skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> we don't necessarily need to build a sentient AI

How do you know if an AI is sentient or not? We don't even know what sentience is. For all we know, maybe the computation of a Mandelbrot set is conscious.

> capabilities far above human without actually having agency of its own

What does this mean? Doesn't a chess-playing algorithm have agency of its own? What about a self-driving car? People say: "oh, but ultimately they are only doing what they were programmed to do". Sure, but so are we. It's just that our programming is done in a much less straightforward way.

Consciousness and free-will are open problems. Theories about these things are not even wrong, because people can't seem to agree on a definition. Personally, I suspect that "free will" is meaningless* and that consciousness is qualitatively beyond our current level of understanding of realty.

* I suspect that this meaningless concept was introduced to solve the conundrum: "if god is good why does he allow for bad things to happen?". And the answer they came up with was "so that we can have free will". But think about it, what does that even mean?
Obviously, no.

But if everybody else isn’t equally punished, or equally investigated, than that is against the constitution, too.
I believe the answer is No. The E-3 Visa states you have an intention to return back to Australia. So you need to move to a Visa like H1B which opens the door to a GC.
While getting a new H1B has become statistically impossible given the statutory limits that Congress refuses to revise, there are other visas like the O1 and J-1 that are still possible.

We have a couple of guys at my company in San Francisco, who came here on a J-1 or an O-1 as opposed to the more traditional route (post-graduate degree student and then an H1).
AI is a pretty huge field, what area are they going to focus on specifically?
I think that depends on how you want to model the danger of AGIs. Nukes are dangerous but the least dangerous version of nukes doesn't seem like nukes "everywhere in the world".

Of course, as a pure hypothetical, it's virtually impossible to come up with a definite danger-model for AGIs.
Though, he is trying to solve a variation of secret santa which has blacklisted pairs, which means a random shuffle might result in an invalid ordering.
And just how many microLenats of bogosity does OpenCyc have?
Might not be that easy esp if your o/s entity still has you as a shareholder/owner. And if that country has a taxation treaty with USA like Australia does. Then you need to reveal all your foreign activity.
He also lied. So keep that in mind while thinking of being true to the original, and just keep it going! :-)
> uber for robot planes will beat any ground bound system

"Beat" as in get to the destination faster, but the ground system would probably be cheaper (use less energy) as it doesn't have to continually expend energy fighting gravity. Perhaps if traffic conditions are very bad (e.g. stop-start driving with no regenerative braking) then the air option would be cheaper.
> NAFTA was Bush Sr.

NAFTA was negotiated under George H. W. Bush, but passed (by Congress) during (and with the support of and active lobby by) the Clinton administration.

> The GOP has a lot of reasons to resist the TPP, but the main beef seems to be the executive branch's attempt at role reversal in the crafting of legislation.

The GOP (including as recently as this year) has supported what you characterize as this "role reversal", through legislation on fast track negotiating authority and trade promotion authority.
The point here is that the government can be smarter than the market. The effort required to educate enough members of the public that microbeads are bad to the point that they become unprofitable is WAY larger than the point required to convince legislators and regulators to outlaw them.
You left out "also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud". Do you honestly think that the will spend even a majority, let alone all, of the $15k on a search and replace operation?
What? The brain has not only solved the vision problem (reconstructing depth from still images, recognising the objects in the scene, and filling in the occluded parts), it has also solved the motion problem of coordinated the movement of our ~300 muscles (given constraints, how do I move from A to B, or pickup the cup, or do a handstand), as well as solved the memory problem (basically infinite memory, with some sort of priority system for removing unused/old memories so we can always learn more). Additionally it solved the communication problem with language that computers still can't parse properly. It is so smart it is even conscious, and self-aware as well as death-aware.

This is not over-glorifying. That is fact.
There were only couple of options for this merger to take place.

1. Dow and DuPont merge without any further plans to split. This wouldn't fly with regulators as combined entity will have too much power in US as well as worldwide. Not only US regulators but also regulators in EU and Asia will be very interested in vetting such deal.

2. Dow and DuPont swap the agriculture and specialty products divisions and merge the materials division with recent DuPont spin-off Chemours. This wouldn't fly with regulators either as both Dow and DuPont will have too much power in their respective segments.

If Dow and DuPont would have gone with option 1, the regulators would have come up with their own plan to divest certain businesses to approve merger. Instead, Dow and DuPont are offering a future split solution by proposing to split in three portions that will get them closer to option 2 with some regulator-driven divestment.

