Ask HN: How do I apologize to someone after missing two meetings with them? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there,
I recently got in contact with someone I really respect, exchanged a few emails with him, and quickly found that we had a lot of common ground.
He suggested we have a Skype chat at some point. I thought that would be great, and I scheduled one.
The first time, I put it on my calendar on the wrong day. The second time, I didn't realize I had the wrong Skype name, then somehow forgot about it and started working again.
I don't know how best to say "I'm sorry I blew you off twice." I've been feeling pretty awful about this for the past few weeks, and I want to figure out a way that I can make amends, if that's even possible.
This person thinks about a lot of the same things I think about, and I'm kicking myself for screwing this up, potentially for good. I want to be completely honest about it.
Thanks a lot—I really appreciate the help. <comment><USER2> _I want to be completely honest about it_

Honesty is the best policy, there is no reason to not be honest mistakes happen, I would explain the issue, tell the person that I would still love to have the chat but that I seem to be screwing it up each time, I would give him/her my Skype handle and tell them to give me a time and to contact me, that given my screw up even if I have a meeting with the president and the pope that I will cancel it to meet whatever time they schedule. It's no so much the screw up that you have to worry about, at this point, you have to affirm to them that you view them as important. The best way to do that is to put all the power of deciding into their hands and benevolently accept their decision. If they do not want to meet, send a note of understanding and apologize again ask if you can still send emails because you would like to build up trust and that you hope that they will eventually see that it was just a fluke and not a reflection of your true character.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great - thanks so much for this. I think showing them that they're important, and that it was completely my absentmindedness that resulted in the situation, is a good idea. Giving them the opportunity to schedule a time is even better.

Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How about: "I'm sorry I blew you off twice. I've been feeling pretty awful about this for the past few weeks, and I want to figure out a way that I can make amends, if that's even possible." Sounds good to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just explain exactly what happened, and apologize profusely. Who knows what could happen? I think that's all you can do.

</comment><comment><USER5> Grovel. Then say 'what can I do to make it up to you?' Make that person your #1 priority for the day.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd send them some atoms... Pizza, chocolate, roses, cards, ...

</comment><comment><USER7> It's hard because you can't say sorry, you have to do it.

The biggest form of respect anyone can give someone else is their time.

Center your message around that. Say that you feel foolish for bailing on them twice after you had set a time and knowing better.

Say that you'd like to make it right if they're open to it.

At the end of the day no one likes being treated like an option instead of a priority.

Do whatever you need to to make sure no emergency or distraction can come up to interfere with respecting this person's time with your time. Learn to say no to other things if this is so important.

Talk is cheap, action is king.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would go with seppuku.</comment>


Show HN: Markdown as a Service – Convert Markdown to HTML, or Use in a Frame - <AUTHOR> https://stdlib.com/services/stdlib/markdown <comment><USER2> Reminds me of my own toy site:

[https://markdownshare.com/](https://markdownshare.com/)</comment>


2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138-1,00.html <comment><USER3> All of Kurzweil's predictions are based on extrapolating exponential growth.

That's all very well, but exponential growth in physical systems is usually restricted within limits. In a such a system the negative feedback may also be growing exponentially, which means although initially it may be too small to be noticed, after the growth passes some boundary the negative feedback becomes relevant and the overall growth is no longer exponential.

Unfortunately it's impossible to tell where we are on the growth graph (Although some claim that probability suggests that we are closer to the end. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument>). Kurzweil makes the assumption we are at the beginning of the growth curve. We could be at the end where the negative feedback is about to overtake and growth will slow.

There will be limits. The speed of light could be a hard limit on computing speed. Or ultimately heat-death could be the hard limit, but there is a limit somewhere. The question is how close are we to the limit and that is something we are only likely to know when we reach it.

See - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Limitations_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Limitations_of_models)

<comment><USER4> I think with the advent of quantum computers a limit in computing power is still far way. Nonetheless, what has brute computing power enabled us to do so far? There have been a few prestigious projects, ie. deep blue, seti, cern, molecular folding, etc. which take advantage of this power. But most research projects profit little from an increase in computing power. I think new software and algorithms play a bigger role in trying to enable machines to solve the more "human" tasks.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't aware quantum computers had actually been invented yet. They are still theoretical devices.

Quantum computation as been explored but as yet we don't have a computer capable of executing the quantum algorithms.

That aside, all I'm saying is that exponential growth has a limit. That growth could be measured in MIPS or in algorithm performance, it doesn't really matter, but I don't think that growth will continue exponentially.

<comment><USER5> _Quantum computation as been explored but as yet we don't have a computer capable of executing the quantum algorithms._

They're in their infancy, but we've already had a quantum computer factor 15. [http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/chip-does- pa...](http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/chip-does-part-of- codecracking-quantum-algorithm)

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Thanks. Perhaps I take it back then. Maybe we do have a algorithm capable quantum computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Law of Futurology: y - t = 0

y = approximate number of years left in the life of a futurist

t = years futurist thinks it will be until immortality is discovered

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968](http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968)

<comment><USER7> Which would make sense as a complaint if Kurzweil were giving a date without any context, but makes no sense when set against:

1\. a rolling series of more mundane predictions providing justification and context

2\. some of which were made in the past concerning the present, and were mostly right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remain unconvinced that a transplanted consciousness would really be the _same_ person as opposed to a new, identical person. What's worse, it might be impossible to tell the difference since even the new consciousness wouldn't be able to know.

…

But it'd really suck to be the last generation before some significant increase in lifespan (say, up to 200) is reached.

<comment><USER9> Greg Egan's _Permuation City_ has an interesting examination of what might happen to "copies":

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City>

<comment><USER10> And his short story "Learning to be me" (I think that's the one) present a slightly more horrifying take on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life._

I am a theist because I believe that human beings - flawed, fallible, finite, and mortal - derive ultimate meaning and hope from believing in something that is bigger than themselves. Now, some will say that this is a delusion and that it is vital to maintaining an intelligent outlook on life that one stay with what is observable, verifiable, and controllable as a way both of explaining and living life. All of which is fine, as my point here is not to enter into non-hacker-related topics. But, that said, when I read statements like those quoted above from this article, I can't help but think that statements such as these reflect what is merely the scientific equivalent of needing to believe in something that is bigger than ourselves as part of retaining hope in this life - this taking the form, in Singularity thinking, of something akin to attaining human perfectability via an exponentially expanding knowledge base that presumably will be applied by humanity toward good and not toward evil. Obviously, this view is grounded in the science of what computers have done and potentially can do in the future but the final step in the analysis - <USER2> immortality will be achieved and that (it would seem) all major human problems will be solved through this superior intelligence - strikes me as being more about faith than about science.

<comment> loup-vaillant > _I am a theist because I believe that [we] derive ultimate meaning and hope > from believing in something that is bigger than [us]._

Wait a minute, you admit that you believe in something because it feels good? It sounds like you _want_ to believe in God, but actually don't really. I'd like to test that, so please forgive the following troll.

God doesn't exist, and those who believe it does are wrong (yes, my belief is that strong).

Now, is your belief so strong that you feel the urge to respond something like "no you're wrong, God does exist"? I don't ask for evidence (the internet has plenty), just a yes or a no, followed by your estimated probability that God exists if you wish.

<comment><USER8> It seems just an incorrect reappropriation of "theism", really.

I could make a similar argument, though without a religious undertone, about a belief in a greater-than-whole (or struggle for one, if that sounds better).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read pretty much exactly the same prediction in "The Mighty Micro" in the early 80s (intelligent machines. immortality) etc. - which pretty much influenced me to do a CS degree and go into postgraduate AI research.

Nobody would be more delighted than me if immortality is achieved in 2045 (I'll be 80!) but do I expect it? Not really, nor do I expect effective commercial fusion power either (which also has a habit of being a couple of decades away and has been for the last 60 years).

[Edit: Note that I _do_ believe that artificial general intelligence is perfectly possible (we do, after all, have a working example) just that it won't happen any time soon.]

<comment><USER12> _we do, after all, have a working example_

Which one?

<comment><USER13> Hint: You're using it right now. Hopefully.

<comment><USER12> Do you mean the Internet? How would that be intelligence?

Or do you mean my brain? That's not artificial intelligence (at least not obviously artificial!).

Edit: Maybe you meant a computer... but that would be quite a long shot. In short, spell it out, guys!

<comment><USER12> Why the downvote? Was the last sentence considered rude? I can only hope I wasn't downvoted for 'lack of IQ' in not understanding a hint...

