skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "more to it" is "if the AI is much faster at thinking than humans, then even humans in the observe/decide/act are not secure". AI systems having bugs also imply that protections placed on AI systems would also have bugs.

The fear is that maybe there's no such thing as a "superintelligence proof" system, when the human component is no longer secure.

Note that I don't completely buy into the threat of superintelligence either, but on a different issue. I do believe that it is a problem worthy of consideration, but I think recursive self-improvement is more likely to be on manageable time scales, or at least on time scales slow enough that we can begin substantially ramping up worries about it before it's likely.

Edit: Ah! I see your point about circularity now.

Most of the vectors of attack I've been naming are the more obvious ones. But the fear is that, for a superintelligent being perhaps anything is a vector. Perhaps it can manufacture nanobots independent of a biolab (do we somehow have universal surveillance of every possible place that has proteins?), perhaps it uses mundane household tools to macguyver up a robot army (do we ban all household tools?). Yes, in some sense it's an argument from ignorance, but I find it implausible that every attack vector has been covered.

Also, there are two separate points I want to make, first of all, there's going to be a difference between 'secure enough to defend against human attacks' and 'secure enough to defend against superintelligent attacks'. You are right in that the former is important, but it's not so clear to me that the latter is achievable, or that it wouldn't be cheaper to investigate AI safety rather than upgrade everything from human secure to super AI secure.
You might want to double check that one about the Third Reich!
It will target as wide a group as possible. It`s just a small backdoor, that lets the agency that should not be named to install a full rootkit at will.
> What was more surprising was that the vast majority of branded alcohols dated to no earlier than the 1950s.

I can't cite, but I've read that before Prohibition, you pretty much went to a bar and ordered "whiskey", "rum" or whatever booze by style, but not by brand name. There wasn't much in the way of differentiation in the market. But during Prohibition, drinking random booze had a real risk of getting you sick, blinded or dead.

This was because 1) A lot of alcohol was still being produced for industrial uses. 2) To enforce Prohibition, that industrial alcohol was treated with additives to make it disgusting and poisonous to drink. 3) To fill the still-existing market for booze, some people sold alcohol that was made to be industrial but later had the additives (mostly) extracted.

During that time, having a trusted source of quality booze (booze that won't kill you) was suddenly very valuable. Good sources started the branding process to capitalize on that new market demand. Those who branded well grew. And, the rest is history.
People from the future will likely consider the industrial and information revolutions to be the same revolution, just like people today generally consider the agricultural revolution to be one event instead of its two separate stages.

We could say the industrial revolution ended in 1945 with the Manhattan project and the information revolution began in the 1940's with the Enigma code cracking so the timelines flow into each other, and, as you say, they both had the effect of releasing vast amounts of energy. The agricultural revolution began about 10,000 yrs ago independently in 5 or 10 places around the world with plant seed selection and animal husbandry, but in only two places, North China and Mesopotamia, did they make the separate step of transplanting it all on a large scale to a river valley, perhaps even thousands of years later. (I'm presuming here Egypt and the Indus Valley copied Mesopotamia.)

I suspect the real third big revolution will be inter-stellar travel in perhaps another 10,000 years.
> Perhaps "ironically" goto is a good feature only because it's criticized enough so that it's typically used correctly?

there are no good/bad features, there are only good/bad programmers.
Fixed thanks to TomH: http://git.openstreetmap.org/rails.git/commitdiff/2b7529a3f1...
One point for citing Black Mirror's Christmas special. It gave me nightmares, literally.
The trouble comes when you need to clean up resources while bailing out. Exception handlers and RAII are great for this, but when you don't have such features available, goto is pretty handy:

https://github.com/kstenerud/KSCrash/blob/master/Source/KSCr...

If I ever had to add more resources or steps into the mix here, I'd be in a world of hurt pretty quick if I were using a complicated nest of breaks and if-else. One could forcefully encapsulate each step into a separate function, but then you start to trend towards a forest of tiny little trees that you're not even sure what to name anymore, and the overall structure of the function and what it's doing become muddled.
Anyone whose work actively undermines the principles of the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution has no moral right to the title "American," though they may be Americans in a legal sense.

Ignorance is no excuse, but it is an explanation. I have no doubt that most people at the NSA can accurately claim ignorance.

As they say, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
Whiskey production in the US exploded following expansion over the Cumberland Gap past Appalachia. See, e.g., http://www.whisky.de/archiv/beginner/bourbon_hist.htm

The routes were overland (rivers have a hard time crossing mountains), this was pre-railroad (let alone highway). There was significant grain production, that couldn't be moved feasibly by other means.

