Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21284960/apple-arm-based-macs-wwdc-2020-report-intel-laptops-desktops-power-efficiency <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465364)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is just a rehash of Bloomberg reporting.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple- pla...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple-plans-to- announce-move-to-its-own-mac-chips-at-wwdc)

older: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/apple- aim...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/apple-aims-to-sell- macs-with-its-own-chips-starting-in-2021)

\---

Personally, I gave up on the Apple ecosystem years ago and moved to Linux. But I feel ambivalent about this.

On one hand, the iPhone/Pad chips have impressive performance and power consumption, at least for the mobile use case. Some competition in this space can't hurt, and it will be interesting how well they fare against Intel and AMD in a different environment.

On the other hand: this seems like a golden opportunity for Apple continue the path of merging iOS and Mac OS, turning the desktop platform into an equally walled and locked down garden.

This will also be a rocky road for very performance sensitive applications which Macs are used for a lot. Like video editing, Photoshop etc.

<comment><USER4> > On the other hand: this seems like a golden opportunity for Apple continue > the path of merging iOS and Mac OS, turning the desktop platform into an > equally walled garden.

They can't turn macOS into a totally walled garden, without making it impossible to use as a development platform. If I can't compile and run my own software, or software I downloaded from others in source form, I can't use it as a development platform.

And Apple needs a development platform, for people to develop iOS/macOS apps on, and for its own OS developers to use in developing iOS/macOS.

<comment><USER5> You can run your own code on an iPhone if you have a developer account. They could easily do the same for the Mac.

<comment><USER6> ...for 7 days. Then you have to plug your iPhone back into your Mac and re- compile the software and reinstall it.

It's an extremely shitty limitation that Apple put in place to give the appearance that they allow sideloading.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like the future for Mac on the desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dan-robertson I feel like this would probably be a good thing for a lot of Apple customers. Especially is they started this with their cheaper models.

Switching to arm might improve power efficiency (though surely most power goes to the screen?) but it could have a bigger impact on cpu temperature and reducing thermal throttling.

Bloomberg suggests that other laptop makers might also switch to arm. I think this is a place where apple could have a key advantage because their arm chips seem to always be significantly better than the competition (at least for mobile).

Most people will do computing consisting of:

\- browsing the web/using complicated web apps

\- watching video

\- word processors or similar programs

I think these days we should be less concerned about some traditionally compute-heavy tasks because they have been being encouraged to switch to gpu compute for performance gains for a while now. Most things that care about performance will have been ported to gpu already if possible.

I feel like programs like word processors are probably more memory than cpu constrained and a small potential drop in cpu performance would not matter so much to programs that were designed to run on much slower hardware.

Web browsers (well chrome and safari) have already been seriously optimised for running on atm chips.

</comment><comment><USER7> I envision there being a lot of ARM support issues across apps that I rely on. We finally got over the keyboard drama, I don't have confidence this will go well either.

<comment><USER8> Well they've already figured out multi-targeting in XCode and gave done this once before so I would imagine for a lot of developers it will just be a recompile.

I saw a really cheap MacBook Air deal the other day and was tempted until I saw they're i3 based. Assuming App support, I could see them replace that with an ARM based CPU without anyone noticing.

<comment><USER9> They've done this 2 to 5 times before, depending on whether you count the 32-bit to 64-bit conversions and iOS.

68k->PPC, PPC->PPC64, PPC->x86, x86->x86-66, arm->arm64

<comment><USER10> what is x86-66?

<comment><USER11> X86-64 is the 64-bit version of x86, also known as AMD 64 and Intel 64. The first computers that apple shipped with Intel processors only supported x86 (32-bit). The most recent version of macOS removed support for x86, only allowing 64-bit apps to run.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64)

<comment><USER12> Yes, but what is what is x86-66?

<comment><USER13> A typo

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting. I imagine they'll have to provide some sort of x86/amd64 compat layer as otherwise this kills every application available for macos right now.

I hope they don't also continue to lock down macos (though I imagine they intend to) by restricting applications to only being available from the app store. That would set a terrible precedent for personal computing.

<comment><USER15> > I imagine they'll have to provide some sort of x86/amd64 compat layer

Just like they did with the mk86->ppc transition, just like they did with the ppc->x86 transition.

> I hope they don't also continue to lock down macos

Let's not confuse moving Macs to ARM processors with turning Macs into iOS devices. Apple has always treated the OS families differently and will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs.

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't be so sure. Apple was happy to leave behind "pro" customers who needed floppy drives (1998), optical drives and ethernet (2013), and USB ports (2017).

Sure, the industry ended up following them on a lot of this, but that should be as much a cause for concern as the rest of it. An awful lot of the pro audio / video work that happens on high end Apple hardware could absolutely happen on a machine where the only software comes in via an app store.

<comment><USER17> > Apple was happy to leave behind "pro" customers who needed floppy drives > (1998), optical drives and ethernet (2013), and USB ports (2017).

sure, but all that functionality remained externally - just not as part of the laptop. locking down the laptop is fundamentally different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would love to see new MacBook pros with the latest AMD Ryzen, speedy and power efficient, processors. I can understand the move to ARM, since iPhones and iPads are already there and it make sense to unite the ecosystem.

Fun fact: Kalamata is the second largest city in southern Greece. I tried finding why they named the Apple project like this, but couldn't find anything relevant. Any ideas?

<comment><USER19> Olives are to apples, as arm cores are to intel cores.

(Kalamata is a kind of olive, a small tougher and pithier version of its blander behemoth brethren.)

<comment><USER20> I was thinking more like Kalamatas are black instead of green.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> After the last few years of hardware problems with Macs let's see who's the brave one to buy a v1 of any Apple new product (meanwhile there's probably people already making a queue to buy one)

<comment><USER22> If you look at the problems with the 2016 - 2019 MBP, and also the problems with the first generation intel MBPs, the biggest issue in both cases was heat. (Although there were clearly other issues as well.) The new Apple chips are going to be much more power efficient, so I think there is actually hope here. I still wouldn't buy a v1 because I think they'll have problems, but I think whatever problems they'll have will be less than previous v1s.

<comment><USER23> > the biggest issue in both cases was heat.

I don't think Apple was in any way naive about how hot Intel chips can run under load. It's also not impossible to make a laptop body that can run those chips with decent temperatures... if you're willing to make compromises on size.

