skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it hopeful see people trying to mitigate these risks while they have only just begun to be realized. There has been more than enough historical cases already of inventions turning into something the inventor would dearly wish to have undone.

One major current concern of mine, that this letter does not address, is AI for surveillance and social control.
What is already being done in that regard is arguably military intelligence technology directed indiscriminately at entire populations, but the added element of powerful AI spidering over the data streams that go into places like the NSA Bluffdale facility is quite appalling.
I think this is even harder to inspect for than autonomous killing systems, and even more difficult to avoid the development of, since much of the capabilities needed will likely be similar to what academia and data-intensive commercial sector will want to serve their needs. But the potential damage through empowering totalitarian control could well be comparable to or greater than an "AI arms race".
I really hope the field will deal with this aspect too.
The threat is more like that humans will design AI with the goal of making X objects or optimizing Y system, which leads to the unintended consequence of killing people.
I welcome this move, but even if it's successful we need to look at the risks beyond AI developed purely for weaponry, and look also to general purpose AI, which carries the same risks.

If we develop AI that is smart enough to learn how to navigate terrain like a human, this AI weapons arms race can start again. Even if the purpose of the AI isn't specifically for the military, if it's flexible enough to be turned to this end, the chances of it being used for this purpose are quite high.

The most effective way to combat this problem is to do away with the need for a military in the first place, however that's a much harder problem to tackle. The only way it could be done is with education and a huge reduction in arms production on a global scale.
This is important but it doesn't go far enough. I want a ban on all domestic use of armed drones and other remote control armaments - even when there is a human in control.
Two Ideas for Predicting the Next Color of the Year
Weapons yield power to the person who controls them. At least nuclear weapons require a refinery process that's difficult. Still, North Korea has managed to limp along for as long as it has at least in part to a strong suspicion they have nuclear capabilities.

A very scary thought is how much power a private entity (individual or corporation) could gain with a relatively low amount of money. I'm not certain a "truce" by engineers is enough. It only takes 1 to break it. In fact, even if there was a law... it's still only going to take one.

Personally, I think we need technological check and balances as much as we need political checks and balances.
The blog post uses a stock photo! From Unsplash!
it's a law firm. https://www.cov.com/
You can never make all people agree on something like this, right? So to some degree everybody needs that technology, or am I having a logical error here?
I keep hearing this refrain from AI doomsayers, but no one can ever tell me how these systems go from talking to the APIs they were hooked up with to somehow doing kinetic things that can kill humans.

Your cheeseburger AI that logically decides humanity's continued existence is detrimental to the perfect cheeseburger: Even if it manages to make the jump from iterating on beef convection models to suggesting murder, what can it actually do? If it starts adding "kill yourself" to the end of the updated recipes it spits out, how is that any more dangerous than a dumb kid on Twitter?
Goodbye Google+. We hardly knew you.
> 'Latency is minimal'

Tell me about it, I've been trying to gather info about a solution where I can record with a camera, probably 1080p (via ethernet or via hdmi to capture card) and use the frame information as inputs in a simulation with a latency around 20 ms and am unable to get hard data on the actual latencies. Nobody cares about input lag because practically no one records as a real time input.

Incidentally, if anyone knows or has experienced with a similar setup I'd be forever grateful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax
More than that, I'm guessing that it also shone some light on those physical realities and therefore advanced the field in general. Maybe not in a big way, but much of science, technology and manufacturing is build of many small advances.
Microwaves. http://mil-embedded.com/news/raytheon-emp-missile-tested-by-...
No, the math is still pretty bad. Are there laws in your particular backwater that require banks to offer these no-strings-attached accounts? Why should banks otherwise forsake the profits from their mortgage on 98 leeches?

Every single customer that comes in requires services from a human that must be paid a salary, a share of a branch that has to pay rent and utilities, the cost of auditing, insurance, and paper trails for everything they do, and that's without even getting started. What platonic realm do you inhabit where these things aren't required? Do you also exist on a diet of pure light?
Google Weans Itself Off of Google+
It's essentially thin client gaming, right?

With the roll out of more fiber networks, this could be a reality (assuming you still had enough host locations to reduce latency).
they do -

http://mil-embedded.com/news/raytheon-emp-missile-tested-by-...

http://www.ibtimes.com/russias-microwave-gun-can-disable-dro...
No, clearly as opposed to UBI. Did you read the whole post?
> Most C code can be converted in C++

That is bad, and is ripe to create a lot of errors.

