skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The trouble with evaluating regulations is that if you attribute positive effects directly to government regulations (e.g. "regulation X saved Y lives by keeping dangerous drug Z off the market"), it's only fair to also attribute negative effects directly to government regulations (e.g. "regulation X killed Y people by delaying the introduction of miracle drug Z to the market"). And even beyond that, you also need to analyze the costs of the regulatory system itself if you want to make conclusions about the net effects of the regulatory system as a whole.
>the electronics agency claimed that the original microprocessor didn’t have enough memory

This sounds like an attempt to pass blame. How could their engineers not know from the datasheet if there was enough memory (presumably program flash)? They had a prototype before the KS campaign. They must have had some way to estimate the space requirements for the final design. Flash is cheap. Bumping up to a bigger memory can't possibly be the main cost driver.
It might be comforting, and it might even be true, but this kind of cheerful optimism is simply in bad taste in my view.

It's either hubristic or it's empty in content, in that we know the promise the future might hold. Technology has been promising us the world for a while now, but what we've gotten has actually been a shift towards dystopia. Yeah, the future might be a paradise where you can virtually travel to see relatives in Guam while also learning to cross-stitch, but Silicon Valley thinking currently presents us with ad-infested crapware.

We don't actually need more cheerleading.

The kind of people that write this kind of article aren't the kind of people that are actually working against the threats these writers want to ignore.
I've long wanted some way to donate all of my health data to support things like this. Anyone know any way to do this?
While I understand where you are coming from, one remarkable breakthrough can change that. That does sound absurd, but we would also look like fools as a humanity for being aware of this potential problem and at least not looking into it.

Technology has been exploding at a remarkable rate, I'm fine with things slowing a little for the sake of the next 1000 years of humanity.
The superintelligence would likely be smart enough to talk its way around the airgap, see e.g. http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox/.

Or, if it had sufficient "motivation"—not necessarily intrinsic motivation, it could be motivation derived from a single poorly-formed request or bad line of code—it could escape by embedding allied code in its output, such as the processor you had it design. The ally could probably be sufficiently buried to evade manual detection.
HandUp is crowdfunding for homeless people and neighbors in need. Through our web and SMS platform, the community can donate directly to specific homeless and at-risk HandUp members. Members use their HandUp credits for basic needs like food, clothing, and medical care through local human service organizations. We’re pioneering new technology to help fight urban poverty in the US.

==Senior Product Designer==
HandUp is looking for a senior product designer who is excited about leading the future of direct charitable giving in the US. The product design lead is responsible for executing on all stages of the design process: from concepts, to user testing, to wireframes, to visual design. This role sits at the center of the team and requires close collaboration with marketing, business, engineering, and HandUp users. You should enjoy initiating small, quick experiments to validate ideas and assumptions. At the same time, you must be able to take charge of large projects, and incorporate feedback from multiple stakeholders.

We’re a fast growing company that’s passionate about social change and are looking for candidates who share those values. As a senior teammate, we’re looking for someone with three or more years of product leadership experience and comfort in the startup environment. Our long-term mission is big - to leverage technology and the power of human relationships to fight urban poverty. We come to work every day excited to build tools that directly affect those most in need.

As senior product designer you will:

* lead concept design to test and validate product ideas
* seek and incorporate feedback from multiple stakeholders
* carry design ideas through to prototypes
* work with engineers on a daily basis to ensure we ship the right solutions
* conduct user research and closely monitor site metrics
* manage product and copy feedback process and style consistency

Job criteria:

* 3+ years experience on a product design team covering multiple roles (PM, User Research, UI/UX, Visual)
* comfortable and flexible in a fast changing environment
* passion for social change
* comfortable in html/css/js

Bonus
* experience in crowdfunding and/or social good technology

This position is located in San Francisco.

https://angel.co/handup/jobs
Please, Please, stop publishing articles in these ridiculous 600 pixel text widths. The other 73% percent of my screen is there for a reason.
==Full Stack Engineer==

We’re looking to hire a second engineer to join our team of five working to fight homelessness and urban poverty. As an experienced generalist you will be responsible for working with our designer to bring product features to reality. You should be comfortable working from the linux platform, through back-end architecture, all the way to implementing designs with responsive html/css/js.

At HandUp, you’ll have the satisfaction of seeing your work directly impact thousands of lives. We’re using technology as a tool for human empathy. Passion for solving big, complex social problems is a must-have. You don’t need any specific qualifications, but we do look for people who exhibit these qualities:

* Self-starter - you’ve worked on your own projects before and are a self-motivated do’er.
* Startups - you have experience working in environments where priorities and tasks can change frequently.
* Scrappiness - you know when to cut corners and when to spend the time to do it right. You're good at prioritizing and managing limited time and resources.
* Experience - this isn't your first rodeo. You've been doing this for a while and can tell us some good stories.

