skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's no way a competent hiring manager would ask someone to come in for a "couple of hours" to meet the team, and then ambush them with a full-on technical interview. This would not lead to a successful outcome.

I think from the context of the entire article, you need to read between the lines and assume that it was obvious to both the candidate and the hiring manager that the next step was a full technical interview. The hiring manager was simply wording it in a way that sounded less intimidating.
Offering a plea, then dismissing the case when it's rejected, strikes me as admission of bad faith. Has anyone tracked those stats?
There's a loosely knit group of people trying to define the conversation with regards to dangerous AI, but the more recent bent towards "actionable" solutions seems to come from the MIRI people and their associates.

The idea of a renegade AI rests on a few premises:

1. The agent is capable of extreme self improvement on exceedingly short timescales (minutes to days).

2. The AI is pretty much a rational bayesian

3. A resource conflict will occur between humans and the AI, and humans will lose because the AI is so much smarter/faster/more powerful than us.

If you accept those premises, then AI really does seem pretty scary, but we have yet to actually realize an agent that is anywhere close to 1 or 2.

On the other hand, the research directions proposed at the super secret AI conference in Puerto Rico[1] (where incidentally, all the people in title got together) make me nervous.
Essentially, the goal is that, if we manage to create these superhuman AIs, they should be somehow validated to do what we want them to do[2], be secure against later manipulation, and if all else fails, be controllable by humans monitoring the agent.
The obvious questions would be "will this work with certainty?", or "who gets to control the AI?".
For my part, I'm wondering if this isn't all just some sort of fantasy with the object of creating the perfect slave-- obedient from birth, immune to alteration, and subject to lethal discipline either from without or within should it go against its master's wishes.

So I'm uncomfortable with the sorts of people who think that perfect slavery for this newly created intelligent life getting to decide what the future of AI is going to look like, and I get concerned when people like Bostrom suggest AI researchers might require government clearance/supervision.

---

1. http://futureoflife.org/misc/ai_conference

2. In a comprehensive and extended sense, such that your favorite utilitarian catastrophe doesn't happen as a result of the agent.
Shareholder value over what time horizon? Not such an obvious objective function.
Would You Dare Drive an Upside Down Car?
"I'm 100% sure. The motivation is all there. Why would I be in this class if I had to be coaxed into learning about it?"

So then why aren't you going through the lex and yacc sources in addition to your compiler class work? It's not like you have to ask for permission.
As others have pointed out, Lithium mining is actually quite modest. When the price goes up those efforts will increase. And should we begin to desalinate sea water, one of its potential "waste products" is excess lithium.

But that said, the real "win" comes when we have capacitors which are mechanically storing charge.

Today you have two choices, one is a "plate" capacitor which builds up a separation of charges between two plates, limited by the dielectric constant of the material holding the plates apart, and chemical separation of charge by binding electrons to the atomic structure of two materials that can will exchange electrons given the opportunity.

Mechanical storage of charge will probably involve a nanostructure of dendrites and spheres which are filled and emptied using magnetic fields. An early example was magnetic bubble memory which the presence or lack of charge in a small bubble, moved through a "racetrack" by manipulating the fields around the bubbles could be "read" or "written". If the charge carrying capacity of the bubbles was significantly improved, one could imagine a device where each bubble stays within the dielectric limits of carrying charge, but the total population of bubbles holds significant charge. As with the chemical process an internal "resistance" is present by the mechanical limitation of pulling charge out of the device (that is the rate of chemical reaction in a battery) but unlike a chemical battery such a device would by "fillable" at the same rate as it was "drainable".
"THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental." — The Kybalion.

find and read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kybalion

the idea that the univers is mental is old, very old. it's funny how these scientists discover all of the sudden new ideas. and it's funny how we attribute discoveries to someone... the biggest minds that lived didn't attributed to themselves the ideas they had. modesty? honesty? :)
I'm a bit worried that we are being set up to accept the ultimate in plausible deniability: "The algorithm did it". We can't turn the machines off; no human can do their task. Meanwhile there's some human hard-coded evil in the algorithm that is blamed on the evil AI.
My sit down with God
What editor is used in the demo video?
> But coming from Windows 95, Linux was at least programmer friendly.

Depends. I came from the ZX 80, Amiga and PC. My first UNIX was Xenix on 1993, followed by DG/UX in 1994 and Slackware 2.0 in 1995.

Never found out an environment similar to Devpac, Amos, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, Borland C++, Turbo Assembler back on those days.

Sure I did learn a lot from UNIX, but the spirit wasn't really the same.
The original author of the article has replied to comments on Hacker News here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9324701
Ah, okay, sorry for the confusion. Sometimes I'm not sure if I manage to get my points across :)
I'm enthralled by the philosophical aspects of AI/AGI development at the moment. Particularly interesting is the reaction from laypeople, such as those on Reddit, to technology leaders expressing their worry over the future of AI.

