skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics.

I think this is a pretty unfair generalization, and furthers the stereotype that STEM majors are smarter/harder-working/generally better than liberal arts majors. It is not inconceivable to me that most people choose to major in something they are passionate. I think people who choose a major just because they perceive it as easy are a small minority of students.

Aside from that, I personally believe academic success is primarily due to hard work, rather than intelligence. I imagine almost all PhDs are reasonably intelligent and could in fact make it through a physics program, provided they were willing to put in the time and effort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-sensitive_language#Exam...
I understand Microsoft's concern but stuff like this will not help.
Take my neighbor for example, I'm quite sure he will still be using his old computer until it breaks, happily running Windows XP with no idea that the support or updates (that he never have installed anyway) has ended, people like him doesn't understand what it's all about and therefore doesn't care.
All I can do is to tell him that it's time for an upgrade but he will insist to keep on using it (at least I managed to install Firefox and Avast on his computer a couple of years ago).
It may be that they feel that the mission of their employees needs to be in alignment with their organizations mission which is wholly focused around a certain religious set of beliefs. They may feel like someone with a similar mission would be more likely to bring the necessary passion to the job. To quote the bible and Lincoln, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand'... Some women might find it offensive that you compare your religious (or atheistic) beliefs to being a male or a female as one involves a choice and the other doesn't. Being an Atheist will surely limit your ability to have passion for the mission of their non-profit (which also will probably pay less and require more of a personal passion for the job than just a simple desire to make a paycheck), but being female or male shouldn't have an effect on ones ability to do any given job.
> Someone has to pay that cost.

You mean like your customers who are already paying you for that?
The fact that it hasn't happened yet is good evidence that it isn't as easy as all that.

Also, evolution optimizes for survival and reproduction, not intelligence. While it may be possible to design an artificial evolutionary system that optimizes for superintelligence, I don't think doing so is trivial (or it would have been done).

Let's posit that your image of post-singularity non-friendly AIs is accurate. They are an immense and irresistible force, like a black hole. I can imagine something like that, but I have a great deal of difficulty imagining something like that that is also constrained by initial design decisions made by humans before the singularity, which is what the friendly AI people hope to achieve. To be fair I haven't read all their stuff yet and I'm sure they address this point.
Please stop the meme that surveilance and spam filtering are equivalent. Thanks.
In some industries (e.g. SEO firms doing linkbuilding) if they don't happen to have a young lady in the office they'll create the persona for one anyhow, because they get measurably better results from emails signed Jessica than emails signed Jeb. I've seen ones matching LinkedIn and Facebook accounts which would pass cursory inspection, if I hadn't recognized the stock photography model.
Nimrod solved that... The solution in a nutshell: If a statement list contains a 'return', it enforces a 'void' context for the statement list, otherwise the statement list has the type of the tailing expression e in (s; s; e).
The point is that writing and maintaining such files by hand is a tremendous waste of time.

When I last used C#, I remember Visual Studio would extract and display such public overviews directly from compiled .NET assemblies.

Even if no IDE is involved, something could just auto-generate a text file for distribution. It could even be adorned with a .h file extension for faux-retro appearance!
Factory farms are a new thing.
Google tries to NSA-proof Gmail
In C/C++/Objective-C the .h files are not use solely for declaring the public interface of a class a lot of times this is where one exposes enums, typedefs, defines which are related to the class in question. The obvious argument against this is using static class members, but I would argue that it adds unnecessary verbosity.
Sport shots are meant to help even the playing field. These are much harder than the typical house shot, but still easier than the PBA patterns.

I don't see why the USBC doesn't mandate sport shots for every sanctioned league.
The Raven's Edge with Chris Clemence Maxxxwell Carlisle The Wacko Network
> However, we are so far away from producing anything remotely close to that level of AI, that I fear their work is ungrounded. It strikes me as fun quasi-SF rather than serious engineering.

At what point would you allow research to go forth? And you know, there's a lot of work that can be done which is not 'directly coding an AI'.

> But I take believe they are seriously interested in world improvement, so my suggestion to them in their work on "benevolent goal architectures" is to study how existing goal architectures work, that is to look at existing economic and social systems where disparate individual goals are coordinated into cooperative or conflicting action, and how the results are related to human goals and human flourishing.

But why would one expect any of that to transfer to AI? What do the internal dynamics of a Board of Directors have to do with, say, the Code Red worm? What lessons can we extract from 501(c)3 nonprofits which will tell us anything about deep-learning-based architectures? Do CEO salaries really inform our understanding of Moore's Law? Or can study of Congressional lobbying seriously help us better understand progress on brain scanning and connectomes? Do Marxian dialectics truly help us improve forecasts for when feasible investments in neuromorphic chips will match human brains?

