smiljo

I'll just chime in with congrats on the new book. I was a huge fan of the Network Programming book that I first read in 2013, and which I still consider as having the best balance of approachability and rigor. Looking forward to checking the new one out. :)

Easy one for me: Stephen A. Cook. Proved that SAT was NP-complete and formulated the P vs. NP problem.

IMO, even among Turing Award winners there are tiers, and he's in the top one in my book.

Author here, thanks for the thoughtful reply!

> Perhaps Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search results (debatable), but that’s not an outcome of a naive application of PageRank.

Is this actually the case? We don't have a good way to test it, but I believe that you wouldn't see the crappy articles I referred in the first N results even with vanilla PageRank (and for a very large N at that).

Keep in mind that my definition of fake news is pretty narrow here: it's "Pope Francis endorses Trump" rather than "Fox dismisses COVID-19 threat" or spin of that sort, which is probably what you meant by crap.

There will certainly be blind spots like the ones above, but my goal is to eliminate the most egregious miscreants and the method outlined will achieve that (well, we'll test it and see how it goes).

Great subject, great panelists, thanks!

Did we break their site? :(

Edit: seems to be back up with everything in order.

I like the inspection feature! The natural question is: could this also support editing, rather than just inspecting?

I guess reconciling that with regular in-file edits might be a problem?

As a distributed systems guy I'm partial to Nancy Lynch. But that's distributed systems, a field which has already had awards.

Search engines getting a couple of awards seemed like a no-brainer.

I couldn't resist the little jab about AI. :)

Saying this as a big fan of the old guard, McCarthy in particular.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, the threshold is too sensitive, but we didn't catch it when testing on my device. My colleague is fixing it and we'll have another version out very soon.

Saw only recently that Judea Pearl was a guest on Sam Harris' podcast: https://samharris.org/podcasts/164-cause-effect/.

The preamble is depressing, since the episode aired right after a mass shooting, but Pearl gives a brief overview of his thinking.

Yup, it appears he was quite passionate about politics, which formed the crux of most of his conversations apart from music.

On a musical note (heh), it's also interesting to learn that he was one of the first people to play and compose for a proper piano. I guess that's what makes his piano works "richer" than those of the older composers (Bach notwithstanding).

And then a different take: https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/01/20/su...