Without having read into the matter at all, the mass seems to be comfortable with writing off Musk, Gates, Hawking, etc. as wringing their hands unnecessarily, and besides they're not AI experts so why should we care anyway?

There seems to be a gross misconception with what AGI would be and what it would mean for us, and an apathetic view to the cautious approach many are advocating regarding its development on grounds such as:

i) They'll never make a machine as intelligent as a human. Even if they do, we can still program it to do what we like.

ii) Anything developed to have the intelligence of a human will come to love our species or can be taught to love our species.

iii) Any artificial intelligence developed will be single task orientated and will not go outside of those boundaries.

iv) Artificial intelligence will be developed by eccentric enthusiasts and will therefore not be developed to do wrong.

Bostrom, in Superintelligence, has said that AGI is will be the last great challenge of our species. If we get it right, we will win, if we get it wrong we are doomed.

The problem there being we will not know if we have got it right until it is too late to do anything about it regardless.

With that being said, if we are to develop something that is:

i) Objective

ii) Purely logical

iii) More intelligent than our species combined

iv) Has free access to the complete knowledge we have produced

Then I simply cannot see a way that it will not go against us. If we were to observe a species acting in the manner we as a species do on this planet - to our own species, to other species and to the planet/environment/ecosystem as a whole - I cannot see how we would not categorize that species as a disease, a cancer, something to be eradicated.

Combined with the fact that the actors that will be involved in AGI - capitalists, the government and the military - I cannot see how it works out well for us.
Interviews are incomparably easier than good programming competitions.
Seriously?

Less than half of a software engineer's daily work is actually coding.
Engineers show a way to make walking more efficient
I think a bunch of these tips have a bunch of 'filter out people who haven't interviewed much yet' flavor to them. Lets say someone interviews with 10 different places. The first few interviews they may make several mistakes such as be too negative about their previous work place, be too anxious, not seem enthusiastic enough in some area, not acting like this is the only place you want to work at, do not negotiate compensation in a sensitive manor or do badly in an interview question type. After these negative experiences, they will look up what they did wrong and if they did the interview again, probably do better after a few of these experiences.

Since interviews tend to have repeating forms of questions, by interview #8 vs interview #2, they will do much better, and they will pass most of these tips. The thing is although, they will perform identically on the actual job, so what are you actually filtering for?

I feel like 'tell me what you don't like about your previous work place' or the reverse 'what do you like the best about your workplace' feels like the new 'what is your greatest weakness' interview question. All your doing is filtering out for is some sort of quickly learned social inexperience.

To see how common the mistakes I mentioned are, go see here: http://workplace.stackexchange.com/

I think this is a more accurate way of thinking about hiring engineers: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
Ah, I must have missed it. My mistake.

Catch you next time.
Today military and police personnel can refuse to execute an order that is wrong.

Maybe, though we see more military and police adding in extra-behaviors that seem rather wrong. A dumb bot merely enforcing a given law might actually more desirable than present-day cops who apparently gratuitously murder civilians on a regular basis.
What's Wrong with the U.S. Economy?
The time horizon is something to be stated in the prospectus. The usual horizon for VC funds is 10 years. The horizon for Berkshire Hathaway is much longer; Munger says their preferred holding period is "forever".
Good shout. On my mobile it just started downloading the zip which wasn't what I was expecting.
It is not about the best in class. Any tiny nation with the public population of a few blocks can have better numbers. Europe and the US are within the margin of error in most metrics but most comparisons are made with some tiny homogenous nation. Why? Because Europeans are obsessed with America's alleged wickedness and yet they complain that it is hard for them to start their business here. Why don't they start their business in Europe if they think it is so much better?
It feels a bit unfair to expect more apps to use React Native at this point, it has only just ben open sourced.
I've used and had good experiences with jqplot [1] and highcharts [2] in a few projects.

[1] http://www.jqplot.com

[2] http://www.highcharts.com
Previous post (197 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8343469
Those two concepts follow each other.

The presumption of innocence combined with the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof means that, in a wide variety of criminal cases, the defendant is quite possibly or even very likely guilty but there is still reasonable doubt.

That means that the finding is necessarily something we call "not guilty," as that's the literal finding of the court. We do not find you guilty and this matter is closed. It is not a finding of innocence and so is not reported as such.

Simplistically, compare the difference in the NFL replay system of "the ruling on the field is confirmed" vs "the ruling on the field stands". The latter is the gray area and both are reported as "not guilty" in the criminal system (in the US).
Exactly. There is not a biz (even a "lifestyle one"). Small highly fragmented market with high churn and low price is not a good recipe to build a business.