I will not be surprised when and if merger and split goes through, we land up with the second scenario anyway. Agriculture goes to Dow with HQ in Midland MI, Specialty products goes to DuPont with HQ in Wilmington DE, and Materials goes to Chemours.
OneDrive users can keep their free 15+15GB of storage, if they opt-in by Jan. 31
It isn't too hard to be off an order or two of magnitude when dealing with exponential increases, no reason advances could or couldn't level off at 1% or 1000% of human capacity.
They've still got a project named Bro, so maybe they're equal opportunity contrarians.
I think this is really naïve. The masses knowingly engage in a hell of a lot of wasteful and/or harmful behavior. I know flying uses a lot of hydrocarbons and literally affects global temperature [1], yet I still fly. A minority are much worse than average. I live in SF and I once had a roommate who “couldn't be arsed” to put recyclables in the recycle bin (which was literally next to the rubbish bin), for example. This man is well-traveled and is educated enough to be a private-school teacher.

[1]: http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate...
Given Musk's public comments about existential threats, I assume the focus will be on friendly AI theory and implementations, akin to what MIRI does.
Totally agree that the laser-like focus kicks in when you have a definitive deadline due, with a boss or colleague waiting on you. Have learned as well that focus is a reservoir like you said, and that task switching is cognitively draining.
Tbh, after 10 years, I think IP should just expire altogether for non-commercial use.
That sums up the distinction perfectly.
Set up a few 72W incandescents that you turn on to preview colors?

I am interested in your general question though. My Cree TW have passable colored light, but are just too damn anemic both temperature and intensity. I'm thinking of augmenting with some higher intensity non-CRI-optimized LEDS.
Facebook is rolling out Web Push. Here's what that means for web developers
> and there's no good substitute at a reasonable price point

Not to mention that the CFL bulbs are poisonous and contain mercury. If they break, they're hazardous.
Definitely agree - after going on a short walk I always wonder why I don't do it for 5 minutes every hour.
Student Team Wins Grand Prize at Facebook Global Hackathon
I think you forget how closed the rPi was when it was initially released. Its only been pried open by the community over the past few years.
Why is this downvoted?
Introducing utest.h – single header C/C++ unit tester
Agreed. But we're going to have to fight hard for a UBI.
It is entirely upto Congress to pass a sensible legislation, which they've been refusing to for a better part of last 8 years.
I am feeling sad about this. The USA economy is clearly weak by any of its own measures, and there is the likelihood that weakness in Europe and China will further weaken the USA. Inflation has been subdued for years and has recently declined further, so there is absolutely no justification for a rate hike. Labor participation among prime age adults remains lower than before the recession. And yet the Fed seems absolutely determined to raise rates, even though there is no conceivable good that can come from this action.

Edit:

Please see:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/12/eco...
It's a kind of abstracted version of the tragedy of the commons, which is known specifically as an exception that the free market does not handle well (that is, assuming the pollution is being done to a shared resource rather than a private one.. If it was 'polluting' my septic tank and causing some kind of damage, I'd have a market-style incentive to fix it).
Yeah, agreed! It's no surprise that LW has been known to attract a few PUA followers as well.
Git definitely has a higher learning curve, but there are some very obvious advantages compared to SVN. I'd recommend SourceTree for a windows GUI that doesn't suck. https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/
What was at stake was to be able to sell into the US at all. For VW that may have been 'worth the risk', I think retrospectively they're happy to agree that it probably wasn't.
Exactly, the best compilation technique involves dozens of small passes, ideally with a new AST after every pass. And rewriting the whole thing so many times is very error-prone and clumsy in general. If you add a new variant to the first AST you may end up amending dozens of the lower ones.

My ideal approach is the one of Nanopass (or MBase, which was developed independently), where you can derive an AST from an existing one using simple rules.

For example, my usual trick for a typing pass is to enumerate all the expression nodes, giving them unique ids (that will become free variables in the type equations). The new AST is usually generated with a couple of lines of code:

ast typed: simple (simpleexpr -> osimpleexpr) recform {
simpleexpr = t(ident:ttag, osimpleexpr:e);}

And the rest of the AST can be very complex and elaborate, but we only wanted to rewrite `simpleexpr` nodes here and nothing else.
I think we must be misunderstanding each other. Developers are human. (At least, I think we are.) We respond to the incentives and structure of the environment in which we're developing. A culture of "throw crap over the wall to QA" naturally creates an incentive for quickly writing up features, without balancing that with robustness, because finding the problems "is QA's fault". A culture of "the devs are responsible for the quality of their code" produces better code. The way to treat the devs well is to have the QA folks go off and create or bring in easy-to-use automated testing and CI frameworks, to make it easy for the devs to do the right thing.

This is not a new observation - it's been happening over the last 10 years. see, for example, http://blogs.forrester.com/mike_gualtieri/11-02-17-want_bett...
or http://product.hubspot.com/blog/the-classic-qa-team-is-obsol...
and, while it's from 2007, http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2007/03/difference-between...
TWC?
I actually used Native because it was legitimately natural, not the "natural" claim that Unilever/P&G make but still pack it with chemicals that shouldn't be in my body.

