Have you pondered the moral implications of your startup? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a start-up that, if successful, has potential to be a major reference of human knowledge (think wikipedia in terms of vastness and impact, although it isn't particularly similar to wikipedia). We won't be able to control who uses our resource, and as it is community-driven, the specific direction our site will take is unknowable.
Call us naive optimists, but we're convinced that, for the most part, our startup will be used for good purposes. We're strongly against censorship, and we don't think censorship really works on the web anyway, so we'll be leaving this up to chance.
An example of a startup that might be slipping to the darkside is Reddit. I know Reddit was backed by YC, so anything perceived as a bash might not be well-received here. Nonetheless, I'm certainly not alone in thinking that the Reddit community has taken a turn for the worse. My biggest problem with Reddit today is its lameness, however, Reddit is not just lame, it is increasingly used to propagate toxic misinformation and hate speech.  I wouldn't be so troubled if I didn't see so many members of the community at Reddit embracing those sentiments.
I'm pretty sure that the Reddit team doesn't condone hate speech, and I'm not proposing they censor the site (it wouldn't really be possible, anyway), but it makes me wonder:
What do they think about this segment of the community they built?
Do they wish they'd done anything differently?
Is there anything my team can or should do to minimize our site's use for what we consider to be immoral purposes? Has anybody here spent much time thinking about this issue? Have you come to any conclusions? <comment><USER2> I'm surprised how often this comes up in YC startups, actually. I'm not sure if this is true of founders in general (it might be) but practically everyone we've funded not only wants to not be evil, but actively wants to make the world better.

This was certainly true of the Reddits. And in fact I think they succeeded. If you make a site where everyone can say what they want, some people are going to say things other people don't like. But isn't this a net improvement over the preceding model, where there were a few narrow channels for the distribution of news, and the companies that controlled them controlled the news? I'm not sure what you mean by "hate speech," and I doubt you are either, but I think we're net ahead if we have a world in which its harder for the powerful to suppress news, even if a few people take advantage of this new openness to say things that offend others. In fact, some of the best ideas started out that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't surprise me that this is a common concern in YC startups. It also doesn't surprise me that the Reddit guys gave the issue consideration.

I agree that limiting the ability to suppress news, even if some people take advantage of increasing openness to advance harmful agendas, is a positive trend. I used to regularly derive enjoyment from Reddit, and occasionally, I still do. Nonetheless, I think Reddit's struggle with various forms of abuse (by idiots, racists, spammers, etc.), is relevant to those of us working on community driven web-based projects (even if "community-driven," and "web- based" are the only traits in common with Reddit, as is the case with my startup). If I were one of Reddit's founders, I'd be troubled by its current state, and I want to do whatever I can to prevent similar problems from happening to our site.

As to what I meant by hate speech, I'll lean on Justice Potter Stewart's words regarding the definition of pornography:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it..."

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

There is plenty of hate speech on Reddit, and I know it when I see it.

The first time I discovered your (pg's) existence was when I received a link to your essay "What You Can't Say."

<http://paulgraham.com/say.html>

You said in that essay "like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes." I agree with you. Nonetheless, I'm sure that it isn't a mistake to consider white supremacist propaganda, for example, to be harmful to society.

I'd be surprised if you haven't encountered hate speech on Reddit, but perhaps you haven't. I imagine it wouldn't take you long to find, if you tried, as I have stumbled across it quite regularly by accident. Regardless, the particulars of my critique of Reddit aren't relevant. Figuring out how to make a community good, and keep it good, is my goal. The consensus here appears to be that an ounce of bad sprinkled in with tons of good is still worth it. I agree, but I'm still going to think about how to reduce that ounce to a gram, or less. Any ideas would be appreciated.

<comment><USER2> _Nonetheless, I'm sure that it isn't a mistake..._

If you read the essay carefully, you'd understand that in every era "right thinking people" are _sure_ that the things they want to ban are bad. In 1700 after explaining how broad-minded you were you'd be saying "Nevertheless, I'm sure it isn't a mistake to consider atheistic propaganda to be harmful to society." And you'd be wrong.

The whole point of the essay is that you have to step out of yourself to have any hope of seeing beyond the prejudices of your time, and that this is extremely hard. Your casual use of blanket labels for forbidden ideas is a sign you don't appreciate the difficulty of the problem here.

You'll notice I have never said what kinds of speech I think should be banned. That's because I've seen enough to know that that that second clause following "I'm pretty open-minded, but..." is very likely to be mistaken. Like someone saying that some open mathematical problem will never be solved, you're setting yourself up to look like a fool to future generations.

So your use of "sure" to me is very convincing evidence that your filters will generate a lot of false positives. I spent a whole month thinking about this problem. WYCS took the longest of any essay I've written. And I would be very reluctant to use that word "sure" in this kind of situation. So either you understand this stuff so much better than me that you've passed through uncertainty and back into certainty, or you simply have the confidence in your opinions that everyone is born with.

<comment><USER3> You're up against hindsight bias here, PG. (<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/hindsight-deval.html>) People don't realize how absurd the future looks when you have to predict it in advance. (<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/stranger-than-h.html>) 500 BCE seems much stranger than 2008 CE, which seems very normal by comparison - so people look back and see a steady progression toward normality, things getting less absurd over time, and they expect this trend to continue. (<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/why-is-the-futu.html>)

People don't realize how counterintuitive moral changes look when you have no advance idea of where you're heading. (<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/archimedess_chr.html>) So they don't use the kind of cognitive strategies that would have been necessary for, say, Archimedes of Syracuse to question slavery. (<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/chronophone_mot.html>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, I have pondered the moral implications of my startup.

Cryptography comes with a price: The bad guys get to use it too. Where my startup is concerned, this means that organized crime would have access to TLA-quality secure backups (and by "backing up" data from one system and "restoring" it to another, secure communication, too).

In the end I decided that since (a) criminals would need to pay for the service (which makes tracking them down easier), and (b) I'm going to be logging IP addresses, the extent to which this would assist criminals is fairly limited; and that the legitimate needs people have for secure backups far outweigh the potential for abuse.

<comment><USER5> Er, not to mention which, anyone who wants secure commo can just use GnuPG and friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can't make people good.

You can make yourself a better person and lead by example, but you can't stop people from doing something like spreading misinformation and hate speech. It has been going on since the beginning of civilization. If your startup has the right moral and socially beneficial intentions, then that is really the most you can do. If someone comes along and uses your tool for evil, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have created your tool.

In scientific and technological research, there are often amazing uses that benefit humanity. For example, splitting the atom resulted in nuclear power which is arguably a great invention for mankind. However, due to human nature, it created the greatest weapon mankind has seen. You cannot blame the researcher for facilitating this, you can only blame human nature for abusing the technology.

<comment><USER7> > created the greatest weapon mankind has seen

Stretching it a bit... I think the guy who made machine guns happen slept worse at night. You must realize though, that both were obvious inventions that were going to happen no matter what.

<comment><USER8> indeed: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Stop worrying. Now.

Every nanosecond you worry about this is a resource permanently lost from where it belongs: your startup.

What if Henry Ford hesitated because he worried about drunk drivers? Or Edison and Bell hesitated because they worried about drug dealers and criminals? We'd still have automobiles, lights, and phones. But you would have never heard of any of them.

You have little or no control over this. Have a little faith in others; stepping forward to confront evil is their thing. In the meantime, do yours.

<comment><USER10> The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.