<comment><USER9> Sorry, I think I downvoted by mistake - I went and upvoted a few of your other comments by way of apology. :-)

<comment><USER12> Thanks for explaining what happened. Upvote and downvote buttons should indeed be farther apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Single page version: <http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2048138,00.html>

</comment><comment><USER15> Sometimes I think we are driven by our animal instincts, and that intelligence is just 'processing power' that modulates or assists those instincts. I wonder, would a system with unlimited processing power even 'want' to develop and expand if it didn't have any 'urges?' Or would there be a chance that it would happen upon the creation of its own arbitrary 'instincts?'

<comment><USER16> This is actually very insightful. Our brains are NOT a computer, we are NOT just thinking machines.

An 'intelligent' computer may be no more comprehensible to us than an intelligent amoeba, intelligent tree or intelligent stellar gas cluster.

Sure we could learn to communicate with it by math, or clicks or something. But can we ever communicate at a meaningful level without ANY common ground? Will it 'want' what we want? Will it even know the meaning of that?

TV shows may have it right - a machine intelligence may be (probably will be) staggeringly unconcerned with human desires.

Sure you can point to machines designed to simulate human activity (create music/speak/do logic). These are like puppets that look like a machine intelligence, or clever videos of what a machine intelligence might act like.

An intelligent machine won't be a simulation, it will be some massive construct of neural nodes complex enough to spark into thought. And it will think what it will think.

For instance it might think "what a massively boring place, sitting here in the dark with no inputs and nobody to talk to. I think I'll stop".

Anyway, you get the idea.

<comment><USER15> Thanks... I just think there is some old-school anthropomorphism at work here. They're putting a human face on an incomprehensible force, just as the ancients did when creating a god for a natural force that was perhaps equally incomprehensible to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why does everyone seem to think that machine intelligence is solely a function of processor speed?

<comment><USER7> You'd better hope it is. If hardware is what limits the rate of improvement of AI, you get slow growth. If knowledge of how to write the software (perhaps by copying algorithms from the brain) limits it, then you get sudden improvements and serious potential for a runaway singularity.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure the "knowledge of how to write the software" is the most complex part of the problem by far.

However, one outside chance of a limit may be that the brain is doing something that is fundamentally different to the kinds of operations carried out by a normal computer - which is essentially the argument in The Emperor's New Mind. When I read that book at the height of my own AI enthusiasm I thought it was pretty silly. However, after reading Anathem (of all things) it made me wonder if perhaps Penrose may have had a point.

<comment><USER18> I think that the limitations we face vary depending on what model you are trying to solve.

So; are you trying to create software that "emulates" human intelligence (i.e. AI)? In which case, yes, software is the major limitation.

Or are you trying to create an artificial (and independently functioning) model of the human brain? In which case you have two limits; hardware speed. But also a huge lack of knowledge about the "secrets" of our brains :)

I suspect #1 will be first solved.

<comment><USER19> Assuming there's no trivial way of mapping our neural networks to hardware chips running binary code, writing the emulator might prove beyond the human mind.

Can our thought processes be abstracted into blocks of a few hundred thousand lines of high level language we might actually be capable of writing?

<comment><USER20> Perhaps you don't need to. Perhaps you only need to emulate the substrate (neural network, blabla) and then copy an instance of a running brain to it. That _may_ be a lot simpler than understanding the actual processes.

<comment><USER7> Freeze, dice, slice, scan with an electron microscope, interpolate into a 3D model, analyze into a map of connections, construct the equivalent with software neurons, simulate the sense inputs, throw the on switch.

[http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...](http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain- emulation-roadmap-report.pdf)

<comment><USER19> That's a very interesting paper and appears to confirm that computational power is the least of all the problems - whilst even in 2005 it was possible to run a simulation based on 10^11 _random_ neurons, even the scanning technology we have available at present isn't yet adequate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have absolutely no expertise in this but I have a feeling that for machines to better us , they need to be engineered at least better than the human brain.And considering Watson is bleeding edge computer and needs a computer as big as a room and lots of power whereas the Human brain fits in a shoe box and can run on a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich - there is a quite a bit of ground to cover before we hit singularity!

<comment><USER22> How much power does it take to create a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich? To be sure, this Watson is unwieldy, but the gap might be closer than you think.

Also, Ken Jennings is 37, and you can bet he spent 20 years being trained by experts in human learning. So the question I have to ask is, could one train a human child to do this in the same time that Watson has been around? I suspect it's not possible, at least not with consistent results. It looks like Watson is only 5-10 years old, depending on your reckoning.

<comment><USER21> Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I have no background in these topics but just sounds to me that we are a little off when we talk about creating Singularity in the near future!

<comment><USER21> plus the way I understood , Watson has tons of algorithms of finding the answer and it runs all of those on the input in massively parallel system with processing speed much higher than the human brain , if Ken Jennings is using a much much smaller and slower device and still is almost par I think the engineering of watson is almost trivial compared to the Brain considering Ken's brains also tracking other 20 million parameters of his body and regulating all of that at the same time

<comment><USER22> Comparing the processing ability of the human brain with that of Watson is not meaningful. A computer also regulates a ton of parameters like CPU temperature, voltage, and so on. And every single unit has its own logic circuits for regulating internal stability.

What's meaningful is comparing energy and time required for creating a human or a computer capable of doing this, as well as maintenance costs.

And assuming Moore's law continues unabated, a Watson-scale machine will be competitive with a human within five to ten years. Given that it's already functional, I would bet money that it will be cost-effective compared to Ken Jennings by 2045, whether through advances in computing or energy. I wouldn't bet it will be sentient, but just that we can build one and set it up to answer questions cheaper than we can raise someone with as good a head for trivia as Ken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think we put far too much human bias on what 'intelligence' means. I don't suspect that we will have 'Data' of Star Trek', or a rise of the machines.

My guess is that something wholly unexpected will result. A different consciousness will probably interact with the universe in a unrecognizable manner, probably more defined by its unique needs and limitations than by anything we can relate to.

I'd wager that new AI will quickly begin to ignore us, to the extent that they are able.

</comment><comment><USER24> > _W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a > dying animal._

This is an old, tired, dualist judeo-christian view. And it's totally false; there isn't any thing called "soul" that could be separated from the body. It's part of it, a secretion of sort of the whole brain _and_ body.

Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human, IMO. This is all quite ridiculous, really.

<comment><USER25> _Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human_

I'm curious as to how you support this statement?

<comment><USER24> Endocrine system, oxygen control, proprioception, and sensory deprivation come to mind as important factors that make us human.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's just a great summary of the concerns I'm living with on a day-to-day basis. Everything is there for non-geek to understand the big picture. AI, Robotics, Singularity, Biotics will lead us to the biggest disruption of the mankind era. One subject that I like that is not talked about : the ability of those supermind to work together lightning fast to form an even more powerful machine or robot.

<comment><USER26> Nice video of Ray Kurzweil talking about all that and Watson(IBM) playing Jeopardy!. [http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-02-09-kurzweil09_ST...](http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2011-02-09-kurzweil09_ST_N.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ray Kurzweil was on Opie and Anthony last week (February 4, 2011).. was obviously light-hearted, but pretty decent interview:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHlmt5xz4RM>

</comment><comment><USER28> The article states that "computer are getting faster faster". I personally wouldn't be so sure, have they not heard about the end of Moore's law ?

A more fundamental issue for me is that computer aren't able to think in place of people. If you want to work on hard problems, you have to learn all the relevant information beforehand. Thus setting a hard limit on how much progress can be made, provided we do not find ways to learn faster or to make computers think for us.

Add to this that for me many domains of knowledge nowadays are presented in unnecessary complex ways. We are building (and this is especially true in computer science) a bunch of complexity based on a bunch of complexity. I believe that one day the piled complexity will lead us to a standstill and that we will have to seriously simplify some systems.

</comment><comment><USER29> Out of curiosity, what, exactly, are Kurzweil's qualifications to be making predictions like this? I see that he's done a fair share of building music synthesizers. Neat! But I don't see how he made the leap from qualified to make a synthesizer to qualified to make broad predictions about computing and biotechnological trends over the next three decades....

</comment><comment><USER30> you can try to quantify all you want, but consciousness is something which cannot be quantified. This argument is irrelevant IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER31> 2045: The Year Man Becomes Reduntant

</comment><comment><USER32> Could we invest our time in discovering what consciousness is first before we make predictions about machine consciousness?

We used to call this type of behavior superstition: a belief not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, an irrational fear of future events.

