skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Along with research grants, the program will also include meetings and outreach programs aimed at bringing together academic AI researchers, industry AI developers and other key constituents to continue exploring how to maximize the societal benefits of AI; ..."

Maximizing the societal benefits of AI, at least in the context of superintelligence, is a very slippery slope.

For sure, it beats a myraid of malignant failure and perverse instantiation scenarios, where humanity becomes extinct (or worse).

However, I believe that if we do somehow manage to solve the seemingly intractable AGI control problem and create an entirely safe superintelligence that is loyal to our every whim, an entirely new ethical challenge will arise.

For example, let us assume this has been accomplished, and humanity now has a friendly superintelligence that has established itself as a global singleton (i.e. it's incredibly powerful, and nothing terrestrial can supplant it).

Humans instruct it to solve the problem of death and disease. It does so.

Humans instruct it to solve the problem of crime. It does so.

Humans instruct it to solve the problem of war. It does so.

Humans instruct it to solve the problem of poverty. It does so.

Humans instruct it to explore the universe and solve the most vexing existential questions. It does so.

In that scenario, the entire worldwide medical, law enforcement, and military professions just ceased to exist. Altruism no longer has much of a place; poverty and disease no longer exist. Overnight, death became a thing of the past. Humanity no longer ponders why it exists or how the universe works, because such questions have already been pondered by the AI to whatever possible maxima.

That example is incomplete for the sake of brevity, but it's easy to imagine such a scenario resulting in all of our problems being solved for us. Which then begs the question, what would become of our humanity when there is no longer struggle or suffering?

Post-scarcity economics, as well as literature or philosophy that concerns itself with the perils of utopia may offer some insight into this question, but I believe the topic deserves a more in-depth investigation specifically within the context of superintelligence.

For my two cents, I'm starting to believe that any superintelligence we construct that establishes itself as a global singleton should have an extremely finite set of goals, perhaps even a singular goal, where it henceforth restricts any other forms of AGI from existing.

While it may be tempting to also have this entity protect us against other forms of existential risk, or perhaps fix some of the truly awful suffering in the world, doing so would still remain a very slippery slope.
Right. It's amazing how many people don't realize English is a Germanic language and that despite the fact we absorbed a lot of Romance words from Norman French and other places, we still have a Germanic grammar. (For one thing, our adjectives go before our nouns, not after: We have a "red dog", not a "perro rojo".)
So many people conflate 'reasonable doubt' with 'any doubt'. Is this possible? Sure. Reasonable? A lot less so.
Do not worry, there will be a do-not-track option... uh oh, never mind.
I don't speak for my employer. With that out of the way -

I don't believe I was creating a straw man or negating the reality of our ecosystem change - I want to make plain: high density crops with no pests or weeds is a profound alteration from the way things are in a natural environment. It allows a high level of density (more food), but cuts hard against other things. The natural plant life is swarming with pests and "Weeds" are a human classification.

WRT your link. We're forcing evolution to occur faster. That's pretty much unarguable, yea?

I'm a software engineer, not an agronomist, so I can't speak to real practical sustainable architecture of food systems. I simply don't have the science needed to be intelligent about it. I don't feel long-term ecosystem alteration is a good thing to our system (see pictures I linked for an example of the variance - which picture is more natural?). I'd like to experiment with urban permaculture, but I don't think that could even feed my family (all 2 of us).

Food is incredibly important - I would love to have a cunning idea to reduce food waste globally, but I don't have that domain expertise at present to produce a cunning and marketable startup there.
Winchester still makes that 1882 .44-40 rifle, albeit indeed as a nostalgic collector's item. If they made it for the "everyman" market - not unreasonable as many similar guns are - the price would drop to about $600 (between scale of production and elimination of premium finishing).
Cool idea. Any screenshots or a demo instance of the web interface?
I love the idea of actually having a quiet room with the sign "library rules" on the door. In the quiet room, if you make noise -- even to have a work-related conversation, you get shushed. GTFO into the open-office area. No apology needed, no excuse accepted.
Of all your examples, the conference one is probably the only time such a feature could be useful. Every other example you've raised has a low tech alternative: just talk to people. I realize many people have a tendency to fear small talk, but it's an incredibly useful skill to have.
The OP never said "The government is going to take my children for playing in the front yard," so I'm at a loss where you got that quote. Maybe you inferred that's what he meant when he said "I'm afraid a neighbor will report me and the government will come take my kids away." That is a very real concern. When a CPS agent comes calling, any righteous indignation on your part can easily result in your children being taken into custody. If you don't bend over and take it with a smile, they'll make it 1000x worse.

EDIT: I really wish I could down-vote things.
I once got a Spanish translation back and was briefly angry that the translator had left a few strings as "TODO"...