The closer I look at corporations and modern economies, the more worthless they seem for understanding the possibilities of AI, much less engineering safe or powerful ones. Modern economies are based on large assemblages of human brains, acculturated in very specific ways (remember Adam Smith's other major work: _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_), which are limited in many ways, and which are fragile and nonrobust: consider psychopathy, or consider economic's focus on 'institutions'. Why do some economies explode like South Korea, and others go nowhere at all? Even with millennia of human history and almost identical genomes and brains, outcomes are staggeringly different. (You complain about corporations; well, how 'friendly' is North Korea?)

And this is supposed to be so useful for understanding the issues that we should be focused on your favored political goals instead of directly tackling the issues?
Having some folks close to me that are trapped in the cycle of poverty this article felt quite refreshing.

I don't know if it's true but it helps explain that I don't understand the plight of poverty because I've never experienced it.

Being an engineer I can think of all the ways people near me in poverty can find a way out. I've even worked with them on some plans to do so. They haven't worked. It's frustrating.

Acknowledging that I don't understand moves me from frustration to empathy which is a much better place to be.
mDesktop & windows 7 is tolerable. no idea how this fares against alternatives. otherwise xmonad when I don't have to use windows
>All that brain-power is being wasted on silly hypotheticals, because those are fun to think about, whereas trying to fix industrial capitalism so it doesn’t wreck the human life-support system is hard, frustrating, and almost certainly doomed to failure.

This is one of my big problems with LessWrong (and I've been reading it four years): for all their claims of relevance, a startling unwillingness to question the social structure in a manner that would decrease the privileges of Bay Area techies like themselves. Politics is the mind-killer, don't you know.

The offshoot Effective Altruist movement has the same problem: throw money at the symptoms (and denigrate anyone who doesn't do the same) while noticeably never, ever questioning the system the problems are in the context of.
> Allocation of capital is a useful function; the problem is that the allocators are helping themselves to a far larger cut of the proceedings than the value they produce

Yeah, I find this (that financial actors are acting in a hostile manner) more tenable than the impression I took from your blog post, which was that the financial system itself was acting with intentionality.

> look at existing economic and social systems where disparate individual goals are coordinated into cooperative or conflicting action

I hope you can bring that perspective to the table; I've noticed that a lot of the public work is about preserving goals while modifying structure, while actually mediating between conflicting goals/values is a bit handwavey.

And yeah, I hope we're far away from human level AI, but we're talking about our uncertainty on conceptual distance to an undiscovered theoretical framework, here. It's not quite as bad as trying to guess when the Riemann Hypothesis will be resolved, but it has that quality.
Once could be ignored as sloppiness. But he wrote: "One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you're not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. [...] Whereas when you're starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with." (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html)

Or he says: "I see a couple of guys walking down the street and I think, oh, they look like they'd make good founders or bad founders, right, as the case may be. [...] The right kind of nerdy. Like, these guys in this room are not suits, but they're not schlubs either. These are fierce nerds. You have to be somewhat intimidating looking, and that's what these guys are. [...] Yeah, yeah. They're like the kind of people Julius Caesar was afraid of." (http://www.wbur.org/npr/155005546/failure-the-f-word-silicon...)

Or that hilarious cherry-picked stat YC came up with: "at least one female founder." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/04...)

If YC people can't see this, that doesn't bode well for their self-critical thinking skills. (But at least Paul Graham's fairly open about what he thinks, and looks good compared to HN posters.)
Checking if a message is marked spam or not isn't the best way to confirm a legal delivery. Say, I setup my Gmail to forward all mails to my thunderbird or outlook but when it gets there, the respective clients accidentally filter the specific message as spam, what then?

Monitoring for a "read bit" on the message is the only way to confirm proper delivery.
Friendships build on bitten tongues aren't much use anyway.
It's because the PBA's livestream offering, Xtra Frame, is utter horseshit. It's a 320x240 stream that you can't even make out who is who. The live scoring is horrendous.

I would pay $25 or $30 a month to watch my favorite players throughout the course of a tournament. But I have no way to do so.
I am running a box built with Fedora Core 4 (2007 vintage). Never patch any systems. Why would I?

If I am running a service facing the internet, it's custom built and patches would do it no good. Why would I wait for vendor to release a patch? If a service is external, I will watch out for vulnerabilities and rebuild ASAP before any patches are out. Besides, 90% of the time my custom build is not even vulnerable to a particular problem.

If I am NOT running a service, why would I care about patches for it?