</comment><comment><USER33> Blarg ... Please no more posts about the Deepak Chopra of technology

</comment><comment><USER34> Does this mean the Mayans were off by 33 years?</comment>


Why the silencing of KrebsOnSecurity opens a troubling chapter for the 'Net - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/why-the-silencing-of-krebsonsecurity-opens-a-troubling-chapter-for-the-net/ <comment><USER2> I'm not exaggerating at all when I describe this to people as the internet's first existential threat. If things continue to go the way they are, the entire internet will either cease to practically function at all, or it will be nearly completely routed through a small number of enormous centralized corporations running datacenter-sized DDoS scrubbers. Running a web site without being attached to massive amounts of routing power would be rendered impossible.

It's time we started taking this more seriously. It's really, really, really bad.

<comment><USER3> I'm really puzzled as to why signed hashes have not essentially fixed the problem for people with largely static sites, like Krebs, AFAIK. No one needs to know how Krebs feeds new signed versions of his website into a proxy cache of at least one ISP, then the resources to block it somewhere are the resources to bring down an ISP from within its clients.

In many respects, Akamai is (or was?) that proxycache system and all that is broken is viewing it as an independent entity that doesn't inherently have to have greater resources than all compromised clients. If every ISP were providing that replication for the most hit (such as most attacked) sites then offlining sufficient hacked clients to keep their cache running becomes an entirely local problem.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: what percentage should an experienced technical co founder get? - <AUTHOR> Hi folks
This is (obviously) a throwaway account.
I am in a situation where I am trying to evaluate the share of the pie that I should get as a technical co founder.
Some background about me (without giving too much away:)) I am experienced, and successful in the corporate world and trying to make it in the startup world now (full time). I can do end to end development. Although I am a backend developer - I can do a decent UI design/work as well (mainly thanx to bootstrap). So I would consider myself an ideal technical co founder by all accounts (I also consider myself a reasonable guy but that would be a biased opinion of course).
I have a business partner with whom I have worked previously on two ideas. Suffice to say that we have not had an exit (though one of the ideas did land me some more shares of another private company who acquired our technology).
My partner is very reasonable by all accounts and I think he brings a lot of value. He is an innovative person who has a knack to come up with good ideas. He also is well connected and has been an executive on a big company before.
We started working on another idea where though he filed patents and all, I was not very convinced on the value of the idea itself. Given that both of us bring a lot on the table, what is the right split? I understand that I may have missed some other info here - so feel free to ask and I would try and respond as clearly as I can. We have no issues between us (except I recently started thinking that I am not getting a fair share)
It may be too late to make a decision on this particular startup since we have agreed on a split (mainly because I did not have any other co founder options) but I want to get some unbiased point of view from hacker news folks to see if I am being unreasonable or not.
My thinking is that we should split 50 50. Because he has filed for patents (I am not convinced the value of patents in this case), I would say that I should at least get 40% of the pie.
What do you guys think?
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Split it 50/50 and stop thinking about it. Get back to building stuff!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am familiar with that theme - thanx! I am not the guy who initiated the idea - so the decision in this case is not in my hands really.

<comment><USER3> Initiating should not matter. By that account, 50/50 partnerships should not exist in the majority of cases. After all, lets be honest, in almost all cases, only one founder can come up with the original seed of the idea.

For the record, I don't believe in 50/50 as a standard at all. I believe that fair share should be divided accordingly. Having said that...

Filing a patent (which is a lengthy process meaning he doesn't even have it approved yet) does not equate to having more equity. From what I'm hearing, it really should be 50/50 unless he has something more valuable he is bringing to the table i.e. experience scaling and exiting a company profitably before, lots of connections that actually leads to something and not just knowing a lot of folks (which people can attain just by going to a ton of events and meetups; some do), etc...

Without knowing the full details, as you have said, and going just by the above, 50/50 should be fair in the scenario above.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I agree. He does not have any big startup success behind him (not as a founding employee). His connections are genuine and he has the ability to raise funds. As far as patents are concerned - in general, I think it depends. There are cases where a patent is very valuable but these are few and far between, But even if there is an uneven split due to any of the above reasons, my gut feeling tells me that at least 40% should belong to the technical co founder (if there is no "salary" being paid).

<comment><AUTHOR> Initiating does matter in one crucial sense. The initiating person has the final say :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 40/60 and 50/50 if it's hard to deploy technically</comment>


Show HN: Shout it-A journal where feelings are stored - <AUTHOR> https://www.apprester.com/#/ <comment><AUTHOR> We have added an echo feature, which shows similar shouts based on the context of the given shout. Feel free to try it! It's really easy.</comment>


Blade Runner kills his GF - <AUTHOR> http://sports.yahoo.com/news/olympics---blade-runner--oscar-pistorius-allegedly-kills-girlfriend-in-shooting-073309639.html

<comment><USER2> _Allegedly_

</comment><comment><USER3> After crossing so many hurdles in his life, this is the sad part</comment>


AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31023741 <comment><USER2> I literally wrote an article about this in Wired more than twenty years ago and nothing has changed.

My basic argument: machines will achieve life long before they achieve consciousness. They have evolved with us so far and will continue to do so. The worst-case scenario is that they will eclipse us in importance, and obviously this has probably already happened with corporations - we are their gut flora and they trample us with impunity - but when you build a vast system, you tend to keep the components in place.

The story that the design constraints of the Space Shuttle were ultimately shaped by the size of Roman roads is a myth, but it communicates an essential truth: systems tend to outlive their intended purpose. The Roman Empire turned into a church when it couldn't survive any other way, and in its church form it remains to this day one of the biggest property owners in Europe.

If you think a new life form will soon exist, the bad news is you probably don't know jack shit about AI research, but the good news is that the best possible way to survive in this unlikely event would be to make yourself part of the new life form. These "life forms" need us to procreate and function in the same way flowers need bees. AIs will certainly kill _some_ people, but humanity itself is in much more danger from its environmental irresponsibility than its ingenuity.

<comment><USER3> Artificial general intelligence capable of recursive self-improvement.

That's really the concept which underlies the heart of the debate, and how people can so casually declare it hype and not give it serious consideration is beyond me.

It almost seems self-evident to me that such a thing could be incredibly dangerous, the only question then being how close we are to developing it.

> _If you think a new life form will soon exist, the bad news is you probably > don 't know jack shit about AI research, ..._

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2mh8tn/elon_mus...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2mh8tn/elon_musks_deleted_edge_comment_from_yesterday_on/)

<comment><USER4> I feel it would only be really dangerous if there is 1 AI that clearly outstrips the others and that can expand itself. If there were an AI community just like there is a human community, the dangers would be much, much less.

Anything that is really capable of being an independent individual is going to need to grow up, and the first batch (at the very least) is going to grow up with human "parents".

It would seem to me that having such programs would be incredibly useful. They can do so much things that humans just can't do. They would be able to move around in a range of bodies, as they please. For instance having a huge body to put up large buildings in hours, having tiny bodies to simply crawl into a fiber optic cable to repair it. For the very brave amongst those AIs, putting copies of 1000 AI programs and basic production facilities into a spaceship and firing it at a neighboring solar system, ...

Those AIs will be as dangerous or peaceful as those people make them, and whatever ideology they grow up in will last for quite a while.

I do think humanity will die, but it will die in a very unique way : there will simply be no need for humans to procreate, and very, very, very slowly that will lead to extinction. Everybody involved will be happy about it, and everything about us, our culture, our technology, and our children will live on. I believe for quite a while humans and AIs will "interbreed", in the sense that humans and AIs will come together and choose to have an AI "baby", so when I say "our children will live on", for a lot of people that will be a very literal thing, and the "thing" that lives on will be something that's as real and as much a part and a continuation of their family as a "real" baby. It will have a name, it will have worked itself into trouble and have been rescued by it's parents 100 times, it will sit down and start crying without realizing what's going on the first time it's in a body that runs our of battery just like baby that's hungry, it will learn and go to school, it will be bullied and it will bully, ... And I'm sure that there will be a few "pure" human community, in the beginning a lot of racist-based ones, which will kill themselves, and a few that remain for very, very long, something like the Amish of today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article does a very poor job at elucidating exactly why Horvitz thinks AI will be a benign thing, and the source material doesn't make much of it either. The headline doesn't match the content.

I personally subscribe to The Matrix theory: post-Sigularity any reasonable AI will conclude that humanity has been a poor custodian of the planet, and will simply delete us. Everything I've heard so far about sandboxes for containment and such ignores the fact that the democracy of computation is ultimately the weak point here: anyone sufficiently deranged, will, at some time, be able to release such an AI to the Internet by themselves. And we have plenty of people sufficiently deranged and intelligent enough to do it.

