Programming won't be automated, or it already has been - <AUTHOR> https://mortoray.com/2017/03/22/programming-wont-be-automated-or-it-already-has-been/ <comment><USER4> Things don't have to be fully automated to mean big changes. The factory that makes Ikea bookcases employs twice the number of people it did in the 1980s but they make 37x as many bookcases [1]

We're looking at a similar situation in the programming, ops, and IT support areas.

A friend of mine Tweeted this the other night: "I'm sleepless so I just created a voice-based health tracker using Google Assistant in about 20 minutes that took me wks to write 3 yrs ago." [2]

I've heard numerous anecdotes of "A Zapier account and 20 minutes of fiddling with things just replaced a SAAS app/consultant, etc. we were paying for."

This is what automation looks like: the top 10% in a profession doing 100x the work previously done. To date the appetite for more and more software development (eating the world) has sufficed, but there is no guarantee that will always be the case.

1 - [http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38747485](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38747485)

2 - [https://twitter.com/Raelshark/status/843776684407111680](https://twitter.com/Raelshark/status/843776684407111680)

<comment><USER5> I don't understand the constant focus on the _upcoming_ automation crunch. Efficiency improvements (through automation and otherwise) have been happening over the past several decades - more output with less jobs - where the majority of the benefits go to the owners of the clockwork.

Now we're in a situation where we produce most goods that society needs (and a lot that we don't need) yet there are fewer jobs. This is absolutely going to get worse, but we shouldn't be thinking of robots as any different to the market forces that have been going on for years. Something has to give.

<comment><USER6> > I don't understand the constant focus on the upcoming automation crunch. > Efficiency improvements (through automation and otherwise) have been > happening over the past several decades - more output with less jobs - <USER2> > the majority of the benefits go to the owners of the clockwork.

Before, automation only impacted the jobs of blue collar workers so nobody cared. Now it impacts the jobs of white collar workers so everybody is starting to whine.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, I think a modern day professional carpenter would much rather work with modern power tools than what carpenters had to use at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Modern-day miners much prefer using their heavy machinery than swinging a pickaxe and pushing a trolley. I can't see many modern-day blue-collar workers volunteering to go back to the old ways in order to increase employment counts.

<comment><USER8> Pretty sure the carpenter will complain when anything made w/ wood can just be put through a 3d 'wood' printer and come out flawless, or a device that basically can take a block of wood, or 4x4s and construct just about anything without any human intervention. Won't be long before mining operations are all manned by drones and not a single human. This isn't sci-fi, it's near-future tech.

<comment><USER9> Mining is already there, bringing a mine online is human intensive, but when that's done most of the mining is automated.

<comment><USER10> But when AIs start to program we as programmers have a simple solution : we simply bring them into a meeting with marketing and product management and let the result natural suicidal impulse take care of those suckers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> David Parnas in 1985:

 _Throughout my career in computing I have heard people claim that the solution to the software problem is automatic programming. All that one has to do is write the specifications for the software, and the computer will find a program [...]

The oldest paper known to me that discusses automatic programming was written in the 1940s by Saul Gorn when he was working at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. This paper, entitled "Is Automatic Programming Feasible?" was classified for a while. It answered the question positively.

At that time, programs were fed into computers on paper tapes. The programmer worked the punch directly and actually looked at the holes in the tape. I have seen programmers "patch" programs by literally patching the paper tape.

The automatic programming system considered by Gorn in that paper was an assembler in today's terminology. All that one would have to do with his automatic programming system would be to write a code such as CLA, and the computer would automatically punch the proper holes in the tape. In this way, the programmer's task would be performed automatically by the computer.

In later years the phrase was used to refer to program generation from languages such as IT, FORTRAN, and ALGOL. In each case, the programmer entered a specification of what he wanted, and the computer produced the program in the language of the machine. In short, automatic programming always has been a euphemism for programming with a higher-level language than was then available to the programmer. Research in automatic programming is simply research in the implementation of higher-level programming languages._

[http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs99r/readings/parnas1.pdf](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs99r/readings/parnas1.pdf)

<comment><USER12> What happens when that 'higher level language' is the everyday language? Everyone knows it

<comment><USER13> We already have this--contracts are "programs" that specify how other people should perform some action.

Nevertheless, entire industries revolve around _correctly_ writing contracts, making sure they are executed in the intended way, and resolving ambiguities and disputes about the original specification.

If it's ever possible to go directly from English to running code, programmers will still be around; they'll just sound more like lawyers.

<comment><USER14> Contracts are not "programs", any more than programs are binding legal agreements between users.

Lawyers are only paid to create clear specifications some of the time, and that mostly in criminal law and political legislation.

In non-trivial corporate contract law they're paid to find favourable ambiguities in existing specifications, and to build possible ambiguities and hidden implications into negotiated agreements.

They're also paid for their ability to use rhetorical, verbal, and theatrical tricks to persuade counterparties, judges, and juries of their point of view.

Outside of STEM, the relative predictability of code is a very poor and superficial model for the relationships, transactions, and goals that define most domains.

<comment><USER13> You're making my point for me.

Natural language is rife with ambiguities, contextual information, and implicit assumptions. It is a terrible method for precisely conveying instructions or expectations, even to equally intelligent peers. Making this work _at all_ requires a whole specialised profession with its own elaborate procedures and complicated argot.

If you wandered into an IBM office and said, "I need a document storage system. Here's a blank check; make it happen!", do you think you would be happy with the outcome? Probably not. What changes when you tell this to a chatbot instead of a guy in a suit? Instead, you'd work with someone lawyer/programmer who knows how to spec out the solution in enough detail that the vendor/optimizer can't go "well, you said _STORE_ the documents, but you never said anything about RETRIEVING them later!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >To completely remove programmers from the equation would require essentially a human level artificial intelligence. And if I start seeing near sentient robots walking around, my first thought is certainly not going to be, "oh no, it's going to take my job!"

Even with all DeepMind can do we still are very far from anything remotely human intelligence. On the extreme low end, the tiny worm C. Elegans has only 302 neurons in its nervous system. The full circuit has been completely mapped out for over a decade, and still no one knows how it works. Bits and pieces are understood, but that is all.

The fruit fly has a meager 100,000 neurons in its nervous system

<comment><USER16> While everything you say is true (ie - I agree), does it really matter?

No - we don't know how the C.Elegans 302 neuron connectome works - but if you slap it into a robot or simulation, it tends to act in a similar manner as the actual biological creature (at least, that's what I understand).

We've seen similar results with biological neural networks (cell cultures and such) hooked up to machines as well.

If the connectome of a fruit fly were somehow mapped, and then simulated on a machine - it is very likely that it would act like a fruit fly.

Taken to the utmost extreme, the same could possibly be said for the connectome of a human being, could it not?

Does it matter in that case, then, whether we understand how it works - <USER3> the fact that it is working?

<comment><USER17> I don't think it's remotely reasonable to extrapolate making a simulation of 302 neurons wiggle a simulation of a simple muscular structure without full understanding of the wiggle process to making a simulation of 90 billion neurons produce outputs which resemble expressions of human cognition without an incredible depth of knowledge of a connectome structure that shows more variation in an individual over the course of a day than C.Elegans does within the entire species, and how that relates to long term memory storage and a mind-bogglingly complex array of sensory inputs and outputs.

Why do you?

It seems akin to suggesting that if I can teach my dog to respond to "sit" despite it lacking human emotion or innate grammar, it seems only reasonable to believe my dog can also learn to respond appropriately to the complete works of Shakespeare. Come to think of it, I'd place more faith in our ability to train our pets to write software than our ability to create a human brain emulation so accurate it's like adding another developer to the team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've always understood "the automation of programming" to refer to essentially what happens in this scene of Star Trek TNG: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPLiaYD1lUo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPLiaYD1lUo)

In other words: constraint-based design, in an interactive context-sensitive dialogue, with the machine-agent able to resolve change requests by—among other strategies—discovering and consuming new third-party components it was previously unaware of. Such a tool essentially presents the same interface that a contract programmer presents to their client: tell me what you want, I'll build it; tell me how it's wrong, I'll fix it.

The article brushes the concept of such a level of automation aside as requiring near-human intelligence. But, unlike a human programmer, said tool wouldn't _need_ do the hard part—requirements-gathering—for you, or have any sense of what "sensible" requirements would be. Where human software architects _guide_ their clients into specifying requirements, this sort of tool would be much like the compilers of today: it would take you literally and give you what you asked for, rather than what you wanted, until you ask for exactly the right thing. It would just do it _very fast_ , such that this could be the basis of an effective feedback loop.

<comment><USER19> I think that scene shows the ridiculousness of the concept; there is NO WAY the computer could have gotten that close to the actual table they were talking about based on those descriptions. It made all sorts of assumptions about the table that just happened to be right in order to move the plot along.