IMO, the biggest issue was they still chose to make the systems thin in spite of the thermal tradeoffs that would result from that.

Yes, thinner's probably more desirable, but would people have stopped buying MBPs if they were a little less thin? I don't think their sales would have shrunk by much, since most Mac users are for the most part a captive audience, because they love MacOS.

<comment><USER22> > I don't think Apple was in any way naive about how hot Intel chips can run > under load.

It seems like for the 2016 MBP, they either made significant last minute changes or moved up the release date by several months. When they released the computers the Apple stores didn't even have the right screwdrivers to open them for several months. That doesn't seem like something that was planned, but rather the result of some sort of timeline shift.

My guess is that they decided they needed them out the door before Christmas and so skipped the last six months of QA. Maybe it was something else, but I think it was more than just being unwilling to compromise on size.

Regardless, the 2020 models are basically flawless so far, so at least there's that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Their iPhone chips blow everything out of the water so this is exciting.

Also adds more fuel to the merging of iOS/macOS.

<comment><USER25> I am having a hard time deciding which name for the result of this merge would be better: iOS XP or macOS CE.

<comment><USER26> I think it would still be normal macOS, just on ARM chips. I find it hard to believe that they would get rid of macOS too given that the iPad Pro exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder have they considered switching back to PowerPC (power9/power10) now that it is open (for whatever that means, I am not sure)? I am sure they would appreciate the control that could give them.

Does somebody have an idea how much approximately would it cost Apple to switch the Apple A14 from ARM to POWER? Usually it is said that the instruction decoder is a small part of a CPU core, and the architectures are not hugely different (compared to AMD64/Intel, at least).

<comment><USER28> They have already heavily invested into customized ARM chips. They do all they need. So no reason to look back at POWER.

Sure for high end mac the ARM chips probably wouldn't be the best fit for now. But staying with x86 for them is just way easier. POWER might only be interesting if they do a server OS. Which they made pretty clear they are not interested in in the near future. (The rack mounted mac is still a rack mounted workstation. Rack mounting high end workstations isn't that uncommon in certain audio/video processing related job areas. For a server it is missing some pretty basic thinks like: Redundant power supply, management interface, trivial easy to swap RAM/Disks without removing it from the rack, and probably more. ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Last time they did this they managed to pull it off really well. From memory there was the ability to package apps for both architectures so they would run on either machine. And to bridge the gap there was Rosetta which allowed PowerPC binaries to run on intel Mac's by translating in real-time with a small performance penalty.

How close are arm chips to PowerPC? They're both risc architectures, right?

<comment><USER30> Eh, really well is a matter of opinion. Compared to the earlier transition from 68k to PowerPC, the PowerPC to x86 transition was much more jarring.

The 68k emulation was present up until the death of Mac OS 9, so there is some software that could run on the original Mac all the way to the Classic environment in OS X.

Rosetta was sufficient for most applications during the transition, but there will always be software that doesn't get re-written. Rosetta was introduced in 10.4, and dropped in 10.7. Only 3 versions.

</comment></comment><comment> dan-robertson This seems to be the source for the verge article: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple- pla...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple-plans-to- announce-move-to-its-own-mac-chips-at-wwdc)

</comment><comment><USER31> I think this is a good news. The vast amount of people use their laptop for little more than running a web browser, and AArch64 chips will make those laptops cheaper to produce (intel charges Apple upwards of $400+ for high end chips[1])

Then there's everyone doing local development in interpreted languages, most of which have stable support for AArch64. Java, python, ruby, go on AArch64? No problem.

The biggest hit things will be mac-specific programs and software built specifically to work with BSD syscalls. We'll see about that stuff.

1\. [https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/24/how- much-d...](https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/24/how-much-does- intel-charge-apple.aspx)

<comment><USER32> What is special about BSD syscalls on AArch64? Are you saying they will be different or absent?

<comment><USER31> Presumably there would be some incompatibility.

<comment><USER32> What would be an example of such an incompatibility?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What's been going on with the embedded ME/PSP in x86-compatible hardware for the last 10 years is ugly. If this is real--I'm hoping this evolves into a real alternative to that architecture though it's possible it could start doing the same thing.

<comment><USER34> Do you see any major differences between a T2-backed system and an ME/PSP one? How about TrustZone?

<comment><USER33> I really have to do some research on this. I haven't because I have not really been planning on purchasing a MAC. Here's some questions I would want to have answers to.

\- Does the T2 have a private uncontrolled connection to system RAM? I know it has some connection to the onboard SSD, other IO and serves as an enclave for platform keys.

\- Does the T2 have a private bus/connection to any onboard Ethernet adapter or Wifi like ME does?

\- Does the T2 serve as the foundation of remote management features (that are present in all CPUs even if not vPro enabled) like ME does? This is important because it means that it's supposed to be accessed remotely by design.

\- Does the T2 serve as the foundation of anti-theft features like ME does? This facility also has remote-access-by-design components.

\- Does the T2 serve as the foundation of Protected Video or Audio path type features?

\- What can the T2 make the CPU do? Can the T2 freeze the CPU, redirect the CPU to other code, then restore CPU state (I'm fairly sure the ME can do this)

\- Intel CPU's have a built-in display adapter and you can't really disable or sidestep it. Hence, there is no separation between what is on the screen and the CPU, and by proxy the ME. To what extent can the T2 modify video RAM without the CPU knowing?

<comment><USER28> But don't ARM chips have TrustZone which is quite similar to ME/PSP wrt. the danger it can have. And isn't T2 additional to the TrustZone on their ARM chips? Or did it replace the TrustZone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What's going to happen to Boot Camp? Are they planning to support Windows on ARM, or?..

<comment><USER36> I have a hunch they'll use the opportunity to kill Boot Camp, which has been unloved for years. However I hope to be wrong here — supporting ARM based operating systems would be a super cool thing for Apple to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Time to urgently make sure your favourite backend is generating decent AArch64 code and you app is compatible with a weak memory model...

<comment><USER38> The memory model of the ISA != the memory model of your code. C has a memory model and any correct C code is compiled to the correct ARM assembly. It's only really an issue if you are translating over x86 assembly, and then you probably have lots of other issues to worry about.

<comment><USER39> a _lot_ of code (especially old code bases) does not actually target the c11 memory model but just happens to work on x86. A lot of code that targets the c11 memory model but primarily targetting x86, still assumes cheap (or free) release/acquire memory barriers (although admittedly arm64 should have reasonably cheap release/acquire and Apple could make them as cheap as they want).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> With this and AMD's Threadripper benchmarks, Intel really needs to step up their game.