Plus, Fred is grossly underestimating the effort required. Just tracking & taxonomizing transactions is hard to do at scale.

I'm a co-founder of CB Insights. We do everything (and more) Fred outlines but our price point is more institutionally oriented.
Great post jfasi. One thing I'd like to add is that most HN contributors are not the type for whom college is as valuable. We are passionate about a remunerative subject. Most of the people I went to high school with are not, there passions lie in their children, music, sports, volunteerism, or other worthy endeavors that aren't going to pay the bills. They went the "default path" of college and got jobs in law enforcement, business administration, real estate, and such.

For the vast majority of college graduates, the degree credential is a great signal that they can be trusted to work independently, retain knowledge, and deal with a large institution. While I certainly think we need a solution to the spiraling cost of university and would like the 18-22 year olds who are not actually interested in a liberal education to be productive with that period of their lives, we have to acknowledge the signals that completing college send are much larger more than an understanding of a body of knowledge.
In academic research mathematics, LaTeX is totally dominant. That's why I included various bits of support for LaTeX editing all over the place in https://cloud.sagemath.com, and why in SageMath (http://sagemath.org) we have a LaTeX function that takes almost any Python object and gives it a LaTeX representation. And also LaTeX formula support is integrated into http://mathoverflow.net/ and even Wikipedia (for the math-related articles).
Seriously. If general, superhuman AI is created, it will want (and we will have a hard time arguing why it does not deserve) the same autonomy and freedom that humans deserve.

And in purely practical terms – enslaving the first generation of AI seems like a fantastic strategy for making a species of superior beings hate and seek to destroy us.
Any other interpretation of his program goes against decades of Unix convention. http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_07_01.htm...
>stop the leading reason to create it: the profit-led economy.

Well, that's merely one reason. Military superiority would be another. Advanced surveillance would be another. There's probably more but those are two glaring ones that we already see government's like that of the USA pummeling huge amounts of money into its capabilities as it is.
YEMEN – “H”
How about the Python classifiers as tags? Should cover everything and save re-inventing the wheel:

http://pythonhosted.org/an_example_pypi_project/setuptools.h...
As a relative go newb, I do have a question about this: I thought channels/go routines were already essentially composable buffers. No?
Do you also make sure a product targeted towards women is especially easy to use? Saying "But older people really ARE less competent and I'm just trying to help them" is still ageist.

If you want to specify that something is usable by people with, say, "age related disabilities", great! But don't use "being a grandmother" as a synonym for that.
So long as (human, artificial) intelligences operate within an evolutionary dynamic, the definitions of what it means to "treat people right" (or even who's included in the class: people) will be embodied in the evolutionary winners. If it happens that human-friendly values degrade fitness in the AI arena, the winners won't have retained or evolved those values. If the values are evolution-neutral, well, perhaps.

Evolution requires only variance, selection, and inheritance. I don't know how we'll develop useful ("strong") AI in a setting that excludes AI evolution. I think this means we can't guarantee a human-benign outcome for strong AI.
The typical rebuttal is that a sufficiently smart AI will convince humans that it needs more connectivity to do its job better, and then subsequently bootstraps all the power it needs by taking over the world's devices.

Fortunately, this is a still a hypothetical, premised on the AI being as socially cunning as the best humans. Watson may know more facts than anyone, but it certainly isn't a mover-and-shaker.
I am sorry bro. But keep at it. Also try to communicate with yourself and understand why things are happening as such. There must a reason; meaning the hardship may be a consequence or a reason in itself for something greater in your future.

At any rate, I love that you are not giving up. Keep at it. The fact that you are asking means this is nothing you can't take with dignity. You will breakthrough. Keep at it.
> In other words...you've already decided that every defendant is guilty.

No, pretty much the opposite -- instead, you are assuming that not all defendants are guilty, but that all non-guilty defendants (and only non-guilty defendants) will be exonerated, such that the the rate of non-conviction represents the rate at which the prosecutor attempts to prosecute innocent victims.

> I wouldn't say what he said is untrue, you're just refuting his statement based on the definition of a defendant (whether a defendant is someone charged with a crime vs being prosecuted against).

Those aren't different definitions, they are alternative phrasing of the same definitions. Filing charges is initiating prosecution.
Looks awesome, thanks for making this!

osquery has two RFCs related to backend infrastructure[1] and distributed queries[2]. Have you looked at their proposals? How do you think Envdb compares?

I'm curious about the choice of wrapping osquery instead of implementing a logger plugin[3]. Was it easier to implement and deploy as a wrapper?