Just imagine trying to describe how to draw that table to a human artist. It would take forever, with a ridiculous amount of iteration.

If you want to program like this, you would have to get VERY good at describing the thing in an unambiguous way, and the skill to do that is going to become the new 'programming' skill.

<comment><USER18> > Just imagine trying to describe how to draw that table to a human artist. It > would take forever, with a ridiculous amount of iteration.

Right, that's more what I was picturing: in reality, interacting with this kind of software would be like interacting with a sketch artist. It would be a very exhaustive (and exhausting) process.

(Though, it'd essentially be the same effect you get by outsourcing piece-work to a service like Mechanical Turk—just with instantaneous response-time.)

> If you want to program like this, you would have to get VERY good at > describing the thing in an unambiguous way

Today, the intelligence/intuition/common sense of the programmer "allows" the client to avoid ever having to develop the skill of requirements analysis for themselves. Thus, even though it doesn't take any special aptitude to learn this skill, it's currently rare.

On the other hand, the naivety and short iteration time of an interactive constraint programming system would, I think, make it likely that anyone who used it would quickly/easily develop the ability to do requirements analysis. Perhaps not without being "lead by the hand" in a person-machine conversation, but certainly with it. (Much like how people who have only ever used CAD software can't necessarily do mechanical drawing by hand.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have been hearing this for a long time now, "automation will take away lot of jobs", I don't understand the people who make such statements. Do they realize how much manual work is done in projects in even the biggest companies? Do they realize that the internal tool which caused AWS downtime last month was not built in one go, it was built eventually, that's why it is hardly perfect.

If we move to a more automated env where we have high quality softwares like the author mentions, it'll just enable us to deliver projects faster, bring better software in the world.

Plus, who is going to build these automation tools? surely every company is going to have a different requirement, considering that for the last 30yrs we haven't yet discovered how to build OTC softwares, where the main software is a generic one which can be customized across domains, it remains to see the "automation scare" and who'll sell robots who do everything that humans do.

Plus, I don't know why this doesn't get discussed, the day we have a general AI which can think for itself, why would it work for us?

</comment><comment><USER21> I would like for more people to talk about automation as REDUCING the need for as many workers, than an all-or nothing REPLACING workers.

Then it won't be a straw man of "it will never replace what I do" or "well, people will find other jobs." Some will, some won't. It's not all or nothing, but the AVERAGE DEMAND FOR HUMAN LABOR will go down, which means wages will progressively become worse as a means of delivering money to the masses. You already see it now, but few people state it in such clear terms.

We need to stop thinking in terms of "well, why doesn't everyone just buy a ticket out of the ghetto" and realize that some will, and many won't. For those many, we will need single payer healthcare, single payer food, rent, movies, etc. You can call it basic income. Whatever you like. But it's inevitable.

<comment><USER22> > wages will progressively become worse

Given that history - especially recent history - has shown the opposite trend, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

<comment><USER21> Link backing up your claim?

Ummm [https://www.dougsguides.com/content/whats](https://www.dougsguides.com/content/whats)

Have you even read Piketty

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Finally some damn sense on this topic. The whole "programmers will be automated away" is just a scare tactic to slow down the automation of what can be automated. People scared and afraid and attacking what they perceive as the enemy. Lots of things will be automated, automating will not be one of them.

<comment><USER24> I've often found that making broad statements about what will or won't happen in a hypothetical future often leads one to embarrassment.

Example: "mankind will never set foot on the moon...how absurd!"

<comment><USER25> ok, yes, but cut me some slack. when i said that, i was stuck on the side of the road next to my model T with three flats and i was reflecting on the poor quality of leather they'd used in the tires.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The idea that "automating away programmers" == "building some ridiculous tool that allows the pointy-haired boss to program with 'plain English'" is a strawman.

Programmers don't have to be fully automated away for automation to happen. Suppose I have a "Really Good Compiler" for a "Pretty Nice Language" (let's not start a language war by discussing which language is closest to this, or which exact features are in it). This "Really Good Compiler" has a great optimizer, the "Pretty Nice Language" has a garbage collector that's really good for the task, etc. The PNL standard library has a huge collection of well-tuned data structures and a generics system that actually works etc. The PNL toolchain also has a ton of really effective static and dynamic analysis tools to find lots of bugs that its type system didn't.

Meanwhile the folks down the hall in a hypothetical competing startup are programming in C using pcc, like they just teleported from the 80s.

How many staff do they need to do the same job, even assuming that they are people just as smart as we are (despite their strange choice of tools?)

We have managed to be largely blind to this because the amount of work that's available to programmers has expanded hugely to compensate for increased productivity - plus our tools aren't quite as nice as the hypothetical I described.

On a related note, I found a great code sequence for something I'd been thinking about for a while, by specifying what the sequence was meant to do, and specifying the semantics of a few SIMD instructions, and turning Z3 loose. Not quite ready to fire myself though.

<comment><USER27> Quoting PG used to be all the rage around here, but it seems to have gone somewhat out of fashion. Anyway, he basically credits the power of Lisp with the success of Viaweb, in exactly the way you suggest:

 _If other companies didn 't want to use Lisp, so much the better. It might give us a technological edge, and we needed all the help we could get. When we started Viaweb, we had no experience in business. We didn't know anything about marketing, or hiring people, or raising money, or getting customers. Neither of us had ever even had what you would call a real job. The only thing we were good at was writing software. We hoped that would save us. Any advantage we could get in the software department, we would take._

[http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Programming doesn't need automation to reduce a companies needs for programmers. Cloud computing, better open source projects, and basically anything we are excited about reduces how many programmers you need in order to build a set of product features in comparison with say even 5 years ago, go 10 years back and it gets worse.

<comment><USER29> Yes and no. Yes, with those things the productivity per programmer is much higher. But the trend seems to be that increased productivity per programmer simply increases the work demanded to create products. The easier it is to add features to a project, the more features customers (and thus managers) will demand.

This whole "everything will be automated and we'll all be out of work" argument I think is similar to the mistake made by Malthus, who famously predicted the world would become overpopulated and be unable to feed itself by the 20th century. There are several mistakes in his work, but one of the most prominent is not accounting for the fact that agricultural technology, and thus yields, also increase exponentially.

<comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm with the "or it already has been". Automation is always happening with programming. Fully automatic programming has no meaning, since you have to define parameters for some set of algorithms to act upon. Once you define parameters, you are already using automation because today we can already with a single line effectively "open file x for appending, and create it if it doesn't exist" and thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code will execute behind the scenes to make this happen.

<comment><USER22> This reminds me of the time when I saw the C code required to display a window in Windows, with all the things we've come to expect from one (close "x", system menu and so on). At the time (Windows 95 I think) it was around 80 lines of code.

I was surprised because in Delphi 2 that was a File / New Form followed by a Show or something like that... I never even _thought_ of the API calls required to do all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Surprised nobody has mentioned the halting problem [1] yet, which logically proves programming can never be automated.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/HVeO7ek.png](https://i.imgur.com/HVeO7ek.png) (CH 8, Algorithms - Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos H. Papadimitriou, and Umesh V. Vazirani)

<comment><USER32> The halting problem doesn't prove that at all. It just shows that _there exist_ programs who's output can't be predicted except by running them (potentially forever). It obviously doesn't prove that all programs have that property. I mean, we write programs which provide useful output then halt every day.

And if humans can write code, a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to write code too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> We used to have more automated web design than we have now. Remember Dreamweaver and Front Page?

</comment><comment><USER34> From my perspective, programming is the work of automating the mechanical parts of human work and experience, whether it be something as simple as FizzBuzz, or a web scraper, to DeepFace. Novice, and even experienced programmers seem to forget that the appeal of a system like DeepFace or ReCAPTCHA is the ability to apply it at a massive _automateD_ scale, not the bespoke ability itself to detect or classify human faces/behavior. I think by definition, programming would seem to be among the final group of human activities to be automated.

</comment><comment><USER35> A job is role responsible for conducting productive activities. Today, some of those activities can be automated, some others can't.

The tasks that cannot be automated usually require human level performance.

As AI advances, when it achieves human level performance in a task, that task can then be automated. This means that fewer people is required to meet the same productivity goals.

Some people argue that automation allows humans to focus in higher level tasks, using bank tellers as an example. Bank tellers remain relevant even after the deployment of automatic teller machines. I think this is just temporary.

When every activity expected of a job is automated, the job can be fully automated and the human becomes redundant. In this category you have: elevator operators, telephone switchboard operators, human calculators, etc. Soon: truck drivers, dog walkers, etc.

Automating programming is going to be a thing. Just enumerate the activities a programmer performs and see how many of them can be automated.

