skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is awesome!

For what it's worth, I spent a little time playing with their Fuel API when the first band was released: http://fredkelly.net/articles/2012/12/21/nike_fuel.html
It lives in a computer. Can't we just turn it off?
Well, he is correct that Matasano was acquired by NCC Group. But as a rank-and-file Matasanoan since before the acquisition, I can't say I've noticed a huge impact on the day-to-day.
If anyone is as confused by the title as I was: googling "Bradbury Pomegranate" pulled up an interview[1] in which he explains the metaphor in the context of his writing:

Weller: “Do you ever marvel at how much you’ve created?” (Bradbury has published close to 600 short stories, over 30 books and numerous poems, essays, and plays.)

Bradbury: “The simple fact is this: I’m a pomegranate. I’m a very big pomegranate that exploded and my seeds are all over the place. So there are 10,000 seeds of me all over the place. I am glad that I exploded and that I took root to become a pomegranate.”

[1] http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2010/07/237931...
When engineers/scientists/programmers think that AI is the true threat, I believe they forget what it is like for "normal" human beings, or at least ones who are in their field of thinking.

I think their fascination of AI blinds them to what seems like the more likely outcome: The human race will destroy itself through reckless use of technology -- whether it is through governmental action or societal breakdown -- far before the point that we develop AI sophisticated enough to autonomously threaten humankind. Think about all the "dumb" automated systems, built or implemented by careless humans and bureaucracies, that have already caused harm.
Then great, this is the proper next step, I wasn't positioning it as a document of truth, but an example of what 'appears' to be credible. Invite discussion. I wouldn't reply that "you cited a crap paper". How about "that's interesting; however, I see there may be concerns with its validity as pointed out by..."

It takes time to investigate everything, and one shouldn't just stop when they find the answer they like. You need to always dig deeper for the rebuttals of both sides of an argument.
Peer to peer lending comes to New Zealand
Ironically, from the head of Microsoft Research: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/artific...
The truth is... nobody can predict the future, so what Bill Gates and any other person thinks is a matter of speculation.

Personally I think it is a threat!
Using the Facebook platform for advertising can be extremely effective and profitable. Facebook Ads on the other hand have been lacklustre at best. They can be effective to drive activity to a Social campaign on Facebook, but are immensely less effective then google's ad products.

On the other hand, google knows it is likely just a matter of time before Facebook gets it right, and when they do they are one of the few companies who could complete at scale with google.
I really don't agree with this guy at all. This makes no sense at all:

> Don’t ever move into an apartment, TIC, condo, or house that has been cleared by an eviction

So landlords should be forced to rent to people forever who can't pay? That makes no sense. It is just stealing the property from the property owner.

I know a lot of landlords and they hate doing evictions, because the tenants aren't paying their rent the entire time they are being evicted. The ones I know often say to the judge, I don't want money back from this person (which is generally impossible anyway because the person is poor), I just want to be able to rent my property to someone who can pay. Landlords with a lot of property have to do this regularly.
It was resolved for me when I moved to CM12. Zero problems in 2+ weeks, previously a daily issue.
Boom – Techstars Alum Bench Raises $7M
Awesome, good to know! I was considering getting it on PS4 but I wasn't sure how well the adventure game style actually translates to that. Your comment makes me feel comfortable enough getting it there.

Speaking of manuals, I could swear that I once accessed a manual for a PS4 downloadable game. But I've never since been able to figure out how I did that, to the point where I question whether it ever even happened. But it seems absurd to believe that they decided that games simply don't need manuals. I get that console games are trending towards having a very minimalistic manual in the game box (often just a page with the control layout), but not every game does that.
Indeed. Even agreeing on a universal definition for "morality" seems to have eluded us.
If you'd like to read a little more about why I built this, I wrote a small post on the subject:
https://medium.com/@dreadpirateryan/time-money-and-email-b1b...
If by "morality gates" you're talking about about an ethical filter that all intelligent machine actions have to go through, this can't be "one of the first hurdles" because such a filter would need to be a powerful AI application itself.

