skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The main question is not about whether the AI would or could have morality. The more important question (and I don't think we disagree here) is whether there could be a superhuman AI in the near future - some decades for example - that might "outsmart" and conquer or exterminate people.

This is a matter of conjecture at this point: Andrew Ng predicts no; Elon Musk predicts yes.

I agree with you that, if you can be sure that superhuman AI is very unlikely or far off, then we have plenty of other things to worry about instead.

My opinion is, human-level intelligence evolved once already, with no designer to guide it (though that's a point of debate too... :-) ). By analogy: it took birds 3.5B years to fly, but the Wright brothers engineered another way. Seems likely in my opinion that we will engineer an alternate path to intelligence.

The question is when. Within a century? I think very likely. In a few decades? I think it's possible & worth trying to prevent the worst outcomes. I.e., it's "science probable" or at least "science possible", rather than clearly "science fiction" (my opinion).
> I strongly disagree and think this is very open for debate. Drivers set their own hours and use their own equipment. They can even simultaneously use another app (ex. Lyft).

> I really don't see how it constitutes an employment relationship. In fact, it seems to match all the typical characteristics of contractors.

From the IRS website (https://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Emplo...):

> The general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if the payer has the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not what will be done and how it will be done.

> You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done). This applies even if you are given freedom of action. What matters is that the employer has the legal right to control the details of how the services are performed.

It's pretty clear that Uber is controlling the details.
Pastery – a Sublime Text plugin for the sweetest pastebin in the world
This is really great, I think. At least, I admire the motivation behind it as it was outlined by Sam.

However, it seems, YC Research started by bringing in accomplished and well-known academics in the field. I wonder whether it would've been more appropriate to focus on providing PhD Scholarship and postdoc fellowship. Though, I understand and somewhat appreciate the motivation behind bring the "top-guns" of research into this, I wonder whether bringing passionate and hungry for knowledge early career researchers could've been a better bet. I am bias on this, but overall think it would be great to diversify the group and level the field -- let the randomness of ideas play its role :) Just my 5c.
I don't have any insider information here but I guess it's because AI researchers want to be published?
You share the (wrapped) post key with all contacts when you add them as contacts
Luckily there are physical limitations. There are practically two ways to arm a drone. Bombs and guns.

A small flying drone operating an 9mm pistol has extremely poor accuracy. Especially with multiple shots. If you increase the accuracy, you have to increase the mass. Which makes it bigger target. Currently regular guy with little training and a rifle can probably shoot down a gun wielding drone most of the time before the opposite can happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqHrTtvFFIs

Then there are drones with bombs attached to them. One of the most sophisticated is called Hellfire missile. But it's needlessly big and expensive. The quad copter in next video costs 100$ and has payload to carry regular hand grenade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb2Tpp3CIoY

You could go RC car route. But you again need a bit of size to conquer stairs. Also it's easier to track where it comes & goes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUXRMDK3r7s

I'm less worried about government doing bad shit and more worried about private citizens getting nasty. Autonomous flight, GPS navigation, address from google maps and bit of facial recognition. First civilian drone murder is just matter of time. People kill with more ease the further they can be when it's done.

I'm guessing this internet privacy thing will seem like child's play when all of sudden everybody wants to hide their physical address. Once that is handled, it's only bit like having rabid dogs with homing device.
This is not a consensus view by macroeconomists. While fraud may have been important, and possibly more important than macroeconomists believe, I think you do a disservice to the HN reading community by not acknowledging the vast body of experts who have already tried to answer the question of what caused the Great Recession. It's a very difficult question to answer convincingly, given that we cannot run multiple trials to see any counterfactual scenarios. I think any attempt at an answer should be presented with humility and caution and nuance.

Wikipedia discusses a bunch of factors related to the Great Recession, correctly mentioning that different economists place different weight on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Recession

Here's a video by Tyler Cowen that discussions the Great Recession in terms of four DIFFERENT macroeconomic models: http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/explaining-the-great-rece...

