skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I've heard is that MIRI has an explicit philosophy of concentrating on the more abstract & theoretical aspects of AI safety. The idea being that if AI safety is something that you can just tack on to a working design at the end, they don't have a comparative advantage there: it's difficult to predict which design will win and the design's implementor is best positioned to tack on the safety bit themselves.

>...imagine a hypothetical computer security expert named Bruce. You tell Bruce that he and his team have just 3 years to modify the latest version of Microsoft Windows so that it can’t be hacked in any way, even by the smartest hackers on Earth. If he fails, Earth will be destroyed because reasons.

>Bruce just stares at you and says, “Well, that’s impossible, so I guess we’re all fucked.”

>The problem, Bruce explains, is that Microsoft Windows was never designed to be anything remotely like “unhackable.” It was designed to be easily useable, and compatible with lots of software, and flexible, and affordable, and just barely secure enough to be marketable, and you can’t just slap on a special Unhackability Module at the last minute.

>To get a system that even has a chance at being robustly unhackable, Bruce explains, you’ve got to design an entirely different hardware + software system that was designed from the ground up to be unhackable. And that system must be designed in an entirely different way than Microsoft Windows is, and no team in the world could do everything that is required for that in a mere 3 years. So, we’re fucked.

>But! By a stroke of luck, Bruce learns that some teams outside Microsoft have been working on a theoretically unhackable hardware + software system for the past several decades (high reliability is hard) — people like Greg Morrisett (SAFE) and Gerwin Klein (seL4). Bruce says he might be able to take their work and add the features you need, while preserving the strong security guarantees of the original highly secure system. Bruce sets Microsoft Windows aside and gets to work on trying to make this other system satisfy the mysterious reasons while remaining unhackable. He and his team succeed just in time to save the day.

>This is an oversimplified and comically romantic way to illustrate what MIRI is trying to do in the area of long-term AI safety...

http://lukemuehlhauser.com/a-reply-to-wait-but-why-on-machin...
Ironically, you're absolutely right. Cops, bodyguards and civilians defending themselves generally only need guns because their adversaries have guns. Just take them out of everyone's hands. I know this works, if you can make it happen, because I've seen the gun death statistics for countries with effective gun control.

Hunters are a different case, but their weapons are rather different too. To be honest I wouldn't that much care about depriving them of a pastime if it meant turning US gun death figures into European ones. But that's probably unnecessary.
"...decades of misdeeds..."
Which they benefited handsomely from and were never sufficiently punished.
I'm with you, my trust of MS is still pretty close to nil.
It's more complicated. Hyperion doesn't really do hardware. The hardware for AmigaOS4 is done by companies like A-Eon [1] and ACube[2].

Note how since Amiga Inc. still holds the rights to the name Amiga, A-Eon and ACube hardware is called AmigaOne rather than Amiga.

To make it even more convoluted, Cloanto owns the name "Workbench" for use with their emulation packages.

[1] http://www.a-eon.com/
[2] http://www.acube-systems.biz/
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.

???!!!

Isn't this like gun control all over again?! You give more guns to people so that they can be safe, instead you end up killing each other.
That's an interesting point, and also seems to fit in to the supersonic jet narrative: people aren't willing to pay a (sufficient) premium to shave a few hours off a flight. In the same way, you might be willing to accept a couple of extra hours travel time to be in the comfort of your own vehicle.
I've seen this figure before, and read that they changed firing range practices after the war to make killing more automatic. This was in Gwynne Dyer's "War", and he's normally reliable.

However, the original statistic is apparently from a not so credible source, a study by SLA Marshall in WWII that's not so well regarded. This thread goes into some depth:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/ubb/get_t...

Not sure what the truth of it is.
The Unreasonable Reality of Junior Dev Interviews
How do you feel about the notion of breaking from our feudal tradition and advocating for basic income? What excites me most about the idea is people would be free to check out of the system and use their own creativity to survive and thrive. Soon, when intellectual capital is understood to be the most valuable, this investment will be returned with dividends.
Slim Down with 30 Days of Healthy Snacks
Fair enough. Given time we'll know it all anyway. Thanks for the exchange!
FYI you don't have to VPN to use US Netflix, you can use a smart proxy, which is cheaper.
Haskell Skyline
The problem with the government is that it is beholden to market actors.

Corruption.
Why not just use AWS S3?
Evidence will be shown when the right moment is.

HSBC was participating kneck to kneck with drug smugglers and making billions a week from that illegal and immoral trade. eventually they were fined only a few billion which they make from that same business within 2/3 weeks. Noone got jailed.

But what happened to the individuals who happened to run digital currency based platform for the same?