My hypothesis is that our jobs will first become negotiating requirements with a computer, and then the computers will fully take over.

Once it's done once, then it's about serializing their trained state and deploying that same system many times. Then, it's over for humans:

A professional programmer requires 20+ years to train. Then, can only work 8 hours, gets distracted and has lots of benefits/compensation and rights, including the right to leave you at any time. In contrast, AI will do whatever you say with no objections, and if your project is late then you can spin up 30 more AI programmers that know exactly the same to work.

<comment><USER36> > Just enumerate the activities a programmer performs and see how many of them > can be automated.

I decide the instructions and the robot pushes the buttons for me?

<comment><USER35> More like requirement analysis, design, implementation, maintenance, testing, deployment...

Those can also be broken into activities, and some of them can be automated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Do you all mean to say that nowhere in the near future will it be possible for a business person to speak out loud to their computer, asking it to show him on screen the latest sales figures regarding the new line of products he released yesterday?

"Give me the latest sales figurs for the new XLine line."

We coudn't parse that into

"exec sales_report '2017-03-23', 'xline-123'

thus rendering the data analyst job you used to have obsolete?

EDIT: Google will easily solve the problem of speach-to-code, or someone else will if Google's not interested once they "crack" NLP, and they will. But what does it mean to crack NLP? Well, they already have the means to build the perfect model. I love the word2vec idea and I think there can be innovation still, standing on the shoulders of that discovery. What would a perfect model mean? With a perfect model you would be able to spot concepts with unflawed precision and be able to translate those concepts, with unflawed precision, into whatever language you have. It's perfectly doable.

<comment><USER38> How is that much of an advance over what we currently do? If Excel isn't rendering data science jobs obsolete, then being able to tell the computer you need some sales figures isn't going to either.

To get rid of data science jobs, you would need the computer to be able to translate from business speak to generating code for all the things data scientists actually do, which probably involves something more than Excel. For starters, that would be cleaning and wrangling data into a format that a tool like Excel could be meaningfully used on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Having been programming for a _long time_ , automation has been talked about for a long time and never really happened. We have had CASE tools, RAD tools and so on, but users demand for new features and capabilities increases at the same rate as developer tool productivity increases meaning the developers are still required.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think, deep learning is only one part of universal AI. What these system are good at are visual processing, we don't have really good (comparable to what a human can do) models for language, logical reasoning etc.

Concerning programming automation, consider modern IDEs, they automate so much, that for me it's very hard to program without them. All this automation is quite intelligent but not human level.

If we consider latest experimental programming languages, for example, Agda, its environment has limited ability to complete code based on its type. If we can make this functionality more efficient, it's theoretically possible to find small programs which satisfy specification, though writing correct specification isn't easy.

</comment><comment><USER41> The focus of software engineering research should be on requirements elicitation, analysis and transformation. There has basically been no progress at all.

<comment><USER42> Exactly.

But this is not fun, and being the next level requirements elicitator is not a prestigious career goal. Authoring a new javascript framework is.

<comment><USER41> It's completely incomprehensible to me why research pussyfoots around the large elephant in the room. Commercial requirements tools (that are amenable to partial transformation into inputs for data driven code generation) do exist (DOORS, ReqIF), but there's a distinct lack of FOSS communities, which is something I cannot understand.

The rise of the agile methodology has IMO worsened the problem by basically making throwing in the towel the default approach. (Throw in some "but, but, you're doing agile wrong!" here.)

<comment><USER42> People don't want to do requirement engineering for their FOSS project, of course - that's the boring part.

To actually provide value the requirement world should offer a higher abstraction level - say, map requirements on "business objects" that are already implemented and configurable, and build software out of those. Workflow descriptions, relations between entities should result in actual code.

Otherwise, you know why doing agile sounds attractive to many developers.

Otherwise

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I feel like at the rate we are going we will eventually reach the Visual Basic days where a monolithic IDE will lower the barrier for front-end development so much that anyone could tinker with it and produce stellar applications with little to no programming knowledge.

The only difference from Visual Basic days is that now we have ML and AI to further simplify and do the thinking for us.

Designers will be hit the hardest. Followed by developers.

<comment><USER44> We are getting close to that futureat least for business apps) with the low- code trend in the Enterprise.

<comment><USER43> any examples?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The ultimate programming interface is a declarative one, where an authority tells an AI to build a program for them.

One might say that abstractly, from the business perspective, the programmer is an expensive AI licensed for use by government. The executor or authority declares what they want, and the machine attempts to build a program with what specifications it was given.

</comment><comment><USER46> I assume they mean in the general artificial intelligence sense?

Most people don't really think of it in these terms, but aren't functions and macros just automation for programming? You define it once and then it handles it from there. You "taught" it how to handle something.

</comment><comment><USER47> >> Moreso, if the goal is to produce reusable applications, we need this to be even more abstract: "Create a plugin that downloads bank statements, compares to the expense statements, and produces a standard report".

But if the computer could do that, who would need a plugin?

</comment><comment><USER48> If programming will be automated then who writes and maintains the automation software?

</comment><comment><USER49> How many 'DO NOT' believe that programming will be brain interfaced in distant (25 yrs) future ? where 'program-thinking' brains 'can' result in new 'products' ?

edit: 25yrs

</comment><comment><USER50> Sorry, wrong. Deep learning can and will take over everything, given enough computing power and profit motive.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_ter...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn)

Eventually (30-150 years), there will be AI pottery artists selling kitsch, easily-offended toasters and corporations without wetware upper management.

<comment><USER38> Marvin Minsky has pointed out that modern AI methods lack common sense, which is one of the requirements for general purpose AI. Rodney Brooks agreed with him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Aren't compilers and runtimes automating programming (well...parts of it)?

</comment><comment><USER52> Programming seems like a thing that would be ripe for automation...

</comment><comment><USER53> These discussions usually conflate "programming, a viable career option" with "programming, an intellectual human endeavor".

The viable career option will, IMO, unquestionably vanish for the majority.

Manufacturing and working at McDonalds were once seen as a viable career path. They've been streamlined and automated such that it requires only a fraction of the human labor it did a generation ago. Google and the like will make this happen for computing as well.

We'll only need so many Evernote like apps. I'd wager we'll have reduced GUI interaction in general, such that a lot of JS/HTML/CSS, and similar coding work will be gone.

We're abstracting things into higher level languages. TODAY I can, with my voice alone, tell my phone to perform a truly fascinating amount of work compared to a decade ago.

When programming as a career is reduced to filling out text files in something like YAML and having ML go to work, only the bleeding edge, the mathiest of the mathheads, will have skills to command a living wage.

</comment><comment><USER54> I agree with most of that, but I think based on current trends we should anticipate that human-like ("human level") artificial general intelligence will be created within less than 10 years. And not too long after that happens, we must assume that there will be AIs that are tuned or turbo-charged so that they can perform better than humans in specific areas like programming. And not too long after that, there will be competition between multiple such AIs being sold to replace humans. And then prices will be reduced and you will be able to buy 10 of these 50X AI programmers for the cost of one human programmer. Then no one will have human programmer employees except for the novelty of it.

<comment><USER55> > I think based on current trends we should anticipate that human-like ("human > level") artificial general intelligence will be created within less than 10 > years

Why? People have been saying this since the 1960s, so much so it's become a running joke. And some of them were very smart people too, like Marvin Minsky.

What is it about AI that creates this illusion of progress (or at least, wild overestimation of progress)?

<comment><USER54> "Wild overestimation of progress" has been part of the story for many technologies.

Minsky was very optimistic, and then he got burned by the AI winter, and became very pessimistic about AI.

There is quite a lot of very serious investment aimed at this type of 'real' AI now. For example Deep Mind, DARPA L2M, recent $100 billion Vision Fund that Softbank's founder said was intended to bring about the singularity.

I believe it because I can basically see how to handle most of the challenges using embodiment or virtual embodiment and interactive learning/L2M etc., by combining or taking inspiration from various techniques that have been published. Stuff like this:

Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks (adding plasticity to NN models) [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/03/13/1611835114.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/03/13/1611835114.full)

"Decoupled Neural Interfaces using Synthetic Gradients" [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.05343.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.05343.pdf), somewhat similar to autoencoder/decoder pair use in

"Feynman Machine: The Universal Dynamical Systems Computer" [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03971.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03971.pdf)

"Safe Baby AGI" [http://agi-conf.org/2015/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/agi15_bi...](http://agi-conf.org/2015/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/agi15_bieger.pdf)

(cognitive architecture) "OpenPsi: Realizing D¨orner's "Psi" Cognitive Model in the OpenCog Integrative AGI Architecture" [http://goertzel.org/OpenPsi_agi_11.pdf](http://goertzel.org/OpenPsi_agi_11.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


The real money (~$0.0005) advertisers pay for your private data (info leak) - <AUTHOR> http://yourvalue.inrialpes.fr/ Courtesy advertisers, also please see the comment. <comment><AUTHOR> We have a project: [https://team.inria.fr/privatics/yourvalue/](https://team.inria.fr/privatics/yourvalue/)

So the thing is, information leak allows us to discover the actual value of private data... It's from advertiser's perspectives, so this is the actual value they assign us... The information leak is likely fixed really soon so we must try to analyze it as soon as possible. For this we must have real users. We have FF and Chrome extensions so if you can, please disseminate and perhaps help. This is our only chance at taking a glimpse into that field. Once they fix the info leak the gate is closed.