Lastly, I'll say that even talking about causation generally is difficult. If someone buys a gun and shoots me, what was the cause of me getting shot? If guns had been outlawed, I wouldn't have been shot. Is it Congress's fault? If the shooter hadn't pulled the trigger, I wouldn't have been shot. Is it the shooter's fault? If I hadn't failed to jump out of the way, I wouldn't have been shot. Is it my fault? Defining causality when there are many serially dependent steps is not easy. So when someone asks, why did the Great Recession happen, it's hard to even know what the question means. Feynman has a famous interview segment where he talks about the difficulty of answering 'why' questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp4dpeJVDxs
This is true, but if you take Piketty's argument that historically the return on that capital is greater than overall economic growth, then labor, being primarily reliant on economic growth for increasing their wealth, never catch up to the capitalists.
Correct, it is a texting app, and is fantastic. I did not want to build another texting app. As a twitter fiend I wanted a private twitter-like experience. Still, there is much to do.
If I'm hiring contract models for a fashion shoot, I can dictate their aesthetics.

Likewise, Uber can require its contractors to use equipment which meets a certain aesthetic standard.

> You take on most of the risk, and they have the nerve to tell you what's aesthetically pleasing, or safe.

The fact that you take on risk is a big part of why it's a contracting relationship.

You can lose money driving for Uber. That's a huge mark against it being an employment relationship—employees don't suffer profit and loss.
This problem was the weekly Puzzler on "Car Talk" on November 9:

http://www.cartalk.com/content/last-seat?question
For the problem to be NP-Complete, it would have to be both in NP (the one thing that can be agreed on) and NP-hard. For it to be NP-hard, every problem in NP would have to be reducible to it. If we already know that the Hamiltonian circuit verification problem is NP-complete, and that the Secret Santa problem is NP, we de-facto know that S.S. is reducible to the Hamiltonian circuit. So the 'Aha' moment in the third to last paragraph is not new information.

It's true that if every NP problem were reducible to S.S., then it would be NP-hard, and as it can be verified in P time with the S.S. list and the list of people plus relations, and is thus in NP, it would also be NP-complete. It would also suffice to reduce an NP-complete problem to the S.S. problem as pictured here to prove NP-completeness.

But this article doesn't give proof of either and generally points in a different direction, like you said, so the title is really misleading and it would have been better to open the article with a question or discussion.

To summarize, this post by Rod Hilton is pretty useful in understanding the relation between P, NP, NP-hard, and NP-complete: http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2012/09/14/traveling-salesm...
I think QA has been misaligned all this time. They're not part of engineering, they're part of product management. They're the low-level eyes and ears for the product team. Automating checks for the issues they uncover is absolutely an engineering function, but user-oriented holistic testing is not.
Things have gotten a lot better over the past year with the NYC bike share, especially with maintenance, but there's still a ways to go.

Generally speaking, if you're commuting, bike docks (where you pick up and drop off) are empty when you want a bike and full when you want to return one.

The official Citibike app is also terrible, and the data Citibike makes available is often inaccurate (shows bikes or open slots when there aren't any). The app "Bike NYC" is a good (free) alternative, but obviously limited by data quality.
Best Apps of 2015
Don't need an app either. Can all be done in a browser.
> It's pretty clear that Uber is controlling the details.

Is it? Uber is actually quite hands off. In fact, you spend most of your time as an Uber driver without anyone monitoring you.

Uber is paying you to transport an individual from point A to point B in an expedient and safe way. They're not paying you for your time and they're not micromanaging your driving.
I think that rising house prices in many parts of the world are directly connected to low rates.

In general (over the last century or so) house prices have kept pace with inflation.

It appears that with really low interest rates, property has become a good investment for the pools of capital sloshing around looking for a return.

It would be my hope that increased rates could redirect some of this capital back into bonds and other non-property investments, which would be good for many people who are looking to buy houses.

This is totally just a speculative theory though, I haven't really investigated the matter in detail.
> Books come in an enormous variety of shapes and sizes. E-books, tablets and smartphones, in contrast, come in very limited sizes.

There's actually a fairly wide size range of devices that are ereaders or have ereader software.
Drivers can switch on and switch off whenever they want. Drivers must actively accept a ride. The passenger controls the destination and route, and provides managerial feedback (ratings).

What exactly is Uber (the company) controlling?
Because you don't call them out for 30 minutes of work, put them on a 10 minute break, give them another 10 minutes of work, put them on a 13 minute break... And only expect to pay them for two thirds of the time they worked.

You also don't have an automated system that broadcasts identical job offer to contractors, and is able to select whichever one answers first.

I'm sure the McDonald's manager would love to only pay his employees for the thirty second increments where there are customers in the restaurant... But I'm assuming you don't do that!
Even without the hardware, I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen more AI-based approaches to finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities. I guess it's still easy enough that they don't need fancier tools; a well-designed fuzzer can do a lot.
As the article says, most American mortgages are on fixed rates. You may see an increase in rates for non-mortgage borrowing.
MIRI employee here!

