The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-surprising-problem-of-too-much-talent/ <comment><USER2> I always roll my eyes internally when I hear people talking about how they only hire A-players.

The way I see it, you want A-players in certain positions where their performance and influence drives the company forward - "moves the needle", to use a clichė. You _don 't_ want A-players in mundane/support roles because they'll end up getting frustrated and likely become disruptive (the exception is when you put an A-player in a support role so she can learn the ropes/basics before you move them to the role you actually want them to fulfil).

<comment><USER3> If someone becomes disruptive when they get frustrated, then they are not an A player.

Part of being an "A player" is to be professional, including in their communications and behavior. IF they are having problems with their role, speaking to someone about it and getting the problems resolved is appropriate, not disrupting the business.

<comment><USER4> That's not the definition of an A player, that's the definition of a unicorn. There are very few talented people who remain productive if they don't feel they're valued / doing valuable work.

<comment><USER3> I said nothing about remaining productive. Of course productivity suffers along with morale. That is not the same thing as actively disrupting a business. Quitting and/or slacking off are common reactions. But if someone gets passive-aggressive and/or otherwise actively disrupts a team? That makes them toxic. And no matter how talented they are, a toxic individual is not an A player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most businesses that pride themselves on hiring only the "best" are of course not doing so, but merely using such phrases to boost the morale of the mediocre body of wage slaves they have on staff. If they truly hired the best, their salaries would be the best. The harsh reality is that most people are close to average. And that's OK. You don't need to be a genius to churn out the next incremental update of a SAP IDOC.

<comment><USER6> I really don't agree with this. I think a lot of people can be exceptional alone, if they direct their efforts towards that, more so if they have coaches, support structures, etc. But it similarly requires a kind of intelligence and the same levels of a different kind of effort, to work effectively with a group.

It's a kind of collective intelligence, almost like trusting your arm to always throw the ball in the way you have practiced, you have to trust that your team mates will be able to compute or think or calculate in ways that you simply don't have time for, or don't know how to know how to do, because there aren't 10 yous, and even if there were 10 yous, you'd probably be blinding yourself half the time you try to lead yourself.

The difference between a good director / lead / manager and a bad one is stark.

I don't think it's hard to turn a single person into a star. I think it's really hard to keep people motivated on a unified goal, keep all those people thinking about what needs to be built, while none of that thinking contributes to egocentricity, passive aggressiveness, defeatist attitudes, etc. There is so much conflict that creates tiny little cracks through an otherwise solid foundation of skill, but all those cracks can add up. Do you spend that five minutes solving a problem with your SAP coworker or do you spend that five minutes grabbing coffee and grumbling to yourself about what an idiot that guy is? For people who are aware of the cracks and go out of their way to fix them, instead of stampeding over others with their supposed skill and intelligence. I mean I would be an idiot if I ignored all the times my ego got in the way of my success, and I would likewise be an idiot if I ignored the fact that I must be aware of all of my social inadequacies, and I must be willing to continue to learn from them, if I actually want to succeed.

Working in teams is completely different from working alone, and working in teams is more than being able to do your part. Working in teams while programming is being psychologically extremely close to all your teammates, whether you realize it or not. There's some stuff that you just have to be able to sync together with and then discard, without even really realizing what happened. Half of the things people wind up arguing about, those things wind up being hilarious when looked at in retrospect, if they are overcome. It's hard to even understand how one could both simultaneously suppress and ignore their social emotional connectivity while acting as though it does not exist, when it clearly does. We like to think we are these efficient, effective, calculating machines, but we aren't. This is a big reason as to why work experience is more valuable than intellectual or educational experience.

I really think the mediocrity of development occurs with otherwise extremely intelligent people, people capable of solving huge variation of technical and conceptual problems, it comes from those people continuously thinking that it is their intellectual and technical skill that needs to be constantly improved and updated, rather than confronting how much time is literally wasted on poor communication, difficulty resolving social conflicts, and rolling your eyes at every motivational, team building activity. You either like the people you work with or you don't, and some people are unfortunately very dependent on jobs they chose out of necessity, rather than jobs they chose because those jobs and those people make that person happy. Whether you cut people some slack when they need it, you apologize when you make mistakes, or you ignore those things and act like a mini tyrant, these things make big differences. It's often not when we are at are best that determines the success of a team, but much of the time when we are at our worst.

<comment><USER7> This reminds me of the argument from Chasing Stars by Groysberg. It is very difficult to separate an individual's performance from that of their environment. A lot of factors come together, including individual skill, to influence someone's performance. If you take that same individual and dump them into another environment it is very difficult (or impossible) to reproduce comparable levels of performance. Applying this to teams, there are a lot of factors necessary for them to generate a high level of performance that goes way beyond the individual talent/knowledge of each developer. That's why its necessary to hiring needs to be about more than just knowledge but personality and cultural fit as well. Then you need to look at all the support structures that you mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can see how this can be true. I've seen a team of "star" programmers fail massively on what should be a simple project. They over designed, they used all the new and latest, framework, language, plus spent all their time reinventing the wheel. They forgot about time/budget constraint.

Meanwhile, a much less talented scrappy team, just figures, "Hey!, we ain't so smart so we are going to get all the help we can" No new technology, just small established libraries and simple design, KISS, and what do you know? they shipped!

You can load up your sales team with talented sales agent and see massive output, they don't need much team interaction. But a dev team? If they are super smart, the problem better be tough or they will invent new problems to solve.

<comment><USER9> ...and Agile is mostly about restraining enthusiasm to small, testable efforts. Which causes much moaning and misery among the most talented developers.

What we need is, some kind of process that sorts the ambitious parts to the talented/experienced devs, and the rote jobs to the new folks. Let the horses run!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure how this applies to football (soccer). As far as I can see, Barcelona have the most superstar team in world football, and are winning everything. The next two teams with the most superstars (Madrid and Munich) are winning everything else.

Also, isn't this impossible, too? A team that wins everything over a long period will by default have their players considered superstars.

<comment><USER11> Barcelona has an undeniable king above all superstars, Messi. This give perspective to all others, Neymar and Suarez just know Messi is better. And the last batch of BCN superstars were formed by stars whose play style was inherently teamworking: Iniesta and Xavi were midfielders whose biggest strenght was prepare the game for others.

And Barcelona have always had its share of average, but impressively dedicated team players, like Puyol, Piquet and others.

Real Madrid isnt the same and do not have the same performance as well.

<comment><USER7> Puyol was by no means an average player and neither is Pique. These are players who were/are considered to be among the top five center backs in the world at their peak. Isn't that by definition a superstar?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find the conclusions made by this paper to be dubious. Perhaps the reporting is weak and did not properly delve into the methodology used by the authors of the paper to draw their conclusions. But based on the article, couldn't it be possible that teams that have the higher percentage of superstars opted to load up on star players and therefore had less resources to flesh out the rest of the team. What would be the point of having let's say five or six world class players in soccer if you can only recruit below average players for the rest of the positions.

</comment><comment><USER12> It would have been much more 'surprising' if the research had shown the opposite to be true.

<comment><USER13> Why? Is it generally a known fact that you don't want a team of superstars?

<comment><USER14> I thought it was.

From sports teams to software engineers, people with exceptional talent also seem to have exceptionally large egos to match. A team of normal people can usually tolerate & use one of them to their advantage, but a whole team of super-egos? What would happen if __everyone__ working on the linux kernel had the skill & personality of Linus Torvalds? There's no way that team would function. :)

<comment><USER15> You are confusing talent and personality. You can be untalented with a difficult personality and vice versa.

<comment><USER16> He's not confusing talent and personality. He clearly wrote that there seems to be a correlation between the two: "people with exceptional talent also seem to have exceptionally large egos to match"

<comment><USER17> Yes, but I don't agree with that hypothesis. From what I've seen, ego tends to peak around the "above average" range where they are trying to convince everyone (including themselves?) that they are extraordinary.

The truly amazing people demonstrate it in action not words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would argue that this is deeply correlated with the reward structure. If you only have rockstars but they are rewarded must strongly due to individual accomplishments they will tend to lower the team play, if instead the rewarding is more calibrated twards team achievements, then there will be much less worriying on who is getting credit for what. Thus increasing collaboration. (I am assuming that the entire team is mainly A players and Bs are filtered out, thus there isn't too much variance in individual productivity)

</comment><comment><USER19> You want to gather the most talented and hardest working individuals with the combined skills that you need that can also work well together as a group. Sometimes skill trumps group dynamic and sometimes group dynamic trumps skill. Your job when assembling a team is to make those judgement calls. It's not difficult to understand.

<comment><USER17> One of the interesting corollaries to this is that the right person for a role at one point in a company / product is not necessarily the right person at a future time.

For example, the rogue / maverick type can be very important at early stages. They drive innovation, take risks, and get absurd amounts of things done. But, later that same risk taking can become absolutely destructive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is a good reason why millions of years of evolution has created a minority of "talented" people. Societies need super-talented people and leaders (these are often not the same people, btw), but it also needs legions of pedestrian followers. Troops. Individually, each troop is not very impressive, but as a collective, _they_ are what makes a vision happen.

Here's a recent example of an overtalented hornet's nest: [https://www.trumid.com/Team.aspx](https://www.trumid.com/Team.aspx)

I give them 6 months.

<comment><USER4> Evolution doesn't optimize for the species, though.

