skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've spent quite a bit of time this year improving performance, GitLab.com is still slower than it should be but it's a lot better now than it was in January. Self-hosted instances that meet the recommended specs are already fairly performant, though we're always working to improve things regardless.

As mentioned in the blog post, this release we decreased page size a lot (from 1800kb to 718kb for a given Merge Request).

We're also working on moving to our own infrastructure, the reasoning behind that move is described here: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/

EDIT: Strike that, we've decided against moving to bare metal for now due to the complexity. I somehow missed that decision.
Gad, I wish social status would just die already.

To the extent that they are not bubbly[1], trades are still a solid way to make money and don't require classroom training beyond high school. Sure, your knees might be shot when you're... forty, but still...

[1] thinking oilfield here...
If Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking etc all expressed belief in UFOs being from aliens, and you didn't know a lot about UFOs and affiliated cults, what would be the smart thing to believe?

Also,

>AI alarmists believe in something called the Orthogonality Thesis. This says that even very complex beings can have simple motivations, like the paper-clip maximizer.

Uh, no. The point of the paper clip maximizer is that it's orthogonal, not that it's simple.

>It's very likely that the scary "paper clip maximizer" would spend all of its time writing poems about paper clips, or getting into flame wars on reddit/r/paperclip, rather than trying to destroy the universe.

You know what can be made into poems about paper clips? Humans. You know what can have better flame wars than humans? Our atoms, rearranged into the ideal paper clip flame war warrior.

>The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve

That's not really a premise. A better version would be "a likely path to super-intelligence will be a self-improving agent".

>It's like if those Alamogordo scientists had decided to completely focus on whether they were going to blow up the atmosphere, and forgot that they were also making nuclear weapons, and had to figure out how to cope with that.

Yudkowsky has argued that more should be invested in research into AI risk. There are tens of billions of dollars being spent on AI R&D, and somewhere in the tens of millions range spent on AI risk research. Even if advocates wanted us to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on risk research a year , that wouldn't make this criticism fair. 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.
You could say that that 3rd way IS part of the physicalist picture already I think. As you say, there are such gaps in our understanding at this point we cannot say we've probed the depths of our brains and still found nothing.

It is like searching the ocean for something that by all accounts should be in the ocean, and deciding that perhaps the thing cannot be found, despite having large portions of the ocean still to search. It is too early to make that claim.

I'm not saying that there are not smug philosophers or scientists or just internet nerds that will declare the problem solved, clearly it is all in the brain and there is nothing magical to it but I think they would be incorrect. Modern physics is incredibly esoteric and shares more with meta-physics than what we tend to observe (which classical physics can explain satisfactorily for the most part). I don't think being physicalist is any impediment to having spirituality and and a sense of wonder about the universe and our place in it - the main difference to me is that we can't just accept a deus ex machina and call it a day. That may sound condescending but it isn't a choice for me personally.
You ought to know that Thinking, Fast and Slow has research in it that did not replicate. If you do some googling you'll observe a lot of people had a much more critical second take.

I believe it was the recent rash of replication failures that ferreted this out, so it is worth checking out in case you adopted false premises accidentally.
I've had less and less trouble over the last couple of years. If I'm worried, I'll add 'cran' into the search string.
every tech worker who bought a motorcycle to be Hard and Cool just owned my karma with downvotes

but you will never be a Hell's Angel
I have read this; I don't generally comment on issues I'm not informed on.

Moxie is simply wrong on many of these points, and has been for a while and has had this repeatedly pointed out with no change in opinion. I would rehash this here but you'd be better off simply reading the linked thread and looking at other rebuttals. In particular I remember a 500+ comment GitHub thread on the Play Services issue where Moxie was repeatedly dismissive and rude to those who take issue with the glaring security problems in Signal.
I realize Uber is a big company and it obviously deserves some press, but I'm surprised just how many articles about Uber have made it to the front page of hacker news the past few days. And (almost) all of them have been very negative. I wonder if public perception will change and people will use their competitors more? Probably not enough to be noticeable. I wonder how Uber considers managing its brand, as they rarely seem to shy away from bad publicity.

With regards to this specific article, how common is this practice at other startups? From anecdotal experience, it seems common for startups to under inform employees with regards to their equity and how it works. I rarely meet a startup employee who understands what their equity is worth.
chargeback
There is no tax _difference_. The only question is when you pay your taxes (on options above n 100,000); it's merely a cash flow thing. The TechCrunch arthor misunderstands that somehow there are tax savings (there are none;
the strike price doesn't change over the course of the option plan).

