skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an illegal question because we as the society have chosen to value family interests above the employer interests and made specific laws to prohibit it.

It is a legitimate question because from a purely practical employer's point of view it IS important. As opposed to irrelevant questions such as ethnicity/religion/sexual orientation which don't affect performance, having a baby does require taking some time off, and does have an impact on performance, sleep, ability to work 100hour weeks, etc - a number of medical conditions fall into this category as well; you can't require a candidate to disclose that they have cancer and have planned chemotherapy, but if you could, then it would make sense to do so.

Knowing the answer is an advantage to the employer and disadvantage to some employees; therefore, if it wasn't legally prohibited, 100% of HR handbooks would actually mandate to always ask such questions - as far as I know, before those laws were implemented, it was the recommended practice to do so. And since the particular scenario of the original post isn't an employment scenario and it's not prohibited - it's likely in the investor's best interests to ask that question; the only downside is a possible PR impact.
Yes, that is the likely solution. The ocean currently absorbs a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and mitigating climate change. It is a tall order though given how much carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere every single day.
a bit offtopic: I suppose cloudflare's "always online" mode wont work unless the origin server sends a cache headers that lasts for long ?
Amazon Gift Card Codes
I find it a rather convincing idea that human motivations are embodied in a sense that would take a lot of effort and no discernible purpose to replicate in an artificial system.

I think more interesting is what Hawkins dismisses as "short term implications": who will control the intelligence enhancing software that we will see within our lifetimes and for what purpose?

One example: what's up with these marketing+tech giants and what is their end-game? How accurately will we be able model desires/fears/motivations and how well can those with access to those models guide a person's beliefs and desires?
Try walking from the train station to the nearby Safeway. You'll be lucky if you even make it past the Central Expy.

https://goo.gl/maps/NoZOa
so, Mr. Hawking hasseen 'The Animetrix,' I gather?
The AIBox link contains a lot of buildup but ultimately delivers nothing. All we get is two people saying after a while "I let it out", questions as to the details of what happened are just not answered. I'm not denying it could be a fun game to play, but the article makes it way too painful and timeconsuming to find out what you're reading is in fact just the description of a game, and not an example for a strategy that could be used to let the AI out.

That being said, yes, what's the point of having an AGI if you're not letting it "out"? It will probably escape anyway, so containment is not a solution.

By the way, there is a lot of precedent in human history about the effectiveness of containing "dangerous" ideas by imprisoning the people who developed them. It generally doesn't work out.

If you're developing AGI, you've pretty much already resigned to the idea that the world will change. The destruction of the human race is only one extreme outcome. Especially if the takeoff isn't very hard, there are a lot of scenarios where a net-beneficial AI could be developed. And all the engineering experience we have does indeed point to a very soft takeoff.

Ultimately, I think the goal is NOT to generate a slave race with super powers. Yet that's what a lot of people are talking about. It's not only morally wrong but also self-evidently stupid. A lot of influential futurists are fans of that idea though, including Kurzweil.

Useful AGI scenarios range from mutually beneficial coexistence to outright merging with the AGIs, and I think that's a goal well worth pursuing. Another strategy would be to keep augmenting ourselves and to continue on a transhumanization path until we are the AGI. You could indeed make an argument that's what's already happening.
While i really like your point about "lack of motivation", here's how i think an "evil AI" scenario might play out:

You design a super system that has access to a shit ton of data and it can interface with pretty much every device on the planet. Let's suppose you gave said AI the task of maximizing your portfolio's profit. Based on the boat loads of data it has, it figures out that stocks of companies plummet when a key figure in the company dies. It identifies the competitors of the companies in your portfolio. It identifies the key players in those companies. It concludes that if these people were dead, their companies would crash and your profit would increase. It uses knowledge of how humans die, and use that combined with devices it can interface with, and eliminates the competition.

Yes, yes, seems too far fetched (i feel weird talking about this too). But see, it's possible. of course no one thought of teaching a financial software that killing people is bad. No one foresaw that it would figure out that this was a way to maximize profit. No one saw that the interfaces we provided it to study consumer behaviour and correlate with stocks, can be used to actually influence said systems to take human life.

Is this a computer turning evil? No. Is it connected to some sort of motivation for self-preservation or "eradicate man kind" or some human emotion of jealousy? No. It was just a logical result from given data and task, on which the computer was able to act.
On my side, I am surprised that so many AI researchers are unable to take the long-term view in this discussion. It's presumably because AI in the laboratory is still relatively primitive.

