skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Possible solution to AGI alignment and safety?
Problem:

We will probably create AGI before we have a formal model of human ethics, which is not an urgent problem but a potentially catastrophic one.

Proposed solution:

We assume we want that AGI (Artificial general intelligence) to be aligned with all life and we want it to produce maximum "good". We then define "good" as whatever any unit of life defines as such. (Interactions between units will produce additional emergent definitions.) Then instead of optimizing for any of those definitions we set AGI's utility function as maximization of the definitions, that is: maximization of the quantity of both units of life and interactions between units, and then to make it all safe we forbid it from interacting with either. Maximizing the quantity of life without interacting with it means both shielding life from cataclysmic events and creating space for life's expansion into places where no life exists (outer space).

More details: https://pni.ai/future

My intuition is that this can be expressed formally, simulated and proven/disproven and if proven may lead to a future with potential for growth that is hard to imagine, yet without any risk to life and without making humans obsolete. There is also no benefit in being the first to create such AGI and all the reasons to cooperate as it produces universal "good".

Can you guys poke holes in this?
Then it's not illegal to operate.
Not in a few months.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stocks-yuan-tick-lower-sen...
> To me the video was boring because watching a human do machine work is frustrating (to me).

I wouldn't think Sudoku is machine work. Yes, a machine can solve it, but it's not intended to be machine work.
phd's will spend 5 years starring at paper
Security scanners for Python and Docker: from code to dependencies
The subset of web technologies that seems reasonable to any given speaker often closely matches the subset of web technologies the speaker uses (either for their own code, or in apps they use).

Personally, I'm looking forward to the point that web apps are capable enough to let PWAs do absolutely anything an Android or iOS application could do.
It’s not possible to read data in a different process’ address space directly (or at least, I didn’t stumble on how to do it). Instead, I first needed to copy the contents of a page range to the memory scanner’s address space.

How about injecting your code into that process? (Either from your own DLL via LoadLibrary and SetWindowsHookEx; or WriteProcessMemory directly into it then CreateRemoteThread) [1]

I love that Windows lets you do this kind of stuff. Security nightmare, sure, but it allows use cases the creators couldn't envision (e.g. I believe UltraMon uses it to add and override window functionality). The first time I injected a hook into another app from Visual Basic it felt like I had a new superpower.

I was going to add some code to force notepad to use the fonts I wanted (Consolas, 11pt), but for some reason sending WM_SETFONT messages kept messing up how fonts were displaying

For this one you could automate the menu dialogs to display the current font. SendKeys should do the trick, then read the control values with the same methodology already used in your project.

[1] https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/4610/Three-Ways-to-Inje...
Were you out walking at night? Do you have any sense of why it attacked you? (I don't know anything about owls)
Just to back this up, the Soviets mounted at least one cannon to a space station (Salyut 3 in 1974), and tried to launch an orbital anti-satellite weapons platform (Polyus in 1987).
Cities. There are lots of short, memorable city names. And they don't get old. (Fictional characters or band names tend to get tiresome after a while.)
Perhaps it is better usage now to call them Czechia rather than the Czech Republic. We usually speak of France, not the French Republic.
Haha the pokemonGo Api! I was in the final stages of a bootcamp right when Pokemon Go came out, and a bunch of us were desperately trying to put ourselves on the map by doing something lit with Pokemon Go. We discovered that the spawns were cycled hourly, so if we could gather enough data we could quite accurately map out every pokemon in the city. Then we came up against not knowing anything about parsing the data we were just yanking back from requests to the API... I think some point in the authentication phase? So we saw that python library, saw that they had solved the problem, but it was using something we had absolutely no idea how to transcribe to Node, and this is like, a bunch of 3 month old freshfaced Javascript devs. Figuring out Python was kinda out of the question (better to focus on pitching ourselves as hardcore Node/Javascript devs in the upcoming job search).

And then, like, three days after we started the journey, someone had not only beat us to the punch, they had done so at a professional level. I don't remember which site it was, but not only did it work perfectly, it didn't require the "crowd sourced" solution to mapping out pokemon that we were counting on. The developer/s had somehow figured out how to just yank all pokemon locations. And on top of that the app was functional, gorgeous, even had its own URL (we were still in the "all our apps are laughinggiraffe.herokuapp.com domains" phase).

All in all, great experience. A nice fresh slap in the face to how much work we had ahead of us, and good fun had anyway.
HN Moderator Dang's Comments
I don't think either of those people are well known for their excellence in parenting.
Privilege escalation via the unintended UnattendedUtilities
A Trip into Optimisation
I got iTunes from the Windows Store and it works fine. It surprised me because iTunes is very much not native and because it needs a lot of access to do its syncing, but it works fine.
People were shouted down here 5-10 years ago for predicting that Google might turn evil, now it's almost a mainstream opinion here.

