skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do you not see this as being a problem? The sequence of events Sam sketched out is pretty logical. It hinges on machines being able to optimize for "survive and reproduce", which feels very plausible to me.
Yea, 111 8th Ave, most of which (afaik) is a datacenter. They've been kicking out the datacenter tenants when their leases end.
AI masters 49 Atari 2600 games without instructions
I wonder if there are similar cardiovascular benefits for hot tubs. Could it be that it's breathing the hot air in the sauna that's beneficial rather than a general increase in body temperature?

I'm asking because we are thinking about installing a hot tub at some point.
Not the place :/
No, but during the middle of the twentieth century, the USSR grew from a mostly rural, agrarian country to one of the major world powers. (Modulo, of course, Russia, which was effectively European, in much the same way that the early colonies in the US were European and how parts of modern China are "advanced" and others are not.)

If we take these things to have a certain lifespan, I'd expect China to have a significant restructuring around 2030.
Women impacting the tech startup scene (and more) in Chicago (2014)
When writing offenses into the law that are malum prohibitum, it would be wise to expend a bit of effort in deciding whether such laws are practically enforceable.

Parisian authorities would probably have done better to mandate an amateur radio operator's license, identification requirements, and liability insurance.

When it's equally illegal for an otherwise innocent hobbyist and for a malevolent bogeyman, it becomes much harder to impute motives to the unseen operator.

Though in reality, the authorities are likely far more concerned about unauthorized, copyright-violating photographs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Image_copyright_cl... ) than about terrorism.
Hey! This isn't cool. I can't downvote you. but i wish i could
prelude-ls really shines when combined with LiveScript - syntactic support for partial application, currying, function composition, "pipelining" (|>), implicit arguments and so much more really make a difference.

I started writing a comparison between un-sugared JS and LS use for functional programming patterns, here: https://klibert.pl/warsawjs-talk/code.html (for the talk I gave: https://klibert.pl/warsawjs-talk/).

That being said, I'm very interested in mori, immutable-js or lz.js. prelude-ls is nice, but is designed to work with native JS types and provides no extended semantics that I'd find useful. It's still my go-to library when working on the frontend and it probably will remain one, but I'm thinking about contributing some support for other advanced collection types to it.
Eating well and exercising are hard to quantify and control for.
>You could use this justification to rationalize any sort of unethical behavior you like.

It isn't a justification; it's an explanation.

Because, I agree: if there wasn't such a societal emphasis on material goods (ie the Benz), there would be less embezzlement.
>> It's not that you need those credentials to model in Excel.

> Rather, you're signaling that you have a proven capability to work long hours, deal with bullshit, work "within the system", etc. It's not about intelligence.

I'm going to argue the opposing part for a bit here: So OP's response should be (something along these lines):

HA, there you admit it's putting up with bullshit! But if it's bullshit what's wrong with cheating on it as long as I get to where I want (within the system)!

Rather I would suggest the premise that there is an ethical guideline to behaviour should rest, on our ability to validate the consequences of this behaviour. So in the embezzlement behaviour clearly there is a deceived party and someone suffers. In the student cheating behaviour perhaps there is a deceived party (the future employer) - but it's not clear whether someone suffers or not, are biology 101 grades a good indicator of anything (i.e. future performance), should students caught copying biology 101 exams be exorcised from their academic institution with prejudice?

My take on it is that least in the US there is an overtly-strong caveat for this kind of thing (i.e. even copying assignments), while we are generally accepting of various other forms of deceit (i.e. sociopathy).

That said in my personal experience standardized tests are a good deal better than attendance grades, participation grades, national honor society, club activities or whatever other bs people have to put up with in highschool.
The theory sure is applicable, but employers don't pay for theory. If you got a CS degree in 1990 and stopped learning the day you graduated, you'd surely have a hard to finding a job in 2014.

The CS field moves at an especially breakneck pace, though. The half-life of the knowledge learned in school is very short.

There are probably some other degrees out there where the knowledge stays relevant a bit longer. But I think it really comes down to the fact that you need at least some degree of continual learning to stay employable after graduation.
It is definitely a threat but bear in mind that there will not be a single machine intelligence but every computer can only carry one and will interface with the others through the network.

That means that it will suffer the same fault that humanity has, a limited interface to others and a lot of coordination problems.

My take on it is that strong AI will be more similar to a dog unless we succeed in building a computer with more computation power than the human brain.
What has changed in the past year?
I think they're just trying to sell t-shirts, but I do agree that these will be the robots to destroy us.
The insane things we do to kids caught crossing into America
Hard to say to what extent. Remember, at least in the early days before there even was a native SDK, they were very pro-webapp for iOS.
>The whole global warming hysteria is FUD.

