The Concept of "Race" Is a Lie - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-concept-of-race-is-a-lie/ <comment><USER2>
        Of course, there are minor differences between various ethnic groups

This is a poor choice of words, which undermines the author's thesis. If there were actually distinct "ethnic groups" then one could call those groups distinct "races." The point is that when we classify people (into ethnic groups, or races), the specific criteria we use, and the boundaries we draw, are subjective.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is only true if you have an understanding of genetics grounded in scientifically verifiable physical reality.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."</comment>


Who says C is simple? - <AUTHOR> http://cil-project.github.io/cil/doc/html/cil/cil016.html <comment><USER2> Interesting read and makes sense. Defining an unambiguous language is hard.

The full C grammar isn't very long, however, handling cases such as undefined behaviors between types seems to cause trouble.</comment>


Zoho knows how to inform about update of Terms of Service and Privacy Policy - <AUTHOR>

It's crucial to always clearly show and explain changes in important docs like Terms of Service and Privacy Policy whenever they happen. I don't want to dwell on details of these particular changes in Zoho, but want to applaud the way they're expressing the change, which many companies should learn from.
You get following message upon signing in:
Hi
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Please take a few minutes to read and understand them. To help you understand, we have summarized the changes and provided a comparison of the current and the previous versions. These changes will take effect on April 19, 2015. If you continue to use Zoho Services after April 19, 2015, you will be governed by the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
[1] Revised Privacy Policy [2] Summary of Changes to Privacy Policy [3] Comparison
[4] Revised Terms of Service [5] Summary of Changes to Terms of Service Comparison [6] Comparison
---
[1] http://www.zoho.com/privacy.html
[2] https://www.zoho.com/privacy-summary-change.html
[3] https://zoho.com/privacy-policy-changes-28102010-19032015.html
[4] http://www.zoho.com/terms.html
[5] https://www.zoho.com/terms-summary-change.html
[6] https://www.zoho.com/terms-of-service-changes-16042010-19032015.html <comment><AUTHOR> Obligatory archived copies of above mentioned pages:

[1] [https://archive.today/Pw2gr](https://archive.today/Pw2gr)

[2] [https://archive.today/2lHs7](https://archive.today/2lHs7)

[3] [https://archive.today/gc1Gu](https://archive.today/gc1Gu)

[4] [https://archive.today/knFJg](https://archive.today/knFJg)

[5] [https://archive.today/8BFxh](https://archive.today/8BFxh)

[6] [https://archive.today/9EkxY](https://archive.today/9EkxY)</comment>


Abstract Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/June_2020_announcement <comment><USER3> Example notation for the project, called AbstractText:

————

Input 1:

Subclassification(Wikipedia, Encyclopedia)

Result 1:

English: _Wikipedias are encyclopedias._

German: _Wikipedien sind Enzyklopädien._

————

Input 2:

      Article(
       content: [
         Instantiation(
           instance: San Francisco (Q62),
           class: Object_with_modifier_and_of(
             object: center,
             modifier: And_modifier(
               conjuncts: [cultural, commercial, financial]
             ),
             of: Northern California (Q1066807)
           )
         ),
         Ranking(
           subject: San Francisco (Q62),
           rank: 4,
           object: city (Q515),
           by: population (Q1613416),
           local_constraint: California (Q99),
           after: [Los Angeles (Q65), San Diego (Q16552), San Jose (Q16553)]
         )
       ]
     )

Result 2:

English: _San Francisco is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the fourth-most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose._

German: _San Francisco ist das kulturelle, kommerzielle und finanzielle Zentrum Nordkaliforniens. Es ist, nach Los Angeles, San Diego und San Jose, die viertgrößte Stadt in Kalifornien._

————

I didn't understand quite what the proposal was until I saw these examples from [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Examples](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Examples)

<comment><USER4> I wonder what happens in more literal languages, where "center" doesn't mean "main area".

<comment> dan-robertson Also the grammars of English and German are pretty similar. How well would it scan in other languages? Perhaps "well enough" is sufficient.

<comment><USER5> The key idea is that if the semantic description is abstracted enough, a grammar engine can convert the ideas encoded in it into the right structure for the language.

Not all languages have "X is Y" constructs, but all known human languages have _some_ structure to declare that object X has property Y. Capture the idea "Object X has property Y" in your semantic language, and a grammar engine can wire that down to your target language.

The largest risk is that the resulting text will be dry as hell, not that it's an impossible task.

<comment><USER6> Though being dry doesn't diminish the value of the text, though. Very exciting.

I'd also be worried about ambiguity; humans can (sometimes) detect when they may be parsed the wrong way in context. I wonder if there will be a way to flag results that don't properly convey the data. How would that be integrated into the generator? (There's probably an answer in the literature.)

Lots of fun questions to explore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For reference, this is from the same developer [1] that created Semantic MediaWiki [2] and lead the development of Wikidata [3]. Here's a link to the white paper [4] describing Abstract Wikipedia (and Wikilambda). Considering the success of Wikidata, I'm hopeful this effort succeeds, but it is pretty ambitious.

[1] [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata)

[4] [https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733)

<comment><USER8> As a long-time Wikipedian, this track record is actually worrisome.

Semantic Mediawiki (which I attempted to use at one point) is difficult to work with and far too complicated and abstract for the average Wiki editor. (See also Tim Berners-Lee and the failure of Semantic Web.)

WikiData is a seemingly genius concept -- turn all those boxes of data into a queryable database! -- kneecapped by academic but impractical technology choices (RDF/SPARQL). If they had just dumped the data into a relational database queryable by SQL, it would be far more accessible to developers and data scientists.

<comment><USER9> > WikiData is a seemingly genius concept -- turn all those boxes of data into > a queryable database! -- kneecapped by academic but impractical technology > choices (RDF/SPARQL). If they had just dumped the data into a relational > database queryable by SQL, it would be far more accessible to developers and > data scientists.

Note that the internal data format used by Wikidata is _not_ RDF triples [0], and it's also highly non-relational, since every statement can be annotated by a set of property-value pairs; the full data set is available as a JSON dump. The RDF export (there's actually two, I'm referring to the full dump here) maps this to RDF by reifying statements as RDF nodes; if you wanted to end up with something queryable by SQL, you would also need to resort to reification – but then SPARQL is still the better choice of query language since it allows you to easily do path queries, whereas WITH RECURSIVE at the very least makes your SQL queries quite clunky.

[0] [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel) [1] [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing/RDF_Dump_Fo...](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing/RDF_Dump_Format)

<comment><USER10> The sparql api is no fun. Limited to 60s for example is death. I had to resort to getting the full dump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People might be interested to know that semantic web ideas have been more successful in some niches than others. Computational biology for example makes extensive use of "ontologies" which are domain specific DAGs that do exactly what Abstract Wikipedia is attempting. Much of the analysis of organism's genomes and related sequences relies on these ontologies to automatically annotate the results so that meaningfull relationships can be discovered.

There are of course HUGE issues with the ontologies. They are not sexy projects so they are often underfunded and under resourced - even though the entirety of bioinformatics uses them! The ontologies are incomplete and sometimes their information is years behind the current research.

For the curious, the Gene Ontology is the golden child of biology ontologies. See here: [http://geneontology.org/](http://geneontology.org/)

<comment><USER12> Amazingly fascinating field. I have learned a (very) small amount about this from Dr. David Sinclair's book Lifespan

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Semantic Web[1] reborn (after alleged[2] death)? Also I wonder how helpful Prolog infrastructure could be since they provided some useful frameworks [3][4] for that.

