10 ms·

Marvin Minsky's Homepage

69 points by jessup 11y ago

jordigh 11y ago
Is Old Man Minsky the only one who still thinks that machines should do AI instead of machine learning? He certainly seemed to believe that in 2007. Who is still on his side? http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/societyculture/old_man_minsky/ http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/societyculture/old_man...
- westoncb 11y ago
  There are still others working on artificial general intelligence, but it's definitely more marginal, and half the time I find someone doing something interesting it's some work to figure out whether they are crazy or brilliant :) E.g. Ben Goertzel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/WakingUpFromTheEconomyOfDreams.htm http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/WakingUpFromTheEconomyOfDrea... It's hard to tell. But the thing that seemed most concerning was that at one point, they suffer some big setback and change things around. Except he's pleased that a large amount of code is still useful, doing maintenance work. I have no real basis, but my instinct says that if dealing with e.g. socket code is even remotely a concern at all, you're probably not actually solving real AI problems. Actually, the bigger thing is that it's just highly improbable they were so close to creating AI and for lack of a few dozen megabucks they aren't able to do so. It's such a tiny amount of money to supposedly bring on the singularity. Especially when you see he was selling a Market Predictor product. It's like those scams where they're going to take your money and buy gold in the Caribbean and bring it back so ya get 2x back. If you actually had market predicting software, I dunno, you could ... put your own money in? Even more recently, Peter Thiel was funding MIRI right? So if anyone close thought this was actually in reach and just needed a bit more Java code to be written, it seems rather probable they'd be able to find _some_ funding. Shit, if you really believed it'd bring about a positive GAI then you'd probably work on it in the open, find some way of completing it over a decade or two (barring severe procrastination and motivational issues). None of this adds up. I'm not sure what he was doing at SIAI/MIRI, but I've no real clue wtf they actually do anyways. Edit: http://wp.goertzel.org/important-research-avenues-on-my-mind/ http://wp.goertzel.org/important-research-avenues-on-my-mind... OK so, "important research" avenue. Apart from making AGI so we can have robots (wtf?). And growing brains in a vat. We should apparently just use Google's "databases of text" to dev a search engine that "really understands stuff". As if Google hasn't though of this "avenue". Oh, and cold fusion and femtotech. I think my estimate of this guy actually making AI has dropped significantly. "Avenues of research" eh? You'd have better luck reading the Player's Handbook and picking your top 8 favourite spells you wish were real.
- pomber 11y ago
  Chomsky http://www.tor.com/2011/06/21/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai/ http://www.tor.com/2011/06/21/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-figh... http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
- sp332 11y ago
  Machine-learning is a kind of AI, right? Assuming you mean human-style general intelligence, it's more interesting to me since it helps us understand ourselves, and we have a working model to work from.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    No, ML is basically stats when you have lots of computing power. Classical AI tackled very different kinds of problems. There used to be a "war" of ideas between connectionists (which kind of turned into ML when neural networks no longer tried to be remotely biological) and computationalists, which is where Minsky would probably be closer to. He wants us to understand how minds work in order to model them better. With ML you don't really try to understand. You throw a dumb and simple-minded algorithm at lots of data and get back good results. You don't try to model all of the complexities of an intelligent problem. So, no, I would not say ML is a kind of AI.
  - abhgh 11y ago
    Yes it is AI. You could quickly go through the Table of Contents in the classic Russell and Norvig "AI: A Modern Approach book" to see what is considered as AI. To be classified as AI, the mode of learning (statistical or not) is not as important as the notion of what an intelligent "agent" is supposed to do. There are quite a few definitions/statements of this notion here. One of them (again from the book) is that AI must "act humanly" - which Kurzweil is described as: "The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people". Note that the behavior of the AI is stressed, not how it produces this behavior. Machine Learning falls under this categorization of AI (Section 1.1 in the 3rd edition of the book).
- cscurmudgeon 11y ago
