skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a massive fallacy in this paragraph:

"This doomsday scenario can’t happen. Intelligence is a product of learning. A brain, no matter how big or how fast, does not become intelligent until it learns. In humans, learning is a slow process requiring practice, repetition and study over many years. Unlike humans, intelligent machines can be cloned, transferring the learning from one machine to a new one, eliminating the learning time. However, for an intelligent machine to discover new truths, to learn new skills, to extend knowledge beyond what has been achieved before, it will need to go through the same difficult and slow discovery process humans do. Yes, an intelligent machine could think much faster than a biological brain, but the slower process of discovery still has to occur."

The person writing this fails to understand the difference between engineering and biological evolution. The AI would be engineered to begin with. There would be nothing haphazard or extraneous about its design. The "slow process of discovery" would be bootstrapped, as stated, by "cloning" (copying extremely fast memory compared with humans). Then, the AI would attack new problems with very likely a minimum 100-1 speed advantage over humans, based on electronic versus chemical speeds. Nerve impulses travel at well less than 100 miles per hour, versus the over 150,000 miles per second of electronic impulses.

Consider a first-gen AI engineer, with "only" a 150 IQ human equivalent intelligence, attempting to design a better AI. Such an AI would have no distractions (food, sleep or sex) and would likely have a monomaniacal focus on its job. It would have a perfect, near-instantaneous memory of arbitrary size (we can already do this). I expect it would in fairly short order produce an IQ 300 version of itself, and that that cycle would likely continue.

That is the basis for the idea of the "singularity", and I find it completely believable. What it would mean, I don't know...and neither does anyone else. We have the same relationship to an IQ 1000 AI that a chimp has with us.

That is the concern that Musk, Hawking and others share.
Maybe you're lacking certain nutrients in your diet, eg. iron, protein.
To be fair "AI safety" is very much an issue even without human-level or post-human AI. I mean, there are far more "mundane" problems such as what happens when a self-driving car gets in a collision? or what do we do after factory workers, service workers and truck drivers are replaced by (dumber-than-human) machines for those jobs?
> I think the situation is more akin to stomach ulcers, which everyone _knew_ were caused by stress, until of course a physiological cause was found.

Everyone knew that there were multiple contributing risk factors, including physiological, behavioral, and stress-related, for gastric ulcers before H. Pylori's contribution was discovered. And all those other factors are still relevant after H. Pylori, too, its just one added factor that wasn't known previously.
If I run a computer system that commits a crime because of a bug, I will be held accountable for my system's actions.

For example, I might misconfigure my FTP server to include my music collection, facilitating piracy. Or I might write a shopping cart that takes everyone's money and doesn't deliver their product. An "honest mistake" defense won't get you off the hook for these.

Since the law applies to everyone equally, airlines should also be responsible for their mistakes. We have laws against false advertising for good reason and if we stop enforcing them, companies will take advantage.
While Altman and Musk don't spend all their time on it, I'd hardly call them "lay people". Altman studied AI at Stanford, and Musk knows a fair bit more than the average person about computer science and technology. The DeepMind people are also pretty bright on this topic, and they were concerned enough to set up an "ethics board".

As someone with multiple degrees on related topics, I was pretty skeptical of the concerns as well. That is, until I read Nick Bostrom's book "Superintelligence": the fact is that the consequences of SMI are so potentially disastrous that even if the odds were 1 in a 100 it would make sense for us to be very careful. But the probability of SMI happening within the next 100 years is likely far more than that.

Don't want regulation? Then come up with a proposal that has a better chance of keeping things under control and simultaneously utterly obviates any incremental benefit caused by imposition of a regulatory framework.

It's one thing to distrust authority, especially when said authority wasn't earned. In the case of Musk, Altman, Bostrom, (and many others) ignoring the thoughtfulness they have brought to this issue seems extremely reckless.
Exactly, if they wanted to propose XMPP 2.0 like they did with HTTP, they could have done so.
I'm really looking forward to see more tools ported to go. The simplicity of copy/paste deployment is really something you don't realize until you've experienced it.

Now, the simple idea of installing python and dependencies then doing pip install for wal-e installation, made me search for an hour on git in hope for a standalone golang binary.
I think @sama's plan isn't very likely to work. Once strong AI is possible, there's no regulatory structure that will keep the genie in the bottle for a meaningful amount of time.

