventually set time aside go to a polling station to drop a piece of paper into a box, only to see that nothing really changes. Do this often enough and only the activists will be left. The silent majority can not be bothered to care enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > On the other hand, asking a large number of people to make a YES/NO decision > on something they scarcely comprehend is like having a hundred school > children who have just finished dissecting a frog collectively decide the > best way to handle a triple bypass operation. That is to say, when the > question requires expertise to answer, widening the circle reduces the > collective wisdom of the group. This is one element of what I call the > Stupidity of Crowds.

If you want to change people's opinions, a good start would be to stop calling people who disagree with you stupid.

If you go and look at which areas of the United Kingdom voted "leave" the most strongly, it's the coastal fishing ports. I'd assume that the fishermen know very much more than the average remainer does about what effect the European Union has had on their industry, and yet in page after page of post-referendum discussions by remainers I have yet to see a single remainer even acknowledge these people's existence, let alone suggest why remaining in the EU would be better for the fishermen than leaving it.

Edit: removed the word "remoaner".

<comment><USER5> Isn't that the problem? If the fishermen only look at Brexit through the lens of the fishing industry they cannot be expected to understand the effects of Brexit on all of society. This can be expanded to any group, even your classy ad hominem "remoaners". Brexit has such wide consequences that it shouldn't have been a decision based on opinions.

<comment><USER4> > If the fishermen only look at Brexit through the lens of the fishing > industry they cannot be expected to understand the effects of Brexit on all > of society. This can be expanded to any group, even your classy ad hominem > "remoaners".

Not to be sarcastic or rude, but the comment you're responding to actually does say exactly what you said there. The remainers did not seem to care very much about the fishing industry, and they've shown no ability to understand the effects of the EU or leaving the EU on other groups of people, such as the fishermen.

<comment><USER6> Alternate hypothesis: the remainers noted that whilst the effects of the EU on the fishing industry may have been bad there are only around 10,000 fishermen in the whole of the UK[1] whose livelihoods aren't guaranteed to be improved by leaving, and there was no reason not to prioritise the far greater number of jobs and revenues in other industries that are threatened by leaving.

Or more likely, most of them didn't because few people understand the intricacies of the Common Fisheries Policy or financial passporting and their respective impacts on the job market and most people actually tended to make their decision out of a vague sense of whether right-wing politicians shouting about taking back control of their borders resonated with or appalled them.

[1]and fishing jobs were lost at a much faster rate last century before the UK joined the EU than afterwards. Needless to say, the proportion of the 17 million people who voted Leave who were affected by the Common Fisheries Policy is vanishingly small.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Boaty McBoatface might be a "terrible embarrassement" to some, but to me it's really good since it shows that you don't take yourself all too seriously.

If all nations took themselves 100% seriously we would all end up like Russia and probably be instantly catapulted into WW3.

<comment><USER8> It was a really good name because it appealed to kids, and could have generated a huge amount of positive PR for Britain and for the earth sciences.

Sometimes smart people are wrong too.

There's a certain irony in calling a blog "Open for ideas" and then putting up posts that say "But not like _that_."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of some research I read a while ago, I think it was here, that said that what matters most is neither expert nor crowd, but data points. You want to maximize the total data you've got to decide, but you also don't want to bias towards one data point more then another.

Their conclusion was that the benefit of crowds is that it adds a lot of data points, by combining everyone's data, but it skews some way too much, because if 70% of the people are making the same decision from the same data point, it's not weighing in other data points.

It was also arguing that most people would decide the same thing given the same data points.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well then, let us ask thousands of people: Had the electorate answer to the Brexit question been a No instead of a Yes, would the voters still - in the view of this very same Aran Rees - have been an unfortunately unqualified gaggle, unsuitable for asking about anything beyond the number of airports in a given country?

<comment><USER10> Are the downvoters themselves part of an inarticulate crowd, or would some of them care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> * The Boaty McBoatface is /r/iamverysmart territory. It was lighthearted and brought interest from across the world - not everything has to be named after a Greek tragedy.

* As for Brexit. Well, the public in general was unaware of the benefits of being in EU to begin with. Ultimately it was the 'experts' \- the people in charge of conveying information - who failed. Not democracy. Democracy is by no means perfect, the metrics for who are qualified to vote hasn't been set.

* The language barrier. For some reason I really doubt that's true. What polls are in questions? I can't find any sources in the article. 4% deviation is completely normal if the question was asked from same people a year later.

Crowdsourcing is amazing, as long as your target group is set properly. This entire article is regurgitating intro into statistics. I do agree with the consensus part. The very problem was relevant in assessing difficulty of 'stories' in software development. When devs were asked to just number the difficulty, people lost sense of responsibility and would normally vote for extremes (very easy or very hard). Hence, the people who chose lowest and highest had to explain why they chose that specific number.

<comment> mike-cardwell Re the langugage barrier. The difference was much more than 4%. What he wrote:

      When asked if the voting age should be lowered 57% said no.

      When asked if 16 and 17-year-olds should have the right to vote, 61% said yes.

What he should have wrote:

      When asked if the voting age should be lowered 43% said yes.

      When asked if 16 and 17-year-olds should have the right to vote, 61% said yes.

I don't know why he wrote it the way he did. Seemed bizarre to me.

<comment><USER12> Might have wrote it that way to be deliberately confusing.

Where's the source for these numbers? Did the polls have similar number of respondents? If these were online polls, was one poll shared on certain internet groups and not the other?

Also the two statements are not the same thing. 'Right to vote' and 'Allowed to vote' are different. A useful follow up poll would be to gauge the percentage of people who believed that 16 year olds have a right to vote, but should also not be allowed to vote. I believe that number may be significant. You can think of it in terms of death row criminals: there is an argument that they have a right to life, but also that the victims have a right to justice. Which right is more important is not something everyone agrees on. That type of logic applies to the questions of voting too.