[1] [https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/](https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/)

[2] [https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic- web.html](https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html)

[3] [https://www.swi-prolog.org/web/](https://www.swi-prolog.org/web/)

[4] [https://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section(%27p...](https://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section\(%27packages/semweb.html%27\))

<comment><USER14> That kind of AI has been tried, 30 years ago, and it doesn't go far enough. It's really difficult to get that out of the toy domains.

<comment><USER15> A bit changed in AI since 30 years ago. The way we use Internet changed as well. Perhaps if we had a better semantic network and today's algorithms, we could go further?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> HolyShit!

> The goal of Abstract Wikipedia is to let more people share in more knowledge > in more languages. Abstract Wikipedia is an extension of Wikidata. In > Abstract Wikipedia, people can create and maintain Wikipedia articles in a > language-independent way. A Wikipedia in a language can translate this > language-independent article into its language. Code does the translation.

from [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia)

Will this mean that knowledge is encoded in machine readable format and that we can start to write programs over this knowledge graph? This is huge.

<comment><USER17> The Abstract Wikipedia idea is a great advance.

> knowledge is encoded in machine readable format and that we can start to > write programs over this knowledge graph

But surely that abilty has been the goal of wikidata from the start?

<comment><USER18> Perhaps, but this seems to be moving towards a more holistic machine-readable article graph. If you look at a page from wikidata[0], it seems to be basically a key-value database (e.g. earth.highest point = [ mount everest { from sea level, 8000m } ], while the "full article" terminology used in the announcement seems like it may be even more connected/informative/structured than that.

[0]: [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2)

<comment><USER17> Agreed, but my point was that the aim has _always_ been to encode these facts and then mix them into wikipedia for any assertion / attribute, so that any fact is backed by an assertion.

<comment><USER19> Exactly. The main difference is that they would now not be used to generate the infoboxes, but actual prose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone who has studied old-school AI will know that this is an _incredibly_ ambitious project; it is essentially throwing itself at the problem of "knowledge frames", i.e. how to encode information about the world in a way that an AI system can access it and, well, be intelligent about it. (Also at the problem of natural language generation, but as hard as that is, at the moment it seems like the easier of the two.)

But...

One of the biggest problems with a lot of the old "Big AI" projects that were developing some sort of knowledge frames (and there were several, and some of them still exist and have public faces) was, who the hell is going to get all the info in there in a way that's complete enough to be useful? Now you have a _learning_ problem on top of the knowledge representation problem. But throw the wikimedia community at it and crowdsource the information?

This actually starts to seem plausible.

<comment><USER21> Even if it's not successful, there's certainly enough interest in it to make it worth trying.

Maybe we only get 30% of the way. So what? That's 30% more than zero!

<comment><USER22> Technically, 30% more than zero is still zero though.

But yeah 30% of the way more than zero is something :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So do people find Wikidata that impressive? Here's what Wikidata says about Earth, an item that is number 2 in the ID list, and also on their front page as an example of incredible data.

[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2)

I struggle to find anything interesting on this page. It is apparently a "topic of geography", whatever that means as a statement. It has a WordLift URL. It is an instance of an inner planet.

The first perhaps verifiable, solid fact, that Earth has a diameter of "12,742 kilometre", is immediately suspect. There is no clarifying remark, not even a note, that Earth is not any uniform shape and cannot have a single value as its diameter.

This is my problem with SPARQL, with "data bases", in that sense. Data alone is useless without a context or a framework in which it can be truly understood. Facts like this can have multiple values depending on exactly what you're measuring, or what you're using the measurement for.

And this on the page for Earth, an example that is used on their front page, and has the ID of 2. It is the second item to ever be created in Wikidata, after Q1, "Universe", and yet everything on it is useless.

<comment><USER24> I find it pretty well stuffed with appropriate information. You're looking at an ontology, not a wikipedia article, it's supposed to be dry (subject, relation, object). It's being used to disambiguate concepts, named entities and support machine learning models with general knowledge in a standard format. There are plenty of papers on the topic of link prediction, auto- completion and triplet mining.

Also, if you look:

> radius: 6,378.137±0.001 kilometre

> applies to part: equator

So it clearly states how the radius was measured.

<comment><USER23> > I find it pretty well stuffed with appropriate information. You're looking > at an ontology, not a wikipedia article, it's supposed to be dry (subject, > relation, object).

We're talking about a research project with a large amount of funding to go from the former to the latter. But pretty much none of the stuff on Earth's Wikipedia page is represented here.

> applies to part: equator

An equator (the general concept to which the ontology links to) has no given orientation. Earth's Equator is a human construct distinct from an oblate spheroid's equator, as are the specific locations of the poles. Nowhere is it specified in the ontology that this is measured at a specific Equator, not just any equator.

This is all human context and understanding that we've built on top, and it's part of what I mean when I say that the data is kinda pointless. All of these facts _depend_ on culture to understand.

<comment><USER25> Well, the linked equator (Q23528) has a geoshape which defines what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A more detailed introduction to the idea: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-04-26/In_focus)

A draft implementation plan: [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda/Plan](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda/Plan)

</comment><comment><USER27> Anything that gives a boost to Wikidata is great. Being able to run queries over wiki remains one of the most magical things on the internet:

[https://query.wikidata.org/](https://query.wikidata.org/)

<comment><USER24> It's magic but the SparQL language is very hard to learn.

<comment><USER28> It's the identifiers that make querying Wikidata difficult, IMO. SPARQL is pretty easy, certainly no more difficult than SQL. It might even be easier than SQL since there are no joins.

<comment><USER9> > It might even be easier than SQL since there are no joins.

Every dot between Triple Patterns in a Basic Graph Pattern is actually a JOIN; you just don't need to worry about using them.

As for the identifiers, you get used to them if you work regularly with them, and query.wikidata.org actually has completion for identifiers if you press CTRL-Space.

<comment><USER28> Right, the joins are in the graph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hi, founder of Diffbot here, we are an AI research company spinout from Stanford that generate the world's largest knowledge graph from crawling the whole web. I didn't want to comment, but I see a lot of misunderstandings here about knowledge graphs, abstract representations of language, and the extent as to which this project uses ML.

First of all, having a machine-readable database of knowledge(i.e. Wikidata) is no doubt a great thing. It's maintained by a large community of human curators and always growing. However, generating actually useful natural language that rivals the value you get from reading a Wikipedia page from an abstract representation is problematic.

If you look at the walkthrough for how this would work ([https://github.com/google/abstracttext/blob/master/eneyj/doc...](https://github.com/google/abstracttext/blob/master/eneyj/docs/walkthrough.md)), this project does not use machine and uses CFG-like production rules to generate natural sentences. Works great for generating toy sentences like "X is a Y".

However, human languages are not programming languages. Many natural languages, like German and Finnish, are so syntactically and morphologically complex that there is no compact ruleset that can describe them. (those that have taken grammar class can relate to the number of exceptions to the ruleset)

Additionally, not every sentence in a typical Wikipedia article can be easily represented in a machine-readable factual format. Plenty of text is opinion, subjective, or describes notions that don't have an proper entity. Of course there are ways that engineer around this, however they will exponential grow the complexity of your ontology, number of properties, and make for a terrible user experience for the annotators.

A much better and direct approach to the stated intention of making the knowledge accessible to more readers is to advance the state of machine translation, which would capture nuance and non-facts present in the original article. Additionally, exploring ML-based ways of NL generation from the dataset this will produce will have academic impact.