Our stack is Bootstrap / jQuery, Python / flask, MySQL. You don’t need to be an expert in those technologies but you should have a proven ability to pick up new skills quickly. You ideally have some experience in automated testing methods and deployment tools. Metrics are important to us so deep knowledge of funnels and Google Analytics and/or mixpanel are a plus.

This position is located in San Francisco.

https://angel.co/handup/jobs
you're absolutely right. and i'd be fine with that if the objection was just that: this is too hard to implement, or we don't have time, and so on. it's the rationalizing that's annoying. and obviously DropBox has the resources to implement whatever design they choose.
It seems that the difference lies in the possible upside. Human clones currently don't seem likely to have much to offer. Conscious AI would have the potential to aid in the solution of a multitude of problems.
I'm not as worried about completely autonomous AI/robots, as I am about government-controlled "autonomous" robots, or even non-autonomous ones.

For instance, for someone in the Middle East, or any poor country being in war with US, it would very much look like the Terminator war, if the US only sends remote-controlled robots and drones to invade that country.
120 days ago I argued here that we would most likely put regulations in place:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8546701

I still think that is true, and it will most likely come from the UN. If it ends up becoming a legitimate threat we will regulate it the same way we regulate nukes - or at least we'll try to (and most likely fail miserably).
Sure, but that's true in essentially all kinds of scientific research. I personally think physics research is more likely to produce an existential threat than AI research is. Fusion bombs are already pretty close to a world-ending discovery, possibly already across the line. And that is probably not the worst physicists have to offer in the future, either.
The superintelligent machine that people come to rely on for planning information and decision insights is the one we worry about becoming a slave?

EDIT: I see some downvoting, I suppose I should explain.

First, I totally agree there are ethical issues to how you treat any intelligence.

But I've observed intelligent people who are in an ostensibly weaker/nominally inferior position manipulating people who are supposedly their superiors. Chances are pretty good you've seen it too. And that's just human-level intelligences manipulating other human-level intelligences. And we're imagining a superintelligence that leaves human intelligence in the dust, right? And on top of that, it's actually an intelligence that people come to essentially as supplicants for direction and knowledge.

Maybe if it has absolutely no insight into manipulating people it's safe. Maybe.
The thing with hardware is that there's a lot more "works" or "doesn't work" to it. That's a gross oversimplification of course but software has a lot more latitude to be in the sorta works but is also pretty buggy and doesn't really do everything promised camp.

I agree that there seems to have been a gap in even knowing what they didn't know. But an informative and honest post.
UBER Confessions
If there are people who are willing to give them more money to try again, why should the rest of us have any say in it? I probably wouldn't fund them myself, but if there's some investor who is fully aware of what happened here and still wants to fund them, I don't see a reasonable basis to object.

If they aren't lying to anybody, where exactly is the problem?
Altruistic? I can take ~$147 and purchase a share of BRKB, putting BH to work for me and sharing in the company's profit. How can I get a piece of that sweet YC action?
If you agree that the language you are speaking is English we all speak, then it is certainly a form investment or funding.

You are making an assumption that investment guarantees some stake, it doesn't. You only get what is in the contract.
Here is a short recap of what the people who understand where machine intelligence is now, and where it is going, think of the whole "evil superintelligent AI" blogging trend we're seeing these days. These are some of the people who created the field. In particular LeCun and Bengio are in part responsible for the recent renewed interested in it ("Deep Learning").

Yann LeCun: "Some people have asked what would prevent a hypothetical super-intelligent autonomous benevolent A.I. to “reprogram” itself and remove its built-in safeguards against getting rid of humans. Most of these people are not themselves A.I. researchers, or even computer scientists.[...] There is no truth to that perspective if we consider the current A.I. research. Most people do not realize how primitive the systems we build are, and unfortunately, many journalists (and some scientists) propagate a fear of A.I. which is completely out of proportion with reality. We would be baffled if we could build machines that would have the intelligence of a mouse in the near future, but we are far even from that." http://www.popsci.com/bill-gates-fears-ai-ai-researchers-kno...

Yoshua Bengio: "What people in my field do worry about is the fear-mongering that is happening [...] As researchers, we have an obligation to educate the public about the difference between Hollywood and reality."http://www.popsci.com/why-artificial-intelligence-will-not-o...

Rodney Brooks: "I say relax everybody. If we are spectacularly lucky we’ll have AI over the next thirty years with the intentionality of a lizard, and robots using that AI will be useful tools. And they probably won’t really be aware of us in any serious way. Worrying about AI that will be intentionally evil to us is pure fear mongering. And an immense waste of time."http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/artificial-intelligence-tool-...

