skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't consider myself particularly alarmist about too many things, but I have to admit I'm a little worried about machine intelligence on one front:

What happens when most people have no salable skills due to the combination of robotics and AI? We're essentially going to have to live w/ income supports for the 90+% of Americans, and worse for the countries to which we've exported eg electronic device construction and clothing manufacture. I think there's a nonzero chance society essentially tears itself apart during the transition period. It is now the Republican party position that not all people deserve healthcare, housing, or enough food to eat. What happens when their hated segment of the populace gets much bigger in a job market that doesn't need cashiers, janitors, gardeners, cooks, taxi drivers, car washers, many farmers, or most menial labor?

Also, I would note that creating AI that requires less control makes it more useful. So in some sense the development of AI itself fights against controls.
I'm reluctant to use anything with the word "ninja" in it because it wreaks of immaturity.
I have yet to meet a serious AI researcher who worries about AI ending the human race. At every AI conference I've been to lately, some guy would inevitably ask the same question to the speaker: "do you think we should be concerned by superhuman AI?". The answer was always the same, for instance from Andrew Ng at the Deep Learning Summit a few weeks ago: "dude, stop it. That's such a distraction".

> One of my top 4 favorite explanations for the Fermi paradox is that biological intelligence always eventually creates machine intelligence, which wipes out biological life and then for some reason decides to makes itself undetectable.

Since you are so knowledgeable about the unknowable, may I ask, Sam, do you think angels are male, or are they female? It has been a long standing question among the sort of people who like to predict the coming end of the world.

Seriously, billionaires and pundits warning us about our impending AI doom is is such a distraction. Does AI have its dangers? Yes. And nobody talks about them. The danger of AI is that is will put increasing power in the hands of those who have the data and the know-how, i.e. large corporations and governments. The power of mining usefully the troves of data they have on every citizen, both on a micro level and a macro level, to understand what people are doing, what they are thinking, and what they are going to do next. And ultimately, to control what they think (to give you an idea, Facebook can already influence your mood by selecting what goes into your newsfeed).

First comes intelligence, then prediction, and finally, control.

Yes, AI is something we should probably be worried about, in the same way that we should have discussed the privacy implications of the Internet years before the NSA files. But a terminator-like end of the world scenario is not a concern. If you are clueless about a topic, please refrain from making grand statements about its future.

A great quote from Neil Gershenfeld:
"The history of technology advancing has been one of sigmoids that begin as exponentials."
Did MS start out to just write BASIC for the Altair? Or if asked would they have said they were going to write software for computer users? The second phrasing doesn't sound so lame. And I imagine you can come up with a lame sounding subset for many companies.

Edit: I get the point that companies might have a larger scope and to look out for it but deliberately trying to come up with a lame tagline seems... Off? Did AirBNB really set out just to offer a single place with air mattresses? Like no plans?
Thanks. Seems to me these anecdotes have to do with humans.

So is the implicit assumption that machines will do what humans are doing ('bad' things) but at several orders of magnitude faster and without the ability to comprehend longer-term consequences of their actions any more than humans do at the present time?
Funny you should ask. Working on it as we speak!
Business VOIP Security Is Finally Serious Business in 2015
Not sure this proves anything.

People in pain are more likely to seek such relief. People in pain tend to be less healthy and more likely to die soon.
Google Chrome Bugs: Pwnium reward pool up to $∞ million
That definitely was too much, just for an interview. A couple times, I had someone ask for a consulting project as a coding test, like the guy who asked for a program that connected to Interactive Brokers and executed VWAP trades. That test project was too specific and detailed.

My rule now is that if the pre-interview coding test takes more than 15 minutes, I just pass.

A lengthy pre-interview coding test has many issues:

- you could do it and not get an interview

- you could do it, and they turn out to be douchebags (likely, because they're insulting your time with the test)

I just pass on almost all pre-interview tests now. How do you know it's worth your time until you meet them?
Ironically, a number of General Magic alumni have gone on to found companies that deliver on parts of the general promise, eg. Andy Rubin of Android ("talk to your phone and get any answers you want"), Tony Fadell of Nest ("tell your thermostat about the comfortable home you want"), and Pierre Omidyar of E-Bay ("tell the Internet what obscure item you want").
Ready by dawn: Taking advantage of our surprise Product Hunt launch
I don't understand how we'll ever have a "superhuman" AI in any meaningful sense. If by some AI in the far future is ever engineered to (or accidentally) starts doing something to destroy humans, we could always repurpose the algorithm to create a counter-AI to solve that problem. The errant AI may cause a lot of damage, but in terms of smarts, it won't be smarter than the smartness humans can harness.
@vonnik I didn't argue that coding challenges were bad. I'm arguing that it's improper for businesses to offload their hiring costs onto programmers. Any business can offer a hiring challenge, but it should be prepared to pay programmers to take them.

