skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might be right that they are safer, but you're totally failing to contest the point. Yes computers are lots better than humans at lots of things, but they are worse at other things. They can't reliably tell the difference between a cat and a bench. Things that may be important when the computer is going 80 mph with humans on board.
Ironically, as someone with children, I am more open to the opposite direction. Practice can lead to passion if someone grows the necessary stimulus reward from it. This can continue on to continued practice and can feed to progress.

Or it could lead to a dead end.
I would agree with this article that every independent solution today does not have the slightest chance to be iteratively improved to some kind of real intelligence. Even the "generic" game playing AI is very limited outside the scope of a pixel buffer and some digital output signals.

However, I don't understand how the arguments correlate to "there is no need to worry about AI". The real worry should come from the fact that there are now many, many more people looking at the problem of AI than before, and it's a competition that now has serious money behind it.

The article mentioned the infinite monkey theorem as a counterargument, but ironically that is exactly how I think we will stumble upon generic intelligence. The more people that work on it and have the confidence, belief, and money to actually try out random things, the more likely it is that someone out there will discover the step change that will, in a day, take AI from deep prediction algorithms to eerily deliberate behavior.

Even if no one manages to shortcut our way to generic intelligence, we sure as hell will brute force it. While we're extremely early in the world of simulating organic brains, they exist. People have constructed virtual organic bodies controlled by virtual electric currents from virtual neurons in virtual brains. It's happening today, and as capacity, domain knowledge, and most importantly awareness increases, more and more people will work on the problem and bigger and bigger brains will be simulated.

I really don't see how we can question whether we will eventually reach human level intelligence running on computers. The only way I see generic machine intelligence not happening is by making people believe it is so impossible that no one ever tries to do it. And maybe that was the purpose of this article.
I like this a lot. Gitlab was hard to get running for me on Debian. Plus it was a rails project so it always takes 10 seconds to start up.

This was pretty quick. As a Go person myself, I love the single binary way.
A subsidy is fundamentally different from a price ceiling, both in terms of its economic consequences and its implementation. There's nothing misleading about that. Both have significant political pressures behind them, but price ceilings manifested as rent control are near universally derided among economists.
I've been using duplicity for a few years now and have been quite satisfied. It did seem slow when I first started using it. I learned to live with it; you run backups overnight anyways.

From what I can remember, a lot of the slowness came from GPG, and specifically files being compressed before encryption. Disabling compression speeds things up, but trades off disk space (and security).

I wonder what it'd take to reengineer the thing to take advantage of multicore -- being CPU-bound on a single core is I think what makes it slow.
> Amazon doesn't really get a break on the hardware cost because 10,000 servers do not cost less per server than 100 servers (in fact they cost more as the volume goes up if you need them to be identical).

Two problems here:

First off 10,000 servers almost certainly cost less than 100. Least of all because you can buy direct from the OEM rather than through a reseller (who profits), and also because the buyer has more leverage for negotiations (that's a lot of money, and they COULD go elsewhere).

Second problem: The servers don't need to be identical, and in fact Amazon's EC2 instances aren't identical (they just pretend to be). If you spin up several EC2 instances over a few weeks then look at e.g. the CPU info, you'll see that they vary quite a lot but are similar-ish (this has caused people issues when they're using on-demand instances and their software relies on specific CPU features, in particular when those features only exist on current-gen CPUs).

PS - Also 10,000 is not even ballpark how many physical servers Amazon has (try 450,000).

> When it comes to labor cost - if you have enough hardware for at least one full time datacenter tech, you're in the same boat as Amazon.

I highly doubt that. Amazon's scale allows them to develop better automation, detection, and procedures in general which allows the number of staff per server to be very low. For example, a single dedicated tech' might be able to handle 10-30 servers MAYBE, whereas at Amazon that might be just a single rack and effectively each tech might be responsible for hundreds of physical machines (even if automation does the lion's share of the heavy lifting).

> So you're paying Amazon to do the same work you would do otherwise - only you're subject to their rules and procedures and Amazon being a profitable business needs to mark their services up.

I will fully admit that a company like SoftLayer (per the article) can give Amazon's EC2 a run for its money. However as someone who's seen the costs associated with running servers in house (in particular staffing costs) I struggle to buy that you can under-cut Amazon by doing so (at least until you have a LOT of servers, and even then frankly it is less hassle to out-source it anyway).

There are legitimate arguments for why you'd want to do so e.g. privacy, security, legal reasons, unique hardware/OS, etc. However if you're just doing something generic like web-host+database, then out-sourcing it to a dedicated company is more cost effective. In particular when you start looking at the hidden costs of internal hosting (like office space, heating/electricity, security, and so on).
For some reason i am still on OS X 10.9.5. It requires OS X 10.10 or later. Any chance to support OS X 10.9.x ?
Who said anything about refusing to burn coal in large quantities? The benefits of the industrial revolution may well have outweighed the costs, and no one is saying it was a bad thing – or likewise, that developments in AI are a bad thing.

