Technology predictions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/technology-predictions <comment><USER3> This post seems to be a response to some criticism of Sam's opinions in other blog posts. The relevant line is this one

> Superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous.

> \- Many otherwise smart people, 2015

I was among those criticizing Sam's point of view, but not because I think the idea of superhuman machine intelligence is ridiculous. I don't know one way or the other whether we'll achieve it or not, but I don't consider it impossible.

What I, and I believe many others as well, was criticizing was Sam's insistence that the current techniques have the potential to cause such great harm that they need to be regulated and that extreme measures need to be taken to address the possible harm of modern AI and ML techniques.

This type of fear-driven reasoning is wildly out of proportion with the facts, as anyone who does research in the area of is familiar with the research in the area can attest to. Modern machine learning techniques are heuristic methods to find optima in functions over high dimensional spaces. Neural networks and support vector machines produce impressive results on image classification and other well defined problems, but are far from general purpose techniques that can be easily applied to any given problem.

So, the bullet points:

1\. Current ML techniques aren't anywhere near creating general intelligence, nor are there areas of research that appear likely to yield superhuman levels of intelligence in the near to moderate-term future.

2\. This doesn't mean superhuman levels of machine intelligence are impossible, just that we don't have any current methods that are likely to lead to them.

3\. Taking action against an ill-defined, likely phantasmic threat is neither cost effective nor helpful for the progress of AI and ML.

4\. When the people who have real, expert knowledge of something all tell you one thing and the people who have something to gain from getting your attention by promoting sensational opinions and cherry-picked facts tell you something else you should rationally assess their motives and weight that when deciding who's views more closely approximate the truth.

<comment><USER4> Did anyone actually say that superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous? I followed the discussion pretty closely, both on hackernews and the quotes and discussion by prominent researchers, and I don't remember reading that. It's possible that one or two people somewhere in the discussion said the idea was completely ridiculous, but it didn't seem to be the common sentiment. The main dissenting ideas I saw said that it was too far away to be considered as a threat, and that most high profile researchers weren't giving it serious consideration.

I don't doubt that "otherwise smart people" have said that superhuman machine intelligence is completely improbable, but I don't know about the "many" part. There's always someone who will say anything. The closest I've seen to a consensus is disputing the timeframe for AGI/SMI, not the possibility.

For that matter, I don't remember seeing a lot of people say "Computers will never play chess" or "Computers could never drive cars" or "Computers could never compete on Jeopardy". I can't recall one prominent researcher saying any of those things definitively, much less "many" people saying any of them.

It seems like there might be some inserting of quotations into the mouths of others going on here.

<comment><USER5> > I don't know about the "many" part

I'll go there, as has everyone I've talked to about the subject (probably half a dozen or so people). I have not heard a convincing proposal of a path towards a rogue autonomous AI, and I've looked reasonably hard. I'm not sure why otherwise smart people are for some reason just now getting worried about an idea first popularized by The Terminator in 1984.

> Superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous

It's not just prima facie ridiculous, it's ridiculous after thinking about it for some time. We will have problems with enormously powerful machine- augmented individuals and machine-augmented totalitarian organizations (be they corporations or governments) long before we have problems with a completely autonomous out-of-control AI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning." \- You-Know-Who, in 1950.

It's a bit ironic that Sam missed this one quote that would have be very relevant to the post, both in term of the conclusion and the topic at hand (it's hard to predict stuffs) ;). It's interesting to note that the prediction was wrong on both counts: our machine is like a gazillion times more powerful than the quote, and we're doing nowhere near the capability of the prediction.

From the last HN comments on the topic, while it's true that there are certain people who believe that strong AI is impossible, the stance I've got from AI/robotics researchers were that it's just silly to talk about general AI at this point: it's so far away. This post from Karpathy would be one, for example: [http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer- visio...](http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/) .

Because of that, any talk and concern on the topic is a bit silly, especially about regulation of the subject. I mean, can you imagine people in the 1600 trying to figure out how to regulate the air traffic that we have right now? Or should we talk about space travel regulation now? Because seriously, chance are that will happen before we have singularity/ strong AI.

If we're really concern about the danger of strong AI, then I'm more in favored dealing with it by the way of Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Singularity Institute (by making sure that whatever we're researching toward is "Friendly"). Even though I'm also thinking that they're too optimistic. I'm not against immortality in my lifetime though.

Now, a talk about more sophisticated automated/ autonomous system that do _funny_ things (in a good or bad way), or their risk, that's something worth discussing about.

For a fun (philosophical) remark, if the robots are to become our overlords, it may be a bad idea trying to regulate them! Google "Roko's basilisk" for more details

<comment><USER7> The article you linked with ends with

"only way to build computers that can interpret scenes like we do is to allow them to get exposed to all the years of (structured, temporally coherent) experience we have"

This may appear daunting until you realize robots can share memories. Five robots running around for a year is equivalent to one robot running around for five years. Does not Google have 25 cars driving around experiencing the world right now?

I also see skeptics running to computer vision as an example of how far we are from human level AI. Is that just the hardest problem to solve? Is it the most useful problem to solve?

<comment><USER8> Besides sharing, who's to say that the machines couldn't do it faster/more efficiently than humans do and so gain the experience at a faster rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Space travel is utter bilge." \- Dr. Richard van der Reit Wooley, Astronomer Royal, British government, 1956

He was right. He did the math - it's not possible to get any significant payload to Earth orbit with a single-stage vehicle propelled by chemical fuels. With multi-stage rockets, it's possible to put a little mass in orbit with a huge booster. That's just low earth orbit. Going further out is even more expensive. Going to the moon required something the size of a 50-story building to move a payload the size of a SUV. Nobody has bothered for over 40 years now.

<comment><USER10> OTOH orbit is halfway to everywhere.

<comment><USER11> Orbit is precisely halfway to the boundary of a region of space for which double of the to-orbit energy is required to attain. It's barely "anywhere" much less "everywhere."

<comment><USER12> It's a saying, "If you get to LEO, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System", and it reflects the amount of deltaV you need to spend to reach Earth orbit, which happens to be around the half of what you need to complete the trip to another body.

(NOTE: you lose a lot of deltaV fighting air resistance)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sure, "That'll never catch on" is funny in retrospect. But don't forget all the cases of "This is gonna be huge" which flop, too.

Popular Mechanics did a retrospective which is an absolute _circus_ of hits and misses: [http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g462/future-that- neve...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g462/future-that-never-was- next-gen-tech-concepts/)

<comment><USER14> Sam covers this briefly with the prediction near the bottom about bitcoin.

<comment><USER15> Attributed to "Many otherwise smart people."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Like every other technology, AI has risks and benefits. The main issue here, is that we are letting fear dominate the discussion, and that fear is not based on any supporting facts or evidence.

Meanwhile, we are completely missing the discussion we need to have about the _realistic_ , short and medium-term dangers associated with the development of AI. Intelligent automation is about to disrupt economic production and existing power balances, much like software has done not too long ago, with significant social consequences. This is what we need to be talking about, and preparing for. We need to plan for a smooth transition to a post-AI world.

Regulating AI for fear that it may take over makes about as much sense as outlawing space travel for fear of aliens. Can we start having a sane discussion about AI now?

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure why it hasn't come up, but my biggest fear is that a powerful nation will use AI for their own advantage, mostly in the form of propaganda and mass manipulation through Internet. That's at least my fear, and I think that "AI taking over" is complete bullshit. Although, if let loose, AI could even accidentally manipulate humanity into any non-positive state. We know that being easily manipulable is probably the biggest vulnerability of humans (and there's lots of history to prove that).

