skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The only way out of this mess is to design a moral fixed point, so that even through thousands and thousands of cycles of self-improvement the AI's value system remains stable, and its values are things like 'help people', 'don't kill anybody', 'listen to what people want'.

Bostrom absolutely did not say that the only way to inhibit a cataclysmic future for humans post-SAI was to design a "moral fixed point". In fact, many chapters of the book are dedicated to exploring the possibilities of ingraining desirable values in an AI, and the many pitfalls in each.

Regarding the Eliezer Yudkowsky quote, Bostrom spends several pages, IIRC, on that quote and how difficult it would be to apply to machine language, as well as what the quote even means. This author dismissively throws the quote in without acknowledgement of the tremendous nuance Bostrom applies to this line of thought. Indeed, this author does that throughout his article - regularly portraying Bostrom as a man who claimed absolute knowledge of the future of AI. That couldn't be further from the truth, as Bostrom opens the book with an explicit acknowledgement that much of the book may very well turn out to be incorrect, or based on assumptions that may never materialize.

Regarding "The Argument From My Roommate", the author seems to lack complete and utter awareness of the differences between a machine intelligence and human intelligence. That a superintelligent AI must have the complex motivations of the author's roommate is preposterous. A human is driven by a complex variety of push and pull factors, many stemming from the evolutionary biology of humans and our predecessors. A machine intelligence need not share any of that complexity.

Moreover, Bostrom specifically notes that while most humans may feel there is a huge gulf between the intellectual capabilities of an idiot and a genius, these are, in more absolute terms, minor differences. The fact that his roommate was/is apparently a smart individual likely would not put him anywhere near the capabilities of a superintelligent AI.

To me, this is the smoking gun. I find it completely unbelievable that anyone who read Superintelligence could possibly assert "The Argument From My Roommate" with a straight face, and thus, I highly doubt that the author actually read the book which he attacks so gratuitously.
Ah OK I see. I think what's so interesting to me about comparing bitcoin to IPv4 is that the latter is an artifact of artificial scarcity based on history rather than deliberate design. I'm sure others have noticed this parallel before, of course.
Any plan to integrate rusti (or another REPL) in the basic tool kit, the way cargo is part of it?
If they're going to be that aggressive/shortsighted with negotiating, why not -- at least counter -- accept the offer Then, get competing offers and if Uber loses, quit.

If their compensation is substantially off, they deserve the employee churn.
In my experience, if it isn't good relatively quickly, it certainly doesn't remain cheap for long.
This practice is so weird.

If I was a good hire yesterday, am I a good hire today?

I like to ignore offer deadlines. I just don't understand them.
Bitcoin hits $900
U.S. government begins asking foreign travelers about social media
> That's not really a premise. A better version would be "a likely path to super-intelligence will be a self-improving agent".

If I understand your claim, it's not very relevant. You seem to be saying that, given that superintelligence happens, the probability that it will have happened via a self-improving agent is high.

That doesn't refute the claim that "superintelligence probably will not happen".

> You have a point that we shouldn't be ignoring other more important things for this, but to argue against increasing spending from 8 figures to 9 figures you need better arguments.

Why don't we spend that money on non-vague problems that actually face us now? For example, unbiased AI and explainable AI are topics of research that would help us right now and don't require wacky far-future predictions.
I'll settle for "effectively." Deal?
Your 60 hour week comment refers to Facebook, or Uber, or both?
> I don't understand why people have such a weird problem reconciling the brain with the mind.

You do understand, you said it yourself! Because they have no free will to not have the problem!

I can't blame you though. You had no choice.

BTW,you are the first person I know who admits being a Compatibilist. I don't understand how you can rationally take that position.
Sure, that's fair. I think Bostrom is no Einstein. But I maintain that he's no crank, either. There's a lot of space in the world for people who are neither.
it's evil and slow, I'll make a few mods and whack it up, got an email or twitter acct & I'll contact u. -- PR

implemented in py using

- Beautiful Soup 4

- Requests

- htmllib

Core idea is to grab an index url and determine size of page and resources by looking at urls likely to be pulled by page. JS not implemented from what I can read. Method is something like:

* pull index page with requests by url

* extract headers

* build list of resource urls

* look at content type to determine new request

* extract images, text, css from urls in page

* look at content length to determine size

* total sizes
> Hawking's Cat, Einstein's Cat: Scams require some intelligence from the victim. The victim needs to mistakenly believe they're doing something smart.

Only if your scam is too complicated for the victim :). Cats are pretty easy to scam - you just have to stick to simple things. Cats respond predictably to food they like. As a cat person, I find this trick to be more than enough for all my needs ;).

