skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a document management company and we regularly see people transitioning from naming systems like:

1) Document draft

2) Document draft v2

3) Document final

4) Document final updated

5) Document final final
"They’re in the remote possibility of building intelligent machines that act, and even appear, as humans. If this is achieved, eventually intelligent weapons of mass destruction will be built, without doubt."

Worrying about this strikes me as a bit daft when you can already convince actual humans to be your weapons delivery system.

It also shows some significant shortsightedness regarding scaling laws which an AI researcher ought to have more experience with. A more legitimate worry would be basement-grade Predator drones. Grenade-bearing quadcopters which use computer vision to track and target dense crowds are something which technology can do now, rather than something which might optimistically happen in a few hundred years.
Yes, if only we could pay the bills with naive idealism.
Workplace policies are what make something nsfw, not any ridiculously extrapolated failings as a human.
In the case of an app that grows over time: isn't there an element of luck at play every month in the user base? Maybe you just got lucky 12 months in a row, and then you were successful enough to show up on the front page of the app store.

You can tabulate the odds of experiencing random radical growth 12 months in a row. It will happen to some portion of the population. If everybody is flipping coins, then 1 person out of 4000 will flip 12 heads in a row.

I am not arguing that most success is due to luck, or even half of it. I just think the statistical argument is interesting to explore.
It's still speculation. Lodsys has come out to flat out deny any partnership or involvement in any way[1], but the #078 patent was originally assigned to Ferrera Etherial LLC in 2004, and then Webvention LLC in 2009, and then finally to Lodsys in 2010. A 2009 Law.com article [2] cites Ferrara Ethereal LLC as a shell company of IV. There is no knowledge of who or what Webvention is, except that it holds a ghost office in the same area as many other known or speculated shell companies IV operates.

Useful trivia: #7,222,078 [3] also happens to be the main patent behind Lodsys v. (independent iOS and Android developers), with #7,620,565 [4] backing it up. Lodsys only holds 4 patents, all four are cited as

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...

[2] http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i...

[3] http://www.google.com/patents?vid=7222078

[4] http://www.google.com/patents?vid=7620565
Pardon me but ... I think that there are way worse dangers than "humanoid bombs"... One of the main reason is that to achieve a nuclear explosion you need to have a critical mass and the it's hard to conceal for a lot of reasons (radiation etc...).

What's the difference with a car that could have a bomb in its trunk? Or a bag? A lot of scientists have wondered about these ethical questions but I believe that the benefits of high performance IA outweights the downsides of its research.

BUT I definitively agree with that:

"Americans should grow up and abandon their juvenile-minded treatment of weapons, high technology, and the value of “non-American human life” (which, sadly, to many of them is synonymous with “lowlife”). This is the hardest part of my proposal."

*edit: And what about an android to dismantle the atomic bomb instead of humans ? Sounds good to me!
It's the result of an incredible bd and ad sales team. If you look at the senior team, esp in sales, it's a lot of very senior CNET veterans who took along most of their experience and contacts from CNET to Meebo.

This is not something duplicated easily.
And yet current culture has more issues with the topless woman being shown in the media then disfigured victims.

I can understand the original warning, even though I think personally that its crazy I should be worried at work about viewing the topless tribal woman but not worried about the victims. In this I think our society is sick.
If I read it right, he has stopped working on a form of artificial intelligence because it could potentially (or inevitably) be used to create androids indistinguishable from humans that are carrying nuclear or biological payloads inside of them, presumably to be detonated in a densely populated area.

Taking as a given, like he does, that the advancement and spread of technology are inevitable, wouldn't it still be many times more likely that people would just detonate suitcase nukes themselves before they decide to hide them in expensive and and potentially problematic robots? There's surely no shortage of people willing to die to do that, and even if there were it's unlikely that setting a bomb on a half hour timer and getting out of dodge will affect the success rate.

That frankly ridiculous scenario aside, I can imagine much more likely applications that computers capable of solving Bongard problems (which sound pretty cool) could be used in war, like automated drones that are able to independently identify targets.
I love a lot of things about Mathematica. Its syntax is not one of them.
The other meaningful definition of worth is the inherent value of the object. A ION bracelet or Rawlings Power Bracelet may be sold for $30. But the plastic or metal in the item is actually worth $2. Or the fact that someone now believes they have better balance may be worth $2,000 to them, but the metal and plastic costs $2.
That seems kind of shady, I mean sure it sucks that it happens and it is kind of bad to have it as your top post but publishing just because you don't want it to be the latest post kinda downplays the publicity factor of being honest about what happened.
Maybe I'm just naive but it seems to me like in a world where the power of the atom bomb can fit in a briefcase, theres no need for androids to get bombs within striking range of their intended targets.
Incredible hack! Hats off to the hacker and to Cloudflare for the transparency of the response.