<comment><USER30> This is addressed in the white paper describing the project's architecture:

 _10.2 Machine translation_

Another widely used approach —mostly for readers, much less for contributors— is the use of automatic translation services like Google Translate. A reader finds an article they are interested in and then asks the service to translate itinto a language they understand. Google Translate currently supports about a hundred languages — about a third of thelanguages Wikipedia supports. Also the quality of these translations can vary widely — and almost never achieves thequality a reader expects from an encyclopedia [33, 86].*

 _Unfortunately, the quality of the translations often correlates with the availability of content in the given language [1],which leads to a Matthew effect: languages that already have larger amounts of content also feature better results intranslation. This is an inherent problem with the way Machine Translation is currently trained, using large corpora. Whereas further breakthroughs in Machine Translation are expected [43], these are hard to plan for._

 _In short, relying on Machine Translation may delay the achievement of the Wikipedia mission by a rather unpredictabletime frame._

 _One advantage Abstract Wikipedia would lead to is that Machine Translation system can use the natural language generation system available in Wikilambda to generate high-quality and high-fidelity parallel corpora for even morelanguages, which can be used to train Machine Translation systems which then can resolve the brittleness a symbolic system will undoubtedly encounter. So Abstract Wikipedia will increase the speed Machine Translation will become better and cover more languages in._

[https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733)

(Theres's more discussion of machine learning in the paper but I'm quoting the section on machine translation in particular).

<comment><USER31> Additionally of course Google Translate is a proprietary service from Google, and Wikimedia projects can't integrate it in any way without abandoning their principles. It's left for the reader to enter pages into Google Translate themselves, and will only work as long as Google is providing the service.

What is the quality of open source translation these days?

<comment><USER32> State of the art is always open source in MT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an article > using words and entities from Wikidata. Because Wikidata uses conceptual > models that are meant to be universal across languages, it should be > possible to use and extend these building blocks of knowledge to create > models for articles that also have universal value. Using code, volunteers > will be able to translate these abstract "articles" into their own > languages. If successful, this could eventually allow everyone to read about > any topic in Wikidata in their own language.

This is a great idea. I bet the translations will be interesting as well. I was wondering about how the translation was going to work and it looks like they thought of that as well. They're going to use code to help with the translation.

> Wikilambda is a new Wikimedia project that allows to create and maintain > code. This is useful in many different ways. It provides a catalog of all > kind of functions that anyone can call, write, maintain, and use. It also > provides code that translates the language-independent article from Abstract > Wikipedia into the language of a Wikipedia. This allows everyone to read the > article in their language. Wikilambda will use knowledge about words and > entities from Wikidata.

<comment><USER34> Pretty-printing the abstract content into an arbitrary target language (a better way of putting it than "translation") would be quite the challenge, because "conceptual models" do vary by language. One can attempt to come up with something that's "as abstract/universal as possible" but it remains to be seen how practically useful that would be.

For that matter, making the source model "logical" and "compositional", as implied by the Wikilambda idea, only opens up further cans of worms. Linguists and cognitive scientists _have_ explored the idea of a "logical" semantics for natural language, even drawing on the λ-calculus itself (e.g. in Montague grammar and Montague semantics), but one can be sure that a _lot_ of complexity will be involved in trying to express realistic notions by relying on anything like that.

<comment><USER33> I didn't assume the translations would be lossless. It's obvious there will be conceptual mismatches but that's why this is interesting. Because when the abstract model is made concrete people can notice the gaps and improve the abstract model. I can imagine a feedback loop that improves both the abstract and concrete/translated models as people work on improving both to reduce the conceptual gaps between the abstract and concrete models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sorry to be the typical pessimistic HN commenter (e.g., Dropbox is just ftp), but this seems ambitious enough to remind me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc).

<comment><USER34> Even Wikidata today is already a lot more usable and scalable than Cyc. The latter always seemed like a largely-pointless proof of concept; Wikidata by contrast is very clearly something that can contain real info, and be queried in useful ways. (Of course knowledge is not always consistently represented, but that issue is inherent to any general-purpose knowledge base - <USER2> Wikidata does at least try to address it, if only via leveraging the well- known principle "many eyes make all bugs shallow".)

<comment><USER36> With regards to bugs apparently largest human by mass is 20 years old gymnast:

[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15710550](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15710550)

<comment><USER37> Looks like someone fixed it after your comment. Thanks for contributing your eyeballs to the hunt!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I hope at least 20-30% of the people involved in the project are at least near-native level speakers of non-Indo-European languages. Linguistic biases based on your mother tongue die hard, and I know this from having waded through tons and tons of software designed with biases built-in that woefully disregard Asian syntax, typography, input, grammar, semantics, etc etc etc. As the whole point of the project is multilingual support, I really hope the developers don't underestimate how grammatically and semantically distant different language families can be.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think a consistent multilingual Wikipedia is a _fantastic_ goal.

But I'm not sure this is the right way to do it.

Given that most of the information on Wikipedia is "narrative", and doesn't consist of facts contained in Wikidata (e.g. a history article recounting a battle, or a movie article explaining the plot), this scope for this will be extremely limited. The creators are attempting to address this by actually containing every single aspect of a movie's plot as a fact, and that sentences are functions that express those facts... but this seems entirely unwieldy and just too much work.

What I've wished for instead, for years, is actually an underlying "metalanguage" that expresses the vocabulary and grammatical concepts in _all_ languages. Very loosely, think of an "intermediate" linguistic representation layer in Google Translate.

Obviously nobody can write in that directly in a user-friendly way. But what you _could_ do is take English (or any language) text, do an automated translation into that intermediate representation, then ask the author or volunteers to _identify_ all ambiguous language cases" \-- e.g. it would ask if "he signed" means made his signature, or communicated in sign language. It would also ask for things that would need clarification perhaps not in your own language but in other languages -- e.g. what noun does "it" refer to, so another language will know to use the masculine or feminine version. All of this can be done _within your own language_ to produce an accurate language- agnostic "text".

 _Then_ , out of this intermediate canonical interpretation, _every_ article on Wikipedia would be generated back out of it, in _all_ languages, and _perfectly_ accurately, because the output program isn't even ML, it's just a straight-up rule engine.

Interestingly, an English-language original might be output just a little bit different but in ways that don't change the meaning. Almost like a language "linter".

Anyways -- I think it would actually be doable. The key part is a "Google Translate"-type tool that does 99% of the work. It would need manual curation of the intermediate layer with a professional linguist from each language, as well as manually curated output rules (although those could be generated by ML as a first pass).

But something like that could fundamentally change communication. Imagine if any article you wanted to make available perfectly translated to anyone, you could do, just with the extra work of resolving all the ambiguities a translating program finds.

<comment><USER40> >The creators are attempting to address this by actually containing every single aspect of a movie's plot as a fact, and that sentences are functions that express those facts... but this seems entirely unwieldy and just too much work.

Doesn't this also get into issues where facts aren't clearly defined. I can think of a lot of interpretation of meaning from my literature classes, but there are also questions such as ownership of land at contested borders, if something was a legal acquisition or theft, or even coming up with a factual distinction between when something is grave robbery vs archaeology. A personal favorite would be mental illness, especially with some of the DSM V changes that have largely been rejected (or outright ignored) by society. And there are all sorts of political disagreements.

And as this applies to different languages, and different languages are likely aimed at different cultures and different nations, this gets messy. I could see some differences in an article written in Hindi vs Chinese when concerning issues involving both China and India. Creating a common language will force a unification of these differences that currently might exist with a sort of stalemate with each linguistic side by maintained by the dominant country for that language.