<comment><USER20> I'm not talented enough to understand what that means... please elaborate.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, sorry, that was confusing. I guess I was just trying to point out that for behavior to arise that is beneficial to a species (like the eusocial behavior in bees), it has to increase fitness for everybody, otherwise that kind of behavior would never evolve. If you want to draw the parallel to creatives vs. workers in the modern workplace, I don't really see that analog or metaphor (or literal interpretation for that matter) working very well – one half gets all the money and recognition, the other half gets zilch.

It just seems very unlikely to me to posit that human talent is variable because of genetic specialization within the species. It's much more likely that talent is influenced by thousands of genes, and lots of different combinations lead to lots of different outcomes. Not a biologist though.

<comment><USER20> I agree with this. However if you accept that the _circumstances_ of a society's existence are highly variable too, that each of the many different genetic outcomes you speak of is relevant only under very specific circumstances, then we could have a situation where a "talent" is viable at some times, and not viable at others. In that case, we have an evolutionary interest in maintaining many different talents, many of which will remain latent/unused, in our multi-individual society, until circumstances wish?

Furthermore, and unrelated, it is also my personal opinion that highly "talented" people in the definition that society places on the word, often have deficiencies in terms of other prerequisites for success. It's a bit of a zero-sum game in some ways. I happen to be an excellent mathematician, but I massively envy the (far less inspired) discipline that one of my colleagues has allowing him to be much more effective in the day to day grind of business. Basically, I'm highly talented by most definitions, more than him (again by the societal definition) but I'm not very effective at making money in a world where that seems to be the scoreboard. Try as I might, I just do not have his work ethic. I just cannot do it. So who has the talent? Him or me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me a comment about the last World Cup: Argentina had Messi, Portugal had Cristiano Ronaldo, Brazil had Neymar, Germany had a team.

</comment><comment><USER22> "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." \--Newton</comment>


So Far, So Good - <AUTHOR> http://hintjens.com/blog:119 <comment><USER2> Backstory: Pieter Hintjens, Belgian software developer and Free Software advocate, diagnosed with terminal cancer, continues to muse on chemo, technology, life, and what odd stray bits of writing do or don't go viral.

And he's chanced upon a Chinese manufacturing practice, Shanzhai, which incorporates the anti-patent concepts he's long fought for.

(My Pocket entry for this blog post has a curious set of associated tags.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember the chemo and it was exactly like this. 5 days of shit every 2 weeks, and a slow tumble up the next 9 days, waiting for the new round.

I got the luck to have a "gentle" lymphoma, but the chemo is hard nonetheless. My 2 last rounds, I couldn't bend down to grab a pan without sweating, starting to tremble and having difficulty breathing.

Let's hope that he gets all the love he needs to pass through gently.

<comment><USER4> Chemo is fucking miserable. Somehow, pure stubborn cussedness and youth, I guess, I willed myself to play high school basketball through my 12 weeks of lymphoma treatments, even driving two hours, getting shot full of nitrogen mustard, riding another two hours home and then scoring ten points with eight rebounds in a game that night. How the hell, I don't know... Should have gotten ESPN on the phone...

Running windsprints at 51% of normal red blood cell count is probably the stupidest, most painful, thing I've ever done.

Best of luck to him

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is sort of a queer feeling about watching somebody blog their final days. I can't quite describe it--not quite macabre, not quite humorous, not quite amazement.

It's sort of one of those synthetic colors, the ones that you never see in reality but recognize instantly if exposed to them.

<comment><USER6> I consider it inspiring, but tinged with sadness. I don't know Pieter Hintjens, but I still hate to see that he's dying, knowing what it will mean for his wife, children, etc. And he's "one of us" as well. But, the flip-side is that he's displaying great courage and spirit in choosing to continue doing the thing that matter to him, apparently right up to the end. There's something to be said for nobility in the face of death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I'll describe it briefly. Every firm in this culture publishes their Bills > of Materials, and design specs. Any other firm may take these, reuse them, > improve them. They must also share back.

> This is why you can buy the same product from a slew of firms on Amazon or > Ebay. This is why the price drops smoothly, as predicted by Cost Gravity. No > patents and trade secrets to slow down the spread of knowledge. This is why > Chinese products haven't just caught up to western designs. They are way, > way ahead. My Xiaomi is built of 95% Chinese components. This is why Apple > will die.

So who pays for capex like _the exact thing Apple is known for_ , protracted and high-quality R&D?

<comment><USER8> No one, because in this dystopian vision of zero returns for innovation, the copycats win until they have nothing left to copy, at which point, we're still using something like an Mi5 (which is visibly an iPhone clone) in 10 years. And as for software, it will be rootkits and hacks all the way down.

My friend who manufactures random stuff in Thailand told me that he has a _one month_ lead on China when his company releases a new product, after which copies flood the markets. His competition's labor costs are effectively negligible, and that's compared to _Thai_ labor. Obviously, this is an unsustainable condition, and one day it will be the Chinese who are scrambling to stay ahead of Bangladesh or whoever.

<comment><USER9> Interesting, as nominal GDP per capita is higher in China than in Thailand.

<comment><USER8> Yes, things are changing already. Thai average wages are about $400/month, and China are about $300/month. My anecdote is a few years old, and the Baht has fallen vs. the Yuan since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like very much the fact that this isn't a post about how is his health, but a post about Chinese economy and a distraction-free writing device.

</comment><comment><USER11> We are born, we suffer a lot, then we die. Make sure to live a life well worth that suffering, and everything else will follow.

</comment><comment><USER12> The belgian interview he talks about if you're interested: [http://www.rtl.be/rtltvi/video/581260.aspx](http://www.rtl.be/rtltvi/video/581260.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER13> I hope you get better soon. And thank you for all your contributions: your books, the talk on the one weird trick, the software.

<comment><USER2> I can understand the sentiments. And I'm not Pieter.

That said, at times the realisation is that you _are_ going to die, that parts of it are going to be awful. And yet there is so much more in life you wish you could have accomplished.

So you do what you can, with the time you have left.

That doesn't just apply to Pieter. It applies to all of us.

So, no, he's not going to get better. He's going to die, fairly soon. But he'll use some of the better parts of tech to do parts of what he'd hoped to do. And I wish him every comfort while that happens, and appreciate his insights.

The Shanzai concept was new to me, but resonates deeply with ideas I've had myself, and is something I've wondered "well, why can't that happen?"

It turns out it is happening.

<comment><USER14> If you want to read some more about Shanzai, Bunnie's blog is excellent. You can start here: [http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284](http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284)

[http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=147](http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=147) is also interesting.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Queued up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So you do chemo to prolong or for a chance to fix or both ?

Have you tried marijuana to easen the pain?

<comment><USER16> I didn't downvote your comment, but if you want to understand why it's happening, might be helpful to read this:

[http://hintjens.com/blog:115](http://hintjens.com/blog:115)

<comment><USER15> I asked because I was curious: "I've told mine they can try whatever experimental chemotherapy they wish to." from his post.

<comment><USER16> Interesting, because he also said this about conversations people have with dying people...

""There's this alternative cure people are talking about," Which gets the ban hammer from me, and happily I only got a few of those. Even if there was a miracle cure, the cost and stress (to others) of seeking it is such a selfish and disproportionate act. With, as we know, lottery-style chances of success. We live, we die."

Perhaps this reaction is somewhat dependant on the circumstances surrounding it (general mood, how it's suggested, etc...).

<comment><USER17> I think he means "alternative" in the sense of "healing crystals doused in snake oil" and not "experimental chemotherapy"

<comment><USER18> Yes, and I think his motivation for enduring the experimental chemo is to produce data for science, rather than any hope of personal benefit.

Enlightened dude, staring right back into the eye of death without seeming to flinch.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's the real environmental cost of electric cars? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22001356 <comment><AUTHOR> It's always seemed crazy to me that just because electric cars are non- polluting, people forget that dangling on the other end of that charging cable is probably a coal-fired power station.

I've never seen figures on this before but it's nice to finally see something quantifying that. This study found: "For a European average power generation mix, and if you use your car for 150,000km, you could hope for a 25% improvement [in global warming impact] relative to a gasoline car"

and also points out that: "some cars make almost double the impact on global warming as conventional cars. This is mostly because of the raw materials and energy needed to build the lithium-ion batteries."

I'd love to see more data around this. I'm not anti-electric but it does seem we could apply our efforts, natural resources and budgets more effectively to other places, like loft insulation.

<comment><USER2> > It's always seemed crazy to me that just because electric cars are non- > polluting, people forget that dangling on the other end of that charging > cable is probably a coal-fired power station.

I don't think that's crazy at all. Think of it as "refactoring" the environmental burden. First you move the energy generation from individual cars to a central energy source. If the energy source (coal in this case) is terrible you won't immediately get a big benefit. However, you have separated the environmental impact of energy generation from combustion motors to a central power plant. So now when you build an infrastructure of clean sources of power: nuclear, geothermal, wind, solar all your cars get the benefit automatically. This is good design. Separation of concerns!

The fact that we're burning coal in this day and age is crazy, of course. Especially given that nuclear power plants are being shut down in favor of coal. Environmental policy isn't exactly rational, but highly politicized issues never are.

<comment><USER3> > This is good design. Separation of concerns!

I'm not convinced that this is necessarily true for environmental policy. Imagine, for example, how much people would care about their waste footprint if they had to _keep_ all the trash that would otherwise go into an ocean.