Why would I wholesale patch a server anyway? If somebody breaks in and gets a local shell, all is lost anyway. If they are not in, they are dealing with externally facing services only, see above. There are specific and counted number of daemons on every machine.

This whole patch-update thing is misguided and for people that want assurances and no responsibility.
What are those better ways?
People crave sugar, nicotine, narcotics, and other things that aren't good for them, so your argument falls apart there.

You crave meat for a variety of psychological and physiological reasons, but not necessarily because you're missing something that meat provides.

My argument for not eating meat is simple - why kill something for food if I don't have to?
Fixed in post, thanks (and insert some juvenile snark about how-are-you-gonna-make-a-superintelligence-when-you-can't-even-keep-your-links-from-rotting? here).
Or perhaps if you need psychologists to marginalize your intellectual opponents, maybe your science isn't quite as good as you think it is.

Notwithstanding the fact the bulk of social psychology research, while not outright bullshit, is hardly of a piece with physics, chemistry or medicine.
Most of the time it's not the CPU that is using most of the energy. It's the mobile or wireless connection, the GPS and the screen.
I'm not convinced that it's purely an implementation issue. While maybe that's true in a theoretical sense, I don't think it holds true in practice.

There are various characteristics of programming languages that can make it much easier to implement them as interpreted languages rather than compiled languages, and vice versa.

Maybe any difficulties could be overcome given enough resources, but this usually isn't the case. I think this is why the efforts to make compilers for a language like Python have never really been that successful. And the same goes for the attempts to create interpreters for languages like C and C++.

Perhaps the most success has been with the various compilers that compile Java source or bytecode to native code. But even in that case, the end result usually isn't very good. It's usually somewhere in the undesirable middle, giving the worst of both compilation and interpretation.
Those aren't the only two possible ways Google could see non-Google email.

Was the source using a Google laptop? Was he or she using a Google network? Was the non-Google email service using SSL "several years ago" when this happened?

If the source used Google equipment and unencrypted email service, then the message is in plaintext on Google's network. No need to open Arrington's Gmail to read it.
It was eradicated through technological obsolescence.
Same story if I use Google Apps for my company?
Would agree for liquid employment markets. Some, maybe even most, don't have the depth to support corrective actions.
Charlie Rose interviews Larry Page onstage at TED2014.
Interesting, I gave up on a few google searches. But your comment seems to confirm the obscurity of such studies.
How about if it were just one hiring manager for a small branch of a large corporation?
Open source bike comparison and review
Simplifying a bit here--but essentially, what happened before is that AT&T owned a wire. Two parties wanted to talk to each other over this wire, and so AT&T only charged one party for bi-directional use of that wire.

In the past few years, AT&T has said, "we're going to limit how much a single party can transfer on that wire in a month." Now, they're saying "both parties need to pay to use the wire." Again, a bit of a simplification.

Ultimately though, nobody should care where the traffic is coming from or where it is going--be it Netflix, Steam, Amazon, or anywhere else. AT&T offered their customers use of a wire, hoped that traffic between backbone peers was equal, and then started to cry when people saturated their connections to a single source.

Your customers already paid for delivery on your network--the whole idea of double dipping is ridiculous. UPS doesn't charge amazon because they send a lot of packages--the cost is the burden of one party, and one party only.
I appreciate the directness of the question. Can't speak for others, but in my case, it's (b) - I was one of the gigglers until I read one of the rebuttals you mention. Just trying to help the meme flow.
I don't know what you're doing but I have rock solid midi timing from Windows 7 via a £5 generic MIDI/USB cable to my Korg Triton Studio. I'm using Renoise as a DAW.

XP was crappy - it hit the disk so often and hung.
This is kind of like getting the "Windows tax" refund. Neat.
Please tell me you are joking.

The is no way you could possibly keep up with every vulnerability of everything installed on your server.

> If somebody breaks in and gets a local shell, all is lost anyway.

That is not true at all. You should run your server such that someone could get a shell running as the apache user - and still be able to do very little. They could read files and the database (which is bad), but not modify any files (which would be worse).
Good point. A better argument against the interpreted approach is that interpreted languages to a larger degree tend to be rather dynamic. With a platform like iOS where release cycles are fairly lengthy(not that this is really Warranted IMO) a static language is much more sensible. It's obviously a lot better to find as many bugs as possible before shipping and I would argue that this is much easier in stricter static languages. Frontend javascript for example is fine being dynamic and interpreted because it's easy to hotfix issues
I think the whole field of biotechnology and genetics. Today many people think we should not be genetically engineering plants or animals, but in the near future we are all going to see the benefit of it.