My point is that both were involved in similar illegal practices, but justice delivered to each was not equal. Surely justice was decided based on several interests, of which the law was mere one of the parameters (often an insignificant one when the convict is a powerful entity.)
As awesome as this looks, I'm totally missing the point.

If they truly believe AI is dangerous, how does promoting / accelerating it is supposed to help?

Or is it a way to commoditize R&D in machine learning so that it will never be a bottleneck for startups?
A Quirk of Physics Could Give Us a Fast, Cheap Way to Diagnose Diseases
> 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.

Sorry but this "guns > NRA > bad > evil" thing is getting pretty old. I don't even own a gun and I have trouble making the "gun > bad" connection when there are hundreds of millions of guns in the US. We should have rivers of blood running down every street. We don't.

Just stop it. They are not the problem. Crazy people are the problem.

Crazy people with drones are a problem. That does not make drones bad.

Crazy people, well, intelligent crazy people, with AI are a problem. That does not make AI bad.

If we are going to have intelligent arguments let's first be intelligent. The minute someone makes the "guns > NRA > bad > evil" argument in some form I know they are making it from a total ideological corner or from political indoctrination. I challenge anyone to put the numbers to Excel and make an argument to support "guns > NRA > bad > evil" or "drones > no rules > bad > evil" or "AI > watched Terminator too many times > bad evil" without having a crazy person as part of the equation.
Using xz for Linux builds of your software might make sense though, or would do so in the future. Recent releases of Fedora and RHEL already uses xz to compress their RPM packages.

Debian/Ubuntu dpkg supports compressing with xz too -- and it's a hard dependency of dpkg at least as far back as the precise (12.04) LTS release. So I'd say the majority of Linux users already have access to xz.
https://github.com/AWSinAction/lambda
Poker, Wikipedia, and the Singular They
In addition to "Pay attention to how food and drink affect your sleep", I would add Pay attention to how exercise affects your sleep.

In my case, nighttime cardio can keep me awake later. On the other hand, weightlifting late is a significant sleep aid to me.
Me, I wish people would stop using RAR. It's proprietary and doesn't have a real compression advantage vs. e.g., 7-Zip, bzip2, or xz.
> The study suggested that black hosts were just as likely to discriminate against black people as white hosts were

I wonder if the discrimination is not so much against blacks as against less wealthy people? Blacks are disproportionately represented among the less wealthy in the US so using black sounding names as a filter will also be a weak filter against less wealthy people.

I'd be curious if the discrimination rate depends on the type of host. In particular, I'd like to see a comparison of hosts who are renting out a room in their own residence and hosts who have separate houses or apartments dedicated to AirBnB.
Kalatú
Been waiting all week for this to come out. I love doing wargames, and have been looking forward to trying out stockfighter for a long time now after reading through all your posts.

Hope you manage to sort out the problems.
Physics. You're right that ecosystems are brutal. That's exactly why I'm not worried about AI as an existential threat to humanity.

A few years back Bill Joy was sounding the alarm on nanotechnology. He sounded a lot like Elon Musk does today. Nanobots could be a run-away technology that would reduce the world to "grey goo". But nothing like that will ever happen. The world is already awash in nanobots. We call them bacteria. Given the right conditions, they grow at an exponential rate. But they don't consume the entire earth in a couple of days, because "the right conditions" can't be sustained. They run out of energy. They drown in their own waste.

AI will be the same. Yes, machines are better than us at some things, and that list is growing all the time. But biology is ferociously good at converting sunlight into pockets of low entropy. AI such as it exists today is terrible at dealing with the physical world, and only through a tremendous amount of effort are we able to keep it running. If the machines turn on us, we can just stop repairing them.
I never pay full price for anything

On that note, I don't pay for anything on Amazon; I can use my Citi points like cash there... and my designated charity (OneBrick) still gets their full cut.

Thanks for sharing the Apple Pay info, but it seems to require Apple devices.
How often does your kernel panic? The tone of your post comes off pretty as though it's a common annoyance.
There's a very real case that any superhuman agent would prioritize its own survival over the survival of any human, since (presumably) its utility function would encourage it to continually guarantee the survival of "humanity" or something larger than any single human... and it can't guarantee anything if it's dead, right?

So the moment there's a war between two superhuman agents, either of them could end up de-prioritizing human life, more so than they might if either of them existed in isolation.

And if there's actually a starvation of resources if there are a large number of superhuman agents? Am I missing something obvious here?

If I'm not missing anything... it's painfully ironic to me that we worry about the AI Box, and yet by open-sourcing the work of the best minds in AI, we voluntarily greatly increase the probability that AI will be born outside of a box - somebody is going to be an idiot and replicate the work outside of a sandbox.