  Just visit any mainstream AI conference like IJCAI. You will see many things in AI out of reach of current ML. ML is just one track. http://ijcai-15.org http://ijcai-15.org Also, even in things like question-answering, pure ML is not the state-of-the-art. E.g., IBM Watson had a bunch of different algorithms. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?reload=true&isnumber=6177717 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?reload=true&isn... We will eventually get there with a pure learning system, but not yet. Till then, we need less FUD. :)
  - jordigh 11y ago
    It seems everyone took my comment to hint that Minsky was wrong. I did not mean to indicate that. I wanted to know who was still doing non-ML intelligent machine stuff, since ML is all I ever hear about in HN.
    - cscurmudgeon 11y ago
      Ah sorry my bad too:) HN is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics. IJCAI, AI magazine, AGI conferences etc would be the best place to look at scientific cutting edging work on intelligent machines that includes non-ML work. The research reported in these places is not always flashy like what the HN crowd loves, but represents unsolved problems being solved in a variety of ways. The Berkley course on AI on EdX is also a good option to understand what is happening in the field. A lot of $$ goes into non ML stuff. Don't get me wrong ML is important, but right now, is not the only game in town. Would be nice to have pure learning machines, but we are quite far from that (despite all the hype and genuine exciting developments in recent years).
      - dang 11y ago
        > HN is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics. There's a way to change that: educate the community by submitting meaningful stories on new topics. Those are the best submissions and we're always on the lookout for them.
    - unhammer 11y ago
- ode 11y ago
  You can disagree without calling him names.
  - Gibbon1 11y ago
    You can register disagreement without reflexively down voting like this is stack overflow.
    - Gibbon1 11y ago
      You guys are really really predictable.
      - dredmorbius 11y ago
        "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        Gibbon1 11y ago
        I apologies, downvoted comments are usually interesting so I never ignore them, but my because my eyesight is slowly failing I find the greyed out comments very hard to read.
        dang 11y ago
        > I find the greyed out comments very hard to read. We recently changed it so that if you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its page, it won't be greyed out anymore. Still an extra hop, but easier than it used to be. (And thanks for responding so politely to dredmorbius' reminding you about the guideline.)
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        Thank you. So long as you're considering styling changes: http://stylebot.me/styles/2945 http://stylebot.me/styles/2945
- reitzensteinm 11y ago
  That the fashionable opinion has turned against his beliefs so quickly shouldn't be used as evidence he's wrong. If anything, it shows that the jury is still very much out.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    Huh, I don't think he's wrong. I just wonder who is still working on AI as AI.
    - tunesmith 11y ago
      Douglas Hofstadter is a clear example. Here's a 2013 article about him: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        I appreciate the article. That was an interesting read. Might have to look at that book at some point.
- jordigh 11y ago
  Huh, so many downvotes. Because I called him "Old Man Minsky"? That's a term of endearment. http://donbot.com/DesignBot/Bibliography/Bib02MinskyDiscoverInterview.html http://donbot.com/DesignBot/Bibliography/Bib02MinskyDiscover... https://books.google.ca/books?id=tNZLF8gtx-EC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=%22old+man+minsky%22&source=bl&ots=hC0zk-fZtw&sig=VdeXCprXSqAnS7Kn7SBmbWb2W1c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEwQ6AEwC2oVChMIzNr1h_CuxwIVV52ICh24LgL2#v=onepage&q=%22old%20man%20minsky%22&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=tNZLF8gtx-EC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA...
westoncb 11y ago
Anyone have opinions on his "The Emotion Machine"? I'd read "The Society of Mind" as a teenager and it was hugely influential on me—but I read a few pages of Emotion Machine last year, it felt very different, and I ended up not continuing.
- wittedhaddock 11y ago
  It was designed to be more continuous, and flowy. I believe Marvin, during one lecture, mentioned that a younger audience preferred it. I don't compare the two. They are different presentations of an idea. I find reading them to be a great way to think deeper, and ask better questions about, the ideas abstracted. Whenever I read TSoM and EM, I always feel like I missed so much -- this feeling seems to only increase read after read.
kleer001 11y ago
Why would you put your relative's homepages and email addresses on your homepage? It strikes me as strange, but I'm sure there's a sensible reason.
- segmondy 11y ago
  You wouldn't understand because you didn't experience the web when it was new and friendly. Before we littered it with cat pictures, we had links to family and friends pages. We had our email on it too before the spam wars.
  - rdtsc 11y ago