What comes to regulations, I think it should be required by law that AI identifies themselves as AI on the Internet discussion boards and social networks. I'm not sure how it's possible to enforce this requirement (without needing proof from everyone that you're human). Captchas are already too difficult (only bots get in these days). Popular captchas (such as Google's ReCaptcha) are also centralized, which is dangerous because it gives the captcha-owner a controlling position.

<comment><USER16> _> my biggest fear is that a powerful nation will use AI for their own advantage, mostly in the form of propaganda and mass manipulation through Internet._

Chances are it is already happening. More advanced AI will give governments and corporations the ability to do the same in a much more effective way, and on a larger scale. Large-scale intelligent data mining will make it possible to use people's data to build actionable models of what they think, what they will do next, and how to affect what they think and do. Better than humans could.

It doesn't even need to occur through sockpuppets, so the anti-sockpuppet regulation you propose would be not only highly intrusive but also ineffective. Here's an example: Facebook can manipulate your emotional state by selecting what goes into your newsfeed [1].

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-u...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook- users-emotions-news-feeds)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > X-rays are a hoax. -Lord Kelvin, ca. 1900

Gwern Branwen did a bunch of research to track down this quote, concluding:

> there there is no reliable primary source for any Kelvin quotation running > "X-rays are a hoax"; and there's some reasonable doubt about what he > actually believed in the short interval between reading newspaper articles > (I think we've all had the experience of seeing newspaper articles on some > new scientific proposal which bore scant resemblance to reality!) and > getting Rontgen's paper & photos.

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:William_Thomson#.22X-rays...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:William_Thomson#.22X-rays_will_prove_to_be_a_hoax.22)

</comment><comment><USER19> This post feels childish and passive aggressive. Just make your argument, if you have one.

<comment><USER20> Exactly my thoughts. A hint of condescension and lack of self-awareness - <USER2> camp Sam Altman seems to be a part of ("regulate AI, it's an existential threat to humanity!") is just as much a prediction of the future as anything else. Yet, somehow, he seems to be subtly implying that he's "more" correct.

Marc Andreessen has been relatively level-headed about the topic of AI recently on Twitter, and it would be nice to see other industry figureheads be less emotionally involved and more scientifically rigorous in their assessment of the industry. The debate is devolving into an ego battle (especially with a post like this!), and it's rather unfortunate.

 _Edit:_ Additionally, Altman appears to be primarily attacking a strawman with this article. "Superhuman" intelligence already exists. The emergent intelligence (via technological amplification) of society is, by definition, super-human. What's less realistic is anticipating a _human-like_ artificial intelligence that would, in any way, represent an existential threat to the human race. There are many, many problems with the latter argument. (From a technological, philosophical, economic, and evolutionary perspective.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

<comment><USER22> To be fair, you can't reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic.

<comment><USER23> I agree with your point. Though some ~420 years after Columbus tried you more or less can[1].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal)

<comment><USER24> Interestingly, if you look on the map you'll see that you have to sail SE through the canal to go from Atlantic to Pacific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Super machine intelligence is something that can be controlled with government regulation."

\- Delusional VC

<comment><USER26> No.

A genuinely sympathetic paraphrase might be:

"Machine superintelligence may or may not be controllable. If we do nothing to regulate it, or to prevent horrible outcomes, we will with X > [too big] probability find ourselves doomed.

We need to find a way to reduce X. I propose regulation is at least not likely to be counter-productive, and may be strictly incrementally useful."

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Arthur C Clarke's, "Hazards of Prophecy" is required reading, [http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech- Society/stored/futurists...](http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech- Society/stored/futurists_hazards_of_prophecy.pdf) and frankly should have been referenced in the post and here already. Cite!

<comment><USER28> Thank you for the link, that was a wonderful essay. And you've just reminded me that I've had an old used copy of Clarke's "Profiles of the Future" (the apparent source of this article) sitting on a shelf in the next room unread. Time to change that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How about if we already have created a superhuman AI, that is tricking us humans into believing that it does not exist? And thus preventing us from building something else that might be more friendly to the human race and counter it's bad intentions? What if @sama has somehow been coopted by that AI's plan to stop further development of AI? :) On a more serious note, no one can predict human behavior to the degree of accuracy needed to call it deterministic. So, it is unlikely that we can predict a superhuman AI's behavior with any degree of accuracy. In other words, we just do not know what we are talking about. Does risk calculus make any sense in the domain of true uncertainty?

<comment><USER26> Relevant, and very worth reading:

[http://www.simulation-argument.com/](http://www.simulation-argument.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Do many "otherwise smart" people actually believe "superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous"? I'd like to see some citations :-). I think smart people tend to have much more nuanced views.

<comment><USER31> >Do many "otherwise smart" people actually believe "superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous"?

I don't know how "otherwise smart" I am, but I wonder how we would be able to tell that a machine intelligence was "superhuman" as opposed to "buggy".

For example, suppose we build a super-AI and ask it, "Is Shinichi Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture correct" [1]. What would we do if it said "yes"?

(Of course, if "superhuman" just means "able to do things humans already know how to do and verify, but lots faster", then we're already there).

[1] [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26753-mathematicians-a...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26753-mathematicians- anger-over-his-unread-500page-proof.html)

<comment><USER32> We'd ask it to produce a simplified version.

<comment><USER31> >We'd ask it to produce a simplified version.

Yeah, that would work :)

Maybe the question I should have asked, is:

What if we ask a super-AI for a proof of the ABC conjecture, and the result is something too complicated for humans to verify?

My point, if I have one, is that when I read about "superhuman machine intelligence", sometime people seem to mean "capable of knowledge that humans couldn't figure out on their own but that humans can understand once they see it"; and sometimes they seem to mean "capable of knowledge that is beyond human capacity to even verify".

I think development machine intelligence of the first kind is extremely likely, but I'm more skeptical about the second kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Prediction: in 5-15 years, there will be a corporation mostly run by an AI. Visualize Goldman Sachs run by an AI program.

Corporations don't have "consciousness", nor do they need it. Maximizing shareholder value is the goal. Machine learning systems are good at optimizing for numerical goals.

<comment><USER33> Corporations are already AIs, just as accounting departments before 1940 were already computers, only made of people processing marks on paper instead of being made of transistors processing electrons.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. They are an interesting model of a completely alien mind, and fortunately this mind runs _very, very slow_ for now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Fun fact, some of those (obviously false) statements regarding nuclear energy may in fact be true depending on interpretation of their original meaning. We still have yet to harness mass-energy-equivalence for power. Modern nuclear energy, both fission and fusion, are more accurately nuclear potential energy (like a hydro electric plant and water).

From Wikipedia[1]:

        E = mc2 has frequently been invoked as an explanation for the origin of energy
        in nuclear processes specifically, but such processes can be understood as
        converting nuclear potential energy in a manner precisely analogous to the
        way that chemical processes convert electrical potential energy.

I don't know, but it seems reasonable to me to conclude that when Einstein stated the following, he may have been referring to mass-energy-equivalence rather than nuclear potential energy, which in fact continues to hold true for the foreseeable future:

        There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be
        obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence)

</comment><comment><USER35> _The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. [...] Later Perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language._

\- The New York Times in 1958 after a press conference with Rosenblatt. ("New Navy Device Learns By Doing; Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser")

We now have walking, talking, object recognizing, writing, self-replicating, face-detecting, text-to-speech converting, and translating computers. All at a scale and accuracy surpassing us mere mortals. We do not know enough about "being conscious of our existence" to measure this in other animals and digital life forms. Perhaps "humans predicting future predictive capability of machines" is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps the above article drew an unnecessary amount of ire and criticism. Probably a fuzzy combination of the two.

<comment><USER36> Self-replicating?

> A self-replicating machine is a construct that is capable of reproducing > itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus > exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature.

