skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless of the merit of this particular piece, the portion of Butler's Erewhon comprising "The Book of the Machines" makes for very interesting and forward thinking reading.

You can skip directly to it here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1906/1906-h/1906-h.htm#chap2...

But the context in the story is fairly important - it takes place in a society that has essentially already carried out its own Butlerian Jihad and taken it too far. Wonderful book by the way.

I'm starting to think that the religious sects in the U.S. that laboriously evaluate a technology before incorporating it into their communities have a pretty good thing going. Sadly it's not really practical at a larger scale, and the suffering that could be avoided by adopting something early rather than late is difficult to estimate. Ah well!
Elon wasn't calling for a hard halt like this article. He's talking about the dangers of general AI (AGI). I don't think most people would consider a self-driving car a likely path to accidental superintelligence; it's a highly-targeted application like a chess engine.

OpenAI's GPT-X engines OTOH, IMO, have a lot more potential danger because it's very unclear what they'll be used for.
Way too late to the testing game! I've had an at-home saliva PCR thanks to LabCorp Pixel almost one year ago. No to mention the at-home PCR-quality test, which launched this May, delivering results at home within 30 minutes [0]!

It's pathetic that you can't buy antibody and antigen tests like I did while I'm in Bulgaria. I paid 10 BGN (around 8 USD) for a EU-certified test kit made in Croatia and 12 BGN (around 7 USD) for a Swiss-made EU-certified test kit. I purchased a bunch, tested my family with antibody kits, and kept using the antigen ones during some possible exposure. Is there a better way to control the spread when people don't wanna get vaccinated? At-home testing is the answer. But the US wants to control the results and this makes testing problematic and expensive. They also have some Chinese EU-certified saliva-based antigen test, which is more convenient than the nasal swab, but I don't trust it as much as the other. The issue with antigen testing is that it can be used at least 5 days after exposure unlike PCR tests, which work after just 2 days.

[0]: https://checkit.lucirahealth.com/
To be fair, having it for individual use comes at a fair price[0]. The real money[1] is when the grad students go into their jobs and demand jetbrains IDEs since, as you said, they don't want to learn a new IDE.

0: https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/buy/#personal?billing=yea...

1: https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/buy/#commercial?billing=y...
Could you mind sharing which hard data you found in your research which makes the above data incorrect then? Talking about how much research you've done isn't a counter to someone sharing their disagreeing research with you.

I'm aware of the lightning network, I'm also aware less than 1% of this 130,000,000 could possibly be using it at current scale right now. It's not a debate about what could be done it's a question of how many actually are.
why not just

touch favicon.ico

so it gets cached and forget about it?
During the early days of the pandemic I put up a poster someone made which was hand washing instructions but with the text replaced with the litany against fear.
As a security engineer, do you feel like the addition of npm audit is a net positive for the security of the npm ecosystem?
I was about to comment exactly this!

I crossed both of them :)
Perhaps someone accidentally left the doors open on the Atom CPU which allowed them to run a disassembler.

"In mid-2020, our team managed to extract microcode for modern Atom processors that are based on the Goldmont
microarchitecture. It became possible to do this on Atom Goldmont systems-on-chip (SoCs) due to an arbitrary code
execution vulnerability in Intel CSME (Intel-SA-00086)."
Infection fatality rate for COVID in the Western world in practice was under 1%. I am quite skeptical of the idea that overwhelmed hospitals would quarduple that.

Do you have a source?
Aren't we inappropriately reifying AI? AI doesn't really exist, other than as an academic field of research. For instance, here is how the European Union is trying to define AI for regulation purposes. Note how broad it is!

"artificial intelligence system (AI system) means software that is developed with one or more of the techniques and approaches listed in Annex I and can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, generate outputs such as content, predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing the environments they interact with"

"Annex 1:
Machine learning approaches, including supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, using a wide variety of methods including deep learning;
(b)Logic- and knowledge-based approaches, including knowledge representation, inductive (logic) programming, knowledge bases, inference and deductive engines, (symbolic) reasoning and expert systems; (c) Statistical approaches, Bayesian estimation, search and optimization methods."
But, you likely would pay 5% of salary (or more) for a paper and pencil (to continue with your analogy) if you had no other choice and there was no alternative tool that could substitute. So I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
OMFG!!!! I’m so excited… let’s go!!!!!!!
Agreed, this seems deeply negative for the employee. It's not semantically different than just being paid a cash bonus, except you are forced to buy company stock with said cash bonus.

Which I suppose you can just immediately sell and get back the cash - which begs the question of why not just model this as cash bonus compensation entirely?