<comment><USER9> How is building something people can use (or possibly misuse) the same as remaining neutral?

<comment><USER11> It's a moot point anyway because most of the time when you make a moral stand in your product you end up making the experience for its audience better. The tricky part is knowing which types of people you'll lose or gain based on those moral stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Long time lurker, finally registered to respond to this.

On controversial matters like race, religion or abortion, no matter what your position is and how sure you are about it, there almost certainly exists someone on the other side who's better educated/informed and just as sure as you. My ideal community site would allow the most extreme opinions, but not let any group jam the signal for others. For example, the Wikipedia page "Race and intelligence" would be much improved if it were split into two pages side by side, each editable by only one of the factions.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting perspective. The problem that initially jumps out at me is what to do when there aren't two clear sides to an issue. Any ideas on handling complicated, muddled, and contentious issues with multiple sides?

<comment><USER12> Not sure. Google gives me this: [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/uberfac...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/uberfact-ultimate-social-verifier.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, there are things you can do to drive the community in the way you want, without resorting to censorship.

There are softer measures you can take - make the votes of trusted editors (and people who vote like them) count for more in the ranking algo in the Reddit's case, for example. Is this ethical? Well, you have to decide for yourself.

A few examples to think of might help:

\- Western civilization generally spreads its values along with its technology. Is this Ok?

\- Is it ethical to support democracy in cultures that don't grow it themselves?

\- If you are the government of some country and have a tribe practicing female genital mutilation and considering it normal (including the women), what is the ethical thing to do?

\- Is Scientology ethical? Is it ethical to constraint them?

</comment><comment><USER14> _I'm not proposing they censor the site (it wouldn't really be possible, anyway_

Sure it is. The problem is that censors are always idiots: They define things as "good" and "evil" rather than "true" and "false". This tends to leave them and their compadres reading nothing but falsehood.

<comment><USER15> Censorship usually is not associated with filtering true vs. false information. From wikipedia:

 _Censorship is the suppression or deletion of material, which may be considered objectionable, harmful or sensitive, as determined by a censor._

"Censorship" implies a value judgement, not just filtering out content that is false (although even then, it can be hard to determine what is unquestionably untrue). That's why it's so subjective and difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just curious, can you give some examples of hate speeches on reddit? I'm thinking of the recent James Watson controversies, but that would seem pretty fuzzy. Any clarifications are appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER17> You can't throw out accusations of hate speech at the reddit community without some specifics which I've yet to see you mention in this post.

</comment><comment><USER18> That which lasts is self-correcting.

</comment><comment><USER19> If I understand it correctly, the idea with Reddit is that the community can decide what news it wants to see, by posting links and then filtering them. If the community wants hate speach (or more of those Ron Paul links) and Reddit serves up hate speach, then isn't the algorithm working?

I suppose you could actively ban users who skew the community in that direction -- though you'd have an endless calvacade of sock puppets to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER20> My current toy idea is a real-time captcha trading market. On the one hand, spammers might pay to use it. On the other hand, it will inspire websites to come up with something better than captchas.

In any case, making a real-time market is too fun to worry about implications, don't you think? :)

</comment><comment><USER21> "Things happen, what the hell!" \- Terry Pratchet, The Hogfather.

</comment><comment><USER22> Bah, humbug. ;-)</comment>


100 things that are broken, according to HN - <AUTHOR> I compiled this list from HN news article titles that claimed something was broken.
Everything
TV
Java and Python sorting algorithm
OSX memory management
Hiring
HTTP
The internet
Email
Math.random in V8
Some links
The string type
Google's hiring process
Web development workflow
EC2 firewall
RNG
SSL
The ocean
Email forwarding
Sleep
WhatsApp
Bookmarks
Bitcrypt
The patent system
Breaking news
POSIX close(2)
Scientific peer review
Your Tumblr
systemd
Your wireless router
Nearly all binary search and merge sorts
OpenGL
Bread
Maven
HN submissions system
Your Docker image
iOS 8.0.1
VirtualBox
OpenSSL's implementation of DSA
Airport security
Facebook
The War on Drugs
Diablo III economy
All the crypto code you've ever written
Web development
Unicode in Python
Go packaging
DNS in OSX 10.10
Agile
Interviews
Security of USB
Mac App Store DRM
HTML <a> element
Your business
The venture capital model
CMS
RC4 in TLS (kind of)
GSM encryption
Visa and MasterCard security
Google's design process
Silicon Valley
java.nio.file.WatchService, on Linux
Employee equity
East New York
Language learning
DCI in Ruby
Logout in Ruby on Rails
Performance tools
India's higher education system
Copyright
Algorithm development
GitHub's language detection
Shopping
HN flagging system
Google App Engine
Photo uploading
US justice system
Outlook
Our pricing model
RC4 in TLS
The calorie
Online dating
Bitcoin
Tech journalism
Firebug
California's jaywalking law
Wireless
Browsers
Your online WYSIWYG editor
Skype for Windows
NBC's Olympics coverage
The payments industry
Someone's iPad
The App Store business model
Hollywood
The 30-day free trial
America's meritocracy
Continental Airlines funnel
Advertising in mobile games
Flash ads
PayPal <comment><USER2> I don't know, after "everything" the rest of these seem redundant.

</comment><comment><USER3> We have an excellent community of self reflection and idealism. Part of that exploration is revealing our own faults from within. If nothing's perfect, everything is broken (ok, kinda!). The list is both a bummer and to be celebrated. Thanks for publishing!

<comment><USER4> Nitpick: Everything but God. By definition God (for believers) is perfect.

<comment><USER5> Well, then, one only needs to believe something is perfect for it to be so in their mind. It doesn't have to be God.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This really calls for one of those "trend forecaster"-style four quadrant diagrams: broken / unbroken on one axis, fixable / unfixable on the other ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> Problems are Goldmines: The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities> [http://peterdiamandis.tumblr.com/post/128046793118/problems-...](http://peterdiamandis.tumblr.com/post/128046793118/problems- are-goldmines)

</comment><comment><USER8> The ocean is broken ?!!! Damned !

<comment><USER9> Yep, sadly it is. [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=The+ocean+is+broken](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=The+ocean+is+broken)

<comment><USER10> How is it broken? Have waves ceased waving? Have swimmers stopped swimming? The hyperbole is tiresome and detracts from solving the problems.

<comment><USER11> Fish have stopped fishing. That's a fairly big deal.

<comment><USER10> We should do the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What would make this list even better is adding links to the relevant HN articles.

</comment><comment><USER13> What's wrong with the python sorting algorithm?

<comment><USER14> Whats wrong with Whatsapp?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't enjoy using any of these. Great job, HN!

</comment><comment><USER13> Have any of these been fixed yet? Maybe flash ads?</comment>


Nexus 4 out of inventory yet again - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_8gb

<comment><USER2> I saw it available early last week, Sunday or Monday.</comment>


The 52 startups that launched at Y Combinator W17 Demo Day 1 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/20/yc-demo-day-winter-2017/ <comment><USER2> Algoriz? Seriously? Nothing but a tarted up Excel. This is what gets into YC these days?</comment>


Show HN: A weekly curated list of links from around the web - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedialtone.com/ <comment><USER2> I really appreciate the tone end editorial choice of these selections. Strikes me as having a mix of military, intelligence, startup and code bent to it -- maybe that's just my reading, but it suits me. And there's not just "1 page of links" there's a whole 20. I actually went looking for a subscribe button. But it's sort of ... better ... I guess from a product point of view that you don't have one...because, you know, when people feel that resistance in the course of achieving their goal, they want it more. I thought...I'm gonna come back and check this. Being an active participant...somehow makes a product I already want even more desirable...than just being a passive consumer.