This nitpick aside, I second all your points.

> If this turns out to be needed, why can't increasing intelligence result in increased ability to simulate an environment suitable for raising superintelligences?

Indeed, we could feed the required stimuli to an AI faster than real-time. VR is a thing already, and so is the "fast-forward" button.
"the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice"

Yeah but thats a choice, whereas being poor is enforced.

Thats why an elite education is an advantage.

The article is horrible self indulgent drivel ...
"you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you". They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?
If you announce verbally on a plane you have something that can explode even if you do not you will still get arrested/jailed.

What difference does it make that you decided to do so electronically?
> I think be the end of the desktop paradigm.

Think about how today's businesses generally use their employees: let's not beat about the bush: they're using Microsoft Office for producing documents and spreadsheets, doing research with Chrome, and (if applicable) creating business value using either line-of-business software ("Bob's Car Repair shop database in MS Access") or specialised content-creation software (Photoshop, AutoCAD).

None of those use-cases can be fulfilled by recent interaction paradigms (i.e. smartphones, tablets, or voice-control). VR's useful for visualisation, but that's a very limited use-case, and VR has been used for architectural and civil-engineering visualization for decades anyway (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2CYLlSn1gA ).

Granted, when considering an iPad paired with a keyboard - we see some of those use-cases become almost workable again (namely word-processing), but it's essentially the same thing as a traditional laptop - just with considerably more painful precision object manipulation due to the lack of a mouse cursor.

I feel the biggest paradigm-shift over the past 10 years is the movement of database business applications away from Access, VB6, Delphi, etc to be web-applications, usually hosted locally, and more recently to being moved to multi-tenancy, subscription-based services ("the cloud") - this has now become acceptable to businesses: the trade-off of no-longer being in exclusive control of their data is increased uptime, reliability, and significantly reduced start-up and (usually) running costs - and being browser-based this has meant a shift away from WIMP - where an activity is contained within a small-ish, often fixed-size, "window", to a "page", which has its own interaction model (e.g. no more modal windows because you can always open a new browser tab).

The next iteration of human/computer interaction we'll see that impacts our (society's) actual working lives will be something that enables me to be more expressive without resigning any degree of control over what I produce - and right now nothing does that better than a large display which lets me interact with multiple applications simultaneously, a keyboard with which I can enter commands or prose almost as quickly as I can think it (with a very low error ratio too), and a mouse for quick, precise, (gorilla-arm-syndrome-free) content/command selection.

Until something comes along that enables me to be more productive for my employer the desktop interaction model will still reign.
And now they are in Arizona with the full support of the governor!
Doesn't Boost have a number of header-only libs? I believe there is a header-only regex implementation for example.
That's interesting now that I think about it....I do still belong to a few forums for dedicated topics, and they are always such friendlier places than reddit.
>It seems like the higher level a position you're interviewing for, and the more unique, the shorter a time window the company can have to leave the offer open.

It really depends on each side's BATNA [1]. If you have stronger walk away power, it's foolish for the offer to come with short acceptance terms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
I've got enemies on HN. They follow me around and downvote my comments. No joke. Do not piss off "the tolerant ones".
Since the education talked about is quite far out of my experience[1], I am a bit concerned that any education could so influence a person that they cannot make small talk with someone else. This actually sounds like an isolation problem or a total need not to be embarrassed. I know some folks are shy and suffer real problems, but this isn't it. It just sounds like someone who has lived with a sect of some sort for a long time. I just have a tough time believing the education did it.

1) sent in the applications with the fees that I couldn't really afford and never even got a letter back. I figured it was a sign.
I can see some crazy youtuber attempting this soon.
Deal.

My point being, there's plenty of time before coming heat death starts to cause problems :).
Afaik the reported volumes on Chinese exchanges are fake. They are much lower if you look at the order books.
Failing to make the connection you're attempting to draw...
Please don't post uncivil comments to Hacker News. There's a good point in the middle of your post, but it's ruined by the name-calling of the first bit and the personal nastiness of the final bit, which break the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Completely agree
The emergent system of human society already does this (read The Wealth of Nations) and you gave some examples yourself,so why (aside from amusement) should we care about dangerous Superintelligence when we already have so many out of control processes heading towards destroying our habitats, societies, and selves?
That light article is fantastic. Thanks for sharing!
Horrible design.
Before this gets flagged to oblivion, I have one criticism and two defenses of the article.