</comment><comment><USER41> So is this an underlying reason for Catalina jettisoning so much older software? Is there a successor to Rosetta, one that will only support 64bit software?

Going to be interesting which models actually debut this month and their availability. Currently I am not in favor of moving to ARM but I leave the door open for Apple to surprise and tempt me

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder what this will mean for Bootcamp. Stupid question time: Does MS make an ARM version of Windows 10?

<comment><USER43> Already exists, no? [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/arm/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> what does this mean for running docker containers on macos?

<comment><USER45> It means you better think about buying a thinkpad.

<comment><USER46> Docker runs on Arm chips.

<comment><USER47> Yes, but Docker on ARM won't run your x86 containers.

Docker can run a different OS but not a different arch.

The point of Docker is kind of having the exactly same thing here and there.

With Docker, I can compile, run, test and debug my backend service on Windows or Mac and deploy to Linux, knowing that I ran and tested the exact same binary.

If you deploy on x86 (as you do), having ARM Docker doesn't help you much.

<comment><USER46> Good point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> People seem to say it will be hard to transform apps to new architecture. Is that really true?

My understanding is when you develop for Mac, you already have to compile to bytecode which means it's already compatible with other architectures.

<comment><USER30> No way. Even if the Swift language works that way, virtually all Mac software relies on being compiled in some fashion.

The only software platform that might be the case is Android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It seems like these new Macs might as well be phone with a keyboard in the way they treat their software and "pro" consumers.

Wake me up when they use less glue to hold their computers together...

</comment><comment><USER50> Is this going to be like the surface Pro X? Ie a copy with arm that is kinda interesting buy no one buys because its not very good - but v3 probably will be. [https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/5/20948092/microsoft- surfac...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/5/20948092/microsoft-surface-pro- x-review-arm-windows-10-apps-features-specs-price)

</comment><comment><USER51> Ugh I've been holding out on my 2012 retina MacBook Pro and was just about to upgrade to the 16 inch MacBook Pro. Now I guess I need to limp along another year to see what comes next rather than pay 3500 big ones to end up orphaned.

</comment><comment><USER52> It's fine that Apple is moving to ARM. It's not okay that this is going to be a proprietary, locked down CPU. T2 has shown that Apple customers no longer own their hardware.

<comment><USER53> > proprietary, locked down CPU

Is it somehow more proprietary and locked-down than the Intel ones?

<comment><USER39> I think the worry is a locked bootloader.

<comment><USER52> That and Apple being able to introduce security via obscurity means we'll probably never see a non-Apple OS on the platform.

<comment><USER53> It's already quite difficult and unideal to install a non-Apple OS on a Mac, aside from Windows via Bootcamp. Not being able to install a custom OS is a long way from "not owning your hardware". Apple OSes are part of the sum package; if you don't want that, you aren't the kind of person who's buying Apple hardware in the first place.

<comment><USER52> 3-4 years ago it wasn't difficult at all to replace macOS with pretty much any EFI-enabled OS. Moving to a proprietary ARM CPU/GPU will probably result in not being able to write applications unless it's using Apple's toolchain. If you have no say over what software you can run on your computer, you no longer own that computer.

We really haven't seen such a large technological separation like this. At least back in the old days you could still run what you want.

macOS moving to the iOS route where you have to jailbreak your device to get any sort of usability out of it is not a space I want to participate in, and yet it seems that's how the entire Apple line is moving. They're almost the complete opposite compared to Microsoft these days.

<comment><USER53> As long as developers continue buying Macs for building non-Apple-native software, there will be ways to get them to run whatever you want, because that's required for a dev machine. If Apple ever decides it no longer cares about selling Macs to developers, well, I guess that's a possibility but it would be incredibly stupid, because that's a significant fraction of their current market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> If only LLVM bytecode were actually portable instead of "looks like it should be portable but definitely isn't."

</comment><comment><USER55> I asked this on another thread when it came up, but didn't get any replies.. What does this mean for Intel as a business?

</comment><comment><USER56> Thanks for playing, Intel.

</comment><comment><USER57> The Verge is a pretty good source, isn't it?

<comment><USER58> Isn't this the Verge's summary of the Bloomberg article from Mark Gurman? Why not link to the original article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> , according to leaks

</comment><comment><USER60> Big if true.

</comment><comment><USER61> Welp, I'm out, Apple. No interest in an ARM-only world. Like my x64 apps too much.

</comment><comment><USER62> Now will be a good time to stock up on Intel macs. At least we will still have hackintoshes.</comment>


Ask HN: Will We Get Close to a General AI in 2017? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> No. Stop reading reddit.com/r/futurology or that _awful_ article by waitbutwhy. Sure its a possibility but we're still making baby steps and tiny tools, pastiches of intelligence as opposed to genuine intelligence or conscious.

People who ask questions such as this often don't consider that it remains eminently possible that AGI is an impossibility for us to build. Also remember that anything an AI can do in the future a human + an AI can probably do better. Right now at least they're just tools we use and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER3> What is the strongest argument for impossibility being a possibility?

<comment><USER4> There are arguments, notably in "The Emperors New Mind", that assert that consciousness must be based on quantum mechanics in some ill-defined way and therefore that "algorithmic" computers can't therefore be conscious.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind)

NB I didn't find this argument particularly strong, but it's a long time since I read it. The brain would have to be doing something spectacularly strange for it to be impossible for us to emulate in one way or another.

<comment><USER3> Out of context it indeed sounds rather fuzzy and weak. It's not even intuitive to me that consciousness comes first. Maybe they are even independent. I should probably read the book though.

More generally, I don't think invoking quantum effects is an especially strong argument for impossibility in the general case. We already use quantum effects to some extent and make progress on quantum computation. It may be evidence of greater difficulty, but not of impossibility. Unless there is a strong case for some particular quantum effect being unharness-able.

<comment><USER5> "It may be evidence of greater difficulty, but not of impossibility"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We don't even have a general outline of a theoretical approach to designing a general purpose intelligence, let alone implementing one. Until we do, any speculation about a time horizon for implementation is a pure guess. How are those guesses working out so far?

1960s Herbert Simmons predicts "Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do."

1993 - Vernor Vinge predicts super-intelligent AIs 'within 30 years'.