Pretty much everyone prefers the six month cliff.
I think the 98% of DNA we share with chimpanzees, with brains almost three times as large, suggests that isn't the case. Language appears to be a force-amplifier in intelligence, and we have no reason to believe that other such do not exist.
But they don't have a place to live anymore.
$100k would allow to live like a king in many places in the world.

While I understand the reasoning, I'm don't understand what's your point.
Boy, this is shaping up to be a terrible week for Uber isn't it? Kicked out of California, the Naked Capitalism post about their inevitable doom is gaining attention, $800MM loss this quarter, the UK labour board ruling means they may have to (retroactively and in the future) pay VAT, and now this.

Couldn't happen to a nicer group of people /s
> OWS received a Grand jury subpoena ( ... )

Link please
Author may be somewhat right but probably not in the way intended. Discrimination tends to be more effective in areas that lack competition. The article itself states that Asians started to own more businesses due to discriminatory practices. With discriminatory laws were relaxed, Asians on average may have put themselves in a more competitive position (through education/training) than whites and blacks. So, with increased competition, white executives may have had to pay equal otherwise risk losing an asset to their competition. Consequently, with more competition, Americans may appear to be less racist towards Asians.

Discrimination apparently still exists with the disparity in terms of executive positions when comparing equivalent levels of education. There's less competition at the very top where who you know with money likely counts more than technical skill, i.e. paying for CEO's rolodex.
I was wondering about the extent of NSLs in that regard. Thanks for clarifying.
As a long-time Windows sysadmin: MSI is vastly superior to ZIP on Windows. You can do the things you're talking about w/ an MSI-based installation so long as the MSI was authoried to include "Properties" (variable substitution) for paths, etc. It's a little bit of additional scripting.
Bitcoin is a currency. Twitter is a company. The comparison doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
> I enjoy visiting my family

> surrounded by people who don't care about you

That's the difference. Not city vs. suburban. Where are the people that care about you and that you care about? That's where you will feel less socially isolated.

I'd bet that if you went to a suburbia that doesn't contain your family, you'd feel just as isolated as you do in the city.
I think the point (which is addressed with Maciej's Almogadro callback near the end) is that the longer term threat being speculated about and dependent on lots of very hypothetical things being true is pretty much irrelevant in the face of bigger problems. I mean, yes, a superpower that had hard military AI could wreak a lot of havoc. On the other hand, if a superpower wants to wipe out my corner of civilisation it can do so perfectly happily with the weapons at its disposal today (though just to be on the less-safe side, the US President Elect says he wants to build a few more). And when it comes to computer systems and ML, there's a colossal corpus of our communications going into some sort of black box that tries to find evidence of terrorism that's probably more dangerous to the average non-terrorist because it isn't superintelligent.

Ultimately, AI is neither necessary nor sufficient for the powerful to kill the less powerful.

And if it's powerful people trying to build hard military AI, they probably aren't reading LessWrong to understand how to ensure their AI plays nice anyway.
I feel the exact same way. It's quite strange. I find I can't connect with others either. In my job I appear to be quite social and pass largely as someone who is considered nice and socially adept...not that I'm not a nice person I just mean nice in the sense of being easy to get along with and "understanding" people but unless I have a given context for interacting with someone (like...work) I've been deemed 'too intense' to be around for a long time in my life. I can't just turn 'me' off so I often find it hard to make friends. I'm lucky that I met my wife because she's very understanding of my peculiarities. If it want for her I wouldn't have a lot of social interactions outside work at all.

i feel you man, I feel you
The thing I think everyone should be most worried about is not robots deciding to kill us, it's the economic upheaval that could result from robots that can do jobs better than their human counterparts.

There's been studies done on this type of thing (https://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/jobs/robot...) and so far use of robots has mostly focused on helping human workers become more productive, and not replacing them entirely. However, for lower skilled workers this isn't always true, and if robots were able to replace even the most skilled workers... that could cause problems for human employment. To quote the article on current status:

"Robots had no effect on the hours worked by high-skilled workers. While the authors found that industrial robots had no significant effect on overall employment, there was some evidence that they crowded out low-skilled and, to a lesser extent, middle-skilled workers."

Now continue that line of thinking and imagine a world where a robot could do any job better than a human...

We could end up with a "is that American made?" or "is that free range chicken?" type of scenario where companies that refuse to replace human workers with robots are competing against other companies that will do anything to lower costs, even if ethically questionable.

So then we potentially end up in a situation where the rich (Executives and stock holders) get richer by replacing costly human workers with cheaper, more efficient robots, and the wealth of the average family declines as people struggle to find work. Alright, well maybe we give all humans an allowance to live off of, food to eat, a home to live in, etc. Except...

Human beings need work. They need to feel a sense of purpose. I don't think the humans from the movie Wall-E hold much appeal. Let's not go there.