<comment><USER35> I meant reproducing (like in the quote), but sure:

[http://www.apollon.uio.no/video/a_robot_e.mp4](http://www.apollon.uio.no/video/a_robot_e.mp4)

And the press release:

 _"In the future, robots must be able to solve tasks in deep mines on distant planets, in radioactive disaster areas, in hazardous landslip areas and on the sea bed beneath the Antarctic. These environments are so extreme that no human being can cope. Everything needs to be automatically controlled. Imagine that the robot is entering the wreckage of a nuclear power plant. It finds a staircase that no-one has thought of. The robot takes a picture. The picture is analysed. The arms of one of the robots is fitted with a printer. This produces a new robot, or a new part for the existing robot, which enables it to negotiate the stairs."_

-2014 Kyrre Glette "Using 3D printers to print out self-learning robots"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Genrich Altshuller worked as a clerk in Russia's patent office, later developing a theory (TRIZ) of structured innovation, based in 50,000 patents, [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller) & [http://www.mazur.net/triz/](http://www.mazur.net/triz/)

Some patents are classified each year. A clerk who has seen many classified patents would have a unique opinion on "blue oceans" for investment opportunities, especially if they knew how to prevent new patents from being classified, by avoiding certain areas of research, [http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/invention/](http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/invention/) . In TRIZ terminology, they would have different psychological inertia.

Is there a yearly list of declassified patents over the last few decades? This would be similar to lists of expired patents or books which enter the public domain in some countries.

</comment><comment><USER38> The original source linked at the end is more informative: [https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm](https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm)

<comment><USER14> My favorite from the source:

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done. \- Peter Ustinov

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I suspect that the augmentation of human intelligence through tech is something we're more likely to get to before full-on AI. Assuming it's unaffordable for most of us, I'm much more concerned about a caste of super- intelligent, super-rich humans than computers that have no history of violence or hunger for power.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." \-- Niels Bohr

</comment><comment><USER41> Predictions about something not being possible are difficult, because you can never be right. You are either proven wrong our 'we don't know yet'. Therefore these quotes are rather meaningless I believe. (I see SAs point of encouraging people to go for the moonshots, but still.)

<comment><USER42> His point is that many experts have been wrong when assuming the limitations of technology in the fields that they have mastered. He is simply trying to mute the argument that predictions from AI experts are sufficient in dismissing AI concerns.

The Einstein/Wright Brothers quotes really hit this home for me.

Maybe the quotes are meaningless to you because you already agree. But they might persuade others that would otherwise assume discussing AI impacts on humanity is a waste of time.

<comment><USER43> I have doubts about the Einstein quote. Atoms had been split at will for decades by then.

Szilard hadn't yet proposed a theory of nuclear chain reactions, but according to some cites of the quote Einstein didn't say it until 1934 - which was after Szilard.

I don't have a problem with the possibility that suprahuman intelligence may be possible. I do have a problem with the fact that currently we have no idea what the concept may even mean - and right now, more immediate cybersecurity issues are being neglected.

Computers are already better than humans at many activities. From playing chess to landing planes to learning how to play a video game - a computer with the right software is _much_ better at these than an average human, and is often at least good as the best humans.

Take that to the black corner, and worms and botnets are already a serious problem.

We don't need to wait for the Internet to become sentient and start talking to us in a deep echoey robot voice to worry about cyberthreats.

There's more than enough to deal with already. And if you're going to try to regulate and contain a future AI, making current systems as secure as possible seems like a realistic place to start.

<comment><USER9> _" I have doubts about the Einstein quote. Atoms had been split at will for decades by then."_

Not in a chain reaction. When Szilárd described the concept of a chain reaction to Einstein, Einstein was shocked. He said "I never thought of that!"

Until then, nuclear physics was purely an academic enterprise. There were few applications for radioactive materials. Radioactive decay just happened at its own slow pace, and not much could be done with it. X-rays could be used to pump the process, but less energy came out than what was put in. Suddenly the nuclear physicists realized they had a tiger by the tail. This was going to change the world, not necessarily for the better.

<comment><USER44> Like @TheOtherHobbes above, I had disbelief about the Einstein quote ("Wasn't Einstein presciently aware of where nuclear fission technology was going?").

But, poking around a bit, I came to the same understanding you have. Here's some more of the time line:

The quote in the OP (which I can't find online; the Einstein archives at Caltech are, alas, not indexed) about Einstein's skepticism about nuclear energy is dated 1932. The first demonstrations of nuclear fission were years later, in late 1938 and into 1939. And as you said, Einstein is reported to have said, "I had not thought of that." \-- regarding the chain reaction.

The fabled Einstein-Szilard letter to Franklin Roosevelt, warning about the Nazis getting the atomic bomb, was written in August 1939 ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein–Szilárd_letter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein–Szilárd_letter)), and then relayed to Roosevelt in October after the flurry of activity due to the Nazis invading Poland had died out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I found the bitcoin intruding on the others, it is pretty impressive how this "digital money" has grown. I remember a time where it was 20$ a bitcoin and no one would have believed it if I had tell them: in 6 months a bitcoin will be worth more than 1000$.

<comment><USER46> I think it felt really out of place because many "otherwise smart people" have been shouting it'll reach both zero and the sky soon and its future is still really unclear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I don't want to go all Clinton here, but, please, lets first define "prediction". Here are some predictions that have general consensus-

1\. You will die someday ( so will I )

2\. The Bay Area will experience an earthquake in next decade

3\. A few islands will go under due to sea level rise.

I wouldn't like to call the above predictions - they are too sun-will-rise-in- the-east obvious. Its like looking at the dumbarton bridge & predicting - someday that bridge will fall. That's a biblical prediction - all standing things must fall, bridge is a standing thing, ergo, given enough wear and tear, it too will crumble and fall.The oldest standing bridge in the world is like 2800 years old & is in a much more geologically stable place than the Bay area, so what chance does dumbarton have ?

Now here are what I call predictions -

1\. qqq $200 by 2018

2\. esn replaces fizzbuzz in 2019 :)

3\. cnn,rnn,esn become middle school curriculum in 2020

I mean, here you have a reasonable level of confusion. Yet, if you plot the probability over time for each of those predictions, the slope is definitely positive. qqq has doubled in the past 3 years, give it another 3 years & it'll probably double again. Given this pervasive SMI fetish, it's only logical that startups replace their fizzbuzz with "in the next 20 minutes, code up an echo state network in haskell". And if sama's actually right, cnns & rnns are going to get so commonplace society is going to want middle schoolers to ace their exams with questions on "ten key differences between the recurrent neural net & the convolution neural net" instead of the pedestrian garbage we teach them now - "on a z3, if 1+2=3 and 1+1=2, how much is 3+3 ?" So the poor kids instead of sweating bullets & laboring through convoluted reasoning like "since 1 + 2 is 3, so 2 +1 is 3 per abelian, and 1 + 1 is 2, that means 3 + 1 per cayley unique column entries must be 1, which implies 3 is the identity, so 3 + 3 must be 3 as well. Ergo 3+3=3. Voila!" can actually make useful technological predictions about which esn based startup will cross a trillion dollar market cap by the time the kid hits puberty.

<comment><USER48> What is esn?

<comment><USER49> [http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Echo_state_network](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Echo_state_network)

<comment><USER48> Thank you for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I will appreciate bold predictions about the future that may turn out to be wrong over today's writings where it's all about super safe post hoc analysis after the fact. Things like "Why X succeeded!" or "X failed because of these 5 reasons" don't impressive me one bit. I wish more writers wrote about bold predictions and explain why you predict that way.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord I like how the second-last one stands out as a _positive_ prediction that was wrong. Good show on that one.