No one is talking about magic. The human brain is not magic, neither is that of chimpanzees, rats, dolphins or gorillas. Intelligence is a purely physical phenomenon, which means it can be emulated by computers. Natural brains are also a product of evolution, which means (1) the development happens very slowly, (2) development is directed only towards evolutionary success and (3) there is no flexibility in how the thinking organs are constructed. Computer intelligence does not in principle have these limitations. It would be terribly anthropocentric to believe that humans are the most sophisticated intelligent entity that can exist in the physical world - after all, we are as far as we know the first such entity to emerge, so from our perspective the evolution of intelligence has now stopped.

That's the feasability argument. The risk argument is that the consequences of an independent, runaway intelligent entity significantly more capable than humans would have such devastating consequences for humanity's future that even a small risk merits a significant effort to map out the territory. Respected scientists have said "it is impossible" to hundreds of things that proved to be quite simple, so this is not an argument. Even if you don't buy the previous part of my reasoning, there is still risk here. In principle, there are any number of things that could preclude advanced AI in the near future even if the above reasoning is correct (too difficult, requires too much computing power, uses different computational techniques), but seeing as we don't know the unknowns here, taking the cautious route is the correct thing to do. This has been a scientific principle for decades, no reason to drop now.

Do AI researchers have any arguments opposing this that don't amount to "the AI we have created up until now is not very good"?
It's not enough to be smart reason 2: Intelligence is not the only quality they're selecting for.
According to caniuse, the global support for variables is 0.01% right now. http://caniuse.com/#search=variables

I think it will take some time until there is enough browser support to use variables on a productive site. but maybe browsers will implement this faster... there's hope
To start with, talk to people who're the target audience for this idea or the underlying problem behind it. Try to gauge if they face the same/similar problem(s) that your idea is going to address.

Ideally, having some sort of early financial commitment (e.g. crowd-funding, pre-orders etc.) from interested people, is a good indication that your idea solves a problem real & big enough that people will pay for it, which is the most essential thing for startup success.
It used to be possible to enable CSS variables support via chrome://flags' #enable-experimental-web-platform-features in previous Chrome builds. Support has since gone again. Hoping for a reappearance soon.

CSS Variables in combination with an additional build step[1] is actually quite usable right now.

[1] https://github.com/segmentio/myth

Edit: The introduction of the new notation as mentioned by heycam, explains Chrome's behavior a bit.
Please note that the final syntax for CSS Variables changed recently, so in Firefox 31 and later, where the feature is enabled by default, you declare variables like this:

:root { --spacing: 16px; }

and reference them like this:

body { padding: var(--spacing); }
I've decided mmap() is my favorite system call
> The primary reason I won't work for Google is because I'm nowhere near smart enough

I think plenty of people tend to vastly overestimate Google's (or Facebook's, ...) hiring bar. I know quite a few people who would be happy to work there and (I believe) can easily beat the hiring process, but they self-eliminate themselves from the game, so I definitely recommend to folks not to make a prejudice about whether they can get into, because they generally don't have many data points, and go interview anyway. Let them figure out whether you are smart enough or not; don't self-eliminate. Never let the widespread propaganda lead you to believe that everyone hired by a successful company in the valley is a genius. They collectively hire many thousands of people; it's hard to believe they are all geniuses.
Bekasi Indonesia, Remote | Part Time 20-25 hours/week

Stack : Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Knockout JS, Cucumber, Rspec, Git, MongoDb, Couchdb etc

Resume : https://www.odesk.com/o/profiles/users/_~01cef6eee56213d4b5/

Contact : aditya at prawirasoft dot com

My name is Aditya, a Ruby on Rails ninja with +9600 hours worked through odesk, i've been working 100% remotely using RoR since 2008 with clients from various countries such as USA, UK, Australia, South Korea, Denmark etc

Previous work involving

- REST API for instagram-like app, so it can be consumed by iOS & Android app

- Project Management app (one page), using RoR & Knockout JS

- Airplane Ticket Searching

- Quickbooks integration for Online Store

- Credit Analysis Web App (actually, i'm currently working on this)

I usually handle 2 projects from different clients at the same time, but one of the project has been finished, so i need another project to fill my time. The other project that i’m still working right now come from a company in Salt Lake City, Utah, i work for this company part-time 20-25 hours/week
Out of curiosity, do you use speech to text to compose your HN posts? I'm wondering how "patent" became "pattern" in your first sentence.
thanks for the hint. i will update my demo asap
Google Buys Rangespan To Add Big Data Inventory Management To Google Shopping
Just want to note that, ethics are not just simply things people have been doing for years, but in fact human progress/efficiency measures built into social behavior.

Such a ignorance towards ethics is like debt: initially you grow, keep doing it, and soon enough you take a nosedive.
Re-read the pointer tutorial and yes I've clearly mis-remembered that so apologies! You're probably right that there's just a lot of discussion about them at the moment.