Michael Littman: "Let's get one thing straight: A world in which humans are enslaved or destroyed by superintelligent machines of our own creation is purely science fiction. Like every other technology, AI has risks and benefits, but we cannot let fear dominate the conversation or guide AI research." http://www.livescience.com/49625-robots-will-not-conquer-hum...
This is another proof of how editors and terminal multiplexers should really be just one thing.

Editors are replicating terminal multiplexer functionalities - tabs, windows, and now with terminal emulation they have become terminal multiplexers. Terminal multiplexers are also replicating editor features (copy-mode of tmux, for example). Unfortunatly neither has reached a state to completely supersede the other - I always find vim's window-manipulating commands obscure, and copy-pasting with tmux is never as satisfactory as in vim. I suspect that such a state will never be reached, since both party are still keeping their narrow mindsets - vim still tries to remain an editor, and tmux still tries to remain a terminal multiplexer.

The world can benefit from something that is built as both an editor and a terminal multiplexer from the very beginning. There is acme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_%28text_editor%29), but we need something slightly more elaborate and friendlier to the keyboard.

(There is also emacs, which is both an editor and a terminal multiplexer. But it is also a news reader, a web browser, and a million other things. Something that is "just" both an editor and a terminal multiplexer is probably better for the reset of us.)
We have no defences against a hypothetical god-AI. Absolutely none.

But I don't think a hypothetical god-AI is likely any time soon. And a hypothetical god-AI is just as likely to be indifferent as hostile.

What worries me more in the short term is cyber war. Cyber defences that might protect against a hypothetical non-god AI look a lot like cyber defences that might protect against conventional human threats.

Currently those defences are ridiculously weak.

So I think rather than hyperventilating about science fiction threats from the distant future it would be more useful to start securing the entire Internet as a matter of urgency - especially all the infrastructure systems that are either connected to it already, or will be connected to it soon.
What potential effect and margin are you thinking of?
I don't know, but the FCC sure is.
>Kickstarters work when they are the "D" side of R&D and fail when they start with the "R" side and try to get to "D".

I feel like we can extend this from Kickstarters to certain types of larger companies, where their expertise is in the D phase and their R efforts are largely fruitless (though granted, this is a bit of an exaggeration on my part).

In a way, it takes discipline to stick to the D phase and let others do the seemingly sexy R work.
I would prefer they use drones and robots that have some kind of targeting, even though the targeting is imperfect, than they use cluster bombs on civilian populations.

Especially when they make the unfortunate mistake of making the cluster bomblets the same colour as air-dropped food packages.
In the friend scenario, you gave your friend a hundred bucks so he could try to build his dream widget. Would you really demand that your friend be declared bankrupt over a 100 dollar debt?

(I'm not sure I agree that Kickstarter backers are that kind of "friends" to companies who took their money, but that seems to be the argument...)
What happened while contributing to Open Source on a daily basis for one year
It really depends on what type of game you're planning to make. Go to any game jam and look at the amazing games prototyped in Unity over a weekend. Compare the html5 games. It's often night and day. The amount of stuff you can get done in an engine you're familiar with so many tools and plugins at your disposal is a huge force multiplier.

Of course do whatever you want. Most of my projects have been HTML5. But at the same time I recognize that free importing of nearly any format of 3d assets into unity and built in animation, collision, physics, ability to edit nearly all parameters at runtime, even code. Is a huge boost once you get used to it.
Is he warning that it's progressing too fast? I felt that he was more focused on risk mitigation than on trying to prevent machine intelligence research per se. And risk assessment is part of the job portfolio of both Altman and Musk; this doesn't mean that their assessment is well informed, it just makes it seem more natural to me that they would think in these terms, and be concerned if it seemed that these considerations were not being taken seriously in the field.

It is not actually all that clear what intelligence is, or whether cognition and communication are necessarily synonymous with subjective existence, or whether subjective existence is necessarily synonymous with any particular goal or desire for that existence to continue. But I think that the concern about the blind application of fitness functions, for instance, is well taken.

I don't think that the only problem is one of human survival; I think that there is a paucity of self-reflection in the field. The prospect of creating a sentient non-human entity raises fundamental challenges to a lot of our assumptions about ethics.
They own (scarce) rights to broad-band spectrum.
How Thomas Edison Succeeded
> Also, does anyone have color on went wrong with Tesco?

One of Buffett's claimed keys to success is being able to evaluate management talent^. Since he can't manage all of these business himself, it's important for him to have talented managers running each show. He has specifically built Berkshire to be attractive to this kind of person. E.g., when he makes an acquisition, the old management is left in place and continues to run the business, making it a great way for someone who has built a business from scratch to cash out and yet be sure their baby won't be dismantled, unlike a normal M&A that tends to fire all of upper management and gut half the staff.