</comment><comment><USER51> Honestly, I think this whole hoopla about AI is overblown. I think when we reach the point where this discussion matters, we will know it, and know it quite obviously.

Right now, we're at a point in AI where Amazon recommends me new types of deodorant immediately after I just placed an order for some. That tells you the state of AI and if we really need to be worried about some of the things that these pundits are, imo, dreaming about.

Let progress happen, and we'll deal with it as it comes. No need for pre- mature fear to halt the speed of progress.

</comment><comment><USER52> Though if instead of saying that X will never be invented, they had said that _if_ X is invented then its inventors won't make a substantial sum of money from their invention, then they would have been right almost every time.

</comment><comment><USER53> Sure, predictions are hard. We often get them wrong on the upside (over-hype) and the downside. As a result, "AI isn't going to happen" really is not a good argument against discussing the potential risks of it. (... and I say that as someone who _is_ an "AI is around the corner" skeptic.)

Yet that doesn't change the basic risk calculus. In his previous post, Sam advocated imposing draconian licensing and observation requirements on what _in practice_ would be the majority of non-trivial CS research. He advocated this on the basis of the _potential_ risk that as-yet-to-be-developed hypothetical AIs might pose to human beings.

I did a short post on it here: [http://adamierymenko.com/did-sam-altman-of-y- combinator-just...](http://adamierymenko.com/did-sam-altman-of-y-combinator- just-start-a-campaign-to-license-and-regulate-all-cs-research/)

In addition to what I wrote there, I think that the risk of dramatically slowing progress in CS/AI also has to be taken into account. There is risk of doing and there is the risk of not doing.

The problem is that we currently face a number of existential risks -- like catastrophic economic collapse due to fossil fuel depletion -- where the majority of the risk is in the "risk of not doing" category. We know with total certainty that if we continue business as usual with no change, our civilization _will_ collapse. It's simple physics and high school math -- exponential growth in consumption of a finite resource without any substitution or path to replacement can only end in one way.

Smart computers might help us crack tough problems like fusion, safe and scalable fission, better batteries to make renewable energy more practical, etc. That in turn might help us avoid an absolutely real, tangible, non- hypothetical, definite existential risk. I see no reason to hamstring that kind of progress to defend against extremely hypothetical low-probability risks.

That's why I consider Sam's suggestions to regulate CS research more dangerous than any risk posed by speculative AI scenarios.

I am not opposed to all regulation, but I am opposed to regulations based on extremely hypothetical hand-wavey risks. I'm also opposed to regulations that are virtually impossible to define accurately or enforce fairly. Regulations should be clear, objective, rationally justified by _tangible_ problems or risks, and _minimal_. We should have regulations around, say, the use of nuclear materials, but that's because we know for an absolute fact that it is dangerous. We should have financial regulations because we know financial fraud has happened and will continue to happen without them. ... etc. But I positively cringe at the imposition of ill-defined broad regulations based on fear-mongering and "precautionary principle" thinking -- a.k.a. institutionalized paranoia and cowardice. Such regulations can do nothing other than halt progress in the name of vague paranoia.

Make no mistake: Sam's proposal in his previous post would halt all non- trivial CS research, or at least would slow it to such a crawl that it would effectively stop. It would also cause a mass exodus from the field, since nobody wants to operate under that kind of nonsense. Given that CS is the primary driver now of progress in other fields, that would also likely halt major progress in energy, materials, propulsion, transportation, etc.

If you read my blog post above, I take this in almost a conspiracy direction and speculate that this is some sort of political power play to lock down the field. The reason for this is that I find it hard to believe that someone of Sam's intellect and education would _not_ realize the implications of what he's suggesting.

</comment><comment><USER54> More of this: [http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis](http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis)

</comment><comment><USER55> [http://imgur.com/gallery/5hiUM1e](http://imgur.com/gallery/5hiUM1e)

More interesting failed technology predictions.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Space travel is utter bilge" is correct, in my opinion, from one viewpoint: specifically with respect to its cost effectiveness along any axis you care to measure save one: the emotionally-driven ego/pride/curiosity axis.

I really wish the trillions "invested" in manned space travel over the decades had instead gone to basic research in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and some of the applied research disciplines that derive from these.

<comment><USER56> Trillions? The total amount (2014 nominal) given to NASA since 1958 is less than 1.1 trillion. If you don't think there have been advancements in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics as a result of NASA's research then I'm at a loss.

<comment><USER57> > Trillions? The total amount (2014 nominal) given to NASA since 1958 is less > than 1.1 trillion.

Thus it's likely that the sums involved across all nations in the world are 2 trillion or more.

> If you don't think there have been advancements in biology, chemistry, > physics, and mathematics as a result of NASA's research then I'm at a loss.

Oh, they certainly were, but those advances were for the most part accidental and incidental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> What about flying cars and jetpacks?

</comment><comment><USER59> I think he forgot "All this is a dream." by Michael Faraday

</comment><comment><USER60> Looks like Sam's on for some moonshots.

</comment><comment><USER61> My criticism of Sam's prediction is really centered around the extreme disparity between the concerns of the digerati wealthy elites and normal people.

</comment><comment><USER62> Survivor bias strikes again.

</comment><comment><USER63> A thought on readability:

It would be nice if there were either (a) two newlines between each quote or (b) only one newline between the quote and attribution.

</comment><comment><USER64> Just add 'prima facie' to your predication and you've covered your ass.

I predict Bitcoin to $10k sometime in the next 5 years. Prima facie of course!

</comment><comment><USER65> Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking all agree AI research is dangerous. Google does not seem to feel there is a credible risk and is doing it anyways.</comment>


Brave Browser for Desktop and Laptop Computers Running Windows, OS X, and Linux - <AUTHOR> https://brave.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Public repository: [https://github.com/brave/browser- laptop](https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop)</comment>


The 'Post-PC Era' Never Really Happened…and Likely Won't - <AUTHOR> https://techpinions.com/the-post-pc-era-never-really-happened-and-likely-wont/53610 <comment><USER2> I love tablets but nothing is as effective of an interface for me as a mouse and keyboard. If I need to get work done with documents or programs, nothing beats it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I personally can't imagine not having a PC (or several actually), but you'd really be surprised how many non-techies don't have one at home these days when even the same people used to in the 1990s and early 2000s. For a lot of people a computer is just a tool to check e-mail, watch videos, and surf the web. These days a tablet or even a phone is good enough for a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think there's yet more evolution for smartphones ahead. Samsung is pushing the Dex solution which let phones become a dockable computing device while it charges. This is probably more impactful for certain Enterprise team's like HR, Recruiting, etc.</comment>


Grub with Garry Tan of YC  - <AUTHOR> http://www.grubwithme.com/blog/gary-tan-umami-meals-with-the-master Proceeds of this meal will benefit Room to Read, a nonprofit that seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. <comment><AUTHOR> Proceeds of this meal will benefit Room to Read, a nonprofit that seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education.</comment>


Ask HN: Exciting thoughts when you grab a new domain name for some idea - <AUTHOR>

What are those exciting thoughts or zeal of that moment when you proceed to grab a new domain name for some idea. <comment><USER2> Its a cool place where, for a moment, ambition becomes reality. Then I actually have to build it!

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have name for it but I know what you mean. It's like happiness+motivation+eagerness.

</comment><comment><USER4> Dopamine

(Seriously -- looking it up, together with seeking/discovery behavior.)</comment>


CBS "60 Minutes" piece on Google's abuse of dominance - <AUTHOR> https://www.yelpblog.com/2018/05/cbs-60-minutes-piece-on-googles-abuse-of-dominance <comment><USER2> Yelp is crying sour grapes here.