As you say, hiring someone is like getting married. So too is getting hired by someone. If I asked you (the recruiter) to write a 1,000 word essay (tailored to each applicant) on why you'd be a great employer, would you do it? Please be honest. I suspect that you'd suddenly see that your time has significant value.
Did sama not simply consider that, by the time AI becomes so powerful as to be dangerous, we might also be able to program an AI with the opposite function, ie 'save humanity', and watch it fight the 'bad AI'?
The US Supreme Court has affirmed that fish are not an info-storage device
Weird train of thought about the supposed scarceness of saunas. My gym in SF has a sauna. Many people use it every time they work out. You can only stay in there for like 10 minutes. Not a huge time investment. Are you telling me that only the very wealthy can afford an $80 monthly gym membership?

Some apartment buildings in Berlin I visited had saunas built in (and these were not luxury buildings).

My understanding is that saunas are even more prevalent in Scandinavia. You should rethink your reasoning.
Wow. Universities trying to protect their franchise as businesses (even if they're non-profit, they pay salaries to the people making this pronouncement...), rather than advancing their core mission.

Seems a lot like the publishers of journals. Yay! (Perhaps they can die in the same fire.)
Magic is chatroulette. A bizarre, temporary amusement. It acquires your curiosity, it gets media buzz because of the premise (which can't be delivered on), but the foundation under it and the 'company' behind it is sand.

To pull off Magic, realistically, will require extraordinary resources and execution. Magic will flame out long before they can manage to acquire such.

A company like Amazon however, might just attempt a variation of it. For Amazon it can be another AWS service: ordering things as a web service. Amazon sources contractor labor, said labor gets reviewed / rated. It's a form of mechanical turk.
for..of simply desugars into getting an iterator from the iterable and then iterating it, right?

To compose iterables, you'd presumably work with iterators directly instead of the sugar.
Half of those things aren't even predictions they are just meaningless statements; those that are predictions are not based on any arguments.

Piece of rubbish.
> If you write a standard, and no one uses it, what use is it exactly?

Only non-people don't use Apple, got it.
I'd like to say...

I just attended a talk where one of the professors is using NSF funding to conduct research, then patent all of their work. Companies are then forced to pay the university based research group for use of their products and for further development.

Personally, I cannot decide whether or not this is for the best or not. The research group can bring in more money to produce quality work. On the other hand, the tax payers are benefiting the creation of patented items they have to pay for?

It seems really strange to me.
Sauna bathing is associated with reduced risk ;)
Unfortunately that is what I've experienced.

I direct your attention to sort: https://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse/src/sort/sort.go#...
This defines sort on []int and []float64.
If you want to sort a []int32, you have to manually define Int32Slice and copy paste lines 232-237. Copy paste the same lines again for any other slice of built-ins you wish to sort, e.g. uint32, uint64, int64, float32, etc.

They removed the entire set of vector containers now, but for the canonical way to implement IntVector, see https://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse/src/pkg/container... -- and compare that to stringvector.go in the same directory. It's almost entirely copy/paste with string substitution to replace int with string.
In fact AI was essentially paused for years during the AI Winter.

That's completely false. AI winter wasn't about AI research being "essentially paused" but about AI startups becoming essentially non-fundable. It was backlash to the intense hype that surrounded the category.
Right - that's why the abstract talks of of an "association". Correlation, not causation.
Militaries are developing AI-controlled guns and mobile gun platforms. They have already accidentally killed humans. http://www.wired.com/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki/ Another incident like this with more intelligence and mobility could kill a lot more people.
Universities are an interesting case in patent reform. By many people's definitions they would be the patent trolls that we are trying to get rid of: They are not the inventors, and they don't make anything.

As an engineering student at one of the schools on the list I like that my school is willing to pay to file a patent with my name on it even if any revenue would mostly go back to the school.
"Scala for the Impatient" by Cay Horstmann; awesome resource to learn Scala because the author relies heavily on Scala REPL and the supporting text is full of clear succinct summaries of fundamental scala concepts
>The CIA spied on MLK Jr., discovered he was having affairs, and used that to try to blackmail him into committing suicide.

Have you got any more on this? Would be interested to read.
> The median income of a California resident is about $29k.

The median income California resident (even a dual-income household of such residents) is unlikely to have had a $200,000 home in the 1980s, or, if they managed it, to have its property value increase to $1 million in the intervening 30 years while remaining a median income California resident.

Heck, by a common guideline (reasonable house price = 2.5 times annual household income), a dual-median-income family at the current median level can't afford a $200,000 house today.
Show HN: TechCasts – A list of podcasts on design, development and freelancing
What if it's the other way around: Individual emphasis on material goods the whole society to appear as such?
$80 per month is a lot of money for most people. It's like buying a new pair of running shoes every month. Quite a luxury. This in itself separates groups of people. Reasoning stands.
I've made that argument in the past too. However, the linked blog post does make an interesting case that there is some reason to believe it does in fact look objectively "weird".