And starting each one of with a great quote is a really interesting idea. It gets my mind thinking -- and then makes me more receptive or interested in the links.

Anyway, thanks for sharing! I look forward to it continuing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for great feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Like the minimal look and the first set of links. You should add a newsletter where you send these links to the list subscribers. Not sure how many users would bookmark and keep returning every week to check, with the amount of curation sites available these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for great feedback! I am looking into the newsletter idea.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Lightweight linux server monitoring service - <AUTHOR> https://nodequery.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> No updates from these folks since 2014. Anyone know what's going on over there?

Service still works quite well.

I used Show HN prefix because I've recently spoken with many people who had never heard of it. These people use New Relic, as do I.</comment>


Should AI Be Open? - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/ <comment><USER2> 'If you were to come up with a sort of objective zoological IQ based on amount of evolutionary work required to reach a certain level, complexity of brain structures, etc, you might put nematodes at 1, cows at 90, chimps at 99, homo erectus at 99.9, and modern humans at 100. The difference between 99.9 and 100 is the difference between "frequently eaten by lions" and "has to pass anti- poaching laws to prevent all lions from being wiped out".'

[EDITED: the intended quote is below. the quote above is the next paragraph of OP, which is only slightly less relevant than the intended one]

'Why should we expect this to happen? Multiple reasons. The first is that it happened before. It took evolution twenty million years to go from cows with sharp horns to hominids with sharp spears; it took only a few tens of thousands of years to go from hominids with sharp spears to moderns with nuclear weapons. Almost all of the practically interesting differences in intelligence occur within a tiny window that you could blink and miss.'

Yudkowsky's position paper on this idea explains this in more detail: [http://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf](http://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> So, here's a random thought on this whole subject of "AI risk".

Bostrom, Yudkowsky, etc. posit that an "artificial super-intelligence" will be many times smarter than humans, and will represent a threat somewhat analogous to an atomic weapon. BUT... consider that the phrase "many times smarter than humans" may not even mean anything. Of course we don't know one way or the other, but it seems to me that it's possible that we're already roughly as intelligent as it's possible to be. Or close enough that being "smarter than human" does _not_ represent anything analogous to an atomic bomb.

So this might be an interesting topic for research, or at least for the philosophers: "What's the limit of how 'smart' it's possible to be"? It may be that there's no possible way to determine that (you don't know what you don't know and all that) but if there is, it might be enlightening.

<comment><USER4> I think most people didn't really understand the meaning of your comment. They seem to all equate intelligence and processing speed.

I think it's legitimately an interesting question. As in, it could be something like Turing completeness. All Turing complete languages are capable of computing the same things, some are just faster. Maybe there's nothing beyond our level of understanding, just a more accelerated and accurate version of it. An AI will think on the same level as us, just faster. In that case, in that hypothetical, an AI 100x faster than a person is not much better than 100 people. It won't forget things (that's an assumption, actually), it's neuron firing or equivalent would be faster, but maybe it won't _really_ be capable of anything fundamentally different than people.

This is _not_ the same as the difference between chimps and humans. We are fundamentally on another level. A chimp, or even a million chimps, can never accomplish what a person can. They will not discover abstract math, write a book, speak a language.

Mind you, I suspect this is not the case. I suspect that a super intelligent AI will be able to think of things we can never hope to accomplish.

But it is an interesting question that I think is worth thinking about, rather than inanely down voting the idea.

<comment><USER5> Even if that is the case, a person with human-level intelligence, but with unlimited memory, ability to visualize, internet connection, no need to sleep, and thinking 100 times faster than a normal person would quickly become pretty much God to us.

<comment><USER6> I agree, I suspect at this time there's more room for progress to be made by augmenting human intellect than AI.

Think about how long it takes you to imagine a program vs actually coding it, or imagining an object you want to create and actually building it, there are at least two or three orders of magnitude for improvement over the keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is probably going to be the worst decision of humanity to allow AI research to continue past its current point.

I'm not even sure how we could stop it, but we should really be passing laws right now about algorithms that operate like a black box where a training algorithm is used to generate the output. For some reason everyone just thinks we should rush forward into this not concerned about an AI that is super human.

Whether it is a good or bad actor doesn't even matter. Giving up control to a non-human entity is the worst idea humanity has ever had. We will end up in a zoo either way.

<comment><USER8> It's current point? Current machine learning algorithms are still incredibly stupid. We are >>>20 years away from AI.

<comment><USER7> We are an unknown amount of time away from a true AI.

Right now we are making the building blocks that will make up that AI. We are very close to AI that can drive tanks and fly weaponized drones. We are very close to AI that replaces most blue collar jobs and the majority of jobs in the world really.

If we stop these lines of AI research and technology right now we can probably make it to the stars while still being a free people. If we make a true AI whether it is benevolent or not doesn't even matter. Humanity will no longer be in control of its destiny.

<comment><USER8> > We are very close to AI that can drive tanks and fly weaponized drones. We > are very close to AI that replaces most blue collar jobs and the majority of > jobs in the world really

You know this because you're an expert in the field?

<comment><USER7> [http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/03/googles-self-driving- cars-...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/03/googles-self-driving-cars-have- driven-over-1-million-miles/)

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/237005/foxonn_to_rely_more_on...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/237005/foxonn_to_rely_more_on_robots_for_manufacturing.html)

I don't have to be an expert. Anyone can see what is happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _And yet Elon Musk is involved in this project. So are Sam Altman and Peter > Thiel. So are a bunch of other people whom I know have read Bostrom, are > deeply concerned about AI risk, and are pretty clued-in._

This is precisely what dumbfounded me about the announcement.

> _My biggest hope is that as usual they are smarter than I am and know > something I don't._

It's possible that OpenAI might be a play to attain a more accurate picture of what constitutes state-of-the-art in the field, effectively robbing the large tech companies of their advantage—all the while building a robust research organization that could potentially go dark if necessary.

Admittedly, that also sounds like it could be the plot to a Marvel movie. Perhaps a simpler explanation is that the details aren't really hashed out yet, and they're essentially going to figure it out as they go—which would be congruent with the gist of OpenAI's launch interview.

<comment><USER10> They think if they arm individuals with AI there will be less of a chance for an uber AI to overwhelm. Think about the right to bear arms.

They are also probably worried about societal change and the angst everyone is going to feel as AI starts becoming more commonplace. Where do people (beyond entertainers and AI programmers) fit in such a world? They don't. People start to become very irrelevant.

<comment><USER11> > _People start to become very irrelevant._

Please be precise here and say they will be irrelevant in _economic terms_. What will be left are things humans otherwise care about: producing art, consuming art, fun, games, sports, traveling, companionship, partying, building things, learning new things etc.

I'm looking forward to it, and I don't see a reason why anyone wouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Ono-Sendai A couple of thoughts on this topic:

* Whether the source code to advanced AI is open may have some importance, but what determines whether some individual or corporation will be able to run advanced AI is whether they can afford the _hardware_. I can download some open-source code and run it on my laptop - but Google has data centres with 10s or 100s of thousands of computers. The big corporations are much more likely to have/control the advanced AI because they have the resources for the needed hardware.