C programmer who tries to write C code in C++ has the worst problem ever, IMO: he doesn't know that he's wrong. Everything compiles, everything works, and he goes home happy after a productive day of laying mines for future maintainers.
Yes, looking at the network requests I also get this error fairly consistently by the third or fourth batch:

> {"ApiResponse":{"$":{"Status":"ERROR"},"Errors":[{"Error":[{"_":"Too many requests","$":{"Number":"500000"}}]}],"Server":[""],"GMTTimeDifference":[""],"ExecutionTime":["0"]}}

Which then results in "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property '0' of undefined".

Cool idea, though!
HotRef Features Popular and New Baby Shower Party Favors
Dear Medium: Please stop hurting the web
> straight out refuse working on such projects

People do. Then they quit their jobs and are replaced by other smart people willing to do the work (and needing the job).

> people who do work on such systems should be held accountable in some deep way

Never going to happen. The political and military leaders are the ones who choose to develop and deploy such weapons. They should be held accountable, and sometimes they are. Should we go out and prosecute all the engineers and scientists who worked on nuclear bombs that have been sitting in bunkers and silos for the past 60 years?

> We have reached a developmental stage where building tools and techniques in the active goal of harming human lives has become morally unacceptable.

Who is "we"? A gun is specifically designed to kill things, but the wielder of the gun decides whether it will be used for good or for evil. Likewise, there are plenty of other objects not designed to kill people that are used for that purpose (stones, rope, buckets of water, etc).

Would you consider working on AI countermeasures? Would you want to have a strong defense that can fend off AI invaders, even if it means that defensive force could be re-purposed for offense?

> This is extremely idealistic...

Ideally, you want to rid the world of conflict and war. But this is impossible while there remain limited resources and different ideas. You would need to find an infinite source of food/water/land as well as force everyone to conform to one ideology to avoid war. So aside from being impossible (as far as resources go), you would need a totalitarian world government imposing thought control on all of humanity to bring about such a "peace."
Hacking Team Arsenal of cyber weapons
Have we reached that point? Most would disagree. It is also dishonest to attribute the blame to scientists, the real burden is always with the ones giving the orders. Scientists working in military projects create a threat at best. Is threat morally unacceptable? The answer is again no, or else diplomacy could not work. Humans are not an angel society. The key is to keep the threats on the hands of responsible leaders/societies.
Does this work with Plex for XBox One? If so, can you do a party chat while it's running? That'd be the awesome hacky answer to 360's great Netflix Party Mode.
He's using a fairly narrow definition of "AI" that means, roughly, "stuff like AIXI". Within that definition, he's right, but of course, within that definition, we don't know how to specify an "express purpose of making cheeseburgers".
React Context – Helpful Context Like AdBlock and OS
What separates Itanium from other processors?
Web assembly, as well as asm.js, is never meant to be manually written. It's a target for compilers. And even the most efficient ever implementation of web assembly won't make your plain old javascript any faster.
Seems to be an issue with namecheap not returning any results and my end not having good error checking. I'll see what I can do to fix
My mind first goes to all of the things that could go wrong.

That's precisely why I am not an organ donor.

I don't want to put anyone in the position of making these decisions based on probability and likelihood. Harvest the organs of the willing only after clinical death has occurred.

I'm concerned that one day a poor person could sustain a traumatic brain injury and just so happens to be a tissue match for someone who is rich, famous, politically connected or influential who needs an organ.
There's two types of sites:

1) Portals/search engines which just link to the content. These claim they are not doing anything illegal because they are not hosting anything illegal.

2) Video sites that host the illegal content. These sites do take down the illegal content when they find it or receive a takedown request. The illegal content is uploaded in so many places that it doesn't matter if a few are taken down. The sites in 1) point to about 20 sites for every TV episode/movie
Pre-construction nightmares
Not sure if it's the HN bump, but it's taking a really long time (about 5 seconds per TLD)
There's a lot of useful information about Microsoft technologies - API docs, sample code, etc. - at https://msdn.microsoft.com.
Well, part of their plan was to raise 10-20bn from Russia to prop up their economy, and the whole plan was extralegal, so I'm not sure that's too far off the mark.
Your proposal implies that the CEO of a company like Google or Goldman (most employees are high skill) should be paid a lot more than the CEO of Walmart or Amazon (most employees being low skill).

I don't see any obvious reason why this should be the case or would be remotely beneficial - it's not as if Walmart or Amazon deserve a lower quality CEO than Goldman.