As a criticism, this article doesn't address the sciences. The availability of research money is a major reason to go to an elite science institution. If you want to do science, the best thing is to do it, and that usually means email a lab and asking to work there. More labs with more money probably means better opportunities.[0]

In the first defense, consider whether there's anything in this article that might also apply outside of elite colleges.

For instance:

But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college.

This resonates so much with what Daniel Ellsberg wrote to a young Henry Kissinger regarding levels of top-secret access:

Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input ... you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are fools. ... it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. [1]

Finally, this article absolutely nails many of the patterns I have observed while at elite universities. For instance:

(If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) reminds me of when an acquaintence mentioned he was going to law school 'In Palo Alto'.

Or, one night at a party when I overheard a friend (future Rhodes scholar) say 'You know you're at <institution> when you use the term statistical variance at a theatre party!' Never mind that they'd used it incorrectly, it was emblematic to say the least.

[0](Please don't take this comment the wrong way - there are best-in-field professors at less-than-elite universities, but not as consistently).
[1]http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsber...
I remember VxWorks. Bigger than a while loop, but used in space missions back in the 90s:
http://www.windriver.com/inspace/

Edit: looks like VxWorks wants a 32-bit CPU, 128KB of ROM, and 1-2MB of RAM. But you get threads, networking, filesystem, etc.
I'm getting kind of sick of people who haven't read 2% of the stuff imagining what they think we've never talked about over the last 16 years.

https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf
I think NFS without its issues (performance & security) would be ideal as an integrated solution.
Like with everything worthwhile, it takes training :).

I used to scorn trackpoints until my friend told me he's very fond of them - that convinced me to give it a try. They're not bad. Play with one for 5 minutes (to the clock), and you'll be liking them more than touchpads :).
Not as bad, but it's scary even if you aren't dying.
It is rather rare at high levels because someone who knows the book lines will equalize fairly easily as black. That said, it isn't losing for white, nor is it particularly easy to play as black if you've never studied it in depth.
I really don't see the resonance between these events.

The damage to signals intelligence capabilities, through the leaking of classified documents, was deliberately and maliciously done through the actions of Snowden himself, most likely in response to a bruised ego.

In contrast, the engineers involved in the Challenger shuttle did their very best to try to avert disaster - albeit to no avail - through their selfless adherence to professional ethics and engineering safety concerns.

The two scenarios couldn't be more different really.
There is no financial or business incentive for Google to block pirated content.
Please don't be uncivil when commenting here. The middle parts are fine (though weakened by a straw man you call "the general feeling"), but the personal swipe at the beginning is not.

tlb's argument is an interesting one, and so would yours be had you focused on its substance and dropped the snark and the elbowing—which was even worse in your original comment upthread. Indignation gets upvotes, but it also reduces signal/noise ratio and primes others for fight mode. Those things are bad for HN threads.
For me, vim mode has been less buggy.
Show HN: MagiXJS – Create the most advance webapp with only one language
ITT: True Believers of the Church of The Singularity
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:205909/fulltext01...

http://www.ictworks.org/2016/06/27/yes-farmers-do-use-mobile...

Etc. And that's just easily measured benefits. There's good reasons why more people in Africa have access to cell phones than to clean water.
Better dead Arizonan pedestrians than dead Californians.
>AI alarmists are fond of the paper clip maximizer, a notional computer that runs a paper clip factory, becomes sentient, recursively self-improves to Godlike powers, and then devotes all its energy to filling the universe with paper clips.

>It exterminates humanity not because it's evil, but because our blood contains iron that could be better used in paper clips.

The consolation of the cingularity narrative is that it tells a story in which the world is not—yet—being destroyed by paper clip maximizers—in cingularity land, the nightmare scenario is still a ways off, and thankfully, with the help of a few Ayn Rand types, market forces can still save us.
Many Faces of Go has some analysis tools that might be helpful: http://www.smart-games.com/manyfaces.html

I found it worth the price. And the lower kyu AI was actually fun to play.
Powerful JavaScript Middleware Pattern Implementation
But why ever would a machine want to kill someone? Only if someone turned the machine on to some reason. That person has agency . And you don't nee SuSuperintelligence in order for a drone to bomb the wrong person, or for a computer virus to destroy the internet, or a biochemical virus, or any other self replicating disaster.
The notion that near-term AI concerns and existential AI concerns somehow represent a binary option that we must choose between is fallacious at best.

Near-term AI concerns represent a massive challenge encompassing many ethical and social issues. They must be addressed.

Existential AI concerns, while low probability, have consequences so dire that they warrant further research regardless. These too must be addressed.