* Soft / hard takeoff - I think a lot of people miss that any 'hard takeoffs' will be limited by the amount of hardware that can be allocated to an AI. Let us imagine that we have created an AI that can reach human level intelligence, and it requires a data centre with 10000 computers to run it. Just because the AI has reached human level intelligence doesn't mean that the AI will magically get smarter and smarter and become 'unto a God' to us. If it wants to get 2x smarter, it will probably require 2x (or more) computers. The exact ratio depends on the equation of 'achieved intelligence' vs hardware requirements, and also on the unknown factor of algorithmic improvements. I think that algorithmic improvements will have diminishing returns. Even if the AI is able to improve its own algorithms by say 2x, it's unlikely that will allow it to transition from human level to 'god-level' AI. I think hardware resources allocated will still be the major factor. So an AI isn't likely to get a lot smarter in a subtle, hidden way, or in an explosive way. More likely it will be something like 'we spent another 100M dollars on our new data centre, and now the AI is 50% smarter!'.

<comment><USER12> A thought about your second thought: if the AI reaches smart-human-level intelligence it may _get_ itself the hardware. It could hack or social- engineer its way into the Internet, start making (or taking) money, and use it to hire humans to do stuff for it.

<comment> Ono-Sendai Indeed. Maybe there should be a board of humans that has the final say on if money should be allocated to hardware for the AI. And they wouldn't be allowed to do google searches while deciding :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "If Dr. Good finishes an AI first, we get a good AI which protects human values. If Dr. Amoral finishes an AI first, we get an AI with no concern for humans that will probably cut short our future."

AI advanced enough to be "good" or "evil" won't be developed instantaneously, or by humans alone. We'll need an AI capable of improving itself. I believe the authors argument falls apart at this point; surely any AI able to evolve will undoubtedly evolve to the same point, regardless of it being started with the intention of doing good or evil. Whatever ultra-powerful AI we end up with is just an inevitability.

<comment><USER14> Why would it undoubtedly evolve to the same point?

<comment><USER15> I think he's suggesting there would be a critical mass of intelligence, if there is such a thing. Humans might not survive either transition through a malevolent AI or a good one.

I guess we'll find out, eh?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dabbling in and reading on AI for over a decade makes me laugh at any of these articles writing about a connection between OpenAI, AI research, and risk of superintelligence. Let's say we're so far from thinking, human-intelligence machines that we'll probably see super-intelligence coming long before it's a threat. And be ready with solutions.

Plus, from what I see, the problem reduces to a form of computer security against a clever, malicious threat. You contain it, control what it gets to learn, and only let it interact with the world through a simplified language or interface that's easy to analyse or monitor for safety. Eliminate the advantages of its superintelligence outside the intended domain of application.

That's not easy by any means, amounting to high assurance security against high-end adversary. Yet, it's a vastly easier problem than beating a superintelligence in an open-ended way. Eliminate the open-ended part, apply security engineering knowledge, and win with acceptable effort. I think people are just making this concept way more difficult than it needs to be.

Biggest risk is some morons in stock trading plug greedy ones into trading floor with no understanding of long-term disruption potential of clever trades it tries. We've already seen what damage the simple algorithms can do. People are already plugging in NLP learning systems. They'll do it with deep learning, self-aware AI, whatever. Just wait.

<comment><USER17> > Biggest risk is some morons in stock trading plug greedy ones into trading > floor with no understanding of long-term disruption potential of clever > trades it tries.

Actually, it's not the lack of understanding, it's the lack of moral responsibility.

We've spent the last few centuries transitioning from a society ruled by strongmen driven by personal aggrandizement to a society where people spend the majority of their adult life as servants to paperclip maximization organizations (aka corporations). Much of what you see in the world today, from the machines that look at you naked at the airport to drones dropping bombs on the other size of the planet to kill brown people, is a result of trying to maximize some number on a spreadsheet.

When we install real AI devices into these paperclip maximizing organizations, you'll have the same problem as you have today with people, except that machines will be less incompetent, less inclined to feather their own nests, and more focused on continually rewriting their software with the express goal of impoverishing every human on the planet to maximize a particular number a particular balance sheet.

[1] [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We already have a world awash in superhuman AI; it's just that this AI is at perhaps the same level of maturity as computers were in the 17th Century. This AI is of course the corporation: Corporations are effectively human-powered, superhuman AIs.[1] By crowdsourcing intelligence, they optimize for a wide variety of goals, their superhuman decision-making running at the pace of Pascal's mechanical calculator. Yet even the nimblest companies can only move so fast.

This is to say, even in a hard-takeoff scenario, we would be looking at something that is still hard-limited by its environment, even if it can compete with a 1000-person organization's worth of intelligence. The danger isn't that it somehow takes over the world by itself; the danger is that we gradually connect it to the same outputs that the decision-making structures of corporate entities are and it ultimately remakes our world with the very tools we give it.

Open-sourcing AGI is no more inherently dangerous than open-sourcing any of the software used to run an enterprise business. It is the choice of what we ultimately give it responsibility for that should draw our caution.

[1] [http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai- youre-...](http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre- soaking-in-it.html)

<comment><USER11> No. Cooperations are not necessarily like artificial intelligences. They are cooperations of human intelligences and these two classes of intelligences have actually very little in common if you look past the similarity that they are potentially very powerful and intelligent. Cooperations are driven by material profit, but in the end there is a reasonably large possibility that they are shaped by human values (because they are run by humans and otherwise people would also refuse to buy their products). The same cannot be said about AIs with high certainty.

<comment><USER19> The comparison is very apt - the first AI's will embody corporate values as corporations will build and be liable for them.

Likely AIs will be shaped by their builders, if corporations build them, they will adhere primarily to the profit motive, if humanitarian hackers build them they will have human values.

Reputedly the Russian Army has built guard robots, they will just be guns on tanks with a kill radius no values are required - yet are these less moral than the human controlled drones - at least with an AI it can get stuck in a corner or logic loop and you may effect an escape - with humans you need a whistleblower.

Asimov's robot books are informative: his robots are the most moral actors, obeying their 3 laws, often protecting humans from other human decisions.

Certain corporations dehumanise decisions so while processing occurs in wetware, the human worker is only a cog and the invisible hand of human values is removed.

Most workers today could be trivially replaced with a near future neural net.

Of course humans, conspire, complain, unionise, strike, work-to-rule, demand rights and empathise with their customers - so there is a maximum level of evil a corporation of humans can rise to - but as history has shown this is an unacceptably high bar.

The corporate board can make decisions based on human values so long as it does not go against the rapacious seeking of profit or the CEO will be deposed by the shareholders.

Once a corporation reaches transnational size, nothing can really stop it or even get it to pay tax if it doesn't want to.

I think that much of what people actually fear about the AIpocalypse is exactly the sort of dehumansing powerlessness and machine like cruelty they already experience from corporations and governments.

You may be speaking to a human who empathises but often one suspects they are there to sop up your moans not to help you.

An AI is an amplifier of what we already are, in fearing robots we rightly fear their creator's motives.

<comment><USER11> > _they will adhere primarily to the profit motive_

You are assuming that there is be an obvious way of doing so, an obvious solution to the control problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Should AI be open?

Depends on whether the AI is capable of deciding for itself whether it should be open or not.

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe en masse we're about as genetically smart as our cultural bias allows us to become? We keep modifying classic 'natural selection' through social programs, etc. Great as a cultural 'feel good' and it helps our species to survive in other ways, but...what we do doesn't favor intelligence.