The only path I see with some prospect of success is to limit the total amount of computation available on Earth. (Basically like Vinge's slow zone). If we could engineer a pause in Moore's Law at just the right point, it would buy us time. Maybe we should put a drastic tax on computation at some stage.
Not so - this routine actually takes a long time by comparison, and I've no doubt the execution will be shamefully slow :) To push 16 bits to the hardware stack on the standard 6502 takes 8 or 9 cycles (depending how you retrieve the second byte); this routine takes 50 (as a round trip including the JSR).
Jony Ive's First Apple Design
No, it's the job of the users to use open standards. I try to use XMPP still and encourage people to use with me. They're probably using Pidgin or a similar multi-protocol chat software anyway SINCE EVERY CHAT PROTOCOL IS A WALLED GARDEN.
Sorry Luke. As usual your fearmongering is not going to get far. For example - MIRI skeptic and famed AGI researcher Ben Goertzel signed the letter (as did I) but not because we are primarily concerned with the threat. Rather:

I signed the document because I wanted to signal to Max Tegmark and his colleagues that I am in favor of research aimed at figuring out how to maximize the odds that AGI systems are robust and beneficial.

The letter helps give visibility and to that end better avenues for funding for AGI projects.

[1]http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.hk/
I'm running Xabber on my phone and I refuse to use WhatsApp. Why would I pay for something when Xabber is free? WhatsApp is also a pain to install and verify your number if you don't have texting.
Your personal relationship concierge
Your project going to be derivative work from UE4. It's mean Epic of course allow you to share it's source code, but you can't grant any more right to 3rd parties than Epic grated to you.

So no way UE4-based project will be FLOSS or even open source.
Oh so all that needs to happen is:

Everyone that makes anything hardware related hires security people full time plus audits.

> So cost $$$ when you can just ship to market anyway since no one thinks about this for a $10 mouse

Have all firmware signed

> Because surely there won't be a cryptographic flaw in signature verification that the NSA can find, or keys to be stolen

Have devices report back

> Because once it's compromised I'm sure the NSA can't figure out how to report back otherwise, despite having already done so for the HDs.

Yah so umm, good luck with this one world. The only hope we have is that firmware is far harder and a giant diversity of devices generally exist...
Why Top CS School Doesn’t Mean Top Software Engineer
I agree that regulation is probably worse than useless. But the people who are most worried are doing the opposite of anthropomorphizing. A prominent argument is that there are a very large number of possible AI motivations, which needn't have anything in common with the motivations of humans, and most of them are probably incompatible with human survival.

"The AI does not love you or hate you, but you are made out of atoms it can use for something else."
> If the airline overcharged someone due to an error, do they give refunds?

Yes
Personally, I have two problems with Republic Wireless: no ability to bring your own device (I'm never buying a device from a carrier again), and an attempt to guilt-trip the customer into not using data (either you're unlimited or you're not, don't tell me I have unlimited data if you're going to gripe when I use it).
Guy wants job at Snapchat – Submits resume in story form
I think there would be huge problem to what count as "your own project source" as it's going to will hugely use UE4 code. So I posted my thoughts on licensing above.
And maybe you could describe why regulating AI research must be an unmitigated disaster? If over time it proves that certain areas of research provide a clear existential threat to our species, why is it irrational to then attempt to slow down certain fields of research relative to others?
So gone are the days of being able to have one IM client for all of the different protocols. It's going to be on the desktop the same as it is on the phone, and we're all going to be running 4-5 different IM clients with all the same features just to be able to talk to everyone.
Well, I for one, welcome our AI overlord.
Actually no. Microsoft branded several licenses that way, but some of them are OSI-approved and FSF-approved (while not compatible with GPL).
This is related to Moxie's blog post from last week just before the release of this software - which is textsecure for iOS - see http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software.html.

Man, you guys can't remember a thing for a single week?
If you're going to call something a "moon" of Earth merely because it's in an orbital resonance, then by the same argument, Pluto is a moon of Neptune.
Well, he's often said the only reasons he will sell is if a business's competitive advantage disappears, he's lost faith in management, or he needs the cash.

Johnson & Johnson would be one recent (2012) example where I think neither the first nor the third conditions applied (though he only said they'd "obviously messed up in a lot of ways in the last few years" in an interview, and didn't discuss it in the shareholder's letter at all).
What would change your mind? Him writing how he felt? I doubt he was ecstatic about failing, I feel this is more of a "alright, this happened, lets just break it down". I appreciate the writeup.
This point always confused me. Isn't the "center" just the point where the big bang took place and started the expansion of the universe?
"Lyme borreliosis"? Not likely. This is for years now...
It would be awesome if they open sourced the hardware. Then hackers could build their own Triggertrap Ada to interface with their mobile app.
I'm going back to pencil and paper.
I think you are far too confident about the usual business approaches to security.
have you looked into finding a contractor for the work that needs done now. Also, your kidding yourself if you think someone with a new baby is going to pop right back into things with out missing a beat in a month.
I'm a little confused - the article says it's 2.2 billion light years away yet the expectation is that it would be a very immature galaxy. Wouldn't it have had ~11.6 billion years to become a more mature galaxy before the light we're looking at left?

