jayvanguard

Here is another good gem from 1999:

"Most books will be read on screens rather than paper."

If he predicted e-ink and portable readers by 2009 that might be a bit more impressive. But "screens"? Just vague enough I'm sure he calls it essentially correct.

C'mon, in 1999 everyone had computers, laptops, and palm pilots. There were audio books, e-books, and project gutenberg.

Many people reading books on a screen was bloody obvious. The _most people_ part of the prediction was still a somewhat reasonable longshot bet although it certainly wasn't true in 2009 and still isn't today.

So, does he claim this prediction came true or essentially true? Worse does he, or his blind followers claim he predicted the Kindle?

The prediction is completely false even though it was weasel worded.

"Kurzweil predicts that [in a book published in 2005] supercomputers with the computational capacities to simulate protein folding will be introduced. In 2010, a supercomputer simulated protein folding for a very small protein at an atomic level over a period of a millisecond. "

This is a great one. When I worked for IBM in 2002-2003ish they were already working on the machines for this. It was public knowledge.

Fast forward 25 years when the dates are a bit fuzzier and someone reads his book published in 2005 and they conclude "Kurzweil predicted the future of genetics!!!". Sucker.

No he doesn't. He does a scattershot of predictions and then never talks about the ones that failed. Just like every other futurist.

Nicely done.

Google does, but Facebook? Names?

His interactions with Newton are what got me hooked on the book. Brilliantly done.

I'm just glad to see he can't draw circles well either.

I wonder how this will affect users is sparse timezones. The conversation could slow down or get buried to the point of being unusable.

I completely agree. The responses to your comment are a great illustration.

Syntax helps readability of structure. Lisp fails at this compared to other languages. Its simple, consistent syntax does help with some types of problems but those aren't the ones that dominate most people's daily programming needs.

I wonder if a condition of the interview was that it was abridged and Apple got to approve it before publication.

For sure. In the case of the African-American civil rights movement it took many generations.

But whenever someone minimizes an individual effort, finds excuses why they shouldn't have fought back, questions whether they really deserved it or not, or nit-picks their stories they are setting things back and slowing things down. Often the most rational people are the worst. They love to ignore context, pose what-ifs, and explore every edge case. But really they are just biased.

> There is zero upside to what she just did both legally and professionally.

For her personally, yes. As for the rest of society, there is a lot of up-side longer term.

This is typically how it works in civil rights movements. Some people have to step up and pay the price. Those that denigrate their efforts are part of the problem.

They don't make it easy, do they? Thanks for the information...

Has it really failed? It seems like at least some of the principles of agile are just a given now. 10-15 years ago that wasn't the case. People actually believed in waterfall.

Of course many individual teams fail at agile but those teams would probably fail no matter what approach they were using.

Yeah, it is broken. I had a higher score and got to a high number and it said I lost.

The language that has more lines of tutorials and articles written about it that actual lines of code.

Wow, old media company finally gets it. I'm guessing they are going to benefit in the following ways:

1. Collect and sell analytics from embedded usage.

2. Up-sell and cross-sell to embedees.

3. Use this to promote their images to potential licensees.

4. Destroy the remaining smaller competitive commercial stock photo sites.

Isn't this independent of the concurrency primitive? It is a fundamental characteristic of making a distributed call to a resource that the application in question needs to act on the response or the failure of in a timely manner (i.e. not fire-and-forget).

Even if you are using actors or the reactor pattern at some point they need the equivalent of a circuit breaker in them. It just pushes it to a lower layer.

Unless you're just advocating avoiding distributed calls which require a timely response whenever you can, which I agree with as much as is feasible, but obviously can't always be avoided.

Pragmatic unit test coverage is the way to go. Most of the summary advice isn't too bad but this statement is beyond absurd:

> • Throw away tests that haven’t failed in a year.

Apparently the author has never worked on a large software project with many versions supported over 5+ years. The value of unit tests increases over time as the software and libraries it depends upon change.

> Hacker News isn't "open source" news

Fair enough.

> If you're not into business to make money, you're not in business. You're playing.

Businesses can also be non-profit or state run. "Making money" doesn't define whether you're playing or serious.

What does drive me nuts is the non-sensical spacing.

- (id)foo

reduces readability, while

-(id) foo

is much better.

I realize the first one is more common in Apple and is probably more standard, but it begs the question why such a horrible convention ever caught on.

I agree. Putting in the id return or not is irrelevant.

I also think his larger point is important though. The general trend towards more explicit typing being the default is a move away from Objective-C's Smalltalk roots and this is a bad trend.

I suspect it is somewhat influenced by Java programmers invading the Objective-C space and spreading their rigid typing, pattern-itis cancer.

Yes, this seems quite reasonable considering the scale it handles.

Why is a $49 product front page HN material? I think a lot of people are clicking and upvoting thinking this open source.

Is there no source code link or did I miss it?

Definitely creepy.

Remember when grey was the default background for pretty much all browsers? Then one day Netscape (I think) came out with a new version and the default background was white. Just like paper. The future was upon us.

I used to love the <HR> tag. Has anyone invented a better way to break up sections?

I kid... partly. What I can't get over is a common justification for using GWT seems to be "but you can program in java and Swing then!", which only holds for fans of Swing. It seems is most often advocated by people uncomfortable with Javascript development and little UI development experience outside of Java.

I don't think Swing is terrible but I do think it isn't particularly productive for user interfaces compared to Javascript or even Objective-C, C#, etc.

So if all you have a Java/Swing hammer then GWT is great, otherwise not so much.

In any event, I look forward to your post.