How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers from Taking Over - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator-plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over-17e0e27dd02a <comment><USER2> The near term danger of AI isn't in hyperintelligent SkyNet like systems, it's in human controlled autonomous weapon systems and "stupid AI"

What you should be fearing is military drones being given the ability to make decisions on targets or to fire, even with human assistance, and these systems won't just reside in the hands of large governments either.

Already police and militaries around the world are using abstracted forms of force, wherein target are identified with algorithms, and then force trained on those targets

What's do you think is going to happen first, SkyNet, or a predator imaging drone telling a human operator falsely that the current image is a terrorist?

What's going to happen first? SkyNet, or self driving cars putting millions of people out of jobs because of a lack of demand for drivers in transportation, or manufacture of cars? (I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it will be very very disruptive)

If SkyNet is a threat, it's 50 or 100 years off I think. "AI" as it is now, is no where near the capability people are talking about. It's sheer hyperbole.

<comment><USER3> Luckily there are physical limitations. There are practically two ways to arm a drone. Bombs and guns.

A small flying drone operating an 9mm pistol has extremely poor accuracy. Especially with multiple shots. If you increase the accuracy, you have to increase the mass. Which makes it bigger target. Currently regular guy with little training and a rifle can probably shoot down a gun wielding drone most of the time before the opposite can happen.

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

Then there are drones with bombs attached to them. One of the most sophisticated is called Hellfire missile. But it's needlessly big and expensive. The quad copter in next video costs 100$ and has payload to carry regular hand grenade.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb2Tpp3CIoY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb2Tpp3CIoY)

You could go RC car route. But you again need a bit of size to conquer stairs. Also it's easier to track where it comes & goes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUXRMDK3r7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUXRMDK3r7s)

I'm less worried about government doing bad shit and more worried about private citizens getting nasty. Autonomous flight, GPS navigation, address from google maps and bit of facial recognition. First civilian drone murder is just matter of time. People kill with more ease the further they can be when it's done.

I'm guessing this internet privacy thing will seem like child's play when all of sudden everybody wants to hide their physical address. Once that is handled, it's only bit like having rabid dogs with homing device.

<comment><USER4> _" Luckily there are physical limitations.... I'm less worried about government doing bad shit and more worried about private citizens getting nasty."_

The MSF Trauma Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan (3rd October) didn't have this luxury and in the _fog of war_ , [0] 12 MSF medical staff and ten patients were killed. [1],[2]

Killing by remote sensing, is indiscriminate. Adding AI is another order of stupidity.

References:

[0] [http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how- te...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-tech-fails- led-to-air-force-strike-on-msfs-kunduz-hospital/)

[1] [http://www.msf.org.uk/article/in-memoriam-msf-colleagues- kil...](http://www.msf.org.uk/article/in-memoriam-msf-colleagues-killed-in- the-kunduz-trauma-centre-attack)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/06/doctors- witho...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/06/doctors-without- borders-airstrike-afghanistan-us-account-changes-again)

<comment><USER5> Not sure that it matters for the sake of argument, but the weapon system used in question was a human-piloted, human-manned AC-130 gunship, not a drone / remote platform

<comment><USER4> _" the weapon system used in question was a human-piloted, human-manned AC-130 gunship"_

True, read the Ars article: _" The BMC crew is responsible for steering the aircraft to targets, identifying them, and shooting them; the aircraft's battery is slaved to the sensor suite for targeting."_ \- Aircrew, well trained, professional. As ethical as you can get.

Now what happened is _" A US special operations team on the ground, given coordinates of the Afghani NDS building by the Afghan forces they were working with, passed them to the AC-130. But when the AC-130 crew punched the grid coordinates into their targeting system, it aimed at an open field 300 meters away from the actual target. Working from a rough description of the building provided from the ground, the sensor operators found a building close to the field that they believed was the target. Tragically, it was actually the hospital."_

Will adding AI to this situation make any improvement when the real issue is _' lack of a "common operating picture,"'_?

<comment><USER5> No, you're right. The only thing that may have happened was lack of connectivity to COP and no person in the loop to authorize, resulting in a stand-down of operation and no ordnance on target. Great if it's a hospital, not so great if it's actually a bunch of enemy that you need to remove to save your soldiers on the ground. Tough, tough thing to get right all the time. I think a measured, hybrid approach will probably get you the best outcome but I'm no expert in this field.

<comment><USER4> just gets muddier and muddier ~ [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/12/11...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/12/11/months- after-the-airstrike-on-msfs-hospital-in-kunduz-what-exactly-happened-is-still- unclear/)

<comment><USER5> Total aside, but the United States should really promote some sort of beacon / FLIR-readable indicator for hospitals. Their existence would have to be kept a quiet so there weren't a bunch of false positives floating around, but I would think the cost is minimal for the returned value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what their use cases are. "Advance the state of the art in AI" is just too nebulous. Having the smartest people in the world isn't enough... you need to focus them on some goal.

Once you get beyond 8 researchers, you'll have problems with politics and egos if people aren't focused on a problem. Everyone will have their pet approach for specific problems, and they won't compose into something generally useful. AI is really like 10 or 20 different subfields (image understanding, language understanding, motion planning, etc.)

I think self-driving cars are a perfect example of a great problem for AI (and something that many organizations are interested in: Google, Tesla, Apple). Solving that problem will surely advance the state of art in the AI (and already has).

tl;dr "OpenAI" is too nebulous.

</comment><comment><USER7> Before you invite regulation into this area, take a long hard look at how the government has historically approached cryptography and IT security. This is a far simpler domain with far simpler concepts, and it's a total shitshow that alternates between ignorant security theater and self-serving power grabs.

Get into bed with the government and they will piss in it. The most likely outcome is costly complicated regulations that hobble legitimate development and accomplish nothing in terms of making us safer from anything. The end result will be like ITAR and crypto export controls: pushing development off shore and making the USA less competitive.

I say this not as a hard-line anti-government right-winger or dogmatic libertarian, but as someone who has a realistic view of government competence in highly technical domains. Look at other areas and you don't see much better. Corn ethanol, for example, is literally the _pessimum_ choice for biofuels-- it is technically the worst possible candidate that could have been chosen to push. The sorts of folks who ascend to political power simply lack any expertise in these areas, and so they fall back on listening to the agenda-driven lobbyists that swarm around them like flies. The results are awful. Government should do government but should stay the hell away from _specific micromanagement_ of anything technical.

<comment><USER8> Yes, and another issue with regulation is that it gives a speed advantage to any team that's willing to subvert the regulations: [http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/techtank/posts/2015/04/14-und...](http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/techtank/posts/2015/04/14-understanding- artificial-intelligence)

If regulations _do_ turn out to be the right path, I'd suggest that people within the AI field form their own informal regulatory body first, fortifying it against institutional failure modes like corruption by lobbyists etc. Then get the government to grant them legal authority. Hopefully that would go a ways towards addressing the issues you describe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds to me like YCombinator wants to fuel their growth by creating these tools for their companies to use. The YC business model is absolutely brilliant, but I can't see this being some purely altruistic mission. Or if it is then I am jealous that they have the power and resources to put up against such a project. I'd spend all my time trying to build an AI if I didn't have to work! (Though I am trying to steer the company I work for in that direction anyway...)