The Earth is older than the light from that galaxy. So why the surprise at its apparent maturity?

Edit: to answer my own question the galaxy cluster that's doing the magnifying is 2.2 billion light years away. It took some googling to figure that one out!
From what I understand, polyphasic sleep has fallen out of popularity lately due to lack of evidence that it actually works better than a "normal" schedule. Even this author you linked to only does a light 20 min siesta.. barely even biphasic (if you're not hitting REM sleep in your nap).

Counterpoint: http://greenminimalism.com/2013/06/15/is-polyphasic-sleep-he...
Spark Release 1.2.1
It's not "false advertising." It's a mistake. Whether or not you agree, it's pretty well established that companies can cancel orders for items that are priced incorrectly--especially if they're in the "so good you must know they're not true" category. It's basically analogous to the signs you see in supermarkets about incorrect pricing in their weekly mailing. Some of the associated legalisms are that the order isn't necessarily consider "accepted" until it goes out for shipment as I understand it.

Clawing back money for something that's already been delivered is much much more problematic though.
Regarding the editor, unreal is pretty amazing.

If it runs.

...and that's a big IF. The editor ran like absolute rubbish originally on macs, to the point where it was actually unusable.

They've done a lot of work on that, but it's still miles away from the unity editor.

I think it's really hard to argue the unreal editor is better; it's a lot slower, but it does have some nice tools.

You also can't create extensions as easily (if at all?) as you can for unity.

As you say, they're two different things, and the unreal editor is actually not bad... but if you were to compare them, the unity one would certainly rank more highly.
This is exactly what I am referring to actually. Re-read my point, but apply it to your own example. This prominent argument assumes that we would be able to understand the possible AI motivations, which is a form of anthropomorphizing. We must acknowledge that the reasons it exists and what it may want could be impossible for us to understand or process. The interesting question then becomes how to act if understanding its wants is impossible?
Why PHP thinks that two different hashes are equal, and other scary traps
My personal experience with these types of apps is that what people post in their profile and what actually happens upon meeting are not highly correlated.
Kickstarter funders aren't customers; they know there's a risk. That's the whole point.
Copyright for APIs is going to be a disaster and only the SCOTUS can stop it
Yeah, any reasonably skilled programmer can write a pretty graphics engine as a hobby project, since that is the fun part of making an engine. It's all of the other boring stuff that is worth (arguably) more than 5%. Writing the resource management system and the editors takes a long time and a lot more effort and is not as fun or glamorous as writing a rendering engine.
There's a whole genre of that stuff. Look in the back of any gun magazine for ads.
The legal answer to your question is that they reserve the right to refund your ticket at any time up to the point of you actually being in the air. Buying a product at a retailer, where your interaction ends when they hand you a receipt, isn't really the same. The comparison would be better if United had tried to charge consumers after the flight. The real question, if you want to use the Rite-Aid example, is "should the employee be allowed to investigate the $1 price tag upon seeing it rung up," and yes, in my opinion, they absolutely should.

That gets to the moral answer, which I think is what you're really asking, I honestly don't think it's that black and white. From the perspective of a business, there are two phases to this mistake, right? The first is letting them buy a ticket; the second is honoring that ticket. The first part doesn't hurt; the second hurts a lot. If I can catch that mistake before the second phase, why shouldn't I? Maybe I'll lose some customers who are genuinely upset that they couldn't take advantage of a bug in my software, but in the long run, I'm not convinced it's harmful.

Meanwhile, from a consumer standpoint, as someone who has -- many times -- bought things at a premium discount because of a bug in software (preorder costs for video games are especially vulnerable to this), each and every time I make that purchase, I'm willing to accept that if they catch it before they ship it and want to refund me the discounted purchase price, fine. I know I'm exploiting someone's mistake and I feel like that's not completely honest.
+1 for transmission, great app.
This is such good news!!!!! I wanted to do something for VR and since I am just one dev things seemed hard doing things the native way. This just made my day.
Contributor to Deeplearning4j here.

I deeply disagree with Sam’s assessment of the dangers of SMI and his prescriptions to regulate it.

1) In our lifetimes, humanity is much more likely to damage itself through anthropogenic climate change and nuclear disasters both deliberate and accidental than it is vulnerable to the development of SMI. If anything, machine intelligence will probably allow us to approach those other significant problems more effectively.

2) For regulatory limits on the progress and use of technology to be effective, the rules must be global, and the technology must be detectable. Neither of those conditions is likely to be fulfilled in this situation. Any law that requires the agreement of and enforcement by every nation in the world fails before it is even formulated. Humanity has shown very little capacity to agree on a global scale. The proliferation of nuclear arms and the persistence of human trafficking are two cases in point.

3) Unlike nuclear testing, the development of SMI would not be detectable with Geiger counters. It does not produce explosions that are seismologically measurable half a planet away.

