It's a pity this won't get many votes because of the timing of the posting (which seems to be a big factor in making the homepage of HN), it's very interesting stuff.
'In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already— life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. "We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer," George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made'.
Amazing stuff! 40 years from now login to have your genes changed to change the colour of your eyes. Pity I will probably not be around!
The singularity may be a fluke of observation bias, it is very well possible that because you are always at the forefront of technological development when you are alive (or you'd be living in the past) you perceive this tremendous advance during your lifetime, leading you to conclude that pretty soon we'll 'take off'.
The singularity has been nicknamed 'the rapture of the nerds'.
As soon as old media will get napstered and Culture will become impossible to be manipulated, and, as soon as we uploaded ourselves completely to the web --- we will have a new digital universe assuring parallel existences and a gateway to the 'old' biological life.
"The world will be changed by the ability to routinely read genetic sequences into computing systems and then store, replicate, alter and insert them back into living cells."
Somehow the front page should become customizable.
HN userbase became (too) large and there is much noise. The problem is not with the nature of the content/submissions but with the only one filter presenting the same headlines for many different point of views/groups of interest.
He's always posting stories from his work and academic history, which works because he seems to have done projects with everyone from Ada Lovelace to Yukihiro Matsumoto; and regards installing Linux on a beowulf cluster of toasters and finding SHA3 collisions in polynomial time as a trivial hack which he can explain to a layman.
As a high-school drop out my academic history is non-existent, I have a typing diploma and a drivers license, I don't know where you picked that up.
I do believe that it is possible to learn outside of academia, I work pretty hard to make up for my lack of formal education. My family circumstances were such that an academic career was not a possibility, I'm still not sure if I should regret that or not.
Installing linux on beowulf clusters is indeed trivial, but when they're made up of toasters I think I'll pass.
Let's just say that I've been pretty busy in the last couple of decades, what have you been up to, other than sniping at people from behind your comfortable wall of anonymity ?
Would you like me to type up a full CV with references or will you just take my word for it ?
That wasn't a snipe; it was genuine admiration, phrased with a touch of hyperbole. I've learned more from your history of hacks than from an average HN post.
A chronological CV would be great, though; to put all the anecdotes in an overarching framework.
Well, forgive me for having long toes but it could easily be taken in another way.
That's the downside of a digital forum, tone of voice is not one of the style attributes :)
I've never even thought anybody would be interested in the stuff that I did long ago, as I said, I've been quite busy.
Hacker News brings up the memories though, lots of this stuff I haven't even thought about for years. But the Chuck Moore post the other day brought back lots of memories of the 'dadadata' times.
I never had a real plan, just an endless fascination with technology, maybe if I had a plan things would run smoother :)
As for all the details, that will take some time if you're seriously interested.
The people that I've met and that left the strongest impression on me are a guy called Eckart Wintzen, Guerrino de Luca, as well as Rene Somer and some other people at logitech.
I came within a hair of meeting Doug Engelbart when visiting there several years ago and I really regret not changing my plans.