But are you saying there's absolutely nothing that could've been done better in the industrial revolution? With some foresight we might have thought to develop solar power more urgently, for example, but no one thought we needed to. Worrying just a little might have changed that.

The point is not to stop progress, just to approach with caution and be mindful of what the long-term implications are.
The Thinkers Behind Musk’s Fear of AI: Russell, Bostrom, and Omohundro
There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing:

Cloud computing offers you the great and awesome advantages of being able to instantly scale your application, replicate your data and basically just grow according to your business volume, and all this without significant investments, delivery time, setup time, people time, maintenance or anything but it's expensive in the long run.

And this is OKAY, this is GREAT.

Once you're big enough, you know what your load is now and what your load will likely be, and you know exactly what you need now and (approximately) what you're going to need in the near future, setting up your own datacenter is way, way more effective.

Amazon does not get free electricity, free servers and/or free people time.
Of course, you're paying that, and you're also paying Amazon's profits.

This is absolutely fine, as long their service fits you.

But when you grow enough, put simply, your needs change. It's just that.
Should drones with RC be considered autonomous? In Canada, apparently not
Author here. This was a weekend project I've been working on. It's very much in beta.

I'm using SJCL (https://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/) and CryptoJS (https://code.google.com/p/crypto-js/) for client-side encryption, and Python's Cryptography library (https://cryptography.io/en/latest/) for back-end encryption.

Would love some feedback. Since it's in beta, signups are limited but you can use "hackernews500" as an early access code to sign up now if you want to check it out.

Thanks!

EDIT (PS - It's not mobile friendly yet, so you'll probably run into some UI issues on mobile devices)
Tags, Trends and News
Chinese internet: Commerce and control
Incuriosity Will Kill Your Infrastructure
This is not entirely true. Certain components pricing decreases as the volume goes up, but this is likely a different scale than softlayer.

Largely the way to efficiently use amazon is to turn of nodes, when not needed for traffic. That is the service you are paying for.
nice. the problem i have with gitlab is not much the upgrage process anymore, but the fact that you don't accept push requests from the community of features that you implemented in the enterprise edition. for example the git hook stuff.

i hope someone who has the time and the skills forks gitlab and merges push requests of new features, even if they are already implemented in your pay-for version.
Short version: measuring time spent with story on screen is more useful than number of times story is viewed. This makes story content more valuable than headlines.
Yep, that is why in the article I specifically pointed out that we have migrated from EC2, but we are still a loyal customer of some of AWS services and those work really nice for us.
Since most vendors source their parts from two or three different places you'll often find that even though you ordered 2000 'identical' computers, they'll have for example two or three different makes of hard drives in them, and sometimes different Bios versions and RAM configurations (2x8GB instead of 4x4GB for example)

If you need 10000 identical severs (ie exactly the same firmware versions, motherboards, hard drive version etc) then that is a bit of a pain since they can't just grab the next 10000 servers out of inventory and ship them to you. You have to make it as a separate special order.
I'd be interested I just don't know how it would work. Most publications want you to pay them I don't know how open they'd be to a more Netflix approach. If it existed I would certainly look into it.
I'd settle for an AI that's better than only the worst drivers. It could monitor your driving, and only kick in if it thought you were that horrible/drunk.
Who in this case is the one living there, and who is the one existing transiently?

Seems more likely that cyclists are local and motorists are not, no?
Could you please list some competitors to SoftLayer? It's hard to get reliable opinions on cloud providers backed up with actual experience. I'd really appreciate it!
Seriously - not the byline I expected to see on something like this.
John Carmack on Mobile VR – 2015 GDC
Another possible option is the Sandstorm.io port of Gitlab. It can be installed as easily as a mobile app. :) That's where I found out about/first tried Gitlab.
Why would they say they have no plans, when it would be obvious even to a deafblind dead man that they are trying to roll their own OnStar, with video?

If they can't handle the video bandwidth, there is little to prevent an initial audio-only rollout.
This ring is an amazing discovery, but you're right that contact between the Viking and Islamic cultures was already well known. The Icelandic sagas, for example, document the prestige won by Norse warriors who traveled to Constantinople and served in the Varangian Guard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard In fact, if you travel to Istanbul today, you can see Norse runes carved into the stones of the Hagia Sophia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_inscriptions_in_Hagia_Sop...
You could use BitBucket. They have free private repositories.