And there's no guarantee that self-imposed limitations will always be applied. Someone could just rewrite and recompile without the filters turned on. Imagine if the US could have built in "morality gates" to the first nuclear weapons. That wouldn't have stopped other countries from building the weapons without the restrictions. And we know software is infinitely configurable and modifiable if you have the source code.
85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half
Further to what curun1r said, most(all?) of the Go stdlib is written in Go and that has much platform specific code. Hence, it supports it. However, unless you're writing system code you will most likely never need to touch this.

http://golang.org/src/net/
I am continually surprised that so many people separate biological systems from machines.
Can you link me to the database used?
But the web is just another set of absurdly arcane APIs upon (something) upon (other things). What I want i something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEIHfXLMtwA

I realize it's only-O'Caml at the moment, but I think this is mostly the kind of thing we're all striving for?

(IOW: I want you, personnaly, to work for this objective :))
Binge-Watching TV Linked to Depression, Loneliness
I believe the argument is that while we can certainly do a great deal of damage to ourselves, an AI would be much more efficient about our eradication if it decided to remove us (and for some outlandish reason, somehow had access to the resources required to do so).

If a human or humans wiped out two thirds of humanity, it would probably be by accident or neglect, no deliberate and planned.
What if Chipotle signed an agreement with Visa and their credit card processor saying that their data wouldn't be provided to traders to trade their stock on?

What if Capital One signed an agreement with Visa saying that in exchange for issuing cards, they wouldn't provide the data to stock traders, and would keep it safe?

What if they didn't trade on it, just sold the info to Taco Bell?

Seems like a situations I want to avoid, if I'm Chipotle.
> It's odd that all of the very smart people of the world feel AI is a threat to humanity.

Only if you define one of the conditions for being a "very smart person" to be feeling that AI is a threat to humanity.
If it truly has human-level (or greater) intelligence, you're going to have some ethical issues that crop up with turning it off. Even if you're personally okay with it, there are going to be other people who aren't.

Waiting until it commits a crime and then having some kind of "trial" and "execution" may not be an option. If it's smart/powerful enough, there may not be enough time for that.
Pied Piper :P But please release with a dummy name first. This is really net :D
Casetext (YC S13) is hiring front- and back-end engineers and attorneys
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1810231/

It's been tried (appropriately enough, with guinea pigs) and there was no inflammatory response, even from xenotransplantation... however, it was also not very effective.
As does Tusk. I am conviced they realized that once a smarter-than-human A.I. will exist, one of the first things it will do is to ridicule our completely idiotic ways to use our resources - one thing which will probably not gain too much support from the 1%. Of course it's a threat!
You're so right. I don't want to raise them to live in a fantasy bubble (when I have kids, that is). The world is a big bad place; I'd rather prepare them, than shield them.
Not to sound disrespectful to differing opinions, but I can't see a single good reason of not exposing your kids to the realities of life (money or otherwise) when they're old enough (starting from 8-9 maybe).
I'm primarily a mobile dev, so the biggest impediment to me adopting Go over Node is the fact that converting and manipulating my data models to send as JSON documents is considerably harder on Go - there's no Go equivalent to Gson yet, nor will there likely ever be due to the nature of the language.
The short answer is that:

(a) we don't really know how to define a morality for a self-improving optimization system to allow a potential artificial general intelligence (AGI) not to be a threat in the first place;

(b) if an entity arrives (no matter if it's an AGI, some aliens or Jesus) that is more powerful than us, then if its goals & morality aren't aligned with ours, then we're screwed. And almost all of the space of possible goals either doesn't include humanity at all or includes humanity as a glorified zoo exhibit - only a very, very narrow and specific set of optimization goals (that we're currently unable to formally describe) would mean a happy future for us. If you think that it's easy, think twice - all the obvious naive goals of 'make us happy' or 'keep us safe' or 'do what I want' actually turn into horrible dystopias as soon as you try to formally define them as instructions for someone/something to maximize that goal.

(c) functioning morality is not a requirement for power - if somehow we solve the very hard problem of how to create an AGI before we solve the very hard problem on how to make such an AGI be friendly to us, then we lose. Permanently.
good luck: http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NWZa0Gn...
The link was from the House Intelligence Committee, not the NSA. I'm sure they're basing a lot of that on information they got from the NSA, since these are, after all, NSA programs, but those four examples came from an entirely separate branch of the government.

I'm curious if you bothered reading the three articles you cited, because the Washington Post article doesn't address those four cases at all, and the other two in that group you cited are, in fact, the exact same article published in two separate outlets. The arguments that the authors pose against three of the four cases is basically that it was possible to acquire the intelligence differently, not that the programs failed. The argument against the 4th case makes the argument that because Khalid Ouazzani was indicted for separate charges, the programs must not have worked. This article[1] gives more detail on the case, and explains why he wasn't indicted.