Where does global warming come into play with respect to the GP post or the submitted article at all? Though the topics are closely related, the submitted article isn't attempting to spread ideas about anthropogenic climate change.

You're attempting to rally the troops to fight an "enemy" or "hysteria" that isn't present in this discussion. Aside from any concerns about climate change, there are perfectly valid issues to be raised about the impacts of chemical slurries on freshwater supplies -- issues that you've completely disregarded in your haste to dismiss climate change. Following the money trail, like the head comment in this thread suggested, seems to be a valid line of thinking both ways, whether it leads to Gore or a Koch.

EDIT: The one mention in the Ars' article that touches upon climate change is merely a mention of methane as a "greenhouse gas." If that gets you riled up, then maybe taking it down a notch would be more conducive to discussion.
Right, thanks for the clarification. Sorry for the slight derailment.
I read the essay few times and it is not clear to me what Sam Altman is talking about.

I think answers to these questions will help me understand Sam's essay. Can you please help me?

1. What is superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) in the context of this essay ? [edited to add the qualifier]

2. What is the danger from SMI to humans and other current life forms that we are concerned about?
It seems to me that concerns about SMI can be classified into two categories: (a) dangers to "our way of life (work, earn, spend)" and (b) dangers for existence of human race. Are we talking about both these categories? Perhaps other categories?

3. What anecdotes (or evidence) is leading to this concern?
Alternating hot and cold showering or even only a cold shower each day, or a few days a week has als been shown to be healthy.
Celebs are leaking location information on Instagram
I don't find that performance runs at % chance scale. When things perform poorly, they are often very consistent. With this architecture you can rapidly iterate & scale your poor performing core services, while the non-core services can run slowly w/o causing a big deal.

The usual alternative is redeploying and scaling the entire app to iterate on performance, which is a much slower process. If performance is a concern, microservices should be a big win.
Two quotes:

- "We also have a bad habit of changing the definition of machine intelligence when a program gets really good to claim that the problem wasn’t really that hard in the first place."

- "We decry current machine intelligence as cheap tricks, but perhaps our own intelligence is just the emergent combination of a bunch of cheap tricks."
Fast-charging, affordable ‘future’ car that Elon Musk hates (hydrogen fuel cell)
Breaking connections to faculty has consequences, namely in letters of recommendation.
The Perfect Mix of Art, Arduino, Sound Sensors, LEDs, and Star Wars
Ask HN: Curating Blog Posts into a EBook
Is it legal to sell a PDF of curated blog posts that are free?
South Africa spied on own government to get facts on joint project with Russia
You would seriously trust some random person to clean baby bottles for you? Seriously? What the hell.

If I had to get those things at 3AM - I don't know where you live, but for me (Out in the country), it's a 10 minute journey to a 24 hour supermarket, then 10 minutes back. The child would likely nap in the car.
You're correct. It's thought that long GRBs originate in certain kinds of supernovae. (What kinds of supernovae specifically isn't really known.) Short GRBs are thought to originate in mergers between neutron stars.
It has been my experience that the more a particular person attempts to understand and control machine intelligence, the more she grows to fear it and its potential.
OK, I'll be in touch this week. Thanks!
It is crazy they still don't have a Linux version!
I'd add to this list Algebra, Chapter 0 by Aluffi. It's very clearly-written, even for a total beginner like me, but not dumbed down at all, and has a boatload of exercises which IMO is very helpful for learning the material. While its focus is on algebra and not specifically a textbook on category theory, it introduces categories very early on and, to me anyway, explains them as well as or better than any other treatment I've read.
Compare that to what other athletes do in their sports and it seems trivial. The Tour de France involves racing your bike for 130 miles a day, every day for a month, over mountains multiple times a day.
Yes, I was the creator/host of the site but decommissioned it because there was no way to monetize the moderate traffic and I didn't have the time to invest in getting it to be bigger. I will revisit it in about a year, with a broader focus on business & tech in Africa. Email me at jkuria gmail and I'll let you know when it is back up.
> Its much more likely that we humans are excelling at dreaming up apocalyptic scenarios, much like we have always done.....

There's always profit in predicting the end of the world.
I wonder if one day, say 50 or 100 years after we colonize Mars, there will be a "Mars Revolution" with the colonists wanting complete independence from Earth. History teaches us to expect one.
I don't think there will be "a lot of new SMS services headed our way." The real value to the user for Magic is that you can use it for everything. Pizza one day, flight reservations the next. You don't need to google multiple numbers for things.

And if there were multiple SMS services for pizza ordering or flight reservations or whatever, then Magic would just subcontract out to those smaller services, and people would still just use Magic.
Sharing all my tech expenses in 2014
Not sure I understand what you mean. For some family members I set up Thunderbird+Enigmail, which was very quick including keypair generation.