The entire attraction of equity is that it can appreciate as it vests - that your (presumed) contribution to the company's market cap during your tenure is rewarded.
Why Taiwanese cities are some of the best recyclers in the world
I started a blog covering unique, alternative solutions that cities are taking to make them suck less. The first one is about how the Taipei government convinced people to be slightly less lazy and achieved one of the best recycling rates in the world. Would love to hear any feedback/suggestions, thanks!
Similarly:

“Thou shalt not make a flying machine that gathers its own fuel from nature.”

Or maybe:

“Thou shalt not make a vehicle that travels on legs.”
One of the better, yet sad jokes, because it must have been one, was, when they announced "markdown support" in Confluence wiki, but barely any markdown worked. One has to ask oneself, who coded up that half-assed parser there, that manages to parse less markdown, than basically any half-serious markdown parser in any language, that I have ever used. Enterprise software for you.

Edit: Now that I think about it, the whole product palette of Atlassian seems to have issues making use of any decent markdown parser out of the myriads of parsers out there, that they could use. For example HTML in markdown on Bitbucket also does not properly work, so generating a table of contents is useless on Bitbucket as well.
What I mean is that it involves a policy setting, but little to no technical change. You cannot create a microkernel just because you declare 3rd party extensions to be banned. In order to classify yourself as a certain architecture you actually need that architecture first.
Lucira – PCR-quality COVID-19 at-home test with results in 30 minutes
If you do actual ML research, the technologies are two sides of the same coin. Three days ago there was a paper posted here in HN on using the GPT-like transformer architecture for reinforcement learning problems (of which self driving cars is a partial subset of).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721037
I would be satisfied with anything approaching a forum, with wide flexibility in specific features.

If you know enough about a web framework to get it going, use it to complete a specific set of tasks, and get it deployed with a database, it would put you ahead of a heck of a lot of grads that I know.

I wasn't suggesting this as an interview question, but more a self check for juniors. Can you actually bring something end to end? Yours works better in an interview setting, although it seems fairly trivial.
True, China will be really receptive to a ban! Maybe we could try and get Xi hooked on opiates and then blackmail him to stop!

It worked before! What could go wrong!?
> We don't know if China would cooperate with a ban. We haven't tried. China is very complicated, and if you think you can predict what Xi will do, you are wrong.

This is astonishingly optimistic (or naive). I'm sure China would happily agree to cease AI development in public and then continue in private.

Getting any country to actually stop AI development is as likely as getting them to give up all their nuclear weapons. AI is a weapon, both in military and economic contexts.
That's exactly my point. I did, explicitly, say it was unpleasant, and something you should only do in extremis -- when you genuinely believe that extinction a likely alternative.

But the US could absolutely glass every semiconductor fab (and datacenter, and research facility) in mainland China using a combination of conventional + atomic kinetic options.
Right now if a vehicle on auto pilot gets into an accident, the driver is scrutinized.

That is reasonable. The driver is expected to be alert incase intervention is needed.

If we take the manual override away, then we'll be squarely in the world that Mr. Musk is concerned about.
There are all sorts of ways to build intelligences. Humans are unique in that they are mammals (defined by having mothers). Mothers raise us with love, and teach us, for our helpless first years. We also have to act in communities. So there is a sense in that we are very lucky - in humans, our intelligence correlates with our altruism. In the grand space of possible minds, it is very unlikely that altruism and morality is correlated with intelligence. So whatever that machine race we birth is, it won't have any of the things we value if we're just building for "precise perception, reasoning, etc"
Good read. Not buying it, but interesting. I suspect a broader definition of evolution includes constructing tools and adapting to them (do humans walk upright because doing so leaves hands free for rocks and sticks?). Our AI assistants may evolve - with help - into robot overlords or some other Luddite/dystopian scenario, but I doubt it. Mutual cooperation is beneficial, and much easier when not competing for the same resources (food, land, water, mates).
I think this is interesting fodder for science fiction authors but lacks concrete examples of what exactly it would mean to regulate or engage in a "Butlerian Jihad against AI."

I know things that I would like to see. Like humans "in the loop" (as opposed to "on the loop" or "out of the loop") for certain classes of decision making - for example target selection of military strikes or law enforcement. Or what kinds of information we use to train the decision making models, for example if you feed ML a racist data set and you get a racist algorithm - use that algorithm to decide who to give mortgages and you'll get systematic depression in generational wealth based on racial lines.

But this isn't some crusade on AI because it's AI; it has to be based in reality - what AI or ML is being used for, what information it operates on, what decisions it is used to make, and ultimately the human beings that are responsible for those decisions. The reason it is so hard to convince people as to how we should legislate (or otherwise regulate AI) is that every conversation drifts into science fiction and not concrete examples of the ethical issues today and what can be done today. Otherwise it comes off as Luddite fearmongering.
True, it's not scheduled, but it's more common than a lot of people think, for a public company to be bought out. And the shareholders don't get to arbitrarily hold out, either.
The art of kanly is still alive in the universe.
Mortality from DrugOverdoses, Homicides, Unintentional Injuries Mar-Aug 20202020
Andrew Ng is a luminary, but this isn't a great analogy.