The cool thing about this is that it makes self-hosting a viable option for more people.
Rent control doesn't grant tenants a permanent interest in the property, even if some rent control regulations make it annoying and/or arduous to remove tenants. The person I replied to suggested that landlords should be required to let their tenants stay in their property eternally if the tenant so chose, i.e., that tenants should have permanent control of the property.
Trends in the App Market [Podcast]
Don't hold me on this, just bouncing a few possible solutions:

- Inheritance: start with an empty dictionary and pass it to an "init" function. Inheritance is then just calling another "init" inside it. Allows for "multiple inheritance".

- "isinstance" and "issubclass" are mostly useful for primitive types, i.e. distinguishing between a number and a string. Also, duck typing.

- Custom iteration/use as decorator/context manager: true, it's not possible. We could amend the language to check for dictionary keys or simply use the "a.b -> a['b']" syntax sugar like javascript. Perhaps a pre-processor? Pyscript?

- Static methods: that's a loss. Fortunately we have modules, so you could just make them simple functions. If this were Java we would have problems.

- We don't have encapsulation, but again pure Python doesn't either (name mangling notwithstanding).

I don't know what you mean by "class specific methods", "the different type".
I would like to know the cost calculation after a year or two. With a handful of servers it's easy to get the false impression that HW failures are rare.
The law of rent... not just a good idea. It's the law.
What I Know Now as a Teen with Dyslexia
Fantastic tool all around. I've been looking for something like this for so long!! Thank you lookback!!!
Here's one project simulating the C. elegans (earth worm) in a virtual environment. If they (or any other project out there working on similar problems) can prove that the simplest organic life form can be simulated in a computer, I think that's a big initial step towards brute forced brain simulation.

http://www.openworm.org/
true, but it really is a pain to search on all articles on a talk when some sites change the name of the talk - it is an imperfect world.

You could add the second slides "...least." to the title as shown.
Pretty sure Amazon Linux is just their particular flavor of RHEL, right?
well, we've got plenty of shameful things in the US that we haven't gotten around to fixing, so no worries
I think the key word from his assertion is "decriminalized." Different from "legal."
Great point, seems like after all the biggest issue with AWS is the inconsistent performance. But if you use S3 to store files this is not an issue...
Probability of AGI is close to 100%, conditional on mankind surviving long enough. We know that human brains don't run on magic, therefore you can build a machine that can do the same thing. (Turing computability doesn't matter, if the brain relies on non-Turing-computable physical effects then a machine can rely on those as well.) The current situation where unmodified humans are the smartest creatures around is unstable in the long term.

Saying that we don't have to worry because AI development will take 1000 years is also missing the point. Research into unsafe AI is inherently faster than research into safe AI, because the latter problem is more constrained. If unsafe AI kills us all, the best time to start working on safe AI is 100 years ago, and the second best time is now.

Saying that we don't have to worry because smarter than human intelligences will have a better understanding of morality is also missing the point. All currently known mathematical formalisms for decision-making allow you to plug in arbitrary utility functions, including "immoral" ones. Thinking that future decision-making formalisms will support only "moral" utility functions is extreme wishful thinking.

Saying that we don't have to worry because brain emulations or human cognitive enhancement will come first is also missing the point. These things can be just as dangerous as AI (e.g. see Robin Hanson's descriptions of how mind uploading increases Darwinian pressures on everyone, including non-uploaded people), and can also lead to AI more quickly.

And so on.

If you want to feel safe and protected, no one can stop you. But you don't have any good arguments for feeling safe. I'm sorry, but you really don't. I've been on the lookout for such arguments for years, and I'd be happier if they existed.
it's about a 5-7 year cycle; IT services are outsourced (this time, to the cloud), but as time progresses, all of those services are consolidated (usually, under new management) in-house.

I used to be able to set a watch by HP's cycle before the EDS buyout.
Juergen Schmidhuber's Answers from the Reddit AMA
Thanks for the vagrant files, super easy to set up.
I'll look into lowering the version requirement
Multiple reasons:

1) you can't get new hardware delivered and get it up and running, all in under 10 minutes.

2) also, assuming the previously gathered hardware is not needed anymore, you can't just return it and say "i used it only for two days because i had a traffic spike, take this 200$ and we're okay.

3) you can't programmatically install, configure, reinstall and reconfigure hardware configurations, networking and services on phisycal services. At least, not as easily.

Many others, but these are very valid points.

Of course, Amazon is not the solution to all of the problems you could ever have, but still it solves a great deal of problems.
All the bodies of water certainly help.
Never Use Glassdoor from Work
Yes, that's against HN rules.
Using thousands of servers doesn't mean that you don't share physical servers.
You probably just needed more swap. If you already had 1.5GB, maybe try it with 2GB. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9212476
Yep, that is why I specifically noted in the article, that given enough resources, it is possible to survive and even thrive in the cloud (Netflix being one of the best examples of that), but in case of a startup it is not aways the best idea to keep burning money and engineering resources when your primary job is to keep building a business.