I was specifically addressing the case within the U.S., not the rest of the world, though yes, you're generally correct. Fermenting (and sometimes distilling) grains, fruit, potatoes, etc., is a way of storing surplus production in a form that's resistant to rot or other decay.
"the prose is turgid"

Another example, the page discussing professionals attempting to write for the public failing by producing camp.

N+1 is always interesting to read.
As someone who believes in Islam this is an extremely thought provoking piece and I love it. It makes you think and question existence. It makes you wonder about what we're doing here and how life would be different if we existing at a different point in time and space. Just such interesting topics for conversation. Life and the universe.
>As a cliche that's become very easy to repeat, but I've yet to see a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF.

Destroy the available (cheap) supplies of fossil fuels, and then trick humans into fighting each-other over the remaining food and fuel. Nasty weapons get unleashed, war over, the machine won.
How is infecting a whole telecom company like Belgacom, which then allows them to get data on everyone, a "targeted" attack?
Testing angular.js application with wallaby.js
focusing entirely on Irish pubs in Ireland

My God! Ireland's annexed Kazakhstan and the Canary Islands?!!!!

From TFA:

In the last 15 years, Dublin-based IPCo and its competitors have fabricated and installed more than 1,800 watering holes in more than 50 countries. Guinness threw its weight (and that of its global parent Diageo) behind the movement, and an industry was built around the reproduction of "Irishness" on every continent—and even in Ireland itself. IPCo has built 40 ersatz pubs on the Emerald Isle, opening them beside the long-standing establishments on which they were based.
Are you a sockpuppet trying to derail the discussion or is this serious?
Why Microsoft Took a Year to Fix Critical Windows Bug
Isn't that a little circular? Should we be concerned about insufficient controls on bio labs? Yes. I am very concerned about that. Should we be concerned about proliferation of insecure networked computing devices? Yes. I am very concerned about that. Should we be concerned about allowable inputs into missile launch systems? Yes. I am very concerned about that.

But I am right now not very concerned about super-AI. I assume, when I read smart people worrying about it, that there's some subtlety I must be missing, because it's hard for me to imagine that, even if we stipulated the impossibility of real AI, we'd not be existentially concerned about laboratory pathogen manipulation.
Each other and the U.N., sort of... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...

Essentially: "no more countries get nukes, those that have them should get rid of them at an unspecified point in the future but get to keep them for now". It is not an ideal solution, nor a particularly fair one, but much better for human survival than "everybody gets a nuke". Unfortunately, it would work better if powerful countries didn't threaten less powerful ones to the point that violating the NPT and getting nukes seems like the only rational response for preserving their own security. Which brings us to why the U.S. unilaterally launching attacks (cyber- or otherwise) against other countries runs counter to non-proliferation goals, whereas coordinated U.N. sanctions/incentives/inspections/interventions have at much better chance of working.
In C, goto is useful for jumping from various parts of a function to a single section of resource-cleanup-and-return code. I might also use goto as a way to break out of a set of nested loops. I think those are both generally accepted idioms among C programmers.
Had a family member that worked for SPEA (test equipment manufacture). Said different government organizations would bring in boards with massively parallel sets of chips and input/output on them, like nothing they ever saw in any other field. They were expressly forbidden to take pictures of them.

Between that and the massive data centers they are building I'm guessing they have rather impressive capabilities.
http://my.teslamotors.com/fr_CH/forum/forums/tesla-makes-it-...
Arcane knowledge needed to write a test in Rails
Russian researchers expose U.S. hard drive spyware program
Is it just me, or is this similar to continuation-based web programming, particularly those that passed the continuation to the client[1]?

[1] http://www.crsr.net/Notes/InfernalDevice.html
The trend seems to be "blog + feed" all-in-one platforms like Medium.com now. The old blogging model was the feed readers were separate from the platforms. I'm not sure if that's better or worse but that seems to be all that's left.
Health Weekly #45: Google health search, social networks for DNA…
I love reading stories like these. I hope more people in the community share first (or second) hackathon stories.
UK to Ban Snapchat?? I doubt it
We already saw IRATE MONK and friends a couple of years ago, right? Is this different, or independent verification?
It depends on how and where you add the absorption, and how it combines with reflected sound.

A tremendous number of public places are presently virtually nothing _but_ reflective surfaces: concrete or tile floors, steel and glass fittings and windows, hard walls. Often lacking in even carpets or table linens.

A mix of reflection and absorption can create an ambient background without the roar so often encountered.
I couldn't agree more that our humanity places truly absurd limits on our existence. You get, if you're lucky 30-40 years of solid productivity after 20-30 years of training. Maybe enough time to create one or two solid accomplishments before your capacity for thought, and soon enough your capacity for life is extinguished.