Now they communicate with me always encrypted, automatically. They don't have to know any details about encryption, except that they occationally have to type in their password.
I honestly don't know where the "scam" line lies.
I just used this to book my flight to PyCon 2015 oddly enough. It was pretty damn easy to use and let me jump from its search results to directly booking with Air Canada. Pretty smooth...
I agree. The duality of the "Let's preserve surburbia" while still wanting low rental/mortgages is a little staggering.

If you don't up the supply, the demand is just going to keep getting more intense.
>Regarding NSA and CIA, what do they have to do to get shut down completely?

The US signs a complete unconditional surrender on the deck of the $SHIP of $NEW_WORLD_POWER - at least that would be my guess based on history.

We don't stop for genocide.
Pluto and Ceres may become planets again soon
There's still a person spending their minutes on a random, menial task, it's just not someone with a Hacker News account anymore.
So you think that home owners who don't work in high growth industries should be forced out of their homes.
This deters me from interviewing as well.

I keep my data structures and algorithms book on the shelf - it was printed 15 years ago and uses Java, but it's easy enough to implement in something else. I used to restudy it every few years, for interviews. You need to be ready to do tree traversal, detect cycles in lists, sort and search, create a hash, find shortest paths in graphs.

I go back and forth on whether I'd do this again. I can't say never, because a good enough job might be worth the effort and risk, but I'm hesitant. How many times in life do you want to retake your undergraduate data structures and algorithms exam? I would outright refuse to do a lengthy "homework assignment". I've done that once (7-8 hours recommended time), sent it in, crickets chirping, and a one line brush off from a recruiter a full month later. I'm actually embarrassed to admit I even did this once.

As an aside, while I generally take a dim view of professional licensing, I wouldn't mind taking a "bar exam" for software development if (big if) it were well designed and administered, and perhaps voluntary to avoid regulatory capture. The reason is, I wouldn't mind studying a hundred hours or more for this test if it was widely respected and meant I wouldn't have to keep re-taking it every time I interview.
Google machine learns to master video games
if anyone on any of the networks at any time connected to any of the other networks, their entire theory goes out the window, and i think it's a fair assumption that such a thing happens on a daily basis. you can't air gap people from their data.
I profoundly appreciate the nostalgia you brought back by talking about Mephisto runs.
> I think there's a typo in your signature.

You think right, that'll teach me (once again) not to typecheck my comments. Thanks, and fixed.
No, it's not even remotely "fine." Would you consider it "fine" if the media couldn't distinguish between an Airsoft gun and a bazooka? That's exactly what's happening when the term "drone" is applied to everything in the air that doesn't have a pilot on board.
Would you trust your life on a protocal such as HTTPS?

How often is https broken? It seems like every six weeks OpenSSL comes out with a new advisory full of vulnerabilities. I'm assuming that the world powers out there have zero days in OpenSSL, they attack SSL and VPNs all day long. People will be harmed if they trust HTTPS to secure their correspondence.

It is great that you're trying to give PGP a new life, but you're weakening it by using a vulnerable protocol with it. The weakest link will always break first.
It isn't? Surely you can work long and hours and deal with bullshit at a community college, or even McDonalds... somehow employers don't value that, though. ;-)
Just as a tip, it might be easier to do a progressive upgrade, i.e. move to 1.5 -> 1.6 -> 1.7 -> 1.8 on older code bases. This way you will get deprecation warning, instead of failure. IIRC Django moves from deprecation to removal in two releases.

On a side note, it is also a good time to try out Python 3, as most packages now support both 2 and 3.
did you read the post at all? the attacks happened YEARS ago. they knew about them then and said nothing. either you're an idiot, or you think "immediately" means "years later only after evidence comes to light publicly"
That's highly debatable.

One of the UI's is a piece of software. The other is an English speaking human required to be quick and accurate.

Last I checked the slogan wasn't "manually entered orders done by on-demand employees are eating the world"
I think it's just a question of habit nothing more.
> What is superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) ?

SMI is advanced decision making software that literally eats the world. Think of HAL killing its crew so they don't jeopardize the mission, but on a global scale. Like a stock trading algorithm that determines the best way to maximize profits is to wipe out all human life on the planet or something. --EDIT-- See http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

> What anecdotes (or evidence) is leading to this concern?

Books, movies, pop culture... plus when all you have are first-world problems, you gotta find something to worry about.
First the computers came for our cat meme gifs and I did not speak up. ;)
Tesla’s forgotten co-founder wants to electrify America’s garbage trucks
Go ahead and do it anyway. May be just what Apple and Google need to be disrupted.

Not too long ago, Microsoft used to display similar arrogance. Look where they are now.
> In most places this IS in fact true.