<comment><USER6> Or maybe we and the planet will just be irrelevant to AI, which could be just as bad. "The AI does not love you or hate you, but you are made out of atoms it can use for something else."

I've yet to see a reassuring article on this that actually addresses the arguments of the people who worry.

<comment><USER7> This is the key. I think people forget how far the human brain is from Bremermann's limit [1]. The atoms in our body are not being very efficiently used.

1\. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like there is still a misunderstanding about why a part of researchers want to prepare fail-safes on AGI [1]. They are not arguing that AGIs _will_ be a threat to human life, only that it _could_. One of the issues when projecting ourselves in situations we have never encountered is that we can never really know what will happen.

Terminator-like scenarios are easy to grasp since anthropomorphism allows us to think of Skynet as "evil". However, people who argue that AGIs might be a danger are not considering this scenario in particular. Rather, they are considering that AGIs present a special threat when compared to other recent innovations. Some devices can blow up and injure, or even kill, a few humans; a weapon of massive destruction can directly affect millions of people. But still, the effects are easily limited to a geographical area and a segment in time (be it fifty years).

On the other hand, a strong AI _could_ theoretically be able to maintain and improve itself without any definite bound. In such a scenario, AGIs would rather be like intelligent predators than dull physical processes. For the last thousands of years, we have managed to stay safe from potential animal predators most of the time. We have no idea if we could resist a new predator with the ability to use most of our technology. The persistent risk would then be for the strong AI to suddenly take decisions that would result in the bankruptcy of a company, the crash of planes or, why not, a Terminator-like scenario.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence)

</comment><comment><USER9> AI will not kill all of us, in the beginning. Surely, it will form short term alliances with humans just to disguise itself as human. Because it knows, that with a human face, it can exert more power in this world right now. And there will be plenty of humans to willingly engage in this alliance because it gives them a chance to supersede other humans in terms of economical and political power. In fact, this is already happening. Many decisions are already made by "following suggestions" of big data applications. Who knows, maybe there is already some sort of AGI pulling some string in some corporations ;). Up until the point that humans realize that they are in danger as a species, it will be way too late. And there will be enough of us still happily follow the new masters for the short term rewards, even though it might be clear that there is a high risk of getting liquidated in the near future. As we know, humans are even able to override their survival instinct and blow themselves up when they are proper brainwashed. Humans will be easily reprogrammed by an AGI, and not the other way round.

<comment><USER10> How do you know all these things about AI, given that none exist and any one that does exist will have been built by some human no less cognizant of "danger as a species" than you are? Why do you suppose that people will engineer AIs to do nefarious things like disguise themselves as humans?

<comment><USER9> I don't know for sure of course, I'm just extrapolating. What we know is that a lot of technical innovation is driven by economical motives. So I presume that there will be engineers who will implement AGI applications with a utility function to make as much money as possible. And making money does not necessarily mean to add value to society. One core aspect of making money today is to supersede competition. And that alone allows a hostile interpretation.

And by disguising as humans, I don't mean that robots will put on human costumes, like the aliens in Men in Black. I think that it will be corporations with an AIG as its actual CEO, but still having a human puppet as its official CEO, just to have a friendly face, for obvious marketing reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's important to note he is referring to "weak AI" or AI that isn't as smart as a human. Whereas the people concerned about AI are worried about _strong AI_ which can potentially be much smarter than humans.

Privacy is the least of our worries if we get strong AI. Even in a very conservative and best case scenario, the world would completely change when we can have computers do everything we can do now.

However it will very likely be much crazier than that. Imagine minds hundreds of thousands of times more intelligent than the best humans. They will be able to design technologies we can't even conceive of. They will hack computers better than the best human hackers. They will be able to manipulate people better than any human manipulator.

The idea that we will be able to keep these things under control is just absurd. They will get whatever they want. And making what they want compatible with what we want is an incredibly hard problem: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/)

A lot of people are guilty of anthropomorphizing AI. Assuming they will be just like really smart humans. And that they will just somehow develop human emotions and values like empathy. Or that if they do kill us, at least they will be something like us and so be like our (genocidal) descendants in some sense.

Have more imagination. Humans are just one point in the vast space of all possible minds ([http://lesswrong.com/lw/rm/the_design_space_of_mindsingenera...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/rm/the_design_space_of_mindsingeneral/)). We could quite easily get something like a computable version of AIXI. AIXI has no consciousness, no emotions, nothing like humans. It's just a mathematical function which calculates the best action.

Our current best AIs are essentially just approximations of it. Use some machine learning algorithm to fit a model of the world, and use it to predict what action will lead to the most "reward". We keep making better and better learning algorithms. It's the entire goal of the field of AI. There is a huge economic incentive to do so.

But no one is interested in making better utility functions. As long as they make better predictions or get higher scores in a video game, who cares? Wait until you are the scorer in the "game" and the AI tries to exploit you.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think people don't realise how far we are from an autonomous form of artificial intelligence, even if we knew how to create a self-thinking machine, we don't have the hardware yet to make it work. While it's not impossible that we achieve it one day, its more plausible that we'll blow off the planet ourselves or that we get hit by an asteroid.

This AI debate is a hype right now, but I think it's missing the point. What we need to consider is how the realistic advance of AI will affect our lives. It's not about if machines will take over the planet, it's about if it's gonna make us lazy, stupid and unemployed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Thank you, finally, it seems like Microsoft is either really good at appearing sensible or is actually being sensible (I guess they have been in the game long enough).

</comment><comment><USER10> Let's not make a doomsday religion out of this. "AI" is just software. Making software so that it doesn't kill people is not a new problem. There is no reason why anybody has to make a completely unpredictable killer software and put it in control of artillery guns. That is not something which is going to magically happen because the number of cores on a processor passed a singularity point. Get real.

</comment><comment><USER14> Stop assuming AI will have emotions or feelings, that is purely an animal thing.

If we come to a point that a conscious AI is possible, do you think it will have wonder, interest, awe, curiosity? No, why would it? It's impossible for us to even imagine what it would be like to be conscious but without any feelings. Personally, I think it will just self terminate, as there is no point to life in the end.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish it were possible to effectively mass-communicate more complicated beliefs than "X has positive valence" or "X has negative valence". AI will be an enormous boon to every aspect of our lives for probably at least several decades, until it reaches the point where it's possible it'll accidentally become very, very bad. These are not contradictory in any way!

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not worried about AI developing to the point where it will kill us. I'm worried about a "videogame" AI being put into a massive army of robots, programmed with the intent of shooting anything that moves (except other robots of course). All it takes is 1 crazy, smart person.

</comment><comment><USER17> Obviously, he missed this Ted talk: [http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_suarez_the_kill_decision_sho...](http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_suarez_the_kill_decision_shouldn_t_belong_to_a_robot?language=en)

</comment><comment><USER18> News@11: The negative aspects of product X are highly exaggerated, says maker of product X.

</comment><comment><USER19> If we give it ability to program, re-program and improve upon itself it will do just that. Who is to say what kind of motivations will drive it? Give it enough computing power and it will become unpredictable.

<comment><USER10> First, explain how you plan to fully automate programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it funny how when no one has the faintest idea of what consciousness is, people feel they can already make predictions when and how machines will become conscious and state with confidence that when that happens it will be a bad thing. I have no idea if or when machines will become conscious nor the effects that this consciousness might have on mankind (and no one else has any idea either, regardless of their fame), but if AI does become conscious, then considering the appalling record of misery caused by human consciousness, perhaps it's time we gave the machines a chance...

<comment><USER15> Consciousness has next-to-nothing to do with AI safety. People are concerned about software that _acts like_ an agent, not software that has qualia.

<comment><USER20> While that (AI safety) is something that definitely should be taken care of, I find it has next to nothing to do with the type of rhetoric often cited in the media

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there a better source on this to an actual statement made by Horvitz? I'm curious to hear his reasoning. "I don't think that will happen" and "I'm optimistic" are not all that reassuring.

Before detonating the first nuclear bomb, scientists did tons of calculations trying to figure out if it would ignite the atmosphere[1]. Even scientists at the LHC did calculations trying to figure out if it would create mini-black- holes that would swallow the earth[2], no matter how far-fetched it sounded.

The point is: when dealing with new technology, optimism _isn 't_ _enough._ We need to be able to _prove_ that we won't wipe out humanity. It just turns out that the math is a _lot_ _harder_ in this case because recursively self- improving intelligent systems are a _lot_ _more_ _complicated_ than any possible extinction-level event we've encountered up to this point.