<comment> mike-cardwell I don't know why he would have written it that way on purpose to be deliberately confusing, as the non-confusing way would seem to have given more weight to his point, rather than less.

<comment><USER12> I don't know why either, but it seems almost impossible to do it by mistake? Which leaves doing it on purpose the more likely, but why he would do it on purpose is a mystery. As you say, it's bizarre.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the number one reason that I thought the YC experiment with letting HN choose someone to receive a grant was a terrible idea. I predicted it would result in a nightmare and it predictably did.

The people choosing didn't have any skin in the game and they followed celebrities instead of thinking for themselves.

I hope YC has learned not to offer these choices.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think in the case of brexit, not only were the general public the wrong audience for the question, their opinion was also informed primarily by the UK press; therefore the answer to the question was actually the opinion of the majority of the press - which is just formulated to sell papers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Could not finish article because of stupid pop-up. What was the conclusion?

<comment><USER16> Same. Couldn't close on mobile, showed up even after re-entering the site.

I don't know if there's data showing those popups work, but they really ruin the user experience.

<comment><USER17> Archived copy, no popups:

[https://archive.fo/vlMiq](https://archive.fo/vlMiq)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> counter point: [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/07/430372183/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/07/430372183/episode-644-how- much-does-this-cow-weigh)

And since we are presenting opinions as fact: Boaty McBoatface was the better name. It would have made the boat and its research subject more appealing to children. More people would know about it, for better or worse. It would go down in history and take its research subject with it. The only winner in the new name is Sir Attenborough himself. Not that he doesn't deserve it, but my point stands.

</comment><comment><USER19> Crowds can be intelligent. Crowds can be stupid. It's interesting how they can really be at either extreme.

<comment><USER12> Is it really the crowd becoming intelligent or stupid, or just that we are agreeing or disagreeing with the crowd and conflating that with the intelligence of the crowd?

As a quick test to try and determine this: try to think of occasions where you thought of a crowd as intelligent: did you agree or disagree with the crowd? Now try to think of occasions where you thought of a crowd as stupid: did you agree or disagree with the crowd?

If these questions are highly correlated, then you may not be measuring the intelligence of the crowd as much as you think you are. That we think of crowds in these two extremes is also a hint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Insufferable pop-up on mobile to add to email list that wouldn't go away 3/4 through article. Awful!

<comment><USER21> Do you have a "reading mode" on your browser? It's a ~new invention for those who intend to _read_ anything from the mobile web, despite the jounals' contempt for their audiences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In science pop culture [joke mine] there is "the layman test". It involves the scientist explaining his work to a layman. Failure to do so means the scientist doesn't understand what he is doing. It is usually used to cut though a forest of terminology.

(One could [say] argue that Object Oriented Programming has property foo. The layman test would have you explain what this OOP actually is. Then, foo is assumed not to be a property of OOP if you fail to explain OOP.)

Nothing is a dead-end topic. If the explanation is successful the layman can learn some more details. Eventually the layman becomes the professor.

Not everyone is good at explaining their work. One professor (his name escapes me) once argued that we assume professionals to be good at education while they never had any such training: Academia works under the assumption their field doesn't exist. Libraries full of books about teaching and learning, some dating back thousands of years. All irrelevant?

What fascinated me was the idea that we deploy amateur explanations from mega overqualified professionals onto the first year students. The ratio is all wrong.

If the people who need information cant get access to it it doesn't matter if the information exists.

The solution to collective decision making is to set up a system for information distribution. Ideally it would be a fully distributed system but since we cant have that we will have to start with a properly designed server then work towards a decentralized formula.

The people who have monopolized information distribution will fight you all the way on this. They will rally their zombie legion of Jackass, Eastenders, Neighbours, Friends, dancing with the stars and football supporters and teach you a lesson.

Imagine this was ever on TV: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-5_34QgGI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-5_34QgGI)

In stead you got Johnny Knoxville is what you got in stead.

To add a fun story:

If you look at the RSS spec you find a rating element. If you chase that rabbit down the rabbit hole you end up reading about a mythological creature called the PICS rating system[1]. It is like the ancient Greeks of internet design forged a most poetic system for content rating. Wondering why such a beautiful thing never took off you end up reading authoritative-sounding attention-monopolists ranting and raving about the mere smell of scrutiny. Eventually they successfully denounce the concept as CENSORSHIP and proceed to brand it a porn filter. Today that is the only remaining implementation.

[1] - [https://www.w3.org/PICS/](https://www.w3.org/PICS/)

</comment><comment><USER23> The article has some good points but the whole "crowd" thing was never a serious idea.

Crowds are not intelligent. Democracies are what are intelligent. Having lots of intelligent people who care deeply about something discuss it thoroughly in good faith and then vote will almost always produce optimum outcomes for all involved. This basic principle underlies everything from global capitalism to modern science to even modern military strategy (network-centric warfare).

The problem is that more often than not you don't have lots of people discussing a topic in good faith. In fact this is a might even be a rare and fragile scenario. It's very, very easy for the discussion or the voting system to be corrupted and subverted. The logical conclusion is that the "crowd" is only intelligent and able to reach good conclusions in a well-defined environment. There must be rules, institutions and ultimately reputational accountability to ensure that all actors are actually acting in good faith. Capitalism needs well-regulated markets, science needs its prestigious institutions and even the military needs civilian oversight and international conventions.