Would also like other recommendations for other bathroom products that are truly natural
I searched for examples of websites built with Django CMS, and I saw that the django-cms homepage already has a page dedicated to that: http://www.django-cms.org/en/case-studies/

Does anyone else have more examples? I am really curious about django-cms in the wild.
You've just defined modern art.
Dow and DuPont have been loosing a lot of customers to BASF in the last 5 years or so. Especially in the area of nano materials.
Describe npm in one module
Before you invite regulation into this area, take a long hard look at how the government has historically approached cryptography and IT security. This is a far simpler domain with far simpler concepts, and it's a total shitshow that alternates between ignorant security theater and self-serving power grabs.

Get into bed with the government and they will piss in it. The most likely outcome is costly complicated regulations that hobble legitimate development and accomplish nothing in terms of making us safer from anything. The end result will be like ITAR and crypto export controls: pushing development off shore and making the USA less competitive.

I say this not as a hard-line anti-government right-winger or dogmatic libertarian, but as someone who has a realistic view of government competence in highly technical domains. Look at other areas and you don't see much better. Corn ethanol, for example, is literally the pessimum choice for biofuels-- it is technically the worst possible candidate that could have been chosen to push. The sorts of folks who ascend to political power simply lack any expertise in these areas, and so they fall back on listening to the agenda-driven lobbyists that swarm around them like flies. The results are awful. Government should do government but should stay the hell away from specific micromanagement of anything technical.
EvolutronicLife – ascii based life simulation
It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly.

The high-stakes wager isn't success vs failure in creating strong AI, it's what happens if you do succeed.
Growth rates in nature are never exponential. They are sigmoidal.
- For whatever his other flaws, Kurweil deals with this by pointing out that Moore's law has effectively been a series of sigmoidal curves - but these series constitutes a trend.

Even if we had a computer that was 1,000 times faster than the ones we have today and used 1/1,000 of the computing power we STILL don't have the algorithms to produce a human intelligence and that is one hell of an algorithm.

- One has to put such an algorithm as in the realm of "unknown unknowns". Anyone who says they know for sure that a human-capability-equivalent algorithm is complex would have to know a least a lot about such an algorithm. No one can yet make that claim. So the non-existence of such an algorithm isn't a certainty but just a trend.

And the "unknown unknown" things might a long time out, might be just around the corner or might be utterly impossible.
It's 'Chomsky' and I can't find a reference for that quote, where did you find that comment?
True, but it depends. I bought a bunch (16?) of top-end Soraa MR16 bulbs at about $30 apiece to replace the halogens in my new house. This is not something everyone can easily afford.

Of course, it turns out that even though they have great dimmer compatibility, they're not 100% compatible with my magnetic dimmers. I have to trim them to 80% of peak; if I try to run them over 80%, the transformer resets and the bulb turns off. Sometimes they strobe for a few seconds when they're running at max brightness, I haven't solved that issue yet.

So unless I want to replace every transformer at ~$60 a pop or more (plus labor costs if not doing it yourself), plus likely a bunch of switches.. It's either $100 per bulb to go LED, or suffer with not-quite-perfect replacements.
> Altman: Our recruiting is going pretty well so far. One thing that really appeals to researchers is freedom and openness and the ability to share what they’re working on, which at any of the industrial labs you don’t have to the same degree.

Do current AAPL/GOOG/FB engineers dislike this so much? There's secrecy within most for-profit entities, what makes AI so different?
This is a key takeaway: "...we are going to ask YC companies to make whatever data they are comfortable making available to OpenAI. And Elon is also going to figure out what data Tesla and Space X can share."

Money is great, openness is great, big name researchers are also a huge plus. But data data data, that could turn out to be very valuable. I don't know if Sam meant that YC companies would be encouraged to contribute data openly, as in making potentially valuable business assets available to the public, or that the data would be available to the OpenAI Fellows (or whatever they're called). Either way, it could be a huge gain for research and development.

I know that I don't get a wish list here, but if I did it would be nice to see OpenAI encourage the following from its researchers:

1) All publications should include code and data whenever possible. Things like gitxiv are helping, but this is far from being an AI community standard

2) Encourage people to try to surpass benchmarks established by their published research, when possible. Many modern ML papers play with results and parameters until they can show that their new method out performs every other method. It would be great to see an institution say "Here's the best our method can do on dataset X, can you beat it and how?"

3) Sponsor competitions frequently. The Netflix Prize was a huge learning experience for a lot of people, and continues to be a valuable educational resource. We need more of that

4) Try to encourage a diversity of backgrounds. IF they choose to sponsor competitions, it would be cool if they let winners or those who performed well join OpenAI as researchers at least for awhile, even if they don't have PhDs in computer science

The "evil" AI and safety stuff is just science fiction, but whatever. Hopefully they will be able to use their resources and position to move the state of AI forward
> > Well, they don't want you to be able to permanently download the files.