Once we have no idea anymore where the power in our cars comes from, and no visible pollution in the street that we know is caused by cars, won't the search for a better power source slow down a lot?

"Not in my neighbourhood" etc... :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aside from the fact that EV are plugged into dirty power sources, lithium in their batteries is a huge problem as well: [1] [2].

The reality is that we know how to build efficient charging systems, and we can even build some efficient power sources, such as wind turbines, nuclear reactors, and even solar panels. The problem is that we don't have a good way to store all this energy so that we can make a vehicle go. A compressed air vehicle [3] might be a better design than a lithium battery one, but it's certainly more dangerous. Other batteries just don't seem to measure up to lithium in terms of charge/discharge cycles and/or energy density [4].

The best we can hope for is a better energy storage system than what we've had up to now. Ideally, something that's clean to manufacture, recyclable, efficient, and long-lasting, but that's been the battery pipe dream. After all, our current cars still use the lead/acid batteries which have not changed much since they entered production in 1881, aside from the invention of a sealed version in the 1970s.

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/us-lithium- analysi...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/us-lithium-analysis- idUSTRE54O2CP20090525)

[2] [http://junkscience.com/2012/08/09/rare-earth-mining-in- china...](http://junkscience.com/2012/08/09/rare-earth-mining-in-china-comes- at-a-heavy-cost-for-local-villages/)

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_car>

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery#Table_of_r...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery#Table_of_rechargeable_battery_types)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think there's no doubt in anyone's mind that electric cars themselves are reliant on the grid, and if its a coal burning station then obviously you're burning coal to drive. I hope that as greener energy forms such as solar and wind catch on we'll be able to really reduce our carbon footprints. While we as consumers can make a personal change on our end and go electric/hybrid it's really up to govs to help make the grid cleaner with legislation and regulation. It's kind of sad that individuals can't go all the way but I want to be optimistic about this. Maybe combining your own solar panels + electric car can some day in the near future get us where we'd want to be?

<comment><USER6> Gasoline cars are reliant on the grid (of petrol stations), unless you can refine and pump oil yourself.

Eletric cars are only reliant on electricity. Availablity of eletricity from the grid is much better than gasoline from petrol stations, and even if power goes out you can charge your car from your solar panels or any other means you can find to generate electricity, of which there are plenty. Gyms could probably generate plenty of miles just from obese people on crosstrainers.

All in all, a move to electric cars and renewable power sources will _decentralize_ energy supply and make us less reliant on the grid (and all the failed states that supply oil).

<comment><USER7> Indeed, I think it's neat to consider that the electric grid could eventually end up being _more distributed_ than the petrol grid.

Petrol has to be drilled from wherever the fossils happened to be compressed, transported to wherever the closest port is, pipelined to wherever it's convenient to have a refinery, trucked to gas stations, pumped into your car. It's a very top-down hierarchy.

Electricity can be obtained from wherever the solar, wind, gas-powered- generator, nuclear-generator, geothermal sources are (hint: just about anywhere), put onto a fault-tolerant grid, and "pumped into cars" anywhere we've run copper.

Gas wins on storage capacity/convenience, but that's about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am no fan of conspiracy theories, but I truly believe that some oil corporation or related investors _might_ have had their influence on this article. Media is an easy source to manipulate people and BBC does it really well (They have a very good history of writing up biased articles in favor of/against certain companies/industries). I wait for the day when some anonymous source like Wikileaks publishes a link on how corrupt these fucking media organizations are from top to bottom. Really.

<comment><USER7> IMO, the article doesn't appear well-written enough to have been a commissioned piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the promise is in the future. Right now electric cars might not be as eco-friendly as you'd expect, but once they've become popular, recycling techniques for the batteries will improve, and we can easily switch the generator of the electricity from coal to something like nuclear power to cut back on emissions, the car won't care. When you're driving a gasoline car though, you're basically stuck with gas.

<comment><USER10> It seems like the electric car will be important in normalizing the grid as solar and wind projects expand. The hard part will be convincing people that their batteries do not need to be full all of the time, and making cars intelligent enough to ensure that the batteries are full when they need to be.

<comment><USER7> > The hard part will be convincing people that their batteries do not need to > be full all of the time...

This is the hard part not because people are stupid, but because their needs and wants, in aggregate, are complex.

My wife is an extremely efficient commuter. She grew up on a farm where they had a "bi-weekly trip-into-town". As a consequence, she doesn't go anywhere without having her route figured out and optimized, traveling salesman style. But she's the exception. The rule is people who spontaneously change their minds about where they want to go in their cars in the next 6 hours.

The reason gasoline wins is not because it's more efficient, but because it _augments_ people's behaviors instead of trying to _alter_ them.

That being said, electric vehicles are certainly able, today, to positively augment the driving habits of people who are near charging infrastructure or who regularly drive less than 50 miles/day.

<comment><USER10> I wasn't suggesting stupidity, just that people tend to think about the worst possible situations when presented with new technologies.

It is handy that the aforementioned sources of power start to diminish as people are also settling in for the day and are less apt to use their car. You are certainly not going to be driving while you are sleeping, for instance, which is a great time for the car to give back to the grid for a while, as needed, before charging back up for the morning. However, the idea that your car isn't juiced up for that late night emergency that happens, maybe, once in your life is a concern many, including myself, will have.

I don't think a car with appropriate learning systems would need to get in the way of your normal life here, but knowing you have a car available for those rare emergencies is a comfort blanket many will realize they have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd prefer to drive my bicycle on a street with electric cars, rather than on a street with gasoline cars.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think since 2010 fuel consumption has declined a lot even though weight has increased. So when manufacturers decrease weight, combustion cars will become even more environment friendly.

For example: a big Audi nowadays can do 20-30 km/l. When losing a lot of weight it could even do more. Losing a lot of engine power maybe even more (there is hardly any need to go faster than 160 km/h).

Edit: wow, reading a little into it: in 1899 a electric car was the first to break the 100 km/h barier.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car>

</comment><comment><USER13> And the alternative is to keep using ICE automobiles? Our very existence impacts the "environment". We're either using up a finite amount of oil, or a finite amount of materials to make electronics. This argument against electric cars makes no sense.

[http://greenmonk.net/2010/01/07/what-if-we-create-a- better-w...](http://greenmonk.net/2010/01/07/what-if-we-create-a-better-world- for-nothing/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes and no.

No technology is going to be a cut and dried solution to all our environmental problems. None. Period. Not even Mr. Fusion.

Ultimately the question is whether or not electric cars are an important stepping stone along the line to a future where more environmental problems are solved or significantly ameliorated compared to today. I think the answer to that question is probably yes, even with the extremely flawed electric vehicles of today (although with enough evidence I might be convinced otherwise). However, we very much do need to keep in mind that this is at best a baby step, and the work remaining outweighs the work that's been done by a huge amount.

</comment><comment><USER15> Elon musk claims that even if you take the same source fuel and burn it into stationary power plants, you're still better off. If you burn natural gas in a modern general electric gas turbine, you'll get about 60% efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine, you get about 20% efficiency. So electric cars 'make sense' if this logic is valid.

<http://youtu.be/IgKWPdJWuBQ?t=59s> I summarized at 59 seconds of this youtube clip you can see his exact claim. Is his claim logically/mathematically sound?^

</comment><comment><USER16> The key number to look at in these "well to wheel" type holistic studies in the assumed lifetime of the car. In this study they used 150,000km, which is about 94,000 miles. That seems low to me. Most cars manufactured in the 1990s could last a lot longer than that, and cars are made even more reliably now.

This matters because the payoff for an EV improves with every mile driven. They are very energy-intensive to manufacture, but more efficient to operate. In addition, the EV's efficiency can be "upgraded" over time as the mix of electricity sources improves.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have a mind-bending question (at least it makes me wonder)

I think it does not matter which energy storage unit we consume right now. Eventually all of them will be consumed. Renewable energy? nope it is not really renewable, it is just another energy storage unit, just renews faster than oil, because it stores less energy. Ultimately the only energy source we have is the sun. What will happen when our daily consumption rate becomes larger than the amount sun can suppl?

<comment><USER18> You might find this interesting <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)>

Total worldwide energy consumption (2008) 10^19

Total energy from the sun that strikes earth each year 10^24

Total energy output from the sun each year 10^34

<comment><USER19> How much of that 10^24 is required to power earth's ecosystem though? Not that this is relevant now, but I could see it becoming relevant when/if we move towards leeching 10^21 of that energy for human needs in a hundred years - which isn't really much in global terms. Mankind might need to move towards a level 2 civilization earlier than some people imagine. That or we figure out large scale fusion energy.

<comment><USER20> I doubt we get to the point where we start taking too much light for plants to survive any time soon, and the heat will end up here anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the most environmentally friendly option is to just avoid buying a new car.

</comment><comment><USER22> Electric cars are a form of self-denial. We think we're doing the environment a favor when in reality we're terrified of a future without cars.

<comment><USER23> Not true. We can still have electric cars almost in perpetuity if the source of energy is the Sun... the current untapped carbon-neutral energy producing byproducts (hydro, wind, waves); we can also use the Moon (tidal hydro); the Earth's molten core (geothermal). et al.

Progress (as someone said upthread) is refactoring away from internal combustion engines that only operate by burning stored fossil fuels, to engines that operate by storing electrical energy... then we can start to spend the next couple of decades innovating on the electrical production problem and find a way to bend physics and the abundant energy in the system to our advantage.

