skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What every author Bostrom, Eliezer et al. seem to miss is that there will be a practical mechanism for a digital AGI taking physical control of systems out of the hands of humans.

No, that's a pretty widely assumed premise, and most authors specifically do anticipate that. (There's actually some dispute about whether any AGI will be capable of growing that capable that fast; the "fast singularity" scenario is not universally accepted. But many authors do recognize and discuss that scenario, and have not "missed" it.)

> So we either incrementally cede power to them, in which case in theory the humans previously controlling the systems are doing so "rationally" and thus see the AGI as better.

Humans are not universally rational, and even if the humans making the decision were rational, they can still make a horrible mistake. As one of many possible failure modes: a group of humans build an AGI and try to hardcode their particular values, utterly fail at extrapolating how the computer will interpret those values, and end up destroyed by it. Or humans build an AGI they think they've programmed appropriately, but fail to implement it correctly.

> Or the system outsmarts the humans controlling the systems in which case it is demonstrating that it is smarter.

A computer can play chess better than any human at this point, which makes it "smarter" in a way, but that doesn't make its values appropriate. If you somehow gave a chess computer enough flexibility in achieving its goal that it consumed the universe to build more computronium so that it can compute better chess solutions, that doesn't make it better than humans, just better at playing chess and building computronium.

In fact, a far more likely scenario than most of the "actively evil AGI" failure modes is the "accidentally broken" AGI: humans aren't its enemy, but we're made of matter that it could put to other purposes.

> There is a tautology here that seems to be ignored: If we create a superhuman-AGI then by default it's goals will be more universally optimal than ours.

"Might makes right" is not a particularly good value system. Supervillains are typically depicted as smarter than the people they defeat. That doesn't make their goals or values better.

And an AGI doesn't even have to be "smart" in the way we normally conceive of intelligence to fail fatally; it doesn't even have to "think" at all to attempt to optimize the wrong value function.

> So if we create one and it decides to maximize paperclips, then that means maximizing paperclips is more optimal goal universally than whatever humans could coordinate as a goal on our own.

I can't even begin to imagine what value system you're using to reach that conclusion. I could imagine someone thinking "if a system were smarter it must necessarily be more morally right", which is blatantly untrue but in an understandable way. But directly describing a system that destroys the universe, including all of humanity, and replaces it with paperclips, as better...
Well lets see... are there any economies that depend on mining? It seems like it would cause quite a stir.
This is a disaster happening all over the country. The EPA estimates we will need $385 billion by 2030 to modernize water infrastructure.

Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even major cities like Chicago are poisoning their kids (to a lesser degree) due to inability to properly maintain infrastructure.
Thanks, that's really kind of you to say.
For iron maybe. Some metals are worth orders of magnitude more relative to their weight. Which would maybe make this economical. The article didn't elaborate much on it's composition of rarer metals though.

Once an industry exists transporting commodities to Earth, it will improve over time. Maybe eventually it will be economical for iron. Or maybe it could justify the cost of a space elevator.
The President of the United States just proposed to raise the defense budget by $54 billion. That's 540x this fix in a single year.
> Debugging this issue gave us a chance to understand some of the inner workings and really appreciate all the little details that Docker manages for us, in order to provide isolated networking between things that are essentially glorified Linux processes.

Great report!

When I see debugging like that, I wonder how many people on the planet have the basic knowledge necessary to understand it (need: OS/process/kernel/networking/etc...)? And how many of them could have performed the debugging AND find the bug?

Then I realize that's the level we need to be able to operate the service and I'm like. Ouchhhhh.
Walter Lippmann famously said that “the goal of politics is not to get people to think alike. The goal of politics is to get people who think differently to act alike”.
Misleading in a way that makes it seem less impressive than it actually was.
I am appalled by the casual sexism and racism of the parent comment. "esp. in a small town - you'll sometimes see a drop-dead '10' Swedish model working behind the counter" --> Is it okay to refer to a person by a sexist score? Does the HN community condones this and at the same time rally against sexual harassment at statups? How is this comment not dead yet?
I haven't - will have to give it a shot.

Thanks for telling me about it.
Are you sure you are not thinking about Transport Tycoon?
Most of our major lakes are badly polluted by dairy farming run off.
This. The alternative:

sudo sh -c 'cat some.img > /dev/sdb'

or even more baroque:

cat some.img | sudo tee /dev/sdb > /dev/null

is a pain by comparison, and the `sudo sh -c` variant has env implications when spawning a sub-shell.