Now, despite all of this, I'm optimistic about AI and its potential. But I believe the best chance we have is when the best, most well-intentioned researchers among us have as much control as possible over designing AI. Ruby on Rails can be used to make fraudulent sites, but it's fine to open-source it since fraudulent sites don't pose an existential risk to sentient biological life. That is not necessarily the case here.
Ghost Riders Abk N A'z ''Indonesia Travelling“
No, xz (on a particular level setting) is both faster than bzip2 and provides better compression ratio, but zpaq is just slower.
Do you have a Phd? How did you satisfy the requirements of EB1A otherwise?
Being the best at something does not make it necessarily the best choice for most situations. This is trivially shown through this example. Assume for the four measured aspects, there is a program this is the best, but in the other three aspects it is orders of magnitude worse than the best in that aspect. Now consider another program which is best in nothing, but is 95% the way to best in every aspect. It's never best in any aspect, but it's clearly a good choice for many, if not most, situations.
That sounds like a problem with lack of resources and bad planning, not just lacking qa. If you were to choose between a) hire 3 devs to offload your work so that you can focus on your tasks better, or b) hire 3 qa guys that will keep throwing back the shit you produce because you are overloaded. I don't think any qa would help in such a situation
Are you living in a computer simulation? (2003)
Forgive the throwaway -- but how does Yahoo define "will work?" Ignoring the calls against the UX change of several years ago, your own user feedback pages at https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/207809 make it pretty clear that longstanding issues such as spam (the same ring of spammers has operated for multiple years as Ultimate Stock Alerts, PennyStockAlerts and ExplosiveOTC and others -- simple Bayesian filtering could have solved this years ago) and things like the fact that the ignore function (a pretty core piece of functionality) has never actually ignored users - merely greyed them out, but they still take up space on the screen.

My point isn't to be negative about the state of Yahoo Finance; you probably don't work in that department, and after three years of neglect, most of the users are long gone.

My point is that if an organization is going to rely on end users to report bugs, the organization must actually respond to those bugs. Sometimes the answer might be "No, we're not going back to the Web 1.0 UX." But ignoring the top bugs for multiple years suggests a breakdown in the feedback mechanism. If Yahoo doesn't care, that's fine, it's just business. But it seems more likely that Yahoo doesn't even know there's a problem, because there's no way for user feedback to make it to the developers.
FYI, this cool little project — https://code.google.com/p/miniz/ — implements faster gzip compression at level 1.
If you are translating an eCommerce site, never forget to check product names
> On the contrary, this fallacy is very important and applicable.

I don't claim that it's an unimportant fallacy to understand and recognize and apply. Instead I said it was my "least favorite", because of it's so rarely applied correctly. By the rest of your comment, I get the impression you didn't catch my meaning.

> For example if US Army has a tendency to employ
> rapists, it's valid to criticise US Army for this fact
> even if they have a rule that forbids such behavior.

Here, the critical point is not that the US Army employed a rapist or even several rapists. Instead you're saying they have a tendency to employ racists. No True Scotsman would only apply if someone from the Army made a statement in complete denial of that fact, hand waving it away by pointing out the rule and saying something to the effect of "The Army has a rule against rape, so anyone who does that isn't a real soldier". It's a valid No True Scotsman because the behavior is clearly evident in a non-fringe component of the group.

If someone did make that statement in sincerity, sure, send in the No True Scotsman patrol and take 'em out. But that's not how it usually happens. Typically, there's a singular incident. That's often followed by a careless article which paints with an overly broad brush: "Does the Army have a rape problem?".

And that is the point where I start looking for the misapplied No True Scotsmans to crop up. There's no way for anyone to defend the Army by pointing out that it's against the rules, or that the number of rape incidents in the army is lower than the general population, or really any other facts.

> It's important to call out this fallacy, because the
> membership in a group can't be defined on the basis of a
> person's conduct, since there's no way to monitor that
> every member of the group adheres to this conduct.

I believe this idea right here is the source of all these misapplications. And it's just false. Of course membership in a group can be defined by a person's conduct. Try comparing Hacker News to Reddit in 3 or 4 comments and see how quickly you get shadowbanned. In fact, I'd say defining group membership based on conduct is the rule, not the exception.