(and I say all this as a bit of a doom and gloom cynic) OK, admittedly, we make batteries from finite, rare-earth batteries. That's ultimately a problem.

<comment><USER24> You forget that batteries can be recycled.</comment></comment></comment>


Good designer shops (in India)? - <AUTHOR>

I have been working on a couple of product ideas and I know my web/UI design skills suck. I am looking for recommendations for a good design team that would translate my wireframes into good looking web pages and would actually give me HTML/CSS/JS. Please recommend if you have worked with any. <comment><USER2> <http://hackerstreet.in/item?id=1394>

</comment><comment><USER3> Checkout <http://www.uberflock.com>. I have worked with them for some of the mobile apps we developed and they are awesome. My contact is in my profile, I can make an intro if you need one.

</comment><comment><USER4> im a UI/UX designer. do you need one specifically in India?</comment>


Georgia Tech Start-up accelerator 2nd cohort open for applications - <AUTHOR> http://flashpoint.gatech.edu/join/

<comment><AUTHOR> You can learn more about Flashpoint here:

<http://flashpoint.gatech.edu/about/faqs/>

Some recent press around the first cohort:

[http://mashable.com/2012/01/27/flashpoint-demo- entrepreneurs...](http://mashable.com/2012/01/27/flashpoint-demo- entrepreneurs/)

[http://www.xconomy.com/new-york/2012/01/19/georgia- startups-...](http://www.xconomy.com/new-york/2012/01/19/georgia-startups- have-new-york-on-their-minds-at-flashpoint-demo-day/?single_page=true)

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/georgia-techs-flashpoint- ac...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/georgia-techs-flashpoint-accelerator- graduates-its-first-class-of-startups/)

We participated in the first cohort and believe tremendous value was gained during the process. Feel free to ask any questions in this thread.</comment>


Froebel's Gifts - <AUTHOR> https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/froebels-gifts/ <comment><USER2> I had doubts listening to this episode - for something as intractable as the artistic/architectural zeitgeist of modernism, could we really attribute as much cause-and-effect to Froebel's invention of kindergarten as Roman Mars seems to? Yet seeing the images of Froebel's exercises side-by-side with architects' and artists' work convinced me. The resemblances between the Gifts and some of these sketches are really uncanny.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah, so that's why they were selling a few of the Gifts at Gordon House (a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian home in Oregon). Wright cherished the Gifts he got from his mother, saying "The smooth cardboard triangles and maple-wood blocks were most important. All are in my fingers to this day."

</comment><comment><USER4> Are Froebel's theories still taught in education degrees? Are his ideas still valid? If I have kids, should I buy them a set of Froebel's gifts and take them through some of the teaching (perhaps without the infant sized desks with a grid)?

</comment><comment><USER5> As always a great story. The part about Milton Bradley mass producing and eventually exploiting Froebel's gifts will stick with me.

</comment><comment><USER6> I never thought a podcast host from half around the word would utter the words "Friedrich Fröbel" and "Bad Blankenburg" (a small town I live close to). That was quite a surprise. I had no idea his school of thought had even spread across the pond.</comment>


Today's dominant approach to A.I. has not worked out - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/opinion/artificial-intelligence-challenges.html <comment><USER2> I feel like this article would be warranted if ML results had stalled and not achieved anything impressive in a few years. But we had AlphaZero recently, and Duplex is pretty impressive. There's no indication that cool new stuff isn't forthcoming in the near future. It's entirely possible that the current tradition will prove to not be up to the task of building an AGI by itself, and we'll need to invent new techniques. But in the absence of better ideas, continuing to iterate on ML and neural techniques seems like a good approach.

<comment><USER3> Duplex is a demo right?

If AlphaZero (which doesn't impact users directly) and Duplex (which isn't released yet) are the best recent examples I can understand why there's negative press appearing.

<comment><USER4> Duplex's underlying text-to-speech technology research (WaveNet) has produced several papers and is now in public beta. It represents a huge advance in text-to-speech fidelity, using a remarkably straightforward algorithm.

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03499.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.03499.pdf)

[https://www.isca- speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/pdfs/14...](https://www.isca- speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/pdfs/1452.PDF)

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05884.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05884.pdf)

[https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/](https://cloud.google.com/text-to- speech/)

<comment><USER3> The first paper is almost 2 years old, and text-to-speech seems to be a relatively small component of Duplex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first quote that came to my mind when I read this was Frederick Jelinek's

"Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up".

Hi NYT writers, "language is infinitely complex" and "statistical approach to ML isn't working. Let's replace it with logic/rules based AI" don't belong in the same article.

<comment><USER6> At the same time, the shallow "understanding" of state of the art NLP methods are still not what we're looking for. As we blow through records, we need to carefully state our shortcomings so that we can look for the next step.

It's critical to ask how we're supposed to get to something better.

Or does it not concern you that these methods work by modeling words by their context, not their content?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a topsy turvy argument, ignoring the abject failure of the old school AI approaches in the Chomsky and MIT tradition and the stunning success of ML statistical approaches. One wonders how little background research the NYT did before they chose these authors.

<comment><USER8> Stunning success in creating Hal 9000s or image classifiers? Because traditional AI was aiming for generalized intelligence and not just success in narrow domains. Minsky's critique of modern AI (or rather the entire history of the field so far) is the lack of progress on common sense.

So an ML model can learn to recognize cat pictures better than humans. Great, but what does it know about cats beyond being able to correctly pick out pictures with them in it?

<comment><USER9> I strongly dislike the phrase "common sense". I have yet to encounter even one example of "common sense" which accurately represents the world.

"Things fall when you let go of them" «Except flying things, things already on the ground, and probably other examples too.» "But that's not what I meant, _it's common sense that's not what I meant_." «Then it's a tautology, things that fall when you let go of them, fall when you let go of them. The real rule (or rather, good enough at our scale) is Newtonian mechanics.»

Or similar conversations about being in two places at once.

When it comes to cats, what does common sense tell you — What cats do? How cats respond to things? How they interact physically with their environment? That's all statistically learnable.

<comment><USER10> >> What cats do? How cats respond to things? How they interact physically with their environment? That's all statistically learnable.

Not at all. At least not in practice and certainly not for any significant subset of the things that "cats do" or the ways they "respond to things".

You can certainly collect some examples of all the behaviours you describe above, but there are so many of them you are never going to have enough to model a cat's behaviour with anything like significant accuracy.

<comment><USER9> > never going to have enough

"Hey Siri show me cat videos"

"Here are some videos I found of 'cat' on the web:" «Link to YouTube page saying "About 79,900,000 results"»

<comment><USER10> The parent discusses:

>> What cats do? How cats respond to things? How they interact physically with their environment?

Not "how does a cat look on youtube".

<comment><USER9> You're the second person who's tried to correct my interpretation of my own posts this week. What's that quote about losing grandparents? :)

Anyhow, my point was that there _is_ plenty of data about _the sort of cat behaviour which humans collectively find notable_.

<comment><USER10> I see what you mean- you're saying that you can find 79mil cat videos on youtube, so you have 79 million examples of cat behaviours.

That might sound like a lot - but it's still not nearly enough to model a cat's behaviour. To convince yourself that this is the case, subtract 79 million from infinity. The number remaining is the number of cat behaviours that a model trained on 79 million youtube videos would never have seen and therefore not know how to deal with.

See, the point is not how much data you have- it's how much data you're missing. If the amount of data you have is a tiny part of the whole, then you can't model the whole very well.

It's already hard enough to train an image classifier to recognise still images (video frames) of cats. You're proposing to train some kind of model (it wouldn't be a classifier anymore) to recognise -and reason about- not only the likeness of a cat, but the relation of a cat with its environment; with _arbitrary_ environments and arbitrary entities in those environments. And the cat is interacting with those arbitrary entities in the arbitrary environments in arbitrary ways.

Seriously, you're looking at an extravagantly large number that nothing we have right now can handle.

What _is_ the quote about grandfathers? ~.^

<comment><USER9> The quote is "to lose one is unfortunate, to lose two looks like carelessness." One person misunderstanding me I can ignore, two in the same way in a short window is definitely a sign I communicated poorly.

Why do you believe there is infinite cat behaviour? Why would they evolve that?

Even if they did, the point of learning is to reduce a probability distribution from "everything is equally likely, from this cat pawing at a toy to pushing a pen in exactly the right way to forge my signature, from hunting for a mouse to mugging an old lady for a voting card and using it to cast a fraudulent vote in her name for the Natural Law Party at the next election" so the probably distribution — your expectations — fits in a finite brain and matches all one has seen (70 million videos only need to be 36 seconds on average to be a lifetime of nothing but cats).

That being the case, all one really needs to do for a _"common sense" understanding of cats_ is _the set of things human are not surprised by cats doing_.

As I said before, I don't like the phrase "common sense" because it's such a bad model for reality. That being the case, it doesn't matter what a cat would do when, say, elected governor of a small town — _common sense_ , right or wrong, would say "eat, sleep, meow" or similar. Probably varies by person, given how many complain that "people just don't have any common sense these days".

Edit: why do you think it's hard to train a classifier to recognise cats? Google did that the unnecessarily hard way six years ago, now we have GANs that imagine into existence cat pictures, as a student project to help apply for a PhD: [https://ajolicoeur.wordpress.com/cats/](https://ajolicoeur.wordpress.com/cats/)

<comment><USER10> >> Why do you believe there is infinite cat behaviour? Why would they evolve that?

