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Why is this so important that it reaches top spot in minutes. My links to curing cancer with ultrasound or creating ai get nothing, but the big G opens a new wi

Why is this so important that it reaches top spot in minutes. My links to curing cancer with ultrasound or creating ai get nothing, but the big G opens a new window for compose and it's a giant leap for humanity! Peter Norvig gave singularity summit talk on exciting work they're doing http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Peter_Norvig_Channeling_the_Flood_of_Data http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Peter_Norvig_Channeling_the_Flood_... , why isn't that top spot? HN is kowtowing to the pseudo-brogrammer crowd.

slig 14y ago
I guess that more than a dozen of people saw this on RSS and rushed to post here. When you post a link that has been already posted recently, HN upvote it for you,
crntaylor 14y ago
I think that you are confusing "what you want to read about" with "what the HN community wants to read about". It's a pain when your carefully curated submissions don't even hit the front page, but you just have to suck it up and move on.
guylhem 14y ago
Let's see why : - "curing cancer" has been announced many times, and until now every proposed therapy has had at best limited success - likewise, "creating ai" has been in the news time to time. We seem to be always on the verge of true ai and the singularity, but it has not happened yet. OTOH, many people here use gmail - I do, and I have been bothered by this compose thing. To see the issue actually addressed, with proof, and hopefully with an implementation that I can use in the next few days, is more valuable to me that a potential cancer cure or potential ai - especially since I don't have cancer. These are worthy goals, but until there is some real advance, why bother? It's a market economy - someone solving a problem I have is more valuable to me that someone advancing in the resolution of a problem I don't have.
- marshallp 14y ago
  The failed cancer cures were biomolecules. This is about literally cooking it with beams, something hackers with a few hundreds in parts could attempt to do. The AI advance is seen as an advance by Peter Norvig (head of Google Research) himself. Both of them are hacker relevant potentially profitable business with huge upsides. Real advances can be made, especially by the hacker crowd. There's too much of a web 2.0 filter bubble going on here.
  - guylhem 14y ago
    The failed cancer cures were not just biomolecules - things like freezing the cancers in place, preventing the growth of new blood vessels, etc. If you're more into cooking, it is something we already do with various particles - and with multiple beams to minimize damage to surrouding tissues (google for gamma knife) It's a good thing Peter Norvig sees an advance. It'd be much better when that feeling is shared by the scientific community. Real advances can be made, and there is indeed a web 2.0 filter here - much effort being spent on barely interesting things. The human race can do so much better. But curing cancer, ai, whole brain emulation etc. are topics which will require a long sustained effort - if only because we are constrained by our technology! It's not a matter of capital - these problems just can't be correctly addressed with our current technology. It's a good thing if we are making steps in the right directions, but it's very unlikely these problems will be solved very soon, therefore my interest in news about such problems is quite low, even with a deep interest in them! So I guess it's just natural that other readers find such things even less newsworthy :-(
    - marshallp 14y ago
      I see where you're coming from, but ultrasound is not like gamma knife, it truly is revolutionary (no sides effects + very cheap), and I'd put Norvig inside the science community of AI, he's head researcher of the premier AI company after all. These are current technologies, not futuristic, that are enabled by moore's law. You're assuming that what the crowd sees is what's right, and that isn't always right. The crowd didn't see search engines as important in the 90s but they were wrong. Anyway, I'm not offended by gmail news, just wanted to get some ultrasound and some ai in there and put things in context.

slig 14y ago

I guess that more than a dozen of people saw this on RSS and rushed to post here. When you post a link that has been already posted recently, HN upvote it for you,

crntaylor 14y ago

I think that you are confusing "what you want to read about" with "what the HN community wants to read about". It's a pain when your carefully curated submissions don't even hit the front page, but you just have to suck it up and move on.

guylhem 14y ago

Let's see why : - "curing cancer" has been announced many times, and until now every proposed therapy has had at best limited success - likewise, "creating ai" has been in the news time to time. We seem to be always on the verge of true ai and the singularity, but it has not happened yet. OTOH, many people here use gmail - I do, and I have been bothered by this compose thing. To see the issue actually addressed, with proof, and hopefully with an implementation that I can use in the next few days, is more valuable to me that a potential cancer cure or potential ai - especially since I don't have cancer. These are worthy goals, but until there is some real advance, why bother? It's a market economy - someone solving a problem I have is more valuable to me that someone advancing in the resolution of a problem I don't have.

marshallp 14y ago
The failed cancer cures were biomolecules. This is about literally cooking it with beams, something hackers with a few hundreds in parts could attempt to do. The AI advance is seen as an advance by Peter Norvig (head of Google Research) himself. Both of them are hacker relevant potentially profitable business with huge upsides. Real advances can be made, especially by the hacker crowd. There's too much of a web 2.0 filter bubble going on here.
- guylhem 14y ago
  The failed cancer cures were not just biomolecules - things like freezing the cancers in place, preventing the growth of new blood vessels, etc. If you're more into cooking, it is something we already do with various particles - and with multiple beams to minimize damage to surrouding tissues (google for gamma knife) It's a good thing Peter Norvig sees an advance. It'd be much better when that feeling is shared by the scientific community. Real advances can be made, and there is indeed a web 2.0 filter here - much effort being spent on barely interesting things. The human race can do so much better. But curing cancer, ai, whole brain emulation etc. are topics which will require a long sustained effort - if only because we are constrained by our technology! It's not a matter of capital - these problems just can't be correctly addressed with our current technology. It's a good thing if we are making steps in the right directions, but it's very unlikely these problems will be solved very soon, therefore my interest in news about such problems is quite low, even with a deep interest in them! So I guess it's just natural that other readers find such things even less newsworthy :-(
  - marshallp 14y ago
    I see where you're coming from, but ultrasound is not like gamma knife, it truly is revolutionary (no sides effects + very cheap), and I'd put Norvig inside the science community of AI, he's head researcher of the premier AI company after all. These are current technologies, not futuristic, that are enabled by moore's law. You're assuming that what the crowd sees is what's right, and that isn't always right. The crowd didn't see search engines as important in the 90s but they were wrong. Anyway, I'm not offended by gmail news, just wanted to get some ultrasound and some ai in there and put things in context.