No True Scotsman is intended to point out the fallacy of someone inside a group avoiding criticism by constantly shrinking or changing the group rules in order to draw a distinction from some negative person or incident. If the goalposts aren't moving, then its likely the person really isn't a True Scotsman, and you should maybe try to understand why not.
Carbon rights?
There is also the pasteurizing step to consider, and plenty of countries have 'milk boards' (cartels by any other name).
>unconstrained by a need to generate financial return

The incentive, not the constraint, provided by financial return is what drives innovation the most, aside from (but not mutually exclusive to) necessity.
I don't think the commenter is saying that climate scientists should rephrase their findings using risk & mitigation models.. at least not the way I understand that comment.
True, although he despised his father for abandoning him before birth
>No, they probably don't. People don't know that smoking is the leading cause of erectile dysfunction;

Yes, there is a picture of a man covering his genitalia with a thumbs down and a big IMPOTENCE written on the back of cigaret packages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_packaging_warning_mess...
'Said activities' are having & will have an enormous impact on the world's poor. This is not necessarily a conclusive argument against undertaking them (if survival is at stake) but a balanced view of the kind we don't get is needed.

The language used is that of religious fervour with talk of 'denial', and 'sceptics' - as if reasoned scepticism isn't the basis of how science progresses. ("Conjecture and refutation- Karl Popper" anyone?)

My point is not to argue against CAGW but to bemoan the lack of any calm appraisal of pros and cons. A response to risk mitigation is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw5Lda06iK0 where the thesis is based on figures accepted by the IPCC and Lord Stern. I've not seen a sensible rebuttal. No one discusses the massive increase in the utterly predictable 'greening of the planet' that has and is taking place as a result of the CO2 increase. This translates to $billions in crop production. We only hear of negative effects. Estimates of the lowering of temperature supposedly linked to lowering of emissions after 50-100 years, cite decreases imperceptible to a human and hedged with uncertainties as to their origin and statistical treatment. And so on.

Finally, you don’t have to be a climate scientist to note that 1/3 of all emissions of CO2 have occurred since 1970 with no significant increase in global temperature. What do we deduce from this about CAGW? This is a question not a slanted conclusion.
Image of Canadian Sikh man photoshopped to look like Paris terrorist
Just to clarify, you don't have any problem with people posting API clients (etc) on Github?
> It's compress-once, decompress on somebody else's machine, so neither of those matter.

Last week, there was a drive mount that was filling up, rate was roughly 30Gb/hr. The contents of that mount was used by the web application. Deletion was not an option. Something that compressed quickly was needed. And on the retrieval end, when the web app needs to do decompression, seconds matter.
Yeah, the example given by GP involves large binary streams. Brotli was designed for small text documents with lots of English words in them, as we often see on the web.
Whither the Internet? An Interview with Cyber Security Expert Rafal Rohozinski
Don't forget that bug count is actually a KPI. More specifically, you end up with JIRA ticket inflation: you get exponentially more tickets generated with time, but the value of each ticket decreases in proportion.

The CEO of the business will basically hear two messages:

1. "Look at how well my tech organisation is doing, we solved 150 tickets this week, a 40% increase over the last 3 months! And yet our headcount only increased 10%."

2. what your comment said.

It's down to him to act accordingly. I've seen many trust 1, he's "data-driven".

There's variations of the JIRA ticket inflation, such as requesting regular update meetings and the tech organisation adapting by finding days-long tasks and pushing off the hard weeks-long ones (since they do not result in neat weekly progress updates).

"I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress." - George Smiley (in Smiley's People) making the point that this is not a new problem.
Have you considered putting the journal on a separate physical device? There have been a lot of reports through the years of some pretty substantial boosts in performance because the drives don't need to bounce back and forth between journaling and writing.
What about availability? I often find myself having to download and compile (de)compressing software because the authors of some other software I need decided to ship it in something other than the standard (.tar.gz), which is available in basically all *nix boxes.
Why is guns the only technological comparison? Replace guns in your statement with mobile phones or access to the internet.
The same joke is posted on literally every submission about compression. It adds nothing to the discussion, so it gets downvoted.

Comments about being downvoted are also almost always downvoted. The comment guidelines actually warn you that it's a bad idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We plan on augmenting the documentation with a user-friendly "guides" section. A big rework of a lot of the docs is actually very high on the near term TODO list, so I'm sorry for the current state of it.

As for how you can more easily use it, we recommend [the now weirdly named] consul-template or envconsul. The former (https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template) will put secrets automatically into files and watch for changes, update the file, and refresh the process. If you put the files onto a non-swappable ramdisk, then it is reasonably secure (relative to most things, less secure than deeply integrating with Vault).

Envconsul, on the other hand, injects secrets as environment variables to a process. This is also reasonably secure but users have to be aware of the various ways that env vars can be read out of process (/proc for example).

These are the two easiest ways to get started that allow Vault to be used with brownfield software. If you greenfield something, integrating Vault 1st class is the way to go for the most security and is what we're seeing bigger users go for.
I suggest that hate is an emotion generated by fear and for every scenario involving hate, you'll find one or more fears it owes it's existence to. This is why the underlying fear is what needs to be addressed to eliminate hate.
People must be educated by the cyber security experts like Rafal to enhance awareness.