An infinity of behaviours is not a distinct ability that has evolved to fulfill some purpose. Rather, it's the result of the animal interacting with its environment. The number of possible such interactions is infinite - or, well, _most likely_ infinite.

An infinite number of combinations can arise from very simple processes- for example, an automaton that generates strings in the aⁿbⁿ grammar (n a's followed by n b's) can go on for ever. There is no reason to assume that a complex mind in a complex environment will ever run out of combinations of mind-states and world-states. Accordingly, there is no reason to believe we will ever be able to collect examples of all those combinations, and represent them in computer memory.

Edit: I'm not talking about a cat being elected governor here. Just ordinary real-world behaviours, like all the ways a cat may chase a mouse, say. Try to observe a cat and systematise its behaviour and see how welll you can do. Then try to do it with a computer.

With a computer, it should be easier, right?

* * * *

I wouldn't say that the point of _learning_ is to reduce infinity to something manageable. I think it's more like animal minds, like ours, have some kind of ability to pick out what is relevant to a learning task from the infinity of available experiences (incidentally, that's the subject of my PhD thesis :).

However, even as our minds are able to perform this one simple trick, we have no clue how we do it and can therefore not yet reproduce it with our machines. The result is the current state of the art in machine learning: data hungry algorithms that require loads and loads of computing power to reach top performance. This reliance on large datasets and compute limits progress: so far we've seen results only in situations were there is sufficient data and computing power and always in restricted domains (cat videos, vs cats in the wild). In problems where either there is not enough data, or the data is not sufficient because the domain is too large and too unconstrained, like natural language or modelling individual behaviour, progress has been much slower.

In short, modern machine learning substitutes quantity for quality, which has proven successful in the short term but looks to be self-limiting in the long run (even before the time when we're all dead). Eventually, we'll need to find an alternative or progress will stall.

* * * *

>> Edit: why do you think it's hard to train a classifier to recognise cats?

Yep, that's a good example of what I'm talking about.

The model in the link was trained on 9304 examples and it shows- you can see the smudges and deformation in the high-res image (and the last one, sent by another person). I can't find the original dataset, but the results look very homogeneous, so they're basically just reproducing the training examples faithfully without generalising well- in other words, overfitting. Which makes sense: 9304 examples are maybe OK for a school project etc, but nowhere near enough for a real-world application.

Not that I can see a real-world application for generating faces of cats, but the point is that if you just want to train a small model to see how this sort of thing works, then you can certainly do it with a few examples; but if you want something useful, that approaches state-of-the-art performance then you need access to a lot more data and a lot more computing power.

I think you're underestimating how hard it is to make machine learning algorithms work well. It is worth reading announcements in the lay press and claims in scientific papers with a critical, even strongly skeptical attitude. Just because Google says that deep learning is the bees knees, don't just accept it as fact. Try to repeat their feats on your own. See how far you get.

I'm assuming you haven't otherwise you wouldn't be asking that question :)

<comment><USER9> This is getting too long and detailed to use my mobile to keep replying in as much detail as it deserves. :)

I get the impression that either (1) you have a _very_ different definition of "common sense" to me, or (2) you are no longer talking about it. Does this seem like a fair representation? If so, can you explicitly describe what you mean by "common sense"?

As for reproducing results: limited experience of simple things only. Full time job has gone from software to full-time carer for parent with Alzheimer's, so I don't have time for anything more complex than e.g. {train scikit-learn to read from scratch, then read all the digits in Shakuntala Devi's number, then calculating the answer to her famous question} and timing it as faster than the human visual system takes to go from a number appearing to conscious awareness of that.

You know, fun toy examples for whiteboard interviews.

Mainly I'm keeping up to date with the "Two Minute Papers" YouTube channel. Hopefully I'll be able to apply to _start_ a PhD when my family can take over care duties for me…

Quick edit: I think your definition of intelligence is equivalent to mine. Please elaborate why you disagree?

<comment><USER10> Sorry for the comment size! I use HN from a PC always and I tend to forget that's probably not the most common use.

You're right, I'm not talking about common sense. It was another commenter who mentioned it. I interjected that it's very hard to collect enough examples of "What cats do? How cats respond to things? How they interact physically with their environment?" to build a good model of cat behaviour.

I'll be honest and say I have no idea what is "common sense" in the context of cat behaviour. Not to mention that it's very difficult to agree on a definition of "common sense". Despite that, I think you'll find there's general agreement that machine learning models don't have anything that could be recognised as "common sense". One reason for that is that it's extremely difficult to collect training examples of "common sense", exactly because it's so very hard to define it.

Apologies if that was too much of a sidetrack from what you wanted to discuss!

I actually don't have a definition of intelligence :) I'm working off an assumption that there is such a thing, that it's one process or one set of processes and that we may be able to reproduce it on computers, at some point in the future. But not in my life time.

The great advantage of doing a PhD is that you have plenty of time to read up and experiment to your heart's content. I hope it all goes well for you and you can soon start your studies.

I'm sorry to hear about yoru parent. You both have my sympathy. Hang in there.

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I think we're basically in agreement then, as all of my responses were predicted on the incorrect belief that you were using common sense as an argument against AI.

I certainly agree that humans can accurately extrapolate — for example what a cat is likely to do next — with what seems like less data than any current machine learning system.

I suspect have my suspicions why, but to keep this short I'll only say "catastrophic forgetting", and separately that the normal approach in ML seems to be like teaching kids "by asking them random questions from the set of things we expect them to know at 18", to almost-quote one of the podcasts I listen to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When the Google defenders brought up Apple's original iPhone demo that only worked if you followed the happy path and compared it to this staged demo, I found the comparison wanting.

The iPhone crashing when you did X was a simple debugging exercise. Making a chatbot that can understand the variety of human speech, translate it to text, understand it and respond intelligently is a much harder problem.

<comment><USER12> Not particularly. Speech to text is mostly solved at this point. When constrained to a small set of domains, so is intent recognition and canonicalization. That's certainly the hardest part, but we are still able to do it within specific domains.

Once you have a canonical request, response has been solved for a while. really I think it's more likely that you consider the problems where you understand how one would debug to be simpler ;)

<comment><USER13> > Not particularly. Speech to text is mostly solved at this point

There's still no software capable to understand me properly in French right now, speech to text sill has a long way to go.

<comment><USER14> Is that just a question of expending the resources on that domain, though? Untold man-hours and compute cycles have been spent on making English speech- to-text mostly work. I would be surprised if even a fraction of that energy has been devoted to other languages.

<comment><USER13> The issue with French and why it works so badly is the assumptions people made when designing the speech-to-text by starting from English. The core issue is that spoken French and written French are two completely and widely separate languages, with a much much greater difference than English. So the current approach to try to use books and mapping words to them isn't just working well.

What I mean is the current approach is pretty limited.

<comment><USER15> > _The core issue is that spoken French and written French are two completely > and widely separate languages_

In what way?

<comment><USER13> Written french is largely codified by the french academy which is very conservative (so the written language did not evolve much in the past 100 years) whereas the spoken language evolved independently. It's a bit like slangs in English if you want but to a whole new level, the two parts of the language don't have much in common nowadays. Tenses, pronouns, grammar, sentence construction and words are different.

<comment><USER15> It's hard for me to believe the they have diverged that much. I'd expect that the one would drastically influence the other. But then I don't know French.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The crux of the problem is that the field of artificial intelligence has not > come to grips with the infinite complexity of language.

I stopped reading at that point. The field came to grips with the infinite complexity of language since before it was called "artificial intelligence."

<comment><USER17> Machine translation is getting pretty good, simply from crunching on enough text. The complexity of language looks finite. Translation between all the European languages works fairly well. Asian languages, not so much yet.

Strong AI still doesn't work. "Common sense" remains hard. Unstructured manipulation is still not very good. But legged locomotion is much better, as is vision processing.

Combining machine learning and geometry has promise. Look at how Waymo does automatic driving. (Not Uber or Tesla; they have no clue how to do it safely, as their crash record demonstrates.)

We're way ahead of where things were in the "AI winter", 1985-2005. This time the startups make money and do useful things. Progress will continue because there is revenue. AI used to be tiny - about 20-50 people at MIT, CMU, and Stanford. Now it's at least a thousand times bigger. Progress will be made by brute force.

(Me: MSCS, Stanford, 1985. I met most of the greats of classical logic-based AI. Trying to hammer the real world into predicate calculus just doesn't work. The expert systems guys were in denial big-time about this.)

<comment><USER18> > We're way ahead of where things were in the "AI winter", 1985-2005.

That was the second AI winter. The first AI winter was in the early/mid 70s.

It is not inconceivable that a third AI winter will happen eventually.

<comment><USER19> I think that you've got your timing out there. Money started to flow straight after Gulf War 1 in 1992/3 because several folks had build components of the logic systems that were used for organising the logistics (Tate : HTN's; Winston schedulers - although I am hazy about this) What I am clear about is that there was money to be had for AI research after that.

<comment><USER20> Sorry to drop in here and interrupt off topic, but you recently wrote a great comment that I missed the first time around, and now can't reply to, and don't know how else to get in touch (consider this "moving along"). It's off-topic but at least vaguely AI related. ;)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14983831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14983831)

That is some fascinating stuff I've never heard before. I would love to discuss it more and ask you some questions! Maybe you could make a posting about the Turing Institute or Lighthill Debate? (There's a wikipedia page about Turing but it's kind of dry and lacking of scandal and palace intrigue.)