<comment><USER10> Well, yes, but in the broadest possible sense, as in the rising water level will raise all boats, including of course the YC ones, since all the work coming out of this group will apparently be open sourced and freely available for anyone to use, YC company or otherwise.

From the article:

> Sam, since OpenAI will initially be in the YC office, will your startups > have access to the OpenAI work?

> Altman: If OpenAI develops really great technology and anyone can use it for > free, that will benefit any technology company. But no more so than that.

<comment><USER9> That's just enough for the YC social network to incorporate OpenAI researchers, and Sam knows it. YC folks will be at the water coolers and ping pong tables with OpenAI folks, and once the OpenAI folks move into another office they'll still be in frequent communication with their YC social contacts, if not through official channels then unofficially as friends. That means they'll hear the researchers' in-progress ideas and details on how the platform works or will work long before that information spreads to the general public. I'd consider that a huge advantage, assuming OpenAI makes sufficient progress.

<comment><USER10> Well you're probably right, but I don't think that you can do too much, realistically, to regulate early access to very fresh ideas through networks like that - and I think that's fine so long as there's no purposeful or unnecessary delay in spreading the information more widely.

You could for instance make the same kind of point about YC companies' access to investor networks, advice of partners, all those sorts of things which aren't explicitly reserved just for them but of course are more readily accessible by virtue of being in the program. It's not something that's inherently bad, it's just how it works.

I'm not saying that having very close contact with this research group won't be advantageous to YC companies, of course it will, but with that as a given, the ethos of this group's findings being made open and freely available for anyone to use is well-intentioned and to be applauded, when it's a privately funded initiative that could just as easily be justified in being somewhat or completely closed and proprietary. Is it really important if some YC companies happen to have a slight advantage from this, as an inevitable side effect, in the big picture?

<comment><USER9> >Well you're probably right, but I don't think that you can do too much, realistically, to regulate early access to very fresh ideas through networks like that - and I think that's fine so long as there's no purposeful or unnecessary delay in spreading the information more widely.

Keep the team distributed across the world and make all communication surrounding the projects open as well. If it's for the world it should be by the world.

>You could for instance make the same kind of point about YC companies' access to investor networks, advice of partners, all those sorts of things which aren't explicitly reserved just for them but of course are more readily accessible by virtue of being in the program. It's not something that's inherently bad, it's just how it works.

I wouldn't argue that, that's just how business works. I would argue that the founders are playing OpenAI up as humanitarian aid when really it disproportionately benefits them (autonomous cars, paid for by research grants? Investment in early adopters of the technology? Uh yeah).

>I'm not saying that having very close contact with this research group won't be advantageous to YC companies, of course it will, but with that as a given, the ethos of this group's findings being made open and freely available for anyone to use is well-intentioned and to be applauded, when it's a privately funded initiative that could just as easily be justified in being somewhat or completely closed and proprietary. Is it really important if some YC companies happen to have a slight advantage from this, as an inevitable side effect, in the big picture?

YC's business is growing businesses, and they'll take any advantage they can get. If it benefits them more at all then it's not charity or non-profit, and they shouldn't be billing it as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whether it's the "singularity" or just software naturally improving over time and taking on more "thinking" work, there's going to be a huge and insurmountable unemployment problem in the near future. The market values human thought/labor to the extent that it's cheaper or more effective than an automated solution. When that isn't the case, you can fill in the blanks. That, to me, is the scary part of AI.

It doesn't sound like this project has any scope to address this practical concern, which to me, is largely economic. I don't see how universal access to AI puts food on the table.

<comment><USER12> There are many dystopic future possibilities as automation eats jobs.

There's also a few positive ones, and I hope we can move towards them. One way would be to shift from taxation of human labour to taxation of the means of production. Another way is if access to quality of life products becomes so cheap that they require very little labour to earn.

If you extrapolate the progress of solar power, 3D printing, and synthetic meat, you can imagine a machine that is cheap to produce, but which would make each human completely self-sustainable. Not needing to work to put food on the table every single goddamn day would transform our society quite a lot in a positive way.

<comment><USER13> I understand your angle, but relying on 3D printing and synthetic meat, probably from petroleum derivatives because 3D printing can't happen from thin air, in order to feed humans ... dude, to me that doesn't sound like a life that's worth living.

<comment><USER12> Thin air contains all the carbon that plants get their bulk mass from...

Extrapolate further, imagine a machine that runs on solar power, and creates whatever food you want from water, carbon dioxide, and human poop. Essentially short-circuit the whole raise-crops-feed-cattle-slaughter-get-meat cycle. Make the food out of the machine perfectly nutricious as well, because why not.

There would still be things to strive for, to work for, if you want. But baseline survival is just taken care of. Sounds like a good future to me.

<comment><USER13> In combination with sun light, the carbon taken from air provides the energy that plants need to grow, however plants also need minerals from a healthy soil.

When it comes to food, baseline survival is already taken care of in western countries and we are wasting about one third of the food we produce. It's not food that's the problem, but living space and forever rising health care costs.

But you know what the irony is? We don't know a thing about what constitutes a nutritious healthy diet, as the reductionist science we've been applying is not up for this task. Even more aggravating is that trying to shorten the "raise-crops-feed-cattle-slaughter-get-meat" cycle and do it on an industrial scale (by means of replacing sun's energy with fossil fuels and do it in concentrated operations) is precisely the root cause of many of the problems we find ourselves into.

As meddling with the things we ingest has given us the modern day diseases such as cancer, diabetes, obesity and heart disease, not to mention that we're on the brink of going back to the dark ages due to the upcoming "antibiotics apocalypse".

And yet here you are, hoping that some future 3D printer will synthesize meat out of thin air, instead of fixing the real problems in our society, which is that we consume and waste too much from processes that aren't sustainable. But yeah, 3D printing will save us, seemed to work for Star Trek characters at least. Good luck with that mate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Once again sensationalism. I watched that interview. Sam's take on AI is perhaps the most practical I've seen in popular media, while everyone is freaking about a singularity event.

<comment><USER15> "Sam's take on AI" being that all machine learning research should be intensively monitored and controlled by the government, or has he backed away from that position?

[http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence- part-2](http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This...sounds incredibly naive? They seem to think that AI risk comes from Bad People doing AI? There's not one mention given to the possibility of well- intentioned people destroying the world by accident.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think the best defense against the misuse of nuclear weapons is to empower as many people as possible to have nuclear weapons. If everyone has nuclear weapons powers, then there's not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have nuclear weapons superpower.

Yeah, right.

</comment><comment><USER18> This initiative makes no sense. If AI could really become a technology which would endanger our civilization, when you clearly would not(!) want it to be useable for everyone. There is a reason why it is not the right of every american citizen to own plutonium, buy sarin or send letters full of anthrax around.

But if AI would be as dangerous to society as for example cars, then we don't need such an initiative. So for me the whole thing seems to be a marketing stunt of sleep-deprived billionaires who read the wrong books.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I would like to see the logic of Sam & Elon's discussions that caused them to opt for this route. Let's have them post it on the internet and give everyone an opportunity to shoot holes in it. (I hope I'd have the guts to do this if I was a billionaire.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Musk is spread so so thin. Not enough to run a rocket company, a car company and be the Chairman of Solar City. Needs to have his hand in even more pots.