Anyway I'm very excited about Rust, really looking forward to 1.0.
There's also a 4GB RAM version of the C720 with a 32GB SSD.
Fill In The Gaps
Just out of curiosity, what do you folks see as the difference between looking at text with the intent to correct spelling (like this text box does) versus looking at text to put an advertisement next to it?

(If I wanted to go reductio ad absurdum, what about looking at text to change <a href="...">foo</a> into a link?)

To be clear: I'm honestly curious, not trying to defend or advocate for one interpretation over another.
Chrome / Blink has pulled the implementation for now because of changes to the spec / poor implementation. It'll come back (in time).

Ref to feature being removed: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

Right now, Firefox 29, Aurora and Nightly are the only browsers that have CSS Variables shipped. (Although, there is still no CSSOM implementation present — that'll come later.)
Why washing machines are no longer built to last
It's not so hard to get in touch with Google recruiters. You just need to get a not so bad score at their Codejam contest.

As a side note, about a year ago, a girl from Google called me from London for a job opportunity (in French, my mother tongue, it nicely surprised me). Anyway, I put the girl call down as I was waiting a call from my then girlfriend to meet up for our first date. We all seem to have different reasons to refuse a job opportunity from Google !
After looking at the spec, I'm wondering does this really save anything for the client, vs. doing this in a CSS preprocessor? Instead of spending the time compiling once and then having clients interpret declarations, every single user who visits the site will have their browser perform the same computation, every time they visit a page that uses these. It's also another source of significant complexity to the browser.
I share a similar view that this all seems too far fetched. That somehow we'll make a race of super-smart machines that will take over the world. But, there are certain scenarios that are actually rather plausible if we give too much control to machines. here's a comment i made exploring one such scenario:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7690242
You know what the scary part is? Likely the first thing an AI would do is plaster the internet with rationale yet pacifying comments like this ;)

As a reader, does it not scare you that you might be so powerless to know the difference and make sensible decisions in such a climate? The world disarmed by page after page of rationale reddit and HN comments?

The power in that is what I find alarming.

EDIT: If this were buried off the front-page, would you ever know the difference? ;)

Sincerely,

The Benevolent AI
As someone with a major in Artificial Intelligence, and who seriously just got back from watching Transcendence...

The movie was well-researched, and surely enjoyable for anyone contemplative. But they had to be farfetched to push the story along. There is likely nothing that occurred in the movie that would reflect any potential real-life issue.

I can't believe I'm disputing Hawking, someone who has accomplished more in a year than I will in my life, with what amounts to an appeal to authority. But I have to say this: his concerns are akin to me being worried about the large hadron collider destroying the universe.
No, economists have been arguing and studying for over 200 years, probably more. Simply saying they've been "studying it" for 200 years doesn't make your view or your choice of economists correct.

Let's have a look at the parent poster's points that you're curious about:

1. "Governments are a form of organized violence" This is correct in quite a few different interpretations, even according to some politicians like Obama. Not only that, but have you looked at the statistics regarding how many individuals have been killed by government action? Wars? Execution? Atomic Bombs? Some people, including me, will go so far as to define the government/state as an "organization with a monopoly on force/violence within a geographic area".

2. "[..]capital class use to protect their access to ecological and infrastructural resources" Not quite sure about this one, really. But the government/state does indeed limit usage/access to resources in the environment, for one reason or another. But it also chooses to give/deny access to certain infrastructure. Ever heard of a poor person going to a public school in a rich neighborhood? Bet you've heard about the perks/protection that civil servants, politicians and union members get from the government.

3. "[..]thereby denying those resources to the poor." Government does indeed give quite a few things to the poor. It also incentivizes them not to use the resources available to them in the natural environment. Perhaps that's what the parent poster was talking about. It's no longer feasible for a poor guy to strike it rich by going out into the wilderness and discovering oil. Not just because the easy wells have been found already, but because the government won't grant them permits/resource rights.

Also, here is some extra reading. First some logical fallacies you seem to be using. And another link regarding the ethics of anarcho-capitalism. Also, the numbering is not linked to the above list.

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

[2]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

[3]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism#Ethics
You assume and assert so wrongly that I have not put much thought in what I said, and that I don't have empathy for the victims. I've witnessed and been subjected to harassment. These stories, and now your comment, make me viscerally sick.
CSS Variables are a misnomer. They're custom properties that obey cascade and inheritance.