<comment><USER37> > questions such as ownership of land at contested borders

The entity representing Kashmir [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q43100](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q43100) has three statements each for "country" and "territory claimed by", reflecting the claims by China, India and Pakistan. There are separate entities for Taiwan (the Republic of China) [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q865](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q865) , Taiwan (the island) [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22502](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22502) , Taiwan (the province of the Republic of China) [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q32081](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q32081) and Taiwan (the province of the People's Republic of China) [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q57251](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q57251) .

So Wikidata can handle conflicting information by collecting all of it, but clearly separating the different viewpoints in a kind of "split brain". That works so long as the different sides can agree that their opponent's views are what they state they are.

In an Abstract Wikipedia article, that means that all viewpoints with a sufficiently large userbase might end up represented equally in all language versions, but they'll still be clearly distinguished as such, so the reader can apply their own value judgments to support their own side's viewpoint over that of their enemies.

<comment><USER41> So Abstract Wikipedia could achieve the ultimate goal of being banned in China, India and Pakistan at the same time.

<comment><USER42> And maybe even in the USA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There could be some very interesting meta analytics that could be done on knowledge structured in this way. For example, this research which identifies the structural differences in the fact graphs of conspiracy theories vs accurate accounts: [https://phys.org/news/2020-06-conspiracy-theories- emergeand-...](https://phys.org/news/2020-06-conspiracy-theories-emergeand- storylines-fall.html)

<comment><USER44> Interesting link, thanks for sharing. I wonder what this means precisely:

      If you take out one of the characters or story elements of a conspiracy theory, the connections between the other elements of the story fall apart.

I guess I have to read the paper, but what are these "connections" and what does "fall apart" actually mean?

EDIT: I just skimmed the paper [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0233879)

The connections capture context-specific relationships, such as co- occurrences. The "fall apart" part comes from the fact that conspiracy theories rely on hidden, unsubstantiated, subjective interpretations of intent or actions whose validity can be questioned. If they are key pillars of the narrative, then their falsity can negate the truth of the narrative.

This reminds me of a philosophical discussion around what "truth" means. Coherent theory of truth: truth is defined as a property that's coherent among a set of beliefs. It can also be used as an epistemic justification -- that is, any set of internally consistent beliefs can be taken as true. Of course, in practice, certain truth statements have to correspond to reality, which is where the correspondence theory of truth comes in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> truly love the mobile design of wikipedia and find myself adding ".m" to every link that i visit on wikipedia. it has larger fonts, more readable copy (for me at least), and works great on mobile. surprisingly the trick worked with this one as well!

how come the mobile design is not the default?

<comment><USER46> I'm not very involved in wikipedia politics so i might be wrong here, but my perception is that the desktop wikipedia has a lot of eyes on it and any change is received with a "aahh, change is scary" response.

the people who react negatively to change are also the people don't like mobile versions of websites, so the mobile site is more free to experiment and evolve their design.

<comment><USER47> Mobile is read- and very-occasionally-edit.

Desktop is basically the full admin interface for a Google-scale website with only rudimentary authentication requirements and a default-allowed policy. That works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> If successful, this could open huge doors in machine translation and NLP. Very cool.

<comment><USER49> It kinda would, basically a huge library of labelled NLP data may come available as the result of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> A Wikipedia Signpost article[1] gives a more detailed overview of the goals of the project, but it also made me think of an interesting failure case. From the article:

> Instead of saying "in order to deny her the advantage of the incumbent, the > board votes in January 2018 to replace her with Mark Farrell as interim > mayor until the special elections", imagine we say something more abstract > such as elect(elector: Board of Supervisors, electee: Mark Farrell, > position: Mayor of San Francisco, reason: deny(advantage of incumbency, > London Breed)) – and even more, all of these would be language-independent > identifiers, so that thing would actually look more like Q40231(Q3658756, > Q6767574, Q1343202(Q6015536, Q6669880)).

But Q1343202 doesn't mean "denial" as in "preventing someone else from getting something", it means "denial" as in "refusing to accept reality". (See [2].) The two concepts are represented by the same word in English, but they might not be in other languages.

It seems like it'd be kind of tricky to create an interface that ensures other English-speaking editors indicate the right meaning of "denial".

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-04-26/In_focus)

[2] [https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1343202](https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1343202)

<comment><USER51> I think the answer is be as clear as possible in the interface, but also accept mistakes will be made. People make grammar mistakes in (normal) wikipedia all the time, then other people come along and fix them. I expect the same will occur here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Can really please ELI5 what the end product would look like? Couldn't understand anything concrete from the article.

<comment><USER53> This article from the SignPost is much more informative:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-04-26/In_focus)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This appears to be an attempt to make a Wikipedia using the semantic data from Wikidata. The semantic web ideas of Tim Berners-Lee may be catching on.

<comment><USER55> That already happens, that's what Wikidata does. [0]

[0] [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:RDF](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:RDF)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is of course an interesting idea, but it has a number of huge technical hurdles to overcome. Here is the biggest:

Right now, if you want to become an editor of Wikipedia, you simply need to have a passing familiarity with wikitext, and how the syntax of wikitext translates into the final presentation of the article.

However, if you want to become an editor of Abstract Wikipedia, you'd need to have an in-depth knowledge of lambda calculus, and possibly a Ph.D. in linguistics. Without a quantum leap in editing technology and accessibility for beginners, there's little hope for this to gain any traction.

<comment><USER33> Why do you need a PhD in linguistics to write code?

<comment><USER56> It's not just writing code, it's writing code that needs to be aware of every linguistic nuance of your native language, so that you can coax the data to come out as a human-readable sentence. [1]

[1] [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda/Examples](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda/Examples)

<comment><USER57> What, didn't Chomsky already solve that in the 1960s? /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> The research article doesn't mention UNL a single time, despite it being a really similar effort (encoding texts in an abstract representation, which is generated and use by tools to translate automatically in various languages). The hard part of the project is not encoding facts into cute little RDF triples (that's the super easy part, and as usual that's where the SemWeb researchers put their focus on), it's generating natural language from the abstract representation.

This means precise linguistics information must be present in the abstract representation for generation of correct sentences. Spoiler: those seems absent, and the renders presented in the paper are very basic. The data part of the project seems OK, but I predict it would go well because the NLP is largely ignored.

</comment><comment><USER59> Wouldn't improving online translation tools achieve the same thing? And a much more reasonable task perhaps (or perhaps not, I am not the expert)

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Examples](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Examples)

I used google translate on English sentences on English sentences here and they outputted exact same German sentences. I feel like this is already a somewhat solved problem

</comment><comment><USER60> It's also interesting to note that, already, bots on some Wikipedias are the largest contributors of articles in that language. The Swedish, Waray, and Cebuano Wikipedias already have an estimated "between 80% and 99% of the total" all written by one bot, Lsjbot [1].

[1]. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot)

<comment><USER61> I wonder if lsjbot has increased single contribution users. Wikipedia (or EN Wikipedia anyway) gates article creation but not editing. If other Wikipedias do that as well, then single edit users won't be able to create an article and hence can't contribute. But if lsjbot has created the stub then people can contribute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is what I hope the future of Wikipedia looks like. If all "facts" are stored in Wikidata and pulled from there by individual articles, it would be simple to keep things up to date. I'd love to see Wikidata grow to encompass all sorts of things - citations would be especially interesting and it could potentially solve the problem of an article citing the same source multiple times.

</comment><comment><USER63> I don't quite get what problem it's trying to solve. Save labor? Improve factual consistency across languages?

<comment><USER42> "Knowledge Equity."