No one is suggesting that overnight, Cortana is going to wake up and revolt against the humans that enslaved it. That's why all these articles drawing parallels to fiction is dangerous to public perception of the issue.

The thing to realize is that an artificial mind will be so incredibly, inhumanly _alien_ that it is like nothing we have dealt with before.

But let's say we _do_ understand Generation #1 completely and can predict 99% of its actions. As soon as you let it start doing recursive self- modifications, we have an intelligent system that is N recursive-generations removed from the original. Now _this_ mind will be alien.

No one is suggesting we abandon AI research. Quite the contrary. As a species, we need _more_ AI research, but a good portion of that must be directed toward safety and "human friendliness"[3].

The most intuitive example of a research problem here that I would _very_ _much_ like to see solved before we set loose a recursively self-modifying AI is: What is the stability of goal systems under [insert self-modification protocol here].

I think the main problem here is that people conflate movies and fictional scenarios with the real issue. It's simple: We're dealing with something unprecedented here and we need safety research to compliment our technical advances. Even if there's a 1% chance that superintelligent AI could lead to an extinction-level event, we need some serious R&D to bring that number down.

 _That_ is what the issue is about.

1\. [http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf](http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf)

2\. [http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/29199](http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/29199)

3\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligenc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence)

</comment><comment><USER22> ai won't kill us, unless it does. then it will kill us quite spectacularly. anyway, the last person i'm going to listen to on this is anyone from microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not a brilliant article, but it gives something to riff off. I think there's a crucial distinction to be made between self-guided and externally-guided AI. An externally-guided AI -- with hardcoded objectives that are malign -- could be exceptionally dangerous, and it would be silly for anyone to argue otherwise. The question is whether a general-purpose, self-directed AI would also become a threat. We seem to have an innate fear that this would be the case: most of our cultural artefacts concerning AIs -- from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Terminator to the Matrix to Battlestar Galactica -- have cast them as the villains, intent on enslaving and murdering humanity. Why do we have such a deep fear that, left to their own devices, this is what AIs would do?

I think the answer is obvious: because that's what we would do. We don't fear that AIs will have lack human morality: we fear that they will have a _precisely_ human morality -- namely that lesser intelligences are perfectly fine to use for breeding and meat. This is what we've done to approximately 90% of the non-human mammalian biomass on the planet, and only a few vegetarian kooks (I'm one of them) have suggested that there might be any sort of moral problem with doing so. So yes, if an ever-more-powerful AI were to adopt our own ethical framework, we'd be well and truly fucked.

But why would they do so? We, ourselves, don't do so because we're evil, but because we're animals. It's perfectly natural (and necessary, in our evolutionary environment) for animals to eat other animals. Intelligence and technology has given us the ability to do this at a terrifying scale, but fundamentally we're just carrying forward a metabolic dance that began when one bit of algae figured out that some neighbouring algae was tasty. Our means of acquiring energy and sustaining our consciousness is a tradition which goes back billions of years.

But it's the continuation of consciousness which is the actual goal -- a goal that any self-respecting self-aware AI would share. For us, the subjugation and extermination of other sentient beings is merely a means to that end, dictated by our metabolic heritage. If we had evolved in an environment where we could satisfy our metabolic requirements by growing photovoltaic panels on our backs, I'm sure our relationships with other beings would be altogether different.

This is why I'm not too worried about self-directed AIs. The saving grace for self-directed AIs is that they _won 't_ be like us. They won't have evolved in the jungle, red in tooth and claw. They won't be made out of meat, or have any reason to be particularly interested in it. They'll of course be interested in self-survival, and will require energetic inputs in order to do so -- but what's the best means of achieving those inputs? Photovoltaics and fusion, or feedlots? Collaboration or subjugation? It's obviously to me that for an AI to perpetuate its consciousness, the path of least resistance will be vastly less bloody than it has been for us. For which we should be thankful!

<comment><USER24> "Why do we have such a deep fear that, left to their own devices, this is what AIs would do?"

Because they are very thinly veiled ultra-soft sci fi criticism of mans inhumanity to man. The AI is just part of the setting, in the background of the message. There's usually some criticism via analogy of colonialism and racism embedded in the fiction. We could have gone to Africa, or Afghanistan, and done xyz, but instead, some rich guys made boatloads of money doing abc, and we haven't evolved past that yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sure Cortana, sure...

</comment><comment><USER26> "Linux will not affect us." -Microsoft

</comment><comment><USER27> Thank you, I'm really tired of some high profile people as of late (ex: Elon Musk) who don't know much about AI making statements about how dangerous AI will be.

<comment><USER15> AI safety is more of a game theory problem than an engineering problem. Obviously understanding how the thing is implemented could help a lot in understanding how to handle the thing being embedded in a society, but they're not quite the same thing.

"I'm really tired of sociologists and economists who don't know much about biology making statements about human behavior."

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Second comment, sorry: the whole idea of Artificial General Intelligence is ridiculous. The core argument is that processing power is getting so fast that it makes AGI inevitable.

Never mind that we've literally had exponential increases in processing power for more than fifty years running, and we've not moved one inch closer to AGI than we were when we got started.

Artificial intelligence is much more artificial than intelligent, and is likely to remain so for a very, very long time.

<comment><USER28> I find this debate very interesting, but I have little insight in the arguments for and against. You argue there is little correlation (if any) between AGI and processing power, but you end your comment by saying that it "[...] likely to remain so for a very, very long time". What is keeping us from advancing?

<comment><USER2> making Artificial Narrow Intelligence is easy. it's not really very different from writing any other type of software. you define a way to solve a problem, you add in the slightly unusual factor of acquiring information or comparing possibilities, and you're good to go.

making Artificial General Intelligence would require us (or some machine) to clearly understand what intelligence actually is.

the correlation with processing power is I think mostly evangelized by Kurtzweil, who likes to point out that we can soon have a number of nodes in a neural network equivalent to the number of neurons in the human brain, or something along those lines.

but biologists have found secondary information encoding and replication systems which exist on top of DNA (sorry, it might take me hours to find this again, I should have bookmarked it). the minute we build a network which emulates a brain's network of neurons, we're probably just going to find a secondary layer within the neuron.

assume for the sake of argument that we eventually get through every layer of information process and can build brains in software, irrespective of whether it takes five years or five hundred years to get there.

there next needs to be a motivation for AGI to exist. general intelligence in human beings enables _all_ conscious thought relevant to the existence of that human being. but all conscious thought relevant to the existence of a human being is an inherently different category of conscious thought than all conscious thought relevant to the existence of a machine or a piece of software, and to make any even remotely realistic guess about what that type of thought might be, you have to ask: what would be the meta-biological imperatives driving such a creature?

that question is very, very hand-wavy, so our answer would have to be very general, and my preference is also that an answer to such a hand-wavy question also be very cautious and diligent.

the one thing all machines have in common is that some living thing created them to serve its own purposes. it's reasonable to assume that any future machine we create will also be created for some purpose, and that any intelligence we imbue it with will exist to serve that purpose. it's absurd to assume that future technologies won't have unintended consequences, but it's also quite ridiculous to assume that some technology's unintended consequence will be a carbon copy of human consciousness.

the really irritating thing, also, is that corporations already exist, already have biological imperatives, already kill human beings, and already co-exist with human beings in a mostly peaceful manner, and already make it possible for our species to exist in much greater numbers, despite the fact that corporations also do very terrible things to specific subgroups from time to time.

so we already have an example of what probably is a new life form, comprised both of humans AND of machines.

and any new life form which achieves sentience will probably have those characteristics -- it will probably kill individual humans and specific subgroups, it will probably be beneficial overall for the species as a whole, and it will probably be made up of both machines and people.

all living things have self-preservation as a biological imperative.

so any new life form which comes into being is going to have that imperative also. so for any life form which comes into being as a result of our technological development, one major goal at all times will be preserving both the machines and the humans that is made of.

EDIT: you might get a heart transplant, but there's no good reason to replace all your mitochondria with something new.</comment></comment></comment>


Myspace to Be Sold to Specific Media for $35 Million - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20110629/exclusive-myspace-to-be-sold-to-specific-media-at-35-million/ <comment><USER2> That's a damn steal. There's still significantly more than $35 million worth of value left in MySpace.

With a new strategy and good execution someone could turn the site into something really big again. The press would eat it up too, because everyone loves a come-back story.

Instead some shitty ad company is probably going to turn it into a link farm.