There are so many ways they could have innovated to stay relevant but has anything changed in years there?

They could have hired professional reviewers. Yelp reviews are notoriously bad.

They could have let you choose what you prefer, example (quality vs quantity) and given you custom ratings or only included reviews from people that share similar tastes.

Following up on the last idea They could have tried to auto cluster reviewers. (people who rated these 5 places as having good taste also liked ...)

the could have scanned menus so you could ask "where can I get a pepperoni pizza at 3am" instead of at best being able to look up "pizza" and figure the rest out yourself.

How about "where can I get a table for 10". How about partner with as many restaurants as possible so I can ask "who's still got a table for 4 for steak and win between 7 and 9pm tonight"

And maybe nothing would save them but I at least for me reviews make sense on Google maps. That yelp couldn't see their audience was going to dry up seems no different than newspaper classifieds and Craigslist. Their quality certainly isn't better so ATM there is zero reason to go there.

<comment><USER3> You might be right, but a company's abuse of dominant position isn't defined by the quality of their competitor's offer.

<comment><USER4> You are right, at least in the traditional anti-trust-ish legal sense as I understand it.

In a wider more pedestrian sense, there is a some kettle-pot-black involved here, at least in my opinion.

Yelp's a little monopolistic middle man. Everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp because everyone reads and writes reviews on Yelp. Market dominance today is the main ingredient for dominance tomorrow. Everyone uses Google search, maps, phones etc. Google gets all the data & ad revenue. They use this to maintain their dominance.

Pick your euphemism for this position: momentum, network effects, buffet's moat, thiel's-monopoly, dominance, viral feedback loops.... Whatever you call it, a restaurant can't opt out of yelp, just like a website can't opt out of google. Their rules are the rules. There is no option B.

A downstream company can be harmed when Google competes direct (AKA the terror of 2006), when they redirect traffic to alternative web pages or disrupts market dominance downstream, intentionally or otherwise.

This is like Yelp's relationship with restaurants. Yelp can stop sending a restaurant customers. Google can stop sending Yelp users. There are no "market dynamics," no "invisible hands," price signals or whatnot. There is no "market" to impose discipline in the way the laissez-faire idealization does on paper.

So... I'm kind of torn. I want to see far more complaints, cases & legislation targeting market dominance, size and monopoly. On the other hand, the hypocrisy...

<comment><USER5> You're right. This is a kettle-pot issue. So how come so many arguments here get reduced to "I side with kettle!"

Yelp is bad. Google is bad. Or more precisely, both are amoral, and responding rationally to the incentives of the internet. The traditional anti-trust sense you mention doesn't take network effects into account. If you ask me, network effects cause the landscape of the internet to inevitably trend towards oligopoly.

This explains why the strategy of most startups amounts to "Growth at all costs, until you're the only game in town" (The model of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and every wannabe unicorn running at a huge loss to investors)

<comment><USER6> How is Google amoral?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> CBS interview leaves out critical details. Initially, Google was scrapping Yelp reviews to show snippets in their Google Places product. Yelp CEO didn't liked that and demanded to remove all snippets. Google said it had right to show snippets like any other websites and if Yelp says their content is "private" then Google shouldn't be crawling them at all. That's what they did. This caused Yelp to disappear from Google and their traffic tanked. So after this some deal was reached. Eventually, Google just decided to do their own reviews and started showing them in Google Maps. Yelp then started this PR war that is now going on for years.

Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of crappy 2nd rate products out there. I hate Yelp. They are greedy bastards who have cornered up huge content entirely contributed by volunteers. They are the ones wanting to monopolize market in this area and avoid having Google as player here. They are the ones who want big price for their theft from millions of hours donated by volunteers. Yelp reviews and ratings should be free and in open domain by vary nature of how it was created (and so should be Amazon's review - but at least they are not entirely volunteers driven website). On the top of this, Yelp has remained mostly stagnant waiting for their big payout day. I don't consider them good for users or internet or industry. So for me this is pick between the worse evil.

The debate is so very similar to IE on Windows, however. Should Microsoft be prevented from creating better[1] browser and not allowed to complete with Netscape? Should they be prevented from putting their integrated polished experience in front and center that benefits the customers? One can say that suing Microsoft actually worked out best overall for industry. I'm not too sure how alternate world would have looked like. History certainly rhymes here.

[1] You can say whatever about IE's lack of implementing proper standards but it was the fastest browser in its day. It was truly free no strings attached (as long as you are on Windows) and it advanced many things, for example, it was the first browser to implement CSS, XML parsing and tons of functionality that is now part of HTML5 standards.

<comment><USER8> > Personally, I don't think Google should be obliged to promote all kind of > crappy 2nd rate products out there.

Who is to decide what is a crappy 2nd rate product? To me, Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having no financial benefit from manipulating reviews. Can the same be held true for Google?

> They are the ones who want big price for their theft from millions of hours > donated by volunteers.

If it was donated, how was it theft?

> Should Microsoft be prevented from creating better[1] browser and not > allowed to complete with Netscape?

They were never prevented from competing, they were prevented from preventing others competing.

<comment><USER9> > Yelp seems to be the superior product since it has more reviews while having > no financial benefit from manipulating reviews.

This is a dubious claim.

There have been periodic blowups about Yelp offering to manipulate how reviews are presented for money. [1][2] Yelp portrays this as advertising [3], like putting a "favorite" review "above the fold" so to speak, but many business owners consistently tell the same story about extortion over negative reviews.

I never paid it much attention before, but recently someone I personally know mentioned that her boss (at the time) was paying to remove negative Yelp reviews, so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Point is, even if they aren't directly deleting negative reviews, reviews are their main product and pressure over negative reviews seems to be at the very least a sales tactic, so don't be so sure they have no financial benefit from manipulating at least certain aspects of reviews--it's not inconceivable.

[1] [https://thenextweb.com/insider/2009/02/20/yelp-remove-bad- re...](https://thenextweb.com/insider/2009/02/20/yelp-remove-bad-reviewsfor- price/) [2] [https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive- rev...](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-reviews- business-refuses-pay-advertising/98695/) [3] [https://www.quora.com/Does-Yelp- remove-negative-reviews-in-e...](https://www.quora.com/Does-Yelp-remove- negative-reviews-in-exchange-for-advertising-with-them)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I want to buy something, I type "amazon.com", not "google.com".

So, why don't I type "yelp.com", when I want to go somewhere?

There is nothing to complain about, when your product sucks.

<comment><USER11> > When I want to buy something, I type "amazon.com", not "google.com".

I do the exact opposite, I either search a specific business' site or Google something vague like "sturdy cargo pants," find a brand / store that I like and visit that store.

I've been burned too many times by cheap, fake shit from Amazon. I'm not willing to deal with the hassle and wasted time.

<comment><USER6> Same. I start on Google and then usually buy on Amazon. Google has the Amazon links like they should and it is high on the list even though Amazon is Google chief competitor.

Reason being Amazon is popular and offers a great service. Versus Yelp is horrible so not high on the list.

Kind of indicates Google search is working how it should and Yelp just has sour grapes.

Now if Amazon moved to the second page that would be something to put on 60 minutes.

<comment><USER11> > Same. I start on Google and then usually buy on Amazon.

When I said "visit the store" I meant "visit a physical shop." Amazon Basics aside, purchasing their physical products are fraught with peril. Especially with easy-to-forge high-margin products like clothing.

I have a few pairs of $40 inauthentic shorts I'd ordered off of Amazon a few years back. I realized they were fake after venturing into a physical store and seeing the difference, but I had gone years thinking Billabong had some seriously shoddy clothes.

I'm surprised we don't see more lawsuits of companies suing Amazon for peddling fakes goods and damaging their brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It honestly sounds like Yelp is just salty at the fact that their SEO marketing isn't as effective as it used to be because of Google's improvement to their search engine algorithms.