To increase the availability of knowledge for speakers of less popular languages. Once encoded in Abstract form, it can be made available in every human language.

That is an improvement over the current situation where knowledge is concentrated in just a few of the most popular languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This has been tried and failed many times before.

Why is this different?

What is the fundamental structural difference that will allow this to work?

<comment><USER65> There are many more English articles than any other language on Wikipedia, even though there's more non-English speakers in the world.

To me, it seems this project will allow for at least "stub" articles in essentially every-other-language which at the very least provides some basic information about each entity to a reader in their preferred language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> My first reaction was to look for a Wikipedia article for an overview of this. I couldn't find one yesterday, but one was created today:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia)

</comment><comment><USER67> AI Researchers: _heavy breathing_

</comment><comment><USER68> Will this mean it will be like the bot generated Wikipedias (like the Cebuano Wikipedia) except it will be done by a Wikidata powered template? It might work for basic data-based facts like populations of villages but what about more complicated statements.

</comment><comment><USER69> It seems that it is the LLVM in Linguistics.

> Such a translation to natural languages is achieved through the encoding of > a lot of linguistic knowledge and of algorithms and functions to support the > creation of the human-readable renderings of the content

</comment><comment><USER70> Might be a good idea, but the multilingual argument doesn't convince me one bit. If this project is any useful, it won't be because of its multilingual part.

Any person worth reading in STEM fields already knows English, and I don't know why anyone would want to read Wikipedia in any language other than English.

I'm Latin American. I used the Internet in Spanish in my early teens before learning English, and it's a joke compared the English Internet. I don't even like English from a grammatical and phonetical point of view, but trying to cater to the non-English-speaking public seems like a waste of time in 2020. Just learn English already if you don't know it, it will be a much better use of your time than reading subpar material in another language.

<comment><USER71> > Any person worth reading in STEM fields already knows English, and I don't > know why anyone would want to read Wikipedia in any language other than > English.

> Just learn English already if you don't know it

Some people are merely fine at English, or uncomfortable reading "casually" in their second/third languages...

It's actually not unreasonable for someone to want learning content in their native language. And there are loads of opportunities to try out new content when people in different places are writing content in different languages, with new angles and takes

For example the best intro to LaTeX is a book originally written in French[0].

And sometimes content just makes better sense in other languages because primary materials will be in that language (if you had the choice, would you rather read about the great Tokyo Fire in English or in Japanese?)

Sure, having access to English content is really important! But trying to have multilingual content is normal.

[0]: [https://www.latexpourlimpatient.fr/](https://www.latexpourlimpatient.fr/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> What's the point of this with the current high quality of state-of-the-art machine translation? Don't we expect machine translation to surpass humans in the near future?

People who are domain experts in various fields don't know how, don't care to, and shouldn't code. They should just edit the articles in natural language.

A lot of the content of Wikidata isn't numbers and is natural language also, so you'd still need to (machine?) translate it. But this time the machine translation algorithm would not have the benefit of the long-term context from the encompassing paragraph.

There are too many reasons why this is a bad idea. Almost makes me mad.

<comment> _-___________-_ Where is the high quality machine translation? I spend most of my time in countries where I don't speak the same language as the majority of people and text that I encounter, so I am using machine translation many times per day. My experience of the average quality of machine translation is _extremely low_. It garbles meaning a majority of the time, and in a significant minority of cases destroys meaning completely.

To me the idea that you could translate an encyclopedia, where accuracy of meaning is critical, using such technology in its current state is horrifying. By contrast the abstract/semantic approach seems to have some potential, although I can't imagine it working well for all articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I'm pretty interested in this actually. Although I'm not part of the Wikidata community, it would be interesting to see which language groups dictate the most involvement.

</comment><comment><USER74> As a regular user of at least four Wikipedias, this seems like a very attractive direction. Interested to see whether it produces the outcomes it's designed for.

</comment><comment><USER75> holy fuck

</comment><comment><USER76> Extremely high barrier to entry. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

</comment><comment><USER77> > Because Wikidata uses conceptual models that are meant to be universal > across languages,

Shows a deep misunderstanding of how human language works.

</comment><comment><USER78> Reminder that wiki means quick, so when you read Wikipedia you only have surface knowledge,

<comment><USER5> As the set of information encoded into Wikipedia approaches the sum total of human knowledge, there's no particular reason that needs to remain true.

<comment><USER79> > As the set of information encoded into Wikipedia approaches the sum total of > human knowledge

An outcome Wikipedia will never get close to. They'll never reach 1% of the way there. Closer to 0% of human knowledge gets recorded, rather than closer to 1%. Of the knowledge that is recorded, a small fraction of it will end up on Wikipedia. Most of what gets recorded is universal or widely experienced knowledge, which is a miniscule subset of "the sum total of human knowledge."

Wikipedia has already begun to stagnate badly. For the most part, it's over. That's why they're attempting Abstract Wikipedia now (aka another round of the failed insular semantic Web for elite Wiki nerds that won't accomplish much of anything for the average reader that wants to learn something); and it's why Wikimedia wants to rebrand itself to Wikipedia; and it's why their system is being overtaken by partisan politics (as momentum continues to decline the system will rot and pull apart in various negative ways at an accelerating clip). The growth is running out, and the Wiki bureaucracy wants to keep expanding, that's what this is about.

<comment><USER80> > They'll never reach 1% of the way there

> Closer to 0% of human knowledge gets recorded

> Wikipedia has already begun to stagnate badly

Anything more concrete you can link to for further reading on this? I understand the difficulty in quantifying such claims and measures but I'd appreciate reading something that attempts to do so objectively.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Road Ahead - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/8456/the-road-ahead <comment><USER2> Woah.

I'm also 32, and when Anandtech started I was building PCs for myself and others. It was an incredible resource, and it's been incredibly consistent in the years since. What always struck me was his discipline and dedication, even in those early years.

Whenever there's some nifty gear announced, I always wait for the Anandtech review to purchase, and whenever I want to compare something new with something old, I know the old Anandtech review will have just the details I'm looking for.

There have been other sites that dove into particular details in more depth, but none that provided a consistently deep level across so many topics.

As much as Anand may have received an education through this journey, I know he has educated so many of us, and through that, strengthened the tech community in ways that will reverberate for years to come.

Thanks for all you have done, Anand, and please let us know what comes next for you!

<comment><USER3> Anandtech essentially replaced Tomshardware as my go-to place for information on PC hardware. Oddly enough, Tom was a doctor turned tech writer as well. Go figure.

<comment><USER4> MacRumors is also run by a doctor turned tech writer, Arnold Kim:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/technology/21blogger.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/technology/21blogger.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My gushy, heart-felt comment thanking Anand:

Thanks so very much for your _leadership_ over the years Anand.

You kept the tech industry honest, called them out on their benchmarketing, and championed the consumer. From display quality, to poor NAND performance, and questionable frequency unthrottling, you've been there the whole time calling them out on their shenanigans.

I want the staff of AnandTech to hold on to your integrity and this resolve of yours for decades to come.

I've been proud to be a reader of yours for over a decade, from my first Abit (what a sweet board) through to the crazy world of walled-gardens and locked down devices that we now inhabit.

Thank you oh so very much for everything. You are a shining star and a damn fine gentleman. And now you've made me all sappy and sentimental... :)

Shine brightly, good sir!

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for all the in depth articles that I've read since '98.