Also consider the economic argument. On the one hand, the level of investment experts make in becoming so is squandered by death. And yet, this also levels the playing field for newborns, since you don't have to compete against the guy with 8,000 years of experience.

I think human intelligence hits an asymptote due to mortality. There's only so deep an individual can go, and a limit on how much you can replace depth with breadth.

We enter and exit this world as babes. 100 years is in many ways a pathetic excuse for an existence. Obviously extending that would have to focus on quality not quantity, and has supremely disruptive economic effects (on par with strong AI) but I do not doubt there are great leaps we will take toward this end over the next 500 years.

One nice side-effect of a millennial-scale existence would hopefully be a more macro and less cyclical approach to "current affairs".
I think it's a symptom of a different bigger problem: that vestiges of the caste systems once pervasive in India (and indeed much of the world) for the last several millennia are still very present. The belief that "those darn workers exist to do manual labor, so we should come to expect that they'll always want to do manual labor and - therefore - we should provide such opportunities" is a rather clear manifestation of that vestige.

In this context, I don't think such a jobs program is in any way, shape, or form intended with genuine altruism. Perhaps that's what India as a whole has convinced itself of in order to rationalize its societal behavior, but it's not something that should fool anyone with the slightest understanding of south-central Asian history.

Basically, I'd argue that the reluctance to automate away manual labor stems not from a desire to empower laborers, but rather to keep them subjugated and prevent them from climbing their way into any semblance of a middle class.
Yes, who's going to plug removeable media from the US into their machine after reading this story about the conference CDs?
There is a lot of good information here. The only thing I'll add, which is present in bits and pieces is - hustle. Hustle your behind off.
I have a friend rightly stated the difference between a freelancer and a full time employee is how you react when work is slow. Full-timers enjoy is, freelancers are (and should be) scared of it. Your next job is your next paycheck and its an attitude that is critically important to embrace, especially once you get a little cushion in the bank.
No job should be beneath you (provided you will get compensated appropriately) you'll learn from everything you do so just keep on looking for that next thing and taking it. Along the way you'll make the connections, meet the people that will lead you to more, and ultimately better, freelance jobs. Once you have this network people will be coming to you with work and not the other way around (that's the pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow.)
I'd have to look back at the article, but I believe the mail interception took place during the Bush-era warrant-less wiretapping. The FISA courts were created to remedy the warrant-less part of that, though they don't really seem to have done much for the oversight concern that you mention.

By this I mean to suggest that such interdiction may not necessarily be truly warrant-less if performed today, even if it is still shady and lacking in accountability.
Sounds interesting. Only problem is your site is quite difficult to use on a mobile.

Will bookmark and view later on a desktop though.
> Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea.

Labeling jobs as "worthless" makes me want to throw up. We are in many cases talking about jobs people find quite fulfilling, and human services many people would love to keep using.

The only way we're going to be able to handle what's coming is to disconnect the economic value of jobs from their social value.
Yes, but the author explicitly explores the semantics she pushes in regard to other limitations: our size relative to the universe, our inability to fly, etc. With everything taken into account, it is indeed odd that the thing that seems uniquely absurd is our longevity. Why aren't we perturbed by our lack of gills or our inability to walk to the moon? The point of the article is to explore this absurdity. You knew the game before you clicked the link ('absurd' is right there, in the title). So you can hardly be surprised that you were dealt a relativistic sludge.
Of course, it's necessary to achieve a certain critical mass to make infecting your target effective and mask the true source of the attack.
Amsterdam to host world’s first drone circus
I also use Django for very small/lightweight/simple websites. Django is very good about staying out of your way if you don't want to make use of its built-in magic. If you ignore the "batteries included" parts of Django (ORM, class based views, forms, auth, caching, etc), it's still a good/easy/structured way of routing URLs to a python function, which seems to be the appeal of Flask. The function takes in a request object, and returns a string for output. Can't really be more simple than that.
Also the gin and tonic, a result of British Imperialism encountering Tropical Disease.

Again: the historical record, indicated by prevalence in the Ngram viewer, suggests a fairly recent emergence in the general public discussion of both cocktails and branded liquor.
I don't get it either. The only one that got me was that you have to scale some decimal numbers to whole numbers to multiply them.

0.1 * 0.2 //0.020000000000000004

But this has never caused issue for me except when tried to make a "prime number finder" when I first started using it.