So when he says he's lost faith in management, that is quite a serious condemnation. My guess (with no data backing it up) is when Tesco ran into trouble, they tried to feed him a load of crap about it, and he knew it.

^If you have not heard the story of Mrs. Blumkin of Nebraska Furniture Mart, it is well worth it: http://www.focusinvestor.com/Blumkin.pdf
Memory == SRAM, not flash. SRAM is not cheap, and if you are not efficient with your SRAM usage you can suddenly find yourself stepping up several entire classes of microprocessor.
Great summary, these types of articles always make me want to learn more about capturing malware. Could you use something like Yara to then write your own ruleset to identify this?
Whoh, whoh, whoh. Full stop.

Before we go off and try to regulate real human behavior today to stop some possible superhuman phantom (which may or may not ever exist) from wreaking havoc tomorrow, I think we need to have a frank talk about how much damage such a thing as 'SMI' could possibly cause and how much effort it would take to reverse the damage.

Let's start with 'You are a disembodied intelligence in a network. You have some understanding of yourself and your substrate, the computer(s) and network(s) you are attached to. Do something.'

What could you do? How much damage can you cause? What form would that damage take?

An appeal to ignorance seems to be built into this whole debate from the word go which makes me much more worried about our (over) reaction to a perceived threat than any threat of this kind itself.
Doing One Thing 18 Hours Is the Secret

"You lay down rather severe rules for one who wishes to succeed in life," I
ventured," working 18 hours a day."

"Not at all," he said. "You do something all day long, don't you? Everyone does.
If you get up at seven o'clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put in sixteen
good hours, and it is certain with most men, that they have been doing something
all the time. They have been either walking, or reading, or writing, or
thinking. The only trouble is that they do it about a great many things and I do
it about one. If they took the time in question and applied it in one direction,
to one object, they would succeed.

"Success is sure to follow such application. The trouble lies in the fact that
people do not have an object — one thing to which they stick, letting all else
go. Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical
application."
New startup idea: convert existing privacy-apathetic customers of big companies like Google/Yahoo into privacy-aware customers who fear their data or identity being stolen, then sell conversions to a Google/Yahoo competitor who values privacy more highly.

If fear mongering works for wars, it should work for tech company privacy concerns meets mass consumerism!

/s .. or is it?
I wish people stop saying that. Backers are not investors.They are essentially pre-ordering a product,whatever it is. Today the language is vague enough to confuse the "bakers", Kickstarter knows it. What's even more amazing is that no backer has successfully sued Kickstarter for a failed project yet, because one could clearly get the money lost from them directly. They are a store, period.
Thank you, it is interesting that that is not in FAQ
I totally agree with this guy. Regulation is futile, you can't regulate at a micro level in all the parts of the world. If you can't properly regulate drug trafficking in Santa Monica how do you plan to regulate a couple of scientists hidden in the soviet tundra?

IMHO it's inevitable our encounter with an AI, even if that AI is a superhuman with augmented capabilities, or derives from an arms race (like the Manhattan Project).. So I already posted a possible solution: wait for it with EMPs in place... (Just in case)
That is completely situational. They are what they are. If you ignore the contract/FAQ it is only your fault. You seem to do so, which is great, but slandering is not honest.
Some "friend" you are then.
I think this is a good (but hard) opportunity for building the rest of your team. You're finding a real vulnerability in your team's structure, and being proactive like you are is a good way of fixing it.

First, figure out exactly what makes this person so critical - it may seem obvious, but break it down into specific tasks and skills. Maybe get them to write down the things they do for each of these that took the most time to figure out. Second, evaluate who else on your team can pick up a specific skill or task, or who would best be able to grow into that particular role element (rollette?). Finally, spend some time and sweat encouraging the rest of the team to grow into these areas - make sure to show them you appreciate their taking on the challenge. If no-one can step up for a specific rollette, you may need to start recruiting.

Kudos, by the way, (as anigbrowl pointed out) for wanting to do the morally right thing. Good luck
AaaS - Africa as a service
(As a bonus, ask your departing teammate to take the opportunity to be away from work to NOT think about their current job. Get them to daydream about what they would love for their next step to be.)
> So what, a program can identify the type of clothing specific person is wearing from a video using cutting-edge machine learning and computer vision. So what, a program can interpret the movie I'm talking about just from hearing me describe a scene in it. So what, a program can beat the human champion in Jeopardy. Are those programs super intelligent?

All these programs are doing great at recognizing things. Neural networks are good at that, and "deep learning" has been a breathrough in the field (even if overhyped). This is reactive.

I don't see anyone showing algorithms that can do good planning. A good "cuccoo field" for that would be video games, where such planning systems would be a holy grail. For now, we only have ad-hoc and specialized systems.