<comment><USER20> I remember seeing him give some interviews a few months back where he looked quite tired and overworked. I hope he has the wisdom to take a break when he needs one.

<comment><USER19> Agree but I don't know that he will (since the way it seems to me) behavior like this is similar to an addiction in some ways. You get so much positive feedback as well as ups and downs he would have to hit a tipping point (or life changing event) to actually change the behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Altman: Our recruiting is going pretty well so far. One thing that really > appeals to researchers is freedom and openness and the ability to share what > they're working on, which at any of the industrial labs you don't have to > the same degree.

Do current AAPL/GOOG/FB engineers dislike this so much? There's secrecy within most for-profit entities, what makes AI so different?

<comment><USER22> > There's secrecy within most for-profit entities, what makes AI so different?

It's not about AI vs other fields, it's about research vs. engineering. Admittedly, that line is more blurry than most, especially in highly technologically competitive fields like AI and graphics (and less blurry in fields where the research-to-implementation gap is larger, like PL or algorithmic complexity).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is a role for regulation and collective choice. Take HFT as an example. If everyone competes for lower latency access, eventually everyone locates their bot at the same exchange. If everyone puts a lower limit on latency (e.g. by coiling fiber optic cable), the latency playing field is leveled and new areas of competition emerge.

Open technology will empower the expression of many human wills, individual and collective. Human wills are today constrained and empowered by many human- imagined systems of thought, and we can invent new ones. Will there be an AI which explores the possibility space of constraints on AI-using humans?

</comment><comment><USER24> My real concern about AI is that generalised Moore's law means we only have a relatively short time to plan. Assuming that computers continue to double in processing power every 18 months or so, then we only have 10 years where we go from 1% human level to human level. This really is not a long time to make good decisions.

<comment><USER25> A few things about AI that the singularity crowd either doesn't get or doesn't want to get:

1) Growth rates in nature are never exponential. They are sigmoidal. Sigmoids look very exponential when you're in the middle of them, but we are starting to see the level of moore's law (yeah yeah, it's technology not ICs, still sigmoidal)

2) Even if we had a computer that was 1,000 times faster than the ones we have today and used 1/1,000 of the computing power we STILL don't have the algorithms to produce a human intelligence and that is one hell of an algorithm.

3) The focus for a long time has been moore's law and the associated increase in FLOPS. I think what is more important and more limiting is the bandwidth and bandwidth is a couple orders of magnitude lower than FLOPS where FLOP=Byte and an extra order of magnitude lower when FLOP=Word.

<comment><USER26> It isn't too hard to be off an order or two of magnitude when dealing with exponential increases, no reason advances could or couldn't level off at 1% or 1000% of human capacity.

<comment><USER24> I am not sure that just hoping computation growth will level off at some threshold below human level is wise planning.It is like assuming that a singularity level intelligence will be nice and so saying we don't need to think about the consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Musk: I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there's not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower.

???!!!

Isn't this like gun control all over again?! You give more guns to people so that they can be safe, instead you end up killing each other.

<comment><USER28> Why is guns the only technological comparison? Replace guns in your statement with mobile phones or access to the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It might be an incredibly bad idea to have multiple AGIs everywhere in the world, but that's the least bad that I can see too.

Also this is amazing, making serious effort towards AGI is what we need. We'll play with RNNs configurations for a long time, but I think it's a good call to fund people who think about the broad picture.

<comment><USER30> I think that depends on how you want to model the danger of AGIs. Nukes are dangerous but the least dangerous version of nukes doesn't seem like nukes "everywhere in the world".

Of course, as a pure hypothetical, it's virtually impossible to come up with a definite danger-model for AGIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is great news. I work at a big company with advanced machine learning tools and infrastructure. Everytime I use them I am amazed by the tools but kinda sad for the students and researchers who have to deal with simpler/less powerful tools. This gives me hope that the best tools will eventually be open source.

</comment><comment><USER2> Remember, when Engines Of Creation and Nanosystems were published, and there was a great fear that uncontrolled Nanotech development would result in a GreyGoo that would consume us all?

With stuff like CRISPR, perhaps Elon should invest to stop the zombie apocalypse. :)

</comment><comment><USER32> As awesome as this looks, I'm totally missing the point.

If they truly believe AI is dangerous, how does promoting / accelerating it is supposed to help?

Or is it a way to commoditize R&D in machine learning so that it will never be a bottleneck for startups?

</comment><comment><USER33> It's incredible the types of doomsday scenarios the wealthy invest in stopping. The problem Elon Musk and Y Combinator are going to solve with their money, what they will be remembered for fixing after their companies have long crashed and gone bankrupt, is better technology. Essentially, technology will become so good at doing human's work we will run out of problems for people to solve and drift into a lazy non-working state incompatible with current economies. I predict Earth will be destroyed by passing meteor before that happens.

Maybe if I was a billionaire I'd understand.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Security through secrecy on technology has just not worked very often."

Nuclear weapons come to mind. Would we prefer that the knowledge of how to make them be more widespread?

<comment><USER34> That knowledge is very widespread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> One example of a evil AI is the fact that the power of all the data out there about people,things and the ability to learn from it allows connections to be made like never before. With the right algorithms it should be possible to even make policy shifts that can impact human lives in a manner that is favourable to the 'super power' Govt. or company who owns this.

</comment><comment><USER36> Humans are general purpose animals and technology is general purpose humankind.

If we believe that DNA is a kind of information and our genes are "looking for" better weasels to survive through then it's only natural to also see technology as a much better carrier of that information than us.

The problem many have with coming to grasp with the idea that AI could be a threat is because they look at where technology is right now and then try and imagine a computer being anywhere near our capabilities.

But this is because many think of it as a thing. As in. "Now we have finally build a strong AI thingiemagick". However just as humans consciousness and intelligence isn't a thing, neither will AI be. It's going to be a lot of things. Some are better developed than others, but most moving at impressive speed and at one point enough of them are going to be put together to create some sort of pattern recognizing feedback loop with enough memory and enough smart sub-algorithms to became what we would consider sentient. </tinfoil hat>

</comment><comment><USER37> The OP seems to assume that the big danger with AI is that it will leave the people at the mercy of an (human) elite that controls an AI or that has programmed an autonomous AI (an AI not controlled by any humans) to care mostly or only about the elite.

In contrast, what organizations like the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Future of Humanity Institute (MIRI and FHI) consider the main danger (and have considered the main danger for over 11 years) is that the AI will not care about any person at all.

For the AI to do an adequate job of protecting human welfare it needs to understand human morality, human values and human preferences -- and to be programmed correctly to care about those things. Designing an AI that can do that is probably significantly more difficult than designing an AI that is so intelligent that the human race cannot stop it or shut it down (although everyone grants that designing an AI that cannot be stopped or shut down by, e.g., the US military is in itself a difficult task).

The big danger in other words seems to come not from a research group using AI research to try to take over the world or to gain a persistent advantage over other people, but rather from a research group that means well or at least has no intention to be reckless or to destroy the human race, but ends up doing so by having an insufficient appreciation of the technical and scientific challenges around protecting human welfare, then building an AI that is so smart that it cannot be stopped by humans (including the humans in the other AI research groups).