2011 ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity (enabled by super-intelligent AIs) will occur by 2045, 34 years after the prediction was made.

So the distance into the future before we achieve strong AI and hence the singularity is, according to it's most optimistic proponents, receding by more than 1 year per year.

I am not in any way denying the achievability of strong AI. I do believe it will happen. I just don't think we currently have any idea how or when. If pushed to it, I'd say probably more than another 100 years from now but I don't know how much more.

<comment><USER7> You should become famous for that law. Eat that, Kurzweil. You found exponential laws. We found a neglinear counterlaw ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The key point is self-learning, or ability of AI to build AI that's better, if only a little.

This is different from, say, AlphaGo playing against itself to train its neural network - we want AI 1.0 to _write_ AI 2.0, not just tweak some coefficients in 1.0.

At the moment all automatically generated code is _less_ complex than source code of code generator itself. There can be more of it in terms of lines of code, but it's usually pretty repetitive.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you read the research, there is lots of incremental progress being made. Mainly with pixels - classifying them into objects, matching object locations to text, attempting to predict future pixel values etc. But this stuff is very 'surface level', not even close to the way our brains effortlessly interpret light - classify objects, detect depth, account for lighting, complete objects we can't see, invoke feeling of the material we are looking at, invoke past memories, detect threats, and so on - every single millisecond.

This doesn't even begin to get into the core of AGI, which is the 'thinking' component. Given this amazing mass of data, how do we then make the machine work towards it's goals? Is this just a neural network? Is it a billion neural networks? Too many variables to tell.

And even then, if every action it takes is a reaction to the environment, does it then not have freewill? Do we have freewill? Is 'consciousness' somehow the key to freewill?

But anyway if you listen to Musk or Hawking, doomsday AI is just round the corner.

<comment><USER10> There is research directly addressing "transfer learning" where the goal is to have more general learning agents. I don't know how advanced it is, but it's certainly not advanced enough to become anything close to an AGI by 2018.

Ultimately I think there are far more pressing issues in AI around ethics, bias, or security. It's great that there are philosophers who can sit around and worry about a possible distant future (and I think as thought exercises they're fascinating), but it's not what most people in the field should be concerned with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If anyone who thinks yes wants to bet $1000 I'll do 1:10 odds.

[https://longbets.org](https://longbets.org)

<comment><USER12> For 2017?

From the site:

"minimum bet period is two years"

<comment><USER11> I'll extend my bet to 2018.

I'd extend it much more because the real odds of AGI are closer to 1:100, but any longer time scale would be a bad return on my money.

<comment><USER13> I always thought betting money (especially with a site like long bets) was about holding people accountable to their claims, rather than the expectation of actual return. :)

<comment><USER12> I think it's more about bragging and joining an exclusive club (example: I have this opinion, and I have a pile of money sitting around that I can dedicate to promoting it amongst a small group of other people I want to impress). The stated purpose of holding people accountable, I have never bought.

People who are really working on the ideas discussed (as opposed to just talking about them and positioning themselves as "futurists") are accountable in a much more profound way, in that they build their entire lives around working toward some goal, with all the risk and opportunity cost that entails. The long bets participants are just playing around, not real players. They may have a little skin in the game, but it's faux skin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No. This [0] is 4-5 years old and I don't think much progress has been made in getting a computer to classify that image as 'funny' and explain why. And if/when it could, I doubt we'd call it intelligent. And this is just computer vision, not mentioning other branches of AI.

[0] [http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer- visio...](http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/)

<comment><USER15> Hell, I know a lot of _humans_ who wouldn't understand why that's funny. And some of them have 4-year college degrees.

Many responses in this thread are along the lines of "computers will never be as smart as Carl Sagan", ignoring that most intelligence on this planet could never dream of being half as smart as the genius we're using to define AI. Let's start by getting a computer as smart as a border collie, one of the more intelligent dogs.

Saying a computer isn't smart because it can't laugh at a highly complex visual joke is entirely the wrong way to define AI, and it's no surprise we haven't achieved it. It took humans millions of years to get this smart, and we've only been working on AI for a very, very small amount of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Better automation != General AI

<comment><USER17> I'd argue "minion level AI" >> General AI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Closer, but not close!

<comment><USER19> it has a tendency to be just 15 years away - the deadline keeps on moving though.

I think that the main obstacle is language - language is terribly ambiguous, and its very difficult to deal with these ambiguities in a program.

Hofstadter [1] says that the core of thinking are analogies and that many of the allusions in language can be thought of as analogies, however this does not seem to be the main focus of inquiry right now.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel- Thinki...](https://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel- Thinking/dp/0465018475) (my review & summary is here [http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blogg/2013/10/15/po...](http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blogg/2013/10/15/post-1.html) )

<comment><USER9> > language is terribly ambiguous

I never get this argument. Sure, maybe it is from the point of the computer, but we humans use it just fine.

<comment><USER15> Much of our comedy stems from how ambiguous our language is. How many petabytes on the Internet are wasted with comments correcting someone's use of language? How many hours are spent as kids in classrooms learning all of the context around our languages, and we still get it wrong often enough to be corrected on the Internet and made fun of in comedy TV shows. We're certainly _not_ using it just fine, we're using it in spite of all its shortcomings.

Do you know how often I'm driving while my wife is navigating and I ask "turn left here?" and she says "right"? Now, is she saying "correct, you should turn left" or is she saying "don't turn left, turn right"?

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. –Groucho Marx

I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long. –Mitch Hedberg

<comment><USER9> > Much of our comedy stems from how ambiguous our language is.

Yes, but we laugh because we understand there is an ambiguity, not because we don't see it.

> How many petabytes on the Internet are wasted with comments correcting > someone's use of language?

People are pedantic on the net, plus on the world wide web not everyone is going to be an English first speaker. Spoken conversations don't have people correcting your grammar every 5 seconds.

> wife is navigating and I ask "turn left here?" and she says "right"

Well in this case she is being deliberately ambiguous. So you either tell by her tone inflection, or rely on previous memory. And of course you have the ability to ask her.

> Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too > dark to read. –Groucho Marx

> I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long. –Mitch Hedberg

Again, I see and understand the ambiguity. I'm not sitting here dumbfounded; I 'get' that they turned the words back on themselves to mean something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No.

</comment><comment><USER21> My own personal pet theory (guaranteed right or your money back): We won't have AGI until we have something that can dream.

Will we get close in 2017? No. Not if my pet theory is right, and not if it's wrong.