You know, simple predictions are often correct. But ignore it (especially if your salary depends on it).
That's true, and obviously so but I never realized it until now. I'm curious why r%(max-min)+min is widespread "common" way of doing this, maybe I just saw it in a few places and never questioned it.
Because the sun is an enormous sphere of hydrogen-helium plasma with a core that's undergoing fusion just due to gravity. Even indirect sunlight is still a very large amount of light and energy.

I don't mean to sound flippant, but I think sometimes people forget just how insanely energetic stars of all sizes are.
The Five Rules of Risk [video]
> Its completely possible for the authorities to be wrong, its also completely possible for charlatan opportunists and insane people to make a bad situation much worse.

In this case, the foremost authority was so wrong that no charlatan opportunist with reach outside the “maybe I should drink bleach” set of the public did any worse than them, and a majority of the “non-authoritative” sources I consulted this year got the important facts (evidence of human-to-human spread, a long tail of very long incubation periods, difficult-to-ascertain asymptomatic carriers, asymptomatic transmission, unlikely to have been transmitted in a purely natural setting) straight as soon as information was available, while WHO was still denying these things without evidence to back up their denials.

Added to clarify: For example, if you watched Tim Pool's (political commentator, often struggles to read and understand things he's covering) podcast, he was able to tell you early this year that some reports saw the virus incubating for upward of two weeks, and transmissible during at least some of that time; and if I recall correctly, at that same moment, the WHO's official position was that there was “no evidence of human to human transmission”, a statement that would be irresponsible even if it were true at the time. While the WHO was denying early concerns that it could spread through aerosols, the same podcast was presenting the evidence for this, and cautioning people to be aware of it (but not to panic). If you ask me, this random independent podcast handled this subject so much more responsibly than the mainstream media (who were at the time saying that it was no worse than the flu, making fun of people for being concerned about it) and the WHO (who were basically advising people to ignore evidence entirely, and not take precautions, until they deemed it sufficient).
A search seems to suggest Chromecast devices are controlled via websocket, though that information is pretty old.
You give a set of ideas a name so that you can refer to that set. You also don't run your processes based on some process that doesn't work, you run it on something that does work.

It doesn't matter how many fancy processes are named and marketed out there if they don't work for you.

The base concept of Scrum isn't any different from the base concepts of feedback loops and self-improvement; but if you call it feedback loops and self-improvement people don't really want it. That's where that marketing bs comes in, and the whole 'certified' nonsense.

You make your units of work as clear as possible, you make them small enough so you have an idea how things are going and you measure periodically to ensure you're not blindsided by human flaws all the time.
It does this most of the time, either through the cloud or direct to the controller. But during setup of the first device on a network it does something direct from the browser to get it connected to the cloud.
Such a good point. I had a small existential crisis watching programmers on YouTube/Twitch because I was focusing on the sounds of the keyboard typing and realizing that they are sitting in front of a screen typing for hours on end and how pointless it was.

The second part of my crisis was that I was no different.

After a few months of dealing with this I remembered that actually they are engaging with an entire world, and so was I. Rhetoric is so stupid sometimes.
Ask HN: Open-source hardware primer for a software engineer
Do you know a good resource to get to know the best practices of open source hardware from the pespective of a software engineer that works on github daily with software that uses hundreds of open source libraries ?

I realize hardware is vast. So let's take the example of a bike (looks more approachable than a smartphone chip).

"Open source bike" on Google gives me this result : https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/2881/are-there-open-source-bikes. It's very interesting, but just scratches the surface.

Can projects be hosted on Github ? Why can't you find something like github.com/myBikeBrand/weaselBike that would have 2000 stars, issues and PRs ?

What's the best editor for each diverse physical part of the bike ? Can they be written in code ? Or exported to text files that enable collaboration through git ? Is the fact that a vector file diff is not readable by a human a problem for collaboration, Github would be lacking a visualisation layer ? Is https://wikifactory.com aiming at that use case ?

I guess "yarn install" would be replaced by "here is the shopping list, have fun" and "yarn start" would be "find a lab, use their tools and assemble your bike according to these instructions".

Is it the order of magnitude higher for each build iteration in terms of time, cost that makes it impractical ?

Complexity doesn't look like a problem. Some websites are far more complex to build from scratch than a simple functionning bike. Is it that most software parts are fully automated (no human involved to instantiate a new DB with a schema tailored for my needs), but hardware isn't (1 hour to change the shape of my saddle but months to make it produced by a factory) ? Which kind of hardware parts can be 3D printed ?