I fail to see how changing the AI-research landscape so that more of the results of AI research will be published helps against that danger. If one team has 100% of the knowledge and other resources that it needs to build a smarter-than-human AI (and has the will to build it) and all the other teams have 99.9% of the necessary knowledge, there might not be enough time to stop the first team or (more critically IMHO) to stop the AI created by the first team. In particular, if the first AI is able to build (e.g., write the source code for) its own successor -- a process that has been called recursive self- improvement -- it might rapidly become smart enough to stop any other smarter- than-human AI from being built (e.g., by killing all the humans).

Rather than funding a non-profit that will give away its research output to all research groups, a better strategy is to give the funds to MIRI who for over 11 years have been exhibiting in their writings an vivid appreciation for the difficulty of creating smarter-than-human AI that will actually care about the humans rather than simply killing them because they might interfere with the AI's goal or because the habitat and the resources of the humans can be repurposed by the AI.

Any effective AI -- or any AI at all really -- will have some goal (or some set or system of goals, which for brevity I will refer to as "the goal") which may or may not be the goal that the builders of the AI _tried_ to give it. In other words, everything worthy of the name "mind", "intelligence" or "intelligent agent" has some goal -- by definition. If the AI is powerful enough -- in other words, if the AI is efficient enough at optimizing the world to conform to the AI's goal -- then all humans will die -- at least for the vast majority of possible goals one could put into a sufficiently powerful optimizing process (i.e., into an sufficiently powerful AI). Only a very few, relatively complicated goals do not have the unfortunate property that all the humans die if the goal is pursued efficiently enough -- and learning how to define such goals and to ensure that they are integrated correctly into the AI is probably the most difficult part of getting smarter-than-human AI right.

That used to be called Friendliness problem and is currently usually called the AI goal alignment problem. The best strategy on publication is probably to publish freely any knowledge about the AI goal alignment problem, while keeping unpublished most other knowledge useful for creating a smart-than- human AI.

I will patiently reply to all emails on this topic. (Address in my profile.) I do not get a salary from FHI or MIRI and donating to FHI or MIRI does not benefit me in any way except by decreasing the probability that my descendants will be killed by an AI.

</comment><comment><USER38> While we're at it maybe we should address the possibility of overpopulation on Mars?

Andrew Ng thinks people are wasting their time with evil AI:

[https://youtu.be/qP9TOX8T-kI?t=1h2m45s](https://youtu.be/qP9TOX8T-kI?t=1h2m45s)

<comment><USER39> > While we're at it maybe we should address the possibility of overpopulation > on Mars?

We've already fucked this planet so I sincerely hope a few people are thinking of ways to avoid fucking another one.

<comment><USER40> I can't imagine we could make Mars _more_ inhospitable than it already is. And, whatever technologies we'd have to develop to live on that planet, would forever be in our toolkit to reverse the damage we've done here, and prevent future damage there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is starting to sound like the OSAF that tried to build a cross-platform open-source email/calendar/notes application for the betterment of the world - in competition with Microsoft and whatever other large corporations were doing PIMs at the time.

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

<comment><USER41> Admittedly, this parallel is based mostly off reading the biography of the project: Dreaming in Code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> (Sorry, this is a bit rambling. Hopefully it'll still be interesting to some of you. Have had a few pints at this point...)

EDIT: Actually, this is nearing "crazy" levels. Just ignore unless you really enjoy stream-of-consciousness. Sorry about this, HN! :)

I know I'm _really_ late to the party here, but there's a premise in this whole discussion that I'm not sure I understand.

Why _should_ we prevent AI from taking over? I mean, I "get it"... it wouldn't be _HI_ and that _feels_ kind of weird, but what's objectively special about HI? Why are we treating "HI==good" as axiomatic? I mean even us tribal, overly-emotional (&c) humans value _DI_ (Dog Intelligence) even if we're pretty sure that it can't contemplate the fact that we're all made of the remnants of supernovae. There's no evidence as of yet that a greater intelligence a) exists[1], even in principle, or b) would be any less benevolent towards us. Perhaps they would even create nice little simulations for us to exist in. Though, I wonder what the purpose of _my_ simulation is, given current circumstances :).

Yes, a transition from HI->AI would inevitably lead to a lot of human death (unless we're talking _really_ out-there take-over plans involving disease and such), but would AI really be _worse_? And for _whom_ and _why_? Humans themselves have caused a lot of death and we seem to value ourselves pretty highly overall (and undeservedly, IMO).

It might be that HI is the "end of the road" just like the Turing Machine appears to be the end of the road in terms of what you _can_ compute... but not in terms of _how fast_ you can compute it. Would "faster" automatically mean "better" (see footnote)? I dunno.

[1] The existence of a "higher" ("faster" is probable) intellige is a interesting question. How would you judge such a thing? Is there more "power"[2] to be gained through something other than being able to reflect at yourself? AFAIUI self-reflection is one of _the_ distinuguishing features of intelligence, but given that we're "better" than Chimps -- who have an idea of "self", thus self-reflection -- it may not be the decider. And even so, such reflection is still subject to Physics and thus without "free will".

[2] Not just faster, but "better", in some non-linear sense.

</comment><comment><USER43> So, capitalism is all about exploiting unfair advantages, right? First mover's advantage on AI developments (regardless of whether they're made publicly accessible eventually or not) seems like a pretty big unfair advantage.

Good for them. I expect some great work to come out of this. :) I'm most excited to automate travel as quickly as possible --- too many people die each year from automobile accidents.

</comment><comment><USER44> It is really sad that the people funding these excellent researchers have no fucking clue about AI (they know plenty about other things and have done plenty of good work, but the level of nonsense here is striking). Thank God they are giving the money to competent people instead of doing what they think they are doing with it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Here is my prediction, after watching "Terminator Genisys". The dangerous AI is not the AI humans "invent". It is the AI that runs away. But, what AI will humans allow to "run away"? What scenario presents an opportunity for one group of humans to attack an AI and then provides the opportunity for said AI to be released from its lease ("run away") and become that which we all fear?

So, you have 'red team' and 'blue team'. Blue team is super rich and builds itself an awesome AI. Red team needs some "rally round the flag" pick me up and so, looking around for targets, decides that attacking a bunch of machines is a safe bet. If they win, awesome. If not, then they didn't kill any persons, just made a bunch of junk.

Blue team's response is to internalize the threat (as is only natural, or is at least politically expedient to some subset of blue team) and frame the situation as follows: "This is what we built our AI for. This is an existential threat. It has the capacity. We only need to let it off the leash. The choices are 'destroy' or 'be destroyed'. This is nothing less than an existential moment for our civilization."

And, with that horrible, non-technical, propaganda riddled rationalization the AI developed by the most well meaning of people will be let off the least, will run way, and nothing that we know about the AI up to that point will be worth diddly squat.

I respect anyone that tries to tackle this issue. But, the nature of the issue, the kernel of the problem, is nothing less than Pandora's box. We won't know when it is opened. But, the AI will.

</comment><comment><USER46> The near term danger of AI, as I point occasionally, is a Goldman Sachs run by an AI. Machine learning systems are already making many investment decisions. We're not far from the day when society's capital allocation is controlled by programs optimizing for return over a few years, and nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is the Steven Levy who wrote this the same Steven Levy who wrote _Hackers_?