I think once people appreciate this it becomes obvious why suggestion boxes is a waste of time and why highly compressed mass referendums are almost certainly disaster.</comment>


Three Routes to Spaghetti-Free Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://zef.me/3715/three-routes-to-spaghetti-free-javascript

<comment><USER2> Route 1: Streamline.js, a compiles-to-Javascript language.

Route 2: Mobl, a compiles-to-Javascript language.

Route 3: Stratified.js, a compiles-to-Javascript language.

And then a _side-mention_ for something _actually_ in Javascript: <https://github.com/caolan/async>

So, to make spaghetti-free Javascript... don't write Javascript? I'll keep looking, thanks.

<comment><USER3> Try jQuery's deferred events. It is, IMO, the most elegant actual-JavaScript solution to the problem I've seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> But why isn't jQuery 1.5 mentionned? See this: <http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/using-deferreds-in-jquery/>

<comment><USER3> Yes, exactly. This is a great description of the new deferred events and methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure if the title is indicative of the tutorial's true usefulness. The information on asynchronous function calling alone is worth the click-through.

I wasn't aware of any of the three javascript packages (are they libraries? frameworks? seems like they're not really), and anyone looking to improve their asynchronous javascript writing skills and readability should take a look. The author admits that debugging could be an issue since these packages all generate new javascript from your current code, but the concepts look very promising.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Extremely interesting and useful ... and not at all what I expected from the title!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've written a library for internal use (that I'm waiting for work to agree to open source) that basically lets you bundle a group of asynchronous calls into a single callback. I prefer this method because it doesn't try and hide the asynchronous nature of the code, it just frees you up from having to nest your callbacks N deep when you require the output from all N asynchronous operations to continue. Wondering what others think about this? Do folks prefer the methods in this article that let you hide the asynchronous nature of some code?

<comment><USER8> It's been done. One of the best libraries for managing asynchronous code in JS without hiding it away is <http://github.com/caolan/async>

I agree wholeheartedly, by the way. There's way too much scope for leaky abstractions when you try to hide away the true nature of asynchronous code.

Same reason, I think, why most people are lukewarm about using continuations in web development, like e.g. Seaside does: in principle, very neat, very clean, but it hides away a fundamental aspect of how the web works, which can lead to all sorts of unforeseen behavior re. caching, debugging et cetera.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I assumed there had to be libraries to do this already, but didn't come across anything that did what I wanted. I'll check out async though, thanks for the heads up.

<comment><USER9> There are many many attempts at solving this problem, both libraries and preprocessors. None seem to satisfy a large audience, most people seem to deal with the callback nesting and hope to avoid cases where it gets super ugly.

I have a lot bookmarked on github, these are mostly libraries.

<https://github.com/coolaj86/futures> <https://github.com/substack/node-seq> <https://github.com/marcuswestin/fun> <https://github.com/creationix/step> <https://github.com/chriso/chain.js> <https://github.com/substack/node- chainsaw> <https://github.com/caolan/async> <https://github.com/kriszyp/promised-io> <https://github.com/kriszyp/node- promise> <https://github.com/technoweenie/node-chain-gang> <https://github.com/creationix/do> <https://github.com/willconant/flow-js> <https://github.com/creationix/conductor>

Some branches of CoffeeScript are also trying to ease the pain. Defer keyword didn't make it into CoffeeScript main. My impression is CoffeeScript makes callback hell less ugly anyway, so there is less need for adding a complex language feature that generates unreadable JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think many people missed my main point. Here's another shot at explaining it better: [http://zef.me/3753/planning-ahead-the-async-javascript- probl...](http://zef.me/3753/planning-ahead-the-async-javascript-problem)

</comment><comment><USER11> A colleague of mine wrote a true coroutine library for JavaScript: <https://github.com/dherman/jstask>

It depends on generators, so it works only in Firefox, but it's a cool hack nonetheless, and might be useful if you're developing Firefox addons.

</comment><comment><USER12> Could we make getTitle a method of some webpage object? Then the event handler could set the webpage instance's title attribute. Webpages could have class variables that kept track of the total number of webpages created and the total number that had titles.</comment>


Ask HN: Learning about machine vision? - <AUTHOR>

Any recommendations on where to start learning about machine vision?<p>A well-written (but not gargantuan) printed book would be preferred. <comment><USER2> O'Reilly "Learning OpenCV" is very well written and covers a wide range of topics.

[http://www.amazon.com/Learning-OpenCV-Computer-Vision- Librar...](http://www.amazon.com/Learning-OpenCV-Computer-Vision- Library/dp/0596516134)

</comment><comment><USER3> Somewhat generic advice: Find a good local bookstore (way easier in cities, particularly those with universities) and start flipping through relevant books until you find one that speaks in language _you_ understand -- there's really no substitute for this, since your background (maths/physics/compsci) and learning style are super-relevant.

I'm a really big fan of MIT press textbooks; they consistently are of excellent quality and authorship (and no, I didn't go to MIT). They're not cheap, but they're significantly cheaper than taking a course.</comment>


X-Ray Structures Of Everything. Without Crystals. Holy Cow. - <AUTHOR> http://making-drugs.quora.com/X-Ray-Structures-Of-Everything-Without-Crystals-Holy-Cow

<comment><USER2> Comments section of the original post is worth reading:

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/03/28/xray_structu...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/03/28/xray_structures_of_everything_without_crystals_holy_cow.php)</comment>


Going the Other Way - <AUTHOR> https://tryjobalerts.com/blog/2020-08-05-going-the-other-way/ <comment><USER2> > In the software world, when you go the other way you notice how all the blog > posts, online help is not really helpful at all. They assume you'd only ever > go A -> B.

I was already a competent programmer when I learnt JavaScript. There's very little out there for someone in this position.