There is ample funding and human resources to work on both problems effectively. Why fight about it?
Is the file association icon for .js in the screenshots the atom one? Kind of amusing.
Just ignore it, it's shitty recruiter tricks. It might even be an individual recruiter and not SOP. I've never heard of this before from uber or on their glassdoor when I looked a while back.
But making them linearly faster to scale them up doesn't help if the difficulty of the problems they face isn't linear. If it comes to making more clever things, I strongly doubt they are even a remotely small polynomial.
I was given an offer with non-aggressive deadline of 2 weeks.

In terms of the equity portion, they were pretty straightforward with me and I had no surprises with my equity portion. In addition, none of my coworkers have complained about their packages either. I don't know this employee but he certainly doesn't speak for the vast majority of us.

That said I don't know what recruiters are doing these days. My boss would never let our recruiter pull shit like that, but I can't speak for other teams.
I wonder how much of the job details are actual vs. aspirational. For example, in many of our R&D job listings we list Python and Hadoop as desired skills, when in reality those are emerging needs rather than the day to day work which is mostly SAS.
Seattle Voted to Drastically Expand Light Rail Because the City Stopped Moving
It's not so much about the code as having a usage that can accommodate being run on "not good".

Banks and hospitals don't.
Ecommerce is a special case here and I'm willing to excuse them for requiring a good connection. I was thinking about all other kinds of apps that don't really need to have so many things so tied to the Internet.

Honestly, I'd be satisfied with the following pattern:

- if you can't connect, fail fast - tell me that you can't do the operation because of an intermittent connection

- never ever destroy data because of a connection problem; in particular, I hate it every time when an app clears its display before attempting to execute its on-line stuff, which results with me losing the previous state - this way, I take an actual risk each time I execute an operation in the app
Thanks, "On Intelligence" has been on my reading list for a while after seeing him give a keynote a few years ago.
My brother went to Yale and this does not seem consistent at all. Maybe the author had shitty friends.
> Very similar to my work here: https://github.com/lwansbrough/HolographicJS that got no love on HN. :(

Yeah, it's only open source if MS/Google/Facebook/Mozilla is doing it.
If Note 7s are so dangerous, how is it that people are asked to turn them off, rather than prevented from taking them on a flight in the first place?

The only thing worse than security theater is voluntary security theater.

(and yes, I'm aware that the device in question here was not actually a note 7).
Sorry dang not my intention.

> name-calling of the first bit

When did I name call though?
Poor sap. Really, I think you can do both, but you have to supplement the education with actual experience (like travel, volunteering, and normal jobs) and not buy into the hocus-pocus businesstalk mumbo-jumbo. At least, if you want to be normal. If you want to be in business, by all means, concede yourself to the Ivy monolith.
> You seem to be saying that, given that superintelligence happens, the probability that it will have happened via a self-improving agent is high.

I'm saying that there's no need to assume that "any intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve". It's a strawman he deliberately uses so that rejecting it lets him get a dig in at his opponents. Of course not every agent will want to improve that, and nobody relevant ever said that every agent will.

>Why don't we spend that money on non-vague problems that actually face us now? For example, unbiased AI and explainable AI would help us right now and don't require wacky far-future predictions.

I said that in response to his absurd claim that AI risk spending is taking a lot away from other things we could worry about.

But anyway, if you look at what MIRI actually produces (see https://intelligence.org/all-publications/), you'll find many papers that don't depend on "wacky" predictions.
They're also terrible at recognizing fortress positions. There are many such positions where decent human players immediately recognize a draw but an engine will give a non-zero evaluation. The engine can then be manipulated up to the 50 move rule whereby it might weaken its own position in order to avoid the draw.
Are you for open borders?

Yes. For the most part, I oppose the idea of nation-states and most of what people call "government" altogether. I support free movement of people, ideas, consumer goods, etc.
As far as I'm concerned, as long as no use of coercive force / aggression is involved, it's all good.
It's also based on access, I remember feeling initially impressed when a fellow applicant on College Confidential that applied to the same top school as myself did community service abroad in South America, when I then realized that it was very costly to do so, and that I couldn't have done anything so "impressive" only because my parents couldn't have covered the cost.
Last I checked, databases came with numerous warning in the docs "don't run me on a network drive".

Is there any reason why you are trying this at all?
Unfortunately, this is the wrong conclusion -- the jobs of the elite are precisely those that don't get replaced by technology. Automation only affects those jobs are systematic and repeatable.

The elite typically hold jobs in consulting, finance, management, government, etc. that require a lot of word-smithing and people skills.

The big blind spot for technologists is thinking that technology is central to everything. It is not. If you look at how society is organized, it's the folks with the people skills who are on top. People who are good with technology work for them.