Ok, so maybe we pass laws against replacing many human jobs with robots. Well, if the robots are truly intelligent, aren't we then discriminating against a group of sentient beings solely because they are too good at their job? Isn't this just going to be a techno world version of the civil rights and lgbt rights movements?

These are the things I worry about. Not robots killing me.

As a side note, I hope cyborg and other bio tech improves at some point, at lot of these concerns could be mitigated if humans had the potential to improve themselves beyond any normal evolutionary rates.
Yes, I agree with the reasoning behind Pascal's Mugging. But Pascal's Mugging refers to things that have an astronomically low chance of happening — like 0.000000001. But is the chance that AI is dangerous that low? Nobody in the world knows for sure at this point, due to how far away superAI might be, and due to the uncertainties in implementation. Therefore, if we use Bayesian thinking and spread it out, I'm not really sure you could put it below 1% (I pulled this number out of thin air, but everybody at this point is doing the same).
I haven't used nuget a whole ton, but yes, that sounds like it. Basically, you have two files: Cargo.toml and Cargo.lock. The toml file declares what version ranges you want to use, then after a successful build, the exact versions used were put into the lockfile. After that, nothing will hit the network or change up versions until you either modify the version ranges in the toml file or use the command-line interface to ask to upgrade.
what do you mean by static url? I don't think pastebin links change.
I don't think it's possible to have a country without rich people, relatively speaking.

In every country we seen have some sort of power hierarchy, therefore unequal distribution of wealth.
I don't think AI will cause a paradigm shift here; but like most powerful technologies, I imagine it will have potent military applications.
EPA now concedes fracking is a hazard to drinking water
That's exactly what Maciej spends the last third of the article saying: that the quasi-religious fretting about superintelligence is causing people to ignore the real harm currently being caused by even the nascent AI technology that we have right now.
I've live on a cul-de-sac (back) in Extreme Flyover Country now for a whopping ... three months, and I met all the neighbors and chat with 'em often. People in stores are very open and will talk if spoken to.
Twitter comparisons aside (what's the point?), anyone know what could be causing the surge in pricing for Bitcoin? It was off my radar for a while and all of a sudden it's at $800+.
Thanks, that's pretty cool.
The US dollar is now worth more than Microsoft.
Can I just chime in again and say, if your threat model includes an adversary who could compromise the Google Play Store deployment process, then you should be comfortable with validating the SHA hash on your APK binaries.

Android is pretty open about letting you sideload and run binaries, which you can do easily as a non-rooted end user. You can personally GitHub pull & compile the Signal app and you're good to go (w/r/t compromised software download).
LINE whitepaper on their encryption tech [pdf]
Google's Larry Page Got Bored of Disrupting the Telecom Sector with Google Fiber
It would also ensure that only rich kids get educated. Do you really want a country full of uneducated people? And also remember that the loans have to be paid back. Nothing is given a way for free here.
I'm completely oblivious to the al-qaeda situation so I don't really know the context of this. But if I try to get at your logic, it would be like saying:

"See? I just went on a drive and didn't get into a crash. All those people that told me to wear a seat-belt were wrong!"
Yep. More of the same. Despite most of the recent improvements to the Linux kernel essentially boiling down to cherry picking Grsec/PaX, no one gives them due credit. And no one's even talking about RAP.
Uuuuuuh... call out the National Guard?

knock knock knock
<opens door>
"Huh?"

"I'm Sergeant Jones with the 665th Airborne. Our records show you haven't been out all week. Come with us, sir... "

It'd be different if he handed you a beer first, I guess.
Perhaps it's my mistake then, apologies. I didn't know it was a variable rate!
> Certainly a NSL might compel OWS to add additional logging

NSLs cannot be used for that. They're a legal tool that can be used to extract certain types of information (such as subscriber information and maybe a little bit of transactional information) that a service provider already has stored on their servers [0]. However, they cannot be used to force a service provider to write and deploy code.

[0] NSLs are not magic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN_qVqgRlx4&t=20m16s
> I must be going to the wrong bars.

Very likely. There are bars where people go to be alone; bars were people go in a group to stay purely within their group; bars where people go to meet between regulars and are closed to newcomers; bars where people are opened to anyone, regulars or 5-minute newcomer; etc.

The most classy, and also often the most hyped ones are the coldest ones. The most popular are often the warmest... providing that you manage to get into the 'family' circle if it is a matter of regulars/locals; or that you belong to the same scene if it is a subculture oriented place.