"What?!" I asked myself. "To do? Why did they ship me an incomplete file?"

Then I looked to see what the "untranslated" strings were: "ALL" (I don't speak Spanish but have enough of a smattering of European languages that it was immediately obvious what was going on.)
Global Bitcoin Lunch day. Are you going?
If you live near Seattle, I recommend Vetco on the Eastside. It's what RadioShack should be.
No they're saying that we use to (unfairly) attribute poor social behavior to ALL cell phone users. Then we all got cellphones, found out they're neat, no longer felt "left out" or "inferior" and realized hey it's not the cellphone that make people obnoxious it's obnoxious people that make people obnoxious.
This isn't new. Microsoft had an unofficial project for a while called Script# (script sharp) that did the same thing. I think they rightly decided it was a better idea to support JavaScript directly and come up with a new language designed to target JS from the start (typescript)
I've worked at 3 companies and it's never been like this. If anything I've noticed developers are afforded more freedom, flexibility, and respect. I really have no idea what you're talking about.
Add a build number to your Assembly Version
Whether auto-face recognition is a good idea or not, it's going to happen as the trends we all know and love continue. Even if major tech companies don't build this in to their camera-enabled products, open source projects will using distributed datasets. Or perhaps not-so-distributed datasets: face recognition systems use only something like 70-80 nodal points that give you internodal distances like eye spacing, mouth width, etc. (I may be wrong on that number; if I am I'm sure someone who works in this area will correct me.)

If this happens, I suspect it will change human interaction significantly and make it more different to be casually anonymous. I'm not so worried about people I casually interact learning my identity; I'd be more concerned about cradle-to-grave government collection and permanent storage of these records, coupled with license plate scanners, etc.
I'm saying that I want to go and work for a couple of hours, and if everyone did the same, we'd all have seats. The problem is those who think their $3 purchase rents them a desk for 4 hours, and those who need to take up more room than they really need.
> have a platoon of operations researchers telling them they need to arrange their offices like this to get them.

There's a name for the fallacy that assuming something happens for a reason, that there must be a good reason, because the obvious reason is so bad.
This is very nice! A question though: it does need a knowledge of client state right? How big is that data per session? Is it viable to keep the data on client and send with each request via a cookie so that you don't need more server resources?
Well, it's good enough already.

First, international transactions just don't matter that much for most people.

Second, for small amounts of money use a Credit Card. The extra cost is negligible. Or if this is not possible, something like Western Union. This will cost 5%, but it doesn't really matter for amounts < $1000 and people do it all the time. For larger amounts (> $10.000), you can send a cheque or for > $100.000 do a stock trade on two markets.

Note that the existing systems have fraud protection and convenience as features which are worth something. If bitcoin would threaten any of the existing systems, banks will simply lower the fees. At that point Bitcoin would be only slightly cheaper but less convenient and secure.
Mapillary Raises $1.5M Seed Round
I agree. However, your use of "algorithms", while more technically correct than the average usage, is also in the minority. The article seems to focus on the culture that lauds algorithms. In that context, the interchangability of "God" and "algorithm" converges. Here are a few remarks from that angle, supplementary to your comment.

I think the mainstream use of the term "algorithm" (or nearly any buzzword) is at the mercy of myriad competing forces seeking to impose their interpreation on the phrase. At least one of those forces is marketing, which has incentive to offer parapharsed, sugar-coated snippets of what something is. This plays on a common aspect of human nature, which is to feel more secure in a situation in which one feels confident that things are accounted for. There are remarkable similarities in what priests, scryers, prophets, and oracles once did, and what, presently, the media, marketers, investors, fans, geeks philosophically abstracting from their technical work, and advocates of theories do-- namely, a presentation of truth from a limited set of the inititated to the mass public.

While it is true that algorithms have their place, it is also true that much of what is said about "algorithms" is part aggrandization, part embellishment, part over-simplifcation by marketers, media, non-technical users, or technical users who have a divergent system of beliefs, and invest much thought and effort into a potential future which may or may not occur, and which is not directly related to their technical work (e.g. technological singularity, etc.).

It's always good to (in theory) maintain perspective on such things, and not get carried away by an over-application of a singular idea.
They'd still go out of business. Not only is that market for components like that small, the profit margins are too. You'd have to stock a very wide selection of items.
Anyone know how they achieved such huge sales the first day/week they released? From other app/game stories I've heard it often takes a while for people to notice new apps and gain traction.
SunOS takes about 240 GB?
The Failure of a Past Basic Income Guarantee, the Speenhamland System
This bankruptcy has been long anticipated. It's time.