<comment><USER3> So true. Which ones did you end up using and enjoying the most ?

<comment><USER4> Perhaps one of these 3 will be of help to you: [https://eloquentjavascript.net/](https://eloquentjavascript.net/) [https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix](https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix) [https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS](https://github.com/getify/You- Dont-Know-JS)

<comment><USER2> The first one clearly isn't intended for already competent programmers.

The focus of the second one doesn't seem to be on teaching the JavaScript language. [0]

The third one looks like the best bet, but it's still not explicitly aimed at an audience of already competent programmers. [1]

[0] [https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix/read#leanpub- auto-a...](https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix/read#leanpub-auto-about- javascript-allong)

[1] [https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/2nd- ed/get-s...](https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/2nd-ed/get- started/ch2.md)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heroku is great but I find it too expensive for hobby projects. I recently converted a small hobby project on a $5/mo VPS to lambda and api gateway and it now costs about $1/mo unless it gets more traffic.

Yes, I can afford to pay a lot more, but I don't want to and I'm willing to invest more time into something to save money if the process is repeatable.

Lately this has been writing cloud formation that can easily be copied between projects. I wish it was easier though.

<comment><USER6> I find CDK[1] way easier to deal with than CloudFormation yaml or json. Try it out!

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/](https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heroku is so great. We recently had to move away from it due to very high HIPAA compliance pricing, but the AWS setup with Beanstalk is much more cumbersome.

Heroku (and its open source cousin Cloud Foundry) just have the right abstraction level and very easy to use tooling.

<comment><USER8> Not sure if it's still an issue, but we used to have a nightmarish time with Beanstalk where deployments would hang and we'd have no choice but to deploy a second instance of our app, flip DNS over, etc. I seem to recall it was some CloudFormation thing under the hood. Never had that kinda pain in my brief time with Heroku.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The 10m rows limit and dynos shutting down was the reason I switched out from heroku to linode+dokku. Dokku is super close to being as simple as heroku but self hosted open source.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would imagine at least some of the price increase was DTO...

</comment><comment><USER11> AWS to Heroku is like going from Sugar to Chocolate cake. It's still made with Sugar. Try Apache. The config is XML. How much simpler can people make it?</comment>


Efficient Software - <AUTHOR> http://inessential.com/2019/04/02/efficient_software <comment><USER2> This is something I've thought about a lot since the first time I heard the (probably not true) idea that if Google turned it's home page black, many tons of CO2 would be kept out of the atmosphere.

I hope this story gets a little traction here because I'd love to hear what others think.</comment>


If you're running a business with high margins watch out for Jeff Bezos - <AUTHOR> http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/11/16/jeff-bezos-amazon/

<comment><USER2> It's especially true for their third-party marketplace. Selling there is just asking for Amazon to destroy your business.</comment>


Embrace Beginner's Mind; Avoid the Wrong Way to Be an Expert - <AUTHOR> https://eugeneyan.com/writing/beginners-mind/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of Richard Feynman's approach to learning (the Feynman technique, [https://fs.blog/2012/04/feynman-technique/](https://fs.blog/2012/04/feynman- technique/)) and his controlled chaotic teaching style where he never relied on just one approach to teaching.

</comment><comment><USER3> A hack for this is to just have terrible imposter syndrome so that you always feel like the biggest idiot in the room :)</comment>


Show HN: Interactive Wallpaper animated art tool (symmetry groups) - <AUTHOR> http://coloring-book.co/wallpaper <comment><USER2> Kudos! This is a beautiful intro to the planar symmetries. If anyone here wants to play around with doodling their own planar symmetry patterns, I made a weird little tool to do that at [https://eschersket.ch/](https://eschersket.ch/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been wondering for a long time how it is that symmetry groups are used in science, and I was thinking about it some more while looking at this.

Is the idea that when analyzing some natural phenomenon there's a bunch of complexity, but in certain cases (where we can use symmetry groups) the complexity follows a pattern. If we recognize the pattern, then in order to get at the heart of the matter we only need to look at _one element_ of the pattern for the next stages of our analysis (rather than considering all of its repetitions).

And then maybe the next thing is that often times the patterns occur in abstract mathematical spaces rather than being literal physical patterns.

Can anyone comment on the accuracy of that interpretation?

<comment><USER4> So in science, symmetry groups appear in physics in various forms. The ones more commonly found in physics are not exactly like the finite symmetry groups in the OP (I cant immediately think of a good example). Briefly, they are used to describe transformations of your physical system that leaves "something" (this can be abstract) unchanged.

So in physics, the best examples take the form of a continuous symmetry. A very simple example is the special orthogonal group SO(3) - the group that describes all length preserving rotations.

Another example in relativity are Lorentz and Poincaré groups. The Poincaré group effectively describes affine transformations, a transformation of space that preserves parallel lines and ratios of distances.

More abstract examples occur in field theory. The unitary group of one dimension U(1), the special unitary groups SU(2) and SU(3) can be used to "describe" electrodynamics, the weak and strong force respectively.

In these cases the solutions to the equations that describe how particles interact under these forces have these symmetries. These theories all have some conserved quantity that is unchanged by the action of these groups (charge, color etc).

Perhaps the one of the important thing to take away is; if the equations that describes your system has some symmetry, then there is a conserved quantity (something that doesnt change in time). This is Noether's Theorem.

Another take away is, if your equations have some symmetry, you can use it to describe all the possible solutions. Once you have one solution you can find others by applying the transformation. So perhaps these are a bit more abstract to think about initially, but there is something physical there.

<comment><USER3> > Once you have one solution you can find others by applying the > transformation.

Interesting. That sounds like roughly the inverse of what I was trying to describe: using the transformations to generate rather than analyze.