What would be the equivalent of "yarn test" ? Virtual assembling, stress–strain and crash tests ? What's the CircleCI for this ?
I think limiting screen time is to allow young kids to concentrate on tasks for longer periods of time. This is recommended by most pediatricians.

Our kids, who are home with us and in the same room as where both me and my wife work, are able to play by themselves for the most part every weekday from 9-12pm.
Something I find fascinating in this discussion is how November affects things. If Trump is re-elected, any hope of repairing institutions is realistically lost. If he isn’t, there’s a real possibility of funny business, either contesting the result or refusing to leave office.

I know it sounds preposterous that a president would refuse to leave office, but it also seems preposterous that an impeached president wouldn’t step down, and he’s become accustomed to degrading norms and breaking the law with impunity.

US lifestyle is still very good, but for those of us looking at the trend it’s really concerning. I know I’m personally making decisions with the possibility of needing to leave in the future.
That wouldn't make the virus disappear though, it would make it less severe. Which is good! Hopefully that happens. That it mutates to the point of being significantly less deadly before a vaccine seems unlikely to me.
My wife is a musician and sang in a highschool/college choir. She hated when they combined with the orchestra and the orchestra conductor conducted a song. Said it felt like the conductor was off a bit because he compensates for different delays.
Which can be done with HTTP as well.
The surprising thing here for me was that you can send qmail a 4GB email message and it will not immediately reject it in the default configuration.
> allowed me to stay in shell script land vs bailing to Python

This is something I've been working on as well. I know how to get any utility task I want done in Python, but it requires a lot more work than being able to pipe commands well in a shell. I've been going out of my way to do things in Bash instead as a way to become to familiar with standard Unix utils. It's a fun little thing to do that ends up resulting in more efficient use down the line.
hi Mikel, do you know if there is some Ralph and Bauhaus info/docs/sources out there? Or they are completely lost in time?
How many other ML people do you work with? Do they all use the same system? Are you only working with Tensorflow and no other tools?

Generally things like MLOps are targeted at providing systems for people that either don't know how, or don't have the time, to set something up themselves, especially when the data science team is more than just one or two people, and when they're using a range of tools that need to interoperate in various ways.

Something like Kubeflow, for example, does a lot more than what you describe.
Satoshi Nakamoto, is that you? Bitcoin mined in 2009 moves for the first time
C&C Remastered: open-source / mod support
Domino's Pizza has an unofficial API as well:

https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-dominos-pizza-api and
https://pypi.org/project/dominos/
It's important to note that we are night owls. The kids have TV basically from 7pm (when I turn on Jeopardy regardless of sunset) until they go to bed around 11pm. And during the current situation, sometimes they go to bed around 1-3am.

So they actually get a lot more screen time than most of their peers.
I think it's a difference in prioritization and how CloudFormation is treated as a separate product as opposed to a fundamental part of releasing features. The other two major cloud providers treat templates as a core part of the release process (now).

As I understand it, the three cloud providers differ in this way:

1. Microsoft Azure releases template/API first - no features can be released unless an Azure Resource Manager template can access it. I think they use ARM templates for their integration testing, as well, but I'm not sure. (If you're an Azure 'softie, please chime in!).

2. Google Cloud Platform releases APIs first - no features are released without extensively being tested via API integrations. They do have a CloudFormation/Azure RM template offering now called Deployment Manager so that my change. (This means that Terraform-like tools can target features quickly, and I have no experience with Deployment Manager but I suspect it does as well.)

3. Amazon AWS releases to the web console first. You might say, "Whoa, what about Bezos' service oriented architecture email?"[1] As far as I know, that's true for internal features. But all user features are exposed through the web console, then wrappers around those APIs are exposed, then, sometimes years later, CloudFormation gains the ability to target those APIs.

For this reason, I trust Microsoft and Google Cloud a lot more to maintain parity between what I can do in Terraform/Pulumi/native template tools and in their web consoles.

[1] - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611, per Bezos: "All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces."
It can be about all that stuff and you can pay people well. Nothing about the latter implies you have to suddenly change your values.
Back in the very early 90's, I ran a small ISP that fed UUCP news and email to BBS systems. As it grew, I had 3 servers. Toronto, where I live, has 3 major rivers, so the servers were named Humber, Rouge and Don.

My Raspberry Pis (of which I have quite a few) have patterned names. One set of them, for example are 'evil' names. EvilEye does monitoring stuff, EvilMind is the main host of a clusterHAT cluster, EvilGenius has a lot of my Lisp programming stuff on it, and so on. Since I don't purposely access the nodes on the pi cluster except to update them, I just give them boring host1 to host4 names.