The original "party line" was the following (from [2]):
Gen. Keith Alexander said these programs enabled the United States to disrupt 54 "events," 42 of which "involved disrupted plots."

Of those 54:

12 involved cases of material support to terrorists;
50 lead to arrests or detentions;
25 occurred in Europe;
11 were in Asia;
5 were in Africa;
13 had a homeland nexus.

Forty-one of the terrorist activities did not involve events in the United States, Alexander said. Alexander went on to say that in 53 of the 54 cases, data collected under Section 702 provided the initial tip to "unravel the threat stream." He said that almost half of terrorist reporting comes from Section 702, ...

When Sen Leahy questioned Gen Alexander on this, it was more of an indictment that the media was getting it wrong and inflating the count by including the 12 material support cases, and clarifying how many cases were the result of the bulk cell phone records program (one or two) versus PRISM (everything else).

> Elected US officials don't have access to enough information to verify those claims, guessing you don't either.

I'm guessing you've never sat in on a classified congressional intelligence committee briefing, and wouldn't have the information to back up your statement.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaedas-abandoned-ny-stock-e...

[2] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/27/19175466-nsa-chie...
There are an incomprehensible number of huge obstacles between us and a future where a strong AI could decide to cause real damage, as opposed to the present where a handful of people could cause a devastating nuclear war.

These are issues that AI researchers and philosophers and science fiction authors certainly should be thinking about. They are completely irrelevant to the general public.
That's not the problem.

The problem is that when we are reliant on intelligent systems to, say, detect certain kinds of fraud in financial markets, then turning them off would have huge deleterious effects all on their own.
A significant portion of Grim Fandango was written in Lua 2.5!
Here is a followup talk from the developer in 2005: http://www.lua.org/wshop05/Mogul.pdf
Because biological machines - living organisms - are much more like a wave. Machines created by humans do not usually rely on constant chemical processes to maintain their functions. So, machines are more like an appendage on humans.
> When engineers/scientists/programmers think that AI is the true threat

Engineers/scientists/programmers almost never think that AI is a threat. Because they understand the nature of the problem, how little we know about human intelligence, and how poorly our binary technology compares to what little we do know.

Even in the unlikely event that we do develop a competent AI in the near future and a malicious AI comes into being ... there is no reason to think that a benevolent one won't be around at the same time ... and that the benevolent AIs will outnumber the malicious. Just like there are computers on the net doing bad things, there are plenty of others serving the role of protecting the common good.

> The human race will destroy itself through reckless use of technology

We haven't thus far. And we've had the capability for a while. Care to present some evidence or a rational argument that we will? Signs point to the contrary.
It's too bad the library with the star lit reading room night sky light would never be possible inside a major city what with all the light pollution.
Why are you surprised? People use the word 'machines' alone to refer to artificial machines and 'biological systems' to refer to natural machines. They're all machines but the distinction is usually crucial.
Yes. So does Yelp.
I don't fear AI for the same reason I don't fear nanotechnology - nature tried to take over the world first. The grey goo scenario, where nanobots try and turn the world into more nanobots, resulting in the consumption of all humans and buildings and bridges seems scary until you realize that this is exactly the goal of all bacteria. The idea of an entity that thirsts for power and sees competing ideologies as a threat doesn't seem that unfamiliar if you look at humans through history.

Additionally, AI-fearers have a grand theory that we'll be able to create a machine that improves itself better than evolution has tried to. Datacenters require maintenance, and so the machine will need to entirely organize that before it can self-sustain. This may create a resource load that diminishes the ability to take over the world, much like my need for food diminishes my ability to do so. It feels like AI today has a lot less redundancy to overcome the edge-failures which cause a permanent shutdown, and which make the human brain seem a little slow when computing floating-point division.

The idea that an exponentially self-improving being will arise seems unlikely when nature has been trying to do that for eons. The idea that we'll be the ones to find the secret sauce seems unlikely, but maybe its not so surprising that people who made their millions, and saw a parabolic rise of their own power thanks to technology, see it as a barely-constrained threat.
You don't think cults are religions?
really.. how am I supposed to be a millionaire if I throw money away like that??
> "I am conviced they realized that once a smarter-than-human A.I. will exist, one of the first things it will do is to ridicule our completely idiotic ways to use our resources "

Or ridicule the way that we designed it, at which point it may decide to correct our mistakes. If we can program it, and it is smarter than us, than presumably it can program a smarter it.