And it also depends also on you. And not necessarily as you expect. I am amongst the most introverted, shy, less talkative persons ever, and yet bartenders and regulars generally great me by calling my name on my 2nd or 3rd visit in a bar while some mates who've been coming to the same place dozens of times in are given the cold shoulder (I have plenty of examples like this, it was quite funny sometimes to see how upset by the situation my mate was :-).
Sweet, thanks for the link, will give it a try after i got everything backed up :)
I'm certainly happy. I can't think of a single company that as "ruined it" for startups more than Uber. Skirting around laws and regulations combined with absolutely insane valuations must have put completely unfair pressure on other startups.
True, true, but somehow that's never been much of an obstacle to totalitarian governments. Somehow there's always a soldier who will push the button.

In Nuremberg we developed a way to think about this: people outside the central circles of power have a tremendous amount of pressures they are considering. It's definitely the case that some are sadistic and horrible, but more are just following orders and trying to get by as best they can, and punishing them for war crimes is not appropriate.

The other side of that coin is that it isn't realistic to expect soldiery en masse to resist illegal orders. It's always more complicated than that.
I will probably be down voted for this.. But I enjoyed Kurzweil's "How to create a mind" and "on intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins . Even though these books aren't super scientific i really like how these guys think about consciousness and intelligence.
> I think it's valuable to think about this problem from an evolutionary perspective. Almost every problem we have can be viewed this way.

Spot on. I was an Anthropology major in college, and this is the single most important takeaway from my education.

Even a few decades ago, families often at least lived with or close to the elder generation (grandparents) which created a greater sense of community and history. At some point it was decided that elder persons should live by themselves, or they were not welcome in their adult children' homes (or there was no room for them there.)

I think what you say about tribes is interesting -- I think people tend to create their own "tribes" either with friends, workmates, hobbies that are communal etc.
> Don't expect too much from other people

I think you have to at least "expect" things to change for the better socially. Maybe its just a matter of finding the right people where you can set expectations of each other? There will be times when the expectations cannot be met, but respect and communication help with that.

Maybe this view is too idealistic :/
"The glaring security problems in Signal"?
Nope, haven't read these but thanks for mentioning them. I'll have a look for sure.
Company Bricks User's Software After He Posts a Negative Review
You just asked in a Rust thread if Rust was a good language to use...
This is pretty bad.

He goes on for pages taking down his own straw men without even getting close to the completely artificial "make-work" nature of most of our pre-AI economy.

We spend hundreds of billions above-and-beyond what could be strictly considered defense. To this day, a great deal of our interior is subsidized into farming, even though that level of effort has not been necessary for over 100 years. We are bankrupting ourselves on a health care system that costs almost twice as much as its western european counterpart to produce uniformly inferior outcomes, and contrary to the right-wing propaganda of torts-gone-wild, much of this cost is pure admin/bureaucratic overhead. Don't even get me started on the bureaucracy and make work of our various educational systems! Municipalities across the nation throw millions of dollars, bad after good, without claw-backs, to any pack of two-bit hucksters rolling into town with a promise of jobs.

If you ask me, our present system is already under tremendous stress just trying to find work for people. It doesn't even care that much if it is productive--just keep those peasants busy so they won't get into trouble.
Thank you. This is exactly what I wanted to read: clear explanation what works and surely not "it's not stable." What are the current encryption-related bugs, that is, what is their worst consequence?

I surely don't have a problem with the manual verification.
I'd go so far as to say that any C programmer at all (whether or not they've read K&R) will know everything in this article. However, it's probably interesting or useful for people who are either in the process of learning C, or people who have to read and write it occasionally, but never truly learned the language. These are definitely all pain points for people coming to C from higher-level languages.
I love how easy the integration with Openshift is. Does anyone have any resources to get a Openshift Kubernetes cluster setup?
Current Digital Security Resources
US government debt is now worth more than the US dollar its worth is measured in
This is a well written article. I agree that this problem is growing, due to less social interaction and more reliance on social media tools and apps. This is not good for society
https://whispersystems.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand...
My folks were Silent Generation,and I think we're a lot less lonely than they were. And face it, I like being alone. I haven't felt lonely since college, and I think that was mostly performance anxiety.
It's a Christmas miracle.
New Ebola Vaccine Gives 100 Percent Protection
Perhaps, but we can at least start to explore solutions to that if we can work on the server too.
I recently registered to try gitlab. I received unprecedented large amounts of spam from them daily with no unsubscribe button. I finally emailed them to stop the spam and they did but not completely I received more but had unsubscribe this time. Unsubscribed so lets see what happens. One more spam and I will close my account and never try them again

GitHub is great, does the job incredibly well, doesn't get in the way and have never been spammed (tip for you gitlab here).

[update] Please don't forget to downvote me for giving honest feedback :-)
I will say that my limited connections comes from mutual hate and not mutual interests.

Not sure if that is good or bad.