skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is anyone else worried about the long term stability of Braintree under such an aggressive board environment? I was always concerned about conflicts of interest with PayPal acquiring Braintree - two competing and incompatible ways to pay with a credit card. As much as I admire Braintree engineering, and I would normally trust a board to believe in the Braintree brand of reliability, it does no good if a single unpredictable actor, namely Icahn, could strongarm the parent company into underfunding or cannibalizing Braintree. Am I just being paranoid?
> Since when our universe is governed by capitalist economy

@temporal our universe is governed by physical reality. AI can't start converting people into paper clips without power, and resources. The AI won't be able to just go and start taking over the world building power plants, and necessary manufacturing without anyone noticing.

Even AI has limits.
Thanks! I loved Fast Food Nation, and wasn't aware he wrote a new book. This is right up my alley!
There is something seriously wrong with the paperclip.
> I was pretty entertained by the second comment

He posted the exact same comment in the 6+ companion review, disappointing.
Bootstrap 3 Tips and Tricks You Still Might Not Know
huh.. you're right. I assumed that anything the military bought these days came with a 1/4 million dollar price tag, but the Mark 84 bomb is only about twice the price per lb of the pumpkin bombs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_84_bomb
Replace the gun/gun effects with sci-fi laser equivalents and I think it fixes most of these issues. Other issues notwithstanding.

Doesn't seem irresponsible at all to me. The creators are just trying to run with something new and ambitious.
I'm not sure the interval from test to drop is all that meaningful. If you can build one, you can build two.

Also note that the design tested at Trinity was not the design used on Hiroshima. The Little Boy design used on Hiroshima was a gun-type design that was so obvious it would work that it wasn't felt that any testing was required. The Fat Man design used on Nagasaki was vastly more complex (but much more efficient and scalable) that it was felt best to validate it before using it in war.

I occasionally wonder about the atomic bombings and the timing of everything. If the project had been delayed by a year or so, the war would have ended without them. But the development would continue, and the Cold War would no doubt kick off something like it did in reality. But without two examples of the horrors of nuclear war, would the superpowers have been as restrained as they were in reality? Rather than the first (and so far, only) use of nuclear weapons in war being two primitive bombs, it could have been hundreds or thousands, in a war run by people thinking that they were just doing a scaled up version of the city bombing of WWII. It seems like the timing ended up being extremely lucky.
Smart and extremely bold move. Interested to see what happens with it. Expensify is a fantastic service.
>And what on earth does it mean, to contribute to an economy wherein only 'non-ordinary' folks benefit?

I have no idea where that came from or what it means, so I can't respond to it.

I made a point of saying that I respect the importance of ordinary workers. I've spent most my life in ordinary jobs, your assumptions about me aside.

However, the fact remains that individually their contribution to the economy is much, much less than the individual contribution of someone who founds and directs the construction and growth of a large company.
I'm sure he feels better getting it all off his chest and it's good to have a hobby.

And if you can't have a hobby then being irrationally angry on the internet will do instead.
Sorry, I mean generically enabling GPGPU stuff, of course they don't want high performance apps that don't have to go through the store (WebGL / WebCL)
Apple tries really hard to give you bragging rights through their processor!?

are you posting this from bizarro world? apple is the one tech company that does not advertise tech specs. they mention them in the keynotes and move on. as if you ignored thousands of articles about this very fact. amazing.
I totally agree with your assessment of Icahn. Andreesen's no saint however, he supports government spying and trampling of civil rights for his personal gain.
Weekdone: You're probably wasting 3.8 hours a week on unproductive meetings
Jeff Koons was making Shapies a long time ago (WARNING NSFW) http://www.lostateminor.com/2013/10/28/kama-sutra-glass-scul...
...okay. Could you provide examples and a clear argument? I guarantee you'll convince more people of your viewpoint.
I love Tcl. It is the quirkiness (meaning non-Algol) of it that appeals to me. The community around it is great. The TCT puts a lot of thought into what goes in as well. I am on the dev list to just keep an eye on what goes on. :)
Darma: Sit smart for a healthy body and mind
What, you're only allowed to learn from failure in Silicon Valley?
It's amusing how much space is devoted to the location of buttons and ports. I don't recall ever thinking, "I want a phone with the power button on the right side and the charge port on the bottom. Those are my primary requirements."

Phone hardware just isn't interesting, anymore. We've reached the point that personal computers reached a couple decades ago: They're all pretty good and not much different from the model released two years ago (though they are faster and have more storage and RAM).
An API is a Competitive Advantage
Show HN: Screenliner – print and reuse lines in the terminal
To anyone that wants to read this book (and you should), be prepared to frequently hold one hand under your jaw - to prevent it from hitting the floor when it falls.