There should be ways to test this. This theory implies that video games should look "better" in an A-B comparison at 60fps if you add certain types of probably-subtle noise to them, probably even through temporary frame rate drops. If so, that would be an awfully cheap way to improve game graphics.
How about Shane Legg (One of the cofounders of DeepMind)?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/691/qa_with_shane_legg_on_risks_from...

Quote:

Q6: Do possible risks from AI outweigh other possible existential risks, e.g. risks associated with the possibility of advanced nanotechnology?

Shane Legg: It's my number 1 risk for this century, with an engineered biological pathogen coming a close second (though I know little about the latter).
Taking Screenshots from Memory Dumps (2012)
Go nuts.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2zdys9hzpr6a7ln/ioi140152.pdf?dl=0
Read: It would harm the gravy train of patenting government funded research. Not good for Corporate U.
Magic isn't going to exist in a year, so that's a non-premise.

They're going to drown and the temporary hype will go away (needed to support the volume, which will fall out from under their service just about the time they're trying to raise serious capital), long before they can scale up and deliver on the premise.

Someone else will make a lot of money off of a service like this, but it is not going to be Magic.
Three Men Transfer Messages from ‘Mind to Metal’ with the First ‘Bionic’ Hands
The only persuasive point I've seen against HFR movies is that they can reveal a little too much detail. Movies rely on makeup and props and sets which may create a good illusion of reality at 24 fps, but maybe not at 48.
Blizzard users experience massive troubles on login
Nor gamemasters, neither players can login to eu.battle.net at the moment.
Yanni is a professional musician who did music all day every day. I'm a lay person and I could hear it. I find it hard to accept that he couldn't tell the difference between excellent and inferior sound reproduction, and wouldn't demand the former.

He was at the height of his fame and so had a reputation to uphold and the resources to do it.
It's "ok" in the absolute sense, but not ok in the context of human perspective, which, by definition, is the only one that matters.
I feel you're missing open whisper systems' target audience. If you've seen how regular people use computers, their phone is the most secure device a normal person owns. Not the most secure if you're worried about targeted attack, but the best place to put a dent in cheap dragnet surveillance :)
I always thought that people bringing up things like "Look at how this AI beats humans at chess or plays a damn fine game of Snake" to be a total cop-out, largely because these types of bots overwhelmingly use primitive techniques and are written pretty much every time a video game is being developed, and the latter field isn't usually what you think of cutting edge AI research?

It's not that I discount strong AI, but I treat people being quick to bring up game bots when trying to convince of an AI apocalypse to be a red flag. Do try to give information to the contrary.
Yes, s/US innovation/university revenue/g
Another uncontrolled-for possibly contaminating factor. There are a host of diseases that make people heat intolerant. Multiple sclerosis (big in Finland) and heart failure are two of them.

People who are relatively intolerant of heat will tend to avoid saunas, thus biasing the outcome in favor of positive health outcomes for people who are able to tolerate the heat.

So they would have had to do a very careful assessment of these people at the time of enrollment in the study.
If Django 1.7 is the "new normal" (and I don't think it is) then this is a comparatively small release.

Django 1.7 was just huge; this is more in line with the changes in 1.5 and 1.6.
That's fairly analogous to the current NIST regulations.

Unfortunately, NIST has been dragging 140-3 in draft form on for years. 140-2 was written in the 1980's and reflects very badly on current hardware and software practices.

Another area you could look into is Common Criteria. I find these certifications to be much more modern.

I've taken products through both processes. If you're going for more than the basic levels they can be quite rigorous and thorough.
Nothing prevents you from having multiple microservices sharing the same codebase.

That said, the "it's just like the web" model doesn't sound fantastic to me. It sounds like your app now depends on contracts which are only enforced by good practices, not by something strongly typed you can check at compile time, unless you use something like protocol buffers to generate the boilerplate.
To be really fair, out of the four biggest browser vendors (MS, Apple, Mozilla, Google) only Google makes it possible to use the other browser engines on their mobile platform.
>The future employer might be deceived, but the other students who did not cheat are the real injured parties. They will have a lower GPA either in relative to the cheaters (no curve); or possibly absolutely if the class is graded on a curve.

I'm not promoting cheating on tests - but.., I do think the value of a class is primarily in the education and not the grade; therefore in my opinion students aren't being cheated, because they all learn as much as they want to learn. Where as if the grade were the value - people should not have been forced into such a course in the first place!
Although, obviously the system (or mostly employers) need some objective metrics for assessment and they have made them (perhaps poorly in some aspects but what systems aren't?)
Nk – A cross-platform application framework for Node.js
Shocked! I'm just shocked! Gambling at Rick's!