> And why is that exactly?

As untog says: "Because it is a streaming service, not a download service."

People make a fair bit of money on software and services that attempt (with varying degrees of success) to automate music industry billing. Music industry billing is complicated because music industry licensing is (needlessly) complicated.

Streaming services typically have substantially different royalty rates than services that make it easy to save a copy of a given audio file. What's more, the license is very likely to have reporting requirements attached to it, along with different rates for partial plays and the like. These rates and reporting requirements may vary wildly from song to song and from album to album.

Have you ever wondered why there isn't one audio and one video streaming site that has everything that rightsholders are willing to have streamed on the Internet?

It's because

* The Big Music and Hollywood rightsholders aren't in this to make things easy for you. They're in this to make shitloads of cash.

* As Big Music learned from Apple, permitting a single entity to distribute pretty much all of your product substantially reduces Big Media's negotiating power. [0] This means that Big Media makes less money and... refer back to point #1.

[0] Being able to credibly threaten to remove something from the catalog, or be a gigantic ass and demand substantially more money for an entire album, rather than "most of the album, except for those couple of songs that are really good" helps to keep their rates high.
He is indeed - he helped me with the Django proposal, actually. He's the one setting the direction for what to include and what to keep separate.
I don't think openai was formed to concentrate on neural networks, and I think we can assume the members are well aware of the limitations of neural nets.

I just don't understand the folks that are so confident that strong AI is either not possible, or not achievable within our lifetimes.

If you're in the camp that thinks it's not possible, then you must ascribe some sort of magical or spiritual significance to the human brain.

If you don't think it's possible inside of 100 years, then you're probably just extrapolating on history. The thing about breakthroughs is they never look like they're coming. Until they do.
The free market is about efficiency. Regulation is about safety.
Cool that they have $1 billion pledged. Curious how they will decide compensation, seeing as a lot of these figures would be making a ton in the industry.
By not owning the LLC, does that mean owning %95 or %4? I often seen %5 requirements in ownership of companies making something invalid.
Note that this is "committed $1 billion", not funded. "although we expect to only spend a tiny fraction of this in the next few years."
I am reminded of H. R. Giger's designs for the movie Alien. They don't seem so far-fetched now.
I can't imagine we could make Mars more inhospitable than it already is. And, whatever technologies we'd have to develop to live on that planet, would forever be in our toolkit to reverse the damage we've done here, and prevent future damage there.
Computers already took over.
s/the/one of the
People can be allergic to soap ingredients already. The packaging will list it.
6 Future Defining Emerging Technologies
This. Carl XVI Gustaf, as a person, is of questionable importance and virtue. But as king of Sweden he's a living symbol. He's like the flag or something. Achieving this effect is also why European royalty has been widely apoliticized.
"Sam's take on AI" being that all machine learning research should be intensively monitored and controlled by the government, or has he backed away from that position?

http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2
Tech Startups Long for the Days of Yahoo’s Binge Acquisitions
> If the Fed has been a bullish coach, the markets have been trusting fans, continually believing that an increase is imminent, only to have their expectations dashed. At last, however, the moment seems to have arrived. On December 16th, when the Fed’s rate-setting committee meets, it seems all but certain to raise rates.

That's what the media said last meeting.
Open question: If this is a search & replace operation, why does it need to be mentioned in a $15k grant at all?

To me, this is one of two things. Either Mozilla is saying "We'll give you money, but you gotta get rid of words we don't like", or they're actually spending significant efforts on political correctness.

Both outcomes are frankly disheartening. I will no longer be donating to Mozilla. They're spreading themselves thin as it is, they don't have the resources to throw away money on political pointlessness.
There's a long series of things tried for "intermodal" operations, dating back to the late 1940s. RoadRailer [1] still operates trailers which can run on both roads and railroad tracks. But standard shipping containers have won out for freight.

For passengers, there's a long history of buses that can also run on rails.[2][3] This has remained a niche product.

[1] http://www.triplecrownsvc.com/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/equi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road-rail_vehicle
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_bus
Were doing a coupling to a soap backend. It has been 7 years since I last did .NET and now I've decided to never go back.
If you have to forget, your memory is not infinite. My computer's HD is infinite, but you have to remove programs that you don't use.
> I honestly fail to see why what Uber wants is in any way relevant here.

Seriously? What Uber wants constitutes exactly half of the argument.
Canada doesn't have any inheritance tax. As far as I know, this was the case at the time in question, too.
Time Warner Cable
What more, the Fed (Yellen) keeps teasing a rate hike every few weeks or so, and has been doing so for months, only to never follow-through.

Every time they tease it then don't act, the market takes a plunge.