And if cold-war nuclear lore is your thing, check out the photo gallery at http://atomic-annhilation.blogspot.com
I don't think anyone can debate that.. But it still does not explain why such an advanced being would continue producing paper clips when it's a. waste of it's time, b. waste of available resources.
Yes the paper clip ai could decide that continuous production of paper clips does not help with it's own goals and decide that the paper clips will not be needed if there are no people on this planet and simply kill us all. But if it continues to work on the paper clips and decides that they are still needed even after people are gone - how is that super intelligent?
I see comments like yours fairly frequently, and it really is bizarro world. It's buying into an obviously untrue narrative that hasn't been true...well..ever.

Apple makes a really big deal about their cores and GPU, as they have every right to (they're pretty great). Quite aside from their keynotes that focus extensively on this, on the product page you learn, right near the top, about the A8 64-bit processor and M8 coprocessor, as if these facts have any relevance to an end user. They're bragging points. Apple talks about their 64-bit advantage ad nauseam.

They absolutely brag about their chip. They boast specs (as they boast "retina" displays and thinness and grams and materials).
What would you call it? I like that word, it describe perfectly well the situation. You got a bunch of things, interconnected through the internet. Home automation/Domotics could be a good term but it's not broad enough, a smart watch wouldn't be included in it but it certainly can be part of the internet of things.
Iceland’s Volcanic Pollution Dwarfs All of Europe’s Human Emissions
Ok sure. Let's try tackling immediate issues that have huge implications on our survival like climate change, before we make plans to send thousands of people to a place more inhospitable than Antarctica.

Colonization is a pipe-dream in our immediate future.
I fully agree. This is a really good story giving us a honest insight into the perspective of a typical user these days. Things should just work. Similar as you also expect from you car. It needs _some_ attention, but the guy at the dealer will care for you for the nifty details.

I feel, that the "PC" world has utterly failed to care for it's user and that the mobile world does here a somehow better job though it comes with many (proprietary) restrictions.

But then the NSA came and these days trusting in other seems no longer to be a good advice at all.
I think this is a good long-term goal, but one thing that's missing from this analysis is the urgency of the thing. Right now, we've never even put one person on Mars, and keeping any significant Martian population alive would be a considerable expense. The cost in human labor and materials would certainly have to be diverted from other enterprises, as is the case with all economic actions.

Given that we are on an exponential growth curve both in terms of technology and wealth, it seems likely to me that by the natural course of things 100 years from now maintaining an extraplanetary base on Mars would be much cheaper and easier, and would disrupt our growth rates much less, if at all. It may be that by acting now, it would take us 200 years to create a self-sustaining population on Mars, whereas if we wait 100 years, we'll be able to get something up and running in just an additional 50 years, thus better insulating us from disaster (consider that until the Mars colony is completely self-sufficient, it will likely be wiped out by any disaster on Earth, even disasters that aren't a real threat to our species, as long as we don't have enough surplus wealth to sustain an expensive Mars colony).
Now chart out the number of planes used in the attack and the potential rate of attacks once the production pipeline really got going. That's what made it remarkable. A thousand B-29s fly over your city and leave it a smoking ruin is Tuesday, but two B-29s fly over and do the same and that's something new and scary.

Contrary to your statement that the attack was considered unremarkable, reports of the attack were initially disbelieved by the Japanese government because they knew of nothing that had occurred that could have caused such damage: "It was generally felt at Headquarters that nothing serious had taken place, that it was all a terrible rumor starting from a few sparks of truth."

From http://www.abomb1.org/hiroshim/hiro_med.html#SUMMARY

The ultimate effect of the atomic bombings on the surrender compared to the Soviet intervention is highly debatable, of course, but it wasn't irrelevant just because it wasn't the most devastating attack of the war.
Distribution and management of resources, it's still a problem we have here on Earth.
Why do we keep running into this problem over and over again? Why do we need one package manager per programming language? Why is software distribution so damn hard?
So what's the point of root?
Can Narendra Modi bring the solar power revolution to India?
> If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people?

The naively obvious answer is "smart", but given that what people have evolved to find attractive in general (before distortions from makeup, etc., designed to fool natural attraction) is somewhat tied to health and physical fitness,
and ability to contribute in a survival situation is very much affected by that as well as smarts, then if those are the only two measures available, there's reason to at least seek some balance between then rather than purely favoring smarts.
What people don't understand is that when BFL mined with the hardware they sold, they effectively made the difficulty of the block chain rise stupidly fast, thus lowering the value of the system. Any advantage customers (like me) would have had was thrown out the door.

It is essentially the equivalent of a car dealer selling you a car claiming it is new when in fact they drove it 150,000 miles.

I was told by a BFL employee that my order would have been shipped before the end of july 2013... I didn't get my units till 11/4/2013

During that time I watched what could have been my returns fly out the door.