I worked at the Turing Institute in 1992, and it was an amazing place with many great people, including Arthur van Hoff who developed GoodNeWS/HyperNeWS/HyperLook! Unfortunately I never got the chance to meet Donald Michie (maybe he dropped by but I didn't recognize him), but I know from his reputation what a great guy he was. I did hear a funny story about him:

Donald Michie once overheard his secretary telling someone on the phone how to pronounce his name (in a Scottish accent): "It's Donald, as in Duck, and Michie, as in Mouse." He was so pissed he refused to speak to her for a month! ;)

For what it's worth, that's a great way to remember how his name is pronounced!

When I was there in '92 it was being (mis)run by some upper crust Tory gentleman who specialized in bailing out failing companies. He was so uptight he got pissed off I'd written the address as "North Hangover St." on the white board! Sheez. Instead putting him in charge, they should have just called Old Glory:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno)

I've been writing an article (still in draft) about the work I did at the Turing Institute (HyperLook):

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews- nee-g...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee- goodnews-99f411e58ce4)

Fun times! Anyway sorry to interrupt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Just as you can make infinitely many arithmetic equations by combining a few > mathematical symbols and following a small set of rules, you can make > infinitely many sentences by combining a modest set of words and a modest > set of rules. A genuine, human-level A.I. will need to be able to cope with > all of those possible sentences, not just a small fragment of them.

The issue is less about understanding language and much more about creating models of "the world" through observations, and then applying those models to perform tasks or answer questions.

Parsing language is actually pretty easy; "knowing" how it relates to a generalized model of "the world" is the hard part.

> No matter how much data you have and how many patterns you discern, your > data will never match the creativity of human beings or the fluidity of the > real world.

This is _firmly_ in the Opinion section of the NY Times...

What Google seemed to do with Duplex might seem like a babystep, but it doesn't take much imagination to recognize very real possibility for so-called "genuine, human-level A.I." to -- gradually -- emerge.

<comment><USER22> Uhh, it does. Being able to have a fun date night conversation has little in common with making an appointment for a hair cut. Duplex is a codified set of rules — essentially a set of blanks that need to get filled in and an elegant way of pulling together a bunch of components to do so. That's nothing like free form conversion which requires world knowledge, perspective (gained from experience), personality, creativity, emotional connection, etc etc.

There's nothing new going on in AI vs the machine learning "pragmatic downgrade" of the 90s, just the accuracy is higher.

<comment><USER23> Parsing the language at some level is required for translation beyond simple 1:1 word mapping. Understanding is really a separate task that sits outside of language and would be just as hard with a very limited language designed to be easy to decode.

<comment><USER24> Correct me if I'm wrong – are you saying that one doesn't need to understand something to be able to translate it? Because that'd be a strange argument to make, looking at the state of Google Translate.

<comment><USER25> > looking at the state of Google Translate

last time I checked Google Translate was a seq2seq based model with symbol level embeddings.

The way symbol embeddings are generated doesn't lead to any real understanding of the sentence/ word/ language. It only really leads to understanding what is normally around that symbol in different situations. You could also very easily argue that the seq2seq model doesn't provide understanding, it only learns to encode the general meaning of the sequence in a fixed compressed format.

It's possible to argue that being able to compress a sequence into a fixed length vector requires understanding but I would argue that understanding requires more than just being able to do lossy compression on a sequence. In my view entity modelling and related problems are much closer to achieving some level of understanding. They at least are able to use context to figure out what parts of the sequence have what meaning and the relationship between separate parts of the sequence.

I'd be interested to hear your view of how Google Translate has understanding.

<comment><USER24> I didn't mean to say GT has understanding, quite the opposite ;) I meant to use it as an example of how translating without understanding doesn't go too well in many cases.

I think I might have misunderstood your original comment though, as we seem to mostly be on the same side of the issue. That being said, could you expand on this?:

> the seq2seq model doesn't provide understanding, it only learns to encode > the general meaning of the sequence

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but "encoding the general meaning" sounds a lot like a form of "understanding", and I wouldn't say seq2seq does any of that. (That's getting pretty philosophical though...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It was nice when nerdy news were only written in nerdy magazines read by a minority of people. Nowadays the spotlight is on tech but the coverage is not geeky, it's always opinionated, dystopian and as bad as politics. They ruin the fun before it even begins.

</comment><comment><USER27> This article has some serious problems, as others have already noted. But one point I haven't noticed anyone making is this: the article falls into the trap expressed in the old saw "once it works, it isn't called AI anymore".

That is, AI researchers achieve a powerful result, and as soon as it's achieved, it's immediately (or nearly immediately) dismissed as being an interesting AI result, and the bar is moved forward yet again.

One can almost picture AI researchers as Sisyphus, pushing the rock to the top of the hill, only to have it roll back down on them, over and over and over and over and over and over...

</comment><comment><USER28> if it's working well enough within the constraint, couldn't we just brute force the entirety of human language, thereby removing the constraint at some future point?

<comment><USER29> I feel like there would almost definitely be unexpected difficulties with that approach, possibly fundamental ones. Human language is crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why have it talk to people taking a hair appointment? It is vastly simpler to have autonomous agents on both sides talk to each other.

<comment><USER31> It's simpler to have hundreds of thousands of small businesses, from all walks of life, sign up for a high tech appointment scheduling software?

<comment><USER32> I feel like a large number of businesses already use software for scheduling but it's a matter of having an API that can be exposed to customers that isn't really supported. So it might be easier than you're leading on.

<comment><USER33> A large number of medium to large businesses do. The overwhelming majority of small locally owned businesses don't. They still represent the overwhelming majority of sales.

Furthermore, big companies all implement their own software or purchase a variety of systems, some of which have API's, all have different API's and none have open API's.

A system that can speak, universally, to every Salon (or even say... 60%) is actually considerably less complex than the universal API you're calling "easier".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 700,000,000 years ago to 300,000 years ago: all of nervous system life gets by on "pattern detection" and "curve fitting" (Judea Pearl's term for deep learning).

Homo neanderthalesis or thereabouts to modern day: language, reason, cause and effect.

> Today's dominant approach to A.I. has not worked out.

But "curve fitting" biological neural networks needed 2500 times more architectural exploration and enhancement to get to rudimentary language capacity than rudimentary language architectures needed to achieve all of human knowledge. That suggests we're doing the right thing in growing and enhancing deep neural network architectures now. Evolution suggests the next step to language and reason on the right architecture is comparatively easy.

<comment><USER35> >Evolution suggests the next step to language and reason on the right architecture is comparatively easy.

<Something> suggesting the next step to language and reason is the right path and easy is the rhyming history of AI for sixty years.

"This time it's different."

<comment><USER34> > <Something> suggesting the next step to language and reason is the right > path and easy is the rhyming history of AI for sixty years.

If evolution can be taken as a successful search through the space of what is possible, language and reason are on the path from curve fitting. But calling this "easy" is far from my point. If evolution is any sort of guide, deep neural network architectures are where the real work is needed before language understanding is possible (contra Pearl, Marcus).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why not both? It is like fighting between engineers of digital electronics and analogue electronics. I believe the practical applications should use hybrid approach.

<comment><USER27> _I believe the practical applications should use hybrid approach._

FWIW, I 100% agree with this. At least in the short-term. I think any "real" AGI will use elements of symbolic processing and sub-symbolic processing expressed as probabilistic / statistical pattern matching using something like ANN's.

The question I have is whether or not, in the end, all of what we call "symbolic processing" can eventually be expressed as operations at that ANN level (that is, can the "separate" domains actually be unified)? Given what we know (or think we know) about how the human brain works, I lean towards the answer being "yes", but I don't necessarily think we have to have everything reduced to ANN-level before we can achieve useful AI's. Arguably that last sentence was sill, because we already have "useful" AI, depending on your definitions of "useful" and/or "AI". :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> AGI is overrated we already have humans for that, machines should focus on the types of problems that humans cannot already solve easily or cheaply.

</comment><comment><USER38> Someone sent me this article on IM. My (unedited) response:

nothing worse than someone who both doesn't understand wtf he's talking about _and_ is very critical

either are ok on their own

>> He's wrong then?

well if either author can provide an article from 10-20 years ago, saying "in 10-20 years, we'll invent a single machine that can reach almost human-level translation proficiency, drive a car in complex environments, beat the best human player at logical games including chess and Go, beat the best human player at language/knowledge based games like Jeopardy, hold a lengthy conversation and answer questions, be able to accurately describe and caption images and video, and outperform humans at trading the stock market and detecting fraud but I won't be impressed because all of those things are simple" then it might have some weight

"The dream of artificial intelligence was supposed to be grander than this — to help revolutionize medicine, say, or to produce trustworthy robot helpers for the home."

robots: we already have the vacuum cleaners. Actual flexible domestic work is coming soon, the moment the military gets bored and releases some knowledge and/or people have finished making money from helping amazon pack boxes and starts making money from normal people instead: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY)

medicine: same machines already being used to detect cancer and heart conditions more accurately than humans, as well as folding proteins to create new medicines. Not sure what more he wants..