    Exactly. Also there was no facebook, twitter, type services. If someone got an account some place to create a website (like say a university professor), that was rather special and they would also use it to host their family's pictures, maybe have a section for his wife's cake decorating hobby and so on.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      I think it was even before Facebook, remember how everything was completely public at first (and by first I meant when it was already launched globally, just before it became a hype). I remember being utterly surprised seeing all girls (I know) phone numbers out in the clear. So I guess we were already not naive anymore about the web.
    - kleer001 11y ago
      Ahhhh! That's the thing. That makes total sense, thanks! It was a matter of age. I was just a kid. No wife with a hobby or digitizer for photos of a family I didn't have. As a kid I was mainly interested in music, porn, games, and weird stuff.
  - kleer001 11y ago
    > You wouldn't understand because you didn't experience the web when it was new and friendly. Yes. Yes I did. I bathed in the firehose when it was just dribbles. I was first online in 1993 when I was still in High School. I remember finding porn on people's personal pages. I remember the nascent scribbbles of some of my favorite tech journalists. I remember looking at my url history file of 3 megs and now I know most of those places are gone. I certainly experienced the web when it was fresh. However I didn't experience it in an academic or professional setting. I think that's the delta there, er, the change. Maybe you don't know what a delta is ;)
chestervonwinch 11y ago
An interesting quote from his biography page next to his Perceptrons text: > ... Many textbooks wrongly state that these limits apply only to networks with one or two layers, but it appears that those authors did not read or understand our book! For it is easy to show that virtually all our conclusions also apply to feedforward networks of any depth (with smaller, but still-exponential rates of coefficient-growth). Therefore, the popular rumor is wrong: that Back-Propagation remedies this, because no matter how fast such a machine can learn, it can't find solutions that don't exist. Another sign that technical standards in that field are too weak: I've seen no publications at all that report any patterns that porder- or diameter-limited networks fail to learn, although such counterexamples are easy to make!
adamzerner 11y ago
Not to complain, but I find it surprising that the web pages for such prominent academics/people are often so ugly. Why not pay some web designer to spruce it up? Or maybe have the department/school use a nice template? Seems worth it to me.
- marincounty 11y ago
  I was suprised too, but glad he didn't see the need for the latest bootstrap template. It's just his hompage. I imagine he will be surprised so many people are now looking it right now. I hope he keeps it the same. A few years ago I was asked to put up website exactly like The Drudge Report. I was suprised it was just html. I don't even think they bothered with CSS? It must have changed?
- killerdhmo 11y ago
  Super super common for professor sites, particularly at CSAIL. They value the functional aspect more I suppose.
- milhous 11y ago
  I think it's great because it exemplifies the spirit of the Web, like back in the Geocities days. He probably wrote the site himself and really has nothing to sell or market. His name, the domain, his work, and his CV are all that's necessary. It's all about the text.
  - adamzerner 11y ago
    That's a fair point. http://justinjackson.ca/words.html http://justinjackson.ca/words.html is one of my favorite articles.
- Rangi42 11y ago
  This already is a nice template. Plain text that responds well to zooming by the user; default colors that are easy to read and make links obvious; a few important images that are large enough to see, but don't take up half the screen like some sites' banners. If you prefer white-on-black text and have a user stylesheet for it (which I do), the site responds well to that too, without any nested <div>s or background-image:s complicating things (unlike some). I don't think that HTML5 web fonts or a whitespace-heavy designer template would aid in conveying any of the brief and well-organized information on the page. See also: http://justinjackson.ca/words.html http://justinjackson.ca/words.html and http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com. (The only thing I would add to either of those is this bit of CSS: body{max-width:900px;margin:0 auto;} to make it easier to read on wide screens.)
rectangletangle 11y ago
The minimalist HTML style reminds me of Stallman's site https://stallman.org/ https://stallman.org/
- vortico 11y ago
  Pretty much everyone in academia does this, because they know how to make functional, timeless websites that are compatible with all devices and browsers in the present, past, and future, all while maintaining their busy schedule. (Or perhaps they just don't know beyond basic HTML.)
MichaelMoser123 11y ago
The videos of Minsky's lectures on Society of Mind are on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg&list=PLUl4u3cNGP61E-vNcDV0w5xpsIBYNJDkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...