</comment><comment><USER22> Define "General AI". An AI that can decide by itself which model it should use to make sense of any given dataset?

<comment><USER4> "Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can."

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

<comment><USER23> There's plenty of tasks that very few human beings can perform. And thus there's task sets that nobody can perform.

What then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Will Google release an AI that can play StarCraft on the same level as humans in 2017?

General AI will have to wait until after that.

</comment><comment><USER25> No

</comment><comment><USER26> Yes. Depends on what you mean by close though.

<comment><USER21> Well, however close we get, you can define "close" to be "that close", and say that, yes, we did in fact get close in 2017. I'm not sure that's useful, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> No. That which can be done is no longer considered AI.

<comment><USER28> Lies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> No, I don't think so. We'll inch closer, but I doubt we're anywhere near AGI on the path of software and algorithms running on traditional networked computing architectures.

That isn't to say the resources don't exist to create AGI. It's possible they were available a long time ago. If you were to ask some omnipotent future superintelligence for a way humans could have bootstrapped AGI in the year 2005 using the available technology of the day, it could probably come up with an answer. Maybe even further back than that, or maybe even present day wouldn't suffice—who knows.

Trying to emulate biological architectures on silicon can be grossly inefficient, and may actually be harder from a design perspective. It is the attempt to formalize and adapt something created by an optimization process that spanned millions of years, a process that had zero regard for how easy its creation would be to understand or otherwise reverse engineer.

At the same time, algorithms vastly more efficient than the human brain's remain a possibility. They need not include the large amounts of evolutionary baggage that humans have.

Approaching AGI as a raw optimization problem may yield better results. However, not formally specifying or understanding the underlying mechanisms is a massive safety issue in the long run.

By the same token, ditching silicon entirely may be a vastly quicker path. Throwing ethics out the window and experimenting with large quantities of lab- grown neural tissue might be one way. Creating a synthetic biological computing substrate another. It's not hard to imagine something like copying human neural tissue's design, but using materials capable of latencies an order of magnitude lower, or significantly higher degrees of interconnectivity.

Looking at the problem from the perspective of strictly space, it's funny to think that we're unable to recreate the functionality of some tissue contained within a space that's less than one cubic foot-even though we have seemingly endless _acres_ of computing power to do it with—that's excluding the brains of the thousands of scientists and engineers working on AI. Even if you stacked up _just_ the microprocessors in question, they would occupy a cubic volume far, far greater than a single human brain—each containing billions of transistors, and each operating at latencies far lower than the brain. Despite all this, the human brain requires far lower amounts of energy.

The reason we don't have AGI yet is that it simply takes a lot of time and effort to invent, regardless if it's ultimately possible with today's technology. Of course, as other commenters have suggested, ruling out the possibility that the human brain somehow has seemingly magical quantum properties that render its recreation an impossibility (on silicon at least) may be unwise.

</comment><comment><USER30> The term AGI suffers from a greatly exacerbated version of the same problem that AI suffers. The problem, mind you, has NOTHING to do with science or technology - it is purely a naming problem.

The term "Artificial Intelligence" is a contradiction - intelligence can NOT be artificial. Intelligence is the ability of a being to get what it wants. It is always organic, as it originates in desire.

Just stop calling it "Artificial Intelligence" and enjoy the wonderful progress that we are making towards getting our machines to help us achieve what we want.

(To be clear, I'm not saying stop calling it "artificial". I'm saying stop calling it "intelligence", because it is not, and never will be. Using the word "intelligence" in the context of machine automation sets entirely unreasonable expectations and inhibits progress. )

<comment><USER31> You seem to be contradicting several well known dictionaries with your definition of intelligence.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intelligence](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/intelligence)

[http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intelligence](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intelligence)

[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/intelligence](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/intelligence)

<comment><USER30> All of these definitions are rather lousy and not particularly useful (except possibly for 1.b in Webster, but it needs clarification)

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it's all the dictionaries that are wrong... surely you must be right.

<comment><USER30> Right.. How dare I question your sacred Anglo-Saxon dictionaries, which are the authoritative source of All Truth. Anathema.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: New Neural Network Primitives? - <AUTHOR> Hey Hackernews,
I'm completing my ms in cs and also am doing some ml research, and somebody recently told me an investigation into neural network primitives, I.e different cell types like LSTM cells, would be an interesting PhD dissertation.
What are some seminal papers and work done in examining different neural network primitives and cell types? Also has there been any work in treating neural networks as hypergraphs? <comment><USER2> Look into capsules, also [1-3] can give you an idea of what can be explored. Evolving NNs [4] would probably benefit the most from NN primitives research. IMO, the best source of ideas for novel primitives is neocortex [5, 6].

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03955](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03955) [2] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.11168](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.11168) [3] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02961](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02961) [4] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-018-0006-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-018-0006-z) [5] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00161](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00161) [6] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00083](https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00083)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is enormously helpful, thank you!</comment></comment>


A Way off the Ranch (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/way-ranch <comment><USER2> The article describes the why (Facebook etc.) and what (FreedomBox[1]) but I don't think it's immediately clear how "cheap, small, low-power plug servers" circumvent tracking unless you already knew about FreedomBox.

From the FAQ[2]: "FreedomBox allows you to provide services to your family and friends (files and bookmarks hosting, remote storage, chat, wiki/blog), to protect your private life against advertising companies while surfing on the net, and to stay anonymous on the network."

[1]: [https://freedombox.org/](https://freedombox.org/)

[2]: [https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/QuestionsAndAnswers#What_...](https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/QuestionsAndAnswers#What_does_it_do_.3F)</comment>


The Latest Kentucky Riot Is Part of a Long, Destructive Sports Tradition - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-latest-kentucky-riot-is-part-of-a-long-destructive-sports-tradition/ <comment><USER2> As a longtime sports fan I have never once felt any desire to set fire to anything or generally cause property damage when my teams lose. I know people who point to this sort of behavior and act as though it's endemic. When you take large groups of people and add alcohol, a small subset of them will want to destroy things. It's human nature. Sports usually has large groups of people and usually has alcohol nearby. For these people it's a very convenient catalyst but I don't believe it is the root cause.</comment>


RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/rip-google-pagerank-retrospective-244286 <comment><USER3> I feel like no matter how Google or any other search engine ranked pages, SEO firms would be there to game the system and make a mess of the web. Making Pagerank visible to people with one particular toolbar does seem like a fairly major misstep on Google's part. The majority of the people who would really care about that are the kind of people you shouldn't be encouraging.