<comment><USER48> Even Steven: [https://twitter.com/StevenLevy](https://twitter.com/StevenLevy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> > unconstrained by a need to generate financial return

AI should definitely be constrained by financial means. Computing, unbounded by financial constraints, will eat everything.

</comment><comment><USER50> > _How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers from Taking Over_

Well, for Y Combinator is easy: by ensuring funding goes to "Uber for X" and "Facebook for Y" startups instead of real technology advancing businesses

/s

</comment><comment><USER51> So all this will end with the red open-source AI Jaeger mech battling against the grey corporate AI Jaegers among the ruins of our cities. Thanks, Elon.

</comment><comment><USER52> I want computers to take over.

</comment><comment><USER53> Fix my autocorrect

</comment><comment><USER54> At the same time couldn't this just make it easier for rogues to fork?

</comment><comment><USER55> Computers already took over.

</comment><comment><USER19> "OpenAI is a research lab meant to counteract large corporations who may gain too much power by owning super-intelligence systems devoted to profits"

As opposed to (almost) the entire startup ecosystem which is focused on ... profits.

Edit: And what does "to much power" even mean other than trying to use hyperbole to make some kind of point.

<comment><USER25> You missed the part where they say OpenAI is incorporated as a non-profit.</comment></comment>


Technical Interview Questions and Answers - <AUTHOR> http://www.techinterview.org/

<comment><USER2> Puzzles are fun, but really not the way to judge a person.

If I were interviewing for a person and wanted to test for technical know how, I'd just ask them how they think ___ works (where the blank is some popular, semi-related product), and use that as a spring board to talk with them for the next hour about stuff. You get a good sense for the type of knowledge and comfort people have for material that's actually relevant to the job at hand, and on top of that you can suss out things like how well you'd work with them.

</comment><comment><USER3> So.. Once you know and understand the solution to a problem or a puzzle, what's the point (with respect to the company that is hiring) in candidate getting lucky in the interview and answering that question?

Usually people say that solution is not the important thing for a question but the process of getting to a correct or wrong solution is important. Some times interviewers ignore this fact.

Instead of puzzles or problems which may surprise some candidates, how about American Idol auditions style interviews. For example, you ask a candidate (for programming job) to design/implement/test some small problem giving the full requirements or simulating changing requirements. Will this process help select a right candidate?

</comment><comment><USER4> counter argument - i loathe people that interview me with $hit puzzle questions and pat 'where do you see yourself in 10 yrs' type questions. that kind on non-thinking and non-personal behaviour will extend right through to your actual working conditions. Thread: what's the best line you've ever whacked back at muppets during an interview? 1\. Q your worst habit? A a toss up between on-selling office supplies for profit and my cocaine habit 2\. Q where do you see yourself in 5 years? A hard to say for sure but approximately half way through my 10 year plan

<comment><USER5> Hey, I'd love to talk to a chemical engineer about some things. Send me an email, you don't have it listed in your profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a question, why does the square piece in tetris make a sound when it rotates? (GameBoy version - if it matters)

it doesn't rotate on the screen. think about it.</comment>


Google Wants $1.7 Billion from 'unfair' iPhone Royalties - <AUTHOR> http://www.hoista.net/post/17365252561/google-wants-1-7-billion-from-unfair-iphone

<comment><USER2> Apple is running a disgusting campaign here in Europe against it's competitors. They even managed to get the European Union to start an anticompetive investigation against Samsung, even though they should be investigated and not their competitors. No wonder Google, Motorola, Samsung fight back. And they should.

Apple even managed that the galaxy tab couldn't be sold anymore here for a few weeks and had to be modified. When a trial ordered the same fate to their ipads, they managed to remove the ban (and Motorola even had to make a deposit of 100 Million Euros) in one day while complaining that banning a complete product because of one violating patent wouldn't be fair.

Is it "fair" to have a phone/tab banned because it has round corners? They didn't complain there and are still trying to ban all sales of Samsung's Galaxy phones on design patterns or trivial patents.

<comment><USER3> I'm not really sure what's so disgusting about it. Anyone with a pair of eyes can see that Samsung have been systematically pushing the boundaries of what you get away with in cloning a design. If Apple didn't show willingness to push back they would be allowing a competitor to dictate where that boundary should be set. Since they spend a great deal on design and branding it's perfectly acceptable that they wish to protect that investment.

<comment><USER4> Really? I see plenty of differences in the popular Samsung phone models. And there is only so much a designer can do with a slim touch phone to make it significantly different.

<comment><USER3> Clearly that's a judgement call on both our parts and neither of us is going to convince each other to think otherwise.

As an anecdote though, I was walking down Oxford St this morning and passed by a mobile phone shop that had two large displays in the window, one for a large black touch screen phone and one for an otherwise identical white version. As my eye passed over them my brain registered 'iPhone' since that is what they looked like. It was only when I looked a little closer I saw the Samsung text under the display.

This is clearly what concerns Apple execs, not merely rounded rectangles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have any thoughts on if making patents non-transferrable would help the current patent situation?

I'll admit I have barely begun to think about the implications so it may be dumb from the outset but I think:

* No transferring to patent trolls

* No situations like the link

I haven't really thought about the opposite side of things, was kind of hoping people here would have strong opinions on the matter.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure how that could be done. If I understand correctly it's the person with his name on the patent that is allowing these companies to use his patent in anyway they see fit. Their name is still on the patent so it wasn't exactly transferred.

Can someone clarify the mechanics of this?

<comment><USER7> There is a difference between inventor and assignee.

Typically, inventor is a person or group of people that acutally invented something, while assignee is "the owner" of the patent that can use it fro protection, lawsuits, etc.

Noone can change inventor, but assignee can sell patent and reassign it to someone else.

<comment><USER6> Ah I see how that works now, so it would be possible to make the assignee a one time thing too but in the end what would prevent a "inventor" from assigning the patent to a troll in the first place and some troll create their own patents so that's an issue too.

Buying companies for patents would also leave another loophole. This issue isn't simple I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I updated it to include the relative shares of the patent pool for LTE to give a better perspective comparing the amounts they ask for compared to Qualcomm.</comment>


Pelosi endorses remote voting for US House - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/homenews/house/493182-rules-chairman-advises-pelosi-to-back-remove-voting <comment><USER2> Can't they make whatever voting rules they want?</comment>


Impossible to edit your birthday in a Yahoo account - <AUTHOR> https://forums.yahoo.net/t5/Manage-your-account-settings/Yahoo-Account-How-to-change-birthday/td-p/2574 <comment><USER2> Aeons ago, when I created a Yahoo account, I was privacy mad, and I deliberately set a birthday of Jan 1st 1900.

It's caused me no end of problems since - luckily I never use my Yahoo account for anything anymore, and nor should you.

The sooner we purge Yahoo from the nets the better, imho.

<comment><USER3> What sort of problems does it cause? I throw around Jan 1st 1900 pretty freely for entities that have no real business knowing my birthday but want it anyway, and never had any problems with it

<comment><USER2> I spent about 3 years locked out of my Yahoo account, because I'd forgotten I'd set my DoB to 01/01/1900, and one of the unlock questions was what's your DoB. :)

Once i got back in (after suddenly recalling the password!) i tried to change my DoB so it wouldn't happen again, and found I couldn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> only service i use from Yahoo is Flickr for backup of my private photos (i also do backup to Google photos), any reason to stop doing it? isn't diversification always better?