Technical/research paper on the analysis is following shortly, btw.

We also tried here, but apparently was not relevant (but has a description ;-) ): [http://slashdot.org/submission/3014643/researchers- divulge-t...](http://slashdot.org/submission/3014643/researchers-divulge-the- price-of-personal-data)</comment>


Darpa Grand Challenge: Autonomous Bipedal Robot - <AUTHOR> http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/04/03/new-darpa-grand-challenge-humanoid-robots-preliminary-unofficial-details

<comment><AUTHOR> For anyone wanting to sink their teeth into the previous grand challenge, autonomous cars, there is a Nova special called "The Great Robot Race" [1]. It's available to watch on Netflix streaming [2]. I couldn't find a link to watch the full special online via other means.

[1] <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/>

[2] [https://signup.netflix.com/movie/The-Great-Robot-Race- Nova/7...](https://signup.netflix.com/movie/The-Great-Robot-Race- Nova/70050544)</comment>


Objects Have Failed - <AUTHOR> http://www.dreamsongs.com/ObjectsHaveFailedNarrative.html <comment><USER2> This is half of a debate that Gabriel and Steele did at OOPSLA 2002. Steele's half is at <http://www.dreamsongs.com/ObjectsHaveNotFailedNarr.html>. Since this was a debate it's difficult to tell how closely these pieces match the authors' personal views. In fact, if you take out the words "failure" and "success" then they're hardly contradicting each other at all. Gabriel's biggest complaints are about OO cultism and static typing, as in this quote:

_[O]bject-oriented languages have succumbed to static thinkers who worship perfect planning over runtime adaptability, early decisions over late ones, and the wisdom of compilers over the cleverness of failure detection and repair._

</comment><comment><USER3> "papers and talks explaining and advocating new ideas might sound like propaganda or fiction or even poetry"

Well this talk reads like literary theory, and that's no compliment.</comment>


Google: We're not making Android hardware - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10387677-265.html

<comment><USER2> The article claims that Google is using some form of "volume licensing" with Android. But how can volume licensing be enforceable when the project is Apache/GPL? Is this an error or is there something I'm not aware of?

<comment><USER3> The base OS, libraries, and functionality is GPL, but Google's apps (gmail, maps, youtube, gtalk) are not, as was made clear with the the alternative android install that included a copy of these apps.

Also, I suspect there is some kind of revenue sharing agrement with the use of these apps, so carriers that provide the google branded apps get a cut of related search revenue. This could help keep licensees in line and discourage things like forks or going it on their own with the pure GPL version.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Submitted because I want to apologize for suggesting, a week or so ago, that Google was _crazy_ to be doing something that, it turns out, they aren't actually doing!

How not-crazy of them...</comment>


Wanted: Co-founder. - <AUTHOR>

Straight to the point.
I'm a single founder starting a small company that has the potential to become huge. I emailed YC regarding co-founders and they suggested HN, so here I am. I only qualifications needed are to be well versed in social network advertising and a massive amount of free time. That's it.
I can't discuss the company details here but, obviously, it has something to do with social networks and advertising. Let's go. <comment><USER2> You've captured the interest of absolutely no one. You can try again though, this is a fickle bunch.

<comment><USER3> I like this group--how it's pretty nice and brutally honest at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No offense, but this reads like a posting on a game development forum looking for an engine programmer to complete his awesome vision.

Edit: cperciva made a good point. If you're idea is so fragile that merely finding out about it would give your competitors the upper hand, then they're probably going to have the upper hand no matter what you do. Is your startup very early stage, and explaining your idea would give them months of dev time?

<comment><AUTHOR> I already have a programming team. What I need is someone who is familiar with social network ad rates and the companies who are heavy social network advertisers so that I can price my product properly. Thanks.

<comment><USER5> Set a price. If nobody buys, it's too high. If it becomes wildly popular, you probably set it too low, but hey, it's wildly popular.

The reality is that nobody wants to advertise on social networks, because nobody that knows how to use Twitter wants to see ads. Have fun with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _I emailed YC regarding co-founders and they suggested HN, so here I am [...] I can't discuss the company details here [...]_

If your idea is so fragile that discussing what it is will destroy it, you really don't have anything useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not that it's fragile. The key with this project is to be the first. I've never seen it done before so I want to do it before anyone else does. Sorry for being so vague. Thanks for the input though.

<comment><USER7> This is usual a sign that someone with more money will reproduce your success once you prove the credibility of the market. If it is that simple to reproduce then you don't have a strong product. If it is a strong product then you can tell the world and it does not matter. Some blasting Facebook and twitter with advertising idea, that anyone can set up with a server and some JavaScript is neither novel or a strong idea for a long term viable business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Okay HN boys, I think we can figure this out. Here's what we have so far:

\- Its about monetizing twitter

\- Needs someone familiar with social network ad rates and companies that buy social advertising so that he can price his product properly

\- "Ridiculously simple" that it can be summed in 1 sentence

\- _Not adwords for twitter_ apparently, claims he's never seen this done before.

The fact that he needs someone familiar with selling to companies means the buyers will be businesses. The fact that its monetizing twitter means his publishers will be twitter users. So he'll be facilitating advertising from businesses to tweets on twitter users. I suppose publishers can join his network, select categories of products/services they're ok with tweeting about, and then get paid for tweeting out sponsored messages.

Anyone else have hypotheses?

<comment><USER8> Given your hypothesis, I feel it necessary to point out: <http://sponsoredtweets.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The requirements are rather vague. Who nowadays does not consider himself "well versed in social networks" and "not too busy to make money"?

Seriously, you've got to narrow the pool a bit. Telling us your startup plan will do X will not mean some random entrepreneur will suddenly work out an entire functional plan for X'ing.

"Something to do with social networks" is about akin and officially evil as a freelance project offering $50 to clone Facebook.

<comment><USER6> _Who nowadays does not consider himself "well versed in social networks" and "not too busy to make money"?_

I'll cheerfully admit that I'm pretty clueless about social networks; and I'm too busy on my own startup to join someone else's. :-)

But I agree that the requirements are rather broad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Again, I would love nothing more than to be extremely specific and go into detail, but I can't. Anyway, this may not be the right forum to look. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not to sound rude, although I will admit that your tone annoys me. Why would someone need _you_ for this? If they already have the key assets needed to make this project successful, what value would you add? The ability to annoy HN?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've got it. I'll know on the 13th if i've made it through to the YC interview. If I do, i'll just ask for their advice re cofounders. If not, i'll throw my plan wide open here and see. Thanks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's about monetizing Twitter.

<comment><USER9> Considering that <http://www.google.com/search?q=monetize+twitter> gets >6M results, including several lists of strategies, you may wish to be a bit more informative.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would if I could, but this concept is so ridiculously simple that I can sum it all up in one short sentence.

<comment><USER2> If its adwords for Twitter, its been done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely not adwords for Twitter. I've looked. Hard. I've never seen this done before so i'm taking a leap of faith.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Danish physicists claim to cast doubt on detection of gravitational waves - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/danish-physicists-claim-to-cast-doubt-on-detection-of-gravitational-waves/ <comment><USER2> I find it odd that the responses from the LIGO team and supporters are so hostile, while it seems Jackson have a fairly constructive perspective:

Jackson says he hope that "our concerns will be taken constructively and lead both to improved methods for data analysis and to a better understanding of LIGO's results and its exciting long-term potential."

It seems to me that Jackson just wants to eliminate potential flaws in the result rather than overturn the result itself. Isn't that exactly what we expect from the scientific method?

I wonder if it is a media created image that the tone between the teams are so hostile instead of collaborative.

<comment><USER3> The article clearly states:

"While LIGO has gained a (not entirely undeserved) reputation for excessive secrecy, Shoemaker says the collaboration has spent a great deal of time interacting with Jackson and his group over the last two years to improve their understanding of LIGO's methods, including extended visits to the Niels Bohr Institute and inviting Jackson et al. to discuss the issue in depth in teleconferences with LIGO team members. So if LIGO's response whenever that drum begins banging anew sometimes comes off as a bit exasperated, there's a very good reason for it."