69 points by jessup 11y ago

Is Old Man Minsky the only one who still thinks that machines should do AI instead of machine learning? He certainly seemed to believe that in 2007. Who is still on his side? http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/societyculture/old_man_minsky/ http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/societyculture/old_man...

westoncb 11y ago
There are still others working on artificial general intelligence, but it's definitely more marginal, and half the time I find someone doing something interesting it's some work to figure out whether they are crazy or brilliant :) E.g. Ben Goertzel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/WakingUpFromTheEconomyOfDreams.htm http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/WakingUpFromTheEconomyOfDrea... It's hard to tell. But the thing that seemed most concerning was that at one point, they suffer some big setback and change things around. Except he's pleased that a large amount of code is still useful, doing maintenance work. I have no real basis, but my instinct says that if dealing with e.g. socket code is even remotely a concern at all, you're probably not actually solving real AI problems. Actually, the bigger thing is that it's just highly improbable they were so close to creating AI and for lack of a few dozen megabucks they aren't able to do so. It's such a tiny amount of money to supposedly bring on the singularity. Especially when you see he was selling a Market Predictor product. It's like those scams where they're going to take your money and buy gold in the Caribbean and bring it back so ya get 2x back. If you actually had market predicting software, I dunno, you could ... put your own money in? Even more recently, Peter Thiel was funding MIRI right? So if anyone close thought this was actually in reach and just needed a bit more Java code to be written, it seems rather probable they'd be able to find _some_ funding. Shit, if you really believed it'd bring about a positive GAI then you'd probably work on it in the open, find some way of completing it over a decade or two (barring severe procrastination and motivational issues). None of this adds up. I'm not sure what he was doing at SIAI/MIRI, but I've no real clue wtf they actually do anyways. Edit: http://wp.goertzel.org/important-research-avenues-on-my-mind/ http://wp.goertzel.org/important-research-avenues-on-my-mind... OK so, "important research" avenue. Apart from making AGI so we can have robots (wtf?). And growing brains in a vat. We should apparently just use Google's "databases of text" to dev a search engine that "really understands stuff". As if Google hasn't though of this "avenue". Oh, and cold fusion and femtotech. I think my estimate of this guy actually making AI has dropped significantly. "Avenues of research" eh? You'd have better luck reading the Player's Handbook and picking your top 8 favourite spells you wish were real.
pomber 11y ago
Chomsky http://www.tor.com/2011/06/21/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai/ http://www.tor.com/2011/06/21/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-figh... http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
sp332 11y ago
Machine-learning is a kind of AI, right? Assuming you mean human-style general intelligence, it's more interesting to me since it helps us understand ourselves, and we have a working model to work from.
- jordigh 11y ago
  No, ML is basically stats when you have lots of computing power. Classical AI tackled very different kinds of problems. There used to be a "war" of ideas between connectionists (which kind of turned into ML when neural networks no longer tried to be remotely biological) and computationalists, which is where Minsky would probably be closer to. He wants us to understand how minds work in order to model them better. With ML you don't really try to understand. You throw a dumb and simple-minded algorithm at lots of data and get back good results. You don't try to model all of the complexities of an intelligent problem. So, no, I would not say ML is a kind of AI.
- abhgh 11y ago
  Yes it is AI. You could quickly go through the Table of Contents in the classic Russell and Norvig "AI: A Modern Approach book" to see what is considered as AI. To be classified as AI, the mode of learning (statistical or not) is not as important as the notion of what an intelligent "agent" is supposed to do. There are quite a few definitions/statements of this notion here. One of them (again from the book) is that AI must "act humanly" - which Kurzweil is described as: "The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people". Note that the behavior of the AI is stressed, not how it produces this behavior. Machine Learning falls under this categorization of AI (Section 1.1 in the 3rd edition of the book).