Further, this would create huge disincentives for companies to take on new lines of business which involve low skill labor and would create incentives for managers to eliminate low skill labor. I.e., Steve Jobs and other execs would have the personal incentive to NOT open up apple stores, even though opening up such stores would be beneficial for both shareholders and those who would otherwise be employed by such stores.
Hidden in here is the unstated assumption that they should develop and support this feature, for your probably sole use, for free.
One I've discovered a couple of years ago is 'picasim' -- IMO the best value for money on the simulation; it's truely /excellent/ and I've trained myself on both aerobatics (using slope gliding) and quad with it.

Not affiliated, but a big fan:
http://www.rowlhouse.co.uk/PicaSim/
Notice how well that treaty went down with USA, Russia and China
The problem is that a cult of Nazis have infiltrated the NSA?
>15 dollars will put people in most of the country out of work.

Like it did in Australia?
> Which, to my knowledge, are only currently generated using a nuclear weapon.

An EMP gun is just a directed energy weapon.[1]

Though you can generate an undirected EMP pulse through various means, there not as useful.[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Non-nucl...
Damnit, namecheap. They must be ratelimiting me... I didn't see anything about ratelimits in the API docs, I guess I'll go re-read them
You can't win a tragedy of the commons by preaching about the moral high ground. You can win it by reaching a binding political agreement, or by killing everyone else who has access to the common.
That's a nice thought, but the cat is out of the bag. One week the elite geeks talk about how strong encryption is available to everyone and can't be stopped, or how you really can't regulate what comes out of a 3d printer. Then they try to put the autonomous AI drone genie back in its bottle?

Gamers gonna use tech for gaming, advertisers gonna use tech for advertising, military gonna use tech for militarying.

I think the pace of tech development is going so fast, we need to stop trying to ban individual developments and start trying to change the way people and governments behave so those bans aren't needed. But I'm not sure if that's even possible short of some dystopia.
> What happens when organ donation is seen as a moral imperative and only a few percent of people choose not to participate? Might doctors not try as hard to save them as "punishment" for being "anti-social" or something?

IMO, if you want to opt-out of donation, doing so should opt-out of the receipt of donated organs as well.
Hangouts has an option under "SMS" to disable automatic retrieval of MMS messages. Can anyone confirm if this at least stops the instant loading of malware?
Don't do Inbox Zero.

I forgot the quote but it is very spot on imho: your inbox is someone elses todo list. Especially starting the day with email is one of the worst things you can do imho. It puts you into reactive mode.

You want to stay pro-active and actively chose the things you need to be on top of.

I keep a few tabs open on email threads that are important to me and for people I'm close to I usually tell them to reach out to me via facebook (white-list opt-in vs opt-out).

I can not emphasize enough how big of a game changer that was.
People think about handling email and inbox zero all the time and obsess about it as if processing all emails in a day was the key to getting stuff done. I think that's too narrow of a pov.

Disclaimer: CEO & Product @ blossom.io
That seems fine. C# is a great language and the Microsoft stack is becoming more and more open all the time. (E.g., products being open sourced, but also other products being released to multiple platforms like their new editor Code)
Finally got to see the internals of a HUCard http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=14103.0

Brilliant form factor.
The reason is that Sega had a local partner (Tec Toy) that understood the market and manufactured the consoles in Brazil.

SNES, on the other hand, where all imported, and importing anything into Brazil has always been hard (bureaucratic and expensive). When it first launched, your only chance of getting one was having a parent bring one from abroad.
To me the big difference is really to do with where the code operates.

With Require.js you make changes to your code to be able to drive it, to avoid having a build step.

Browserify you had to have a build step, but it operates on your code 'from the outside', to avoid having to modify it.

Webpack does both of those.

it has a build step, but it works by extending the require() format to be able to specify the transforms inside the code itself.

The webpack configuration format is mostly just a way to replace require calls at runtime with a regular expression.

I find that this is a lot more straight forward, powerful and explicit than the [1] filename extension checks that happen in most browserify transforms.
https://github.com/jnordberg/coffeeify/blob/master/index.js#...

I made a presentation about webpack, if you want to see :

http://adrianrossouw.github.io/webpack-mostly-just-works/
>As much as you want to tax "the wealthy", there really aren't enough wealthy people to pay for everything,

The point isn't to make them pay for everything. The point of taxing them is to mute the inflationary effect of letting them keep their money.

The primary noticeable effect of taxing the wealthy on the rest of us would be to make property more affordable once again.
Right, but for it to be successful, there's still a substantial amount of R&D to get the systems cooperating in a manner effective on the battlefield.

I agree, however, that if this were to go forward with a military bankroll, the result would be much easier to replicate. I'm particularly struck by this sentence from the letter: "If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development...autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow." That's terrifying.
Businesses would generally charge the price that would result in the most profit (revenue - expenses). Businesses can't just raise prices and get more revenue. If they could, they would do that already.

