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Given the Baidu work, I think we can safely say that Hinton et al's forecasts 4 years ago were on the money. Deep approaches are now clearly dominant and have yielded fantastic performance.

A 'further reading' is not a reference; 'further reading' means 'here are additional sources you might find relevant about material not covered here'. Which of 'Triumph of the City', 'The Ghost Map', and 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' did the stuff about animals come from, if you hadn't already read them? That's right - you don't know! Because he's not giving a reference.

The post reads like a (very poorly written) rehash and plagiarism of Diamond...

'Prosper'!='exist'. He claimed they existed. They did not, barring ancient people being some sort of bizarre near-super-human race which can laugh off protein and iodine deficiencies and parasite loads and early-childhood infections in a way modern people can only dream of.

This is the same problem you see when people solemnly pontificate about how many Einsteins are trapped in Africa/India and if only we would fund One Laptop Per Child we could unlock their potential...

They probably also benefited from low-hanging fruit. No one today has the opportunity to invent 'logic' or 'the Pythagorean theorem' or 'the tragedy'.

You can see underwater, but you don't see as well as they do:

> The kids had to dive underwater and place their heads onto a panel. From there they could see a card displaying either vertical or horizontal lines. Once they had stared at the card, they came back to the surface to report which direction the lines travelled. Each time they dived down, the lines would get thinner, making the task harder. It turned out that the Moken children were able to see twice as well as European children who performed the same experiment at a later date.

> The level of sophistication of science in medieval Europe may be way ahead of what we assume (have we even tried to measure it?).

I think he's not gesturing towards medieval Europe, but Rome. There was one empire which was extremely interested in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and England, and was bound together by ship, put a lot of effort into improving travel and logistics and measuring distances, much of which's science & math has been lost (leading to regular surprises like the Archimedes palimpsests and the Antikythera mechanism), whose maps could have lasted 800 years or so to be rediscovered by medieval Italians.

I wonder about the legal aspects. The reuse in one set of cases may be legal, but what about the others? If nothing else, you would think that the NYT or USA Today would have a clause in their contracts that puzzles are guaranteed new and unique...

And that expansion was done for the revenue it could deliver now, not in 2108. If the original Suez Canal had not been constructed in 1869, then this new one could still have been constructed now and it would be for the short-run gains, not gains a century-plus away.

> The only reason that things like canals get built is because people can charge money to recoup their costs.

In the case of the Suez Canal, though, it wasn't finished in 1869 for the income it could deliver in 2016, since discounted at 7%, even the headline figure of $350000 would've been worth in 1869 ~$17. (Which is just as well for the French investors in 1869, since they and the later UK investors would eventually be expropriated by Nasser in 1956 and would see nothing of any revenue after that.)

The Ainu barely exist anymore, and the whole thing about the Burakumin is that they aren't visible and all their descendants hide any connection. A better example would be the Korean descendant population, but that's still a tiny fraction of the population. (I think 1 million out of 130 million or <1%?) So there's no good comparison in Japan to the ~17% African-American population.

It's always 'climate change'. Dozens of megafauna disappear? 'climate change'. Whole tribes with fortifications suddenly disappear? 'climate change'. Wholesale population replacement? 'climate change'. It's our age's "peoples don't migrate, pots do". It's gotten to the point that when I read about the latest population genetics result show introgression or replacement and they invoke 'climate change', I no longer know if it's a case where it could be climate change or just the usual total refusal to speculate about pre-historic warfare and predation.

Sounds like 'all public Google+ photo albums'. (I say public because given what Facebook reports about daily photo uploads, a cumulative 126m seems like it would be way too small for G+ if it covered all Google Docs/Photos uploads including private ones.)

The point about ECC and accepting lower error rates makes a lot of sense. It's the end-to-end principle again: since all of these HDDs are going into a global pool in which each of them is disposable and written content is protected by FEC spread across multiple drives, there is no need for each drive to spend a lot of resources, going deep into diminishing returns, trying to make itself as resilient as possible. If a network transmission fails, it is retried and doesn't need to be swathed in huge numbers of elaborate checksums and ultra-reliable links; if a hard drive fails, the content is recovered from the FEC and re-written out to a new drive.