What customer was the target?
To really learn Ruby & Rails if you haven't already done it do the rails 3 tutorial http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book. It goes through building a rails app line by line without scaffolding.

For the Ruby try Learn Ruby The Hard Way. http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/

If you haven't already find the ruby/rails user group in your area. I found that having people locally to ask questions to makes a huge difference.

If you are on linux or mac install RVM to manage versions of ruby and rails. It allows you to install multiple versions of ruby and rails on your system.
In my (limited) experience with Mongo, its just not like that.

You can't just (quickly) query any key in the document - you have to define indexes anyway or you'll be doing the equivalent of a table scan or Map/Reduce.

Document databases shine when you're just not doing that kind of query anyway, and you've got a ton of data to store. If you need to do e.g., fulltext and/or geospatial search you should probably use a search server anyway (I like Sphinx), and then just lookup by PK in whatever datastore you're using.

Its been mentioned elsewhere on this thread, but I'm also quite fond of the old FriendFeed method: serialize your arbitrary data into a (MySQL) BLOB, and then run a background process to build "indexes" (really tables) when you find out you need them.

Its ridiculously simple to start doing that, and there's no new tech to learn.
"AT&T was tricked into redirecting my voicemail to a fraudulent voicemail box"

Capitan Crunch called...
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I'd imagine you wouldn't blow a discovered flaw in Google's two-factor authentication setup on a small site. You'd sit on it until a big enough target came along, which CloudFlare certainly has become.
> “So where does the air vehicle called the Predator [i.e., a flying robot] fit? It is unmanned, and impressive. In 2002, in Yemen, one run by the CIA came up behind an SUV full of al-Qaeda leaders and successfully fired a Hellfire missile, leaving a large smoking crater where the vehicle used to be.”

> Yes, just as you read it: a number of human beings were turned to smoke and smithereens, and this pathetic journalist, whoever he is, speaking with the mentality of a 10-year-old who blows up his toy soldiers, reports in cold blood how people were turned to ashes by his favorite (“impressive”, yeah) military toys. Of course, for overgrown pre-teens like him, the SUV was not full of human beings, but of “al-Qaeda leaders” (as if he knew their ranks), of terrorists, sub-humans who aren’t worthy of living, who don’t have mothers to be devastated by their loss. Thinking of the enemy as subhuman scum to be obliterated without second thoughts was a typical attitude displayed by Nazis against Jews (and others) in World War II.

That's... quite a string of logic. He seems to know an awful lot about the mental process of that journalist.

As a critique of his general point: good general AI is dangerous (and useful) in so many ways I don't see why he focuses so narrowly on humanoid carriers of weapons of mass destruction - hell we already have those.
Haha. Wish we were that organized. We have a big announcement on Wednesday and need the announcement about Polish (http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-polish-automatic-imag...) and the feature we're announcing tomorrow (Mirage) to come out before then.

I think being among the top stories on Hacker News will take care of people seeing it. And, for the record, I voted the breach story up.
The more interesting question is what will happen when a known member of {insert bad group here} particpates and does nothing but make meaningful technical contributions. At some point, he'll be outed and then what? I think that there's a better than 30% chance that said person will be booted.

My question is more interesting because the situation that I describe is far more likely. (It's almost a certainty.)
You can rather easily, if it is written well and marketed properly.
There doesn't appear to be any evidence Kissinger said that. And anyway, they kind of did both lose.
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From the intern side, when I have been paid (I had a three-year unpaid internship because it was the best job opportunity around), it's been between $8 and $25 an hour. The $8/hr was for other jobs in which I was also asked to do work that included software development. The $25/hr was way outside standard deviation; from reading the want ads and talking to other CS students, intern programmers usually make in the $14-$18 range. A real, non-intern job in IT paid me $16-$17/hr.
Excessively specific adjective: The average human has no particular regard for the life of the Other. An open-eyed view of both history and the world around you reveals that in spades. Calling out what we usually call the civilized world for not caring about the life of the Other is a major, major lamppost argument. The idea that one should care about someone else 10,000 miles away of another color and completely different culture is a striking and unusual attitude in human affairs.