Minimum wage has to do with marginal cost of producing an extra product. Marginal cost generally increases after a while. So producing that last additional unit usually costs more than the one before. When you increase cost in the form of the price of human capital, the marginal cost of producing a unit will increase and the intersection with the marginal revenue (price of the unit) will drop to a lower quantity supplied and higher price.

So yes, prices will go up but the business will also sell less units. Since less units are sold, there will be less capital that will need to be utilized.

Prices aren't arbitrarily set and increase in price will result in less units being sold and less employment. This isn't as controversial as journalists make it out to be.

Pre-political Paul Krugman does a great job explaining it:

> So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment. This theoretical prediction has, however, been hard to confirm with actual data. Indeed, much-cited studies by two well-regarded labor economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, find that where there have been more or less controlled experiments, for example when New Jersey raised minimum wages but Pennsylvania did not, the effects of the increase on employment have been negligible or even positive. Exactly what to make of this result is a source of great dispute. Card and Krueger offered some complex theoretical rationales, but most of their colleagues are unconvinced; the centrist view is probably that minimum wages “do,” in fact, reduce employment, but that the effects are small and swamped by other forces.

> What is remarkable, however, is how this rather iffy result has been seized upon by some liberals as a rationale for making large minimum wage increases a core component of the liberal agenda–for arguing that living wages “can play an important role in reversing the 25-year decline in wages experienced by most working people in America” (as this book’s back cover has it). Clearly these advocates very much want to believe that the price of labor–unlike that of gasoline, or Manhattan apartments–can be set based on considerations of justice, not supply and demand, without unpleasant side effects.[0]

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/03/02/paul-krug...
VLIW architecture with predicated execution.
You energize a coil and then blow it up. Makes an EMP. No nuke needed.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb3.htm
Life cycle of a wind turbine
Hahaha not quite what i was implying, i guess the idea that someone could be building things without our knowledge to destroy society
Also, this is really PHP specific.

Look at any larger Python (Django/Flask/...) or Ruby (Rails/...) project, and you will always find a proper "public" directory, although it may be named differently.

Not sure about Perl though ...
Schoolgirls for Sale in Japan
Though not the end of G+, hopefully it will be the end of G+ as we know it. From day one G+ should have simply been a social mesh between the many (very) popular Google properties like YouTube, Play, Maps, etc. Making it a standalone application was their fatal mistake, and here's hoping Bradley can lead them towards becoming a social utility instead of a social platform.
As an undergrad, I worked in a lab that had a satellite all-sky imager.

It had three CCD cameras with strip imagers that were combined into a single all-sky image every orbit.

I was given a FORTRAN codebase that dated back to the 70s (supporting functions) and was told to figure out the best way to pick the start and end of the orbit as far as image frames were concerned.

The pointing data was in satellite frame-of-reference quaternions [1], and the satellite orbited about the axis of the Sun-Earth line, approximately.

Approximately was the key. Since it wasn't at a perfect 90 degree angle, the CCD strips each crossed over the plane defined by the Sun-Earth line and the axis orthogonal to the Earth's orbit (I referred to it as "south") at an angle.

So, if you want to stitch together an image of the sky that looks continuous, but the orbit of the imager wobbles a bit, and different discontinuities show up every day, how do you do it?

The leading CCD could be entirely across the southern line when the other CCDs were just starting to cross it. This created a lot of problems with how you define a complete orbit that lacks discontinuities and makes intuitive sense so others can understand the code.

I decided to pick the point where the middle of the central camera crossed the plane as the frame of reference for the start/end point.

Ultimately, this project took me about three months, just to get used to the code base, the spatial coordinates and transformations needed to make sense of the data, and then to finally write the code.

The meaningful changes I made in the commit consisted of about three lines of code.

I found the commit message:

Fixed problem near seam of map where start and end of orbit meet. The orientation of camera 2 at the start of the orbit is now used to draw a reference great circle on the sky. Near this boundary pixels are tested individually to decide whether they are part of the current orbit and should be dropped in the skymap. Introduced torigin to keep track of the time origin for the lowres time map. This is added to the Fits header of the time map as keyword TORIGIN (used to be STIME). Times tfirstfrm and tlastfrm are assigned the time of the first and last frame, respectively, for which at least one pixel was dropped in the skymap. These are written into the main header of the skymap as keywords STIME and ETIME. Added extra extension to lowres maps containg nr of pixels contributing to each lowres bin

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotati...
Pwd.sh: Command-Line Only, GPG-Encrypted Password Manager