<comment><USER5> If you are using their "private sharing feature" you need to aware that it isn't private by any means.

<comment><USER4> i am not using any sharing feature, just upload them through Flickr app where they are set as Private by default, not putting them into any album either</comment></comment></comment>


I retired at 30. The best part isn't leisure – it's freedom. - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9023415/mr-money-mustache-retirement <comment><USER2> I retired at 55, nine years ago broadly using the well known principles and agree that "Creation of new ideas, new enterprises, or new things is the biggest joy of being alive".

</comment><comment><USER3> _For anyone familiar with the principles of personal finance and investing, my trick was unimpressive and easily reproducible: Just spend much less than you earn and pour the difference into efficient index funds._

This is the usual US centric nonsense where a certain privileged few can use their privilege to get out of the rat race, whereas the vast majority of the planet can't even get into that race in the first place, never mind hack it for these sort of benefits. I'm rather sick of the bullshit claims that there is no magic and that anybody else can do this too - this is patently untrue. You are ultra privileged; you lucked out in the ethnic and circumstances lottery. By all means share how you did it, but please stop intimating thats its at all possible for the vast majority of the rest of us to do this.

<comment><USER4> You're right. There is magic here. It's called 1st grade math. For this to work, income minus expenses must be much greater 0.

You don't need to be rich or privileged or win the "ethic and circumstances lottery" as you called it. The key is to live well within your means and save the difference. Saving 25x your annual expenses is something anyone (even someone making minimum wage) can do but it does take time hard work and the willingness to defer gratification. Do you really need that fancy vacation or the iPhone 10x++? Or do you want financial freedom at some point in the future?

It's your choice. Choose wisely.

<comment><USER5> Do you really think that someone making minimum wage is able to save 25x their income? Do you think those same people are buying "iPhone 10+++" and "fancy vacations"? That sounds insane.

Doing some basic math assuming $8/hr minimum wage at 40hr/wk with no vacation: $16,640/yr

Your assumption then is that someone can live off of $665 a year?

It's hard to even survive on minimum wage let alone save anything.

<comment><USER6> Doing this on minimum wage isn't going to work as you can't live below your means at that income level. You do need to learn a trade, or profession (like Engineering) which allows you to save, then live below your means.

There's a lot of entities in this world trying to sell products and services you really don't need. All of this is a big diversion, and most people get caught up in it.

What most people don't realize is, once they get in their mid fifties, it becomes harder to hold on to a high-paying job (Engineers: I'm looking at you) If you don't have a nest-egg built up in your mid fifties, you might be in for a serious lifestyle adjustment.

I was employed as an engineer for over 30 years, and in November of 2014, I was laid off. I'm in my mid fifties. Because I did something similar to what MMM did and lived below my means, I'm not hurting due to the layoff. Would I like to go back to work? Yes. Do I have a choice of how I want to work and for whom I want to? Most definitely. This is what MMM calls a "Position of Strength". If more people lived below their means, and were in a position of strength, there would be a lot more interesting work to be had at a good rate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Citizen journalism app: lets you create the news and decide which story matters - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/me/2012/04/15/this-citizen-journalism-app-that-lets-you-create-the-news-and-decide-which-story-matters/

<comment><USER2> By crowdsourcing news, it gets faster, but more biased. Quality journalism takes time to create. Hence, impulse-reporting like Twitter will never improve news.

<comment><USER3>
      By crowdsourcing news, it gets faster, but more biased.

How does that work? It's much easier to influence a single person (i.e. the talking head on the TV) than it is 100 people (who probably have a great deal of different biases and perspectives)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of Tackable:

<http://blog.tackable.com/about/></comment>


User Interfaces: How Not to Design a Microwave - <AUTHOR> http://jordansmith.io/ui-design-principles/ <comment><USER2> Good post: although maybe missing a bit on testing? If the manufacturers got a just few people to try to heat up some bolognese, they would probably soon have discovered their UI needs a of tweaking.</comment>


Note on Text Editors for Getting Started Writing Code - <AUTHOR> http://nerdfs.blogspot.com/2012/07/note-on-text-editors.html

<comment><USER2> I would say the only thing _essential_ for a barebones code editor is being indentation-aware. Next come nice-to-haves like syntax-highlighting, directory trees, multiple tabs, etc.

Sublime is great. I will be using it for everything except heavily REPL- oriented languages (as in Clojure - I dearly hope Light Table delivers).</comment>


Ask Hacker News: What is the % chance of cataclysmic climate change? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n12/abs/ngeo689.html

<comment><USER2> Cataclysmic event? An incoming asteroid or the Yellowstone super volcano erupting - both cataclysmic I suppose with a finite chance of occurring. Both of these would probably have a chilling effect over the short term (couple of hundred thousand years).

Runaway warming following some massive release (from somewhere) of a greenhouse gas - possible one supposes but it does not look as if anything like that has happened during the last few million years.

The most likely medium term scenario based upon the rather limited historical climate data we have is that we will slowly move into another ice age. Now that will be cataclysmic for folks living in the Northern temperate zones where most of the current world economic activity takes place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cataclysmic is pretty unlikely. Do you think there is 1%+ chance of some major coastal cities becoming uninhabitable or requiring significant engineering to hold back the rising sea?

<comment><USER2> Interesting question and I suspect difficult to get a sensible answer to. I am assuming that you expect the 20th Century warming period to continue to raise Northern hemisphere temperatures to the levels experienced around 1,000 years ago. Certainly we know that Greenland had a lot less ice then - although we do not know where that water was. I am not sure if we have any information from Northern Canada or Asia. Regretfully I have not heard about any useful data from the South. Was the sea level higher a thousand years ago? Even extrapolating from coastal site evidence might not help as many land masses were still (and are still) rising gently following the last ice age.

There is not a lot of evidence that sea levels are rising substantially at the moment - you had best ask an oceanographer - I would stick with the science rather than ask a "climatologist".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The argument against global warming seems to be that there is a lot of uncertainty. The models really could be wrong.

What is your prior probability for the formal scientific opinion on climate change being correct? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change) I choose 95%.

What percent chance do you think there is of cataclysmic global warming, human caused or otherwise? I can't pick an exact number, but it is certainly above 0+ and it seems like a bad enough scenario that it is worth doing something to try and stop it if we can. Note that I don't think this type of analysis is very meaningful quantitatively, but it can reveal why people think the way they do. I really don't understand the contrarian perspective on global warming and I would like to hear how you justify your probabilities.

<comment><USER3> Well, one of the issues is magnitude: do we get, naturally or unnaturally, temperatures back to the level of the Medieval Warm Period or do we get a "cataclysm" (or do we get the next Ice Age, we _are_ overdue one, and the same general group of people and some of the same people were warning of that before the '80s).