I have an ARM/linux installer script that writes the u-boot image to a specific offset before the first partition:

dd if=${UBOOT_DIR}/MLO of=$LO_DEVICE count=1 seek=1 bs=128k
dd if=${UBOOT_DIR}/u-boot.img of=$LO_DEVICE count=2 seek=1 bs=384k

This is admittedly somewhat esoteric, but it seems like a stretch to say `dd` does not have some place, especially when transferring binary data in very specific ways.
Apache Beam, version 0.6.0
Maybe if you define 'right wing' and 'left wing' as just being against/for public spending. That's very specific to a very narrow characterizatuon of the American political spectrum, but is hardly appliacable to the political spectrums of nearly every other country.
> I always wished a 5.25 mass storage HDD would come back on the market. How much would those hold relative to this?

Google presented a paper at FAST16 about the possibility of fundamentally redesigning hard drives to specifically target hard drives that are exclusively operated as part of a very large collection of disks (where individual errors are not such a big deal as in other applications) – in order to even further reduce $/GB and increase IOPS: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... .

Possible changes mentioned in the paper do actually include new (non-backwards-compatible) physical form factor[s] in order to freely change the dimensions of the heads and platters. The only market for spinning rust in a decade or so will be data centres (or anywhere else that needs to store a shitton of data) -- everything else will be flash.

Other changes mentioned in the paper include:

* adding another actuator arm / voice coil with its own set of heads

* accepting higher error rates and “flexible” (this is a euphemism for “degrades over time”) capacity in exchange for higher areal density, lower cost, and better latencies

* exposing more lower-level details of the spinning rust to the host, such as host-managed retries and exposing APIs that let the host control when the drive schedules its internal management tasks

* better profiling data (time spent seeking, time spent waiting for the disk to spin, time spent reading and processing data) for reads/writes

* Caching improvements, such as ability to mark data as not to be cached (for streaming reads) or using PCIe to use the host’s memory for more cache

* Read-ahead or read-behind once the head is settled costs nothing (there’s no seek involved!). If the host could annotate its read commands with its optional desires for nearby blocks, the hard drive could do some free read-ahead (if it was possible without delaying other queued commands).

* better management of queuing – there’s a lot more detail on page 15 of that PDF about queuing/prioritisation/reordering, including the need for the drive’s command scheduler to be hard real-time and be aware of the current positioning of the heads and of the media. Fun stuff! I sorta wish I could be involved in making this sort of thing happen.

tl;dr there is a lot of room for improvement if you’re willing to throw tradition to the wind and focus on the single application (very large scale bulk storage) where spinning rust won’t get killed off by flash in a decade.
To pick a random set of citations: http://tahoetowhitney.org/content/sierra-nevada-backpacker-w...

There seems to be a fair amount of disagreement.

Look. I have no idea personally. However, conventional wisdom is that it's prudent to treat water. If I were dehydrated and had no treatment options, I'd certainly take my chances and drink apparently clear, clean water. (And have on occasion.) But I wouldn't just set off on the assumption it wasn't necessary either.
All that I know is we were able to afford the infrastructure originally under a higher tax regime. That suggests to me that we can afford to solve this problem, even if it means that the wealthy are contributing back to the country that provided the business and social environment to do so.
Meanwhile a complete jerk move did cost Maine university employees thousands of dollars in unpaid wages over the course of a decade.
A good security class will give you the principles. Look at CS 161 at Berkeley:

http://www-inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/sp16/

Any bug is a potential exploit. That exploit may not get you very far but it can be chained with another which will get you further.

The principles are almost elegant. The details are mind numbing. Luckily, common exploits get collected into metasploit:

https://www.metasploit.com/

Script kiddies (Annoyingly Persistent Teenagers to quote Nick Weaver) generally use toolkits like metasploit.
Credit where it's due: while the original Colonization (which I agree was brilliant) was sold under the "Sid Meier's" label, its lead designer was actually a colleague of Meier who would go on to become a celebrated designer in his own right, Brian Reynolds (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reynolds_(game_designe...).
It's not for development, it's for infrastructure.

Terraform allows you to manage VPC, network, routing table , firewalls and gateways in the cloud. There is no other software to do that (only manual click in the AWS website).

It can also create AMI, instances and auto scaling groups but there are many tools in that field that do it better.
I suppose one could make the argument that the voters should be able to forgive small gaffes like that, yet here we are.
Some of us don't "fall" into the command line, we reluctantly get out of it, and only for specific purposes.
"So far as I know, pure free-market capitalism always tends towards monopolies or oligarchies absent some level of intervention."

Where do you get that idea from? Nearly every monopoly is the product of government bestowed privilege.
For what it's worth Tarn apparently has plans for the source code to be released if he dies of natural causes.
Nice! Works: http://i.imgur.com/ADLFzit.png
18mb file failed though. STL download would also be appreciated :-)
>allowing valuable AIs to be trained in insecure environments without risking theft of their intelligence
your system involves an unencrypted network and unencrypted data, it would be trivial to train an identical network

the idea of controlling an "intelligence" with a private key is silly. you can achieve effectively the same thing by simply encrypting the weights after training.