I think you are overlooking into this, there is no hostility whatsoever.

<comment><USER4> I have two coworkers like that. No matter how much communication we have seemingly nothing ever gets settled nor progress made. The one calls himself an anarchist. There's a large difference between constructive "skepticism" and destruction of progress - but so much can hide under the false umbrella of "just trying to understand."

<comment><USER5> I am genuinely curious - how do you (did?) resolve that kind of work-place conflict?

<comment><USER6> > _how do you (did?) resolve that kind of work-place conflict?_

Figure out a domain they operate exceedingly well in, determine the minimum amount of information they need and firewall them from everything else. A side effect of such disagreeability is not being involved in the sort of open-ended discussions which delineate upper from middle management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The detection of GW170817 is the nail in the coffin here. A gravitational wave corroborated by numerous other teams and instruments detecting the same event using completely different physical principles. There is almost zero likelihood of such a coincidence.

<comment><USER8> Yes, in this case the theoretical models predict a gravitational wave to coincide with the observations from other trusted instruments. There may be systematic issues with LIGO's analysis, but it would appear that LIGO also reliably detects astronomical events which suggests that it does actually detect the waves themselves and not just coincidental artifacts in the analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "the controversy all boils down to a misunderstanding about LIGO's methods for analyzing its data." This plus the mentioned secrecy is the modus operandi in the physics community.

No open data, no open calculation how you reached a certain theoretical result and no open code with which the simulation/analysis is done.

There is also the case to be made for a reproducibility crisis in the hard sciences.

<comment><USER10> The Nobel Prize Committee doesn't do mistakes, right? Right? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Phys...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Physics)

Thousands of people worked on gravitational waves, but somehow only LIGO is the one taking credit. I'd like to know what other physicists think of the LIGO results and methods.

<comment><USER11> Astroparticle physicist here.

I work in gammay-ray astronomy. We work closely together with LIGO, they alert us in case something interesting happens so we can observe the same position.

This is e.g. what happened with the Neutron star merger.

The community has great respect for the awesome work our colleagues at LIGO do.

Especially since they made data and code public, which sadly is something that just starts gaining track in gammaray astronomy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At least a few other detections have been reported by LIGO, and I assume that they, like the first one, are correlated in the data from Hanford WA and Livingston LA.

Doesn't anyone looking to debunk the LIGO results need to first explain what _is_ producing correlated signals at interferometers thousands of miles apart?

Also, are the incidents we're receiving in the US producing similar data at VIRGO in Italy?

If so, then wow, Jackson has a tough case to make.

If not, then why not?

<comment><USER13> > Doesn't anyone looking to debunk the LIGO results need to first explain what > is producing correlated signals at interferometers thousands of miles apart?

> Also, are the incidents we're receiving in the US producing similar data at > VIRGO in Italy?

Yes and yes (also there was the optical/GRB confirmation for one of the events)

That's why I'm siding on the LIGO side of this

The whole article sounds like some "skeptics gone wild" trying to start a car with a banana then saying cars are fake because of it (and that's my behaved way of phrasing it)

<comment><USER14> I'm on LIGO's side on this one, but I disagree that one must be able to offer an alternative explanation in order to claim a result is bogus. That is, I don't need an alternate theory in order to falsify yours.

Again, to be clear: I think the LIGO results are probably correct. There's a bunch of corroborating evidence, and from the outside it appears they've been acting is very much good faith. I'm just making an epistemology quibble.

<comment><USER15> Agreed: the scientific community is supposed to havea consensus on [Popperian] falsificationism but seem to act like they don't really believe it quite often.

<comment><USER16> > the scientific community is supposed to havea consensus on [Popperian] > falsificationism

You couldn't have it more wrong. See here, with more physics relevant points:

[http://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/3/3/611](http://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/3/3/611) [PDF only]

And here with more science relevant points:

[http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/4/635/htm](http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/4/635/htm) [Different article, mobile friendly]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Presumably if LIGO fell victim to a statistical fluke of noise in the data because they underestimated the likelihood of such a fluke then those flukes should have happened during the decades when they were running multiple detectors at lower sensitivity. Is it possible that the probability of these flukes occurring sits just within the window of "likely enough to happen and still be mistaken for a true signal" and "not so likely that it would have happened more than once in the last 10 years". My question is, are the Danish considering the fact that this kind of noise will occur regardless of the sensitivity of the detectors?

</comment><comment><USER18> How does this interpretation error result in the actual finding of an optical counterpart to the gravitational wave in the region it was supposed to be in? (see GW170817)

Or are they only trying to weigh in on the first detection?

<comment><USER19> Apparently jackson just don't trust the GW collaborations at all, so I guess he just puts it down to chance?

<comment><USER20> My understanding is that the neutron star merger observation was the first of this kind that humanity has ever done.

Calling that a coincidence isn't a very convincing argument.

<comment><USER19> It was the first time we recogniced these transients as ns-ns mergers, but there is very likely other events hidden in archival data. Simply put, gw170817 looked fairly boring in the waveband that has good skycoverage, so without the ligo trigger most observatories wouldn't have bothered looking.

The article states that jackson had some objection to the signal processing done for gw170817, but nothing really about what he has to say regarding the transient found in the ligo-virgo error contours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "And contrary to Jackson's assertion in the article, a technical paper really is in the works at the LIGO collaboration detailing how it has handled the noise in its data—noise just hasn't been a top priority."

where in which article is Jackson claiming that "LIGO does not have a noise- handling technical paper in the pipeline" so to speak?

this is a really weird comment in the conclusion...

</comment><comment><USER21> >On that point, people seem to be in agreement. But Reitze counters that the complete data from that first run is _already available_ online.

The italics are the link to [https://www.gw- openscience.org/about/](https://www.gw-openscience.org/about/)

is this hug of death? where can I actually find their data and materials?

</comment><comment><USER22> Science needs to re-learn how to live without so much religion. Observation is expensive, interpretation is cheap.

<comment><USER22> If you're going to downvote, at least have the courage to voice your objection. I thought that was supposed to be a privilege here, not an opportunity to skulk behind a rock.

I'll reply with a similar but lengthier remark from another contributor. Possibly _it_ won't go over your head.

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

 _I 've thought for some time that the slow down in "fundamental invention" that some have observed since roughly the late 1960s to early 1970s is the result of "scientific fundamentalism" and Skepticism. Look into the backgrounds and thoughts of people like Einstein, Tesla, Engelbart, Turing, Edison, or Schrodinger, and you generally will not find them to be fundamentalist-positivist Skeptics.

It seems like the general intellectual trend from roughly 1970 until maybe 2010 or so was the rise of fundamentalism of every kind, both religious and secular..._ \- (api; 2015 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10288033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10288033))

</comment><comment><USER23> The article keeps talking about "Danish" this and that.

The only one of the so called Danish physicists quoted in the article is Andrew Jackson who is American. I believe this is the paper it all relates to: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04191](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04191) None of the authors are Danish, but most are related to the Niels Bohr Institute.

Andrew Jackson probably has a lot of Danish colleagues at the Niels Bohr Institute, which of course is in Copenhagen, and many of them might agree with him and some might have been involved in the study. He probably also lived in Denmark for many years and he might even have gotten Danish citizenship, family and he might even speak Danish. The same might apply to some of the other authors.

But you wouldn't call Einstein a Swiss, Austro-Hungarian or American physicist although he did most of his important work in those countries (and actually obtained both Austrian and American citizenship), would you?

I am aware of the Copenhagen school quantum physics/ the Copenhagen interpretation, and that the article might try to play on that old thing in the hopes that we might see a new Danish school in physics. But why?

<comment><USER24> I have no idea with what nationality Andrew Jackson identifies with, but as an immigrant myself, your comment puts my back up a bit. How much of one's life must be spent in a country before being considered "from" that country in your philosophy? If you are born in one country does it indelibly mark you for life? Do you have to be raised in a country in order to identify with it? If you move somewhere, live many years there, have a family there, speak the language, follow the customs, have citizenship there and have no intention of every living anywhere else are you _still_ cursed with your original nationality? Do you feel that such people who have not spent the entirety of their life in a single location need some sort of asterisk next to their nationality? Not a "real" Danish person. Can never become one.

I can understand your question: are they really Danish physicists, or simply physicists working in Denmark. Personally, I don't care but I suppose if you are thinking that Denmark is claiming something they don't deserve, then I suppose it's not a crazy question. However, I hope you can see that the way you put it could be pretty insulting to someone who literally _is_ Danish, but just happens not to be born there.