(Since universities have an overwhelming interest in making tons of money, this is a typical non-story-story "dog bites man". The only thing of interest is the contortions the players will go through to keep the cronyism humming along. The joke above references the movie Casablanca. Everybody knew that there was a lot of money changing hands but the official position had to be that there was total surprise when it was discovered. If you can't see the money changing hands here, you're not paying attention)
Isn't the PCI standard a better, although certainly imperfect, model for addressing this without roping the Beltway into the process?
Anyone more than the simplest app with only one developer will quickly require more than what the GitHub app provides. Whatever issues you run into, when you Google and you haven't learned git, you'll have no clue. I like the mapping of git commands: I can use the CLI, but I have a tool that makes that workflow faster, rather than hide it from me because it's too hard.

However, for a tool that lets you quickly commit and push, which is what the Github app is ideal for, Gitbox is very nice (Mac only however).
How does SourceTree compare to gitx? I've still to find a suitable alternative to gitx, which is light-weight, lets me visualize branches, and stage hunks. That's really all I need in a git gui.
In philosophy, "identity and individuation" is an interesting topic. Saul Kripke, a logician, wrote a book titled that. Philosphy of logic has solved some puzzles there.

Identity: what makes us humans?
Individuation: What makes human X different from human Y

We can further go down the abstraction:
Identity: what makes me 'me'?
Individuation: what makes me at X (time, space) different from me at Y (another time, another space).

Whenever we speak of spatio temporal career of an object (object in general, not from programming), there we see the issue of identity.
Anyone know why Harvard and Stanford not on the list?
That is broken by design.
I've been studying machine learning lately... Here is my take:

Well before we create an ASI (artificial super intelligence) we will have put 90% of the human race out of work with specialized (non conscious) intelligent agents... (for example, self driving cars). I believe that this will be a disaster for our society as it exists today. My hope is that we will adapt and make the necessary societal changes so that we can reap the benefits of this technology.

Everyone assumes that an ASI will be able to augment itself and learn exponentially. I suspect that this will be true if the nature of the brain is defined by a single algorithm. If the brain is not defined by a single algorithm and is instead a big ball of complexity then our ASI's will not be able to grow exponentially any more than we can (they will likely not really understand their own consciousness, just like we don't).

If a single algorithm defines the brain, then I suspect humans will be able to augment their brains with machine intelligence as well. If we can augment our brains, then we're playing the same game as the machines.

If it proves impossible to augment our intelligence, I suspect that an ASI would still preserve humanity if only to preserve us for future potentialities.

ASI are much more fit for space travel than us.
1) Not nearly as sensitive to radiation, so less shielding, so less fuel.
2) Much less stringent environmental requirements (no heating, cooling, air, food, etc.)
3) Ability to sleep for incredibly long periods means ASI is far more suited than us for exploring the cosmos.
I suspect that an ASI might leave us alone simply because the universe is so vast, and entirely open to it.
All APIs have performance SLAs that are not consistent. You may have 50% of requests finish in 200ms or less, 90% finish in 300ms or less, and 99% finish in 600ms or less. You can do work to narrow the performance variation but performance is a % chance.
I don't understand how this is a critique of capitalism. Doesn't this argument of shortsightedness apply to all economic and political systems?

The specific defect here is that right now, today, a capitalist country is not, in your estimation, putting enough capital behind biotech to solve the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. More expansively, you're saying that Capitalism is incapable of making this effort.

It sounds facile, but what's the alternative? Isn't this a defect of every economic and political system on the planet, not just capitalism? Cuban communism is not putting sufficient capital in play to solve this problem as well, you know. Nor is passive anarchy in eastern Africa putting enough capital towards solving the problem.

Even assuming that more capital would magically solve this is kind of a naive viewpoint; serendipity and advancement in parallel fields has played a much larger role in advancements in medical technology than directed research has [citation needed], and for all we know, advances in information technology could hold the answers to solving this problem in a much more effective way.

The notion that a directed, centrally planned effort can solve problems (rather than just implement those solutions) is one that is historically unsupportable in any context.
*and by just met, i mean just hired @Mesosphere!
A large portion of houses in finland have a sauna - it's as common as a tub (ok, I don't have exact statistics but more or less). Usually in the least apartment buildings have a common sauna. The cost of usage is neglible. Public saunas in swimming halls etc are not very expensive. The income level is not a factor (what ever the quality of the research may be)
What does your software stack look like?
The universities are one of the biggest problems in all of this. They mostly exist to siphon funds away from the government and individuals (via subsidized loans) and spend lavish amounts on administration, all while claiming they can't come up with $34,000 a year for a professor. Let them rot. They've somehow convinced people their product is worth more than an individual's own drive in learning something, and artificially slow education.