Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago. • Hacker News Board

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#41

Post by gwern » Wed, Nov 10, 2010, 8:44 PM UTC

cobralibre wrote: post #25

Maciej Ceglowski had a similar, if less grandiose, site called Wrong Tomorrow, but it looks like it's down: http://wrongtomorrow.com/ I don't know if the site is only temporarily down, or if it's been abandoned, but it's a shame if the latter. The idea behind Wrong Tomorrow was chiefly to hold pundits accountable for their frequently bad predictions. You can read his site announcement, where he explicitly mentions si…

I believe the right URL had a prefixed www. (During some downtime, but not this one apparently, http://wrongtomorrow.com didn't work but http://www.wrongtomorrow.com did.)

Back in July, Maciej told me

> It's not abandoned, but I had to take it down since a sister site on that server was getting high traffic, and needed the resources.

I began copying over predictions from Wrong Tomorrow and Long Bets to http://predictionbook.com/ and I found that a bunch of Wrong Tomorrow predictions were corrupted/unavailable, and told Maciej about them; no reply. So I think it's safe to say that Wrong Tomorrow has been pretty much abandoned.

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#42

Post by gwern » Wed, Nov 10, 2010, 8:46 PM UTC

BCM43 wrote: post #40

steveklabnik wrote: post #4

I like the RESTful urls, check out bet #1: http://www.longbets.org/1 We've got a while, but it feels like an appropriate bet.

What happens if the organization the money is going to be donated is not still around then?

IIRC, the Long Bets terms include language like 'or similar charitable organization chosen by bettor or the Long Now Foundation if bettor is unavailable'.

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#43

Post by tjarratt » Wed, Nov 10, 2010, 8:48 PM UTC

RK wrote: post #30

drats wrote: post #21

Esther Dyson's bet "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect." http://www.longbets.org/5 The Computer History Museum gets $10,000 if she loses, I guess they should start planning an exhibit on old Russian computer technology. But to be less smug for a moment why anyone would think this is beyond me. While…

Does malware count?

Just goes to show, even in a broken, corrupt system, it's possible to grow/create world class software.

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#44

Post by kragen » Wed, Nov 10, 2010, 8:52 PM UTC

drats wrote: post #21

Esther Dyson's bet "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect." http://www.longbets.org/5 The Computer History Museum gets $10,000 if she loses, I guess they should start planning an exhibit on old Russian computer technology. But to be less smug for a moment why anyone would think this is beyond me. While…

Many Russian programmers are algorithmically brilliant. New compression algorithms in the last few years are largely Russian. A Russian guy figured out a couple of years back that using two pivots instead of one in quicksort reduced the number of swaps by 20%, which improvement is now in JDK 7. Quicksort! He found a jewel of performance improvement hiding in the world's best-known optimal algorithm, a jewel nobody had noticed since 1961. Russians routinely win on TopCoder.

It turns out that great software developers are not enough to be the world leader in software development. But it's easy to imagine why someone might think they could be, especially by 2012.

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#45

Post by winthrowe » Wed, Nov 10, 2010, 8:59 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #37

eru wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the biggest problems will be the legal framework and the power of unions. Technically flying a plane should be easier for a computer than driving a car.

Where a computer fails is when judgment is required. For example, you have an in-air emergency, and are going to have to crash land. What do you pick to crash land on to? Consider Captain Sully's recent decisions in just such an emergency.

Being a private pilot with a lapsed license, I can't possibly see that emergency landing area selection is a problem worse than navigating a street vehicle in an urban environment. Taking all the GIS databases around, I can't imagine emergency landing site selection would be a huge roadblock.

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#46

Post by eru » Wed, Nov 10, 2010, 9:56 PM UTC

winthrowe wrote: post #45

WalterBright wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where a computer fails is when judgment is required. For example, you have an in-air emergency, and are going to have to crash land. What do you pick to crash land on to? Consider Captain Sully's recent decisions in just such an emergency.

Being a private pilot with a lapsed license, I can't possibly see that emergency landing area selection is a problem worse than navigating a street vehicle in an urban environment. Taking all the GIS databases around, I can't imagine emergency landing site selection would be a huge roadblock.

And for lots of emergencies you can probably do remote flying from some call centre in India.

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#47

Post by eru » Wed, Nov 10, 2010, 11:12 PM UTC

blntechie wrote: post #34

I would love to see (or not see) how the predictor wins this bet,long bet making a decision and awards the stake. “Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth.” http://www.longbets.org/382

I guess it's just an interesting way to give to "Save the Children".

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#48

Post by Zev » Thu, Nov 11, 2010, 12:09 AM UTC

lmkg wrote: post #36

drats wrote: post #21

Esther Dyson's bet "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect." http://www.longbets.org/5 The Computer History Museum gets $10,000 if she loses, I guess they should start planning an exhibit on old Russian computer technology. But to be less smug for a moment why anyone would think this is beyond me. While…

It's a stronger bet than it first sounds, although probably not in the way the author intended. Russia doesn't actually have to be the world leader in software development, they just have to be referred to as such by a news organization. Considering the linkbait trends in modern journalism, the following headline wouldn't surprise me, regardless of what the ground truth is: "Russia: The World's New Leader in Software…

You know, Nginx did come out of a Russian web conglomerate that owns a newspaper over there…

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#49

Post by jerf » Thu, Nov 11, 2010, 1:25 AM UTC

lmkg wrote: post #36

drats wrote: post #21

Esther Dyson's bet "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect." http://www.longbets.org/5 The Computer History Museum gets $10,000 if she loses, I guess they should start planning an exhibit on old Russian computer technology. But to be less smug for a moment why anyone would think this is beyond me. While…

It's a stronger bet than it first sounds, although probably not in the way the author intended. Russia doesn't actually have to be the world leader in software development, they just have to be referred to as such by a news organization. Considering the linkbait trends in modern journalism, the following headline wouldn't surprise me, regardless of what the ground truth is: "Russia: The World's New Leader in Software…

These bets are adjudicated by humans, not computers doing a string matching algorithm. If that article's headline was just a lead up to an answer of "No, not even close" or was even a reference to the bet itself followed by "no, not even close", I don't think anyone is going to argue that as a win. It has to be serious, and barring catastrophe at this point, that's not going to happen. "World leaders in botnet development" won't cut it, either.

Re: Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

#50

Post by jimfl » Thu, Nov 11, 2010, 2:35 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #44

drats wrote: post #21

Esther Dyson's bet "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect." http://www.longbets.org/5 The Computer History Museum gets $10,000 if she loses, I guess they should start planning an exhibit on old Russian computer technology. But to be less smug for a moment why anyone would think this is beyond me. While…

Many Russian programmers are algorithmically brilliant. New compression algorithms in the last few years are largely Russian. A Russian guy figured out a couple of years back that using two pivots instead of one in quicksort reduced the number of swaps by 20%, which improvement is now in JDK 7. Quicksort! He found a jewel of performance improvement hiding in the world's best-known optimal algorithm, a jewel nobody ha…

This is very different from software development, which involves a hugely broad diversity of skillsets—only one of which is programming—and the ability to have them all work together without clawing each other's eyes out. Project management, technical writing, graphic design, operations, support, quality assurance all must be cohesively brought to bear in order to claim leadership in software development.