For some perspective, here is a link to a 1999 feature on 17 year old Anand. [http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/1999/12/01/27...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/1999/12/01/271048/index.htm)

"Despite the disparity in size, this David has had some winning moments against the Goliaths. Just a year ago, Anand scooped everyone in reporting on a new processor from AMD, the K6-3, well before its release. AMD officials say they don't know how he got the chip, and Anand sure isn't telling. The incident drew considerable attention to AnandTech, including a sniffy reference in PC Magazine to tests "purported to have been run with a prototype of the K6-3.""

</comment><comment><USER7> Anandtech filled (continues to fill) an important place in the industry that opened up when Byte magazine fell down. It's the one place where you _always_ know that the hobbyist can go to to get great technical details, in an entertaining and approachable manner.

I'm super interested in seeing what Anand is up to next - I'm sure it will be something interesting.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been following Anandtech since my obsession with the first Athlons. Lasting 17 years as a public figure in an extremely divisive industry with the level of integrity he consistently maintains is an amazing accomplishment. Looking forward to seeing what comes next.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think I've ever seen a single thing at anandtech that would qualify as "controversial". I can think of very few other journalistic endeavors for which that's true.

<comment><USER10> Do you mean that as good or bad? Controversy can cut either way.

<comment><USER11> I interpreted the word as "scandalous" but he may have meant something else.

<comment><USER12> I imagine he meant "arguable, potentially false or misleading", and is commenting on the consistent clarity and reliability of AT journalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thank you Anand, you honestly helped me select parts for so many PC's over the years. Your work was filled with so much depth yet concise at the same time. I always looked forward to your intel chipset reviews on pins and needles back when I was in college. Your writing was literally one of a kind and really helped so many people, even if it wasn't the most important work in the grand scheme of things. I am confident no one can fill the void you will leave. This is reminiscent of the loss of Huell Howser, in the sense that your work could only have been done by you. Good luck with your future, and if you are ever in the north bay I owe you a beer!

</comment><comment><USER14> I didn't notice any mention of "why?".

He strikes me as a very clever fellow. I wonder what's next for him.

<comment><USER15> He's tired of doing that and wants to move on. That was obvious in reading.

<comment><USER16> You'd think the world of "change jobs every 9 months" would understand that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Crazy that it's been so long. Did any site used to have as in-depth reviews as AnandTech regularly does? My impression is that AT is what pushed other sites into having such detailed hardware reviews...

<comment><USER18> In the early days Tom's Hardware did and it pre-dates Anandtech, though gradually Tom's got worse and Anandtech got a lot better and regular. I remember in the even the early days (late 90s), I stopped reading magazine reviews of 3D graphics cards and CPUs because all the reviews were so bad compared to those sites. Also with the death of Byte magazine, we lost the architecture explanations too, which those sites then filled the void for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> He was a legend when I was going to NC State. Rumors By 2000 were that he had a Ferrari and multiple homes. He was around the social group I was in but never got a chance to meet him.

Good for him to move on.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow - I think it's us readers that should be thanking Anand for raising the bar on technical journalism over the last 20 years. I'll miss his hands-on contributions but look forward to seeing what he turns his hand to next.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm kind of surprised noone has mentioned nowhere mom yet.

That's an early reported example of people faking extreme circumstances - usually cancer but in this case a relationship, marriage, then road traffic accident.

[http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=275172](http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=275172)

Some of it it tucked away in the archives. [http://web.archive.org/web/20010624115154/http://forums.anan...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010624115154/http://forums.anandtech.com/arcmessageview.cfm?catid=38&threadid=102468)

<comment><USER22> Slightly off topic, but that second link is a surprise; posted by dennilfloss in 2001.

Dennilfloss himself passed a few weeks ago. [http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2386854](http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2386854)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't read AnandTech a whole lot, but whenever I did, I got the impression that the site was credible and can be trusted. I hope this continues as their leadership changes.

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone knows what happened to the previous smartphone editor Brian Klug?

<comment><USER25> This. His twitter @nerdtalker still lists him as senior smartphone editor, no mention of his disappearance (of many months) from AAT, no comment from anyone, it's surreal.

He and Anand really had a passion that IMO surpassed all the others there. I think their absence will really weaken Anandtech, although I hope I am wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Happy for this guy. It's almost like his 17 year old is going off to a college designed just for him. Got to be a good feeling.

Being a week younger than Anand, and brown, and a tech head since around the same age has been great (for me). We both made our first Geocities site around the same time, although mine was dedicated to the Chicago Bulls and filled with animated gifs. Does anyone else feel strange kinship to other members of their (00) high school class? Britney is looking good right?

We've really entered into a review economy these days; it's almost like no one spends time or money on anything without reading a review of it first. Anand's "reviews" have always been so thorough that even though something's rating may be high, he might tell us why the product might not be the right one for us. It's a great life lesson; the best _______ may not be the best _______ for YOU.

Thanks, Anand. Wish you all the best!

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow. I was wondering how the last couple of months had fewer and fewer articles by anand himself. And how they also became less and less relevant to what I'm interested in. I've been particularly interested in their / Anands analysis of CPUs which has been somewhat lacking. Why was nvidias Denver CPU not mentioned at all?! Where has the analysis of upcoming arm64 CPUs been?! While the quality of the tech reviews might have been the same, the direction hasn't. Let's hope they can keep on revealing and analysing CPU designs such as apples A8, nvidias Denver or qualcomms comm chips. I'm doubtful they will.. Or at least the last half year they haven't.

Last but not least, hats off to an amazing accomplishment by anand. The number of times he has revealed some deep tech info/cheating/etc which was seemingly superbly hidden is unbelievable.

</comment><comment><USER28> I went to the same high school that Anand went to (albeit several years after he attended).

It was always interesting listening to my C.S. teachers talk about Anand and how he had gotten started and everything. It was the kind of thing that inspired me to keep working and improving my skills.

</comment><comment><USER29> Damn, the one-of-a-kind Anand will be missed, he's been delivering the most analytical and technically in-depth content for new hardware, several years running.

Tech journalism has just lost one of its best technical writer greats.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wow. He deserves a really good vacation, and I'm really curious to see what he does next.

AnandTech has been an amazing resource, and fostered a lifelong fascination that turned into a career. Sure, there were other sites, but Anand himself showed me that a true deep understanding of the hardware made it even more interesting. And he explained in such a great way as to open up the wonder and beauty within everything he wrote about.

That was the other key teaching from Anand: that good writing and good communication make everything better. He showed us that in earnest through his great work.

Three cheers!

</comment><comment><USER31> I agree with Anand, the other writers have indeed been doing a tremendous job.

I've been wondering for awhile now what exactly was going on with Anand at anandtech. It was either that he was locked away writing some epic articles, or he was stepping away from the site. Good to see the issue settled publicly.

Regardless, with it also being the case that David Kanter no longer produces pieces for Real World Tech [0], I'm a bit apprehensive about the future of in- depth architecture coverage.

[0] [http://www.realworldtech.com/](http://www.realworldtech.com/)

</comment><comment><USER32> thanks for all the fish.

for ssd and cpu arch, anandtech was/is has been delivering the best articles for years.

</comment><comment><USER33> 32?!?!?!

<comment><USER34> I remember reading an article talking about how he started anandtech when he was a teenager (maybe 16 or 17) and had to argue with his parents to let him do it.

<comment><USER35> What I want to know is how rich he needed to be to get all that hardware to review.

If I had access to all that hardware I might have done something like that as well.

<comment><USER36> > how rich he needed to be to get all that hardware to review

I believe manufacturers at some point just send them free hardware pieces to get reviewed.