"If machine learning and big data can't get us any further than a restaurant reservation" because you know, the current state of machine learning has been around for, what, 12 minutes now and we're still stuck on making restaurant reservations. Def time to call it quits and start over

". But in open-ended conversations about complex issues, such hedges will eventually get irritating, if not outright baffling." — weird that it's pretty difficult to get computers to understand a very ambiguous, illogical and inefficient form of communication. Luckily humans are so much smarter than computers that we can easily process 1-billion+ logical inferences a second and talk to them in an efficient and logical way.

>> Okay you've convinced me

but i've only just started

<comment><USER39> Oh, you never ran into Hugo de Garis?

iirc (it was back in 1997 when I heard him talk), he was promising human level "artilects" about 2015, and super-human intelligence by 2025.

The problem that I have observed, is that the popular press always ignores the 100 experts that say, nope, not going to happen, for the one "visionary", who'll promise whatever they want to hear, as long as somebody else is paying for dinner.

<comment><USER40> If de Garis is (still) predicting super-human intelligence in under 10 years, then it sounds like he _is_ impressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "Not worked out"? It seems like it's working pretty well to me. What a silly article.

</comment><comment><USER42> Zombie Searle

</comment><comment><USER43> >The crux of the problem is that the field of artificial intelligence has not come to grips with the infinite complexity of language

Or, put another way, the problem space reality presents is unimaginably large. So large that it took 4 billion years to achieve human level intelligence. That said humans have been working on the AI problem a pretty short period of time and we have made some pretty good strides at reproducing intelligence.

<comment><USER44> You know, it's kind of funny. We have no idea if the current path is trending toward a local optima, or if we're heading toward a global optima.

We are completely aware of the issues of finding a local optima in our AI (especially ML) algorithms, but little thought has been given if our AI evolution has been trending toward one or not. We're pouring vast research reserves along a few pathways, and hoping that our hill climbing leads to a global maxima (or at least a local one sufficiently high as to be 'human level intelligence')

<comment><USER33> > but little thought has been given if our AI evolution has been trending > toward one or not.

Wait, you think people aren't thinking about that all the time? They absolutely are. And there's very little obvious ways to determine if this is a local or global optima. Resources are limited and everyone wants to follow the current best results, because that's necessary for business success.

<comment><USER44> One would expect a competitive advantage, then, in funding research to try something else. Exclusively following the current best results just means equivalency, and provides no competitive edge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Earnest Davis from NYU right? Next bit of news we'll hear is "Yann Lencun starts fist fight with fellow professor"

</comment><comment><USER46> This group does not know what they are talking about. Mark my words here. It's about advanced distance calculations and engineered feature attributes.

</comment><comment><USER46> No it's not. A complete definition of intellect (let alone consciousness) has never been done. When it is then progress will be made.

<comment><USER26> Why would we need that (and why do you think it is even possible)? We didn't have a definition of spacetime until we had one. Our current definitions if intellect and consciousness may be completely off, like the concept of absolute time.</comment></comment>


How Facebook squashed Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2016/how-facebook-squashed-twitter/ <comment><USER2> It always seems odd to me that Twitter and Facebook are directly compared to each other. At least in my experience (as a user of both), they are totally different services that fill totally different needs.

<comment><USER3> The article agues that while they serve different purposes, there is still only so much free time each person has in a day. Both, Twitter and Facebook, are in competition for this free time and from that perspective you can compare them directly.

<comment><USER4> I only have so much money, but Nabisco isn't competing with Intel for my cash except in a coarse, weird and not-very-useful sense. If Twitter and Facebook fulfill different social needs, then they aren't in competition for the same free time.

<comment><USER3> Yes and no. In this case you assume you have enough money to spend on both, but if you are on budget then if you buy expensive intel product then you have less money to spend on Nabisco and vise versa. In this situation instead of money it's time. Twitter and Facebook audiences intersect so they are directly competing for attention. Amount of ads you get exposed to depends on how long you spend on the site. The more time you spend on Facebook = less time you spend on Twitter = less ads Twitter can show you = Twitter make less money.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't Trust Stories - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_stories.html

<comment><USER2> A pretty good list of the "seven types of stories": [http://aglssofwter.blogspot.com/2010/05/seven-types-of- stori...](http://aglssofwter.blogspot.com/2010/05/seven-types-of-stories.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> transcript: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/8w1/transcript_tyler_cowen_on_storie...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/8w1/transcript_tyler_cowen_on_stories/)</comment>


General Motors driverless car program gets $2.3B boost from SoftBank - <AUTHOR> https://news.alphastreet.com/gms-driverless-car-program-gets-2-3-billion-boost-from-softbank/ <comment><USER2> As of posting GM shares are up 11% in premarket trading.

If GM were to be valued like one of those whacky, high flying tech companies, based on the merits of Cruise's future revenue potential, how much do you think it would be worth?</comment>


Android users outraged over Motorola's broken promise - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57526994-94/android-users-outraged-over-motorolas-broken-promise/ <comment><USER2> This is what keeps me from android. I'm sure there are other android phones out there that receive updates but until I do a fair amount of research I won't know for sure. My days of carefully researching device purchases are behind me. I just want to walk into a store, buy a new phone and know for the next 2-3 years I'll get all the latest updates.

EDIT: Android phone recommendations?

<comment><USER3> What keeps me from Android is...

\- The whole fragmentation and apps being made for iPhone first and sometimes never even making it to Android

\- There is no Android store to take my device for a quick free fix or free replacement (Apple has replaced many of my idevices at no cost and done so quickly)

\- A new Android device is released weekly; many cheap inexpensive ones. It just doesn't feel sexy/special to me as there is one iPhone millions lust for and the press and consumers go ape nuts over.

\- The carriers and device manufacturers have a stranglehold on Android. Many Android users are not able to update their 2010 or 2011 Android device to 2012/2013 software as you can choose to do so with the iPhone. Also the device manufacturers create they own UI and add bells whistles. Android does not have one UI/UX to rule them all like iPhone.

With that being said as a long time iPhone owner .. I am annoyed by....

\- Apple's tight control on it's ecosystem .. it indeed stifles innovation. I wish they would allow developers to build onto the built in apps (plug ins) like the camera, maps, alarm clock, facetime and other built in apps.

\- New Maps definitely a step down from Google Maps

Overall I just wish there was only one Android device in which the UI/UX is controlled by Google. That would solve my Android complaints, but Google's M.O. is to be on as many devices as possible and thus Android doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER4> > _New Maps definitely a step down from Google Maps_

I'm tired of this meme. It's grounded in truth as the best memes are, but otherwise mostly it's "much ado" by we technorati, doting on SF and NYC public transportation and using "Google" Maps like a paper map to see what's nearby (campus, neighborhood, etc), and thinking everyone's use case mirrors theirs. It's easy to join this chorus. It's harder to voice disagreement by pointing out the huge usability strides in Apple Maps vs the earlier app. You will be mocked. But...

In most of America, cell coverage is sporadic and slow. Try to pull up where you are on former maps app and you wait ages for tiles to come in. Zoom, wait ages again. Drive or hike in marginal coverage with Apple Maps and the difference is night and day -- Apple Maps seems almost like it is in offline mode. Stats and tests prove it uses a fraction of the data, and holds far more of your map in memory.

In most of America, getting from A to B needs a car. The "Google" Maps didn't do real time turn by turn, much less offer the spoken guidance, glancable visual guidance (and status bar guidance while in other apps) of Apple Maps.

In the rest of the world, the famous public transportation options of Google Maps weren't necessarily available. In Rome, for example, a public transportation search simply returns no public transportation found. Apple opened transit up to local providers, and now cities worldwide are already offering local-grown transit apps that hook in. In this country, professional guidance companies like Navigon have already hooked in with "urban guidance" that can blend car to get into city, walking to get from parking to public transportation, and transit to get around town, in a single route.

Blogs show screens of Apple's 3D view mapping satellite onto 3D models poorly. So it's not Google Earth. For everyman's workaday use, so what? Articles joke about addresses being in BFE instead of downtown. Google Maps does that too, more times than not, unless you're careful to give enough precision in the search terms, and even then it will prefer Queens or Brooklyn to Manhattan for similarly numbered streets in "New York, NY". You have to use "Manhattan" to get the street 2 blocks away.

There's a report issue button, and as users use Apple Maps, the glitches will improve. In the meantime, what's amazing is how much more usable the foundation and architecture of the app and server side data is compared to the old app. This is not a step down, it's a huge step forward that can be readily built upon, and the launch day quirks (that can be found in any mapping app when you know your own area within a data set that covers the planet) simply do not get in the way of the typical user's everyday use.

I'm a mapping hobbyist. Google Maps have gotten almost as good as hand made paper maps from the past, but still have a long way to go to get to the level of a Richard Saul Wurman. Apple Maps already have map usability techniques that offer clearer info with less clutter, and in the months of using the beta test app I rarely had complaints in the greater NYC area other than transit, which has now been even better solved by the whole new class of beautiful and usable third party transit apps. Yet technorati have scared regular users from upgrading for fear of "losing" their Google Maps. That's a huge disservice to the normals who count on us for guidance. (And of course they can add Google Maps back to their home screen. It only works online anyway, why aren't we telling people how to have both?)

Apple upgraded Maps to offer guidance to regular people in flyover country. Of course Apple should be held to task for insufficient debugging of place points, but even aside from the other fantastic features of iOS 6 (eg shared photostreams), friends and family just wanting to drive to work on the best route to avoid traffic should be encouraged upgrade today.