One of the obnoxious things about SEO is that if one person is doing it everybody has to do it. It's not necessarily enough to simply offer a better product at a better price. Luckily Google does try to reduce the effect of SEO. I notice for instance that StackExchange almost always beats out Expert Sex Change links these days.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure how much of it is that google tries to reduce the effects of SEO, or that they just keep moving the target. Every time they change their algorithm it seems like a bunch of sites who were practicing one strategy disappear, and before long a new strategy is discovered causing new sites to rise to the top.

Ultimately Google's ability to quantify both quality and relevance will converge on _actual_ quality and relevance. In other words, the way to "game" the system and practice SEO will be to create a site that is actually relevant with high-quality content. But we're not there yet, and who knows how close we'll actually get.

<comment><USER5> This is definitely what is happening. I work in SEO and follow the industry closely, but the SEO industry itself is a giant echo-chamber. But essentially what it boils down to is:

\- make something your audience wants

\- make content your audience wants to share

\- "earn" links by creating useful resources & content

Essentially, the way to get great rankings in Google is by actually having a website that people want to go to and is relevant to their interests. Trying to game the system is much harder these days, and honestly for the most part isn't worth the effort.

<comment><USER6> Well a bad part of it is that "something your audience wants" has proven to be "awful buzzfeed clickbait titles", so human shittiness trumps value in this way

<comment><USER7> You may just be working with a poor definition of value if you consider giving people what they want to be at odds with it.

<comment><USER6> Is heroin a very high value product?

<comment><USER8> Absolutely, judging from what people are willing to pay.

Arguments against heroin are invariably rooted in negative externalities. I have never heard anyone argue that there is no demand for heroin.

<comment><USER6> The "value" of heroin comes from it tricking your brain with chemicals that you need it and will die otherwise. I WANT IT GIVE IT TO ME == value, without follow up questions? Similarly buzz feed tricks you with catchy titles. Oh look the end result was I clicked it, therefore it has tremendous value without further analysis.

<comment><USER7> "Tricking your brain with chemicals" is a ridiculous way to dismiss something that people like. Every desire or want we have is the result of chemicals.

<comment><USER9> Our desires and neurochemistry evolved in a very different environment from today. I think it's fair to say that a chemical that mimics an evolved desire/reward system without actually fulfilling the need that system serves is "tricking" the brain.

<comment><USER7> Because of our different environment, none of those "needs" really exist though. Being part of modern society basically guarantees we stay fed and sheltered. Very few people are trying to procreate as much as they can. Some of us are choosing not to at all.

We eat high calorie foods because our brain tells us its good even though we're a little fat. We fuck each other because our brain tells us its good, while we use contraceptives. We go out and try to be successful because our brain tells us it's good even though our base needs are already provided for.

Sure you can say that we're tricking our brain, but only so far as you can say everything we've done since we discovered conscious thought and developed agency is tricking the brain. Hence why I find pointing it out in a specific case a little silly. "Hey you're only doing that because it feels good!" Well yeah duh? Same reason any of us are doing anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really crummy title. PageRank is the reason we HAVE a search as powerful as Google, and largely the reason the web is as good as it is today.

Raise your hand if you want to go back to AltaVista/AskJeeves.

<comment><USER11> I actually miss old AltaVista I always could find what I was looking for with their boolean expressions. Yes, perhaps it was harder to some, but it worked well.

With Google, I feel like I have to fight with it. If I'm searching for something obscure or perhaps a word that is misspelled on purpose it thinks it knows better what I'm looking for. It also often returns searches without the word that I searched for and often ignores when I prefix it with + or put in quotes.

<comment><USER12> If you quote a word or phrase, it will be treated as required, just like "+" used to work with AltaVista.

You can also click on the "Search tools" button and select "Verbatim" from the "All results" dropdown. This causes the search to only perform exact matches: [https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/142143?hl=en](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/142143?hl=en).

And yes, I also spend a lot of time fighting Google's inferral rules. I remember doing a search for Biber at one point, and it asked if I meant Bieber instead.

<comment><USER13> Not quite: I've sometimes put "CentOS 7" in quotes when looking for something CentOS 7-specific, only to have Google return pages and pages of results for older versions of CentOS. These days it's almost a crapshoot whether or not I'll get relevant results from Google.

<comment><USER14> As lobster_johnson says, verbatim mode is key. I wish it was the default - I'm always using specific phrases the google re-interprets into something more popular. A big pet peeve given my line of work: I know autocad is more popular, but _please_ google, I really do want results about draftsight!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I never knew PageRank scores were visible, and I never used the web before Google.

But this article is so far up its own ass.

> Ever gotten a crappy email asking for links? Blame PageRank.

Never mind that web rings were around long before Google and used the same tactics.

> Ever had garbage comments with link drops? Blame PageRank.

There are way more reasons spammers exist than just boosting PageRank.

The author is acting like a) Google had less of an influence on the web before PageRank was public information and b) the web was somehow better both back then and before Google existed. There will always be people who want to game search engine results, regardless of how much information they know about their own standing, and the web was pretty much un-navigable pre-Google.

<comment><USER16> > Never mind that web rings were around long before Google and used the same > tactics.

If you "never used the web before Google," how would you know this? I suppose you might have read about it. I did use the web before Google, and I don't remember web rings back then. There simply was no reason to do so, before Google started ranking pages based on the links.

I do remember lots of BS meta keywords.

<comment><USER17> I used the web before Google too, and I remember them.

Also, I do consider reading about something to be a valid way to learn about things you didn't directly witness, so it's strange that you would discount this.

> There simply was no reason to do so, before Google started ranking pages > based on the links.

Webrings were useful for people who found a website interesting and wanted to visit other similar websites. The incentive to be in a webring was that you could get more exposure. Not to mention that the 90s were full of trendy things like this: "under construction" gifs, "valid HTML" buttons, etc. Web rings were one of those "clever" things you could add to a website.

<comment> james-skemp Having had pages in Webrings way back when, it was definitely about exposure, but I think it was also an extension of groups (Yahoo! Groups being the biggest I can recall, but I think there was also OneGroup (?) - it maybe had purple in it's logo?).

With Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire, and the like it was fairly easy to get a really basic page up, typically with a bunch of links to pages that you checked on regularly, and might be of interest to others.