"Worth doing something" is nice and fine, but that "something" really needs to be connected to the probability of the risk. The extreme warmists want us to essentially spend all the world's disposable wealth on something that has at best a _very_ shaky scientific foundation (cataclysm). It would be a real pity if we did that and it turned out we were entering the next Ice Age instead, or needed the money for some other greater threat instead (e.g. one of the ones mentioned in this discussion, like a megacaldera cutting lose). A maxim of warfare is that the side that tends to win in a battle is the one that is the last to commit its reserves. We _really_ need to keep some reserves.

In the HN discussion in which you posted a pointer to this discussion I referred to Bjørn Lomborg, "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Back before the release of the CRUtape Letters he believed moderate AGW was happening, but he advocates moderate local expenditures to deal with that (moderate at least when compared to the "take over the world's economy" proposals of the extreme warmists), and that we spend some serious money on targeted interventions that will clearly help a lot of people (e.g. as I vaguely recall one involves addressing a common vitamin deficiency).

Unless a threat is truly cataclysmic it's a mistake to focus on it to the exclusion of all else, and the extreme warmists are just one example of an advocacy group that thinks they've found the _one_ problem we're facing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Global Catastrophic Risks [1], many of the risks considered, including unfriendly AI and nuclear war, are argued to have a higher probability of causing catastrophe than climate change.

[1] <http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks like a job for ... Prediction Markets!

As in, seriously: has such a thing already been set up?</comment>


Ask HN: Datalog as the only language for web programming, logic and database - <AUTHOR> Can Datalog be used as the only language which we can use for writing server-side web application, complex domain business logic and database querying?<p>Are there any efforts made in this direction. <comment><USER2> Not anything I'd want to use. The closest is prolog. But at a higher level this is what Eve attempted to do.

Eve was built using the semantics of Dedalus which is built from datalog. I _highly_ recommend watching Peter Alvaro's Strangeloop talk about creating Dedalus - it's exactly the same train of thought you're onto. [https://youtu.be/R2Aa4PivG0g](https://youtu.be/R2Aa4PivG0g)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) Dedalus and Bloom language looks pretty neat.

[http://www.neilconway.org/docs/dedalus_dl2.pdf](http://www.neilconway.org/docs/dedalus_dl2.pdf)

I wonder why anyone hasn't put significant effort in it and make it mainstream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To quote myself from a post the other day [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407170) :

> _PyDatalog does Datalog (which is ~Prolog, but similar and very capable) > logic programming with SQLAlchemy (and database indexes) and apparently > NoSQL > support.[https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/](https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/) > _

> > _Datalog:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog) > _

> _... TBH, IDK about logic programming and bad facts. Resilience to incorrect > and incredible information is - I suppose - a desirable feature of any > learning system that reevaluates its learnings as additional and > contradictory information makes its way into the datastores._

I'm not sure that Datalog is really necessary for most CRUD operations; SQLAlchemy and the SQLAlchemy ORM are generally sufficient for standard database querying CRUD.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Logicblox yet [1,2]

[1] [https://developer.logicblox.com/](https://developer.logicblox.com/)

[2] [https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/dan.olteanu/papers/logicblox- sigmod1...](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/dan.olteanu/papers/logicblox-sigmod15.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, if that's what you want just use Prolog; everything you need is there including a huge number of libraries and a web application framework.

Although I personally don't understand why anyone would want to do this ... If you actually try using Prolog or Datalog, it becomes relatively obvious that it makes a very specific set of things easier at the cost of making everything else harder.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to do this to have only One High level declarative language to cover all areas to avoid impedance mismatch across all boundaries involved in full stack programming so that learning curve can also get reduced.

Sticking to one language increases productivity as it encapsulates many underlying lower level details which I must not be aware of to get productive. In order to get more productive, I seek a language which is more about WHAT to get done (declarative) than HOW to get done (imperative).

The parser, interpreter and JIT can hide away all the best practices which otherwise needs careful crafty knowledge, lower-level optimization, concurrency, data persistence and system level interfacing details.

I know to a certain extent it sounds like daydreaming but its awesome abstraction to have. :)

I prefer Datalog over Prolog for a simple reason that Datalog is more declarative and program termination is certain.

<comment><USER6> Not what you asked for, nor is it ready to use, but Aquameta may be interesting to you considering your high-level goal: [https://github.com/aquametalabs/aquameta](https://github.com/aquametalabs/aquameta).

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Thanks for the link. I think might be okay with SQL instead of Datalog. Besides that I love Postgres.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fulcro, Pathom, EQL and Datomic

Is full stack datalog as far as I'm aware

Not tried any of them yet but actively trying these are some tough things to learn

<comment><USER7> Oh I should mention [http://www.hyperfiddle.net](http://www.hyperfiddle.net) is a realisation of this kind of stack

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the mention - Yes, "datalog" for "everything" is the core hypothesis we are testing with Hyperfiddle.

"Datalog" we've interpreted as Datomic Query and Transaction DSL, which is basically exactly what you need for automatic tables and forms – both read side and write – and not an inch more or less.

Very small amounts of Clojure are necessary to glue it all together. React.js view layer progressive enhancement is completely optional, so that doesn't count. There is a small data model for routing (hyperlinks, like the web) and Clojure's namespaced keywords turn out to be very important as well.

Maturity – today, we think Hyperfiddle is amazing at administration dashboards, you can crank them out really fast – basically about as fast as you can think.</comment></comment></comment>


New EC2 Instance Type - The Cluster GPU Instance - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/new-ec2-instance-type-the-cluster-gpu-instance.html <comment><USER2> Amazon is expanding their EC2 feature set so rapidly... The pace is mind blowing to me. Last year, Randy Bias estimated EC2 was pulling $220M revenue/yr:

[http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazons- ec2-gen...](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazons- ec2-generating-220m-annually)

And he estimated an overly conservative 10-20% annual growth. But given the EC2 buzz this year, and personal anecdotes from my friends and colleagues using it, my gut feeling tells me the 2010 revenues will have increased 50-100% over 2009 revenues.

Is EC2 profitable to Amazon? Likely _very_ profitable if you want my opinion. It is well accepted in the industry that the dominant cost in large scale datacenters is power and cooling --not hardware, not human resources-- and I keep running numbers in my head and the hourly prices of all instance types are well above power & cooling.

Just as an example, we know that this new GPU instance has two 95W Xeon X5570 and two 247W Tesla M2050; assuming (1) a max TDP of 50W for the motherboard and rest of the server, (2) instances are run under full load 100% of the time and always reach these max TDP numbers (unlikely, but follow me for the sake of the argument), (3) Amazon uses servers with 80PLUS power supplies (80% efficient or more), (4) a rather good datacenter with a PUE of 1.3 (power usage effectiveness, which includes overhead from power distribution and cooling; numbers in the range of 1.2-1.4 are often quoted by James Hamilton from the AWS team: <http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/>), and (5) electricity costs of $0.10/kWh (average in the US, but I know Amazon datacenters are in locations with cheaper electricity), then the hourly power and cooling costs would be:

      (95*2 + 50 + 247*2) / 0.8 * 1.3 / 1000 * 0.10 = $0.119/hr

Amazon charges 17x this amount for on-demand instances ($2.10/hr), and 6x this amount for reserved instances ($0.74/hr).

Given these numbers, Amazon must recoup the initial deployment costs very, very quickly... Which is why I also think EC2 must be very profitable.

<comment><USER3> It's even more impressive when you know Amazon started AWS to take advantage of excess capacity they had during the off-season when they weren't dealing with the crush of holiday orders.