And no, I don't think they're getting any real special treatment from Amazon since every single talk from a Netflix engineer points out the the cloud-specific issues they're solving in their infrastructure software.
An Infinite Regress. Of Dumb: More Reflections on “Market Efficiency”
I love OSS, however I hate this argument:

"You could certainly purchase access to private Github repositories, but most certainly you’d rather want to invest your capital in more pressing matters."

That's their #1 reason? GitHub is, like, $7. If that saves you 10 minutes of having to maintain your own servers? Completely seems worth it to me. Or, GitLab or BitBucket have free private repos.

My argument is this: your time is the most important thing you have, and you shouldn't be wasting your time on maintaining your own source control servers.
It is dishonarable in Japan to live in your parents' home until you find something stable ? Or to live in a flatshare ?

The average salary for those Coffee Shop dwellers is higher than a starting salary for many jobs in Southern Europe.

Even if the cost of living is inferior to Tokyo, it's still not enough to rent an apartment by yourself for most people, so many 20something stay at their parents' home until they saved enough to move out, or found a better job, of just find a flatshare.

I know it's cultural, and not very flattering for those still living off their parents in their mid-late twenties, but given the alternative...
On the other hand, the thinking process found to be effective appears to be more recursive, and the failure thinking modes seemed to be less so: less data driven, less flexible in their handling of feedback, and so on.

I might suggest that this article/research sets out a meta-thinking process, a second-order thinking process if you like (akin to second-order moral principles: another level of abstraction), compared with many other more narrow, less flexible, less recursive and more simply rule-driven than this.
> AWS is always going to include a premium because they take care of the DevOps portion of your infrastructure.

No, they don't. They provide the tools, its still up to you to orchestrate it.
I don't think ordering as a gift makes a difference. The email, below.

Hello,

We're writing to you because we have concerns regarding the ordering behavior on your Amazon.com account with an Amazon Prime membership. The shipping activity by you or your invitees is similar to patterns we've seen when Amazon Prime is used for reselling (as described in our Terms & Conditions).

This e-mail is a courtesy notice, and no action is being taken at this time. We encourage you to continue using your Amazon Prime Membership according to our Terms and Conditions, which you can view here:

www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=13819201

If future activity on your account continues to follow a pattern consistent with reselling or shipping to customers, we may terminate your membership without refund and without further warning.

If you think you received this message in error, or would like to clarify the order activity, please contact us directly at pai@amazon.com.

We appreciate your cooperation and understanding.

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Amazon.com
1) Yes, there are several DNS service providers that offer BGP anycast with geographically aware failover / load balancing. UltraDNS and DYN are the larger ones.

2) Yes, some ISPs do set a minimum TTL. Although BGP anycast is the most effective as the first line, sometimes it makes sense to have your reverse proxy caching layer override that distribution based on GeoIP and redirect to a more suitable proxy node closer to the client. This is especially the case when people using recursive lookup DNS servers that aren't necessarily geographically close to them (e.g. 8.8.8.8). It could also be useful in cases where TTL expiration hasn't caught up yet though.

3) No. Think of BGP Anycast DNS as distribution at a global level, and dedicated load balancers as distribution at the local level. You need to work out how to get the traffic to the load balancer first, and load balancing across distant geographies (high latency) results in horrible performance.
For those with experienced with the JVM and OpenBSD, is the compatibility and performance the same as in linux? (the presentation contains heavy images :/
I see no explanation for why suppliers wouldn't match demand. Aside from the HDD shortage which hit everyone, I've seen no issues like you're describing where essentially the market runs out of servers/CPUs/etc.

Because that's the only way this theory applies, if they're completely unable to meet the demand due to some specific shortage in the market.

The only reason your shares analogy makes sense is because there ARE a finite number of shares available at any given time, and buying too many drives up the cost in the entire market. Most manufacturers can scale up production as demand increases.
If it's anything like the extremely terrible devices in their current vehicles, those are custom device similar to existing off-the-shelf GPSes. If they're in any way based on Android, they've gone well out of their way to completely replace the UI with something entirely unlike Android.
I see issue tracking on the demo site: https://try.gogs.io/moulaf/VLC-git/issues
Here's one that's barely turned six:

We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
The attack requires too many sessions to use against a user's IMAP mailbox (or similar) but is entirely possible in automated APIs.
Snowfall aside, I think most New Englanders will still relate to 1978 as a more severe winter given the number of fatalities.