Also, it's laughable that of all companies, Yelp is the one complaining about Google.

<comment><USER13> It's pretty obvious Google has moved against the best interests of consumers, by their own admission.

They now insert ads into the top of the search flow, commingling results and ads, something their founders correctly proclaimed in the early days to be fundamentally anti user experience. When faced with mobile (and no right side area to allocate ads), they chose to violate their earliest of principles and decided the money mattered a lot more than providing the best product for the consumer. It's merely one example of many that Google isn't acting in the best interest of the consumer with their search monopoly.

Yelp can be salty and simultaneously Google can be an abusive monopoly.

Sun and Oracle were two of the loudest complainers about Microsoft. It doesn't mean they were wrong, despite their own at times shitty behavior.

<comment><USER14> > hey now insert ads into the top of the search flow, commingling results and > ad

Google has done this as long as I can recall - the top few results are always "sponsored". Yelp also does this, by placing a star on your map instead of a rating.

<comment><USER15> Google was created to build an open search engine that doesn't rely on ad revenue.

Literally, that's what the original paper says:

[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

<comment><USER16> I don't think that is true. It's the first time I've heard about it, anyways.

<comment><USER15> That's why I linked the source above.

> This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be > advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to > push more development and understanding into the academic realm.

> One of our main goals in designing Google was to set up an environment where > other researchers can come in quickly, process large chunks of the web, and > produce interesting results that would have been very difficult to produce > otherwise. In the short time the system has been up, there have already been > several papers using databases generated by Google, and many others are > underway. Another goal we have is to set up a Spacelab-like environment > where researchers or even students can propose and do interesting > experiments on our large-scale web data.

From Appendix A

> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is > advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always > correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our > prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The > Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains > in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a > cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its > high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of > citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine > which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty > justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For > this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian > 83], we expect that _advertising funded search engines will be inherently > biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers._

[…]

> Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor > quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would > not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a > query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to > the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required > this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline > to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point > of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will > be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the > advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. > However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to > switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the > issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that _it is crucial to > have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic > realm._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 60 Minutes didn't reveal anything here a lot of us don't already know, there wasn't any hard-hitting journalism or incredible revelations. But given 60 Minutes reaches millions of people, it's probably massively raised awareness of these issues with a significant number of people who don't generally follow tech explicitly.

<comment><USER18> > _60 Minutes didn 't reveal anything here a lot of us don't already know_

In my experience, 60 Minutes is less about breaking news than competently explaining it. The tech community, as a whole, is generally bad at communicating its non-commercial preferences. This issue is no exception.

<comment><USER17> I don't think it served well as completely explaining it, because Android and Chrome were only cursory mentions, and I'd argue they're both critical to Google's ability to control the Internet, while each also being monopolies in their own right.

<comment><USER19> In what sense is Chrome a monopoly?

<comment><USER17> It has an exceedingly dominant market share (FYI: Being a monopoly does not require "zero alternatives exist". Merely that those alternatives are at the mercy of the main one), which it uses to direct and control Internet protocols in the way it finds most beneficial to Google.

All new Internet protocols and 'standards' proposed by Google come with the implied threat that Google will do it anyways, since often Google implements it in Chrome before it is a standard, leaving everyone else to accept it or be rendered incompatible with Google, who has control of most of the Internet.

A significant number of websites now only test against Chrome and only support Chrome, leaving really only one option, often, when trying to interact with a given Internet entity.

And Chrome isn't just a monopoly, it's a monopoly they illegally use to manipulate the market and boost their other products. For instance, while competing search engines can bid for default placement on Firefox, Google gives it's own search engine exclusive rights to be default there, the monopoly search engine on the monopoly browser.

Recently, Google even introduced a method for banning competitors ads into Chrome, rendering Google ads the only "sure thing" for not having your ads arbitrarily blocked by Google.

Chrome is one of the clearest examples of why Google _must_ be broken up. It's Ad/Search business cannot own platforms like Chrome and Android.

<comment><USER20> Your working definition of what an _illegal_ anti-competitive use of monopoly power is seems to be the reverse of what I've heard before.

Under your definition, Chrome is supporting the even stronger pre-existing monopoly Google has on search or ads, and therefore is bad.

Usually anti-competitive actions are seen as a player using its monopoly to support emergence into a _new_ market, not to build a moat around an existing market they already are dominant in.

For example, under your framing, Microsoft's usage of Internet Explorer would have been bad _not_ because it came pre-installed with Windows, but because it was Windows-only (or worked best on Windows) thus supporting the existing Windows monopoly.

I don't know if this reasoning can hold legally---merely because I have never seen it used before.

<comment><USER17> The general concept of tying relates to connecting unrelated products, and using control of one to benefit the other. I'm doubtful the claim "the other product is already also a monopoly" is a usable defense for this practice's illegality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have run several local marketplaces and what Google is doing to local search is so anti-competitive that many people have decided not to start new local marketplaces. You can Imagine what that does to innovation. In the medium term it will hurt Google. It takes years to build trust and it erodes slowly over time until one day it's gone.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yelp is not that innocent either, their "practices" are just as questionable, if not more questionable, than Google's.

<comment><USER23> Only sharing for reference, you reminded me that someone made a documentary ('billion dollar bully') about this (not released yet, but supposedly being premiered soon):

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

[http://www.prostfilms.com/](http://www.prostfilms.com/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHEbVh3Yhrw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHEbVh3Yhrw) (recent interview with the film creator)

<comment><USER24> The creator has been saying it will be released "soon" for years. Pretty sure it flopped.

<comment><USER23> FWIW, They talk about the delays at 19m23s in the interview I linked.

From staring at [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1299637435/billion- doll...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1299637435/billion-dollar- bully/posts/1873596) I'd guess they're still looking for or going through a distributor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Mainstream media story about web company? Check. Nothing new? Check. Negative? Check. Of course Yelp participated...but Yelp angle aside, CBS is just following the news cycle patterns of their brethren. I'm mentioning this a lot these days, but feels like watching cattle being herded (albeit willingly).

<comment><USER26> There is a prevailing "tech can do no wrong" attitude in the tech community, and it absolutely needs to be challenged hard.

<comment><USER25> > There is a prevailing "tech can do no wrong" attitude in the tech community

Is there? I see the opposite in communities including the one we're on. The anti-big-web-company torches seem brightest within compared to the more accepting yet non-ignorant outside.

<comment><USER27> I think it's not quite "tech can do no wrong", but "all problems can be solved with tech" is definitely prevalent. I guess it's because we're all tech guys here and "if you only have a hammer...".

<comment><USER6> But you need to use valid examples which the Yelp one is not. Yelp is terrible so not high on the search results like it should be.

But then do a product search and Amazon a top result returned even though Amazon banned any company on their market place from selling a bunch of Google products.

It is just Yelp sour grapes. If going to accuse Google think you might use a valid example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google recently started showing job postings in their search results (at least here in Canada). I suppose this will affect indeed.com, monster.com, and a site I had stake in. I love monetizing niche search engines and other data products, but it looks like Google will eventually get into any industry where the main source of traffic is organic search, I wonder what is next.

<comment><USER29> They struck deals with a number of job sites to get that data. It's not as one-sided as it might seem.

<comment><USER30> Until they no longer need that data because they "harvest" it themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In the US, Yelp was the go-to for reviews.

But that's not the case in other markets. Travel to Australia, and you'll find that basically the only reviews are from Americans. All the Australians use Google.