(Since we ourselves are human it can be easy to blip over the historical manifestations of these facts as just part of the natural order of things ourselves. So, as one exercise if you have trouble understanding what I mean on a gut level, consider the stocks [1]. Consider what it means that in the middle of what was at the time the height of civilization and the genesis of our own in the western world, these things not only existed, but were in public places. And used. I can not truly internalize this, only observe it. And consider how often you've seen these and never thought about what they actually mean about the culture they appear in, if you never have before. For those not of western civilizational descent you can find your own examples; they are abundant in all cultures.)

Of course, actual examination and comprehension of this state of affairs won't necessarily leave you more confident about the likely outcomes.... but it may make you reconsider the validity of letting someone else beat you to the research anyhow. Your influence towards humane usage is maximized by being on the cutting edge, not just being some guy over there yelling.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stocks
Yes but - shipping schedules, raw materials, invoices and hirings will tell you a lot more about that than high resolution sat photos of a building in an office park in a city center
Yes, I'm wondering if is satirical. It keeps on approaching serious points only to jump into a strangely particular and extreme aspect of them.
> "So, though now I have started working again in cognition (but in isolation), I can’t avoid seeing the problem coming."

Quoted from just above the heading: "What can be done?"

It appears that he continues to work on the simulation of human cognition.
The author's attitude that very few Americans are "intelligent, mature," and "[respect] life deeply" impeach his opinions on both logic and geopolitical topics as far as I'm concerned:

> It is typically Americans who display this attitude regarding hi-tech weapons. (If you are an American and are reading this, what I wrote doesn’t imply that you necessarily display this attitude; note the word “typically”, please.) The American culture has an eerily childish approach toward weapons, and also some outlandish (but also child-like) disregard for human life. (Once again, you might be an intelligent, mature American, respecting life deeply; it is your average compatriot I am talking about.)
If you're willing to impress a tortured reading onto his innocuous (and correct!) comment just so that you can make a statement about society's views, there's something wrong with you as a human.
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Isaac Asimov wrote a pretty good story about this. The plot is described on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lets_Get_Together_(short_story)

That gives away the ending, so if you like Asimov and might want to read the story, beware.
The whole posting appears to lie somewhere between an immature rant and a publicity stunt. A suitcase would both elicit less suspicion and always (?) be easier/cheaper to design/develop/purchase/deploy than a humanoid robot.

A hundred years from now, it will probably be trivial to set up X-ray scanners (or whatever they will be using) to secure most urban areas from entering by humanoid robots; much more difficult to do so with suitcases, cars, and trucks which people have to bring with them for business, otherwise urban centers would not exist in the first place.
I'm sure j_s's comment was meant as tongue-in-cheek and not as an actual criticism. I have every confidence that eastdakota's response (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4066982) indicating that it was just a coincidence is true.
Atomic dielectric resonance scanning obsoletes nukes anyway. It also obsoletes most concepts of privacy and most existing biological, chemical and geological analysis technologies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_dielectric_resonance

http://adrokgroup.com/
But no one would ever literally contemplate the single fact of their personal luck long enough to degrade their professional potential. It is realistic only that one might spend a few days a year or minutes a day at it. And occasional periods of self-awareness or mediation are almost certainly helpful in achieving life's goals. Instead, I take as Lewis's message that the successful should be and behave humbly. We should help those who live in less comfort or happiness.
They’re in the remote possibility of building intelligent machines that act, and even appear, as humans. If this is achieved, eventually intelligent weapons of mass destruction will be built, without doubt.

We already have those. There are plenty of people willing to blow themselves up and take a bunch of others with them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_belt

As a non-American from a constitutionally neutral country, I think this is the equivalent of having people traveling in front of trains with red flags. There are any number of ways to disguise a devastating weapon or deliver it undisguised, and evil is not a mere by-product of technical incapacity.
In production Java has a lot of upside. Compared to ruby or python it is screaming fast. Twitter has moved large portions of their app to java from rails because of this.

The reason why interpreted languages are hot with startups and why twitter was originally built on rails is the speed you get in development. Also production speed differences are being offset by cheaper faster hardware.