<comment><USER23> I think you misread my comment. I have nothing against immigrants. I am an immigrant as well, and I have lived in 4 different countries.

I also think it's a bit hard to say that he is "cursed" with his original nationality or "marked" for life. I don't know him but from his own page on the Niels Bohr Institute, he sure doesn't seem embarrassed or sad with his American background: [http://nbia.nbi.ku.dk/members/jackson/](http://nbia.nbi.ku.dk/members/jackson/) And why should he be.

I was simply asking why they call it the "Danish" 5 times in the article. I believe the answer is that they really want to stir up the idea of another Danish/Copenhagen school as opposed to the mainstream views in physics. That's it. And I doubt this little debacle will ever evolve into anything as important as the original Copenhagen school.

Now, I don't think it necessarily matters what nationality we identify with. To many people, nationality is a legal concept, not a matter of feelings. That view on nationality has the advantage of being clear. It's hard to know what people identify with. I am not even sure what I identify with anymore. A bit of different countries, I guess. Maybe none. As a legal concept, however, nationality becomes something that is objectively right or wrong.

As to who deserves the credit or blame (Denmark or the US), I have no idea. A huge part of what makes a great scientist is his upbringing, primary and secondary education. In this case, they guy got his entire formal education in the US, and spent several decades there before going to Denmark. Maybe it's not nation states that deserve credit. Did Argentina make Messi or did Spain? Or was is just genes and the fact that his family of football players? I don't know...

<comment><USER25> Agree this usage is odd. My guess is that they are used to describing people by their institutions: writing things like "Caltech scientists showed..." etc. is very common in such articles, to save readers from having to keep the names straight. And of course this identifier is uncontroversial the day after they got hired.

But who counts as Danish is obviously a thornier question. I don't know that "nationality we identify with" captures it, as it's mostly about what others think of the person. It doesn't line up perfectly with having been issued a passport either. And being Danish is also different to being American...

This applies to sub-national identities too: Wasn't the old-time saying (something like) that you could become a New Yorker in 6 months, but to come from Boston took generations?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It doesn't make sense to me that something which emanates outward can in any way cause things to move inward. It just seems to violate logic itself. I find it more likely that there's some fundamental aspect of space itself we are missing which is a purely inward phenomenon. I suppose that force itself too could be described as a wave but more in the way that you can describe pulling on an elastic rope that's tied to something can be described as a wave. Also if we did live in a holographic universe, there could exist forces which are simply there and are completely unexplainable from within the hologram.

<comment><USER27> Is this logic also violated by seeing a magnet pick up a piece of metal? Something is clearly emanating outwards from the magnet, yet the piece of metal is attracted inwards. It doesn't have to make sense to you, but the experimental evidence seems pretty solid.

 _some fundamental aspect of space itself we are missing which is a purely inward phenomenon_

A fundamental aspect of space... purely inward phenomenon... That sounds like gravity, as described by general relativity.

<comment><USER26> Nothing Eminates from the magnet. The magnet is distorting a field that exists with or without the magnet

<comment><USER27> So a distortion emanates from the magnet? So there is something emanating from the magnet; a distortion.

That said, in the particle model, there are force carrier particles.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Colonization of Venus - <AUTHOR> http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/proceeding/aipcp/10.1063/1.1541418

<comment><USER2> Any hypothetical that doesn't leverage something we actually do here on earth (e.g. create large, self sustaining, floating cities) is science fiction. Not that we can't do it, but we're not going to go to Venus to build such things until we build a couple here to make sure it works.</comment>


Google Books team open sources a book scanner - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sources-their-book-scanner <comment><USER2> I thought the design of their book scanner was very creative. It was also really interesting to see how they were basically able to prototype the entire thing in a day using cardboard they found around the office and a vacuum cleaner. I read through their design document and I'm considering trying to model all the various parts in CAD software for others to use.

However, the figure they posted of 45% of books tearing a page was a little troubling. I'm hoping the design can be improved to be gentler on the books. I read someone else mention that if you wanted to use this scanner on a book then you likely don't care about possibly damaging it. If that is the case, then why not just cut off the binding and feed the pages into a sheet fed scanner? If you do care about the books being damaged then you would likely use one of the more expensive automated scanners or a manual scanner.

<comment><USER3> I think the use of air pressure to pick up individual sheets of paper goes back to card readers (as in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card_reader>). See for example [http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/documation/M300_TechM...](http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/documation/M300_TechMan_Jan72.pdf) (page 9):

 _"The riffle air acts on the first half inch of cards in the input hopper so that they stand apart [...] This prevents the cards from sticking together"_

 _"The picker mechanism utilizes a strong vacuum to grasp the bottom card"_

So, this might seem creative, but programmers over the age of 50 or so will find it old-fashioned :-)

Also 45% chance of a page with a teared page to me sounds much and much better than 100% of chance of having the back completely cut away from your book.

<comment><USER4> It was also 45% chance that a book would end up with a tear, not a 45% chance per page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A prime example of a difference between Google and Apple both on HN front page at the same time. "Apple patents the page turn": [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/apple-now-owns- the-...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/apple-now-owns-the-page- turn/?smid=tw-nytimesbits&seid=auto) Then Google open sources a book scanner.

<comment><USER6> Not sure I see what you're getting at here. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER7> Google open sourced something related to books and Apple patented something ridiculous related to books. Not a direct comparison as both companies have patents, but Google does share with the community a ton more than Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To be clear, 'their book scanner' refers to a '20% project' by an employee - not the actual hardware behind Google Books.

<comment><USER9> Is there any public knowledge about what the hardware behind Google Books looks like?

<comment><USER10> There's this snippet showing that humans are involved.

([http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/03/18/google-books- scannin...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/03/18/google-books-scanning- errors-turned-into-works-of-art/))

<comment><USER11> I'd like a comparison between human tearing of books and the machine. 45% seems way too high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For reference, here is a camera-based DIY automatic book scanner: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PE1Z4wl9fk&feature=relmf...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PE1Z4wl9fk&feature=relmfu)

As far as I can tell, the main advantage of the google device over this one is the ability to keep the book open to less than 90 degrees. Though I think his (close to) 45% damage rate is worse for the books in the aggregate. I'm sure that it could be refined to get the error rate down, but I think that mechanically handling the pages right near the spine (as the google scanner does) may never be that safe.

</comment><comment><USER13> I hope innovations like this could reduce the price of book scanning. I recently used a book service in San Jose to scan all my books: <http://1dollarscan.com>. It was good experience, with good support, but a bit pricey with their extras.

<comment><USER14> Sounds great until you look more closely. Here's the plan:

1) Gather up all your treasured books and send them to us 2) We'll make scans of them 3) We'll then grind your favorite books into compost, so you can Save The Planet! Yay!

$1500 Google design I still have to build myself that only damages 45% of my books? No, thanks.

Scanning service that only charges me 1$/book to destroy my books for me? No, thanks.

I think I'll just look around, thank you.

<comment><USER15> It depends on the circumstances. This service is brilliant for people outside of the US who are interested in books published in the US. You can send books directly from Amazon,com or from one of the used sellers. Therefore you only pay regular postage and find most of the time used versions of a book (which not always ship international).

When I was in Europe, I would have paid $15 for the only available used version of a book on the local Amazon, with 1dollarscan I payed $1 book + $3 shipping + $2 for the scan.</comment></comment></comment>


Waffle: I'm not your f****** monkey anymore - <AUTHOR> Anyone know what this is about? http://waffle.wootest.net/2017/02/22/no/
Content of post: No 2017.02.22 02:30 Screw this. I'm done. I'm not your f monkey anymore. <comment><USER2> Err, probably a silly question, but what's the context behind this post?

I get that Waffle seems to be a weblog script or something. But are you quitting a company/team project or stopping a personal project because of annoying users and requests?

Just wondering, for those of us here who don't know what's going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I posted it, I'm trying to get the context. Waffle has some great programming related blog posts.</comment></comment>


Transformer-XL: Unleashing the Potential of Attention Models - <AUTHOR> https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/01/transformer-xl-unleashing-potential-of.html <comment><USER2> I am very impressed with how well this does on the Hutter Prize.

<comment><USER3> How well does it do? Would you have a link?

<comment><USER2> [https://paperswithcode.com/sota/character-level-models- hutte...](https://paperswithcode.com/sota/character-level-models-hutter-prize)

<comment><USER4> That site claims 0.99 BPC, which I guess means the compressed size is 10^8 * 0.99 / 8 ~= 12,375,000.

Does that include the size of the model, or is this just the cost to encode the errors?