<comment><USER4> This is just urban myth, according to Werner Vogels.

<comment><USER3> Well, the Amazon Senior VP of International Retail said this was the case in his talk for the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership series. So, seems there's some dispute within the company. But I suppose I should take Werner's word for it since he's the CTO.

<comment><USER5> It was premeditated and planned using all new capacity. I chatted with Chris Pinkham, who architected and was VP of Engineering for EC2. I also verified with Chris Brown, who was development lead for EC2 and Ben Black who was leading networking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool, but you know what would be even cooler? Instances with SSD storage. It's so annoying to have database queries run an order of magnitude faster on my MacBook Air than on a cloud server.

I don't know of any major provider that offers SSD instances. It really is an untapped market.

<comment><USER7> I don't know if they use SSDs, but Linode's London servers are absolutely _screaming_ fast.

Linode: Timing buffered disk reads: 230 MB in 3.01 seconds = 76.44 MB/sec

My local X-25M: Timing buffered disk reads: 246 MB in 3.02 seconds = 81.48 MB/sec

This would suggest they are using SSDs (or fast RAID? I'm not sure if this benchmark is sequential access). I get comparable performance for the Georgia data center, but it varies greatly there, so I'm not sure what's going on.

EDIT: Sorry, apparently I can't tell my sde from my sda. My _actual_ SSD performance is:

Timing buffered disk reads: 564 MB in 3.01 seconds = 187.47 MB/sec

So yes, disregard everything above.

<comment><USER8> 76MB/s is quite common for regular hard drives. The great advantage of SSDs is not necessarily sequential speed but rather random IO.

As for your X25-M, do you have TRIM enabled? Your read speeds are consistent with a used-state SSD without TRIM.

<comment><USER7> I am using TRIM now (I assume), as I'm running the Ubuntu 10.10 kernel, which supports it on ext4. Before this, I was running 10.04, which didn't support trim. I'm not sure if I should clone the drive and reformat to get more speed, and I'm also not sure if there are alignment issues (I followed Ted Ts'o's advice on setting that up)...

<comment><USER8> Sorry if you have already done all this, but do you know if you are using the G1 or G2 X25-M? G1 doesn't have trim. G2 supports TRIM as long as you are not using the old firmware. So might be worth checking your firmware etc.?

Btw here is hdparm reading for my Western Digital Caviar Black (regular hard disk) just to give you an idea: 318 MB in 3.01 seconds = 105.56 MB/sec

<comment><USER7> I did upgrade my firmware a month ago, but I'm not sure which version I have, I'll check. However, now that you mention it, I do remember the disk doing 200ish mb/sec, maybe this was a fluke. It's almost empty, I use 20 out of the 160 gb, so I don't think it's a matter of allocated space...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not exactly an apples for apples comparison, but with your 8 instances rocking 2 * 515Gflops of GPU each, you get just over 8Tflops. Looking back at the TOP500 lists, this "peak" value would have got you into the top 15 supercomputers in 2003. (Looking back further, you'd be vying for a top 5 spot in mid 2002..)

The more depressing observation is that 33.5ECUs are equivalent to 8 cores @ 2.93GHz on Intel's recent architecture. This means your typical "small" EC2 instance with 1 ECU is on a par with ~700MHz of a single modern Intel core. (Highly unscientific but an interesting ballpark.)

<comment><USER10> _This means your typical "small" EC2 instance with 1 ECU is on a par with ~700MHz of a single modern Intel core._

Amazon says that " _one EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor_ "[1].

[1] <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/>

<comment><USER11> GP:

> > _The more depressing observation is that 33.5ECUs are equivalent to 8 > cores @ 2.93GHz_

You said:

> _I don't know where you got 700 MHz from, because by my math, it'd be > equivalent to a 1.43 GHz Nehalem core (33.5 / 8_ * _2.93)_

Transposed.

>>> 8*2.93/33.5

0.69970149253731351

8 cores at 2.93 GHz is 23.44 GHz, which means one compute unit is 700 MHz.

A modern processor can do more per clock than an older processor. In addition, it has a larger cache, faster cache, and a faster memory bus, although on the flip side the memory bus is being shared between more CPUs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like the Tidepowerd beta came out with perfect timing, must give this a spin <http://www.tidepowerd.com/> compile .net code to gpu.

P.s. Disclaimer, they are friends of mine, the beta is pretty epic!

</comment><comment><USER13> Amazon are really pushing the boundaries in the vm area, and also making it easily available and quite affordable as well.

It seems like they will never turn evil, but most big companies do, or perhaps they are just hiding it very well. ;)

<comment><USER7> It's easier to keep honest when your business model is "provide great service for a good price".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Man thats a beast of a machine - each of the CPUs have 8b of cache, not to mention that you get a terra flop of double precision.

Now if only I had some use for this :( (inspiration welcome, I am writing about GPU programming right now).

<comment><USER15> The sky is your limit for inspiration. Check out the applications section of the Wikipedia GPGPU page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU#Applications>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> These machines hold their promises, they are extremely fast, the networking between the instances in fast, as is their connection to the outside world. I'm eager to see what people do with these.

And the pricing... to quote from the other article[1] on the GPU instances that's on the front page right now:

"An 8 TeraFLOPS HPC cluster of GPU-enabled nodes will now only cost you about $17 per hour."

[1] [http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/11/cluster_gpu_inst...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/11/cluster_gpu_instances_amazon_ec2.html)

<comment><USER17> "I'm eager to see what people do with these."

Is anybody else thinking "custom built rainbow tables for any algorithm you like, delivered directly into your S3 bucket in under 1 hour for $25"?

(I wonder how much this means I should up the bcrypt workfactor to keep my password hashes secure from typical website crackers?)

<comment><USER18> Well, rainbow tables are defeated with salt. I wouldn't worry about that if you're salting. And you are salting, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> does anybody know GPU instances can be of any aid for building full text indices (inverted lists) or other non-floating point workfloads ? I was skimming through the title of a recent paper presenting an sorting algorithm exploiting GPUs, but still I'm in the mental model of treating GPU workloads as having to do with floating point operations.

<comment><USER20> Modern GPUs do have a full set of integer instructions, they just don't run as fast as floating point instructions.

Depending on how well a problem maps to the massively parallel architecture of a GPU, this may not matter.

<comment><USER2> This is wrong. The rate of integer and logical instructions that can be run per clock is equal to or higher than floating point instructions. For example, AMD GPUs 5-way VLIW units can execute, per clock: 5 integer/logical op, or 5 single precision flop, or 1 double precision flop. Nvidia GT200 GPU streaming processors can execute, per (shader) clock: 1 integer/logical op, or 1 single precision flop, or 0.5 double precision flop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Check out the extensive benchmarks here:

[http://blog.cyclecomputing.com/2010/11/a-couple-more- nails-i...](http://blog.cyclecomputing.com/2010/11/a-couple-more-nails-in-the- coffin-of-the-private-compute-cluster-gpu-on-cloud.html)

(HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1906452> )

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow! Amazon is absolutely killing it. I wonder if this will be the inflection point when GPU computing really takes off.

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems this is dedicated server technology, not virtualization, except we can boot up the server using API?</comment>