This is most extreme in the case of engineering humans. Most people are horrified at the idea, worried about eugenics or a Gattica type future. But if you really examine what this will do, ie eliminate many forms of horrible genetic diseases or propensity to cancer, then I think you are going to see that this is something we really should do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_transformation

It might be interesting to hook up different AST representations directly into an editor, in this case iGo would never exist on disk. Really all he has done is push what would be an editor completion into a new sytnax.
Stuff like "HTTPSEverywhere" isn't entirely a legal advocacy matter, either. I don't think EFF needs to constrain itself to legal advocacy to be an effective organization. Making technical and policy recommendations to private companies and individuals (as producers and consumers) seems fine.
If you are not causing embarrassment or other harm (in Google's view) you are probably pretty safe unless you are entering or likely to enter a major business deal with Google. In those circumstances I wouldn't want to risk Google reading internal communications.

This means any startup even open to acquisition should probably avoid hosting private communications with likely buyers including Microsoft, Google and Facebook. When millions of pounds may be on the table it just isn't worth the risk that somebody in the big company decides they want an advantage in the negotiation.
It's also not that hard of a game to find, even with the destruction: AtariAge [1] rates it a 1 out of 10 ("Common") in rarity, and I know I own at least two copies.

Also, it's interesting to note that HSW (Howard Scott Washaw, who coded the whole game in 5.5 weeks) has said at least once that he doesn't believe the landfill incident actually occurred[2].

Quoth HSW: "I had many friends all over Atari, if the company was burying all these carts someone would have told me. And the moment they did, I would have immediately grabbed a photographer and hopped the next flight out and gotten some great protraits of me standing on the pile. How could I possibly not get that picture as a momento?"

I can't believe that post is over ten years old already!

[1] http://atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=157

[2] http://atariage.com/forums/topic/7337-5-million-copies-of-et...
> if a decent looking/working e-mail client with end
> to end encryption appears this year, I'll move to it
> almost immediately.

Thunderbird and GPG work with Gmail today.

> So if Google wants to keep me as a Gmail users,
> they'd better enable the DarkMail protocol [1]
> or something similar in their e-mail client.

Gmail doesn't have a desktop email client. If encryption were added to the Android clients, then the web interface would become useless and the whole point of Gmail (being a web-based email system) would be moot.

> As soon as TextSecure is fully cross-platform,
> I'm switching completely to it.

The TextSecure wiki[1][2] describes a fairly wonky encryption protocol involving two shared symmetric keys instead of using public key encryption, so I have little confidence in their system's ability to withstand analysis by state-level actors. You're better off using GPG and email.

[1] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/Protocol
[2] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/Using-Text...
Is there any reason for such a single-purposed machine to be connected to the internet?
That wasn't the only case, there was one incident where Google employees were caught sniffing users accounts [1]. Also Google have themselves said not to expect any privacy on GMail [2].

Not sure why it surprises many people that Company X has access to the data stored on their servers especially when no explicit contract has been signed stating otherwise.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/google-spy/

[2] http://phandroid.com/2013/08/13/gmail-privacy-concerns/
Seems so. By the way, it looks like some of them have found this thread.
Surely chain gangs are older than the 18th century.
Can you really not think of other natural things (ie, things that animals do) which we don't?
I think his point is not that an interpreted language is the right thing. His point is that the assumption that it must be a compiled language is the wrong thing - that we need to re-examine way more of our assumptions than we usually examine when defining the "next" language.
I do agree partially about the repetition issue, but with a language such as Objective-C you'll auto complete every definition the second time which hardly takes a second, especially with fuzzy auto completion. If time saving is the goal the naming convention for methods is a far better candidate for change
Traditional Sunday Sauce
... they should be?
> Who cares where the traffic is coming from--be it Netflix, Steam, Amazon, or anywhere else.

AT&T does. Particularly, AT&T, who has a quite lucrative business selling video content, doesn't really want video content being sold and delivered over their network unless they are getting a payment for it to compensate for the potential loss to their own video content sales from the competition, in addition to getting paid for the bandwidth.

There is a reason why this exact scenario with regard to video content and discriminating against competition was highlighted in the Open Internet Order as one of the things it was intended specifically to prevent, and that its the one specific instance of non-neutral policies that immediately became a huge deal when the Order was struck down.
yes, nuerologically true. poverty is lockage in left prefrontal: security. almost total dependency and constant paralysis, waiting for the three unavailable essentials of a self: it's all but locked out of expertise (left frontal), imagination/legacy (right prefrontal) and freedom/assertion/truth (right frontal).

it takes extreme effort to break free of, chemically; it is counter-current from that point to build pathways out, by pure will, which is largely if not totally depleted by fear