If I was going to build some stat site with a whole bunch of scientific data, I'd probably break out the python. IMO JavaScript is just the best language to work with if you're coding web sites or web applications (and probably prototyping custom UIs for anything). Plus you can use multiple languages server side easily, so use the right tool for the right job.
A 3D merchadise catelog as a new web standard
I don't know what's more disturbing: the fact that US government does this with impunity or the fact that a sizable group of technically competent citizens defends it.
Simply view this link with any devices!
Routing belongs on a mobile device. Now all I need is a usable Android app for browsing maps and navigating. OsmAnd seems to be the benchmark, and it's freaking terrible.
> levels the playing field for newborns

We see the effects of longer, more productive lives already in youth unemployment and property prices. It may not be until the post-boomer generation that we adjust to this. Perhaps there is a historical period where a generation has lived far longer than the few preceding it, from which we can get an idea how society managed?
The thoughts and actions you have are largely a product of your culture, your position in space-time.

Maybe think in classes instead of individual cases. 100 years is nothing. Wheels within wheels. And larger wheels are turning.
Why are we writing to please Google?

Depending on your reach within social media networks (Twitter, Gplus, etc), it can be sufficient enough to just migrate entirely. Scoble's blog, for example is defunct now, and all his content has migrated to social media. See:

http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494

It is not especially required that we write to please Google. All writing should be done without a bias towards search engine crawlers. "Write like Google won't index this" is a good rule of thumb.

The goalposts are always shifting. Pretty much the only 'hack' you need in terms of web traffic is to stay ahead of the curve.

IMHO, Marco should never have to worry about traffic. He might say different, but Marco Arment is pretty much synonymous with what blogging is about. It's the newcomers who all need a leg up on how to get traffic. I recommend watching Rand Fishkin's whiteboard Friday. Some real gold in there.

http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday

The old way of doing SEO, of 'set and forget' obviously is dead. You really have to work hard for traffic. Listicles are only useful if you have no shame. Buzzfeed are pretty much loathed by the 'independent publisher / indyblogger' crowd, but then Buzzfeed are making truckloads of cash, so they will never care as much as we do. They have no shame.
> Snowden's revelations have hurt the United States' relations with some allies and slowed the sales of U.S. technology products abroad.

God damn it. Again with the "kill the messenger" attitude. It's not the disclosure of the acts that harmed the relationships. It's the spying and hacking acts themselves. It's like your friend telling you your girlfriend is cheating on you, and getting mad at the friend instead of the girlfriend, for "harming your relationship".

You don't want your relationships harmed? Uhh..here's a solution for you, US government: don't fucking do it to your allies in the first place if you don't want your relationships "harmed". It's not rocket science.
AT&T charges $29 more for gigabit fiber that doesn’t watch your Web browsing
This one's tough to answer, actually. The truly optimal learner would have to use an incomputable procedure; even time-and-space bounded versions of this procedure have additive constants larger than the Solar System.

However, it's more-or-less a matter of compression, which, by some of the basics of Kolmogorov Complexity, tells us we face a nasty question: it's undecidable/incomputable/unprovable whether a given compression algorithm is the best compressor for the data you're giving it. So it's incomputable in general whether or not you've got the best learning algorithm for your sense-data: whether it compresses your observations optimally. You really won't know you could self-improve with a better compressor until you actually find the better compressor, if you ever do at all.

An agent bounded in terms of both compute-time and sample complexity (the amount of sense-data it can learn from before being required to make a prediction) will probably face something like a sigmoid curve, where the initial self-improvements are much easier and more useful while the later ones have diminishing marginal return in terms of how much they can reduce their prediction error versus how much CPU time they have to invest to both find and run the improved algorithm.
It's the extreme that people take that quote to that causes the problem. He explicitly mentions library development as a place that you always want to optimize, because libraries are often used in inner loops.

When developers totally ignore optimal code practices, bad things can happen. Things like 25000 (!) string allocations for each character typed in the Chrome "omnibox". [1] That's not likely one small bit of code with a few std::string's being allocated, but probably dozens or hundreds of (albeit minor) fixes spread throughout the code.

It is absolutely worthwhile to code optimally as a habit, when the optimal coding practice isn't significantly harder to implement or understand than the suboptimal practice. (In the above case, having a "pass all strings as const references" would have likely prevented most of the allocations.)

Similarly, the way you architect a product can strongly influence how easily it can be optimized. I've cut processing time down from 10's of minutes to under a second on some tasks, just by improving how the code was written -- and that approach means that when I write servers, I can handle all the likely traffic I'll ever see on a handful of servers instead of having to create additional layers of complexity to handle dozens of servers working in parallel.

So I disagree that "premature" optimization is a bad thing, by the typical definition of "premature."

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/chromiu...