We're on good terms with the people at OpenAI, and we're very excited to see new AI teams cropping up with an explicit interest in making AI's long-term impact a positive one. Nate Soares is in contact with Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, and our teams are planning to spend time talking over the coming months.

It's too early to say what sort of relationship we'll develop, but I expect some collaborations. We're hopeful that the addition of OpenAI to this space will result in promising new AI alignment research in addition to AI capabilities research.
Also, depending on the language, it should sometimes be a requirement. If you're hiring for a Haskell developer, and you're a startup, you don't have time for a top python engineer to spend 2 months getting up to speed in Haskell.
Then there are employers that hide entirely behind a recruiting agency. Why should I apply if I have little idea who you are and what you do?
Show HN: System.sh cleans your system
I like the escrow idea. I've also seen forgivable loans based on certain obligations (hiring, salary levels, etc.)

But they are taking advantage of a bunch of things; local governments inability to govern certain areas (whether due to state or federal laws) or that the mayor is thinking about election time and who would say jobs are bad?
> Musk: I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower.

In a sense, we have no other defense. AI is just math and code, and I know of no way to distinguish good linear algebra from evil linear algebra.

The barriers to putting that math and code together for AI, at least physically, are only slightly higher than writing "Hello World." Certainly much lower than other possible existential threats, like nuclear weapons. Two people in a basement might make significant advances in AI research. So from the start, AI appears to be impossible to regulate. If an AGI is possible, then it is inevitable.

I happen to support the widespread use of AI, and see many potential benefits. (Disclosure: I'm part of an AI startup: http://www.skymind.io) Thinking about AI is the cocaine of technologists; i.e. it makes them needlessly paranoid.

But if I adopt Elon's caution toward the technology, then I'm not sure if I agree with his reasoning.

If he believes in the potential harm of AI, then supporting its widespread use doesn't seem logical. If you take the quote above, and substitute the word "guns" for "AI", you basically have the NRA, and the NRA is not making the world a safer place.
In fact, the problem has been that rates aren't low enough, they are united by the zero lower bound. The natural interest rate would be several points in the negative.
I can't tell you how excited I am to see it. It seems to me that there is no good reason end users shouldn't control their social networking info, to use (e.g., via third party apps, to backup, to migrate) and share as they see fit.

> threat model is advertisers and data-miners

So many threat models I see are hackers and malware. Those are important, but much more widespread are the threats you identify.

> It is part of a set of new applications we are building at SpiderOak.

This has me much more intersted in SpiderOak. What else is in the pipeline, if you can share?

> Kloak is more or less a lab experiment in the UX of private systems

Great. Even if Kloak itself doesn't work out (and I hope it does) it could be a step forward for everyone. It seems like the path to building non-private system is very well-established, but those who want to give their users privacy have much more to invent on their own. So thanks for making it open source too.
My understanding of USCIS's definition of "work" is "doing something for which one would generally expect to be remunerated". You can't do a job and take no salary. You can't work on your own pre-revenue startup.
> forbid them from moonlightning.

How does Uber forbid moonlighting?

I know tons of drivers on both Lyft and Uber.

Uber is not paying people to be available and does not require you to work a certain schedule. They're paying you only for rides you pick up.

There are arguments for classifying drivers as employees, but time isn't one of them.
the unemployment is what the government makes it out to be, the number employed is a better measure. when you look at the number who could hold jobs or full time jobs where they do not the number doesn't look that great (this means, avoid that silly number some like to throw out of ninety plus million as that includes retirees and college kids)
> Every time they tease it then don't act, the market takes a plunge.

The market keeps plunging on expectations, and then rebounding after they don't raise interest rates.
>Our most powerful computers are many orders of magnitude below human level processing.

How can this be true? Human brain consumes just so much energy, our chips are already running close to single-electron level switching, and consume comparable amounts of energy (not even talking about computer clusters/supercomputers). May be layouts/programming are not good enough, but bare computing power is there.
Well, it becomes a bidding war, which means only one of the bidders has to be an idiot for a bad deal to happen.
Deal with modules and providers in AngularJS?
The Fed is in a jam, though, because it faces asymmetric risks. If it raises rates too soon, its scope to cut them, should the economy then sour, is limited by the fact rates cannot fall far below zero. If it waits until inflation is stronger, it has unlimited capacity to raise rates to tame it.