Which makes Yelp in Australia GREAT for Americans. A feature I wish they would build out officially. I like seeing how other people like me rate things. When someone says, "The pizza ain't like home." I know to trust that person if they're from NY. Or, how the Texans ranked local brisket, how people who spoke German rated the schnitzel, or how people from states that grow apples rank apple pie. A million other examples. Profoundly useful for finding good reviews.

Anyway neither Google or Yelp offer this feature, and it seems so fundamentally easy to build out. Just aggregate reviews by reviewer meta-data, no? Or something as simple as, "Show me where people who rated this place a 5 also ate." Mix in "check-ins" (and tie those to discount tiers, since Yelp can) and you can start seeing, "Show me places where people rate 5, and actually return regularly..." This stuff makes for powerful reviews. You don't need first names, you don't need to worry about fake reviewers... they have my credit card linked to them, and if that serves as a reward system... anyway Google and Yelp are both missing the boat on a lot of this stuff.

I really despise how they both make me use a "real" name now. No way I want friends and family seeing what I write. If a place sucks, I want to be free to trash it without fear of someone saying, "Hey {person with a fairly unique first name who is fairly well-known in a relatively small community}, why did you trash my pizza?" or, "Hey Mr. Regular, why haven't you written me a review yet?" or, "Hey Grandson, I see that you're reviewing the same BDSM shop your grandfather and I love!" Ha. Having real IDs on the web... creepy as fuck.

<comment><USER32> That's what I've found about travelling out of the US. Tripadvisor is good/decent. Although it's gamed a lot.

Yelp is TERRIBLE for food choices. In the Caribbean, you'll see how bad it is. (There aren't a lot of reviews and the places that are reviewed are really bad)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The whole piece looks & feels like a documentary that could have been aired during the Dotcom bubble. Looking forward to watching this in twenty years from now.

</comment><comment><USER34> Hasn't Yelp forced businesses to pay or else they'll showcase the negative reviews more than the positive ones? Pot calling the kettle black when it comes to abusing dominance.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yelp has a point. Google, and largely Larry Page's insistence on shortening the time between query and answer is starting to stumble under the reality that the source data Google utilizes for its own services isn't the best there is as Yelp rightly laid out. It may be wise for Google to back off on some touchy verticals or to integrate 3rd party data sources to stymie any attempts by regulators to flex. This is the perfect populist opportunity for any public official to run on. Maybe this will take some of the heat off of Amazon for a minute.

</comment><comment><USER36> I get calls from yelp sales which I would call nothing short of predatory, to the point where I literally put on my website a notice to yelp staff to stop calling me.

</comment><comment><USER37> Actually, a huge mistake yelp made is forced you in their app. Very very anti user.

<comment><USER38> it seems like less companies are making this mistake nowadays, but maybe it's just me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Using Duck Duck Go, nearly all my top search results are Yelp, and that is at times enough to make me use Google. (Yes, for every search I could type -yelp but that gets painful.) It's clear that the way Yelp indexes, that Google is doing something to push it down. The question is whether that is purely to squash their competition, or because people don't actually want Yelp results. I'm not suggesting the former is not the case.

</comment><comment><USER40> I use Yelp all the time. I've never even considered using Google maps as a replacement for Yelp.

But I just tried it and you know what? I think I might switch. I just did a search for "lunch" from my house, and it came up with all my favorite places. (I know this could be because it's using what it knows about my location data to suggest places I've been to frequently, which is why I'm not totally sold yet).

I'll try using both for a while and see how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is ironic. Yelps complaint about Google, is the same I have heard from a few small business owners I have worked with.

One customer had over 50% of their legitimate reviews that they worked so incredibly hard for, gone in one day. In trying to appeal, Yelps canned response was its due to our algorithm and there isn't anything we can do. My customer was in tears over this issue.

</comment><comment><USER42> i thought it was pretty funny during their demonstration of how bad google was, they googled "san francisco restaurants" (or something like that), and there on the auto-complete was "san francisco restaurants YELP", like, dude, this website that is so evil is advertising for you, right there, in the box where you're typing!

</comment><comment><USER33> Using Google Cache now since the site is down...

<comment><USER33> Direct video link: [https://www.cbsnews.com/video/how-did-google-get-so- big/](https://www.cbsnews.com/video/how-did-google-get-so-big/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Google reviews can't be trusted either. Google reviews can be removed, I worked for a company that would work to remove all the bad reviews by real clients then pay people overseas to leave 5 star reviews.

</comment><comment><USER44> They have a point but this really is the best example of the pot calling the kettle black that I'm aware of. Yelp _and_ Google both abuse their dominance.

<comment><USER6> How is Google abusing their position?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Search results are become a google product. Just as restaurants have turn into yelp products.

I can't say it was all their secret goal from the beginning, but it now is.

<comment><USER46> Are becoming? ...How else do you think they have been making money all these years? It's their oldest and most profitable product and it's called AdWords. The foundation of what we know as Google.

<comment><USER47> Yeah. I consider Google to be first and foremost very much an ad company. Search is just the vehicle they use to fill their shelves with product, "you" that they're selling to advertisers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I didn't see the majority of the piece because the kids were acting up, but I must be missing something. Why is this a big deal when it's the SAME company's browser that the user is using that is showing products/services at the top for the SAME company's products?

Why can't google have their own products'/services' links at the top of all search results?

<comment><USER49> For the same reason the courts broke up the stranglehold robber barons had in railroads and banking back in 1900... it's monopolistic and anticompetitive.

This time, much of the anticompetition will be totally invisible, since nobody but Google knows how they bias their search results. Do they collude with Microsoft Bing? Nobody knows but the e-robber barons.

<comment><USER6> But here there is other choices and Bing is two characters less so less friction. I think it is very bad policy to penalize someone that creates a better product.

I see no inherent advantage for Google over say MS. Google search is just a lot better and why no more Excited or Alta Vista, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I didn't read the post but the idea of yelp complaining about abuse is pretty funny.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use Google all day long. I start there for pretty much everything.

Looking for a product I start on Google and usually end up buying on Amazon.com. Amazon is Google's chief competitor yet it is one of the first couple links that come back.

Reason?

Because Amazon offers a great product and is popular and therefore high on the list returned.

Versus Yelp is awful and not high on the list. Google search is working how it should.

Yelp create a better product like Amazon and you get high on the list.

But how in the world did this story even get on 60 minutes? Does Yelp know someone at CBS?

</comment><comment><USER6> Do a search for a product and Amazon is #1 or #2 result and chief competitor of Google and will not allow Google products to be sold by anyone on their market place.

This entire thing is ridiculous. Google is obviously not gaming results.

Yelp sucks so lower down. Make it better and be higher like Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER51> The problem is not Google. The problem is that the government is unable to get his head around an internet based monopoly. Google shouldnt be allowed to host more than 50% of searches by law.

In any other industry enjoying a monopoly position in search as google has enjoyed all these years would have reason enough to break it up into smaller pieces.

<comment><USER52> > In any other industry enjoying a monopoly position in search as google has > enjoyed all these years would have reason enough to break it up into smaller > pieces.

No, it wouldn't. Formation of monopolies is not illegal or grounds for breakup. Anticompetitively leveraging market power in one market to monopolize another market is illegal, and a variety of remedies, including breakup, may be available for that.

<comment><USER51> Firstly, It doesnt have to be illegal. Monopolies decrease choice for the customer and hamper innovation. That reason should be good enough and has been good enough in the case of telecom.

Secondly, if there is enough competition than why has Google enjoyed overwhelming market share for such a long time ? This doesnt happen in any other industry, not with any other company and definitely not in any industry as lucrative as search ads.

Thirdly, Search is critical infrastructure. Google is known to hire lobbyist to supress research unfavourable to it. How do we know that publishers do not self-censor content critical to Google lest they get bumped from search.