There was a time when it was hard for hobbyists to buy parts. Even in Silicon Valley. I used to have a commercial account with Hamilton/Avnet just so I could order and pick up at will-call. The alternative was ordering from Allied Radio, with two week delivery and a 5% error rate. Now, anybody can order from Digi-Key, and get delivery tomorrow if you pay for express shipping. There's not even a minimum order.

If you're looking for a business model, consider a hobbyist front end to Digi-Key and Mouser. Digi-Key has about 40 options for a 1/10 watt 100 ohm leaded resistor. This overwhelms many hobbyists. (Do I need flame resistance?) Octopart does some of this, but a social component is needed. Something like Github for hardware, with design files, bills of materials, issue tracking, etc.
To avoid detection, terrorists purposely sent emails with spammy subject lines
I want to know everything about this!
The development cost didn't separate the ios and android releases, but I agree, it probably would only have been a marginal increase. Doubly unfortunate for android.
> Honestly, I don't see a fit for Google Glass in society right now.

There's a huge fit for Google glass. But there is no high volume huge fit. And Google doesn't care about low-volume as they can't move enough ads across it.
The transparency of the window is a weakness. Some folks have started putting up posters and curtains.

But the real issue is that they transmit basically all the sound. Fortunately there usually aren't conversations going on just outside people's offices, but if two people are talking while walking down the hall or the person in the next office is yelling at folks on hangout, it's not much quieter than a cubicle.
Even so, most of the time when I'm out in public I like to be anonymous. Since I'm not famous, that is extremely easy, and I like it that way.
The Giant Flip-Dot Display at CES
> Latin, as all other languages, wasn't designed

To be fair, some languages were designed, such as Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Lojban, Klingon, Sindarin, Verdurian, and other, less-known examples.
Teenage Dream
I found the FAQ, but my experience was that actually reporting something was a bit of a circular journey. You shouldn't have to contact support; abuse reporting should be a first class feature when the core business is people soliciting money.
Oh and courage, well it's nothing. War is all about working effectively with fear, that's why the emphasis on training, the more and more you train, the better you're able to keep fear as a background process and not panic.
This is exactly right, it's not AR. What it has done though for AR is show people the idea of overlaying information on your environment which is a core tenet of AR.

That has been hugely helpful in making the understanding of how AR works accessible to a much wider range of people.
Can I ask, was this at all inspired by reading my blog post that I posted here last year?

Looks awesome!

http://jamie.st/blog/news-timeline-v2/
This is something they hope to be true, but they probably know to be false. If you already know it to be false, then it's a lie.

Someone pointed out you do get to know your coworkers better, but I'd argue you just get to know them better, faster.
Arguing against AR is going to be as silly in retrospect as arguing against email/internet. It will undoubted connect people to information, which is at the very core of what we're looking to achieve with technology.
Apple was promoting that game pretty hard before release and they had a prominent place in the App Store. I think they got it because it was iOS only for a spell and apple played that up.
Great stuff!

You're correct about it being sort of awkward at first when you are figuring out how to structure an isomorphic applications. It gets even weirder when you only use JavaScript as a compilation target.

I created an example isomorphic Clojure and ClojureScript application (https://github.com/domkm/omelette) and wrote about how it works (http://domkm.com/posts/2014-06-15-isomorphic-clojure-1/). It was an interesting experience. I wouldn't recommend it for production quite yet but I'm looking forward (and working toward) the day when we can easily deploy isomorphic applications that are not written in JavaScript.
Given your experiences, would you recommend picking up Python or Clojure for data processing/data science?

I'm currently quite deep into Javascript/Node, and am already comfortable with functional programming. Next I'm looking to gain more data abilities, and had assumed Python would be the natural next step. You're making me wonder whether Clojure would be a smarter step, though I am concerned that most of the jobs still appear to be in Python.
Completely. I hadn't thought about the camera-phone analogy but you're absolutely right. There were a few years there of hand-wringing over th new ability of snapping photos in locker rooms and people filming concerts.

I think the screens will lead the way. Seems "the screen" will migrate from the phone to the watch, and maybe then to glasses. Apple's move here seems smart.

Google glass jumped the gun, going after what was possible over what society was ready for.
In 1869, if you were white, upper-crust, and Our Kind, you had a shot at Harvard.

Otherwise, get back to your manual labor, peon. We don't take you your type around here.
Not if a large subset of those customers are not profitable, was the point.
How secure is my password? Very weak, if you've ever entered it into a "how secure is my password" website.
Ha, nice catch. Originally it would have been called 'sign', that's right. Matthias had the great idea to rename it to 'sigh' (which is quite similar). But as you mention, it's just the feeling you get, when you have to deal with provisioning profiles.
You got the cause and effect backwards. They expanded into non-technical markets because the technical market was failing.