In many places property tax can increase after you purchase a property without California-style Constitutionally-imposed limits; there's very little evidence that this actually makes it reasonably likely for anyone to actually be priced out of property due to value increases in other-than-highly-unusual circumstances.
Machine intelligence does pose an existential threat to humanity. The question is, how does that threat compare to all of the others? Is it greater or worse than climate change, the possibility of a bio-engineered virus, growing income inequality, nuclear war or asteroid strikes? It's true that malevolent machine intelligence has the potential to systematically exterminate all human life in a way that many other threats do not. But the question is, what are the odds of that actually happening?

The first issue is that the development of machine intelligence is wildly unpredictable. We have made incredible progress with statistical optimization and unsupervised categorization in recent years, but we have very little to show in terms of machines that can do human level reasoning, creativity, problem solving or hypothesis formation. One day someone will make a break through in those areas, perhaps solving it all with a single algorithm as the essay suggests. But we have no idea when that day will be and absolutely no evidence that it's getting any closer. sama does note these points and states the timeline for a dangerous level of machine intelligence is outright unknowable. I can only assume that the second part of this piece will explain why we should be concerned about something that might or might not occur at some point in the near or distance future, as opposed to the very real and quantifiable threats that the world is facing today.

The other issue is that we have no idea what the nature of machine intelligence will be. The only model we have for intelligence of any kind is ourselves, and the basic aspects of our reasoning were shaped by millions of years of evolution. Self-preservation, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, a desire to control scarce resources...these were all things that evolved in the brains of fish that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. They aren't necessarily the product of logic and reason, but random mutations that helped some organisms survive long enough to produce offspring. A machine intelligence will start completely from scratch, guided by none of that evolutionary history. Who knows how it will think and see its place in the world? If someone explicitly programs it to think like a human, and it cannot change that programming of its own accord, it might indeed decide to think and act like a sci-fi villain. But it seems like the most likely outcome is completely unpredictable behavior, if it chooses to interact with us as a species at all.

This Superintelligence book has sparked a meme among very smart people. That's just how culture works, I guess. Some ideas catch on among certain groups and others don't. But I can't wait for the technical intelligentsia to move on to something else so that we can get back to the business of making stupid machines that are incredibly good at optimization and prediction. The world has a lot of real and pressing problems, here and now, that affect lives in a negative way. Hopefully we can use statistics to do more with less, and bring relief to those who need it instead of worrying about what-if scenarios and unanswerable questions.
The Neophyte's Guide to Scala is the best language intro I've read.

No other platform I'm aware of has anything like Typesafe Activator, which is an awesome learning/tutorial resource.

There's also Scala Koans out there somewhere I found helpful to practice with.
Two reasons that make this difficult:

- It is difficult to double down on feedback requests when they stop returning your calls and emails after the generic rejection pablum

- One is hesitant to do the same to them (ignoring their requests)

Fundamentally there is a difference in the power relationship here, in my opinion. A typical company can and is able to afford to treat candidates badly but I don't believe that a typical candidate enjoys a similar luxury.
> In the student cheating behaviour perhaps there is a deceived party (the future employer) - but it's not clear whether someone suffers or not, are biology 101 grades a good indicator of anything (i.e. future performance), should students caught copying biology 101 exams be exorcised from their academic institution with prejudice?

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 wholeheartedly disagreeing, but there's so much more to consider:

1) You're not at home.
2) You don't always order Dominos.
3) You don't even know what's available for delivery (I'm in a less urban area than most--Pizza Hut just started delivering in the last 12 months, and doesn't deliver to the whole city)

Essentially, when things get complex, Magic's cognitive load hardly changes at all. If it's a matter of routine (same pizza, same company, same house), your way is probably worth saving the money they charge.

Anyway, my pizza place has none of that. Including "online account," my pizza guy would have a good laugh at that.
I don't think our future will be that bright. (http://i.imgur.com/lM5lmHt.png) [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
People have been making concierge companies for years. Here's one that was around Brooklyn a while back: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/nyregion/thecity/21bode.ht...

You can write good dispatching software, but at the end of the day your scaling bottleneck is adding humans.
Whoops, duh, you're right.

My point was that he's not hurting for work in general, so this story doesn't really have bearing on the talent shortage.
I'm a proctor, and I invigilate exams.
Growth Hacking Success Stories (free course via daily emails)
>The Arctic will become like Antarctica - an everyone/no one space

I don't think so. The arctic countries are really really keen on splitting that pie, and the talks are already on their way.
Disagree. Reputations travel far and last a long time. 2008-2009 was part of a cycle that will come around again.

There are plenty of companies that are unwilling to deal with the friction of "rockstar" developers.
This is already true.
This is way too much. You're better of grabbing "Category Theory (Oxford Logic Guides)" by Steve Awodey and then augmenting it as necessary.