<comment><USER5> That is just the cost to encode errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Relevant discussion at end of this thread: [https://encode.ru/threads/3059-How-much-further-can-the- best...](https://encode.ru/threads/3059-How-much-further-can-the-best- compression-go)

tldr: the measurements here are not meaningful for a comparison, read [https://encode.ru/threads/3059-How-much-further-can-the- best...](https://encode.ru/threads/3059-How-much-further-can-the-best- compression-go?p=59178&viewfull=1#post59178)

<comment><USER7> That comment complains that the model is not useful for _compression_ , because it stores all that linguistic knowledge in the 3GB of model weights. But for NLP applications, you want the model to store as much information as possible, and it only matters whether it generalizes to unseen data or not. The compression measurement is just to show that, not to imply that the model would be useful as a general-purpose compression algorithm.</comment></comment>


Inside the TalkTalk 'Indian scam call centre' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39177981 <comment><USER2> I've been called by some "Windows support" three times during last month. The first time I didn't have the time to talk to them but the second time I took the time to do so.

Somehow, even though I don't have a windows computer, I was able to fake it for about 10 minutes that I am following his instructions and doing what he tells me. First I had to press Win+r, which I didn't really know what it did, but I suspected it opened the CMD, so I told him that a new window opened, a black one. Then he spelled to me what I should write (I don't remember what, I didn't have anything to write with me).

Then he asked me if I had Chrome installed, I said yes and he spelled a website url to me. I told him that it loaded and there was a "Download" button and asked if I should click it. He said yes. Then he talked me through how to install it, from his description I got that it was TeamViewer.

He told me to start it, bare in mind that this was painfully slow for both of us because I had to come up with plausible mistake to make and had to think of some plausible but generic answers on the way because he always asked me what I'm seeing on the streen now. After I "started" it I had to tell him that in fact I didn't have a computer in front of me, but I only was playing along with his script.

He stopped for a couple of seconds and then he asked me:

"How is this possible ...? Why are you waisting my time??"

<comment><USER3> > "How is this possible ...? Why are you waisting my time??"

That's actually not so bad. I got a different, more hilarious response when a scammer realized I was stringing him along. Which I recorded.

I received a call just last Thursday from a professionally recorded American sounding female voice saying it was my credit card company. "Nothing was wrong with my account" but there was an opportunity to reduce my interest rate on EITHER my "MasterCard" OR "Visa." I knew this was going to be fun so I played along, pressed 1, and got connected to a guy from India. He began by asking for my credit card number to verify my account.

I started recording half way through, hoping to keep him on longer but failed. Here's the short clip from when he realized I was giving him random credit card numbers (NSFW language):

[https://instaud.io/Niz](https://instaud.io/Niz)

<comment><USER4> >I received a call just last Thursday from a professionally recorded American sounding female voice saying it was my credit card company.

I get those too. Also ones that say they are from Mariott Hotel or something. They always use local phone numbers, so I always pick up :(

But I hang up right away anyway.

<comment><USER5> Super annoying, I've been getting many of the Marriott calls from a local number (408) lately. Not sure what I can do besides not pick up unknown local calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dell support has a similar issue. Relatives of mine have been contacted by people claiming to be from Dell support soon after the person actually opened a case with support (so someone has ongoing access to the Dell database). The scammer had the tag of the computer, which I confirmed was correct.

They basically said to check the error log of Windows with instructions. There are always some benign errors, which they'll tell you are proof there's something wrong, and then try to get you to download software to fix it.

Edit: see [https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/latest-tech- support...](https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/latest-tech-support-scam- stokes-concerns-dell-customer-data-was-breached/) and [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/dell-to-customers- report...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/dell-to-customers-report- service-tag-scams/)

<comment><USER7> The only bit of fake delivery tracking scam I've received was suspiciously right after I ordered a Dell XPS back in 2013. It had some details close enough that I had to message dell to confirm a tracking number and they hadn't shipped it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Key point - because they outsourced a call center to India, the customer data of TalkTalk was stolen along with their customer care scripts. This was then used to setup a fraudulent call center in India that has been scamming their customers - brutal:

> In 2011, TalkTalk outsourced some of its call-centre work to the Kolkata > (Calcutta) office of Wipro, one of India's largest IT service companies.

> Last year, three Wipro employees were arrested on suspicion of selling > TalkTalk customer data.

> A source in Kolkata, who did not want to be named, alleges the same data was > obtained by a criminal gang, with USB sticks full of data trading hands at > parties.

<comment><USER9> If they had been TalkTalk employees, in India, it could still have happened.

If they had been TalkTalk employees, in the UK or any other country, it could still have happened.

It doesn't seem that its _because they outsourced a call centre to India_ , or even _because they outsourced a call centre_ , but rather _because three call centre employees were corrupt_.

Anyone following the UK news knows there are plenty of insider-jobs happening on-shore too.

<comment><USER10> Certainly you agree that its easier to get something like this done in India though? Roughly half of the population[0] there has paid a bribe at some point in time.

[0][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India)

<comment><USER11> Certainly that's not a good sign, but I don't find that statistic nearly as interesting as the (apparently unmentioned) proportion of the population who has accepted a bribe. If _paying_ a bribe is only the way to get things done, then doing so is just trying to move through the system. In a corrupt system, _accepting_ a bribe is the sign that an individual is themselves corrupt.

<comment><USER12> Besides the fact that in India corruption and scam is a common and widespread problem, accepting a bribe is certainly worse than giving one. Sometimes you just don't have any other option than giving a bribe, while the one accepting the bribe most often has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My wife used to be a Talk Talk customer in the days of dial ins. Anyway 5 or so years back they suddenly started billing her credit card again monthly for the service she had cancelled years before. We couldn't stop this online as their system claimed no knowledge of her so I had to call the support numbers listed on the Talk Talk website. These went through to the usual Indian call centre but what went on there was very unusual. The first operator wanted my wife to post him her VISA statements to his home address (as they would get lost in the post if we sent them to Talk Talk). Another call brought an operator who said he could only trace what had happened if my wife gave him her VISA number and CVV over the phone !! I tried to call their Fraud Prevention office but got another Indian who wanted a VISA number before we could proceed.

After multiple calls one day a call was answered by an Irish voice who was very apologetic and arranged a refund which arrived a few days later. Attempts to tell Talk Talks UK office about this went no where as all calls seemed to go to the same Indian call centre.

Since I have read that Talk Talk had closed their Irish call centre for reasons of cost and now all support is from their Indian call centres. Avoid this company at all costs.

</comment><comment><USER14> Someone tipped me about "Lenny": [https://www.youtube.com/user/ToaoDotNet/videos?view=0&sort=p...](https://www.youtube.com/user/ToaoDotNet/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid) I'd love to know if it is possible to route calls from outside the US to him!

<comment><USER15> [https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/)

> Instructions for use:

> Transfer, conference, or forward your telemarketing calls to 1-347-514-7296 > or sip:email@example.com. If you conference Lenny in, be sure > to mute your phone. The rules: Lenny is for incoming, telemarketing calls > only - not for annoying people, even if they deserve it.

>Testing/experimental calls are fine, as long as they don't bother anyone.

<comment><USER14> I tried it and the recording says Lenny doesn't accept international calls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been repeatedly called with 'Support Scam' where they trick you into installing sw that lets them monitor and control your computer. I don't remember this being as prevalent as before. Clearly it is profitable and they are finding enough targets to warrant operations.

<comment><USER17> My father fell for this scam. As you get older, you lose patience with computers, so he developed a tendency to click on anything to get browser popups to just go away. One of them was a "Your computer is infected and we have the cure" scam. His info was passed to their "customer care desk" which took him for $300 to supposedly clean his PC. They would regularly call back for subscription renewals (more $$$).

I didn't find out until it had been going on for a few years, because dad didn't want to bother me with his computer problems. Make sure you inform your parents about this - they're easy marks for these assholes.

<comment><USER16> Sorry to hear for your dad. Definitely majority of population is not capable to handle all the details modern tech is requiring.

I do blame modern tech for that.

<comment><USER17> Thanks - I do miss him.

I think if someone were to come up and knock on their front door, most older people wouldn't hesitate to send them away (exceptions for Girl Scout cookies, of course). But when a fraudster arrives via computer screen, they don't recognize the same threat. They believe what they see on a computer screen because well, _it 's a computer_ and everyone knows they don't make mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a TalkTalk customer, and was on the receiving end of this scam last year. I'm savvy enough to know that all the machines on our network were unlikely to be suffering from the problems they tried to describe (only one Windows laptop, and that was dual boot with Linux and carefully used).

The most annoying thing (for us) was that they repeatedly called the home number at random intervals through the day until we actually picked up, and then you'd get complete silence most of the time. When they finally managed to get someone on the phone on their end it was easy enough to tell them they were scammers and get rid of them, but I can see how those who are less confident around technology could easily be taken in by them.