To read the one skype chat log makes me sick
The iPhone 6 Plus Mini-Review: Apple's First Phablet
Steve Wozniak on starting companies, solving problems, finding happiness
The AI is modelled as an agent with goals. If you want to argue that "intelligence" means "has a terminal goal exactly matching the values of humanity," then I suppose a paper-clip maximizer is not intelligent, but that's a non-standard definition of intelligence. The more common definitions for intelligence go something like this: The capacity of an agent to select and implement actions that bring about its goals. Here the "goals" could be anything. That is, any goal could be combined with any level of capability so long as the agent is intelligent enough to comprehend its goal.

>If you have to specify the goals very carefully then the AI it's not super intelligent by definition.

When you're designing the agent, you have to select something like a goal, whether it's a fitness function or the maximization of a reward signal. Evolution certainly selected our goals. Love, self-expression, sex, fun, intellectual stimulation, the beauty of social interaction – these all reflect features of our ancestral environment. It’s a little naive to think there is a One True Morality that all agents stumble upon. It’s even sillier to think it happens to reflect our values

The intelligent part of the paperclip maximizer selects actions and weights them in the context of its utility function, to maximize paperclips. Any thought of changing its goals would be judged of negative utility, as that would lead to less paperclips.
It's immoral to state one's opinion? If he truly believes that the bombing was the best outcome, how was that immoral?

Note that even with the bombing and the Soviet intervention, there was a military coup aimed at preventing the surrender that very nearly succeeded. The contingent of the Japanese government that felt it was better to be obliterated than to surrender was large and powerful.

One could certainly argue that they would be overcome as the realities of the situation set in, but one could also argue that they wouldn't.

It is, as you say, debatable. Which makes it odd that you just dismiss the other side so readily.
We landed on the moon with computers no more powerful than a pocket calculator.
It's definitely ambitious and the tech is to be applauded. Just think it's lazy and dangerous to have adults in public spaces running around pretending shooting one another with gun-like devices and sounds.
I think the goal requires many technologies that aren't mass produced at the moment but which such technologies would be highly valuable and required to reaching a sustainable environment here on Earth.
Courtesy of @symetricasaurus elsehwere in this thread: https://archive.today/94EKG
Have a look at Scalyr: https://www.scalyr.com

The setup is straightforward [0], and you'll find that the plans are very competitive.

[0] https://www.scalyr.com/help/install-agent

(Full disclosure: I work with them.)
What protective clothing would be helpful here?
Statistician Creates Mathematical Model to Predict the Future of Game of Thrones
Nice and reasonable explanation, thanks!
I've had the iPhone 6 since Sept 19. In the 10 days since then, I've shattered the screen, when it slipped out of my pocket as I got out of a chair, and bent the phone just yesterday, after putting it in my back pocket and sitting down on it (and then immediately getting up when I realized what I did). Let me tell you that the bending issue is very real. My phone isn't bent like those consumer reports videos, but it is definitely warped.

I realize that both incidents are my fault, but this phone is by far the most fragile iphone I've ever owned, out of 4. In the 10 days that I've owned it, I haven't changed any of my behavior and it already has been damaged twice. I'm pretty disappointed with the poor durability of the phone and am considering replacing it with my reliable iphone5, and waiting for the 6S which hopefully fixes these durability issues.
Updated Unicode Security Specifications and Guidelines
WEDG Personal Cloud hits $115,000 goal in under one week
Idiomatic Generics in Go
I'm not sure if I agree on the superpowers being as restrained as they were. The US and the USSR had over 70,000 nuclear warheads in the 80's... If they showed any restraint, it was more in not using them.
"She's going to a play."

Doesn't check out, sorry.
Unfortunately, just making an effort is insufficient for 100% success in this area for many people.
General Catalyst Dedicates $10M for Startups Built on Stripe Payment Tech
Paintball is not banned because of physical danger. It's banned because it simulates killing. So the comparison fits.
FYI: I'm not a native English speaker. I just love languages.
“Why Wall Street Always Blows It:” a History of Bubbles
>>> They absolutely brag about their chip. They boast specs (as they boast "retina" displays and thinness and grams and materials).

Completely agree.

As far back as I can remember (Apple iMac G3) they've been touting their processors and architecture as being superior to other manufacturers, and one of the key reasons you should be using their hardware. So your comments are right on point, and something that's easily lost when most people only see is their advanced design chops.
Ha, Funny Matching Mobile Ad Colors to Country's GDP Improves ROI
> ... If the algorithm was so intelligent as to know how to go from manufacturing paper clips out of supplied resources to deciding how to get more of the necessary resources by killing humans, it could probably figure out that this is pointless.

This is an interesting point.