This to me is the key paragraph. Why not wait until we reach or exceed target inflation, when they risk tanking our still very fragile economy, and then being unable to do anything about it since rates would still be close to zero?
Incentives often cause really nasty political wars within orgs.

When a site gives a 500 because a database went down and the web app couldn't connect to it... is that a bug, a missed test case or should ops take a hit on down time? Furthermore, if you argue that the dev team should have reasonable failsafes in code to connect to a db, in a 10 year old organization, should the current Dev team pay for something that could have been in the code for years?

If you set up a system where devs hand off to QA then they hand off to ops to deploy. Furthermore every step is incentivised somewhat against each other. Even if all teams are equal, it ends up in my opinion, to the path to CYA and Waterfall. Everyone is more concerned with problems not being 'their' fault than shipping good code.
This.

Devs don't think like users. They know a lot about computers and can make good guesses about how other devs think. So devs are not the best people to test code that's going to be put in front of non-dev users.

Users are likely to have different models, and a different set of expectations. You can't write tests for all those possibilities because you literally have no idea what they are - and won't find out until you put them in front of users.
>I would take it a step further and say that worrying about the implications of AGI is like thinking about Earth being overpopulated by space aliens. First we have to establish that such a thing is even possible, for which there is currently no concrete proof.

Given that I could probably sketch out a half-assed design for one in nine months if you gave me a full-time salary - or rather, I could consult with a bunch of experts waaaaaay less amateurish than me and come up with a list of remaining open problems - what makes you say that physical computers cannot, in principle, no matter how slowly or energy-hungrily, do what brains do?

I'm not saying, "waaaaah, it's all going down next year!", but claiming it's impossible in principle when whole scientific fields are constantly making incremental progress towards understanding how to do it is... counter-empirical?
Just focus on the first half of the statement. Governments spend other peoples' money. There's less of a direct connection between value for money received. The interest group that benefits may have a much larger interest in the deal going through than the masses who actually pay the taxes -- like any other kind of lobbying.

Plus the usual; politicians might be reaping short-term benefits but making long-term payments that happen long after they leave office.
The US economy has been weak despite all of the stimulus. Respectfully, why would continuing policies that are meant to counteract emergency conditions help?
How about four options:

( ) Accurate location

( ) Fuzzy location (within 4 miles)

( ) Super-fuzzy location (state/country and time zone)

( ) No location
I dont think the NSA is the 99% threat model. It is data miners who are building up dossiers on all of us to sell to the highest bidder which will raise costs for all of us in the long run. think Insurance companies raising rates on how often you visit the online whiskey store.

We also released a password manager called Encryptr, but there is a larger project underway that I won;t say anything about yet as I am not in Marketing, etc:)
This is why specification should happen collaboratively with everyone with a stake (and that includes QA just as much as BA), you can fix them before they're developed against.
Although I hear about machine learning-based approaches to fuzzers more and more lately. So I think you will soon!
You have point there. No ICE is really balanced, there are 16(?) different vibration modes and the best boxer 6 engines can deal with maybe 4 of them.

I have pretty strong gut feeling that the 1st harmonic is more important than the 15 other modes combined. This far engines with odd numbers of pistons have been exception. Until we go to single row star engines, but they got replaced pretty quickly with two row star engines. Which can take the 1st harmonic into account.
10:1? You do realize QA has to have a semblance of life too? Adding more QA isn't designed to screw up the process, but to alleviate the workload. If you want to blame anything or anyone, I'd usually shoot for 1) hiring incompetent QA that isn't SDETs but merely just black-box QA competency, and 2) process - or lack of process, i.e. an agile process of building a little, testing a little, and delivering consistently a working product on pretty much any basis - monthly, weekly even.... That's the ideal of course.

If this is in place, adding extra QA can be beneficial.

None of this of course is excuse for a dev not producing code that works at least in its happy path plus/minus a few of the most obvious exceptions/error paths...
“your Twitter account .. may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors”
I think often the answer is "you won't know until you try it". Forward-phase, reverse-phase, symmetrical... Low voltage in particular makes things more complicated.

http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/print/volume-9/issue-6/...
http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Education-Training/Pages/LCE/Dim...
> but the eyes of the law care who owns the equipment

And where is there any evidence of Uber owning the equipment.

Financing is done through third parties, not Uber. Not to mention that it's a pretty novel interpretation that financing somehow transfers ownership.