cscurmudgeon 11y ago
Just visit any mainstream AI conference like IJCAI. You will see many things in AI out of reach of current ML. ML is just one track. http://ijcai-15.org http://ijcai-15.org Also, even in things like question-answering, pure ML is not the state-of-the-art. E.g., IBM Watson had a bunch of different algorithms. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?reload=true&isnumber=6177717 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?reload=true&isn... We will eventually get there with a pure learning system, but not yet. Till then, we need less FUD. :)
- jordigh 11y ago
  It seems everyone took my comment to hint that Minsky was wrong. I did not mean to indicate that. I wanted to know who was still doing non-ML intelligent machine stuff, since ML is all I ever hear about in HN.
  - cscurmudgeon 11y ago
    Ah sorry my bad too:) HN is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics. IJCAI, AI magazine, AGI conferences etc would be the best place to look at scientific cutting edging work on intelligent machines that includes non-ML work. The research reported in these places is not always flashy like what the HN crowd loves, but represents unsolved problems being solved in a variety of ways. The Berkley course on AI on EdX is also a good option to understand what is happening in the field. A lot of $$ goes into non ML stuff. Don't get me wrong ML is important, but right now, is not the only game in town. Would be nice to have pure learning machines, but we are quite far from that (despite all the hype and genuine exciting developments in recent years).
    - dang 11y ago
      > HN is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics. There's a way to change that: educate the community by submitting meaningful stories on new topics. Those are the best submissions and we're always on the lookout for them.
  - unhammer 11y ago
ode 11y ago
You can disagree without calling him names.
- Gibbon1 11y ago
  You can register disagreement without reflexively down voting like this is stack overflow.
  - Gibbon1 11y ago
    You guys are really really predictable.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - Gibbon1 11y ago
        I apologies, downvoted comments are usually interesting so I never ignore them, but my because my eyesight is slowly failing I find the greyed out comments very hard to read.
        dang 11y ago
        > I find the greyed out comments very hard to read. We recently changed it so that if you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its page, it won't be greyed out anymore. Still an extra hop, but easier than it used to be. (And thanks for responding so politely to dredmorbius' reminding you about the guideline.)
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        Thank you. So long as you're considering styling changes: http://stylebot.me/styles/2945 http://stylebot.me/styles/2945
reitzensteinm 11y ago
That the fashionable opinion has turned against his beliefs so quickly shouldn't be used as evidence he's wrong. If anything, it shows that the jury is still very much out.
- jordigh 11y ago
  Huh, I don't think he's wrong. I just wonder who is still working on AI as AI.
  - tunesmith 11y ago
    Douglas Hofstadter is a clear example. Here's a 2013 article about him: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      I appreciate the article. That was an interesting read. Might have to look at that book at some point.
jordigh 11y ago
Huh, so many downvotes. Because I called him "Old Man Minsky"? That's a term of endearment. http://donbot.com/DesignBot/Bibliography/Bib02MinskyDiscoverInterview.html http://donbot.com/DesignBot/Bibliography/Bib02MinskyDiscover... https://books.google.ca/books?id=tNZLF8gtx-EC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=%22old+man+minsky%22&source=bl&ots=hC0zk-fZtw&sig=VdeXCprXSqAnS7Kn7SBmbWb2W1c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEwQ6AEwC2oVChMIzNr1h_CuxwIVV52ICh24LgL2#v=onepage&q=%22old%20man%20minsky%22&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=tNZLF8gtx-EC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA...