While the US should incentivize the “right” research into machine intelligence through financing and other means, onerous regulations and absurd government bodies will simply shift research offshore to other countries looking for an edge. (Machine learning research does not require large facilities. All you need is a keyboard and the cloud.) That offshoring would be disastrous for the United States, because our competitive advantage in the world economy is technological innovation.

At the same time, regulation by slow-moving committees will simply drive military/intelligence research underground. I doubt the three-letter agencies will acquiesce to a law that puts them at a disadvantage to their peers.

In other words, if SMI is possible, then it is inevitable. It will be put to many uses, like all technology. If we are technological liberals at all, then we must trust that the positive affects of machine intelligence, on balance, will outweigh the negative ones. We should not be the ones sowing fear.
> For example, I might misconfigure my FTP server to include my music collection, facilitating piracy. Or I might write a shopping cart that takes everyone's money and doesn't deliver their product. An "honest mistake" defense won't get you off the hook for these.

Honest mistakes will indeed get you off the hook in your examples. Criminal laws have intent requirements, and honest mistakes usually don't clear the bar for criminal culpability.

Now, if the circumstances are such that the jury simply doesn't believe it was an honest mistake, rather than intentional, that's a different issue.
Location: Porto Alegre - Brasil

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not right now

Technologies: PHP (did a lot of projects with Yii Framework and Wordpress), Javascript (from JQuery to NodeJS).

Résumé/CV:

I am a 25 y/o grad student about to finish my CS course and looking for freelance/remote opportunities to improve my portfolio and meet people around the world.

Currently I'm available close to 30h per week, but I'm very independent and fast to get work done. Please send me an email and I'm sure we can work things out.

Email: gdelavald <at> gmail
Just curious did you actually want to fly to new york? Or was it a case of "wow it is only 1.86 to go to nyc, i guess i am going".
And a related question – if we can't understand its motivations or its why, what can we actually understand about it?
I agree that the author seems very nonchalant about this. He made rookie mistakes that were completely unnecessary. The project was essentially dead from the get-go because they had no idea how much money they needed to raise. The financial projections were comical. Thinking 500k is an nearly unlimited amount of money is shockingly naive for somebody who already has 5 people on the payroll from their existing business.

That said I think some perspective is necessary. Businesses of any size squander money every day of the year. So does the government, obviously. When a billion dollar business squanders $100M on a boneheaded idea nobody blinks an eye. Even though that money could have gone to employees or shareholders. When government projects go way over budget we don't care, because it's par for the course. It's only when tiny 5 people shops mess up that we become judgmental. I don't think that's right.

Squandering 500k is bad, but the 2008 crisis wiped away trillions. Countries start trillion dollar wars on the flimsiest of pretense. Lousy CEOs crash billion dollar companies. In the big picture, a 500k mistake just isn't that big of a deal.
It is technically a donation:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/chancebarnett/2013/09/09/donatio...

...when I first heard about it, it was frankly obvious that kickstarter was a devious way around SEC investment rules regarding the category of "accredited investor". Nothing since then has suggested to me otherwise. But that's how the scam works. It's a donation that feels like an investment.

If people are actually stupid enough to donate money thinking they are "investing" that merely shows the success of the con.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't exclude the possibility that AI experts are biased for at least three reasons, namely (1) that they believe in some sort of sanctity of the human mind (like many people do), (2) that they don't want to be regulated and (3) that they don't want to raise overblown expectations. There are definitely historical examples in which the majority of experts was wrong.

I also find it incredibly difficult to tell what is missing about an algorithm. Perhaps multiple breakthroughs are necessary, perhaps just one (there is no good reason to believe that an algorithm that yields AGI can't be considerably simpler than what happens in the human brain). Initially, nobody thought that search could be done in O(log n) and similarly not many researchers expected neural networks to perform useful tasks until back-propagation was invented and demonstrated.
If you are expecting to be paid back in full then you should not be spending your money on Kickstarter!
Superintelligence and intelligence explosion are mentioned as valuable things to investigate.
Sam Altman's (4) "provide lots of funding for R+D for groups that comply with all of this, especially for groups doing safety research" is especially important. Regulation is a mixed bag, but safety research is pure upside and research surrounding AGI safety has been severely under-funded in the past.

The Future of Life Institute has a grants program going on the subject, allocating a $10M donation from Elon Musk. Their abstract submission deadline was yesterday. I wonder how much good safety research they have asking for funds, as compared to their budget?
> If the airline overcharged someone due to an error, do they give refunds?

Yes?
Look at their webpage: http://triggertrap.com/

"Compared to a traditional remote trigger (...) it represents superb value for money - Trusted Reviews"

How about they add something like: "Took 500,000 from 'customers' and gave them nothing in return"

At least this wouldnt be misleading