What's the different between that and plain old structured programming subroutines?

Although I don't think this is some sort of conspiracy, HN front-page is curated content, ranking is not only based on votes.

Flags are a factor, and function as downvotes on articles but are much heavier weighted than upvotes.

> Watson got bored of beating grand masters at chess and started refusing to play

That's when you reboot it, if that doesn't fix it good old persuasive maintenance techniques can also come into play

"I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave" - HAL

It is not a given that any AGI would be a treat. There are plenty of Natural General Intelligences, and I don't fear monkeys taking over the world, or creating faster, better, stronger monkeys any day soon

Aí winters happened because of the hype and that people ultimately realize AGI (not even talking about the Singularity) is not as easily achievable as hyped. So interest dies.

Yeah, I'm not really sure where we're standing at the moment but I feel like there's a slight over-hyping going on. Frankly I wouldn't be too surprised if even something like self-driving cars was not as close as some people make it to be. I think many people think "hey, we're 90% there, just one last push and we're good" except the last 10% has a very, very long tail and it might take us a long while to figure out completely. The idea that we might have completely autonomous general-purpose self driving cars in within a decade seems very optimistic to me.

That being said I'm very far removed from A.I. research so I don't really know what I'm talking about.

Debt possibly. I personally knew a few people that would spend money they don't have just to show off IRL before social media was a thing, and I can see doing it to a larger audience being much more efficient.

And that's how we went back to book burning, again.

If you're referring to the mission of impressing the girlfriend, success doesn't seem likely.

Natural monopolies are like that. Artificial ones are either Govenrment enterprises or Government enforced taking what was initially natural one and making it into law, and tend to overstay their welcome because of that.

Monopolies are good as long as they can be gone in the flip of a hat if people decide so.

Exactly and they have the perfect excuse:

"Well when talking about deleting we mean we do the exact same thing the file system does to a file, it flags it, but doesn't actually erase it's content. Acting like a filesystem delete operation is what people expect when using that word"

That would be somewhat reasonable if it were just an implementation detail. But unfortunately, it's not just an implementation detail. When a filesystem has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, it overwrites the data which was flagged for deletion. But when a web 2.0 company has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, they buy more hard drive space, usually automatically.

It probably is an implementation detail. I'd bet you 64 days is time is takes for all their backups to be rotated.

Not that I think that's legitimate! Implementations can be changed, just like you could write a filesystem that shreds files when they are deleted.