westoncb 11y ago

Anyone have opinions on his "The Emotion Machine"? I'd read "The Society of Mind" as a teenager and it was hugely influential on me—but I read a few pages of Emotion Machine last year, it felt very different, and I ended up not continuing.

wittedhaddock 11y ago
It was designed to be more continuous, and flowy. I believe Marvin, during one lecture, mentioned that a younger audience preferred it. I don't compare the two. They are different presentations of an idea. I find reading them to be a great way to think deeper, and ask better questions about, the ideas abstracted. Whenever I read TSoM and EM, I always feel like I missed so much -- this feeling seems to only increase read after read.

kleer001 11y ago

Why would you put your relative's homepages and email addresses on your homepage? It strikes me as strange, but I'm sure there's a sensible reason.

segmondy 11y ago
You wouldn't understand because you didn't experience the web when it was new and friendly. Before we littered it with cat pictures, we had links to family and friends pages. We had our email on it too before the spam wars.
- rdtsc 11y ago
  Exactly. Also there was no facebook, twitter, type services. If someone got an account some place to create a website (like say a university professor), that was rather special and they would also use it to host their family's pictures, maybe have a section for his wife's cake decorating hobby and so on.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    I think it was even before Facebook, remember how everything was completely public at first (and by first I meant when it was already launched globally, just before it became a hype). I remember being utterly surprised seeing all girls (I know) phone numbers out in the clear. So I guess we were already not naive anymore about the web.
  - kleer001 11y ago
    Ahhhh! That's the thing. That makes total sense, thanks! It was a matter of age. I was just a kid. No wife with a hobby or digitizer for photos of a family I didn't have. As a kid I was mainly interested in music, porn, games, and weird stuff.
- kleer001 11y ago
  > You wouldn't understand because you didn't experience the web when it was new and friendly. Yes. Yes I did. I bathed in the firehose when it was just dribbles. I was first online in 1993 when I was still in High School. I remember finding porn on people's personal pages. I remember the nascent scribbbles of some of my favorite tech journalists. I remember looking at my url history file of 3 megs and now I know most of those places are gone. I certainly experienced the web when it was fresh. However I didn't experience it in an academic or professional setting. I think that's the delta there, er, the change. Maybe you don't know what a delta is ;)

chestervonwinch 11y ago

An interesting quote from his biography page next to his Perceptrons text: > ... Many textbooks wrongly state that these limits apply only to networks with one or two layers, but it appears that those authors did not read or understand our book! For it is easy to show that virtually all our conclusions also apply to feedforward networks of any depth (with smaller, but still-exponential rates of coefficient-growth). Therefore, the popular rumor is wrong: that Back-Propagation remedies this, because no matter how fast such a machine can learn, it can't find solutions that don't exist. Another sign that technical standards in that field are too weak: I've seen no publications at all that report any patterns that porder- or diameter-limited networks fail to learn, although such counterexamples are easy to make!

adamzerner 11y ago

Not to complain, but I find it surprising that the web pages for such prominent academics/people are often so ugly. Why not pay some web designer to spruce it up? Or maybe have the department/school use a nice template? Seems worth it to me.

marincounty 11y ago
I was suprised too, but glad he didn't see the need for the latest bootstrap template. It's just his hompage. I imagine he will be surprised so many people are now looking it right now. I hope he keeps it the same. A few years ago I was asked to put up website exactly like The Drudge Report. I was suprised it was just html. I don't even think they bothered with CSS? It must have changed?
killerdhmo 11y ago
Super super common for professor sites, particularly at CSAIL. They value the functional aspect more I suppose.
milhous 11y ago
I think it's great because it exemplifies the spirit of the Web, like back in the Geocities days. He probably wrote the site himself and really has nothing to sell or market. His name, the domain, his work, and his CV are all that's necessary. It's all about the text.
- adamzerner 11y ago
  That's a fair point. http://justinjackson.ca/words.html http://justinjackson.ca/words.html is one of my favorite articles.
Rangi42 11y ago
This already is a nice template. Plain text that responds well to zooming by the user; default colors that are easy to read and make links obvious; a few important images that are large enough to see, but don't take up half the screen like some sites' banners. If you prefer white-on-black text and have a user stylesheet for it (which I do), the site responds well to that too, without any nested <div>s or background-image:s complicating things (unlike some). I don't think that HTML5 web fonts or a whitespace-heavy designer template would aid in conveying any of the brief and well-organized information on the page. See also: http://justinjackson.ca/words.html http://justinjackson.ca/words.html and http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com. (The only thing I would add to either of those is this bit of CSS: body{max-width:900px;margin:0 auto;} to make it easier to read on wide screens.)

rectangletangle 11y ago

The minimalist HTML style reminds me of Stallman's site https://stallman.org/ https://stallman.org/

vortico 11y ago
Pretty much everyone in academia does this, because they know how to make functional, timeless websites that are compatible with all devices and browsers in the present, past, and future, all while maintaining their busy schedule. (Or perhaps they just don't know beyond basic HTML.)

MichaelMoser123 11y ago

The videos of Minsky's lectures on Society of Mind are on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg&list=PLUl4u3cNGP61E-vNcDV0w5xpsIBYNJDkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...