That's pretty cool though. If I understand correctly, the process would be something like: prove that an equation has some symmetries[0]; then find one solution; then, since we know the equation's symmetries, we can use them to gain access to a formal expression of all the solutions, which could then be used (for example) to assert that such and such must be in the solution set or not in the solution set, etc. (actually, bad example there since our original equation already allows us to do that...)

If that's right, then there's probably some way of making reference to the symmetry groups algebraically—maybe that's part of what the U(1) etc. notations are for? And then some way of getting a symbol meaning essentially, "group X applied to entity Y", where entity Y is something like a solution to an equation with the appropriate symmetries, and group X is a symbol for the symmetry group like U(1)? Or maybe "entity Y" is the symmetric equation rather than a solution.

My initial thinking was more like that you'd start with something symmetric like the full set of solutions, then use knowledge of the symmetry to eliminate repetitions, so that you're only left with what's unique and can analyze that in isolation. But I guess that would make more sense to apply to observational data rather than to a set of solutions.

Using the electrodynamics example: maybe you'd start with a bunch of recorded data related to electric and magnetic phenomena interacting, which in some sense is like a sampling of the solutions to (ideally not yet discovered) equations describing electrodynamics. So if you could determine that that data has some symmetries, you can use it to eliminate everything that's repeated, and what's left (a single solution I suppose...) might given you some insight about an equation which would have it as a solution.

[0] When it's said that "an equation has a symmetry" is it just shorthand for "the solutions to an equation have a symmetry"?

<comment><USER4> [0] Yes a solution will transform under the symmetry to be another solution of the same equations. Perhaps for a bit of history Galois originally used finite groups to look for solutions to algebraic equations. You might find one solution and then be able to describe all the other solutions. A bit later on Sophus Lie (where the name Lie groups comes from) went on to study the same problem for differential equations. Maybe to say it briefly, if you understand that your solutions have a symmetry you can use it to simplify your original equation and make things easier to solve.

In the field theory example, you have something called a Lagrangian which you can use to derive the equations which describe the dynamics of your system. In those cases it will have a symmetry of one of those groups, you can transform the Lagrangian by one of those groups.

Knowledge of the symmetry does help you simplify your problem - its basically used to remove redundancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you fix the infuriating history state that just disallows me from using the back button on my browser? It's way too fast that I can't click it a second time to navigate back to HN

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes -- Fixed! Thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's strangely beautiful, especially for something educational. A slow moving version of the animations as a wallpaper would be cool.

</comment><comment><USER7> doesn't seem to work. Just a white screen.

<comment><USER8> I tried it IE11 and it doesn't work. But it work in Chrome and Firefox. Do you have javascript enabled?</comment></comment>


If You're Going to Do a SaaS Startup You Have to Give It 24 Months - <AUTHOR> https://www.saastr.com/if-youre-going-to-do-a-saas-start-up-you-have-to-give-it-24-months/ <comment><USER2> I agree with one point and disagree with another. The point about taking a lot of time - people would be well served to really internalize that. Even in something like biotech you have a push for development and exists within a year of starting - a few years isn't that long a time to build something worthwhile and itll take you that long.

The point I don't agree with though is zero optionality. A simple counterexample is Warby Parker - the founders all had jobs lined up. A lot of founders I know consulted while getting their company off the ground. In general, founders need a high risk tolerance yes, but needless risk loving characteristics seem needlessly self destructive. Maybe this is too biotech specific a view, but you make progress by controlling risk and decreasing the amount of outstanding risk. You're able to handle the enormous risk at the start, but your job is making that number as small as you can over the following few years through building the venture. Creating optionality, creating new revenue sources to extend runway, decreasing reliance on outside capital, decreasing personal stress to allow you to focus on your work better, all these things work in your favor.</comment>


NHS abandons £12.7 bn IT project - <AUTHOR> http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/snXX8cxfNgad4ynPFTn5TxA/view.m?id=15&gid=society/2011/sep/22/nhs-it-project-abandoned&cat=most-read

<comment><AUTHOR> The recommendation to 'dismember' the project is particularly harsh! Killer line towards the end though: "we will be moving to an innovative new system."</comment>


Nanocubes: Fast visualization of large spatiotemporal datasets - <AUTHOR> http://www.nanocubes.net <comment><USER2> I can't figure out what is supposed to be new here.

Spatio-temporal only means 4 dimensions at most I would think.

They give a time for 4.5 Million objects (not sure what that means) as 3.5 minutes. I've already personally been able to rasterize gaussian filtered kd- trees at a rate of 10 million in a few seconds.

Are people really paying for this? If so where can I find them?

<comment><USER3> (Author here, sorry I didn't catch this earlier) The 3.5 minutes is the _preprocessing_ time (think of it as index-building time).

After the index is built, the goal is to be able to generate outputs at a time bounded by (up to a poly-log loss) the size of your screen, and _not_ of your data.

After the index is built you get sub-millisecond answers for the 2-D histograms over reasonably-sized screens, and that turns out to be pretty useful for the use cases we're going for.

<comment><USER2> I was including the indexing time too, I think 10 million points in 4 seconds on one core was what I saw.

These were single high dimensional points, I'm guessing that the data being dealt with here is different?

The link in your post doesn't work but I did look at the paper and couldn't really see the uniqueness. I wasn't clear on what 'data cubes' was supposed to mean.

When you say 'screen' you are talking about ranges or bounds of area right?

<comment><USER3> We use "data cubes", as per Jim Gray's paper, [http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs345d-01/rl/olap.pdf](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs345d-01/rl/olap.pdf).