Humans aren't adapted to a Mars environment, and there's little incentive for us to move there.

AI has so many practical uses that everyone is getting in the game and pushing the envelope. A huge amount of money is being spent on ML, and a wealth of expertise is being developed.
Probably using something like that: https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sandsifter
I would guess the number of people who have opted-out of the notifications are either not reported, or the aggregate opt-out ratio doesn't make a ding on overall notification conversion rates.

In other words, people don't have a uniform frustration tolerance to irrelevant push notifications, and losing the most irritable segment might be 'worth' it if the majority of the population is still getting them.

An alternative explanation is opt-out burn-out; people might just give up on the possibility of a high signal/noise ratio notification space.
> In general, the speed wars are over and everyone is reaching deep to become as smart as possible. Or in the other words, just being fast is no longer an edge, it's a commodity.

I'm curious what the best techniques for being "smart" are when you have to have such quick turnaround. Are these rules-based techniques, statistical but interpretable, or black box?
I only brought it up because you asked, but no, not worth my time to dig up the data and articles. This is a journey we will all go on.

Here is a simple article to get you started, but I promise, there is a lot more info out there if you seek to find it:

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/countries-using-cryptocurren...
I like to think of AI-Genesis through the lens of what humanity has already done through domestication. We take something primitive and progressively adapt it to serve a greater utility. I think working dogs are the most interesting example of this. We've taken a species, the wolf, and made it smarter while also making it want to do work, learn tricks, and follow orders. Of course, you still need to train the animal for optimal results but even breeds like collies know how to herd instinctively.

Anyways.

Let's assume the best and brightest dog breeders endeavor to make German Shepherds as intelligent as they possibly can. Would the same ethical debates about what constitutes a 'mind' come into play? What would happen if the dogs became smart enough to make their own mating decisions? Would we be worried about them turning on us once they get close to human level intellect? Would it be immoral to make these dogs work? Or, would not letting them work be considered immoral?

This is just food for thought. But I suspect AI's capabilities will grow much in the same way other domesticated species have grown into the specialized roles we've crafted for them.
Do Assassinations Change History?
It's really not, since we don't have anything close to a strong (or "general") AI. GPT-3 is the closest, but even it is just in that direction. So it is quite early. Good time to have the conversation.
I also used to live in an apartment right next to it (white building with red roof on the left in second picture) and yes, it was loud. The first times it felt like an earthquake but I quickly got used to it and the view was worth it.
I wish we still had real investigative journalists. If you're bored sometime, go through the Deng/Murdoch divorce papers and look at how the Murdochs claim Deng altered Lachlan, Rupert and James' business practices to benefit the Chinese government.

From the outside, it sounds like certain SV companies are behaving in the exact same way. But I guess we won't know until someone leaks, huh?
TBH I'd feel jittery working at door dash. COVID is going to end completely soon and the boom in deliveries is going to drop with it, probably along with their stock price. If was to go work there, I could start selling every month.

But they also don't give you units of RSUs as stock comp, just cash equivalents, so that is another major downside working there.
I’m not sure we actually disagree: the Americans started out far too confident in their abilities and their view of what they can do now is, tempered by two decades of fighting, much more realistic. A loss of confidence, even if caused by a collision with reality, is still a fairly accurate description when taking into account what you point out.

The French I think have a much more accurate understanding of their abilities. The reversals they suffer have been far fewer and less disastrous than those the Americans face. For example, in Chad, the FACT is now certainly on the back foot—even the opposition media who previously seemed to think that the FACT had a good chance of taking N’Djamena have stopped suggesting that that’s a possibility and now focus on ructions between Déby fils et frères. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s hold on its strongholds is pretty much secure, and they may even retain some cities.
> That's the Human-centric way of thinking as described in the essay, where you care about the outcome of the solution - "having a house as shelter".

Yes. Because we have finite lifespans. We do things for a reason. To suggest anything else is pure philosophical wankery.
It equally orbits the sun and the earth.

Normally, objects with smaller orbits take less time to make a circuit. But this is placed where the earth's gravity pulls it back, just enough to make it take one (earth) year to finish its smaller orbit. So gravity from the earth and the sun are involved.
I don't know about everyone mentioned, but Yudkowsky in particular rejects Pascal's wager (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ebiCeBHr7At8Yyq9R/being-half...) and argues (IIRC) that AGI poses a large risk of killing us all, rather than an infinitesimal risk.
Looks like in C++ memory_order_acq_rel is treated like memory_order_acquire when it's a load and memory_order_release when it's a store. I would argue that this isn't really a difference in memory model but a difference in API.
> Rather rich coming from one of the self driving car market leaders.

