edmccard

>We'd ask it to produce a simplified version.

Yeah, that would work :)

Maybe the question I should have asked, is:

What if we ask a super-AI for a proof of the ABC conjecture, and the result is something too complicated for humans to verify?

My point, if I have one, is that when I read about "superhuman machine intelligence", sometime people seem to mean "capable of knowledge that humans couldn't figure out on their own but that humans can understand once they see it"; and sometimes they seem to mean "capable of knowledge that is beyond human capacity to even verify".

I think development machine intelligence of the first kind is extremely likely, but I'm more skeptical about the second kind.

>Do many "otherwise smart" people actually believe "superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous"?

I don't know how "otherwise smart" I am, but I wonder how we would be able to tell that a machine intelligence was "superhuman" as opposed to "buggy".

For example, suppose we build a super-AI and ask it, "Is Shinichi Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture correct" [1]. What would we do if it said "yes"?

(Of course, if "superhuman" just means "able to do things humans already know how to do and verify, but lots faster", then we're already there).

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26753-mathematicians-a...

>It won't be long before someone runs a top-of-the-line X86 to Power8 benchmark using FreeBSD.

>Here is such a comparison using linux:

>http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh092914-story02.html

Which benchmarks are linux-to-linux? In the article, it says the SAP SD test is AIX vs Windows, and the SPECjEnterprise test is AIX vs Oracle Linux; and in the linked Oracle benchmarks, it seems to always be IBM/AIX vs Sparc/Linux.

>...your logo, which seems to have been inspired by malware and perhaps labels required for industrial chemicals

Or maybe "pyret" is pronounced like "pirate" and the logo was inspired by the skull-and-crossbones pirate flag. I especially like how the crossbones look like the letter lambda.

FTA:

"In 1996 Baumeister, now teaching at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, co-authored a review of the literature that concluded that it was, in fact, 'threatened egotism' that lead to aggression. Evil, he suggested, was often accompanied by high self-esteem. 'Dangerous people, from playground bullies to warmongering dictators, consist mostly of those who have highly favorable views of themselves,' he wrote.

It was an astonishing theory..."

I can imagine a group of people who might not be astonished; anyone who has been bullied, and then told they should feel sorry for the bullies because the bullies had "low self-esteem". At least, when it happened to me, my first thought was "Low? More like way too high."

>Maybe it's because I grew up with personal computers ... (early 8-bit machines, then DOS on a PC) that I find it hard to get scared or excited by local-only exploits like these.

In the 8-bit world, if you don't have a hard drive, and your only "network" is trading floppies with your friends, and "Elk Cloner"[1] is the nastiest virus you have to worry about, then there isn't much reason to be scared.

Nowadays, though...if you consider inserting an infected USB stick to be a local-only attack vector, then Stuxnet was local-only.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk_Cloner

>Yeah, no. Usually good books get translated, period.

Great books certainly get translated in every direction. But for merely good books, I wouldn't be surprised if readers outside the US consumed more books translated from English than readers in the US consume books translated from other languages.

That if something has a velocity of X cm/sec this year, it might have a velocity of (X+1) cm/sec next year.

>Did anyone ever actually believe that there was a fire-all-ze-missiles button?

Well, a lot of us believed that there were only two possibilities for nuclear war: either no missiles got fired, or they all did -- either in an escalating pattern of strike and counterstrike, or in one big "let's knock them out before they get us" attack.

So I guess a "big red button" is as good a metaphor as any for the sort of on/off, all-or-nothing situation we were afraid of.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8909927

"An address will exist in the country's postal service's database"

This is the one that I've run afoul of -- not because I live in a brand-new building, or a houseboat, or 30 miles from anywhere on an unnamed road; it's just that there is no door-to-door delivery for houses within a 2-block radius of the local post office, so we have a PO box.

The trouble happens when a business that needs my street address uses the USPS database for address verification. One example is online stores that don't ship to PO boxes. Some of these sites have a form with a sort of "Are you sure" prompt when my street address isn't recognized; others just refuse to accept it.

Even worse was when the local company that picked up my trash was bought by one of the larger regional "waste management" operations, and all the drivers' routes were re-planned for "efficiency" (evidently using software that hit some USPS database); the upshot was that everyone on my street had their address removed from the pickup routes.