When I say "screen", I mean (e.g.) your laptop's screen resolution. If you're going to display a heatmap on a screen with p pixels, we (roughly) touch only O(p) memory cells on query time, independently of the dataset size.

When you say "you don't see the uniqueness", I'm not sure what you're comparing it against, so I can't say anything more. You mentioned gkd-trees earlier: is that the comparison you mean? In that case, these are two completely different data structures. For example, (at least as described on the 2009 siggraph paper), you can't subset on a categorical dimension of the pixels. In the case of the data structure we created, we can report (for example) a heatmap of all geolocated tweets generated by an iPhone, or all geolocated tweets generated by a windows phone, or all geolocated tweets irrespective of device, _without having to scan the 200M tweet database_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, how is this different from an in memory olap queryable column store like vertipaq?

<comment><USER3> (author here, sorry I didn't see this earlier)

One of the principles we tried hard to follow is that after building the indices, the query times should be proportional to the resolution of the plots you're generating.

So the difference here is building the data structure that's fundamentally well-suited to interactive visualization. So we push hard to get low latency, and we take trade-offs that will let us generate query results well-suited to create histograms , heatmaps, etc. These are typically multiresolution (sometimes you want mile-wide pixels, sometimes you want yard-wide-pixels, or day-wide pixels vs second-wide pixels) and require some index-building tricks that we hadn't seen combined in the way we did it.</comment></comment>


For Twitter C.E.O., Well-Orchestrated Accidents  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/jobs/08bosses.html <comment><USER2> The thing that's interesting to me is both Blogger and Twitter focus on simple, straight-forward human to human communication. Neither are complex or try to solve abstract, confusing problems.

By the measure of Blogger and Twitter's popularity, Evan is obviously skillful, regardless of whether or not Twitter is purchased by Google or some other entity. He focuses on an area relevant to all humans, communication. He makes his services easy for everyone to use. He has the foresight to see potential value in something unexplored, and he has the tenacity to work problems long enough for the results to prove if his hunches are right.

But perhaps most important he tries over and over, failing more often than he succeeds. That seems to be the real lesson here, it's not that Evan just luckily makes some mistakes and comes out on top, it's that he tries over and over.

Success has very little to do with luck, a bit more to do with circumstance and mostly to do with trying, and trying and trying some more.

<comment><USER3> Also, knowing how to deal with people, focus, and discipline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me or did this article seem underwhelming? Twitter has gotten some incredible publicity lately, so much so that my _mom_ asked me what Twitter was.

So perhaps that is why the Times asked Evan Williams write a sort of autobiography. But nothing was really all that meaningful.

He could have talked about why he believed giving investors their money back was the right decision. He could have talked about why Twitter was worth investing more time in. He could have even talked about what he learned from his previous failures.

Evan Williams doesn't sound like that interesting of a person, but props to him for developing one of the next big things in online communication.

<comment><USER5> I actually thought this was one of the best articles I've read in a while.

A lot of entrepreneurs I know try and try again and always come up short(myself included, though the success rate has steadily improved). This can be really discouraging because after a few attempts you start to wonder if you have the right characteristics necessary to create a successful startup. It's not like basketball where if you're 5'8" you can quickly figure out you're not going pro and can move on to other things. So in this story you've got a guy who "was broke for 10 years", made a ton of mistakes, then went on to start 2 really really successful companies.

I thought that's really inspiring and I'm glad he shared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The one thing that is very interesting about Evan Williams is the ability to pull off TWO possible companies that were Google aquire capable. Blogger he already sold. Twitter he may.

Another way to look at it is, Twitter may have been already acquired by Google had not Evan Williams already had one company bought by Google. This may have stopped it from getting to the point it is now judging by some companies success after that event.

One major success is probably lucky, TWO is probably skill, or else a complete craziness by consumers. But what it is looking like is Evan Williams has created 2 successful companies in one bubble and coming out the end of the bubble it appears twitter might have some of the best value built in.

<comment><USER7> This is the same Google that labelled Twitter "Poor mans email"?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, after reading that article and watching Schmidt on Charlie Rose, I feel that he's a little out of touch with technology. His idea of monetizing youtube involves micropayments of a few cents per view, and his idea of the 'next thing at google' is some weird wikipedia mashup on mobile phones.

<comment><USER9> After seeing that headline (I'll admit I skipped the article) - I figured that Google was either making a play for twitter behind the scenes - or had been rebuffed by them.

Also - he technically has this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaiku>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ev admits he has a hard time staying focused, so it makes total sense that he built two of the biggest attention suckers of the last decade while he was supposed to be working on something else. Makes total sense.

<comment><USER11> I think when Ev said that he was either being self-deprecating, or judging himself against his own lofty ambitions, or both. I've worked for him and would actually characterize him as extremely focused.

Blogger was close to the brink and only survived because of his dedication. I think Twitter is another example of him getting more focused over time.

Maybe he's not overly engaged by mediocre opportunities, but that's a long way from saying he isn't able to focus.

I just wanted to point this out in case there were any potential founders who thought their ADD was an asset.

<comment><USER3> He said he lacked focus when he was talking about his career before 1997, not at present. When did you work for him?

<comment><USER11> 2005-06 at Odeo.

<comment><USER3> Maybe this is kind of the point you were making, but I think it's very likely that Ev wasn't trying to claim he "lacked focus" during the Odeo epoch, with or without false humility. It sounded like he was contrasting the more recent part of his career with the earlier period in which he lacked focus, discipline, and people skills.

I first met him in 2001, at Blogger's low point, so I don't know what he was like four years earlier.

<comment><USER11> You're right, he only said that the first company (pre-Pyra) was unfocused.