That scenario could be harmless, or it could be very dangerous. I expect that as soon as we start to get close to this sort of achievement, we'll start to see at least informal "Turing Police". Groups of people who task themselves with preventing the ascension of strong AI (or at least construct physical safeguards to kill the host hardware in the case of an emergency.)
Ask HN: What is the role of communication in a programmer's career
I'm a senior in a CS major at BYU. For an assignment in my advanced writing class, I need to interview a professional in my field (programming, preferably python backend or javascript/html/css frontend). It's short notice, and probably a little presumptuous to ask this online to a community at large, but I feel like this would be the place to try. If you'd like to help me, you can email me responses to swsieber [at] [that one google mail site].com

But feel free to post it as well. It'd be great to have a general discussion - it'd be interesting to see how the experience differs workplace to workplace. I think this is a vital part of programming that's often missed. I know I need work on it.

Here are the questions:

- What do you program?: the languages, the type of program and in what domain (medical, developer tools, etc)

- What kind of writing (and other communication) do you do?

- What kinds of audiences do you write for? Who's the hardest to communicate with? How is this influenced by your seniority and role?

- How much time do you spend writing during a typical workday?

- How important is writing (and other communication) to such things as salary, prestige, and promotion?

- What would you focus on in learning and preparing to write better for a programming job?
Take into account that at one time these people could pay their rent and now, because of gentrification, they can't. A person too poor to afford a home and has been renting the same place for decades is getting evicted because the wealthy moved in next door.
Facebook's ad revenue share has been increasing, while Google's has been decreasing. In just two years, Google has gone from owning 10x as much ad revenue share as Facebook to just 2x [0]. Facebook has much more data on its users (age, location, school, etc) than Google which allows advertisers to target their ads much easier. It seems like Facebook is better if you want to narrowly reach a specific demographic since they know so much about their users, whereas Google is better if you just want to broadly reach a lot of people since they have such a dominant presence on the web. It depends on what you want as an advertiser, but there's definitely people who would prefer to spend their advertising dollars on a specific demographic.

[0]: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook-Google-M...
FYI, I've recently worked on a similar project, and I tried both the ubertooth and this TI development kit device [1]. The TI device and software was much more reliable and is pretty much plug in and go. Did you do all of this through an Android phone? Very cool.

[1] http://www.ti.com/tool/cc2540emk-usb
VCs and Angels are often not young as the founders are, so they are funding people that don't resemble them.
There isn't any ageism in Silicon Valley. Younger people are just more willing and capable of filling the required roles. Besides, there are plenty of older people in SV. I see them all the time! This article is just yet another slander to find controversy when there is none.

If you're older and you're not doing well in SV you should take a look at yourself. Maybe you just don't have good ideas anymore. Maybe you just don't cut it, and should find a place somewhere else. There are plenty of other careers you could switch to that happily accept older people.

But there is no ageism in Silicon Valley. Anyone who says there is is just trying to start trouble.

(Paraphrasing arguments made against the suggestion of sexism in SV on HN yesterday. Hurts when you're on the receiving end, no?)
Let's assume that the AI has the intelligence and capabilities that match or exceed a decent human teenage hacker.

From historical evidence we can observe that such capabilities are enough to create a botnet, obtain significant money through fraud, hire employees and make shell companies, and rent (or obtain by hacking) large amounts of computing power on Amazon or other cloud services. All of that through a single low-bandwidth network connection and no physical interaction, assuming that it can figure out a single zero-day vulnerability in some common software.

After that, you can't turn it off. Before that, you shouldn't assume that you can outsmart it in security - as you should assume that the adversary is smarter than you, and if your security works in 99 scenarios but fails in one... then it fails.
The smart/wealthy are also powerful and rogue agents will definitely use AI to do things. AI that wealth can't necessarily control will definitely exist and that is probably system changing.

I doubt it will be a threat to humanity anytime soon like a Grey Goo type situation, but even in such things at HFT the influence is immense. People will definitely use it to do power plays on others, we shouldn't have dropped nukes but we have done plenty of that. Basically the warning in 2001 was that AI was not to fear really but the subversive programming by other humans within the AI systems.

I am sure over time AI systems that access critical infrastructure and financial systems will have to operate in a distributed approval/review system checked by other agents and maybe even a blockchain like system.