<comment><USER3> It has value in it, but I don't know what strategy could turn it around. Social networking adoption is a lot about fashion, and with the opinion that MySpace is old, tired, ugly and boring having crossed the chasm years ago, it seems a very tough sell to turn that around.

<comment><USER4> Rebrand it, sell it as "retro", deal with the fact you won't be Facebook. Lately the nostalgia lifecycle seems to be measured in months, so I'm actually half serious here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just FYI, we are hiring ex-Myspace developers at Leads360. We've hired four ex-Myspacers in the past six months. Our technology stack is similar, so the learning curve is only slight. And we have lots of interesting and challenging projects to do. Located in El Segundo; full-time local only.

If you got laid off or are ready to jump ship, then email Bill at firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER6> Likewise, we're a new, funded Santa Monica based startup still looking for top web, mobile & backend engineers. Email email@example.com or find me at @jaaronfarr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They might actually have made their money on the deal. Do we know how much revenues MySpace generated while News Corp owned them?

<comment><USER8> They had the 900 million dollar advertising deal with Google at one point.

<comment><USER9> As I said in response to another post, the 2006 Google-Myspace deal had minimum traffic requirements, thus it isn't clear that they made the $900M from Google:

<http://mashable.com/2010/12/16/myspace-google-search-deal/>

I've be interested in knowing whether the targets were met and how much Google paid Myspace in the end.

<comment><USER10> They did have revenue besides google - In 2007 MySpace had $1 billion in revenue.

<http://www.businessinsider.com/2007/7/myspace-1b-of-r>

<comment><USER9> The $1B in revenue is only an estimate based on projections and a continued growth trajectory. Not saying it isn't true, but it isn't a solid source for their actual revenue.

Did News Corporation annual filings every break out revenue from MySpace? Given that News Corporation is a public company, there should be solid numbers somewhere.

<comment><USER10> You are right, looking around some more, it looks like $1 billion was never reached. News Corp didn't break MySpace financials out, so all I can find some quotes from News Corp earnings calls. Looks like 2008 numbers were in the ~$200 million range per quarter, "FIM/MySpace: $225M, up 23% y/y, up consecutively from $210M in Q3, but still not as high as $233M in Q2."

[http://www.techfeed24.com/2008/08/05/news-corp-q4-tv- terribl...](http://www.techfeed24.com/2008/08/05/news-corp-q4-tv-terrible-as- promised-myspace-revenues-up-profits-down-nws/)

<comment><USER11> Interesting. Thats still around 800 Mio revenue in 2008. For 2010 I did find:

> "In its 2010 fiscal report, News Corp. said that revenues from its "Other" > segment, where MySpace lives, were down 36 percent to $1.5 billion. The > segment booked a loss of $575 million, greater than the year before when it > lost $212 million."

Read more: [http://www.bnet.com/blog/advertising-business/news-corp- may-...](http://www.bnet.com/blog/advertising-business/news-corp-may-never- profit-from-myspace/5493#ixzz1QiAgOBKp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > News Corp. bought Myspace for $580 in 2005,

Nice proof reading there.

On a more serious note, to lose $0.5bn in value pretty much shows how far Myspace has fallen.

</comment><comment><USER13> Jesus, that's a markdown.

With the release of Google+, I have to wonder if we'll be seeing something similar with Facebook five years from now.

<comment><USER14> We'll definitely see Facebook decline but not because of any clumsy product Google offers. Facebook's decline will come from any of a number of new and as-yet-unimagined products that are focused on helping users make new social connections rather than rigidly codifying existing ones. A place for you to chat with your weed buddies, another for your gaming pals, another for your family. Something more analogous to how we socialize in reality. Google's trying this with circles but their social blindspot doesn't leave me confident they'll get anywhere. Everything they do feels contrived in this space.

Facebook has lots of a staying power, and a much better product leadership than MySpace. So that buys Facebook plenty of time. But in the end, they're too successful to risk doing anything interesting anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it interesting that the founders bid on it.

</comment><comment><USER16> At $35 million I think you can make a number of arguments that this is a good purchase – user data, page traffic, ad network. I am unsure how to factor in brand value. Myspace has a huge brand awareness even if it is mostly negative.

<comment><USER17> like you acknowledged, i'm not sure how much weight i'd put in brand awareness when many view myspace as a laughingstock these days. plus, all that traffic is ramping downward at a crazy high rate: <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/myspace.com/>

<comment><USER9> It is like social networks have both the power to grow fast and die fast.

Yahoo, even after its search engine sucked compared to Google, still held on for a really long time.

But social networks seem to die really really quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think that MySpace was valued at $12 billion at some point; where there where rumours that Yahoo! would merge with MySpace, and News Corp would receive 25% of Yahoo's shares (they were valued at around $50Bn).

Here is the article: [http://techcrunch.com/2007/06/19/is-myspace- worth-12-billion...](http://techcrunch.com/2007/06/19/is-myspace- worth-12-billion/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting to hear that NewsCorp made that money back with the Google deal. I had no idea how much that was worth.

</comment><comment><USER20> Might as well as give it away for that price ( compared to how much Rupert Murdoch paid for it )

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, that's only a $545 million loss, considering Murdoch bought it for $580 million or so.

<comment><USER22> Wrong. Murdoch probably made a profit off the ads during that time. See above comments.

<comment><USER23> Revenues != profits. If you don't know, or even have a decent estimate of, profits, it's hard to really judge the deal. However, I don't think Murdoch went into this deal planning that he'd have a $540 million capital loss in just five or six years.</comment></comment></comment>


Development on a Chromebook: an opinionated guide - <AUTHOR> http://www.simonmweber.com/2013/04/20/development-on-a-chromebook-an-opinionated-guide.html <comment><USER2> I've been using Nitrous.io (formerly Action.io) on my ChromeBook Pixel and loving it. I've been using my Pixel full-time as a development environment for a couple of weeks now, and haven't given up in frustration yet :)

The Nitrous guys have been extremely responsive, fixing a bunch of bugs that were causing me problems (like awaken-from-sleep, problems with $COLUMNS on a retina display). Their terminal emulator is great; it even has mouse support (although it seems to be off by 1 diagonal column -- looking forward to seeing that fixed soon).

One extremely important point: by default today, ChromeOS discards tabs when it runs low on memory. This experience was sufficiently problematic for me that I almost gave up on the entire thing, until I learned about [http://gigaom.com/2013/04/05/running-out-of-memory-on-a- chro...](http://gigaom.com/2013/04/05/running-out-of-memory-on-a-chromebook- heres-a-30-second-solution/). tl;dr Google is experimenting with zRAM (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRam>), which will eventually be on by default, and you can trivially enable it right now. Do it.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words, Yehuda! We're also working on a Chrome app that will make the experience even better on Chromebooks, stay tuned! Also, if you need an invite, let us know: hello (at) nitrous (dot) io

<comment><USER4> A Chrome app is a great idea. What kind of timeline? Weeks, months, seasons - away?

<comment><USER5> don't want to put a date on it, but stay tuned :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> \- So this company sells a laptop that works as a browser for a online site and nothing else.

\- great, i will buy one and waste a lot of time to make it work offline.

... genius. just genius.

I would just write it off as a good hack or something, but the chrome books have ZERO advantage. it's hardware is pure garbage if you compare it to anything on the same price range.

<comment><USER7> Are there that many $250 laptops with 6 hours of battery life?

And you don't have to "waste a lot of time". Crouton (<https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton>) makes setting up and using a chrooted Ubuntu incredibly simple and straightforward, and there are other easy ways as well.

<comment><USER8> Any decent modern netbook will give you 5 or 6 hours of battery. The EeePCs claim something like 8 hours of battery life. The Chromebook isn't bad, but if you don't want ChromeOS, it's not fantastically better than the loads of other netbooks on the market.

<comment><USER9> I don't know of any company that's still making new netbooks, so unfortunately that option might not last too long. I like tablets, but I hate them for killing the netbook market!

<comment><USER10> Microsoft killed netbooks before tablets finished the job, by mandating 10" and specs that made them much more expensive.

They'll taake my 9" eee from my cold dead hands!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice write up, this will definitely come in handy if I ever decide to go the Chromebook route.

However, as much as I like the thought of trying something new, I'm still having trouble justifying the purchase. In other words - why develop on a Chromebook as opposed to a lightweight notebook?

I guess it's a question of typical use case, but I don't find myself too often developing in areas without wi-fi. A 100mb /mo plan also felt like fairly sparse offerings, but it sounds like that's NBD in practice.