Can't someone simply recover the weights of the network by looking at the changes in encrypted loss? I don't think comparisons like "less than" or "greater than" can possibly exist in HE or else pretty much any information one might be curious about can be recovered.
I too would like to know. One recommendation I saw in regards to learning to hack stuff like the Nintendo Switch is, first learn to write a kernel, and also learn about compilers. Also, personally I've been considering working through Bunnie Huang's "Hacking the Xbox".
Why does "not cloud" imply "on the same premises"? Can't you literally store the hard disks in a separate location?
And that you can make 2.7 times a Bay Area salary and own a 5,000 square foot home in a city with mass transit that is much more culturally rich than S.F. It really sounds magical.
Really, they escaped from two virtual machines, the JavaScript VM and the VMWare VM. Maybe give them half a VM-point for breaking the confines of the Windows process (if you take your OS textbook seriously, a process is an abstraction of a computer, so sort of a VM).
Yes, that would be nice -- look at the languages my code is written in or the categories my code is, it makes sense to suggest new projects based on that.
But can't you put your own hard disks offsite somewhere? Just because you're holding your own backups that doesn't mean you have to be keeping them at the same location.
great point. I don't think that LE or GT exist in this homomorphic scheme. :) Otherwise, it would be vulnerable. Checks such as this are what go into good HE schemes.
The odd paperclip utility function is meant to demonstrate that an arbitrary harmless sounding utility function can/will have uncontrollable consequences when given to an entity with unimaginable power to fulfill that function.
Why Scientists Are Worried About a Landslide No One Saw or Heard
Poland confirms 98-year-old Minnesota man was Nazi commander, seeks extradition
GhostBSD, MidnightBSD, DragonflyBSD, FuguIta...
> For example, instead of using a distributed log as an Event Sourcing backend for building a key/value storage as an interpretation of an ordered stream of updates we can run a distributed log instance per key.

That is a key insight. I often wonder if people who implemented Raft and discarded Paxos right off the bat knew this? Also I think "Paxos Made Live" scared everyone away from Paxos for a long time.

But what is often missing is that Google implemented a distributed log system. Paxos doesn't do a distributed log by default and just deals with reaching consensus on a value. In practice there is often a need for a log, but not always. If a distributed log is not need Paxos becomes less scary.
The more I see from this project, the more I like it. The Pijul team seems just completely serious about building system software right. Also while I could wish for more doc, what's there is a really good overview.
You are implicitly talking about being able to objectively measure a goal's "optimality".

Unless you believe in absolute morality or the like, there's no such thing as an objective measure. A goal can only be optimal to an agent.

In your example, the fact that we pursue science and can destroy ants doesn't mean that their goal is "objectively less optimal". Their goal is absolutely optimal to them, though they can't reach it if it collides with ours.

Some goes for a superintelligent AI.
> That suggests to me that we can afford to solve this problem

I don't think that follows. It's certainly not true in software.... it's cheap to add things in the beginning of the design process, but gets exponentially harder as you add more complexity. And in general in homebuilding remodels are at least a factor of two more expensive than new construction.

Putting down a water main while you're building a street and before you've built any houses seems substantially easier than replacing a water main while dealing with traffic and a block full of customers who need continuous water supply. Not to mention more stringent building codes and such.

I think it should be done regardless, because it's generally impossible for people to run their own water lines, so the State has a moral imperative to do it. But I can easily see it being much more expensive than the original build.
less melty
Dude's missing an important point:

If you mess up the syntax on a dd invocation, a nice thing happens: nothing.

Use a shell command and pipes, and your command better be perfect before you hit return.
Even simpler:

sudo cp image.iso /dev/sdb
That's... a pretty big rock. Honestly, that's more like a sci-fi candidate for "bubble-forming" with some hypothetical fusion-powered reaction, and I don't mean deuterium-tritium fusion either.
> Maybe that's a good example of how to get right-wing politicians to agree to some left-wing ideals: prove that it will save money and let them lower taxes.

It's not the politicians we need to convince, it's the people who vote for them.
>I expected that to be a post to an actual discussion, not a link to one of your own posts which nobody actually responded to.

I laughed, that's some n-gate quality material right there.
Somewhere in Iowa.

If it's in his comment history I figure it's fair game to state it here.
If you go down that road, Linux and derivatives will drop off the table too.
I liked his blog, but I hope this isn't a precedent that will be followed. I have precious little time to read posts in my goodreader backlog. Podcasts, in addition to being terrible most of the time, are sucky unless they provide a transcript, and even then it would be 100x better if they dug more than 1mm deeply than the headline.
No matter how much the job pays, it's still very hard work. 60 hours a week of manual labor is no joke. I grew up on a small farm and have a bit of experience with how difficult farm work can be. Honestly, I might even hesitate to do it at $200 an hour (and we all know that's an insanely unrealistic figure).