<comment><USER5> Apple maps doesn't have 3D or turn by turn for me. That's because Apple decided go the planned obsolecence route and withhold those features from iPhone 4 owners. So now I have all the downsides of the new maps wih none of he benefits.

<comment><USER4> With Apple, there's usually a usability reason for these decisions. When you get to update, but certain features aren't enabled, I'm not sure that's planned obsolecense. Not releasing ICS for phones launched last year is, but in this iPhone 4 vs 4S situation, looking at what iOS 6 features you do get vs which you don't, there's a common thread that points to something else.

On your device you get iOS 6, but 3D turn by turn NAV is designed to run in parallel (multitasking) with other apps like Mail or Messages. Consider the performance gain of the iPhone 4S vs the iPhone 4 (nearly 2x, see below), and consider how users would react if the background turn by turn nav was causing their foreground apps to freeze.

A hallmark of the iPhone experience is fluidity. It's one of the painfully obvious differences to owners of both OSs (I own a Google Nexus as well). Framerate and responsiveness make the UI feel more tactile and real, connected to your touch and intentions. My _speculation_ is that the processing power needed for the turn by turn could degrade the experience while in other apps, so it was nixed.

<comment><USER4> Forgot the 4S vs 4 performance link: [http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-vs- android...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-vs-android- benchmarks-posted-even-the-galaxy-s-ii-is-getting-smoked-for-now-at-least/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He said it was a resourcing issue, they didn't have the resources to patch every phone and considered every option. Except, it seems... paying for more resources?

I'm just glad to be on a Galaxy Nexus with OTA updates direct from Google. Even then the version I was on was configured not to receive OTA updates as it was a Nexus Samsung ROM not a Nexus Google ROM. It took reflashing the Google image using community tools, something that is mostly not possible for most of the population.

I suppose the only solution is greater awareness of the issue, to increase demand for better support

<comment><USER7> I don't understand the problem. Why can we upgrade our computers' OSes so easily, while it's impossible to do it for phones? Don't they have drivers for all their parts so you can just plug them in the OS's API and have the newer versions just work?

Why does it take so much work?

<comment><USER8> Apparently the driver situation is much different on phones. All the different SoCs need extra drivers, the graphic chips, the display, everything. It's very different on a PC (where you may have upgrade problems as well, if you have hardware that has no drivers for your new OS) and it's especially easy for a Mac.

<comment><USER9> Plus, I think Google made a terrible mistake in the beginning by _not_ asking manufacturers to support the drivers for their phones for 2 years or more. It would've been even better if they convinced them to make all drivers open source, although that might've been a lot harder to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone who was cheated by Motorola should sue them for the price of the phone in small claims court. Motorola might be able to weasel out and win the case depending on the actual language of what they promised. But if enough customers sue them it will create a PR nightmare and major legal expense to the extent that they will be forced to reverse their decision.

<comment><USER11> You might have a case for promissory estoppel if you bought one after they claimed they would upgrade. If you bought one before? Not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You know what

Users can cry me a river.

Motorola has repeatedly broken their promises. This is not the first time a new phone is not upgraded.

I won't touch a Motorola phone, yes, even with Google. I may opt for a Android phone next, but other manufacturers have presented more upgrade options.

Incompetence runs deeply in some organizations

This is a big sore thumb for Android, something that Google should really enforce against the big vendors.

<comment><USER13> Yep. My first thought was "is anyone actually surprised by this?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They are not stuck at all. If they had bought an apple, microsoft or blackberry phone they would have been stuck.

But because they are on an open source android device they have cyanogenmod which is even better than stock and either has or has coming ICS for their model.

This is pretty revolutionary for mobile devices where you no longer are slaved to the manufacturer. Credit to google?

<comment><USER15> This provides that you're a) a nerd, b) comfortable voiding your warranty by rooting the phone and c) that your phone is even popular enough for there to be things like Cyanogenmod to install on it.

Sure, I did that with my HTC Incredible, but I shouldn't have had too and most people won't.

<comment><USER16> You don't need to be a nerd; you only need access to someone you trust who would do it for you. And plenty of folks wait until their warranty runs out before modifying the OS.

<comment><USER17> how long until the updated version of this? <http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/388b/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In May, Google announced the expansion of the Nexus branding to multiple OEM partners simultaneously.

LG has recently shown off a Nexus phone, and one can expect more such announcements.

Nexus now resembles Microsoft's "Signature" branding for craplet-free PCs. All reasonably recent Nexus devices get upgrades directly from Google, much like iOS devices.

Also, not all OEM extensions are evil. Samsung's mobile device management extensions can be very useful in some use cases. If only we could get such extensions a la carte.

</comment><comment><USER19> HTC did the same with their HTC Desire phones. I own a HTC Desire HD and I regret buying an Android phone as the only update I received was 2.3 with their Sense UI crap-ware. I've lost faith in Android ecosystem with early users being denied new features and security updates because they want users to upgrade to newer phones.

<comment><USER20> I have exactly the same experience with my HTC.

I was actually very happy with it when I bought it, for the first few months. The battery life wasn't great but it was tolerable and the UI was simple and responsive.

A few months back I got an update, which I hoped would give me a new version of Android with some extra useful features. Instead all I got was a ton of bloat and crap which made everything harder to use, slower and the battery lasts about 1/2 what it used to. Naturally it doesn't let you turn this crap off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If they advertised this in conjunction with their devices, I imagine consumers would be able to get their consumer protection agency involved because of false advertising.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Soni admitted that the company wasn't quite there yet. But he believes the decision to cut off some upgrades would position the company to meet its future commitments." Bad business practice. Keep this up and you won't have any customers who would want to touch your "future" products. People are not that dumb. Some actually do research on a company's reputation before buying their products and others, well......they just don't forget when they were screwed over.

<comment><USER23> I can only assume he's talking about commitments to vendors or carriers, rather than customers who obviously need to discount anything they may say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm surprised that Motorola isn't facing a class action lawsuit yet.

<comment><USER25> Indeed, that would have a lot more teeth than FTC complaints and threats to boycott.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's really no reason for this to happen with so many excellent community roms. Open source is a give and take. Motorola and others could most likely keep their promises if they started with a community rom and focused on QA.

Also, Android needs a better method of updating the os that is more in line with how apple allows updates through iTunes.

</comment><comment><USER27> It seems like this happens a lot in the Android world. HTC/Verizon recently postponed plans to upgrade the Thunderbolt to ICS: [http://www.gottabemobile.com/2012/09/26/htc-thunderbolt- ice-...](http://www.gottabemobile.com/2012/09/26/htc-thunderbolt-ice-cream- sandwich-situation-is-unacceptable/)

</comment><comment><USER28> The first company to ensure constant android updates for a decent amount of time (ex. 3 years) is sure to make a fortune even if they don't have the best phones.

You may argue that it will still take months to upgrade, but that should be OK given that you're pretty much guaranteed you'll get an upgrade (well, hypothetically speaking).

<comment><USER29> I think the relative poor sales of Nexus devices proves that a fortune isn't really a guarantee if a company ensured updates. The amount of people who care about updates aren't enough to keep a business profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Right now, the only sane expectation to have with most android phones is that the version of Android you buy it with is what you get (unless you are able/willing to install your own mod). That's definitely a downside compared to iOS, but most Android phones are a lot cheaper, which helps compensate for it.

</comment><comment><USER31> "But Android is such an open platform! /QQ" Meanwhile, my iPad 2 just asked me if I wanted to upgrade to iOS6. It did it over wifi, and the whole thing took maybe half an hour.

<comment><USER32> Meanwhile, my iPad 1 will never get iOS 6, even though they were top-of-the- line just 14 months prior to its announcement.

<comment><USER33> But the iPad was released 30 months ago.

<comment><USER34> Released? Are you saying never buy any Apple product except on the week of their launch?

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad> Jobs unveiled the iPad 2 at a March 2, 2011

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Stuff like this is androids biggest issue. My HTC was supposed to get 2.3, but despite their promises they never did that.

<comment><USER36> Same thing for me with HTC ('Hero'.. Really?), and no different now with LG (P990 / Optimus 2x). Update to ICS was promised a year ago. Look at link like this (or any LG source on the net that allows comments) to see angry (and .. childish) people:

<https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=334420639902596>

So - apart from buying a Nexus device (or maybe a Samsung?), it's the same bullshit w/ every manufacturer, I guess.

<comment><USER37> Same story with Samsung. Droid Charge owners are stuck on Gingerbread.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: World Cup 2014 Schedule with world time and multiple languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.timetidy.com

<comment><USER2> Bug reports:

Tried changing to the UK time zone but got an error:

      Not Found

      The requested URL /en/Europe--London was not found on this server.

Why so many timezones anyway? Europe will have only five timezones during the World Cup, not one or two per country. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_time_in_Europe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_time_in_Europe)

Wikipedia disagrees with you on the time of England -v- Italy. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_FIFA_World_Cup#Group_D](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_FIFA_World_Cup#Group_D)

<comment><USER3> Same here, All South East Asia, East Asia: Not Found!

<comment><AUTHOR> I fixed this bug. Thank you. And, it id hard to believe FIFA official World Cup website does not provide match schedules in any South East Asian or East Asian languages!

<comment><USER3> Great, Many thanks</comment></comment></comment></comment>