I'm not convinced that it could decide or figure out that the operation is pointless (for reasons I'll explain below), and I feel like it is perhaps taking the paperclip example to an unnatural extreme.

Really, the crux of the matter is that any intelligence agent at human level would have the intelligence and problem solving skills we do without the moral and social constraints that we do. Any problem it decides to solve or any task it's given to complete will be performed with the same ruthless efficiency you'd expect a machine to have. This is why it might not be able to figure out that the operation is 'pointless' or 'wrong'. If you give it an objective but don't provide first order or axiomatic values for human life or the non-substitutability of people, then you'll get behaviors which you would consider evil.

Consider the following:

"Person arm stuck in assembly line. Halt assembly line for 1hr, lower-bound for total cost: $1,200,000. Continue assembly, upper bound for injury settlement cost: $1,000,000. Decision: continue assembly."

There's no implicit consideration of human worth that people have because human morality is relative. In general, we have a similar set of base parameters instilled by evolution (cute things and things like us are good -- don't hurt or kill them), but we can't prove from any mathematical axioms that these are 'right'.

This is why people get scared -- if you program a computer to maximize the profits of a company and to do so at any cost, a human-level AI will spend an eternity doing just that, even if it means the complete subjugation of humanity. (Since we can't eliminate humanity otherwise currency ceases to exist and economic collapse will hurt the bottom line.)

I would wager (but can't prove) that a study of abused people, child soldiers, and sociopaths would yield interesting parallel psychological profiles. These are people (human level) with a set of axioms which are distorted by artificial means. There's still the built-in problem of the human component adding "Don't hurt the cute things," in most cases but nonetheless.
The opposing viewpoint is that since we're decelerating our technological progress and achieving new wealth by pursuing more and more trivial enterprises (come on, it's a messaging app!), a new kind of space race that inspires generations to come might exponentially accelerate our progress, just like the last space race did!
California Lemon Lawyers
The California lemon attorney has created recourse for buyers to get appropriate compensation (refund or replacement) if their vehicles occurred to have permanent and dangerous problems.
Your lawyer should have the experience and the legal knowledge to help you learn the California Lemon Law and its details to know what to resort in particularly your case.
It often leads to the same conclusions.

If people have free will, then we punish those who harm others.

If people are finite state automatons, then we punish those who harm others, because that's how you change inputs into the finite state automatons.
Glad to hear about respecting 'ordinary' workers. Still, I suspect there's a difference between respect and understanding the importance of these workers.

If the pay of 'ordinary' jobs is to be set to some low minimum level, then the 'job making' or 'economy building' of the non-ordinary people will have no benefit for most folks. Its fine to brag about building wealth; but if its the highly-educated building wealth for themselves then who cares? But them of course.

The economy is not the plaything of those that have figured out the system. Its not there to make them wealthy, though I have no problem when that happens. As long as we remember the whole system is supposed to be for everybody.

There is a long chain of responsibility in an organization to allow anyone to function effectively at their job. Repeating what I wrote above, take away 'ordinary' tasks and the company grinds to a halt exactly as dead as if the CEO were removed. Maybe not; a company can go on for a year or so without a CEO on momentum; it stops dead if payroll stops processing, or heck if the lock on the front door breaks and nobody can get into the building.
Further, the buttons are designed poorly. I use a pinching motion to click the power button. My thumb and index finger grip the phone and I put pressure on my thumb to click the power button. Unfortunately, that means the volume button also gets pressed with my index finger. The phone won't lock when both those buttons are pressed at the same time.

It's frustrating. I have to grip the phone unnaturally so that I don't click both buttons at the same time.
What's to keep the government from broadcasting 2.4ghz noise and disrupting all communication on that frequency (or 5ghz in the case of some versions of wifi)? Are cell towers capable of such a thing?
This is an example of an actual "first world problem."

Other first world problems include:

* Decarbonizing energy and achieving a sustainable energy and transportation infrastructure. (Not coincidentally Elon's also doing work in that area.)

* Curing the diseases of aging and achieving significant life extension.

* Augmenting and enhancing human intelligence.

* Closing natural resource cycles to achieve a much higher rate of recycling and lower overall resource consumption.

* Discovering new positive-sum solutions to the conflict between economic liberty and economic fairness / wealth distribution. These problems are probably game theoretic in nature and will probably require thinking at that level.

* Unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity and unlocking a comprehensive and coherent understanding of ultimate physical reality.

* Achieving a true holistic comprehension of the language of genetics and inheritance that goes far beyond "a gene for X" correlation-fishing.
It's almost always one or both of these problems:

i) Not having Product/Market Fit and/or
ii) Not having a perdictable way to grow (ie grow or die).

Everything else is a subset of these imo.
You're right. I meant in the case of a code execution exploit in the openssl layer, those things would be exposed if they were all on the same host/network.