As for laptops, I'm boring. My laptop is ksaj-laptop, my SO's is similarly named, and my old one that I rarely use anymore is crappylappy.
> More usefully, I'd ask, "Why the Moon?"

Just a guess, but maybe it's because this president seems obsessed with editing himself into the narrative of numerous political and national news events that were historically significant during the early adulthood-middle age years of boomer-era folks like himself. Thus the effort to bring about personally-styled reduxes of the moon landing, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iran crisis, the cold war, SDI, etc. All of these make up the notion of the "again" referred to in his slogan. Compare the focus on "American" story points of this period to how little he seems interested in events of similar significance that came into prominence after around 1990, other than opportunistically channeling the outrage of his base over anything connected to Clinton.
Shelter.travel – Your nature refuge, far from crowds
Does this somehow prevent you from using Groups/Teams?

>if the same slide is present in 15 Powerpoint decks any edit will require tons of mindless and error-prone copypasting

This is exactly what you want SharePoint for. Have 15 people open the same PowerPoint deck, in desktop PowerPoint, editing the file simultaneously. It's fully versioned and you have no merging of files back together.
Switched to the Tmobile connect plan last week, in part with trying to keep bills low.

Despite being a longtime Tmobile customer they issued me a new number. Mild inconvenience.
Yeah that's why there are mass protests against lock-down that are overwhelmingly attended by hardcore conspiracy theorists (go watch some interviews of these people).

The WHO never once denied that human to human transmission was possible, the only thing they said very early on was that there was not enough evidence to conclusively support it yet.

Somehow this has been twisted online (by people like you) that the WHO had some kind of campaign to deny fact, and all the nutcases on youtube were infact the correct ones.
Some members of the public disseminated factual information. Other members disseminated dangerous lies.

On balance, I think the WHO is more likely to get it right than the general public. At least their message is more consistent.
Attacking Agriculture – Security Vulnerabilities
That's not a web app then.
Electricity travels at a big fraction of the speed of light, he couldn't hear a cable length delay. Sound travels about a meter at 3ms in air, that's more likely what microphone calibration was for.
Were your parents rich?
I don't understand why the parent post of yours is getting this much downvotes. What's wrong with using a GC'ed language when performance requirements are permissive?
Transphobia is a property of actions, not an immutable property of people. Rogan may not hold transphobic beliefs. That does not stop a particular action from being harmful.

This isn't a judgement on his person. I don't want to shoot him into space. I want people to recognize that this specific sentence is harmful and we can be better than that. We can have conversations around transgender people in sports without using the same exact same phrasing as people who want to kick them out of their homes and call them freaks.
Finally an error library which shows correct trace for sentinel errors in Golang
Lots of “teaching” is literally excluding from consumption for young kids. Parents know better than their kids, why entrust that kind of advanced decision making within them?
I'm 32 and needed glasses for the first time last year, just mild nearsightedness which runs in my family, and I'm actually doing better than most (my mom and sister both needed glasses as teenager).

I eat healthy/exercise and use dark-mode themes where available to minimize glare. That's it's for eye health. I wonder if the negative association of eye health to screen time is less about the screens and more about high blood pressure brought on by being sedentary. High blood pressure absolutely destroys the eyes over time.
They can't. The lists of viable ads are constructed, built and updated real time.
There are shortcuts, but then you have to account for things such as quality scores, probability of you clicking on the ad if you recently have seen them, etc.... and do that trillion times per second.

Even light speed is not infinite.
Decentralization works all the time in meatspace, but when you have a wide open channel of information anywhere, it tends to get flooded with lots of bad information.

Email spam is the obvious one. Algorithmically promoted conspiracy crap was the less obvious less predictable one that bit YouTube and other services and is much harder to police because it turns out the police are also just as biased and dumb as the people they're trying to police, just in different ways.

Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with increasingly sophisticated malformed information, and at some point it will probably devolve into an arms race of these programs trying to con the other programs. I think Anathem had a passage in there about this, "insanity programs" or something to that effect, can't really remember, but until that day, you'll have to actually pay people to disseminate your own carefully crafted propaganda instead.

Centralized services provide the illusion of safety against this in much the same way urban landscapes do, but there's no substitute to taking responsibility for your own safety, your own hygiene, and your own bullshit.
These stats always freak me out when you extrapolate it over the long term. The average adult will also spend 2 years commuting or an entire year of their life sitting on the toilet.

Lot's of wasted time here people. I think this also shows the power of what we can accomplish by spending 10 minutes a day doing something.