You don't need anything close to strong AI to do a reasonable job of driving a car. It seems like 90% of the problem is object recognition, and even in terms of brain-equivalent logic that's a really low bar.
> Is this even a problem? It's a problem

It's not a problem. People like that don't really care for the town either, only their bottom line. If small businesses go bust, tax revenue craters, and municipal services are gutted, they're still making money on their investment.
With high probability, 'just statistics' is an essential component of strong AI. Another essential component is embodiment, of which self-driving cars, and also military drones, are canonical examples. Researchers are taking the correct essential steps towards strong AI, it's a matter of (short) time until they succeed.
Afghanistan I think is illustrative of the fundamental logic underpinning foreign policy decisions. There is no direct connexion, I agree. (Well, perhaps there is but neither of us are aware of it.)
> IIRC capsaicin is like this in humans.

Capsaicin triggers the heat-sensing nerves in mammals specifically. Scientists think this is because birds disperse the seeds well after consumption, while us mammals tend to crush the seeds with our grinding teeth. Peppers don't want to kill us, they just want to hurt as real bad ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin#Natural_function
We were all super busy after we moved on from the business.
So if they do get weeded out quickly then why would any rational employee even care about not having a cliff when looking for a new job to begin with?

This is simply increasing the risk of hiring short term employees in addition to existing risks including the high cost of ramp-up times.
Drove to China from Portugal with a old car. Tried to find the concentration camps in Xinjiang. Got detained twice, was so much fun! Chinese police a really really funny (if you have the right passport).
Richard C. Lewontin, Eminent Geneticist with a Sharp Pen, Dies at 92
I graduated two years ago. We learned subversion :)
You think the people refusing to get vaccinated are going to take a rapid antigen test?
Pointed at earth.
I would like to push back in the spirit of inquiry: ecosystems surrounding rivers that are dammed are shaped over millions of years by the presence of an estuary, and then modified nigh irrevocably by a few years of human intervention. That is to say, even after the destruction of the damn, the landscape will be permanently affected, and by extension the ecosystem. I can see human adoption (and modifcation) of natural annual burn patterns having a similar effect. We have a habit in the West of undue skepticism of indigenous peoples' agency and ability (see: 100 years of Egyptologists denying that Egyptians actually built their ancient structures).
Animal Cognition
Do their US congregants not have the same level of representation that all citizens living in a state have?
It's not harmful to watch videos, if you don't do so uncritically. If you watch uncritically, almost any media is harmful, down to Teletubbies. People need to take responsibility for their minds: Boogaloo bois and Antifa didn't radicalize you, you radicalized yourself by believing what they said, either rationally or by default — but own your decision-making.
It says a lot about what injustices we have learned to accept that AI alarmists focus almost exclusively on the scifi-level hypothetical dangers of AI, rather than the very real problems it already causes today.

Those problems largely fall into three categories that I can think of off the top of my head at 1am:

1. AI is a convenient way to justify potentially uncomfortable decisions you would have made otherwise (idlewords said it best: "AI is money laundering for bias")

2. AI is being used in situations where it can be a threat to life and limb, like the current crop of self-driving(ish) cars

3. Essentially all of the gains from automating work going to people who already have capital
Be careful what you wish for.

If social media platforms are considered common carriers they will have a 'duty to serve." They will need to provide their service to anyone not judged by a court to be breaking the law.

That includes spam, pornography, and many forms of online abuse and harassment. There is a strong case to be made that ISPs should be common carriers, since they don't (and should not) know what is contained in the packets they transport.

But treating Twitter or Facebook or Hacker News as common carriers makes no sense. They are not "carriers" who are neutrally transmitting data they have no control over.

That's not what they want to be, and that's not want their users want them to be. 4chan has it's place, but most people don't want to whole web to look like that.

== Edit:
Keep in mind the the law is a blunt interment. Claiming small social media sites don't need to worry about laws restricting big social media sites, is like claiming that honest citizens don't need to worry about laws targeting terrorists.
On top of that, ads stimulate overconsumption.

Also, they distort the free market (not the best product wins, but the one with the biggest advertising budget)

And they often target young children.

The only reason ads exist is because countries measure the success of their economies by how much is consumed.
This is so obvious. Incumbents would like nothing better than a new law that makes it harder to operate (within “reason”, of course) in their industry. It is amazing that more people here don’t see right through the manipulation.
Rapid tests took long time to reach the market, pandemic was already big when they became available at scale. I also think most people would not agree with getting tested so often (I would not).

Track and trace was introduced and failed in most countries.