If you hit twitter or facebook scale issues and need more of a speed bump than you can get by throwing more boxes at the problem. Congratulations you've won and if you built on ruby you can go from mri to jruby and get all the java production speed without giving up the ruby development speed.
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In which case someone can crack the games we've got on our hard-drives, which is a situation we're already in.
I'm leaning towards the theory that Microsoft will release a "free for existing customers" mobile version of Office. I'd thought the primary motivation would be to deal with their cannibalization concerns, but it would also avoid issues like Apple's slice.
I think Mathematica is designed more for engineering/non programming folks. You would think this shouldn't affect people with programming backgrounds, but I also have felt Mathematica seems much harder to learn than some other languages.
I think the most credible concern this post mentions is the general disregard in the United States (especially among those in charge of the military) for the long term implications of the indiscriminate use of A.I.-based warfare. Drones seem great for the U.S. now: they make it easier to kill enemies and don't directly endanger American lives. But in a decade or two when "enemy" nations start to develop them too, things get a whole lot more complicated.

Nonetheless, I think the general stance of the article is severely flawed. We cannot halt research in computer cognition because it has the potential to be weaponized (and dangerously so). As the author himself mentions, it would be akin to halting the development of the knife because people can use it to stab each other, or the development of the Internet because it makes it easier for criminals to communicate and organize.

Avoiding a potential advance in technology by doing things like cutting funding to it, and hoping it will go away as a result, is never the solution to potentially dangerous development. One cannot stop the inexorable march of progress by "making a statement." The approach with greater value is to call out the dangers that the potential advance poses (as the post has done), and then work to develop an ethical framework for which the new technology can more safely exist.

The Singularity Institute has raised awareness of this broader issue in the past, as have several others, and is promoting the creation of "Friendly A.I." [1] to help address the problem.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_AI

See also this recent article: http://www.economist.com/node/21556234
Retrieving satelites never really held water.
Your own payloads would have to be very very valuable to be worth the cost and risk of manned launch and rendezvous and the shuttle couldn't land with something the mass of HST or a KH spy sat

Snatching an enemy's property is even more risky - as soon as the opposition has the capability you would fit your special toys with an anti-handling device. I don't work on the 'dark side' but I'm betting that anything special has a self destruct anyway just in case a launch goes wrong and it is retrieved.

You could even launch a whole constellation consisting of just a proximity fuse, a few kg of C4 and some ball bearings and wait for the other side to go fishing in their $billion space plane.
Humans don't carry nukes because fissile material is _heavy_. Add onto that the shielding to make sure the person can even carry it without becoming gravely ill very shortly into their delivery and the fact a suitcase nuke or dirty bomb has never been personally delivered is not very surprising.

The ridiculous part is that making an android carry this payload doesn't change the nature of the payload. Heavy, fissile material will still give off signatures that will trip all manner of alarms.
A visual environment for a text-based language can get you a long way. Intellisense makes learning a lot of things about a new language without any external documentation very practical.
How'd that work out for the US with Iraq?

http://articles.cnn.com/2004-04-03/us/powell.iraq_1_official...
If you had some sort of theoretical wide-scale, long-term coverage, I wonder if you could actually track the supply shipments from the source?

Hmmm.
Already on the front page with more than 100 comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4065233

What's with the funny (noncanonical) URL in both submissions?
Patents don't troll. People do. For example, people who run companies, like the shell companies IV incorporates.

It's not the patent that reveals trolling. Rather, what indicates trolling are the actions of the person running the company that controls the patent.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your question.
You are very right to question the interpretation of the subhuman argument. If someone has not been shot at or genuinely afraid for the life at the hands of another human being, it is very idealistic to say that the conversion of humans to subhumans by combatants is petty. As someone who has been shot at and shot back, the reduction of an unquestionably hostile enemy to subhuman is very normal if not necessary for most members of a military, on both sides of a conflict. People that judge the hatred of religiously motivated enemies are both naive and living in walled gardens.

The fact that the OP can morally object to participating in the research is the perfect definition of ideology inside a protected environment. If he had ever needed a gun, for example, to save his life, he would not question the morality of the creator, until he was once again safe from those that threatened him. I say until because people that question the need for violence have never experienced true hatred of violence. IMEO.
Originally the desktop font was going to be part of a "commercial version"... the developer appears to have changed their mind?