At least that's how it was for me. I think the rings I was part of included Terragen, POV-Ray, and Star Wars, and I can recall getting a couple people started with basic (and of course very ugly, with that same star field background for the SW-related pages) for people that I met in the various groups.

Good times.

EDIT: And don't forget the 'made with notepad' icons. Or recommending 800x600 or 1024x768 as the best resolution to view a site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I first learned about this after starting [https://neocities.org](https://neocities.org) and seeing a bunch of really garbage pages that were full of random text that linked to a derpie site somewhere.

We get pagerank SEO spam from time to time, and it's pretty annoying. I have the tools to take care of it within 5 minutes every day, but I do worry that if we grow to a certain point it may no longer be possible for me to handle the problem alone.

I'm sure many other sites have similar problems with comment spam, and I'd love to hear some advice on how to deal with this from sites that have the same problem.

Right now our main lines of defense are a recaptcha (our last remaining third party embed, ironically sending user data to Google I'd rather not send to deal with a problem Google largely created), and a daily update of an IP blacklist we get from Stop Forum Spam.

I tried to do some Bayesian classification, but didn't make much progress unfortunately. And nofollow really isn't an option for me, as it would involve me manipulating other people's web sites and I don't want to do that.

<comment><USER19> This might be very heavy handed, but could you build something that added rel="nofollow" to all links on user pages until trust is verified?

<comment><USER18> I've pondered doing something like this, but it kindof crosses a line I'm not yet comfortable crossing (changing users' HTML without them noticing), and would require a way for me to convert from/back when the user edits their site. Technically it's pretty difficult: HTML/XML parsers like Nokogiri like to "fix" html when they parse it, so they can do a lot of changes to your document you didn't want to make.

I've said I would decide to cross it if I ever ran into a major security issue, but so far that hasn't been the case. I've even decided against web page auto optimization ala things like ngx_pagespeed for this reason.

One place I do cross this line is for our [https://neocities.org/browse](https://neocities.org/browse) gallery in order to deal with iframe issues (I make the A links on a site open a new tab with a javascript inject), but that passive model won't work for pagerank issues because it uses the browser to make the changes.

And honestly, let's be real, even if I put on nofollow and Google stops using pagerank, they're probably still going to do it because they're basically shady pagerank scam artists in the end, fooling gullible people into sending them money. They don't understand they're feeding into a botnet meets army of underpaid pagerank spammers, and it's basically impossible to fix this with education.

It would be excellent if Google gave me an API to report pagerank spam. For all the money they've made on pagerank, it would be nice if they could defer some of that money into helping us deal with this, and would definitely help to improve their search results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hah.

Back in 2003 I wrote:

"PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked. The act of Google trying to "understand" the web caused the web itself to change."

[http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000751.html](http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000751.html)

It's amazing that it took this long.

<comment><USER21> You might be interested in Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law)

A friend mention that recently to me and it was really eye-opening. Once you start looking, the pattern is everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The real problem is that Google was losing the link spam war until very, very recently. It was trivial to game them up until 2010, and only really became relatively difficult somewhere around 2012.

And, the solution looks roughly like "weigh established authority to the point where it trumps relevance".

</comment><comment><USER23> Google has dealt with web spam by replacing it with their own ads. Search for "credit card" or "divorce lawyer". Everything above the fold is a Google ad. Air travel searches bring up Google's own travel info. No amount of SEO can compete with that.

(I still offer Ad Limiter if you'd like to trim Google's in-house search result content down to a manageable level.)

<comment><USER24> > Google has dealt with web spam by replacing it with their own ads.

This.

Google are not interesting in protecting us web users from SEO, but themselves (or more specifically their core ad business). After all why would you pay for Google ads if you could just get free traffic from Google via SEO techniques? So SEO is the logical competitor to Google.

<comment><USER25> I also believe this. Almost all updates to the search engine seem to be to drive SEOs towards adwords. It's not about protecting users, it's about profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Better title: "How SEO Asshattery Turned The Web To Shit"

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone here think we need a search engine which lets us maintain large blacklists of websites. For example, if I am searching for information about airbnb, I do not want news websites like NY Times, WSJ, Forbes, Business standard etc to show up in the results at all. Any business related question on India is invariable dominated by Times of India and other newspapers. With google, its becoming increasingly difficult to filter out websites.

Edit: Changed "on airbnb" to "about airbnb"

<comment><USER28> Check out chrome extension "Personal Blocklist"

<comment><USER29> I had used that extension for ages to prevent w3schools from appearing in my search results, but removed it when I eventually got tired of seeing search results jump around.

(Because the extension works on a JS level, it needs to wait for the results page to load before it can strip out what you want to hide. Too often I'd see the results page begin drawing quickly, with a couple w3schools results at the top of the results, and my eyes would scan down to find the first non-w3schools result; then a second later, in the middle of finding the first such result, the w3schools results would be removed, and the non-w3schools result which I'd finally found and was about to click on has moved.)

<comment><USER30> I used that extension for the same reason you did and like you I removed it because it was annoying. What I started doing instead when on a new computer is I'll include _mdn_ in the query when it's web related so i'd search _js history mdn_ and such and after a while Google learns that I value results from mdn highly so when I search even without saying _mdn_ , those results come up high in the results. For example when I now search for just _js history_ , the first result for me is "Manipulating the browser history - <USER2> APIs | MDN".

The Google search bubble is powerful and can be harmful in some ways but once you learn of its existence and are careful about what results you click, it will work for you in a great way.

I am still uncomfortable with the amount of stuff Google knows about me. I sometimes try ddg or even yahoo or bing but they're not as good.

<comment><USER29> To achieve the same result, I've now got a browser shortcut (aka omnibox search engine) for an "I Feel Lucky" Google search restricted to the MDN site for whatever keywords I'm looking for. This means I type "mdn js history" and Chrome picks up the "mdn" prefix to use my shortcut, expands it into [https://www.google.com/search?q=site:developer.mozilla.org+j...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:developer.mozilla.org+js+history&btnI) and I end up on the same page you mention. (The "feeling lucky" search isn't perfect, but it's usually good enough for me...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "How gravity ruined flying"? PageRank looking at links isn't some arbitrary thing, it's a source of information every good search will take into account.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think it's odd to perceive the end of a relative transparent metric - whatever relevant or not it has been - as a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER33> Indeed, one of the things I don't like (hate?) Google about is the SEO and PageRanking BS. All pages in the last 10 years are starting to look the same. All pages are becoming what Google wants them to be.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just because I can't see the score doesn't mean I'm not going to what I can to increase it.