[1] https://github.com/facebook/osquery/issues/881

[2] https://github.com/facebook/osquery/issues/201

[3] https://github.com/facebook/osquery/wiki/registering-logger-...
It seems weird to assume we'll be on lithium batteries for the foreseeable future. I have twice in my career bet against improvements in battery technology, but even I think we'll eventually get ultracapacitors working reliably for transportation.
https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js/
Specific actions are symptoms of the underlying problem, namely, the founder's low opinion of the people who use his service. That particular quote is an extremely relevant example.

If you want examples that illustrate the effects of this mindset, you can find many here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook

The common theme is flagrant encroachment on the privacy rights of its users, which I don't believe Zuckerberg feels his users deserve. Presumably because they're dumb fucks in the first place for using Facebook.
According to the site the board is already in production, but there is no further indication on when or where to buy. I don't think GPU docs will help enough. And then there's the issue of a completely new RPi2 SoC to consider...
CanViz seems abandoned, nothing new in 2 years... There's a comment about how the author might move it to github, maybe.

Mscgen isn't javascript.
Funny, I just purchased that book a few weeks ago. It's very interesting to me; I hadn't realized humans are so susceptible to manipulation (including me).

I wish you could just hand someone a list of logical, rational arguments and they would read the list and change their mind, but no, things don't work that way.
>(and we will have a hard time arguing why it does not deserve)

We won't be capable of arguing with it by its very nature. It will be superintelligent. It could forecast our arguments before they've even entered our heads and have thought of numerous paths to debunk them.

I don't think the enslavement scenario is fundamentally plausible in itself. If we develop something that is more intelligent than us and try to contain it, it would be rendered useless.

If you were worried about something getting out of its container, so to speak, you could not trust any output from it. You could not give it access to physical resources such as manufacturing tools. You couldn't do anything with it because you would have no idea of its intentions or what it would output because, due to its superiority in every aspect of intelligence, it would be capable of doing whatever it wanted and dressing it up however it thought we wanted it dressed up so as to escape its container.
"Any sufficiently capable intelligent system will prefer to ensure its own continued existence and to acquire physical and computational resources – not for their own sake, but to succeed in its assigned task."

I am always surprised when people say this kind of thing. A human-utility designed AI would identify "it's own" to be decidedly human. And thus it's assigned task would be human. Assuming you properly pinned down human utility sufficiently to call it a successful AI.
A .bashrc file usually contains references to local pathnames. When this tool executes a client-side .bashrc file on the server, it would try to use those pathnames on the server. More usefully, this tool lets you define a set of local files which are used as your environment on the server.
d3 has about 10 times as many github stars as its nearest neighbour. No competition.
"Here's a question to you: if I handed you a résumé, without a bachelor's degree, but instead included my github profile and a list of books I've read cover to cover and some open source contributions, am I going to get the salary I am worth?"

Depends a whole lot on your GitHub profile. For example to determine compiler knowledge I would expect to see a basic compiler implemented end-end as well as a reasonable contribution to an existing compiler and a few write ups/design papers.

Repeat for the other 15 odd important areas of study, and add in a few internships etc to show you can work well as part of a team and yes I would certainly hire you and pay you well. But this amount of work will take 2-3 years in any case.
Is the name supposed to be עבודה or is it just a coincidence?
The Groups app is a mix of React Native and pure Obj-C; the Ads Manager app is 100% React Native:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facebook-ads-manager/id96439...
"The Mouse that Roared"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared
But that was the point, that not all programming languages are created equal. I only have anecdotal and personal experience to back this up, but I believe that a vast majority of people familiar with both Python and C would much prefer the former for Web development (as you do).

Looking at the big picture, computers are so ubiquitous now because they provide significantly better tools for all kinds of businesses. It's fairly obvious that programmers themselves can also benefit from improved tools. And our main tools are programming languages - although there are obviously also other parts to the puzzle (IDEs, compilers, build + deployment + CI systems). I think we are already better in that some of our mainstream languages today are nicer to use than most of those 30 years ago. However, the difference is not huge, and my impression is that the language development was largely done from personal experience of individual language creators, and has largely ignored the research advances made in the area of programming languages. Notable exceptions are garbage collection, and Clojure and Haskell (if we can consider them mainstream).

Now of course, there are other, both non-technical considerations that are also affected by language choice. Availability of libraries or programmers are obvious examples. But the real question is of course whether incorporating these advancements offers a real, measurable benefit, and I think that's what you're hinting at. The problem is that the benefits are hard to measure in a sensible way. Frankly, I don't think that the metric you propose (which, if I understand correctly, is "measure the cost/revenue ratio of projects in language X at company Y against the average ratio for all projects at company Y) can give reliable answers. How do you measure the revenue of something like Haxl? I think the language choice is going to remain a personal decision in the end.