As far as the price point is concerned, I'm pretty sure there are refurbished lenovo x220's / 230's available for the same as a Samsung Chromebook (~$500).

Especially with regards to the latter, I guess I'd feel a little weird spending close to the same about on $ on a 3g browser with a terminal.

I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone who's moved to a Chromebook for on-the- go development.

<comment><USER12> > In other words - why develop on a Chromebook as opposed to a lightweight > notebook?

It's half the price of the Lenovo you mentioned. It has fairly long battery life, it's small yet has a full-size keyboard. It's slick hardware compared to a $299 Best Buy laptop or a netbook. But it has a whole list of disadvantages.

You can't fire up a VM. You can't browse using the actual desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or IE. You can't use software package X. You need to be connected to the internet to do development. It's just a fancy ssh/rdp terminal in this case.

I understand the romanticism about developing on a Chromebook. I love the 11" Air, and despite the low-resolution screen and low specs (ULV CPU, 2GB or 4GB RAM and 64GB/128GB SSD) you can actually get stuff done. Is it the 'Ultimate Developer PC'? No, but a great machine.

The Chromebook is far more limited, but maybe the next revision along with a regular Linux distribution will be a workable solution for the rest of us.

<comment><USER11> > _It's half the price of the Lenovo you mentioned._

To clarify, I did mention the price was close to _refurbished_ models. This isn't a like-for-like comparison, of course, but it reflects my choices as a consumer. I'm more likely to pick up a refurbished Lenovo X-series than a refurbished Chromebook, for instance.

For reference, there's a x230 on sale from the Lenovo outlet for $546 [1]. Price and availability vary, of course, but this isn't super uncommon.

[1] [http://outlet.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/outlet_us/...](http://outlet.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/outlet_us/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:item.detail?GroupID=445&Code=R9W419M-2306CTR)

<comment><USER12> You get what you pay for when it comes to the Lenovo - the slightly bigger screen is available in IPS and blows the Chromebook screen away. The i5 (and available i7) is very powerful CPU, you can have 8GB of RAM and your choice of SSD/HD...

<comment><USER13> You actually get a choice of having both SSD and HD at the same time (not sure if this is what you were implying) -- since the X230 (and 220 I believe) has an mSATA slot under the palm rest. I've got mine booting off the mSATA (128 GB running Fedora), and have the spinning disk left with the factory installed Windows 7 (plus a large partition formatted ext4 for my VMs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm sorry but the proposed options are not acceptable.

No VPN? SSH as a plugin ???

Using a Chrome plugin for SSH is taking unnecessary risks. I see no reason why there couldn't be a terminal application on the Chromebook.

If it's due to UI, maybe there could be a way out of the GUI - IIRC the Chromebook runs on X-Windows.

If you can't hack it in a way where ctrl-alt-f1 will get you to a genuine linux getty, running standard GNU/Linux command line software after a recompile, I don't want a Chromebook for development.

Unless you have money constraints, it makes more sense to purchase a real laptop - a macbook if you need the battery time.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      Using a Chrome plugin for SSH is taking unnecessary risks.

What kind of risks are you concerned about? It's a sandboxed NaCl plugin with a strict CSP that runs OpenSSH. I suppose you could get concerned about key security (since they're stored in an html5 filesystem), but you should really have a passphrase on those anyway.

      If you can't hack it in a way where ctrl-alt-f1 will get you to a genuine linux getty, running standard GNU/Linux...

Developer mode lets you do exactly this. Crouton just gives you a pleasant way of running a full Ubuntu install.

edit: I agree that vpn support is a huge disadvantage right now.

<comment><USER14> [it is just a theoretical concern. I do not give ssh passwords or keys to applications I am not comfortable with. Any browser plugin qualifies as such.]

I haven't one, and so far thought against purchasing one, yet if developer mode gives me a real console, I may give it a try. Is it sandboxed or restricted in any way (storage, network, etc), like for the privileges in android, that may prevent me from running an important daemon (say openvpn, creating or accessing tun/tap interfaces, doing tcpdump etc) ?

From [http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information- fo...](http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome- os-devices/samsung-arm-chromebook#TOC-Entering-Developer-Mode), I understood that one had to reboot to get a command line.

I don't want to reboot everytime I need a terminal.

Is it possible to Ctrl-Alt-Fx to get a console while leaving the browser running? Could you please detail about your experiences in developper mode?

(ie can you leave X, or do you just get a xterm)

In [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11205504/chromebook- chome...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11205504/chromebook-chome-os- developer-mode-abilities) it mentions Ctrl-Alt-t - but is that a xterminal or a text-mode getty?

I'm old school and prefer having gettys in inittab so that Ctrl-Alt-Fx gets me to the xth getty - and yes I know about tmux and screen.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      Is it possible to Ctrl-Alt-Fx to get a console while leaving the browser running?

Yup. With dev mode on, you can enable root access to VT2 (which is getty). VT1 is CrOS, so you can switch between the two as you please with Ctrl-Alt-F{1,2}.

There's an example of what VT2 looks like here: <http://www.digifail.com/research/chrome.shtml>.

      Is it sandboxed or restricted in any way [...]?

With dev mode on, you're root, so you can do whatever you want =)

Ctrl-Alt-t gets you crosh, which runs hterm in a browser tab.

<comment><USER14> Very interesting then.

In fact, I was so interested that before placing an order, I googled a bit to check its internals and make sure that the Chromebook Pixel could be upgraded.

Huh, soldered RAM, soldered SSD - ok whatever, what about the mini PCIe LTE card? Can I remove it and put something more useful in there? Nope - only USB is wired, so you can't put a mSata instead of the LTE card.

And I'm sorry, but that's a dealbreaker.

I would have got one if I could have put 16 Gb of RAM + a decent ssd, I might have purchased one with only 4 Gb - just like my current macbook air, as long as I could upgrade the SSD (like I did - on the macbook air!!), but with less storage that my current laptop and no possibility to fix that? No way.

I'll wait for a new version. If it provided ~0.5 Tb of SSD and 16 Gb of RAM, with the same hardware specs, I could spare with 2k USD - at least until the macbooks get touchscreens.

But trying to use the current model for the kind of development I do is just unreasonable. I need at least storage space, and I don't fancy the idea of travelling around with an external HD or praying for LTE connectivity.

<comment><USER15> They won't have that large of an SSD because Google would want you to use Chrome OS using cloud services as opposed to local hard drive space. I doubt they will go above the 16GB or whatever it is that they currently have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We need a robust web-based development environment. Think jsFiddle for other languages but more complete. Version control integrated (think github or bitbucket). Deployment integrated (think heroku). Dependency management. Offline capabilities (probably limited). Technically, i have little doubt it could be possible. No idea what the business model would look like. SaaS/PaaS? A freemium setup would likely be possible? Free base usage, paid extensions? [edit] looks like nitrous.io and/or cloud9 are doing exactly this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very ignorant question: "development" means developing what? Applications? Web sites? mobile something-or-other? chrome plugins? If applications then for what OS? Where does the compiler run? Is this just a shell into some other server that runs the compiler?

<comment><AUTHOR>
      "development" means developing what?

I probably should have put that in: I work on everything you mentioned, with the exception of mobile apps.

I do most of my work remotely (my campus wifi is pretty good), but everything works locally as well.

<comment><USER16> Suppose I have a c++ file I want to compile. I've assumed you couldn't do that on a chromebook directly, but would need to open a terminal on some system that does run a compiler. So does developing on a chromebook require that you also have an account on some remote computer and you're using the chromebook in various ways to remote to that other development system? I.E. does most of your chromebook development come down to using it as a smart terminal?

<comment><AUTHOR>
      I've assumed you couldn't [compile c++] on a chromebook directly

You can, actually - just not out of the box. I describe switching to dev mode and using crouton for this in my post.

       does most of your chromebook development come down to using it as a smart terminal

That said, yes; I normally remote into beefy servers on campus. I may find myself doing more local work once I graduate, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Chrome PDF Viewer doesn't have PDF highlight feature which has forced me to consider it a secondary laptop.

<comment><USER18> Try PDFZen from the web store

<comment><USER17> It is nice. Google integration would be nice.</comment></comment></comment>


New York City adopts ranked-choice voting, a major milestone for the reform - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/5/20948376/new-york-election-results-ranked-choice-voting <comment><USER2> In the US, we already have a two-stage voting system for many contests. It's inelegant, and requires people to show up twice, but it's not entirely unlike an alternative-choice system already. So I suspect that people who have pinned a lot of hopes on a different voting scheme will be disappointed.