<comment> k-mcgrady How about when he was just getting started though. There would have been a long period when the site wasn't making money, he had to pay for hardware (which was more expensive in 1997) and he was so young he likely wouldn't have had any of his own capital. It would be interesting to know how it worked. Maybe they did send him hardware right from the start but it doesn't seem likely.

<comment><USER37> If you knew the manager of a big box electronics store in the 90's it was not hard to come by a large variety of computer parts.

The scene in 40 year old virgin where they destroy all the returns is pretty accurate to what is supposed to happen. What actually happens is they only destroy like a quarter of it.

<comment> k-mcgrady Cool, I had a no idea. I was only really getting started in the late 90's and fortunately had family that were big into computers and would give me free parts so don't know much about that scene.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Been a long time fan of the site. Content always surpasses my expectation and quality of hardware reviewed is amongst the best in the PC market.

</comment><comment><USER39> Best wishes to Anand. I do think the site has a little to worry about though. Whenever I read a particularly well written article on the site, I think "this must be Anand" and when I jump to the byline I'm correct. He sets a quality bar by example.

</comment><comment><USER10> Think there's any significance in the title echoing Bill Gates' book?

I have appreciated Anandtech a great deal over the years; the coverage of AMD's rise to the top with hammer was especially gripping. Thanks and best wishes, Anand.

</comment><comment><USER40> Amazing to see Anand stay in the game for so long. I remember reading his first few articles about _memory very hazy - I think_ Pentium 100Mhz CPUs. Look where he is - persistence works.

</comment><comment><USER41> We would all be lucky to have contributed as much to technology. I hope you start your next project out of the same sense of joy. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER42> Thanks for all the great reviews Anand.

You can tell the site is in good hands by reading recent SSD reviews from Kristian Vättö. Great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER43> The Kernel will be missing from the AnandTech system.

</comment><comment><USER44> Interesting

</comment><comment><USER45> I wish he retired after the review of the iWatch? :-/

<comment><USER45> haha... he's headed to the company that'll make the iWatch ;)

[http://recode.net/2014/08/31/veteran-tech-journalist- anand-s...](http://recode.net/2014/08/31/veteran-tech-journalist-anand-shimpi- headed-to-apple/)</comment></comment>


Should We Be Able to Reclaim a Racist Insult – As a Registered Trademark? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/magazine/should-we-be-able-to-reclaim-a-racist-insult-as-a-registered-trademark.html?WT.mc_id=2016-KWP-AUD_DEV&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVREMARK&kwp_0=314525&kwp_4=1210945&kwp_1=546037&_r=0 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what to call this but... problematic? It is not too much to ask from your government but that they give everyone equal rights and privileges under the law. I don't necessarily mean that as an absolute, but it should at least be the default assumption. Cases where we want to provide preferential treatment to certain groups should at least meet the bar of that desire being explicitly spelled out in the relevant legislation.

One of the main benefits of good governance is that their decisions are predictable and reliable. If we are to enshrine identity politics into routine administrative matters, which is exactly what this columnist is obliquely supporting, that leaves us with decisions which are even more capricious / arbitrary / subjective than we currently have. You don't want to go to your lawyer if you are a band and hear "Well, maybe we could get that name, but I am not sure you guys have enough Asian bona fides. Maybe you could replace the singer with someone from China rather than a half-Filipino?"

The best case scenario is that it will merely have a chilling effect, where any name even moderately edgy is avoided by people who don't think they will be able to match with present moment social justice criteria. But there is something very morally wrong with the government saying "We reject your [trademark / patent / immigration] application on the basis of your skin color." And I like some edgy things and names, including NWA, so I wouldn't want that to go away.

Is this entire thing merely my opinion and hopelessly normative? Yes. Could you find extensive academic discussions of all the relevant factors produced by X Studies departments that perfectly tease apart all the politically correct aspects that should be considered in these decisions? Presumably you could, or you would be able to if this became a hot-button issue. But weighed against simplicity of government, the ability to actually know the rules and follow them, I don't think that social justice wins. Let that debate take place in the market of ideas rather than in the halls of justice.

<comment><USER3> > But weighed against simplicity of government, the ability to actually know > the rules and follow them, I don't think that social justice wins. Let that > debate take place in the market of ideas rather than in the halls of > justice.

Ideally any word should be able to be copyrighted or whatever.

But if you want to ban words based on something, like racism or whatever. Don't be surprised when someone's sensibilities outpace yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a very relevant interview of Simon Tam by ReasonTV: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_yNnmsrLkc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_yNnmsrLkc)

</comment><comment><USER5> Long podcast interview with Simon Tam that's well worth listening to if you are interested in IP law - [http://openargs.com/oa33-interview- slants/](http://openargs.com/oa33-interview-slants/)</comment>


Ask HN: How far can personal projects get you? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently working on an application as a sort of showcase of my skillset. SPA frontend in Vue.js with a REST API in Scala using Spring. Although, it is a struggle to put what little time I have left after work into this. I'd also like to go on to turn it into a couple short blog posts where I can comment on what I've done and show I know what I'm talking about. It's also worth noting that I crash and burn at whiteboard problem solving and would far prefer takehome exercises so this is another thing to make my CV stand out.<p>Those of you who were in a position of no work experience and a graduate degree (still working on mine) - just how significant of a role did your personal projects play in getting you hired somewhere you actually wanted to work? What kind of company was it? Was it ultimately worth pushing yourself towards doing it? <comment><USER2> It depends on the role you want, but for front-end developers having a portfolio is an ABSOLUTE MUST.

Seriously.

I didn't have a stellar portfolio, but the jobs I applied to got so many applicants with NO portfolio that I immediately stood out.

The thing is -- your personal projects don't have to be front-page HN-worthy, but they should demonstrate skills that you'd be using on the job you're applying for.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have a particular passion for front-end but I do like to make an effort to learn how other applications implemented similar UI so that what I produce can pass as designed and not necessarily 'developer-made'.

I'm in the UK but I would like to find myself somewhere "exciting" like the west coast of the US or somewhere in Asia. I need to be in a position where companies abroad justify the cost and hassle of a remote recruit.

<comment><USER3> The West Coast of the US is objectively the greatest area for human beings to live on the planet. As someone who lives here, I believe that everyone born here is (or should be) extremely thankful for it, and anyone who isn't born here will likely spend their entire lives figuring out how to get here. :)

Glad to see you already understand this. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Took an entrepreneurship class

My group didn't want to work on our project (I was the only tech person in the group)

Another group recruited me to build theirs. I was the only tech person willing to do the work in the group. I self-taught Angular and Javascript

Attempted to get into an incubator with those people.

Failed.

Met up with another team wanting to build a startup.

Built it. Launched it. Learned Meteor and expanded JS skills

Graduated.

Got job at startup writing JS.

\---

tl;dr: Pretty far.

<comment><USER5> It's kind of crazy how many people go into entrepreneurship, in school and the real world, thinking they can succeed without doing a ton of work.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it is the reason I don't really work with people anymore on their startups anymore. Even "recruiting" a co-founder seems risky.

At first, it was fun but after "co-founders" bailed on me twice because "it isn't fun anymore" (eg: what happens when you get into actually, you know, running the thing), I just stopped joining teams that didn't pay me.

Everyone has an idea that they think will make them a millionaire or whatever. Either they need to pay me (money. None of this "equity-only" junk) or they need a proven track record of unstructured work and some killer skill I can't touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I first turned pro 17 years ago, my personal portfolio of projects dating back to high school certainly made a difference. 10 years ago when I moved to SV and joined a tech startup, it was my open source contributions that made the difference.