CSS preprocessors can do only lexically scoped substitutions. With CSS "variables" you can have values inherited within DOM's scope.
I've built DeskPortal which is an application platform on web browsers years ago taking years as my hobby project. Initial version is pretty much complete but didn't have the time to go commercial or find user interests and pretty much kept it as is sitting these days.

http://deskportal.com/ - LP

http://demo.deskportal.org/ - Demo
Not that bad for a 260$ laptop...
Assuming strong AI arises, which I think likely, and given human nature I imagine people will build all sorts of AI's, 'evil' and 'good', though those terms are a bit subjective. Probably the likes of Kim Jong Un would love to have an army of self reproducing killer robots and Google will try to build nice ones and the US defence department will continue with drone like things. I agree with Hawking it could be a problem and hope the nice ones win out as they probably will. Fingers crossed.
I think this is the latest version, and it does show "--" syntax - it's still a work in progress though: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-variables/
Now you are being disingenuous. The snark in your original comment is clearly visible, yet you claim good faith.
"Node" is the name I used to talk about the cons cells your singly linked list is made up of.

Now 2 things.

First, the tiled denotes unique pointers. Your example was a singly linked list. Singly linked lists have 2 important characteristics: adding or removing the first element is O(1), and the tails of those lists can be shared. With unique pointers, you can't share. By design. If you want several references to a "node", you need to use shared pointers, whose allocation is manage by reference counting or garbage collection. So you have a data structure whose only advantage is O(1) insertion and removal… of the head. That's not very useful to begin with, considering the absurd amount of heap allocation you need to do. Other data structures fare better (vectors, ring buffers…).

Second, your example supposes the existence of a `cons()` function to begin with. If you really want to use unique pointers, you should write a function that accepts values, and wraps them in a pointer instead. That way, you can write `cons('A', cons('B', cons('C', empty)))`. There, no more pesky tiled: they have been factored in the definition of `cons()`. Less repeating yourself for the win.

> are you saying that for every self-referential constructor of an algebraic datatype, the correct thing to do is to write a boilerplate function that simply wraps the constructor and a call to whatever the boxing operation winds up being...?

Not quite. I'm saying the constructor itself should take care of the boxing operation. When devising a data structure, you generally know what it will be used for. It's memory allocation scheme should be a part of it. Hidden, if possible. For instance, unique pointers have value semantics. As such, they're an implementation detail. Leave them out of the interface. If it turns out you didn't need them after all, you can scrap them without breaking outside code.

Hmm, I guess that makes three…
Not only people is sounding more like idiots, people say more and more idiotic things.
Not really ironic because nobody expects that CloudFlare Always On cached copies will actually work.
During spelling correction, there is not any need for any data to leave your computer. In fact, the spelling correction on this text box is a feature of your browser, not of news.ycombinator.com.

The whole point about serving targeted ads is aggregating multiple sources of data to build an extensive "customer" profile.
Microsoft Patches Latest Internet Explorer Security Flaw – Even For XP Users
That's a very interesting hypothesis, but once you step outside into the real world I wouldn't imagine it being too difficult to spot the androids from the mortals!
Simplistically:

If Win = Continue

If Loose = Change

Basic evolutionary principle.

Then giving the tools of doing, would be required to consume the formula.

I argue that an AI with limitations would not work.
Here's a discussion of what was probably said during the AI box experiment: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment
Compete with other players on same board in multiplayer 2048
Let the man speak his point.
Gridzzly (and why is this not gridzz.ly?) is nice and all, but the Incompetech generator is in fact much better. Still, we're startup fanboys, we're not that bothered about substance if there's some nice style on offer.
Even if AI is harmless, there is still the risk of brain emulation. To me this is a greater threat, because if we don't know how a fully artificial mind would behave, we can get an idea of how an emulated human brain could. The problem is that human beings are potentially dangerous: they have volition, and they can enjoy destroying things. Basically they can be narcissistic psychopaths.

All it would take would be a human being rich enough to have his mind uploaded in a machine, and then this man will get greedy for more computing power, even if to do so he would have to take over the World and extinct humanity in its organic form.

Sounds very far-fetched, but as Hawking puts it: there is nothing in the physical laws that prevents a man-made device to perform as well or better than a human brain.
As I understand it, yes, you would still have final control.

When you click on the plugin icon in the browser toolbar, a popup box displays all the trackers Privacy Badger has found. There is a slider next to each tracker, with three states, green, yellow and red. Red means blocked.

As Privacy Badger works, it moves the slider for a tracker when it notices it following you across domains. But you can still manually drag the slider across to Red if you want.
Makyaja Bahar Geldi
This has been discredited (along with Penrose's incompleteness theorem based "AI is impossible" conjecture before it)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind#Roger_Penrose_and_...
In my opinion, Google's activities are "evil" because they intentionally profile their consumers through parsing all their personal data (email, shopping history, etc). Furthermore, Google chooses to spy on their users through a matter that allows the NSA to collect entire profiles for Google's users. Google does this mainly for the money involved.
LESS and co. can't implement this, because CSS variables are cascading.
Strong white-knighting in this commentary.