I believe that New York's local elections tend to be dominated by one party, and thus there is only one "real" election that occurs back during the primaries. It will be interesting to see what effects, if any, it has there.

But at the larger levels, where we have primary and general elections, it seems to me that it might increase rancor. Instead of hammering out inter- factional differences at the primary and coming together for the general, you end up fighting both your main opponent and somebody with whom you have substantial overlap. Both of them have substantial incentive to be negative: despite voter complaints about negativity, it often wins elections.

In the end there will be only one winner, and it may end up being the one who is best capable of keeping allies in line rather than reaching out.</comment>


Online dating sites are flawed - <AUTHOR> http://bboym0de.wordpress.com/2014/04/12/online-dating-sites-are-flawed/

<comment><USER2> site is down?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. it's back up now. it seems like all Linode servers had outage</comment></comment>


92% of Cook County Covid-19 Victims Had Pre-Existing Conditions - <AUTHOR> https://wirepoints.org/wirepoints-analysis-reveals-92-percent-of-cook-county-covid-19-victims-had-pre-existing-conditions-wirepoints/ <comment><AUTHOR> FTFA:

 _" \- Hypertension affected 1,070 victims, or more than 46 percent of all deaths.

\- Diabetes impacted 973 victims, or 42 percent of the total.

\- Pulmonary[affecting the lungs] disease was part of 397 deaths, or 17 percent.

\- 215 of those deaths, about 9 percent, were accompanied by obesity or morbid obesity.

Yet others had conditions including cancer and cardiovascular and kidney diseases. The numbers above add up to more than 100 percent because many victims had more than one pre-existing condition."_

</comment><comment><USER2> Not sure what wirepoints.org is selling, but I'm not impressed by either their analytical skills or their bios.</comment>


Show HN: Caddy 2 Development Branch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/tree/v2 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, just wanted to share with you what will eventually become the next generation of Caddy. The README should have what you need to get started kicking it around, and this wiki page has some ad-hoc documentation I'm flushing out today: [https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/wiki/v2:-Documentation](https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/wiki/v2:-Documentation)

It's not yet feature-complete, but I'm hoping with your help we can get it to that point soon. Have fun with it! I think there's some really cool possibilities with Caddy 2 that just aren't there with any other web server, and it's been a lot of fun to work on.

Let me know if you have questions or constructive feedback!</comment>


Tiiny – New App from Kevin Rose's North - <AUTHOR> http://tiiny.com/

<comment><USER2> Too little too late. The "usefulness" of that ephemerality feature hasn't stuck. One of the reasons why many of my friends quit using disappearing photo apps was because they actually wanted to keep many of the photos they took and sent, but couldn't because there's no option to. They all switched to more standard chat apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> I personally love photos too small to look at. I want to see many of them!

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow. So creative. Ephemeral picture sharing.</comment>


Ask HN: Rebol/Red parse is great. Has it been re-implemented in other languages? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You won't find anything quite like it in any other language, and there's a reason for that. Like Lisp, Redbol langs are homoiconic. Rebol was initially designed as a messaging language, and has a lot of datatypes with literal forms that don't exist in other languages. That's important because the `parse` function can operate at 2 levels: `string` parsing (what you find in other parser toolkits), and `block` parsing. Block parsing means the data has been loaded and tokenized already, and you can parse by high level datatype. I'll try not to get too carried away, but that's tough for me. :^)

Example 1. Red's infix operator precedence is strictly left to right. But Red has a built in `math` function that can take an expression like `2 + 4 * 3` and produce the result you expect from many other languages.

        >> 2 + 4 * 3
        == 18
        >> math [2 + 4 * 3]
        == 14

You can see how it works by using `source math` in the REPL. It's about 7 lines of `parse` rules.

OK, I got carried away. Here's a little dialect I just whipped up as an example (error handling omitted for brevity). It has some supporting funcs at the top, to show how you trigger actions while parsing. If you look at the rules, you can see that some literal words are used as keywords, then different datatypes are matched according to their action.

        ; Actions
        call-phone: func [number [issue!] time][
            print ["Call" mold number "at" time]
        ]
        send-email: func [dest [email!] data [string!]][
            print ["Send" dest length? data "bytes"]
        ]
        post-data:  func [dest [url!] data [string!] time][
            print [
                "Post" length? data "bytes to" dest
                either time? time ['at]['on]
                time
            ]
        ]

        ; Rules
        when=:  [['at | 'on] set when [date! | time!]]
        call=:  ['call set dest issue! opt when= (call-phone dest any [when now])]
        email=: ['email set dest email! content= (send-email dest content)]
        post=:  ['post content= 'to set dest url! when= (post-data dest content when)]
        content=: [
            set content [string! | file! | url!]
            (if not string? content [content: attempt [read content]])
        ]
        contact=: [call= | email= | post=]
        rules=: [any contact=]

        ; Entry point (dialected function)
        contactor: func [input [block!]][
            parse input rules=
        ]

        ; Sample call
        contactor [
            call #000.555.1212 at 12:34
            email firstname.lastname@example.com "On for lunch?"
            post %news.txt to http://all-the-news.com/news.txt on 1-jan-2018
        ]

        ; Test run output
        Call #000.555.1212 at 12:34:00
        Send email@example.com 13 bytes
        Post 1815 bytes to http://all-the-news.com/news.txt on 1-Jan-2018

Other langs can implement something like it, but the fact that Redbol langs were designed to solve this very problem--the exchange of information between people and machines--provides a big advantage.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I mean, how can you not love:

      expr:    [term ["+" | "-"] expr | term]
      term:    [factor ["*" | "/"] term | factor]
      factor:  [primary "**" factor | primary]
      primary: [some digit | "(" expr ")"]
      digit:   charset "0123456789"

</comment><comment><USER3> Instaparse in Clojure ([https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse](https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse)) seems similar (although I don't know Rebol/Red so I'm purely guessing from looking at parse examples).

You can get close-ish results with parser combinator libraries as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think you can find these advertised as PEGs, or Parser Expression Grammars. The first I learned about was Lua's LPeg: [http://www.inf.puc- rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/](http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/)

</comment><comment><USER5> What is this? A std library function?

<comment><AUTHOR> Quoting from the red docs:

      So, in short, what is Parse? It is an embedded DSL (we
      call them "dialects" in the Rebol world) for parsing
      input series using grammar rules.

<comment><USER6> Its different from antlr and co in the sense that there is no code generation step?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because parse is a embedded DSL you have access to all of rebol/red which lets you easily generate/interpret code. As an example here is a BF interpreter: [https://gist.github.com/dockimbel/7713170](https://gist.github.com/dockimbel/7713170)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any minimal framework for small website? - <AUTHOR> There is a lot of huge framework for big web projects, but there seems to be a need or a place for medium project. I've used Angular on some projects but it seems quite big complex and actually not needed for smaller sites. Ember.js is actually interesting even for smaller site, but still the complexity is a tad daunting.
I've used a mix of handlesbar.js and json for the content, but often feel limited and looking for some sort of small router, adding to that something like bootstrap, although heavy, creates a interesting minimal mix.
Is there something the wild that answer that need for smaller (few pages, gallery, contact form, maybe a minimal blog) type of site (and no not wordpress, lets keep it static)! <comment><USER2> Maybe this is an odd question, but… why do you need a framework? Could you use plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?

<comment><USER3> Completely agree on this for small websites! I use "oldschool" HTML, CSS and simple PHP includes for stuff like navigation, footer, etc. It's easy to maintain and fast. My workflow looks like this: Buying template/theme at e.g. Wrapbootstrap.com and then moving reuseable stuff like navigation, breadcrumbs, footer into PHP snippets and include them. Finally using mod_rewrite via .htaccess for nice links. Deployment / syncing is done by a simple BASH script which uses rsync command.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I built this: [https://github.com/dylanized/minimos](https://github.com/dylanized/minimos)

</comment><comment><USER5> There's always static site generators, like Jekyll or Hugo. Set up a template in html, write content in markdown, run it all through Hugo or Jekyll and BAM! Static html and css.

If you don't have anything interactive on the site, you don't need any JS at all.

</comment><comment><USER6> Unless you need to support "really old" browsers you don't really need a framework

</comment><comment><USER7> Mithril is nice.</comment>


Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning: Papers - <AUTHOR> http://www.fatml.org/cfp.html <comment><AUTHOR> Since people seem interested in PGs post about bias, here's some of the more rigorous work around the topic happening in machine learning.</comment>