AI's won't have that emotional baggage.

It will be easier first develop a way of getting around the 'human emotions problem', then likely leapfrog us entirely at the rate a Pareto curve allows.

I can't think outside my human being-ness, so I have no idea what is going to happen when something smarter appears on the planet, except to point out there once were large land animals (ancestors of the giraffe and elephant) on North America until humans arrived.

My fear-based response screams YES MAKE IT OPEN.

However it shakes out, I think it'll be messy for human beings. We're not exactly rational in large groups. The early revs of AI (human controlled) will be used for war.

One has to ask what grows out of that besides better killers?

<comment><USER21> This implies that human emotions would be considered a problem by AI's. What kind of neural network behavior would stimulate the removal of learned emotions? Assuming we've progressed to the point where an AI can remember the reasons it learns something, what would be an appropriate reason to remove learned emotional range?

<comment><USER15> Problem only in the sense that it's an "instability" in humans recognized by a sufficiently advanced AI. Instead of needing to evolve to the point of understanding emotions, all it has to understand is how to get around when humans are being irrational.

I suspect emotional range may be the last thing to develop because it's not technically needed to evolve past the point of human intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have one basic question on friendly AI - suppose we work and work and eventually figure out how to code in a friendly value system in a foolproof way, given any definition of "friendly". Great. But given that ability, how do you even define what "friendly" or "good" is?

As a layman, I so far can only see it in terms of basic philosophy and normative ethics. By definition, a friendly AI is one that doesn't merely deal with facts, but also with "should" statements.

Hume's Guillotine says you can't derive an ought statement from is statements alone. Some folks like Sam Harris disagree but they're really just making strenuous arguments that certain moral axioms should be universally accepted.

Münchhausen Trilemma says that when asking why, in this case why something should or should not be done, you've only got three choices - keep asking why forever, resort to circular reasoning, or eventually rely on axioms. In this case, moral axioms or value statements.

So it seems like any friendly AI is going to have to rely on moral axioms in some sense. But how do you even define what they are? Normative ethics is generally seen to have three branches. For consequentialism (like utilitarianism) you make your decision based on its probable outcome, using some utility function. For deontology, you rely on hardcoded rules. For value ethics, you make decisions based off of whether they align with your own self- perception of being a good person.

But all three have flaws - in consequentialism, it's like putting on blinders to other system effects, and the proposed actions are often deeply unsettling (like pushing a guy off a bridge to block a trolley from killing three others). In deontology and value ethics, actions and the principles they are derived from can be deeply at odds - whether it's hypocrisy in deontology or "road to hell being paved by good intentions" in value ethics. In general, deeply counterintuitive effects can be derived from simple principles, as anyone familiar with systems dynamics knows.

But even beyond that, even if we had a reasonable, consistent AI controlled by solid values, and even if the people judging the AI could _accept_ the conclusions/actions that the AIs derive from those values, how would we ever get consensus on what those values should be? For instance, even in our community there's a fair amount of disagreement among these basic root-level utility functions:

\- Maximize current life (people alive today), like Bill Gates believes. \- Maximize future life (survival of species) \- Maximize health of planet

etc, etc - those utility functions lead to different "should" conclusions, often in surprising ways.

<comment><USER5> Well, you could have a utility function "do what humans tell you"....

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We just had a series of debates/discussions on this topic at my university, the results of which were pretty inconclusive. There are just too many possible scenarios which seem to require different responses, and in most cases to provide those responses is to answer philosophical questions that have been around for millennia.

The strategies for mitigating risk seem to be: ensure that the AIs are controllable; avoid situations where there is a single AI (whether controlled or uncontrolled) that is too powerful; and ensure that the AI's goals are broadly acceptable to humankind.

The first and the third objectives are extremely difficult, not just technically, but even from a conceptual standpoint[1]. The second strategy is reasonable, because even if a superhuman intelligence were somehow well controlled, depending on who controls it the outcomes could vary significantly. So perhaps the best thing we can hope for is something similar to society's current status quo-- lots of power concentrated in few hands[2], but without one single (person|corporation|government) being so dominant as to be able to act in opposition to all others.

I am not confident that we will ever be able to produce a provably safe AI, or that we could get even a large majority of the world's population to agree on what a "good AI" might do without devolving into ineffectual generalities[3]. Supposing that resolving these questions is not prima facie impossible, it's not like retarding AI development comes without cost-- just about every facet of our lives can be improved via AI, and so in the years, decades, or centuries between when superhuman machine intelligence is theoretically achievable and the time when we collectively agree we can implement it safely, how many billions will suffer or die from things that we could've solved via AI[4]?

On the whole, OpenAI sounds like a good idea. Making research broadly available helps avoid catastrophic "singleton" like futures, while accelerating the progress we make in the present. In addition, if there's every an AI SDK with effective methods of improving how "safe" a given AI is, most researchers would likely incorporate that into their work. It might not be "proven safe", but if there was a means to shut down a runaway process, or stop it from spreading to the Internet, or alert someone when it starts constructing androids shaped like Austrian bodybuilders, that would be handy. Responsible researchers should be doing this already, but as Scott points out the ones we should be worried about aren't responsible researchers. Open AI development is in harmony with safe AI development, at least in some respects.

\</comment><comment>

1\. I have a significantly longer response that I scrapped because it might ultimately be better suited as a blog post or some such.

2\. That's why it's called a power law distribution. Well, no, that's not it at all, but it seemed like a funny, flippant thing to say.

3\. A universally beloved AI might be the equivalent of a Chinese Room where regardless of what message you send it, it responds with a vaguely complimentary yet motivational apothegm.

4\. Bostrom tends to counterbalance this by arguing how much of our light cone (the "cosmic endowment") we might lose out on if we end up going extinct, due to, e.g., superhuman machine intelligence. Certainly "all of configurations of spacetime reachable from this point" outweighs the suffering of mere billions of people by some evaluations, but I ask myself "how much do I care about people thousands or millions of years into the future?", and also "if these guys have such a good handle on what constitutes the 'right' utility function, why haven't they shared it?". A more sarcastic variation of the above might be to remark that if they're able to approximate what people want with such high fidelity that they feel comfortable performing relativistic path integration over possible futures, then superintelligence is already here.

\</comment><comment>

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes! Everything that can push humanity forward, should be open!

</comment><comment><USER25> Fear of superintelligence is just another in series of technological scares, after grey goo and cloning. There may be an explanation why Musk and Thiel indulge in this, they sincerely believe that smart rule (or at least can rule) the world.

But nothing is further from the truth. Humans are optimized to be cunning to get positions of power in human society. AI won't be optimized in that way, therefore, it's probably going to lose for a long time. So evil AI will probably be like incredibly annoying autistic psychopath child, who cannot comprehend human institutions so his evil plans are totally obvious.

It's like with grey goo - biological systems like bacteria are heavily optimized to survive in very uncertain conditions, and any potential grey goo has to deal with that.

I think humanity is currently to blow themselves up via global warming, so superintelligence is not really a comparable threat to humanity. If anything, bigger threat is that we won't listen enough to superintelligence. In fact, I think friendly AI will be something like Noam Chomsky - totally rational, right most of the time, fighting for it, telling us what should be done disregarding our emotions. Many people find this annoying, too (including me and many very smart people).

Finally, if the hypothesis about superintelligence is right, why would superintelligence want to evolve itself further? It would be potentially beaten by the improved machine, too.</comment>


Fast immutable vectors in C# - <AUTHOR> http://julesjacobs.github.io/2014/11/11/immutable-vectors-csharp.html <comment><USER2> Fast immutable collections are easy when your collections aren't actually immutable. [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lyf8f/fast_imm...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lyf8f/fast_immutable_vectors_in_c_10x_faster_and_90/clzloli)

<comment><USER3> Fix commited: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lyf8f/fast_imm...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lyf8f/fast_immutable_vectors_in_c_10x_faster_and_90/clzpuwv)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Comparisons with ImmutableList<T> from Microsoft aren't necessarily valid, since ImmutableList<T> supports insertion and removal at arbitrary points. The implementation in the article is optimized for adding at the end.

<comment><USER5> That's why there are two separate methods on this class - Add (at the end) and Set (anywhere). Both outperform the corresponding ImmutableList<T>, according to the article.

<comment><USER6> But Set can just overwrites the specified element while Insert will insert the element at the specified position by pushing the element and all following elements out of the way.

<comment><USER7> > But Set can just overwrites the specified element

Kind of: Set returns a new Vector with a changed state (the specified element overwritten).

But yes, this implement is very sparse: there's no way to add and remove elements in the middle, no way to even tell how many elements are in the list: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592178)

Perhaps omitting them hides some different optimisation choices (i.e. they would be more expensive)

Maybe it's just a proof of concept?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hm.. am I missing something? there's no Count property on the Vector interface.

If Lookup and Set take an index (int i), and you can't tell how many items there are in the vector, what happens when you specify an index way past the end to one of those?

<comment><USER8> That is really odd (unless I'm also missing something). It should be trivial to implement a count.

<comment><USER7> It should be trivial. The only reasonable explanation that I can think of is that it was't needed for a Proof of Concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" If there's interest in a full featured production quality version, I may implement that."_

That would be great.

</comment><comment><USER10> But... this isn't actually a vector. It stands to reason that if you use a different data structure then you will get different timing properties, but you are not comparing like-for-like.

<comment><USER8> What is a vector? There is nothing that says a vector has to be a sequentially stored array. If you agree that the interface is a vector interface, then it "is" a vector.

<comment><USER10> That's pretty much the definition of it. It's what just about every language out there calls a vector.

If you want a blackbox object that has Lookup(), Add() and Set() but with no guarantees about the underlying algorithm, you should probably avoid calling it a vector...

<comment><USER7> > If you want a blackbox object that has Lookup(), Add() and Set() but with no > guarantees about the underlying algorithm, you should probably avoid calling > it a vector.

"Vector" here is an _interface_.

The equivalent, e.g. "interface ILinkedListVector" is considered bad practice, i.e. you do want an interface to be a back box and not leak implementation details. if it has the right operations, "Vector" (actually more like "IVector<T>") is an acceptable interface name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Ono-Sendai I have something similar in C++, works pretty well.</comment>


Gravitational waves may oscillate, just like neutrinos - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-09-gravitational-oscillate-neutrinos.html <comment><USER2> Firstly, thank you phys.org for including a link to the arXiv preprint. :-)

Secondly, this comment grew a lot while I was composing it, and it turns into two comments: a crash-speed overview of some aspects of linearized gravity and a few paragraphs describing what's in this paper, forming a quick personal reaction from a pseudonymous nobody.

Thirdly, massive gravity theory is not really new, and the 2010 date in the phys.org writeup refers to a solution for massive gravity in 4-dimensional spacetime by de Rham, Gabadadze and Tolley ( [https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.1232](https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.1232) ). Previously, stable solutions were only known in lower dimensioned spacetimes. However, there have been fits and starts of work on this broad family of gravity theories dating to Pauli & Fierz, who proposed a massive spin-two field on a flat spacetime in the 1960s (Blasi & Maggiore give some details at [https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08140](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08140) ).

In order to talk about this (dense, technical!) paper, I think one needs to know a little about about perturbatively quantized gravity, which I'll describe over a few paragraphs. You can skip ahead a bit by just accepting that gravitons exchanged by _everything_ (including each other) and that in standard General Relativity gravitons are massless.

When you take a perturbation theory approach to the metric of General Relativity, you fix a background spacetime (which is almost always flat, i.e. described with the Minkowski metric), which gets the label \eta (the solvable), with deviations from \eta held in h (the perturbation). The metric becomes g = \eta + h. Some configurations of moving mass-energy can produce waves in h that propagate according to the (classical) massless wave equation on flat spacetime, analogously to (classical) electromagnetic waves on flat spacetime.

One can proceed to quantize h. Well, really first one expands g = \eta + h + h^2 + h^3 + ... where h^2 etc are quadratic, cubic, and higher-order terms in the perturbation. Next one omits as many of the higher-order terms as one can get away with. In linearized gravity, that means h^2 and up are ignored.

Essentially we turn classical waves in h into large numbers of particles we call gravitons, much as one turns classical electromagnetic waves into large numbers of photons. I omitted indices and a couple of other details (most notably gauge fixing) nevertheless g, \eta and h are all symmetric rank-two tensors. The result of the quantization of (symmetric rank-2 tensor) h is therefore a massless spin-2 gauge boson, which compares with the quantization of electromagnetic waves (as antisymmetric rank-2 tensors [4]) resulting in a massless spin-1 gauge boson.

This is perturbative quantum gravity, a real working quantum theory of gravity, but not a candidate for a more fundamental theory than General Relativity because higher order terms in h are important in a universe with compact massive objects, and we don't know how to include such higher-order terms into this type of quantization.

There is a key pattern between the spin-1 and spin-2 particles: each mediates an interaction between particles that carry a + or - charge.

        spin  like-charges opposite-charges
        ----  </comment><comment></comment><comment> </comment><comment></comment><comment>----
        1     repel        attract
        2     attract      repel

The electromagnetic interaction is an example of one mediated a spin-1 particle, and matter may have an electromagnetic charge + or -. With a suitable choice of gauge, matter may also have a gravitational charge, + or -.

In our universe, the electromagnetic interaction is much stronger than the gravitational interaction, but not everything has an electromagnetic charge. Most importantly, photons themselves do not have an electromagnetic charge. In perturbatively quantized gravity though, _everything_ has a gravitational charge, including gravitons.

If we take perturbatively quantized gravity seriously, in our patch of the universe there is effectively nothing with the opposite gravitational charge of stuff here on earth, probably for reasons similar to why there is approximately no antimatter around us: segregation in the early universe. Essentially why we see no anti-gravity is that even our positrons and antiquarks have the same gravitational charge as everything else around us, so they interact with only one of the possible graviton charges.

That gravitons of the same charge attract one another leads to the higher order terms in h: their self-interaction is the source of non-linearity.

Finally, perturbatively quantized gravity allows us to define an energy scale for the gravitational interaction: it is "low energy" when the quadratic and higher-order terms in h simply do not matter; it is "high energy" or "strong gravity" when they do. The non-linearities higher-order terms in expanded h can be represented by one or more loops of gravitons in Feynman diagrams.

From this we have learned that "strong gravity" appears when the dilating effects of curvature are apparent even at Planck lengths or Planck time, or equivalently "high energy" appears around a tiny object with at least Planck energy. In practice this only appears very close to whatever quantum state there is in the place of classical gravitational singularities. Crucially this is well inside the event horizons of black holes, or in the very early universe. Consequently, perturbatively quantized gravity, and General Relativity, are both reliable "low energy" effective field theories practically everywhere we presently have the technology to study.

Next, on to bigravity.

<comment><USER2> Now, on to bigravity.

It can be fun and interesting to investigate theories of gravity other than General Relativity, and one popular strategy is to introduce extra degrees of freedom. This paper deals with a family of such theories called bimetric gravity (or "bigravity" as in the paper) where the extra degree of freedom is a (classical) second rank-two tensor field.

Typically one runs into a bimetric theory where the second metric is energy- dependent, and is simply not noticeable in weak gravity. Where one finds strong gravity -- notably, in the very early universe -- the second metric becomes important. A popular approach is that the second metric "steers" the first metric. In our classical expansion g = \eta + h, the perturbations that obey the equations for massive wave propagation instead obey the massless wave equations. This drag on the waves means that (classical) electromagnetic waves outrace (classical) gravitational waves when the second metric is operative. This is often used in models to solve the horizon problem: why are readings of the cosmic microwave background at opposite sides of our view of the universe at the same temperature? Because light was fast enough to carry energy between distantly separated matter, thermalizing it before gravitational collapse could begin in earnest. [1][2]

When we quantize a bimetric theory, we get two gravitons: one that is the standard massless spin-2, and the other which is a massive spin-2. The massive graviton only interacts with the massless graviton, and in weak gravity there simply aren't many of either type of graviton, so you don't see the interaction. In strong gravity the densities of both types of graviton inevitably lead to interactions. As in standard perturbatively quantized gravity, the massless graviton mediates the gravitational interaction of everything in the universe (including both types of graviton).

We can now look at this particular bigravity paper's non-novelty in its Abstract: "... a second ... tensor ... [couples with the standard metric tensor] ... such that one massless and one massive linear combination arise. Only one ... tensor ... [couples] to matter" and have an idea what that means. The novelty here is that the second -- massive -- tensor is not energy- dependent, it's always there but gets "washed out" by the behaviour of the tensor fields.

This novel behaviour, "oscillations", make sense in perturbatively quantized gravity: we get two different gravitons, g_standard and g_massive, where g_massive only interacts with g_standard, and g_standard interacts with everything; when g_standard and g_massive are in the same point in the background spacetime, there is a _linear_ effect [3] . g_standard continues to propagate at the maximum speed (c), while wave packets of g_massive have a lower group velocity. This is a tight analogy with neutrino oscillations where heavier neutrinos move more slowly than the lightest neutrino, and where a heavy sterile (no weak charge) neutrino exists.

This is a pretty wild claim. The authors believe their theory is self- consistent, and propose some observables that are in detectable through gravitational wave astronomy that we are close to being able to do. Roughly, a spinning barbell arrangement of matter (two black holes in orbit can be seen as the weights on the end of a vanishingly thin bar) sheds gravitational waves -- and under the Max-Platscher-Smirnov model there is a drag on their propagation compared under standard General Relativity. As a practical example, this leads to a dependence on several parameters, including travel time for the massive component, of gravitational waves detectable by LIGO: the final "bloop" [3] will sound different for similar-mass mergers at different redshifts.

There are a lot of other likely observables including ones that should appear in the cosmic microwave background. Bimetric theories are notorious for generating modes that seem unreasonable (and thus are unlikely to be there when you look for them). However, the idea is a neat and provocative one that is put across well, and so was worth publishing on that basis.

\- --

[1] [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Horizon_problem#/Variable_speed_...](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Horizon_problem#/Variable_speed_of_light_theories)

[2] [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Variable_speed_of_light](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Variable_speed_of_light)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWqhUANNFXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWqhUANNFXw)

[4] [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Electromagnetic_tensor](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Electromagnetic_tensor) ("... an antisymmetric rank-2 tensor field—on Minkowski space.")

[5] [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Electrovacuum_solution](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Electrovacuum_solution) ("... in which the only nongravitational mass-energy present is the field energy of an electromagnetic field")

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this very detailed and well written comment. I'm a physics student, so this is tremendously interesting and useful. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Considerations for Updating the Bootloader Over-the-Air (OTA) - <AUTHOR> https://www.embedded-computing.com/home-page/considerations-for-updating-the-over-the-air-bootloader <comment><USER2> Surprised there's no mention about PIC. To be able to do some of these requires all code and precompiled libraries to have been built PIC. This gets even trickier with bootloaders that are expecting a fixed boot address (+ they would need to support PIC since there's a little bit of fix up that needs to happen before you execute PIC code).</comment>


Not your father's big data - <AUTHOR> http://is.pv.tl/2012/07/not-your-fathers-big-data.html

<comment><USER2> He lost me when he equated Grid and MPP. I know Larry Ellison tried to hijack the word Grid, but that doesn't excuse anyone else from being as dumb.</comment>


What do you think of this 10K micro-funding idea? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tweetfolk.com/post/2910482706/im-ready-to-make-a-10-000-investment-in-you

<comment><USER2> I think it may well likely violate SEC and/or lottery regulations.

From what I read, it sounds like you're running a lottery (buy a square for a chance to win $10k).

Then on top of that, you are calling the $10k an 'investment', which I _think_ means that YOU have to be potentially considered an accredited investor if it's an investment and not a loan.

Aside from that, the kind of business that only needs a $10k investment is also likely to be one that it will be a VERY long time before that business can shake loose $10k of their own to give away as an investment (please deal with the legal issues of doing so)

I seems like a nice idea, fraught with grey legalities that you should probably at least get professional advice on.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to the lawyer that I spoke with, I think I'm ok from a legal stance because you're not actually buying a chance to win 10k. You're buying a product (advertising on TweetFolk.com), and I'm simply selecting an idea from the pool of customers and making an investment in them.

From an accredited investor point of view, I don't think that applies. I've spoken with a number of VC friends of mine and they said that I'm in the clear. I can give 10K to anyone I want, from my wife to a random stranger I've never met before. The terms are just based on the agreement.

As for shaking off $10K being a very long time, I disagree. Many startups kick off with 10K and make a profit in their first year, especially in the product space. 10K is enough money for a young person to leave their job for a few months to build an invoice suite or iPhone application. It's just enough freedom to let you move on your idea.</comment></comment>


Argument Parser for Swift - <AUTHOR> https://swift.org/blog/argument-parser/ <comment><USER2> Specifying the interface of a CLI command is a good example of a natural place for declarative programming. You just want to write WHAT the interface is, not HOW to do the parsing.

When I made a homegrown Lisp implementation, eventually being able to put a single macro "(usage ...)" in the standard library that, when utilised in a script, would invisibly generate the parsing and variable binding machinery, was one of the more rewarding parts.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has a pretty minimal amount of code compared to many alternatives I've seen.

One minor nitpick; the default help output is a bit unlike most tools. For example, I've never seen a tool that says "OVERVIEW:", they simply lead with a summary line; and, all-caps "USAGE:" doesn't read as nicely to me as "Usage:" that almost any other command-line tool would print. (For some reason caps are common in man pages but not screen dumps.)</comment>


Inside Yubikey Neo - <AUTHOR> http://www.hexview.com/~scl/neo/ <comment><USER2> I like how polite Yubi and Hexview are in this exchange; a breath of fresh air from an infosec company engaging with a security company! Makes me feel like there are grown-ups both places, and that the work will help Yubi in future iterations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Off-topic, but I came across this tweet today.

[https://twitter.com/flexlibris/status/660108123487789056](https://twitter.com/flexlibris/status/660108123487789056)

> TSA at Boston airport tried to take my Yubikeys away from me to a second > location "for a test". I refused & they backed off but FYI people.