>it seems theres a cap at 45%

That number is for photovoltaic cells converting light to electricity; the 90% in the article is for converting light to heat.

Slide 16 says that ME v1.x used an ARCTangent-A4 and that ME v2.x uses an ARC 600.

>What were the AA batteries for?

Some motherboards from the 286 era used 4 AAs as the CMOS backup battery.

>I don't understand why randy would focus on making tools for blocking people on Twitter though...

Usenet had killfiles, email has spam filters, Facebook has unfollow...no reason not to focus on something similar for Twitter.

>It would also be nice if she adds how to help

There is a second part to the post: Still Here, Part 2: Call to Arms[1]

[1] http://randi.io/wp/archives/91

>I guess there was an entire set of illegal opcodes on the 6510

Yes, but they were the same set of illegal/undocumented opcodes as the 6502.

>16-bit? Did they mean 4-bit?

This batch of recovered Nimbus images was converted from film to digital; there was another [1] where the analog data from magentic tape was digitized.

[1] http://www.moonviews.com/2010/03/dumpster-diving-for-science...

>The amount of advertising...

...was a reason people subscribed to computer magazines in the days before the internet, because it was one of the best ways to find out about (and purchase via mail-order) new stuff.

>This always copies and will lead to quadratic performance

In D, "a ~ b" always copies but "a ~= b" might not. Also, appending using ~= will grow the array exponentially, so the amoritized performance will be better than quadratic.

Doing "x.length += 1", however, does incremental growth and will have poor performance.

(See http://dlang.org/arrays.html and http://forum.dlang.org/post/op.wuic5nateav7ka@stevens-macboo... )

>the other 9 candidates who are waiting in line don't want that [to wait for the first candidate to contemplate the offer]

If any of them have other offers, they might appreciate _some_ extra time to decide between them.

EDIT: Nevermind the previous bit--I was still thinking in the context of multiple simultaneous offers, which I guess is not a thing.

And if not, then if the first choice turns it down, you make an exploding offer to the second (to be fair to the next 8), and again to the third (to be fair to the next 7), etc. Is there ever a situation where an exploding offer is not in everyone's best interest?

>Whenever I've offered an exploding offer in the past, it's because I had several candidates: an extremely strong candidate and several strong but somewhat weaker candidates.

If you had several candidates of equal ability, would you still use an exploding offer? Otherwise, it seems to be less about "giving candidates an answer within a certain timeframe" and more about putting pressure on the candidate you really want.

>there's a risk of losing all candidates if I waited for an indefinite time on the strongest candidate.

Is there nothing in between an exploding short-term offer and an indefinite open-ended offer?

>There isn't really an explanation anywhere, but the colors that the game changes to in pride-mode...

...are a rainbow, a symbol of gay pride[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_pride

On the PS1, Final Fantasy VII was O=yes, X=no, and so were a bunch of the less mainstream JRPGS; also, Metal Gear Solid games were O=yes, X=no at least into the PS2 era.

>there are a lot of articles from the newyorker which make the HN top?

There has probably been a higher frequency lately since the New Yorker has gone no-paywall for the summer.

>Twitter has verified accounts...

Which is something else that William Shatner has strong opinions about:

http://mashable.com/2014/06/24/william-shatner-twitter-verif...

>Their job is to lie to you, your job has to be to lie right back.

I usually use some variation on "I'm moving in with my girlfriend, and she already has <type of service I'm cancelling>"

The IeSF has now changed from separate male and female divisions to an "Open to all" division and a female division.

http://ie-sf.com/bbs/board.php?bo_table=iesf_notice&wr_id=10...

>So, apparently, luck and timing are huge factors in what does well here.

Here, and everywhere else too :)

Another interesting lo-res (40x48) game is "Escape from the Homebrew Computer Club", a "modern(ish) raycasted 2 1/2 D game for the Apple II"[1]

[1] https://archive.org/details/Kfest2011-DavidSchmenkEscapeFrom...

>Isn't it also possible that the photos were taken at slightly different times and the path of the lightning bolt shifted...

In the time it takes for the light from a lightning strike to fade, the bolt basically doesn't shift at all.

There's a guy called Tom A. Warner who shoots 7207 fps video of lightning; if you watch the first video on his page[1] you'll see that once the bolt reaches the ground, it's path doesn't change.

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