Granted it was a simpler time back then, but I fundamentally believe in the idea of scratching ones own itch and showing the world. Maybe things are saturated now, and you won't stand out as much, but I still think shipping is the ultimate litmus test. If you can ship stuff by yourself that's one of the most powerful signals, and we are very fortunate how easy it is to do that as developers in the modern age.

A lot of startups are aping Google/Facebook and trying to get the absolute smartest engineers they can find by casting a wide net and then aggressively culling so they end up with what they believe are the cream. If you really want to get into one of these then you need to practice algorithms and whiteboarding, you _can_ improve at it. That said, passing a high interview bar says very little about your real value as a programmer. Companies like Google and Facebook have amazing technical knowledge and to work on, but your individual impact will rarely be detectable. And if you're not careful you end up with the golden hand cuffs in the sense that no other companies pay as well, and you won't really learn the hustling skills you need if you ever want to do your own thing.

</comment><comment><USER7> At some point in the past each of us has had no work experience. Way back when I did not, my personal projects mirrored exactly what I was passionate about, which was data compression. Because I did what I was passionate about I was compelled to be more creative and I produced some very significant work including multiple novel compression techniques and solutions to related algorithmic problems. As with anything else in life chance plays a role as well and I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to get a job with a company that specialized in just that - data compression. But, as the saying goes, chance favors the prepared (mind). Because I followed my passion I was prepared when the opportunity arrived and my personal projects all but ensured that I could get the job. That job was the best experience of my life and allowed me to continue to pursue my passions for another 15 years or so.

You're personal projects, assuming they are really compelling to you and not exclusively to showcase your skill set, will be the strongest assets you have when an opportunity arises to do what you are passionate about. The degree will, likely, be far less important than your body of work.

Follow your passion in your personal projects and you will be positioned well when the opportunity to pursue that same passion professionally presents itself. And you will likely be exceptionally well versed in the subject matter that is important to that employer as well since they will likely be considering you due of your body of work in the exactly the area where they are in need. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER8> In a nutshell, where a "sensible" person (engineering manager, engineer, founder..) is involved in front line recruiting (i.e they search, they look at applications), your projects are valuable. I found that in a lot of cases such people have a bias against resumes and will only consider candidates with side projects and a github profile. Mostly these would be early stage startups and some growth stage and large companies that believe in side projects.

Where "recruiters" and "recruiting systems" do front line recruiting, projects don't matter. They're pattern matching resumes and looking for specific things they're told to look for. These would be growth stage startups and large companies, generally companies that hire in volumes and don't have the time or patience to holistically look at candidates.

In short: don't work on projects just to showcase your skills and get hired - hiring is a crap shoot. Work on them because you love working on them, and believe that the world could benefit from them no matter how small.

</comment><comment><USER9> I see my website [0], where I teach React and JavaScript, as my personal project. It is time consuming, but in the end rewarding. Only some of the benefits I see:

\- improve communication skills

\- learn yourself by teaching others

\- it's open source, you give something back

\- maybe it is even good for your employer

\- personal branding, enhance own credibility

\- [0] [https://www.robinwieruch.de/](https://www.robinwieruch.de/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't have a graduate degree, few do in your typical software company that's not a household name. However, employers are very interested in personal projects and want to know what you gained from building them. Professional experience trumps personal projects I would say, but something is better than nothing. Were my personal projects worth it? Yes, without them I probably wouldn't be employed. But it's easy to get lost in them, when sometimes you should move on.

The better strategy is to take a job where you know you can introduce programming into your assignments, even if your job isn't a developer position.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have no degree. Personal projects played a huge part in helping me get jobs at Microsoft and Electronic Arts. Also, I'm very sure I'd be a shit programmer if I hadn't put tens of thousands of hours in at home.

<comment><USER12> How did you put tens of thousands of hours at home? Are you referring to remote work in your house? Or did you somehow have enough money saved up to study for 10 hours a day, every day, for 6+ years?

<comment><USER11> I'm old, so I've had a lot more than 6 years. When I got my first job at a small unknown software company, I'd been programming in my spare time for 9 years already, and I estimate I had put in the proverbial 10,000 hours. I wasn't very good at that time, just good enough to get hired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In college I had no work experience and wasn't going to a good enough school to work where I wanted based on my education alone. I spent two years making games in college, and it was extremely worthwhile. It played a big role in getting my dream job straight out of school, and made me a far better developer than I would have been otherwise. In my experience, it can get you pretty far.

Having impressive side projects puts you ahead of the majority of applicants at most places.

</comment><comment><USER14> Side projects is the best favor you can do to yourself IMHO. The benefits are lots:

0\. You exercise your passion

1\. You improve your coding skill

2\. You learn new stuff

3\. You build a portfolio

4\. You network (if you decide to do your side-project in a group)

5\. There is a slight chance that your project will succeed.

I personally started spending all my free time in side projects about a year ago, and it was the best decision ever.

</comment><comment><USER15> As far as you take em. It's not necessarily that you get to demo your project and will get hired. It might happen, but it's more so the knowledge you acquire along the way. That will serve you well down the line.

</comment><comment><USER16> My personal project (www.enrad.io) got me a nice job. Also, I'm still selling the units, making coin on the side.

</comment><comment><USER17> pretty far. it goes a long way for a prospective manager that you are self- motivated</comment>


How are critical thinking skills acquired? - <AUTHOR> http://timvangelder.com/2010/10/20/how-are-critical-thinking-skills-acquired-five-perspectives/

<comment><USER2> CT skills are also acquired by realising you've been suckered by some bogus idea, then backtracing to find out what bug in your thought process facilitated the dupe.

With the plethora of news articles on the web, and the motivation of news organisations to push out articles as fast as possible, it's often the case that even apparently reliable sources can end up espousing bad, poorly researched or just inaccurate information. With little or no editorial fact checking it's more than ever down to the individual reader to exercise critical thinking.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reading, arguing, analysis.</comment>


Upsie: Affordable warranty for your electronic devices - <AUTHOR> https://upsie.com/ <comment><USER2> A couple years ago I had two phones with a national carrier. My wife and I decided to purchase the warranties for loss or damage. The first month, my phone got wet and stopped working. That was replaced under the warranty. The second month, my wife lost her phone. For this phone - under a paid warranty mind you - the warranty company refused to replace the phone. Their "out" was some clause that, if they believed we were attempting to cheat them (which we were not), they weren't required to honor the warranty.

Now, if the more expensive warranties sponsored by the national phone companies don't honor this situation, why should I trust a company to protect us, if that company makes less than half the amount of money of the other companies?

I'm not being combative, just realistic. Why is this company different? Is the difference only the stated cost?

<comment><USER3> Hello, IncRnd,

Thanks for the note! Sorry to hear about your situation with the national carrier. Unfortunately, we hear these stories all too often.

To answer your question, First, Upsie doesn't cover loss or theft. There are way too many "gotchas" in that coverage such as police reports, notaries, eye witnesses (joking), etc. The plans for those are MADE to say no unless you have a perfect claim. Second, Our prices are more affordable because Upsie doesn't over charge. This doesn't mean our insurance is any less. Its actually on par or better if you check out the T&C's. Our plans are backed by an A-rated carrier, same as all the other companies that are "national players". Third, our 100% focus is serving our customers. In the case you explain above, it sounds like that wasn't the focus. When customers come first, you take care of them by any means necessary. Our focus is on affordability, transparency and service. Thats how we separate ourselves. If you want to chat more about this, please shoot me an email. I would love to hear from you. email@example.com

Clarence - Founder/CEO

<comment><USER2> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment>