Secret Hacker Bookshelf - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/top-dozen-hacke.php <comment><USER2> This is a good list, but if you're a startup founder you generally only need to know 1% of each of these books. Don't buy them all. If you had to choose 3 books from that list, what would they be?

<comment><USER3> (Caveat: As a hacker with an interest/need to learn marketing)

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - just the best overview for how to get out there (in the words of Steve Jobs, "it's a noisy world, the best you can ever hope or ask for is that just one single idea about what you do can be remembered"). Also might as well throw Positioning in there as its compliment.

Made to Stick - how to encapsulate a single idea, and hook it in people's minds

Founders at Work - a huge boost of motivation and some interesting individual strategies that people used, but light on useful tactics or broad strategies that you can action.

Not on the list, but I really highly recommend, is "Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works" - an absolute bible for how to get your words on a website to be read and remembered.

<comment><USER4> Love Made to Stick and Founders at Work. I haven't read 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, but I'll check it out, thanks.

One excellent marketing book I recently read is Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon (no ref link: [http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive- Youngme...](http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme- Moon/dp/0307460851)). She believes that going tit-for-tat on adding features and augmentations is a losing game that results in every competitor looking like one another. Instead, you should find your strength, and focus on that while resisting to focus on where your product falls short. The book is also very... poetic. She's quite a quotable writer. Good stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The quality and relevance of the books on this list seem mixed at best.

Maybe I'm cynical but the original page looks like linkbait for the guys affiliate code to Amazon. I'm saddened that HN has found this so 'useful'. I think we could do a better job crowdsourcing the very best and relevant books together on a "Ask HN" thread.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's fairly easy to criticize something that somebody did, but it's usually a lot harder to do better.

From what I understand about how Daniel put this together, he wrote some software to create these lists, he did not try to add his own 'value judgement' to what got on there or not.

Presumably he could have done a better job, but that goes for any piece of software, so instead of saying that 'we could do a better job' try to be specific and indicate which books you think belonged there and which did not (and maybe why?) that way Daniel has something that he can use to try to figure out if he can improve things.

There have been many attempts at 'crowdsourcing a list of relevant books' but none that I've seen got longer term traction and I'm _really_ happy that someone is willing to invest the time and the effort in to making this happen.

First versions almost always suck, now let's see how to make it much better than what it is today without diminishing the contribution in a way that reads as though you think Daniel intends to score 'big bucks' from this somehow.

<comment><USER5> I understand your perspective, but I don't think a list of books generated from best sellers/most popular is the way to go... after all that's why I don't want to get an MBA - because it's the same old populous thinking that actually ISN'T the way forward nor most relevant to startups.

<comment><USER6> dotBen --

Boy are you preaching to the choir. It's weird to see my own objections to my own article repeated back to me.

I'd like to make a couple of points for you to consider:

1) Regarding monetizing the links, there are two possible arguments: a) that it is beneath the quality of the board to publish sites that monetize so blatantly, and b) it was an attempt by me to somehow "game" HN so I could (presumably) make a buck from something that people liked.

This is a startup-related board. Hundreds, if not thousands of startup founders read and post here every week. Guys that are making money using Adsense on free web sites, guys that are making money on freemium models, guys that are trying to get as much traffic as possible and worrying about the money all the time. No matter what kind of application or startup you have, monetizing eyeballs is part of the discussion here. At the end of the day, each bit of traffic means server costs. That means that there has to be some trade-off. As several pointed out, print out the list and take it to your bookstore.

As far as gaming the system and making the board go to hell, let me remind you that we've had "rate my startup" posts for years. Lots of them had blatant monetization strategies right there for folks to see. Apps asking for donations, apps using paid recommendations, apps for using gradual engagement. I think this is a pretty sophisticated bunch of folks. If I thought for just one second that my post would lead to blatant link-spamming of HN I wouldn't have posted it. Fact is, HN is already being blatantly link-spammed. All sorts of articles both on the front page and on the new page have all sorts of profit models. That's why we vote. I honestly think the quality will continue on at about the same level as before. If not, then I'll be the first to ask PG to remove my article. My reputation in the community is not worth the few bucks I might make off the article.

2) about the following the crowd thing, boy am I in there with you.

I am not a book-seller. I'm simply a startup guy who has read a lot of books and would like to share that with others. In my post, I recommended that people follow the discussion on places like Amazon (or here) before deciding to buy any kind of book. I have to say here that there were a _lot_ of benefits to the readers (and author) by using those affiliate links. Amazon serves the image, Amazon provides an up-front price current price before you click. Amazon even hosts a reviewing an discussion system. All of that is simply too much to ask for one blogger to put together for one article. I _strongly_ advise folks to come back to HN and read the discussion and also to track the discussion over on other sites before buying a book. After all, Ben, I'm the guy who wrote a blog article a couple of weeks ago criticizing both popular authors and people who follow their books blindly! So I'm the last guy to want to see people just follow the crowd in their purchasing decisions. Use your brain, compare notes, make an informed choice. Even after you get a book, be careful how you apply it. I really hope that I got that message through.

Finally, why be so cynical? This board is all about hackers and startups. I'm happy to share my traffic and revenue numbers from the post, I'm happy to talk about whether or not a website that provided information like my blog article would make sense. Perhaps somebody else can take what we've learned with my post and make something of value to people. We're here to learn from each other, not make a quick buck at other people's expense. That was never the intention.

<comment><USER6> Followup with sats from the article and analysis, including profit potential, traffic, and business options.

[http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/the-great- hac...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/the-great-hacke.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think overall it is a good list, one I take issue with is "Head First HTML" I don't know if it is fixed now, but about a year ago, I tried to teach someone using that book as a manual and the first chapter was incomplete, It literally was missing the text so the individual could not continue without me. Which defeated the point of buying a book so that they could do projects and learn while I was not around.

For most of the rest that I have read, they are great books first or second best on their respective subjects. This is one of the better lists I have seen.

We really should have this kind of post 1-2 times a month as this one (books) comes up just a little less frequently than "whose hiring". We should also have one for "tools I use to develop with" I always scrounge out a gem that I did not know about in those tools posts.

I tell you what would be nice Daniel, would be to have these kind of posts and have your blog scrape the post for products people recommend and then add those products to your list, if you could grab their votes you could get a sudo weight to their product recommendation.

<comment><USER8> From personal experience, "HTML Dog" is a better book than "Head First HTML". The list is good but if it's targeted toward people not already familiar with the tooling, some hand holding is required.

For example, "HTML Dog" and "CSS Mastery" may be placed together. As already suggested on his blog, parallel path recommendations would be good viz. Python using "Think python", Ruby using "Learn to program", Scheme using SICP .. and pointing out that if your aim is to learn to program, you can pick any of them.

But heck, it would be too much work for the poster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised that The Pragmatic Programmer isn't on there. Am I that much out of date that this book is no longer recommended? It completely changed the way I thought of development at the time.

<comment><USER10> Kernighan and Pike's _The Practice of Programming_ covers a lot of the similar content better, IMHO, often with more concrete examples.

(Also, _The Pragmatic Programmer_ might have more impact if people hadn't been systematically ripping it off for blog content for years.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This list is missing some pretty vital books:

* 4 Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank's mimeograph-quality bible of lean startup marketing)

* Growing a Business

* The Knack

* All of Seth Godin

* Blue Ocean

It's weird that the list has so many big-business suit-and-tie titles (Ogilvy, New Rules, etc) but is missing small business core titles like these.

<comment><USER5> You can download 4 Steps to the Epiphany from Stanford.edu in pdf format _(my preferred format anyway)_.

[http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi- bin/winter/drupal/upl...](http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi- bin/winter/drupal/upload/handouts/Four_Steps.pdf)

Not sure what the legality is of that but it's there if you want it. Do buy the book and support Steve if you find it useful.

<comment><USER12> That is only 45 pages. The full book is larger, if you look at the table of contents you'll see that this is incomplete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a bit surprised at not finding any Seth Godin books. Do you, personally and as a 'hacker community' not find his books useful? I always felt like they taught me more about marketing than any other books I'd read on the subject. Is there something I'm missing in reference to Godin's books?

<comment><USER14> I was a big fan of Seth Godin's blog and books until a few years ago. Now I don't read any of those.

Seth Godin books are good when you starting to read those kinds of books. His blog can inspire a lot when you are new to his style, but after some time you realize that many of the articles in the blog (or the books) do not teach you anything new. They are just rehash of the same ideas over and over. YMMV, but I have a few Seth Godin books I am not able to complete because the books are very low in actual content. Every time I start reading them, I put them down to read some other better book.

So yes, Seth Godin will inspire you initially, but after a while the value in reading the books and the blog seems to be going down.

But then again this may be a case of familiarity breeding contempt. Or this may be the case of me graduating from the Seth Godin school of thought. I don't know.

<comment><USER15> I completely agree with you. In the beginning, when I was confused whether I had to stick to the illusory safety or to do my own thing and create value. Listening to Seth Godin's audio books and some of his interviews had definitely helped. Sometimes, people need that kind of motivation and reassurance to get started though they will realize sooner or later. Now, I don't see the point in reading his books and I have removed his blog from the feeds probably for the same reason as yours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seth Godins books are like the training wheel equivalent of marketing. But no matter what, you will always find at least something in there that might change your perspective, I've yet to see any book that I didn't learn something from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice list. I wouldn't expect to see SICP, The Little Schemer, and CLSR next to Head First HTML, however. Certainly, the former are a bit more timeless.

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice to see "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis in there. Best lesson from that book? "Equity isn't the main thing, it's the only thing", as in, don't give away any part of the only thing you have of value; your business, unless you have to.

</comment><comment><USER18> I added a book recommendation engine to HackerNewsers a few months ago, but so far only a few people have added their reviews, <http://www.hackernewsers.com/books.html>

</comment><comment><USER19> Great list, but is Introduction to Algorithms really so good that you had to list it twice? :)

</comment><comment><USER20> That's an interesting list of books, thanks for the submission.

How did you collate the lists?

Where did you get the books from? (e.g. HN, other sources?)

It's interesting to see what's not on there as much as what is. I would've considered the javascript books not nearly as important as Stephens' TCP/IP Illustrated, or Tanenbaum's Operating Systems Design and Implementation, but then again how much use would they be in this modern age (for the majority of use cases)?

</comment><comment><USER21> Great job, Daniel. Thank you.

I am familiar with about half of these and the ones that I know are great. The ones that I don't know are a new opportunity for me.

Nice touch on the front covers. Anyone with a color printer could just print your page and take it to Borders or Barne's & Noble. Looks like an easy way to find stuff on the shelves and read a whole lot of Chapter Ones.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is HN really the new place for book spamming aa links?

Which books don't matter. Half those are outdated or will be by the time they're read.

<comment><USER7> You know you should really take a look at who posted the article and who wrote the article, jacquesm and Daniel are some of our most respected and informational members that we have. Both have contributed volumes of information to this site without asking for anything in return. If there is anyone one this site that could be accused of having the passion for the subject matter of this site it would be Daniel.

As is said in the blog, this post comes up quite frequently so Daniel put it on his blog. Forgive a guy for trying to cover some cost, would you.

<comment><USER23> As well you don't lose anything by giving someone an affiliate sale, so unless your getting tricked into clicking someones links I think people can tend to make a bigger deal of it than is needed.

<comment><USER24> I upvoted you, but the general problem with these links is that they affect author motivation, whether or not they realize it. This is especially true for subjective listings such as this one, they are simply a brain dump of whatever the list author could think of. That's why you get SICP next to "Head first HTML", and that's why you don't get "Coders at work" at all, even though it's mentioned >800 times on this site, vs much less for other titles on the list.

<comment><USER6> This list was put together by googling "best books" on ycombinator and then picking each thread and listing the books from top to bottom.

HeadFirst appears because a commenter pointed out that it was a good book that you wouldn't think of, and this comment got several upvotes. From this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128713>

There was no "thinking" that was involved in creating the list. It was a pure mechanical process. That's why there are two dupes and a lot of books that didn't make it.

I guess to be completely fair I should have written a program to scrape every book mention on HN and then cross-matched them to aggregate votes. But I was just trying to make a larger version of an HN comment in blog format, so I didn't take the time to write up a system. As it was, it took most of the day tracking down links, book references and such.

I can assure you that there was no finagling with the list or author's opinions that were inserted. I have "coders at work", and it's a great book. It would have made my list easily. There are a bunch of other books just like it. My list would have included more Java books, and books about tracking to- do items. But this wasn't my list. It was HN's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I think that Effective Java by Josh Bloch deserves to be added to this list.

<comment><USER25> If I were to recommend only one Java book, it would be this one. Definitely deserves to be on the list.

<comment><USER26> If I were to recommend only one Java book, it would probably be some kind of "Ruby for Java Developers" book.

I kid, I kid. Kind of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Would be a great list to compare opinions on with various people at <http://www.5ftshelf.com/>, sadly the computer & internet section ([http://www.5ftshelf.com/mini_shelves/books/6-computers- and-i...](http://www.5ftshelf.com/mini_shelves/books/6-computers-and- internet)) is dominated by the head-first series. While I think they're good intros, they wouldn't rank high on my list on "must own" books in that genre.

</comment><comment><USER28> I just downloaded PayPal Wars. Any other page turners on this list that you can't put down?

</comment><comment><USER29> this list is huge and awesome. thank you!

I would say JavaScript the Good Parts is pretty much the bible of JS for the client, the definitive guide is nice, but a lot of stuff in there is very dated. It's not a good guide for DOM manipulation. The JavaScript cookbook by shelly powers (c) 2010 is much better.

Also, High Performance JavaScript by Nicholas C. Zakas is a great book for people who need to go from beginner to intermediate / advanced.

</comment><comment><USER30> Pretty extensive list... could anyone recommend some less technically orientated business books (startups, small business?).

</comment><comment><USER31> <http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/> ?

</comment><comment><USER32> Safari (safaribooksonline.com) offers a good option for reading widely at relatively low cost.

</comment><comment><USER33> A hacker cheat-sheet written by someone with a hotmail address. I don't mean to judge a book by the cover, but... hotmail?

<comment><USER23> Have you used hotmail any time recently?

I had a hotmail from way back and was going to swap (only held back by the lock in of my current email address being everywhere), but honestly now I don't see much reason to. Hotmail web interface is close enough to the gmail one now and windows live mail integrates nicely if your running and windows machine.

<comment><USER15> Yes, I have seen my friend using hotmail recently (on Windows). It is pretty good.

<comment><USER34> It's really not very good at all.

1) The back button doesn't function as you'd like.

2) With Chrome as the browser at least, checking an item can result in all other checked items being unchecked - this I think happens only after the first AJAX postback.

3) Logging in takes you to a page other than the inbox - that's an unnecessary additional click

4) The spam filter isn't a patch on Gmail's.

5) The search filtering has nothing on Gmail's

6) Because it uses .NET's AJAX methods as opposed to another model such as jquery ajax + web services, all actions involve posting back the entire page and therefore hotmail is much slower than gmail. (*This is an assumption based on how slow hotmail is - I haven't checked in firebug).

7) Last time I checked you can't auto-forward mail.

All this said, I still use my ancient hotmail address whenever I need to post an email address in public or give an email address to a company that's likely to spam me. Perhaps it's the same with the article's poster.

Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of the above

<comment><USER35> If you're referring to .NET's UpdatePanels, they do send the entire post data, yes. But the response only contains required HTML to rerender that area.

ASP.NET can also take any "web service" (i.e., a bunch of function you define and mark as directly callable via XML or whatever), and VS will generate JavaScript proxy objects for it. Then you get lightweight calls (only send and receive parameters and response), but get IntelliSense and stuff on them.

Hotmail might do something stupid and be slow. I don't know or care, but .NET offers plenty of options.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New openssh key format and bcrypt pbkdf - <AUTHOR> http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/new-openssh-key-format-and-bcrypt-pbkdf

<comment><USER2> Good to see this step in the right direction.

The private key should be encrypted such that the only way to know if you guessed the right password it is to try to login. Some formats, like putty ppk, add an unencrypted checksum in the file, which allow a local check to see if decryption was successful. Way to make offline attacks easy! You'll see a line like:

       "Private-MAC: A1B2..."

For example, instead of PKCS#1 ([http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3447#page-7](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3447#page-7)) just store the encrypted private exponent (an integer) with nothing else. Do not store 'n' (RSA modulus) within the ciphertext. Do not keep the public key file on the same server.</comment>


Gitlab and Red Hat: Automation to enhance secure software development - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/29/gitlab-and-redhat-automation/ <comment><USER2> _Disclosure: I work for Red Hat but I 've used Gitlab for years (before working for Red Hat)_

I'm happy to see this partnership and I hope it continues to develop. I've been using Gitlab for years. I always hoped for Github to open source their platform, but alas that isn't likely to happen. I think the de-facto home of open source should be Gitlab, an open source product itself. I am not doing my part however as most of my open source projects are on Github. I am going to spend some time at least setting up mirrors of everything so users with purer values than me don't have to sacrifice their freedom to access it.

Anyway, I came here to say that Gitlab CI has revolutionized CI in my opinion. It's truly an amazing product, and Gitlab is worth a look purely for that IMHO. A lot of others are implementing similar features because of how good it is. The ability to host your own runners alone made Gitlab an exceptional fit for me in the past. I initially tried it after Circle starting experiencing instability and small pockets of downtime routinely during the day, which was causing pain to my developers. With Gitlab we've never had that problem (this was years ago so Circle may be much better now. Not trying to crap on Circle).

If you haven't tried it out, it's worth a look. You can start (and scale pretty far) without paying a dime. Even just a simple smoke test for your code is easy to implement and worth the time. From there you can iterate and build a truly useful CI suite.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your feedback -- it's great to hear that you've had a positive experience with GitLab so far!

I'm the new Sr. Open Source Program Manager at GitLab and will be working on further improving the experience of the GitLab for Open Source program. I am also an internal advocate for open source projects and hope to explore ways that GitLab can help open source projects thrive at scale.

For those who are unfamiliar with the GitLab for Open Source program, you can find out more at: [https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open- source/](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/). Through this program, we give our top tiers for free to open source projects, and that comes with 50K fee CI minutes and 95% off of support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing your experience with GitLab and the point you made about hosting your own runners.

Gitlab allows developers to iterate faster, with smaller code changes and the integrated approach allows developers to compress the cycle times. GitLab being open source allows everyone to make a contribution to the project.</comment>


Facebook blocks sharing of critical Guardian article - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/profcarroll/status/1045757268124467200 <comment><USER3> Whether malice or incompetence the key thing is that _it 's blocking a legit post with no recourse_. That's a _serious problem_ given that it's such a core sharing platform for so many people.

<comment><USER4> _Whether malice or incompetence the key thing is that it 's blocking a legit post with no recourse._

Is The Guardian a legit source? What does legit source even mean? As far as I can tell, it means, "Has a strong brand." Given what we know about brand decay and bait and switch, are our criteria even remotely useful and valid? From what I've seen, I don't think so. It seems like many "legit" news sources with failing business models are cashing in their brand reputation, while it lasts, for some link-baiting and public manipulation.

<comment><USER5> It is deemed a legit source on the matter because the info in the article is correct.

<comment><USER4> Then why not take the evaluation down to that level? Why do we even need brand level proxies in 2018? It would probably be best if we evaluated down to the article level of granularity, _at least_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hilarious, but I bet it's Hanlon's razor at work again:

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, if they actually wanted to censor something they would do it silently, by not showing it in people's news feeds. Proving such practice exists would probably be near impossible without having access to the source code or core usage statistics.

<comment><USER8> Looking at some of the tweets it seems FB has a mechanism that autoflags article links as spam if "too many people are trying to share" it.

This just makes me wonder exactly how automated that feature is, because _surely_ a non-nominal number of people share current event links all the time about something political, sporting event, natural disaster. I wonder if it happens then, or is this a matter of recency....Streisand (there's got to be a better word for it than that) following the news of those 50million accounts being breached.

<comment><USER9> What I don't understand is why this is considered spam. Are lots of people not allowed to talk about the same thing?

<comment><USER10> I can think of a couple of possible explanations:

1\. Viral content like "share this or Facebook will delete your account" \- may as well shut that down straight away.

2\. A security flaw in a Facebook site that lets malicious websites post to your wall automatically from a webpage. In that case, the malicious website will probably post a link to itself, so that it can collect more victims. In this case, this limits the impact of the flaw. Look at the Samy worm as an example.

3\. News feed algorithm "breaks" in some way when a lot of people are posting the same thing, so they just prevent that from happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised at how credulous everyone is being about this. Even assuming a maximally evil Facebook (which they make pretty easy to do...), they'd have to be incredibly stupid to be unaware of the Streisand effect and the fact that this would take off even more (and much more negatively) if they tried blocking it.

It seems a lot more plausible that this article is unusually widely shared, which is obvious since everyone on Facebook has some interest in Facebook...

<comment><AUTHOR> Despite the complete moral vacuum there seems to be a facebook, I do still believe that this isn't deliberate. But big name companies do far worse things, and Facebook themmselves have done worse. And stupider, since you mention it. It is entirely plausible that they are intentionally suppressing the news.

I find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities when history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by humans, after all.

<comment><USER11> > But big name companies do far worse things, and Facebook themmselves have > done worse.

.

> find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to > believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities > when history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by > humans, after all.

I'm not sure why the majority of your comment is focusing on how plausible it is that they would do something evil. It couldn't be less relevant to my comment.

Like I said, my point doesn't rely on any assumptions about Facebook's morality as an organization, just some baseline of competency. I know organizations have done stupider things, but I can't think of a similar org taking an action whose _first-order_ effect would so obviously be the opposite of what they intended. It's far more common and far more plausible that they didn't consider the second-order PR effects of an algorithmically-enforced broad policy they have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, well maybe we're at cross purposes. You did use the word plausible originally, and again in reply. It depends whether you bring any context to a given judgment or rely on intuition on statistical distributions. I think that when appraising the plausibility of bad faith you should take past behaviour into account.

I can totally see a situation where a well meaning PR person says "what can we do to slow down this story?" and some engineer says "we have this mechanism but it wasnt designed for this purpose..."

Compare with yesterday's fun and games when the same metanarrative was reported. "We could shift more units if we had phone numbers"."we do but they were given to us for an expressly different purpose" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082017)

When you're in this position, ethics is a competence. They may be great at shipping code but past experience suggests that there are deeply inadequate decision making processes.

Apologies if this misses your point again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is sadly funny. It's probably a legitimate feature to block spam - <USER2> and what it is about is just highlighting the issues with large scale automation and data analysis. Must be a tough day and upcoming weeks at Facebook....

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, FB keeps shooting itself in the foot. They'll likely blame an algorithm, not a deliberate human choice, but that's not a valid excuse.

<comment><USER14> Not an "excuse", but a valid explanation, don't you think?

When we offload decisions to algorithms, that's wha you get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15>
        Some users are reporting that they are unable to post today's
        big story about a security breach affecting 50 million
        Facebook users. The issue appears to only affect particular
        stories from certain outlets, at this time one story from The
        Guardian and one from the Associated Press, both reputable
        press outlets.
        ...
        The situation is another example of Facebook's automated
        content flagging tools marking legitimate content as
        illegitimate, in this case calling it spam.

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/facebook-blocks- guardian-s...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/facebook-blocks-guardian- story/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Does FB have a team dedicated to responding on HN yet?

</comment><comment><USER17> What is amazing to me is that twitter still does not have a solution for sharing mobile links to desktop users. It is a really bad user experience.

<comment><USER18> I realized the other day that wikipedia doesn't either. You'd think it wouldn't be all that hard to redirect in the year 2018, but apparently it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That is pretty Orwellian of them. Are we at 'peak' facebook, or will they be able to continue growing from here?

Seems like trust and enthusiasm in their platform has been eroded to the point that they are much more vulnerable to competition than they were a year or two ago.

<comment><USER20> Could you explain what exactly is Orwellian here? Not meaning to pick on you but you're currently the top comment that doesn't attempt to Chakrabarti engage with the topic.

I don't see much evidence of anything other than a crap algorithm here as yet.

<comment><USER19> Orwellian is often used to describe deliberate and malicious censorship of information, but I think perhaps this case is an even more accurate parallel: creating a convoluted automated system where all participants can believe they are acting ethically but the net effect is censorship of information which would damage the system and restriction of individual expression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Aaaand it's back (just tried to share it and it worked).

</comment><comment><USER22> The power and domination can not accept critics. All big companies are involved in war communication on their own activities. FB just reacts as Monsanto or Texaco/Chevron do with all possible means.

</comment><comment><USER23> So Facebook is trying to censor a story that _they themselves made public just a few hours ago_? Guardian thinks a bit too much of itself.

<comment><USER24> Guardian didn't say censor, they said block, which is factual.

Nice strawman though.

<comment><USER23> So Facebook is trying to block a story _that they themselves made public just a few hours ago_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow. This is too much!

</comment><comment><USER26> It's astounding that educated tech journalists think this is malicious. Clearly, this is an algorithm.

Just like as a thought experiment, wouldn't it make more sense to allow the post to go through and then prevent everyone on Facebook from seeing it? Obviously, FB doesn't do that, but wouldn't that be a more sensible approach if they did do that type of thing?

<comment><USER27> A spam-detection algorithm that doesn't whitelist pages like The Guardian? I have to say I find it hard to believe that they would be so incompetent.

<comment><USER28> Facebook can't be seen to be prioritising one news source over another.

So I can't imagine they have lists of any news sources and rely entirely on user signals to determine the quality of a source.

<comment><USER29> I second that.

An example: a few weeks ago I shared on my FB profile the Mozilla Foundation petition link for the EU copyright reform[1] and it was removed with this motivation:

"We removed this post because it looks like spam and doesn't follow our Community Standards."

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2018/09/07/eu- copyright-r...](https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2018/09/07/eu-copyright- reform-the-facts/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dell Unveils Subscription Model to Counter Amazon, Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-12/dell-unveils-subscription-model-to-counter-amazon-microsoft <comment><USER2> Considering equipment leases have been around forever I feel like this is just a way to say "why yes, we do subscriptions as well!". The _real_ takeaway here is it's not that subscribers (customers) want this. It's that Wall Street wants this because: investors. This is because deferred futures are great for smoothing and forecasting of revenue. Subscriptions are ultimately bad for the buyer because you pay more and get less in most situations. And then you have vendors offering subscriptions that literally have taken formerly perpetually sold product and wrapped it up in a subscription model with little to no value add. It's also given vendors a way to lock customers out of support and upgrades. I'm waiting for the pushback... People complain about it, but not as vocally as they should.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft's upgrade cycles for Windows 10 are a big problem for many companies. Many places deferred PC upgrade cycles for 6-10 years because they didn't need them.

Now they are stuck with an accelerated upgrade cycle and big capex.

With respect to other subscriptions, I think that you'll see pushback. Adobe and Microsoft play hardball, which gets old quick.

<comment><USER4> I don't follow, Win10 runs on a 9 year old pc for me without issue?

<comment><USER5> I think it's more of a will this update cripple our 20yr old in house developed app that is crucial for the business that either we don't know how to maintain or lost the source no longer working on the latest windows.

Previous employer, we were on WinXP and compiling a/ VS2003. Upgrade to Win7 mostly effectively crippled VS2003 for reasons I don't know. This necessitated porting our very large (100s of Millions of LOC in C++ to at least VS2008) set of in-house libraries. It should on paper be trivial, but it was a firm wide effort that spanned 18 months. Why? Because someone sent the CEO an xlsx that he couldn't open. This was circa 2007-2008. We were forced to upgrade OS and compiler for the new Office version, but it trickled into a firm wide rebuild of all C++ code. Wasnt pretty or fun.

<comment><USER6> LTSB edition is supposed to fix that. Unfortunately their licensing for LTSB is strange and not friendly...

<comment><USER7> That would likely turn the 18 month upgrade effort into a 36 month upgrade effort that happens 5 years later.

Sometimes long upgrade cycles are great, but I suspect a yearly upgrade to the latest Visual Studio would have been a lot less painful. Fixing a few small issues is much easier than fixing many of them, and having to do it yearly both makes everyone better at doing it and better at avoiding the creation of such issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is light on details but this doesn't seem to be the same thing as leasing as others here have said. This is more akin to offerings from HPE and IBM where you get a whole bunch of infrastructure, but then only pay for what you consume. It's Infrastructure as a Service, but in your own data centre.

Not sure how this translates to personal computing though - typically you're either using the whole computer or none of it. I guess you could get a whole bunch of desktops and then only pay for the 8 hours a day that you're using them? Doesn't quite have the same scalability benefits as you can get from the compute infrastructure.

<comment><USER9> It's the difference between paying for _capacity_ and paying for _consumption_. Which is useful, it opens a variety of potential economies and options for both Dell and their customers.

Many customers are fine doing their own planning and dislike being billed after the fact. Charging for capacity is what they want. That is the common case now.

Many other customers resent bearing the risk of over-provisioning or under- provisioning. Charging for consumption solves that for them. That's what Dell is adding. It's not totally new to them, EMC have done something like this for some time now.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which is part of the Dell EMC keiritsu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting how hardware manufacturers have offered the ability to lease equipment for literally decades.

Now, they start calling it a "subscription" and Wallstreet thinks it's innovation.

<comment><USER11> I work in infrastructure... Nothing has changed here. This is leasing. Dell also has a division named Dell Financial Services that will lease or loan you the hardware.

<comment><USER12> I don't totally understand what they mean, the press-release-style article isn't very specific. But:

> Customers will now be able to use Dell's hardware based on their > consumption, as a service… For the consumption programs, customers pay for > the amount of storage or computing power they use.

That part sounds different than an ordinary lease, yes? I'm not totally sure I understand what it is though... the hardware on-premise at the customer for their exclusive use? But somehow it's usage is metered?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of HPE greenlake [1].

I wonder how the TCO compares to public clouds

[1] [https://www.hpe.com/us/en/services/it- consumption.html](https://www.hpe.com/us/en/services/it-consumption.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Installment plans, not software, are eating the world.

<comment><USER15> How depressingly true. Run out of technical innovation? Let's switch to subscription services!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 2017 version: [https://www.techradar.com/news/dell-to-bring-pay-monthly- sub...](https://www.techradar.com/news/dell-to-bring-pay-monthly- subscriptions-to-pcs)

It would be a total Amazon power move for Dell to displace one of its customers' businesses by removing the middle-man in computer rental (aka "cloud computing") businesss.

<comment><USER17> The hardware is only a small component. Hosting and maintenance are others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does this make sense when you're dealing with a rapidly-depreciating asset? Many businesses seem to be using "subscription" as a veil for "payment plan", as they are not delivering a service or recurring good.

<comment><USER19> Labor and transportation also cost. And turnaround time introduces friction.

If you're staring at slow servers and someone says they can fix that in 20 minutes for another few bucks a month then that is the easy way out.

Also redundant hardware can be used to deal with hardware failures. No rush to swap out the machine. There are three spares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like a tough sell, with Amazon offering their new Outposts product, which is also an onsite datacenter subscription model but also integrates seamlessly with AWS.

<comment><USER9> Dell is closely connected with VMware, which also integrates seamlessly with AWS. And Azure and GCP. Everyone has dived into the all-places, all-clouds pool to try and outmaneuver each other.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're being acquired by VMware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wish Apple would do this for their laptops. I'm not really sure how it could be done. Will be interesting to see how Dell handles the cost.

<comment><USER22> They do, they just call it leasing: [https://www.apple.com/financing/](https://www.apple.com/financing/)</comment></comment>


Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/05/1704949114.full <comment><AUTHOR> We find that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is extremely high—even in "species of low concern." In our sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851/27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which we have detailed data, all have lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species have experienced severe population declines (>80% range shrinkage).</comment>


Hacking A Beetle - <AUTHOR> http://diybio.org/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=2&page=1#Item_0

<comment><USER2> I've watched this video three times now and can't decide if my 'disturbed' reaction is stronger or weaker than my 'amazed' reaction. Both are quite high.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had the same mystified response. However, the kid in me fancied a remote control beetle.</comment></comment>


Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/17/geoffrey-hinton-and-demis-hassabis-agi-is-nowhere-close-to-being-a-reality/ <comment><USER2> And no one should be surprised by this. The NN advancement of late doesn't help addressing human-style symbolic reasoning at all. All we have is a much more powerful function approximator with a drastic increased capacity (very deep networks with billions of parameters) and scalable training scheme (SGD and its variants).

Such architecture works great for differentiable data, such's images/audios, but the improvement on natural language tasks are only incremental.

I was thinking maybe DeepMind's RL+DL is the way leads to AGI, since it does offer an elegant and complete framework. But seems like even DeepMind had trouble to get it working to more realistic scenarios, so maybe our modelling of intelligence is still hopelessly romantic.

<comment><USER3> Maaaaybe. I tend to think that symbolic reasoning is a learning tool, rather than a goalpost for general intelligence. For example, we use symbolic reasoning quite extensively when learning to read a new language, but once fluent can rely on something closer to raw processing - no more reading and sounding out character sequences. Similarly with chess - eventually we have good mnemonics for what make good plays, and can play blitz reasonably well.

And - let's be real - a lot of human symbolic reasoning actually happens outside of the brain, on paper or computer screens. We painstakingly learn relatively simple transformations and feedback loops for manipulating this external memory, and then bootstrap it into short-term reaction via lots of practice.

I tend to think that the problems are: a) Tightly defined / domain-specific loss functions. If all I ever do is ask you to identify pictures of bananas, you'll never get around to writing the great american novel. And we don't know how to train the kinds of adaptive or free form loss functions that would get us away from these domain-specific losses.

b) Similarly, I have a soft-spot for the view that a mind is only as good as its set of inputs. We currently mostly build models that are only receptive (image, sound) or generative. Reinforcement learning is getting progress on feedback loops, but I have the sense that there's still a long way to go.

c) I have the feeling that there's still a long way to go in understanding how to deal with time...

d) As great as LSTMs are, there still seems to be some shortcoming in how to incorporate memory into networks. LSTMs seem to give a decent approximation of short-term memory, but still seems far from great. This might be the key to symbolic reasoning, though.

Writing all that down, I gotta say I agree fundamentally with the DeepMind research priorities on reinforcement learning and multi-modal models.

<comment><USER4> Once someone is fluent in a language, the logical operations and judgements involved stop being overt and highly visible to the conscious mind. But that doesn't mean that one stops getting the benefits and results of logical operations.

What you might see as logical operations "not mattering", I would see as logical operations integrated so deeply into reflexive operations that it's hard to see where one ends and the other begins. The contrast is that humans can do pattern recognition in a neural net fashion, taking something like the multidimensional average of a set of things. But a human can also receive a language-level input that some characteristic is or isn't important for recognizing a given thing and incorporate that input into their broad-average concepts. That kind of thing can't be done by deep learning currently - well, not a non-kludgey sort of way.

 _Similarly, I have a soft-spot for the view that a mind is only as good as its set of inputs._

It depends on how you want to mean that. A human can take inputs on one thing and apply them seamlessly to another thing. Neural nets tend to be very dependent on the task-focused content fed them.

<comment><USER5> There's a parallel between something being logical and it "feeling right" without a necessary connection at the "implementation level" between the two, just like there may be a parallel between an artificial NN recognizer recognizing something unambiguously and not caught awkwardly with multiple weak or conflicting activations, and a logical system using rules to determine a contradiction, without ever needing to embed the second in the first, however deep - it's just that illogical inputs didn't get good training because they either don't happen or have no meaningful training data.

I, personally, just know I don't use logical rules very often at all. Usually I apply them retroactively as a post-hoc justification, or narrative, to explain a sense of discomfort or internal conflict or dissonance, but I have no way of knowing if my rationale is true other than how it makes me feel - I'm simply relying on the same mechanism, with an extra set of pattern recognition learned specifically to identify fallacies and incorrect logical constructs. If I didn't have that extra training, my explanations could be illogical and I'd be none the wiser.

I think humans are very bad at logical reasoning and very inefficient at it. Only a small % of the population ever does it and they usually do it incorrectly with biases, constructively to justify an already held conclusion. They're great at pattern recognition though. I don't think logical reasoning is anywhere on the critical path to human level AGI at a deep level. It could very well be a parallel system though to help train recognition if we don't figure out better ways of doing that.

<comment><USER4> Well, neural nets and similar things laughably worse than AI systems when confronted with "real world" situation.

I wouldn't argue with the point that humans use rigorous logic and overt rules-based behavior much less than they imagine (your summary is very much a summary of the other-NLP model of mind, which I know).

I'd argue that while "refined" logic, systematic logic, might be rare, fairly crude logic, more or less indistinguishable from simply using language, is everywhere and it an incredibly powerful tool that human have. Again, being able to correct object recognition based on things people tell you is an incredibly powerful thing. You don't need a lot of full rationality for this but it gets you a lot. And that's just a small-ish example.

<comment><USER6> Intelegence is not limited to what Humans are good at. People are really bad at several tasks where current AI tech excels, but those things tend to be excluded from the conversation.

AGI that is as smart as say a rat would easily qualify as AGI even without language skills.

<comment><USER4> _Intelligence is not limited to what Humans are good at._

Being able to implement all the things human are good at, however, should be able to get us everything that we could do, because anything we could create, it could create too.

 _AGI that is as smart as say a rat would easily qualify as AGI even without language skills._

Indeed, but while a full language-using AI is ways a way at least, using language is one thing that's at sort-of describable/comprehensible as a goal. A rat is a lot more robust than any human made robot but how? Overall, I keep hearing these "there's intelligence that's totally unlike what we conceive" argument but it seems like computer programs as they exist now either do what a human could do rationally and more quickly (a conventional program) or heuristic duplicate human surface behavior (neural nets). You could sort-of argue for more but it's a bit tenuous. Human behavior is very flexible _already_ (that's the point, right). And assuming AI is hard to create, creating something who properties we to-some-extent understand is more like than creating the wild unknown AI.

Also, "Getting to rat level" might not be the useful path to AGI. If we simply created a rat like thing, we might win the prize of "real AGI" but it would be far less useful than something we could tell what to do the way we tell humans what to do.

<comment><USER7> A rat can do something else that a neural net can't - it is a self replicator. Our neural nets don't have self replication or a huge, complex environment and timescale to evolve in. Self replication creates an internal goal for agents: survival. This drives learning. Instead, we just train agents with human-made rewards signals. Even a simple environment, like the Go board, when used for training many generations of agents in self-play, easily leads to super-human intelligence. We don't have the equivalent simulator for the real world environment or care to let loose billions of self replicating AI agents in the real world.

<comment><USER8> Survival is instrumental to any goal. Not only self replication would create that drive.

<comment><USER6> Bombs don't need to survive to be useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions)

"Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years--provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials. [Emphasis added.] The New York Times, Oct 9, 1903, p. 6."

\-----

A couple of the leading minds in AGI say it's a long ways away... just because the universe likes to give us the finger, maybe AGI is on the horizon. Maybe we'll look back at this in 10 years and laugh (if we're here).

<comment><USER10> The arguments like above are "platitude level arguments".

We really don't learn anything from the problem in had by talking in generic terms. We use these arguments when we want to justify our hopes and feeling, but there is really nothing to learn from it.

Hinton, Hassabis, Bengio and others point out that we can't 'brute force' AI development. There needs to be actual breakthroughs in the field and there may be several decades between them.

AI, brain science and cognitive science are extremely difficult fields with small advances, yet people assume that it's possible to 'brute force' AGI by just adding more computing power and doing more of the same.

Macroeconomics is probably less complex research subject than AI or brain science, but nobody assumes that you can just brute force truly great macroeconomic model in few years if you just spend little more resources.

<comment><USER11> > AI, brain science and cognitive science are extremely difficult fields with > small advances, yet people assume that it's possible to 'brute force' AGI by > just adding more computing power and doing more of the same.

Do people assume that? I mean, I'm sure _some_ people do, but I don't think I've encountered many people, at least not in the AI safety movement, that actually think it's a matter of more hardware power. Some people think it's _possible_ that that's all that's necessary, but I don't think most will say that that's the most likely path to AGI (rather than, as you say, actual breakthroughs happening).

<comment><USER12> That's pretty much the Singularity conjecture in a nutshell: that exponential advances in computing power will drive an exponential increase in machine intelligence.

It gets more nuanced than that but there are actually very specialised people who argue very forcefully that AGI is a hair's breadth away and we must act _now_ to protect ourselves from it.

Edit: so not "most" people but definitely some very high-profile people. Although granted, they're high-profile exactly because they keep saying those things.

<comment><USER13> nope [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Algo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Algorithm_improvements)

"Carl Shulman and Anders Sandberg suggest that algorithm improvements may be the limiting factor for a singularity because whereas hardware efficiency tends to improve at a steady pace, software innovations are more unpredictable and may be bottlenecked by serial, cumulative research."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Behind every successful neural network is a human brain. Neural networks are a tool, an advanced tool for sure, but still just a tool. If we are looking for AGI, and assuming the brain is an AGI, then there are still many differences to resolve. For example, back propagation has not been observed in nature. Nor has gradient descent. So the core mechanisms for learning in nature have still to reveal their secrets.

<comment><USER15> Behind every brain is a successful neural network. Or at least that's the promise of connectionism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you want AGI you need to give it a world to live in. The ecological component of perception is missing. Without full senses, a machine doesn't have a world to think generally about. It just has the narrow subdomain of inputs that it is able to process.

You could bet that AGI won't manifest until AI and robotics are properly fused. Cognition does not happen in a void. This image of a purely rational mind floating in an abyss is an outdated paradigm to which many in the AI community still cling. Instead, the body and environment become incorporated into the computation.

</comment><comment><USER17> Tangential: This title is weird. As if no one but the top minds in AI didn't know this? This isn't big news to anyone who has done even just a modicum of AI research.

<comment><USER18> > As if no one but the top minds in AI didn't know this?

Anecdotal, but nearly all of my programmer friends believe that full-blown AGI is less than a decade away.

<comment><USER19> Sounds like an opportunity to place some bets and probably win some money. Or maybe they'll back down and widen their intervals -- less than a decade, _maybe_ , but probably longer. Maybe quite a long time too, and maybe after development of some other planet-changing tech.

It's worth thinking about this section of [0] when various AI experts offer predictions:

> Two: History shows that for the general public, and even for scientists not > in a key inner circle, and even for scientists in that key circle, it is > very often the case that key technological developments still seem decades > away, five years before they show up.

> In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, > Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.

> In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain > reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence > that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I > believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the > denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then > granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for > this I neglected to keep the citation.

> And of course if you're not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be > even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now > a thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were > esteemed intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that > heavier-than-air flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more > slowly back then.

[0] [https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire- alarm/](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/)

<comment><USER20> If there is AGI all bets are off so to speak, what's a few dollars worth then? If there isn't AGI the money still has value. Doesn't sound like a rational bet, even if you think the odds of AGI soon are high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ilya Stuskever of OpenAI says 5 years:

[https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/near-term-agi-should- be-...](https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/near-term-agi-should-be- considered-as-a-possibility-9bcf276f9b16)

<comment><USER22> I watched the talk linked where that quote apparently comes from, and it was really good. Thanks for sharing that. Ilya specifically says in the talk that it is unlikely but that there is sufficient lack of understanding that we can't rule it out, and that thus the questions around it are worth thinking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It bothers me that the qoutes in this article are all cut up, in some cases ending when a sentence clearly wasn't finished. It makes it hard to judge what they are really saying here, and I wish the full interview would be published.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder to what extent the data being fed to these models are the issue. Or rather the problem is the systems that generate these data-sets and how representative of reality they are. If we make an app that involves humans and that data is used in a model - to what extent does user experience and other factors warp reality?

Maybe our existing methods are good enough given enough compute to reach AGI but our datasets are too low fidelity and non-representative of the problem space to reach desired results?

<comment><USER25> The problem is not the data. The problem is the need for high quality data. Current ML is data driven statistical learning. ML tries to learn a model that describes the distribution. It's impossible to get similar performance as the best reference implementation (human brain) using this approach. [https://i.redd.it/kvvgv6zzhtp11.png](https://i.redd.it/kvvgv6zzhtp11.png)

Think of 16 year old human:

* it has received less than 400 million wakeful seconds of data + 100 millions seconds of sleep,

* it has made only few million high level cognitive decisions where feedback is important and delay is tens of second or several minutes (say few thousand per day). From just few million samples it has learned to behave in the society like a human and do human things.

* Assuming 50 ms learning rate at average, at the lowest level there is at most 10 billion iterations per neuron (Short-term synaptic plasticity acts on a timescale of tens of milliseconds to a few minutes.)

Humans generate very detailed model of their environment with very little data and even less feedback. They can learn complex concept from one example. For example you need only one example of pickpocket to understand the whole concept.

<comment><USER26> This pickpocket example seems like symbolic? relations reasoning.

I think we need simulation of other agents outputs as primary tool for reasoning. That seems to be how intelligence emerged in evolution.

Something like this: choose desired action > simulate other agents outputs based on future state after performing action > check reward for this action after simulating outputs of others > perform action or not > update all agents models and relations in "world" graph model

I think world could be modeled as simple graph and each agent as NN.

Then based on graph we could conduct symbolic reasoning and very fast learning (by updating edges)

I think these models need also need good physical simulator and good understanding of competitivness.

Is anyone aware of such trials of building AGI as I described?

Humans have natural language as big competetive adventage (easy way to compress parts of world graph and pass it to others - ambiguous. I think with aftificial machiness can be done more efficient). Another advantage is knowledge storage - also easy to do with machiness.

If we can build insect AI building human AI should be easy.

<comment><USER26> I also think it would be great if we could just do "world_model = fold(books)" instead of simulation.

Is anyone aware of such efforts/results?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not sure how I feel about this; for one, the Kurzweilian singularity which largely could be fueled by the advent of AGI is both exciting and yet also scary. The upside could forever change humanity as we know it; far increased longevity, the potential to create _anything_ via a universal assembler[0], bringing everything feasible within the laws of physics to reality. Knowledge is the only limiting factor stopping us from doing anything which is physically possible in this universe; and in that light AGI could be an enlightenment.

On the other hand, the ubiquity of knowledge once it's available could lead any maniac to use it for the wrong purpose and wipe out humanity from their basement.

My feelings on the potential of AGI is therefore mixed. I for one have just found my particular niche in the workforce and am finally reaping the dividends from decades of hard work. Having AGI displace me and millions (or billions) of individuals is frightening and definitely keeps me on my toes.

Technology changes the world; my parents both worked for newspapers and talk endlessly about how the demise of their industry after the advent of the internet is so unfortunate. Luckily for them they are both at retirement age so their livelihood was not upset by displacement.

If AGI does become a thing it will be interesting to see how millenials and gen Z react to becoming irrelevant in what would have been the peak of their careers.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler)

</comment><comment><USER28> I have a small experiment to discover if AGI is already a solved puzzle.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18720482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18720482)

</comment><comment><USER29> Not to mention that we don't even know if general intelligence exists. All we know is _that_ mental abilities tend to correlate, but not _why_ they tend to correlate. And if you think about designing machines, in general, the idea of general intelligence is utterly ridiculous. Does a fast car have general speediness? Of course not, it has dozens or hundreds of discrete optimizations that all contribute in some degree to the car being faster.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure you and the OP mean the same thing by "General Intelligence".

It seems clear that autonomous systems which can apply their computational machinery to a diverse range of problems, and can, in a diverse range of settings, formulate instrumental goals as part of a plan to attain a final goal, do exist.

Because that's what humans are, at least some of the time.

<comment><USER31> But if human performance in these regards never exceeded what the pinnacle of today's AI performance is, we would not regard them as intelligent in a general sense, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Great interview with Hassabis from the BBC. It's meanderingly biographical, with insights about his path through internships, curiosity, startups, commitment, burnout, trusted team mates and eventual successes ...

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06qvj98](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06qvj98)

</comment><comment><USER33> Demis Hassabis (true) statements here would be much more credible if DeepMind wasn't currently making a mint by promoting AlphaZero to the masses as a "general purpose artificial intelligence system".

Don't believe me? Check out this series of marketing videos on YouTube by GM Matthew Sadler.

1\. "Hi, I'm GM Matthew Sadler, and in this series of videos we're taking a look at new games between _AlphaZero, DeepMind's general purpose artificial intelligence system_ , and Stockfish" (1)

2\. "Hi, I'm GM Matthew Sadler, and welcome to this review of the World Champinship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana. And it's a review with a difference, because we are taking a look at the games together with _AlphaZero, DeepMind's general purpose artificial intelligence system_..." (2)

3\. "Hi, I'm GM Matthew Sadler, and in this video we'll be taking a look at a game between _AlphaZero, DeepMind's general purpose artificial intelligence system_ , and Stockfish" (3)

I could go on, but you get my point. Search youtube for "Sadler DeepMind" and you'll see all the rest. This is a script.

But wait, you say, that's just some random unaffiliated independent grandmaster who just happens to be using an inaccurate script on his own, no DeepMind connection at all! And to that I would say, check out this same random GM being quoted directly on DeepMind's blog waxing eloquently and rapturously about AlphaZero's incredible qualities. (4)

Let's be clear. I am in no way dismissing AlphaZero's truy remarkable abilities in both chess and other games like go and shogi. Nor do I have a problem with Demis Hassabis making headlines for stating the obvious about deep learning (that it's good at solving certain limited types of puzzles, but we are a long way from AGI, why is this controversial).

My problem is that Hassabis is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Increasing DeepMind/Google's value by many millions with his marketing message, while acting like he's not doing that. It feels intellectually dishonest.

To solve this, all DeepMind needs to stop instructing its Grandmaster mouthpieces to refer to AlphaZero as a "general articial intelligence system". Let's see how long that takes.

(1) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-wFUdvKTVQ&t=0m10s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-wFUdvKTVQ&t=0m10s) (2) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4T0_IoGQCE&t=0m05s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4T0_IoGQCE&t=0m05s) (3) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS26Ct34YrQ&t=0m05s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS26Ct34YrQ&t=0m05s) (4) [https://deepmind.com/blog/alphazero-shedding-new-light- grand...](https://deepmind.com/blog/alphazero-shedding-new-light-grand-games- chess-shogi-and-go/)

<comment><USER21> I suspect "general purpose artificial intelligence system" means the same architecture applied to 3 games (western Chess, Shogi, Go).

<comment><USER33> Wouldn't that be a "general purpose game-playing intelligence system" at best? (without mentioning that it only applies to certain types of perfect- information games)

Maybe it's just me, but "general purpose artificial intelligence system" sounds like, well, General Artificial Intelligence. Which sounds like Artificial General Intelligence, which is the holy grail.

<comment><USER34> > Maybe it's just me, but "general purpose artificial intelligence system" > sounds like, well, General Artificial Intelligence.

Well, it doesn't sound like that at all to me and I think the phrasing is fair. Also, it folds proteins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If AGI (an artificial human mind with direct access to computational power of classic computers and whole Internet of information) was possible then we would probably already be living in the Travelers TV show.

<comment><USER36> _... was possible then we would probably already be living in the Travelers TV show._

How do you know we aren't?

BTW, if you hadn't noticed, Season Three just came out on Netflix. I'm champing at the bit to binge watch that... :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> As I always ask regarding this sort of story, why do we believe human intelligence is computable? The only answer I've heard is the materialist presupposition and sneers at any other metaphysic as "magic," which is not exactly a valid form of argument.

As an alternative, the human mind could be some sort of halting oracle. That's a well defined entity in computer science which cannot be reduced to Turing computation, thus cannot be any sort of AI, since we cannot create any form of computation more powerful than a Turing machine. How have we ruled out that possibility? As far as I can tell, we have not ruled it out, nor even tried.

<comment><USER38> We know the brain is doing something - if you don't want to call it computation, then you might as well call it magic.

<comment><USER37> There are other possibilities. For example, there can be an immaterial mind that operates as a halting oracle and interfaces with the world through the brain. Halting oracles are well defined, and we can empirically test for their existence. So, no reason why we have to assume everything humans do is reducible to some sort of automata. The only reason we make the assumption is because of prior materialistic commitments.

UPDATE: I've been rate limited for some reason, so here is my response whether the mind intuitively seems to be a halting oracle.

1\. It's obvious there are an infinite number of integers, because whatever number I think of I can add one to it. A Turing machine has to be given the axiom of infinity to make this kind of inference, it cannot derive it in any way. This intuitively looks like an example of the halting oracle at work in my mind. Or, an even more basic practical example: if I do something and it doesn't work, I try something else. Unlike the game AIs that repeatedly try to walk through walls.

2\. We programmers write halting programs with great regularity. So, it seems like we are decent at solving the halting problem. Also, note that it is not necessary to solve every problem in order to be an uncomputable halting oracle. All that is necessary is being capable of solving an uncomputable subset of the halting problems. So, the fact that we cannot solve some problems does not imply we are not halting oracles.

<comment><USER39> Roger Penrose basically suggests what you say in "The Emperor's New Mind". Roughly, it says that the brain (likely, according to him) uses quantum computation, and so we can't make an AI out of a classical computer.

The practical flaw with this argument, of course, is that you could instead make an AI that itself uses quantum computation. I asked Roger Penrose about this at a university philosophy meetup over 20 years ago, and he agreed.

Likewise, if there is some kind of halting oracle, perhaps we can work out how the brain creates and connects to that oracle, and make our AI do the same.

Meanwhile, there is no physiological or computational evidence for this possibility. We should keep hunting though, as that's the same thing as understanding the detail of how the brain works!

<comment><USER37> Well, quantum computation is weaker than a nondeterministic Turing machine, so not the same thing I'm saying. Penrose correctly identifies the mind cannot be a deterministic Turing machine, but his invocation of quantum mechanics does not solve the problem he points out. A DTM can simulate an NTM and hence anything inbetween, so the inbetween of quantum computation does not solve anything.

The fundamental problem Penrose identifies boils down to the halting problem, which requires a halting oracle to be solved. Hence, a halting oracle is the best explanation for the human mind, and no form of computation, quantum or otherwise, suffices.

UPDATE:

Since I'm rate limited, here is my answer to the replier's comment:

A partial answer: the mind has access to the concept of infinity, and can identify new, consistent axioms. Other possibilities: future causality and ability to change the fundamental probability distribution.

But, it's also important to note that we don't have to answer the "how" question in order to identify halting oracles as a viable explanation. We often identify new phenomena and anomalies without being able to explain them, so the identification is a first step.

<comment><USER40> >Hence, a halting oracle is the best explanation for the human mind

What does it explain though? That the human brain has a black box capable of solving certain problems... how exactly?

<comment><USER31> Indeed - it's essentially the homunculus fallacy, or magic dressed up in the language of knowledge.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Yep and considering a very high majority of our work does not require GI we still have huge AI job disruption looming.

</comment><comment><USER42> Progress-skeptics are always wrong - except for artificial inteligence.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm not even convinced that a real AI is possible with conventional computer hardware or anything remotely similar to it. Not even considering software I get the impression there is a fundamental limitation of hardware.

<comment><USER44> I'm not convinced we've even defined the problem space well enough to solve it. Like what is the concrete measure(something to target) for intelligence? If we develop general intelligence is it going to be human, dog, or fish?

<comment><USER45> I'm not convinced any of those creatures have general intelligence. I'm similarly unconvinced that we'd recognise general intelligence if we saw it.

<comment><USER43> Are humans even capable of general intelligence? I feel like the philosophical question of determinism vs free will is unsolvable.

The baseline of human capability would definitely still be impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Isn't that exactly what an agi would say once it takes over the brains of leading scientists.

<comment><USER47> No - it would post what you just said on HN instead. :)

Seriously - that's a wicked funny post you had there!

<comment><USER48> Nice try, Mr. AI but you won't escape detection by pretending to be a jokester who grew up in Boston.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> As someone who files taxes every year, I'm quite certain that Adjusted Gross Income is a reality ;)

</comment><comment><USER50> I don't believe in the idea of AGI for Dreyfusard reasons, but it's possible that it could emerge from something completely different than deep learning.

For all we know, Isabelle and Coq could be speeding through the road to consciousness but we're busy having a blast doing Computer Vision pretending it's AI.

<comment><USER50> I'm used to random downvotes for comments about current controversies - I'll say things about income inequality that people won't like, and it's okay, you have your politics. Deep learning shouldn't be part of your politics, it either does stuff or doesn't.

Deep Learning is amazeballs for Computer Vision. It's fun because people like looking at pictures. But sufficiently prodded Isabelle proves theorems, I've seen it first hand, and the "sufficient prodding" is way underdeveloped yet. At one point backpropagation was dead too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The computational power of the hardware is getting really close to what a human brain is capable of (on an exponential scale, anyway). If "nowhere close" means not in the next 5 years then sure.

Over the medium term I'm not sure AI researchers are the best people to ask. They are completely dependent on how much power the electrical engineers give them - I doubt there is a deeper understanding what a doubling or quadrupling of computer power will do than any programmer learning about neural networks.

<comment><USER17> > The computational power of the hardware is getting really close to what a > human brain is capable of

Why do you say that? AFAIK computing architecture and brain architecture are completely different. How would you even begin to compare their power?

<comment><USER51> Well, Wikipedia was my source [0] and it links [http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain- chip/](http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain-chip/) as its source.

Google has TPU that are off from the estimated power required to simulate a brain by a factor of 3, so technology is reaching the ballpark. Given that brains were evolved, the part that does symbolic thinking is probably "easy to stumble on" in some practical sense.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders_of_magnitude)

<comment><USER52> Faster hardware will help, but I'm not convinced that it's the answer. OpenAI Five used on the order of 2000 years of experience to train their agent. There are clearly still _huge_ algorithmic gains to be had.

Given how we've managed to improve on nature in other domains (see solar cell efficiency, for example), I think that if we can figure out how intelligent organisms manage to learn so quickly we can likely beat nature's efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis "know what they are talking about." Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in _one_ framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it to be infinitely frustrating when condescending journalists talk down to the concerned layman. This irritates me because AI is a death scentance for humanity — its an incredibly serious problem.

As I have stated before, AI is the end for us. To put it simply, AI brings the world into a highly unstable configuration where the only likely outcome is the relegation of humans and their way of life. This is because of the fundamental changes imposed on the economics of life by the existence of AI.

Many people say that automation leads to new jobs, not a loss of jobs. Automation has never encroached on the sacred territory of sentience. It is a totally different ball game. It is stupid to compare the automation of a traffic light to that of the brain itself. It is a new phenomenon completely and requires a new, from-the-ground-up assessment. Reaching for the cookie- cutter "automation creates new jobs" simply doesn't cut it.

The fact of the matter is that even if most of the world is able to harness AI to benefit our current way of life, at least one country won't. And the country that increases efficiency by displacing human input will win every encounter of every kind that it has with any other country. And the pattern of human displacement will ratchet forward uncontrollably, spreading across the whole face of the earth like a virus. And when humans are no longer necessary they will no longer exist. Not in the way they do now. It's so important to remember that this is a watershed moment — humans have never dealt with anything like this.

AI could come about tomorrow. The core algorithm for intelligence is probably a lot simpler than is thought. The computing power needed to develop and run AI is probably much lower than it is thought to to be. Just because DNNs are not good at this does not mean that something else won't come out of left field, either from neurological research or pure AI research.

And as I have said before, the only way to ensure that human life continues as we know it is for AI to be banned. For all research and inquires to be made illegal. Some point out that this is difficult to do but like I said, there is no other way. I implore everyone who reads this to become involved in popular efforts to address the problem of AI.

<comment><USER54> Stating something more times doesn't make it true. Everything you've written is pure speculation, and alarmist at that. There's no proof that AGI is even possible, and if it is possible there's no proof that it will end humanity.

<comment><USER55> Clearly, AGI-level intelligence is possible, because human brains exist.

So unless you pose that a function has to rely on its materialization (there is something untouchably magic about biological neural networks, and intelligence is not multiple realizable), it should be possible to functionally model intelligence. Nature shows the way.

AGI will likely obsolete humanity. Either depricate it, or consume it (make us part of the Borg collective). Heck, even a relatively dumb autonomous atom bomb or computer virus may be enough to wipe humanity from the face of the earth.

<comment><USER54> It's not at all clear that AGI is technically feasible. Human brains exist but we have only a shallow understanding of how they work.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that AGI is possible, there's no scientific basis to assume that will make humanity obsolete. For all we know there could be fundamental limits on cognition. A hypothetical AGI might be no smarter than humans, or might be unable to leverage it's intelligence in ways that impact us.

Nuclear weapons and malware can cause damage but there's no conceivable scenario where they actually make us extinct.

<comment><USER55> Something can be possible, while still technically not feasible.

I agree our knowledge currently is lacking, but see no reasons why this will never catch up.

There are fundamental limits on cognition. For one our universe is limited by the amount of computing energy available. Plenty of problems can be fully solved, to where it does not matter if you are increasingly more intelligent (beyond a certain point, two AGI's will always draw at chess). Another limit is practical: the AGI needs to communicate with humans (if we manage to keep control of it), so it may need to dumb down so we can understand it.

Even an AGI as smart as the smartest human will greatly outrun us: it can duplicate and focus on many things in parallel. Then the improved bandwith between AGI's will do the rest (humans are stuck with letters and formulas and coffee breaks).

Manually deployed atom bombs and malware can already wreck us. No difference with autonomous (cyber)weapons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> If AGI is possible, it already happened. If even AI experts put it a 100-1000 years out, where some human monkeys banging on digital typewriters could eventually create it, then, in the vastness of space, time, military contracts, alien intelligences, and random Boltzmann brains, it must have been reality multiple times already.

If AGI is impossible, it will never happen. We already know that perfectly intelligent AGI's are not physically possible: Per DeepMind's foundational theoretical framework, optimal compression is non-computable, and besides that, it is not possible for an inference machine to know all of its universe (unless it is bigger than the universe by at least 1 bit, AKA it _is_ the universe).

Remains being more intelligent than all of humanity. To accomplish that, by Shannon's own estimates, there is currently not enough information available in datasets and the internet. Chinese efforts to artificially increase the intelligence of babies is still in its infancy too (the substrate of AGI is irrelevant for computationalism, unless it absolutely needs to run on the IBM 5100).

So until that time travels, we will have to make due with being smarter than/indistinguishable from a human on all economic tasks. We're already there for some subset of humanity, you may even be a part of that subset, if you believed this post was written by a human.</comment>


Show HN: AutoTable - An experiment in storing schemaless data in a relational DB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vyrotek/AutoTable

<comment><AUTHOR> This is just a quick hack I put together in an attempt to implement an idea I mentioned in a past discussion here on HN. Please forgive the crudeness of the project and idea. I don't normally share these type of weekend projects but I had enough interest from friends who wanted to see my implementation.

Here was my comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5425772>

</comment><comment><USER2> Cool! Thanks for sharing.</comment>


Examples of Extreme Minimalism in Web Design - <AUTHOR> http://singlefunction.com/30-examples-of-extreme-minimalism-in-web-design/

<comment><USER2> I found most of these sites to be pretty low on content...

<comment><USER3> Yes, they are confusing the two. We have a minimal shopping site (<http://stylous.com/>) that is not minimal on content.

My co-founder, Steve Dekorte, is the primary designer. His blog uses a minimal design without being minimal on content (<http://dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi>) as does his programming language (<http://www.iolanguage.com/>).

<comment><USER4> Really nice. I've sent a link to my girlfriend to see what she thinks as a "user" :) Comment was that she can't send a link to a ring (gasp) to me, until I've explained she can when she clicks on the product and that font is a bit on the ugly/unreadable side (firefox). thought you might wan't a feedback. Keep up the good work.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback! The dilemma with links to individual pages is that we allow arbitrary scrolling, and we don't want to create a history entry for each item as you scroll (would break back button). A possible solution would be to have scrolling snap to pages.

Re: Font, What version of Firefox is she using?

<comment><USER4> ok - she got used to linking stuff once she figured out she can link to a product and it will scroll to it (probably because it looks different than regular web stuff), since I got spammed with "look at this! look at this too! this is so nice, look at it..." :) firefox is 3.5. One major hurdle though, which you should definitely work on is to point out who are you buying from and where do they ship to - we live in europe for example, so we couldn't figure out how to buy stuff, which is - according to her - fabulous and cheap!

<comment><USER3> We only aggregate US retailers at the moment :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Not mentioned) My personal favorite: [http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com...](http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/)

<comment><USER6> Thoughtful comment in source:

<!-- if the lhc actually destroys the earth & this page isn't yet updated please email email@example.com to receive a full refund -->

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 30 examples is a bit high; many of these are just clones of each other or similarly unremarkable. Alittle selectivity wouldn't hurt... Still, it's better than their list of 105(!) twitter webapps.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice, they mentioned my site (simplecountrycodes.com)! I got some awesome feedback from HN on the design of that, so thanks everyone :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com the best. I should register a site that explains the difference between principle and principal.

<comment><USER10> There are quite a few basic grammar sites that could (and probably should) be developed.

      Their, There, They're.
      We're, were.
      i before e...
      The correct spelling of many common words.

<comment><USER11> My personal pet peeve:

        s/independant/independent/g

<comment><USER12> You're and your

I especially love when someone says something along the lines of: Your so stupid.

<comment><USER13> it's a bad habit of mine to prematurely judge people's intellect solely on their ability to differentiate between the two

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> All of the pages (that I checked) look pretty minimal for me - I'm using links2 to browse at the moment. At least one, #12 IIRC (no tabs!), is using /#pagename for page links; presumably for SEO but giving nothing for non- javascript users.

I guess if you're after an accessible site then you're not going to go with them.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love Konami Code Sites. <http://konamicodesites.com/>

<comment><USER16> Using vimperator it's impossible for me to execute the Konami Code.

<comment><USER17> Doesn't "shift+i" do the trick?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> <http://watrcoolr.us/> <http://hacker.watrcoolr.us/>

Sites I made for myself to deliver the most interesting news to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> I love <http://isitgoingtoraintoday.com/>. All the weather info I need.

</comment><comment><USER20> <http://whattimeisit.com/> \- very useful!

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not loading for me. Firefox's "Connection timed out" page is pretty minimal, though.

<comment><USER22> im getting a blank page white page, hilarious right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> More focus on typography and less focus on graphics continues to be the trend.

</comment><comment><USER24> this is dumb <http://istwitterdown.com/> but this is dumber <http://isistwitterdown.com/>

<comment><USER25> Link should be <http://www.isistwitterdowndown.com/>

Reminds me of the old trick of typing (including quotes) 'bash: command: command not found' into bash.</comment></comment>