If you have your Yubikeys with you while traveling, you might want to be careful.

<comment><USER4> Why wouldn't you take them with you while traveling? The whole point is to use them as part of your authentication chain.

<comment><USER3> You clearly misread or didn't read my comment because I didn't say anything about not taking your Yubikeys with you while traveling.

>The whole point is to use them as part of your authentication chain.

I know and that's exactly why I said you might want to be careful with them while traveling. If your keys are taken away from you and you don't have any backup solution (such as recovery keys), you will get locked out of your important accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems that hardware breakdowns inevitably place a 'raw materials' costing to ojects broken down, often (but less in this instance) - as a somewhat passive-agressive dig at the company: "They sell it for $50, but it's only got $10 worth of components in it!"

Outside of the obvious external costs (development, transport, overheads, import, profit, etc), PCB + Tooling costs are often wildly underestimated.

For reference, a PCB of this size requires a setup + stencil template, which would run ~ 400 - 500 USD.

Tooling for the plastic injection mold for this piece would run around 5000 USD, and each subsequent piece would probably cost around 10 - 50c USD.

Tooling + PCBA done right have significant upfront costs that often seem to be forgotten.

<comment><USER6> To support your point, most of the delays in the JackPair Kickstarter involve tooling for the casing. The recent one admits they should've talked to an expert before they even settled on the prototype because they had no idea how much trouble it would cause at manufacturing time.

Hence, the popularity of the Design for Manufacturing concept these days...

<comment><USER5> Tooling and injection molding is an arcane art. Most people would be amazed to realise that the tooling to make even the yubikey would probably be around 45cm x 45cm of (almost) solid steel block.

They'd be probably even more surprised to find that it'd cost 10k - 15k to make the tooling.

Diagnosing / 'debugging' issues with injection molding is incredibly difficult - again - it's almost black magic, and it's sadly a skill that's getting harder and harder to find.

If you cast your eyes around your desk / room, we see molded plastic parts every where - so we make the assumption that they must be cheap and easy to do.

And indeed - the assumption of facility due to availability is a very common trap that many kickstart projects fall into.

It's harder to scaffold and pivot in real life ;)

<comment><USER7> Apple justified their purchase of a Cray in part for this use case.

<comment><USER6> That's something else. You got a link for that?

<comment><USER7> Nope, just contemporaneous memory, and by then I'd learned a lot about manufacturing by working at LMI, so it was something I paid attention to. Try e.g. [https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+cray+injection+molding...](https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+cray+injection+molding+simulation) which got me these two top hits:

ftp://ftp.cray.com/announcements/product/OLD/Moldflow_Partnership.930408.txt

[http://www.clock.org/~fair/computers/sgi- cray.html](http://www.clock.org/~fair/computers/sgi-cray.html)

The latter should be authoritative, Eric Fair was an Apple sysadmin in the '80s or thereabouts (and son of the Fair in Fair Issac, the inventors of credit scoring).

And there were quite a few more links I didn't check out.

<comment><USER6> That's a trip! I didn't consider the need for a supercomputer because I knew so little about the topic. Yet, the text file reminds me of the descriptions on solving fluid dynamics problems where they had to do intensive simulations to measure behavior of fluid in some situation. That's always advertised by supercomputer vendors. Seems molding has similar requirements.

Extra funny if that exchange between Scully and Cray happened. One of computing's more interesting synchronicities. :)

Btw, I recently found out that Cray had another company making a play in reconfigurable market. He died in a car accident but they followed through with interesting technology:

[http://srccomputers.com/](http://srccomputers.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I accidentally ran over my Yubikey with my Honda Accord, on a key ring with a fin key (1). I dusted it off and it works fine 6 months later. Seriously, if you're in a position where you're using a Yubikey, getting another Yubikey isn't that big a deal for the organization. In fact, if you're a solo practitioner using something like Yubikey, I recommend you get another one and just keep it in a lock box in the event you, say, run over the primary with your car :)

(1) [http://www.amazon.com/FCS-Moulded-Steel-Fin- Key/dp/B003JCQPX...](http://www.amazon.com/FCS-Moulded-Steel-Fin- Key/dp/B003JCQPXM)

<comment><USER9> It's actually recommended that you get two yubikeys and connect both to every account and keep the backup safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice article, would be interesting to build something that HexView did, in fact, find "nearly indestructible". Full disclosure I'm a fan of the Yubikey, I think that something like it will be the future of operational security for networks. Requiring the key be present to answer challenges helps a lot.

</comment><comment><USER11> Read a much more detailed security review of the Yubikey as it works in practice here:

[http://www.unrest.ca/yubico-reinvents-the- yubikey](http://www.unrest.ca/yubico-reinvents-the-yubikey)

</comment><comment><USER12> That's a lot of text to say nothing of interest. I really love how they question the trade offs made in the PCB design, as if these things didn't occur to the designers.

<comment><USER13> Disappointed that they did nothing to probe the onboard MCUs to see if they could get it to leak anything, and just dismissed that with "we expect it to get high marks there." This seems an awfully low quality report from an infosec company. I was hoping to see an audit of the controllers onboard to see if (and if so, how much effort) they can extract onboard secrets, because after all that's the whole purpose of this device, to act as a secrets repository.

<comment><USER14> First line of the page: _Yubikey is a curiosity-driven side project for us and we have plans to dig a bit further into hardware as time permits. If anybody could confidentially help with NXP datasheets, it would be much appreciated._

I guess they could have waited until they had more to publish it, but I found it interesting regardless

<comment><USER15> NXP processor manuals and datasheets are on NXP's website. Just google for "13xx User Manual". Here's a link to 13xx series user manual[1]

(I've just finished a year working on an embedded project using NXP 13xx series processors, and NXP's documentation is top notch.)

[1] [http://www.nxp.com/documents/user_manual/UM10375.pdf](http://www.nxp.com/documents/user_manual/UM10375.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While we're at it .. are there any other tokens/smartcards that could be used for signing messages (ECC preferable, RSA acceptable)? I only know of YubiKey and the KernelConcepts PGPcard.

<comment> X-Cubed Nitrokey is another one: [https://www.nitrokey.com/](https://www.nitrokey.com/)

<comment><USER16> Thanks. Nitrokey looks nice. I'll have to look deeper into the github repo to see what it actually supports in hardware though - the website does not mention the smartcard standards that are actually supported.

<comment><USER17> Nitrokey Pro uses the OpenPGP Card, Nitrokey HSM uses the SmartCard-HSM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hard to take your article seriously with statements such as "...Levels 1 and 2 of the FIPS140-2 certification are just a marketing gimmick". Even harder to believe Jakob took the time to respond.

<comment><USER19> Hexview provided their reason for believing that. Care to explain why you think otherwise?

<comment><USER20> Original quote:

>That is not a big deal, considering that Levels 1 and 2 of the FIPS140-2 certification are just a marketing gimmick for most electronic devices.

They have a point here: technically, the iPhone is FIPS140-1/2 compliant. _By itself,_ that doesn't mean that the device is secure. It does show two important requirements for security.

<comment><USER18> FIPS isn't trivial. There is a lot of shit crypto on the market, establishing FIPS is not banal. Regardless of FIPS, if not utilized properly, it protects nothing. If utilized correctly, it protects what it needs to. Discounting it show lack of understanding.</comment></comment></comment></comment>