I filled in the rest based on the comment above and on memories of people calling Odeo unfocused. I just wanted to kill any notion that Ev's successes come from being unfocused. Really, it was Ev's focus, keeping us from getting tied down by biz dev deals and refusing to settle for a middling success even when we got positive feedback, that set the groundwork for Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Right now, anything we would do to make money would take our time away from acquiring more users. "

We'll lose money on each unit sold, but make it up on volume!!

What I fail to see, is how twitter won't be replaced by some open source library that does the same thing. Just as you can install blogging software on your own server and use aggregators to aggregate.

But they're the current dotcom darling, so they can do no wrong.

<comment><USER13> I am surprised that he says he is still focused on having more users.

Twitter already has, in my opinion, a quite large (mostly techie) user base, the numerous whales would approve.

Figuring out how to make money out of it would be nice for them now, probably with advertisement tweets.

<comment><USER14> They're looking for mainstream adoption, which, IMO, it is on the brink of achieving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "I grew up on a farm in Nebraska, where we grew mostly corn and soybeans." is the best opening line ever. So redundant.

<comment><USER16> Not redundant; there are lots of things you can grow on a farm in Nebraska. (As a kid I grew up on a farm.)

But it is a fun opening line.

<comment><USER15> I recently read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" which describes how the economics of subsidies available to farmers mean that corn and soybeans are crowding out every other crop. It was talking about Iowa mostly but I assume that the same economics apply to Nebraska.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Now I know Mr.NNT has been given his due attention on this site several times already but I can't help thinking (and commenting).. Black Swans!</comment>


Ask HN: Add .user-{username} class to posts? - <AUTHOR> That would allow user blocking through Adblock. <comment><USER2> Why do you want to block a user with adblock?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure that you could also write a simple greasemonkey script / chrome extension for this.</comment>


Here's Facebook's cap table with ownership for Zuckerberg, other early investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/02/01/heres-facebooks-cap-table-with-ownership-for-zuckerberg-other-early-investors/ <comment><USER2> Marc Andresson has shares. Never knew he was still in the tech game</comment>


Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-hawking/artificial-intelligence_b_5174265.html <comment><USER3> Am I the only one who's skeptical about the feasibility of AI? As I see it there are two ways to think about AI: first there's the kind of AI that arises from software emulating parts of the human brain based on our current understanding of its inner functioning and produces human-like intelligence, so even if the mechanisms are different from those actually employed by the brain the output is similar in response and depth of reasoning; then there's the AI that stems from creating an artificial brain by reverse-engineering the human brain, but we are an awfully long way from doing that, mostly because we can't expect to unravel in a few decades what evolution has spent millennia perfecting.

It looks to me, a layman, that the only approach that holds any water is the first one. But then again, it mostly looks like people are implementing software based on a flawed understanding of cognitive functions and basically hoping that something magic happens. How can a scattershot approach like this ever produce anything even remotely resembling human intelligence?

<comment><USER4> I'm extremely skeptical of this, even though I spend a good deal of my time trying to automate machine 2 machine communication (which gets me thinking about this a lot). I also think that there's a good amount of hubris in these scientists believing that the brain is something that can be emulated by computing power of any kind...are we sure it's an apt analogy (brain as computer)?

<comment><USER5> Where is the hubris in attempting to do something without knowing whether it's possible? What is it about AI that seems to make people defensive? Is it the idea that human intelligence might not be as special as we think it is?

<comment><USER6> Religious people, even if not strict, have this reaction always. I don't see this clashing with religion, but 'they' do. Then again, i'm not religious although I was raised with the bible at home and in school and know it by heart.

<comment><USER4> I guess that if you're religious, then yeah, almost by definition, you would be skeptical of assertions like these. Although to the parent comments point, I'm not defensive at all about looking into AI. I find it fascinating and exciting and though I'm not trained in it, I read as much as I can about it and don't want to stop any research or questions into it at all.

But hubris - yes it is hubris. Because there is no scientific basis for the assertion that we will cross that chasm into 'true' AI, and thus it's based just as much on faith as any religious belief. And it's hubris because they claim a scientific basis where there is none.

When there is a scientific basis or proof that we've reached (or will reach) this 'singularity', you won't see me complaining. I'm not anti-science. I just don't think it's ever going to happen.

On a semi-related note, doesn't anyone find it kind of odd that Ray Kurzweil's calculations for when the singularity will occur happen to be just about the time his natural life will end (statistically speaking)? These projections are all driven by ego and faith, very little by science...

<comment><USER6> I said exactly that about Kurzweil his predictions here on HN a while ago; others have the same issue; fear of death moves their predictions near the end of their own life. That's not weird though; if you don't get to see it yourself, what's the point? Sure it's nice for the future generations but that's not really how most people think.

About religion and science; it is about definition where there difference is; IF you accept some definition X as being strong AI then when we reach that we have a scientific reality. The chasm and 'true' AI and what these are in scientific terms are vague, however in science we accept definitions of how nature works and if those definitions are things you hold true there is no reason why it won't be reached as there is not 'special' in the fabric of our brains which we couldn't copy given advanced enough ehm, take your pick; biology, nanotech, electronics, 3d printing etc. If you however cannot agree on definitions and have that (to me alien) quality of accepting mystery above all, then sure it's all believe or not. Not a good conversation maker as we are done after 2s, but he.

<comment><USER4> I don't know tluyben, we've been having this conversation now for....24 hours or so. I think 2s is a bit of a low estimate ;)

Seriously though, I don't think the Conversation needs to end there (conversation with a capital C - ours can end whenever we want). I do indeed believe in 'mystery above all'. I actually think that's a lovely way of putting it. Because mysteries are just unknowns, and without unknowns, what happens to scientific exploration? Do we just assume we know everything? And then the exploration stops. I'll be more explicit than that as well - <USER2> believe in God, and I am somewhat religious. I don't think that cancels me out of any interesting conversations.