<comment><USER52> > Firstly, It doesnt have to be illegal.

Yes, in the US, for government to break up a company, there must be something illegal done.

> This doesnt happen in any other industry, not with any other company and > definitely not in any industry as lucrative as search ads.

Clearly, you are posting from an alternative universe where Microsoft, who has held overwhelmingly long-term dominance in at least two different markets significanlty longer than Google has existed (desktop OS and enterprise productivity suite.)

> Thirdly, Search is critical infrastructure.

If true, that would be a reason for it to be a public utility, not to break a Google. But if we can't even get a consensus that actual internet _access_ should be a public utility, good luck making the case that search is.

> How do we know that publishers do not self-censor content critical to Google > lest they get bumped from search.

In systems with due process, punishments aren't based on "how do we know X is not true", but instead in "here is the evidence by which we know X is true".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Writing an LLVM Pass  - <AUTHOR> http://llvm.org/docs/WritingAnLLVMPass.html

<comment><USER2> I think this is actually really old, it's been around since the early LLVM versions.

Still, it's definitely the best way to get exposed to writing optimizations using LLVM. Writing optimization passes ends up being really self-contained too (just that one file/class, and it 'automatically' gets registered into the optimizer), so it might be just one of the better ways of learning LLVM overall.

</comment><comment><USER3> Writing an LLVM pass isn't too bad. Debugging one, on the other hand...

<comment><USER4> Debugging is actually not THAT bad once you get used to the debugger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for this, I really like this type of post.</comment>


VC Starter Kit - <AUTHOR> https://vcstarterkit.com/ <comment><USER2> This fleece vest is something that's come across from trading floors.

It started at SAC capital management (now Point 72). SAC was famous for very carefully creating an environment for peak efficiency. Noise was bad for concentration, so the SAC trading floor was really quiet. Even the phone ringers were off. You had to pick up the phone when the light blinked. They found that people tended to perform best when the thermostat was set to quite cold, so that's what they did. Then they found that you didn't have to completely freeze but but being just a little cold put your brain in the right state so vests became popular. You were't uncomfortable but your arms were cold so you got the performance benefit for the least amount of discomfort.

Making a trading floor really cold is actually quite a convenient thing to do because other than a data center there aren't a lot of places with a higher density of heat generating computing equipment than a trading floor and also because traditionally people wore suits so a little cold was fine.

The Jeans, shirt and fleece is not or at least post the initial spread from SAC was not a Wall Street thing in general. It was quite specifically a trader's "uniform". You didn't want to wear your suit jacket all day long because the mesh on your office chair (usually an aeron) would rub against it and make holes in the back of your jacket. So you took off your suit jacket, took your vest off the hangar in your office, hung your jacket and put on the vest if it was cold.

<comment><USER3> The SAC vest story is fascinating. Have a source on that?

<comment><USER4> I agree, this is half of NYC midtown/ws, curious to know how it's traced to a single firm.

<comment><USER5> I just did a quick search and the story seems very accurate, everything points to SAC. [https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/polar-fleece-is-the-new- powe...](https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/polar-fleece-is-the-new-power- tie-160324795.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is so real. Our VCs gave us Patagonia Fleece Vests, suggest Super Human... All Birds, Sapiens. Damn good job.

</comment><comment><USER7> IMO the industry has moved on from Patagonia fleece vests to Arc'teryx down vests.

Or maybe it hasn't crossed the chasm quite yet.

<comment><USER8> Arc'teryx gear is annoyingly good quality and well thought out. I don't want all my gear to be Arc'teryx but it's such a safe go to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This kit is absolutely genius. It's uncannily accurate. As a VC, I own, use, and love almost every single item in the first and second kit.

I use Superhuman, wear Atoms, own a Patagonia fleece vest, occasionally read The Information, have read Sapiens and Zero to One… I don't know whether to be embarrassed or amused.

Bravo

</comment><comment> enahs-sf needs more burning man tickets.

</comment><comment><USER10> The lack of pockets in the women's version is a beautiful touch.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can confidently say that Patagonia fleece is totally stolen from WS trading floors. On a side note what does HN think about Zero to One?

<comment><USER12> Interesting take on a no shit Sherlock situation.

^ doesn't down play the book in any way.

Sometimes some things are so common place we gloss over them and it takes a book or someone famous to point things out even when they're staring us in the face. Zero to one did a great job of this.

What value I got from it? How I applied it in my day to day?

Probably close to zero than one.

It did give me a perspective on the importance of going from zero to one and I think that is often lost on people where I usually can detect and point out now.

The ?onopoly stuff was quite interesting but wasnt quite relatable for me.

Perhaps others in other positions got more from it than I.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> hilarious... and accurate.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd encourage all vest wearers to take a look at offering by LL Bean. IMO it's better than Pata or Arc

</comment><comment><USER15> love it!

</comment><comment><USER16> funny, but this isn't reddit or twitter.

<comment><USER17> It is. And that is not a bad thing.

Most of us read HN to inform ourselves, learn new stuff but also because of entertainment.

We do have a very simple mechanism to vote/downvote what we decide to consume as ways to flag/hide content. I highly recommend you to use those tools.

<comment><USER18> Well, keep in mind that most users here probably don't have the downvote ability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> someone seriously took a twitter meme reposted to instagram and made a website out of it?

 _mumble cringe_</comment>


2011 Rankup your Hacker/Startup/Biz Bookmarks - <AUTHOR>

Let's try I game I'll call rankup.  One unique hacker/startup/biz site bookmark per comment.<p>My interest is reading/learning from the best thought sources for hacking/startup/business online.  Add your best bookmark you visit daily/weekly ONLY if if doesn't appear in the comments.  Rank up bookmarks others post that you also visit. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.ycombinator.com/></comment>


Hash functions: theoretical basics, mixing, and evaluations of algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://bretm.home.comcast.net/~bretm/hash/

<comment><USER2> The author seems to have more depth in theory than in practice, unfortunately. The first function examined, and casually discarded (without attribution) is the Dan Bernstein djb2 function. This is a very popular function, largely because of its extreme simplicity ("multiply by 33 and add/xor in the next byte") and comparative robustness (it's _VERY_ strong for a one-line algorithm).

Neither of these benefits seem to be of interest, though, so he drops this one on the floor and he then trots off to examine a bunch of 20-30 line monsters. Which is interesting enough, but not terribly useful to someone who actually wants to implement, y'know, a real-world hash table.

djb2 happens to be a favorite of mine, it's a great thing to keep in your head for when you need a nice robust mixing function. If you really have requirements that go beyond what it can provide, you're probably better off just using a cryptographic hash than trying to internalize the stuff in this article. Given that digest hashes are the strongest algorithms available anyway, _all_ the advice here is just carefully disguised premature optimization, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great page layout and graphic design! Peeking at the CSS, I notice that the main div is called "paper" and that the offset lengths are measured in centimeters and millimeters. I find that intriguing and unusual. Was the layout created with a WYSIWYG editor? Or is it due to the designer's preferences?

</comment><comment><USER4> I think every programmer needs to know how Hash Function, and Hashpams/Tables work from the inside-out.

It gives you a great insight on why certain techniques are used, and it is a classical CS problem.

If you can write a simple but solid implementation of a hash function, and a hash map, you are ahead of most developers out there. A lot of developers use them everyday, but don't have the faintest idea on how they work.

</comment><comment><USER5> Excellent article, with a nice degree of depth. I'd like to see more by this author.

</comment><comment><USER6> Umm, hash functions ARE NOT used for crypto, one way functions are, and they are not hash functions.

<comment><USER7> The phrase "hash functions" refers to a general category that includes "cryptographic hash functions" (which are hopefully one-way) as a special case.</comment></comment>