On top of that, it's a job with zero job security and basically no potential for advancement. It's no surprise that people take other options whenever possible.
Grandparent comment was saying "X is bigger than Y", saying "Y is not zero" misses the point.

sqeaky's comment offers an explanation. I don't fully agree with it but it's a productive step forward in a discussion. When you use words like ignorant, tedious, stupid, dumb and lazy while failing to refute the argument it doesn't make you or your side look any better. I look at sqeaky's comment and have to admit I can see where they're coming from, meanwhile I look at your comments and wonder why you think you've just knocked this one out of the park.

> CITATION NEEDED.

Do you really need proof that more effort is going towards getting women into jobs from Column A than Column B? You had to resort to linking one of your own comments from a middle-popularity post on a fairly small website from a year ago. I could easily find videos of world leaders saying "This is important"

But you can just clear your cookies, go to google and see how "women in ____" auto-completes, then see how many results each phrase gets. You may not see an "orders of magnitude" of difference but you won't be able to act like there's equal attention going in each direction either.
Ideally that process is a jail. If Edge is anything like Chrome, it has dropped privileges for that process and that process is just a renderer.

https://seclab.stanford.edu/websec/chromium/chromium-securit...

Read this as I'm very impressed by the exploit.
Amazon & Microsoft both have a significant software presence in Phoenix. I don't know if they still do, but at one point Google had some stuff here as well.

Amazon recruiters have also been pinging me for jobs they have in SoCal, although I wouldn't say that LA is significantly cheaper than the Bay Area or Seattle.
I don't really disagree. I expect that, as a practical matter, it's pretty safe to just drink water in a lot of remote places. That said, I also filter or use iodine even if I don't worry about medical facility cross-contamination procedures a lot of the time :-) It's not a lot of trouble and the consequences of getting an infection are unpleasant.
Why do only men have to lower their standards? From what I see amongst my peers, the guys have lower standards than women do. These aren't guys who don't "put more effort in" either.

See Tinder for example. Most guys have a hard enough time getting matches but one male-model looking guy can easily have hundreds. The modern dating reality for men is winner-take-all.
Have been drinking from NZ lakes and rivers for nearly 30 years and never had a problem. Did hear of a friend getting a bug about 15 years ago though.
The Kama'aina rate even applies to Pizza Hut.
How the Internet of Things Changes Big Data Analytics
Appreciate this moderate take. It's the cold hard truth of American capitalism, especially in places like Michigan, but it doesn't mean we can't wish for humane policies!
Grimaces

As though deserts were somehow magical "dead zones" we could afford to lose. On the other hand, we might reach a point where controlled ET impacts could be the only near-term way to generate the net cooling we need to survive climate change. Wouldn't that be a treat for a method of geoengineering!

A more realistic idea would be a Lunar base, probably automated. We crash asteroids into Luna, break them and process them there, then either rail-gun them into Earth orbit for an elevator grab, or a controlled descent into water.

That minimizes the Delta-v all the way, while still making concessions to a realistic need to process this stuff before "importing" it... i.e. crashing or "snatching" it.
Is Earley's algorithm fruitfully used for any particular natural language and task?
At what point does it become cheaper to relocate everyone in Flint to a new city?
Ok I see your point. Sorry to make my point so strongly but I saw it as trolling but I was wrong.

Anyway a way around this would be for the union to not touch salary, but help individuals get a good deal given that they are happy with their salary. I can think of things like helping to ensure people know what they are getting into with share options, and helping with the legal side of things if there is unfair dismissal etc.
I'm not from the media and I am campaigning against "effective altruism" because it promotes eco-terrorism, habitat destruction, call it what you want. I am compelled to do this to protect public safety.

There's no point in denying that a large portion of self-identified EAs are for eco-terrorism, it's all over the internet. There is no gray area here, you are either with the terrorists (strong negative utilitarians) are against them.
Controversial opinion: Governments are inherently bad at managing anything that stretches beyond the next election.
I've lived in New Zealand for 22 years and haven't been robbed once, so I don't think a sample size of 1 makes for valid statistics.
I've tried the gui tools in the past, but dd just seems far easier.
No, it's just a recognition that if the employees go home for the day, the truck full of perishable goods will go bad, harming not just the company but also the Maine residents who were hoping to get a gallon of milk at a reasonable price. We can have a discussion about whether that's the best solution but first please try to understand Chesterton's fence.
Frankly, backups is something I do; it's folly to rely on a single provider to host both the original and the backup. That's why I don't use services that don't let you export your data somehow - at least, not for important stuff.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2008-Au...