I think you're making an assumption when you say that if you hold scientific definitions true then there is no reason why it won't be reached. Science says nothing about the future certainty. It is composed of models whose intent is to reflect reality, testable hypotheses to build and refine those models, and the results of the tests of those hypotheses to validate or disprove the hypotheses. We have no model (other than some vague calculations of processing power of the brain), no testable hypotheses and no results for these projections. It's not science.

But I would say I've proven you wrong that this isn't a good conversation!

<comment><USER6> You are right, it's a good convo. And one worth to be continued. I also do not assume we know everything, but I think we can. And I also think that it's giving up to just assign stuff we don't get to 'something we cannot understand or see or ever find but is there and is intelligent on top of all that'.

Also like I mentioned before, I have no clue how AI would clash with the existence of a God or religion. And so I don't understand why religious people get so upset about it. There are many things we improved on where we don't try to take god's place (as I guess that's what it's all about) according to religious people; like when we made a wheel, did we better God's work or try to out-do His work by showing that wheels are more efficient for a lot of things than legs? I don't see the difference with copying or even improving on intelligence. So what that clash is I don't know but religious people seem to get downright aggressive when you talk about strong AI which gives me, and many others, even more incentive to just side them with the crazies.

I was born in the Dutch bible belt and I was raised with religion in school where I had to learn verses by heart and recite them every day; the people too stupid to learn them (small village with lot of inbred) were punished for not being able to learn them and I was punished for asking questions like didn't God create these stupid people too, why punish them for something they cannot do? My aunt used to give me physics books for my birthday written by religious professors; actual physics books with quantum mechanics and string theory. And although I did not believe in god at all from a very early age (mostly because none of the people who tried to push me into christianity wanted to answer any critical questions) and I don't and never will understand how someone can believe in most of the the things religion dictates, those books my aunt brought showed not everyone was a crackpot and actually there is no reason (and there isn't ffs) why physics, AI, evolution theory would not simply rhyme with religion. They are not mutually exclusive as so many (I cannot find another way of saying it) misguided individuals seem to think especially in the US. I assume you are not one of them as you don't mind critical discussion etc.

<comment><USER4> No, I'm not one of those people. And I agree with basically everything you've said here (except for the part about the possibilities of AI and the limitations of mystery - but we've covered that!). I find the closed- mindedness of many people so disappointing. I think asking these questions is so important. I also find others' experiences with religion fascinating. Thank you for sharing. My experience was extremely different - and the community I was (and am) part of doesn't strike me as closed-minded. As you note, there are many religious people who don't see a conflict between science and religion. I count myself as one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think that one thing that people are missing when they think AI is not a threat is there does not have to be a singular AI for every problem.

Chess computers are better than humans, but I wouldn't trust them to manage the electricity grid. What if there was an equivalent quality of computer specialized for every significant area of society - electricity grid, packet routing, high speed trading, etc etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Obviously agreeing with the points, but this seems to be more an awareness piece than an actionable one.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm no expert in this area so I welcome corrections to my rough numbers below.

        Approximate number of human neurons:    1.0e11
        Approximate number synapses in a human: 1.0e14

These are big numbers, but not impossibly big numbers. There are different kinds of neurons, and signals on synapses are not simply binary. However, even with these complications, the hardware needed to reach these scales isn't hard to imagine.

        Transistors in XBox One:                1.0e09

Brains are biological computers so they suffer from very slow switching speeds at the neural level. Neurons run in parallel, but they are not fast:

        Approximate neural switching speed:     1.0e03/sec

Even if all of the synapeses could sustain this rate in parallel (they can't) and even if all of the brain was 100% occupied with solving a single task (it isn't) this would mean that we absolutely can't compute faster than:

        Speed * synapses (brain ops per second): 1.0e17/sec

For comparison, the fastest bitcoin hardware I see is advertised to operate at the following speed:

        Minerscube 15 (hashes per second):      1.5e12/sec

And a regular GPU is capable of simple instructions that run at the following speed:

        AMD Radeon HD 6990 32-bit instructions: 2.6e12/sec

From this we can see that hardware is catching up with the raw computing ability of the human brain. Now consider the problem of programming a brain. It isn't necessary to program every synapse. The brain learns, and essentially programs itself. To see why this is true consider the programming that we are born with:

        Bits of information in human genome:    1.0e10

This is far less than the number of synapses that we have. Therefore, the brain must program itself, somehow.

Now, to address the argument about evolution taking millions of years. First, we can evolve programs much faster than nature can evolve humans. There have been, perhaps, 100 million generations of humans. Even if it takes six seconds of computing time to run an evolutionary computation for a single generation it will take no more than 20 years to run over 100 million generations.

Brute force evolution isn't the only way to build strong AI. A program can exhibit behavior that we don't anticipate. I've written simple programs that beat me easily at games such as Othello or Freecell.

Finally, once machines get smart enough to design other machines there may be a rapid acceleration of progress in this area as we employ them in designing subsequent generations.

I feel that strong AI may pose a significant risk to humans; consequently, we should proceed with caution. Here is a thought experiment. If a chimpanzee could be taught to drive, would you trust it to pick your kids up from school? What sort of value judgements would it make in the case of an impending emergency? Would you let an elephant baby sit for you? Even if was much "smarter" than a normal elephant?

Strong AI will not be like us. It will learn and develop without a human body, and it will not interact with the world and society as we do and may end up being very foreign to us. Will it be sociopathic? Or will it be like whales, intelligent, but mysterious, perhaps spending all its time singing AI songs to other AIs.</comment>