>resistors, fuses, soldering equipment, breadboards, various controllers and sensors, hard drives, processors: everything I needed to assemble an electronics project, fix a computer, make something.

Almost nobody uses any of these. Those who do it as a hobby and don't wanna pay corner store retail for products. Microcenter is essentially the only one selling half that stuff and they can support like 1 store per major metro area. And they don't even really sell resistors and sensors.

Nobody repairs electronics anymore.

The tiny niche maker movement could support a radioshack like store. But radioshack is a corner store. More like 7-11 than a microcenter.

They have to tell resister for 400 bucks to keep 5 thousand stores open.
FourZeroFour – showcase of 404 pages
How India's Patent Office Destroyed Gilead's Global Game Plan
I've seen that! I'm happy to see other languages do this as well. I love Clojure(Script) and there are several things I've borrowed from it (if you look in my code, I use CSP channels and transducers). :)

The more examples we can get of this the better.
People will collect anything I guess. The nicest do-not-disturb sign I recall was at Kona Village Resort where you put a coconut on the lanai (porch) to indicate that you did not want to be disturbed.
It was Apple's Editor's Choice in the app store (across all apps, not just in games) in its release week plus a fair amount of pre-release hype. Though mostly it's about being Editor's Choice.
You know, it used to be part of every interview where I was asked very seriously how much experience I had with the entire software development lifecycle. I didn't get it at the time, but there's really different skills involved in the different phases of any kind of project: the idea, prototyping, mid-stream development, wrapping up, shipping and then all the work to do to let people know that thing you just made is now available.

If people think SDLC is hard, what about traditional hardware product lifecycles?

I think it's interesting that Google, being built around continuously moving, never-really-finished, web products, has tried to move into really-has-be-finished-to-ship hardware...and I think it's been hard for Google to do, it's just not in their blood.

Occasionally something comes out, the Chromecast, or early 1st round versions of something. But then they seem to get lost in the weeds, not to mention weird cancellations of products right before they're ready to ship.

It kind of reminds me of what I've been reading about what went on inside of Atari during the boom days.
> They can, in some cases, do services, but the idea that something ever reaches a finished state in which everything is complete doesn't seem to be part of their DNA.

I know what you mean, but I'd actually say the opposite:

Google has a history of dumping a bunch of resources into a first release. Which may be quite good (Google Books), barely a proof of concept (Wave), somewhere in between (Hangouts), or bizarro what (Plus). And then withdrawing all resources, never iterating on it again, never delivering any major improvements.

In fact, this, it seems, is what Glass-purchasers felt for the past year and a half -- So, this is a good first draft, but when's it gonna get better? Answer: Never.

Presumably the projects which start looking like they will make money for Google receive further investment.
Which client state? The only penalty is that the server needs to send a "payload" of data to the client on the initial rendering, which is all the data that the server used to render the initial HTML. Once the client picks up this payload, from then on it just uses normal REST patterns to query APIs for data.

You may need a session for authentication, but that's it.
Congrats Darude.
Newer TCP implementations
The Consensus Is in on Brain Training, but the Jury Is Not
JK. It's by far the best office I've ever had.
http://m.timeline.com

Does not load anything for me on Safari with Ghostery on.
There's a Problem in the Silk Road Trial: The Jury Doesn't Get the Internet
I agree with the general rule, however checking the dev tools this site doesn't actually make any calls to a server during or after you've typed your password.
the problem with being pedantic like this is that you just come off as a huge nerd to everyone, even other pedantic nerds. that's why i said "easier to sell", not "technically more accurate."
DNSSEC is probably OK if all you use it for is within an organization for your own stuff (ie, with your corporate root CA, for your corporate domains only, where you control for and vouch for every node connected), and then using it to enhance other things like distributing SSH keys through SSHFP (again, totally internally, not internet facing).

But everything else said here I totally agree with - if you don't control the root, you don't control a whole lot of anything.

If you want something that hides the contents of DNS packets in transit, DNSCurve at least does that, and is relatively easy to deploy - the current best server appears to be the curvedns in the freebsd ports (updated to use libsodium, etc.): https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/dns/curvedns/
It hasn't even been a whole year. I think this speaks to how excited people are about the iOS ecosystem and how put off people were by Objective-C. I'm currently tutoring a Swift class online and my students are from all backgrounds. People that don't even program are excited about it. I started learning the week after WWDC, and I'm finally getting comfortable with the language to the point where I'm not writing Swiftjective-C (Swift that looks like Objective-C). It's great to be able to use functional programming constructs that have been in other languages for over 5 years.

I'm just waiting for the Job postings that ask for "Swift Experts" and "5 years Swift experience" to start showing up.
Photos from Chicago's Gangster Past, Minus the Romance
OpenZFS Device Removal