</comment><comment><USER35> What difference does it make if the semantics of PageRank are still in place for determining position in the search index, but it is just hidden?

You can still infer the approximate rank of a page by where it places relative to other pages, when searching for relevant keywords. Someone wanting to place ahead of the competition still has a function for measuring how well they are doing in SEO.

</comment><comment><USER36> Another way to look at this is a blow to openness and a concentration of Google's power. The PageRank scores still exist, but they now will be known only by (some? all?) Google employees.

Therefore, the data is no longer open and power is now more concentrated: Those who know someone at Google can find out their page rank score; the 99.999...% of the rest of the world cannot.

</comment><comment><USER37> I just lost a ton of respect for Danny Sullivan.

Every system can be gamed. Every system where money can be made WILL be gamed. It's a predator-prey relationship.

The way this article was written made it sound like Google Search was a bane when it arrived. And sure, it was the worst Search Engine at the time, except for all the others that had been invented up until then.

<comment><USER38> You're reading things into this that I didn't write, I'd say.

When Google arrived, it was a huge advance in search. It offered an obvious improvement in relevancy, which is why so many serious searchers switched to it from AltaVista and then users of other search engines moved over.

Nothing I wrote suggested that Google was bad, didn't offer great relevancy or anything like that.

My story is about what happened when Google revealed PageRank scores for pages across the web. That fueled an explosion in link buying and selling. It allowed people to attach Google's own score to a page, a value if you will that Google itself placed on those pages, which made it easier to then assign a monetary value.

In turn, that lead to many of the woes that the web as a whole has to deal with today: understanding how to use nofollow to block links, to stay in Google's good graces. Spam mail pitching links, trying to buy links. Link spam

I'm sure we'd have had some of this even without PageRank scores ever having been revealed. Perhaps it would have been as much, even. After all, it was well-known that Google was leveraging links as part of its ranking algorithm. The market would have been there.

But I do think that releasing the PageRank scores accelerated market faster than it would have done otherwise.

Back to the gaming -- again, it feels like you're reading stuff I didn't actually write. I'm certainly not saying that Google itself introduced the ability for people to try and game search engines. That was happening even before Google existed. Of course, Google initially thought it was immune. In 1998, Sergey Brin even said this on a panel that I moderated:

"Google's slightly different in that we never ban anybody, and we don't really believe in spam in the sense that there's no mechanism for removing people from our index. The fundamental concept we use is, you know, is this page relevant to the search? And, you know, some pages which, you know, they may almost never appear on the search results page because they're just not that relevant."

Google soon changed its view and introduced extensive spam fighting efforts. Those were inevitable. As you say, it was prey that would attract predators. And even with the link selling, it has done an admirable job fighting off the spam. It's not always perfect, but it's a very robust system.

Nevertheless, the spam attempts will continue regardless if Google actually blunts them because, as the article explained, there's simply so many people with misconceptions that they'll chase anything anyway. PageRank scores fed into this, that's all.

<comment><USER37> Thanks for the response.

> My story is about what happened when Google revealed PageRank scores for > pages across the web.

And I'd assert that people already knew if they were number one in the search results, or not. And that metric continues to be the main thing they pay attention to. Well, that and their traffic numbers from Google. My point being, we all knew Google was using links to rank, and the search result rank was visible just by doing a search on a few of your synonyms and adjacent terms, market, brands, trademarks, etc. The battle over spamming links was inevitible, whether they revealed PageRank numbers or not.

> I'm sure we'd have had some of this even without PageRank scores ever having > been revealed. Perhaps it would have been as much, even. After all, it was > well-known that Google was leveraging links as part of its ranking > algorithm. The market would have been there. But I do think that releasing > the PageRank scores accelerated market faster than it would have done > otherwise.

I can agree with that, but that's not the tone that I get from your article, at all.

The tone I get is that Google created this monster, visible PageRank score, and those crappy emails, link drops, and need to use nofollow, are uniquely Google's fault, and it all could have been prevented if they hadn't ruined the web in 2000 by making it visible.

> Google initially thought it was immune.

Your quote from Sergey doesn't imply to me that he thought they were immune. It tells me that they mechanism they intended to use to fight spam would be to reduce its rank so low that "...they may almost never appear on the search results page..."

You may think that's a pedantic difference, but I see it as a meaningful difference. You can't claim that we're all immune to measles, mumps, polio... But we've reduced the incidence to an incredibly low level, here in the Western world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Reading this makes one realize how easy it was for Groovy's Tiobe ranking to jump from #82 to #17 in just 12 months, as shown at [http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=Groovy](http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=Groovy) , and the other spikes in its history.

<comment><USER40> Are you saying that someone working on Groovy is doing "link optimisation" in order to get higher on Google thus Tiobe?

<comment><USER39> According to [http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=programminglanguages_d...](http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=programminglanguages_definition) , Google is by far the largest component of Tiobe's calculation: Google.com: 7.69%, Google.co.in: 5.54%, Google.co.jp: 4.92%, Google.de: 3.69%, Google.co.uk: 3.08%, Google.com.br: 2.77%, Google.fr: 2.46%, Google.it: 2.15%, Google.es: 1.85%, Google.com.mx: 1.54%, Google.ca: 0.92%, Google.co.id: 0.62%.

It seems the most likely reason for Groovy's strange behavior on Tiobe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> PageRank is still visible today?!? Where? (I am just curious, I thought it's not visible anywhere for years)

<comment><USER22> [http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?client=navclient- auto&c...](http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?client=navclient- auto&ch=751310424703&features=Rank&q=info:http://news.ycombinator.com&num=100&filter=0)

The value of "ch" is a checksum you have to precalculate.</comment></comment>


Importing Actual 3D Models from Google Maps - <AUTHOR> https://blog.exppad.com/article/importing-actual-3d-models-from-google-maps <comment><USER2> There's an attempt at reverse engineering the protobuf here: [https://github.com/retroplasma/earth-reverse- engineering/blo...](https://github.com/retroplasma/earth-reverse- engineering/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, I was not aware of it, I'll have a look at this :) I updated the README of my tool to link to this: [https://github.com/eliemichel/MapsModelsImporter](https://github.com/eliemichel/MapsModelsImporter)</comment></comment>