<comment><USER19> "you'd get complete silence most of the time"

This is caller software. They figured it was too wasteful to have operators waiting for the phone for you to answer, so a machine dials you and when you answer its supposed to patch you into an operator. Obviously if they're are more calls then operators, you wait, or just hang up....

<comment><USER20> My (least) favorite variant of this is the telemarketers who wait for you to say "hello", then, after they quickly conference in the actual operator, they say, "Oh! Sorry, I was having a problem with my headset. Anyway, I'd like to ask you about..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So yeah, I knew someone who worked at a place like this in their previous job. For him, it was just a job that paid really well. He frequently made more than Rs. 1 lakh per month, which is kind of a big deal in India when you're just a year or so out of an average, run of the mill college.

Generally, these 'call centres' train employees to think that Americans are really stupid people who can be scared & fooled easily. Given the commissions he made, they were damn good at it, specially with the older people who would pay fairly large amounts every month or so to keep their computers virus free.

He never thought he was in some scammy company though. For him, the callers were 'virus' hit users who were calling to get their computers repaired, and these guys just had to make quick, easy, FUD driven upsells.

Oh, and these guys are unhappiest when they are made the manager, who get a very small commission from their team's upsells. I guess this meant that no one was looking for 'career growth'.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder is not it bank's responsibility to refund the money that were stolen from customer's account? And don't they use SMS messages to confirm outgoing payments?

But this case shows also that Internet banking UI are too complicated for some people and they don't realise what they are doing when following scammers' instructions.

</comment><comment><USER23> I got called by these guys last month. It was immediately obvious something was amiss as the line quality was absolutely dreadful, like virtually inaudible.

The lady on the other end said i had been identified as someone from TalkTalk who would be having problems with my internet speed and they could help.

She then asked me what OS i run, when i said OS X she hung up.

</comment><comment><USER24> I happened to have the 400 series http errors open when one of these chappies rang up. I think I got to 'Request, Time Out' before he twigged.

</comment><comment><USER25> TalkTalk need to do more to fix this issue as they were responsible for not keeping customer information secure. Admittedly they did give out free stuff last year as a sort of compensation. However if this annoyance is not resolved soon TalkTalk's reputation will slide further.

</comment><comment><USER26> I can't believe how these companies do not get busted ever ? Englang is really unfair country for small business owners. More bigger corporation, less they pay tax, less they care of customers, less they protect your data...

</comment><comment><USER27> We need to find this place, and issue drone strikes as soon as possible. If that is the only thing that Trump does with the rest of his presidency, he will go down as a better president than Obama.

</comment><comment><USER28> Tech scamming is an interesting phenomenon to say the least...

I have been binge watching scambaiters on youtube recently. I can highly recommend it if you want an introduction to how these scammers work.</comment>


Amazon Patent for Propeller Sounds - <AUTHOR> http://www.uasvision.com/2016/04/04/amazon-drone-patent-for-propeller-warnings/ <comment><AUTHOR> Note: this is interesting because the propellers will actually do the talking!

"Accordingly, the controller may determine and cause to implement modulations of the rotational speed of a propeller, thereby causing the propeller to produce a series of sounds that are audibly perceptible as "Watch out!"</comment>


Programming with Punched Cards (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/fisk.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> "I'd seen that diagonal line before -- sort of a poor-mans way of keeping the cards in the right order. I knew that the black mark on the top of a card out of sequence would stand out even if only misplaced by one or two cards from its original order."</comment>


Security Flaw in OS X displays all keychain passwords in plain text - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@brentonhenry/security-flaw-in-os-x-displays-all-keychain-passwords-in-plain-text-a530b246e960 <comment><USER2> If your passwords are going to be available to user mode processes without a privileged interactive password prompt, they're going to be available. This is how it's designed and is necessary for the current user experience (that apps you are running have access to your key chain secrets for unlocked key chains).

Crippling tools to make it look like the passwords are hidden or further secured is just security theater.

<comment><USER3> No, there is an easy fix. Make the "SecurityAgent" process "special" and non- scriptable. Kind of how when Windows is requesting a permission, the whole screen is otherwise grayed out with an overlay. It should run in some sort of permission mode where only direct, physical user input is taken into account (unless the user has previously selected "always allow" for this application).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait till this guy discovers the filesystem. "Security Flaw in OS X displays all files in the home directory in plain text."

I mean, it _is_ pretty bad, when you think about it, compared to "freedom- hating" "user-hostile" sandboxed designs like iOS, but "all your data is available to all your programs unless you explicitly hobble a specific program" is pretty central to *nix.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems unusual to me that those security dialogs are 'scriptable'.</comment>


The difference between junior and senior engineers - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-fastest-algorithm-to-find-the-largest-number-in-an-unsorted-array/answer/Thomas-A-Limoncelli?share=1 <comment><USER2> Reddit thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3ox3zi/if_you_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3ox3zi/if_you_ever_wanted_to_know_the_difference_between/)</comment>


Interactive Map of the World's Fastest Supercomputers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/17/business/20081118-super-graphic.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> To put this in perspective the largest Hadoop cluster Yahoo (or anyone) has spun up is 4000 2.5ghz dual-processor quad-core Xeons. According to <http://www.clustervision.com/cluster_hardware.html> a Xeon runs about 4 flops per cycle. That means the entire cluster was running at about 20 megaflops.

The smallest computer on that map is 27 teraflops. More than a factor of 1000 on our cluster.

That said, raw power isn't everything. I know we were all impressed with Google's recent TB processing record, which prove the old adage _it's not how big it is, it's what you do with it_.

<comment><USER3> Damn. I think you managed to get every single number wrong :-)

First of all, FLOPS is not the same as FLOPs / cycle. Note the lowercase 's'. The former is floating point operations _per second_. The latter is per cycle. To convert the latter number into FLOPS, you have to multiply by the clock speed. That gives you 10^10 FLOPS, or 10 gigaflops. Now that's _per-core._ You said quad-core, so it's 40 gigaflops per processor. 4000 processors, so it's 160 teraflops. Much higher than the slowest on that list, but much lower than the fastest.

The other thing you got wrong is that if it were a mere 20 megaflops, it would have been a factor of a _million_ slower :-) Tera is 10^12.

Anyway, I think this whole thing is apples-to-oranges because actual supercomputers have a much more tightly inter-connected grid (I believe) than the sort of loose cluster that Hadoop typically runs on, and further, they have a different programming model (Fortran with MPI and things like that.)

<comment><USER2> Sigh. And this is why I shouldn't stray outside of my realm of expertise late at night, even if it seems like an interesting diversion.

Thanks for the correction :)

<comment><USER4> And that is why I should not upvote without fact-checking. Multiplying is easy after all.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How we made an extra £14 million a year for a travel company - <AUTHOR> http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/sunshine-case-study/

<comment><USER2> _Improving conversion isn't just about expressing benefits; it's about overcoming all the major objections._

Key lesson from this article.

</comment><comment><USER3> "...Don't just test your site—test your competitors' too. By comparing sunshine.co.uk against the competition, we were quickly able to see what they were doing right—and what we could do better."

Hadn't thought of that before. Nice tip!

</comment><comment><USER4> "In fact, during this period, the travel industry lost over £2.1 billion in profit."

Does this even make sense?

<comment><USER3> I was trying to figure out if they lost 2.1B pounds, or if profit fell by 2.1B pounds.</comment></comment>


Make One Big Speaker - <AUTHOR> http://speakerblast.com?

<comment><USER2> Hi Jay, thanks for creating this thread :) Much appreciated!

We'd love to hear your and everyones feedback.

We're working hard to create the best user experience.

thanks again! ryan</comment>


Minimalistic Dependency Injection for ES5/ES6/ES7 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/justmoon/constitute <comment><USER2> I don't understand the aversion to the "annoying glue code" (which is perfectly straightforward and readable, and in my experience, you don't end up writing _that_ much of it), and I definitely don't understand the desire to replace it with a ball of magic.

<comment><USER3> You are right in the simple use cases. And I can see that it makes the dependency declarations more concentrated for large projects. Every DI libraries are magical and need us to learn their terminologies. Just see whether they are efficient and easy to use.</comment></comment>


TechSentiment lets you follow Social Sentiment for your favorite Tech stocks - <AUTHOR> http://startupjuncture.com/2013/06/06/techsentiment-lets-you-follow-social-sentiment-for-your-favorite-tech-stocks/

<comment><USER2> Wondering how much these kinds of sentiment analyses add to the stuff that's already out there...

<comment><USER3> Feel it could be a valuable addition, specifically to technical analysis, confirming reversals etc.

<comment><USER2> Yeah that could be pretty cool indeed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool concept, when do you expect to expand the service to include further stocks?</comment>