Is there a simple algorithm for intelligence? - <AUTHOR> http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/sai.html <comment><USER3> This ignores that genetic code is meaningless without the translation machinery (ribosomes and the entire physical world of physics and chemistry). Genetic code without the translation machinery and the physical world it is translated into is meaningless.

A multi-cellular embodied intelligence can acquire information about the patterns of the physical world by growing in it - the code is compact because much of the necessary information can be acquired during embodied growth.

A disembodied intelligence such as AIs can't rely on external storage and acquisition of information during a cellular growth stage, and thus must likely be considerably more complex from the get-go.

<comment><USER4> His numbers are also based off the difference between humans and chimps for some reason? We can't replicate the intelligence of a chimp on a computer, so why that is a valid basis of comparison is beyond me.

<comment><USER5> Quite. You would suspect that if we were able to produce an AI with the intelligence of a chimp then a human-level AI would be in reach. The harder step is probably getting to the level of chimp intelligence; you'd have managed to create consciousness and solved the hard problem for a start.

<comment><USER6> It's a much, much harder step, actually.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox)

Kind of renders all of his information theoretic calculations moot.

<comment><USER7> Moravec's paradox is not an experimental result. It's just one guys musings on intelligence. It says a lot more about the misguided things people thought about intelligence in the early days of AI than the actual inherent difficulty of achieving human-level AI.

<comment><USER8> According to the linked article, several notable researchers were of the same opinion (and one might also say that relativity was just one guy's musings - though admittedly experimental evidence wasn't long in coming.)

I do, however, agree with your second sentence, and I think the paradox is also weakened by the fact that when 'high-level' mental tasks are computerized (chess-playing, for example), it is often through brute-force calculation that is not a model of how humans use their general intelligence to perform the task.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Given unlimited computing power, AIXItl [1] is a pretty simple algorithm that can provably solve all problems, in some sense, at least as well as any other algorithm. The idea is to simply dovetail over all possible algorithms and select the ones that fit observations best. That includes humans, if you believe as I do that humans are computable.

With limited computing power, it's likely that the best algorithms for many different problems (possibly including "intelligence" however you define it) won't be simple, just like the best known algorithms for integer multiplication [2] aren't simple. In particular, AIXI variants will be hard to approximate, precisely because they dovetail over all possible algorithms.

That said, it's very likely that the best algorithms for intelligence will be simpler and faster than humans, because humans are the stupidest possible creatures that can build a civilization (otherwise it would've happened earlier in our evolution).

[1] [http://www.hutter1.net/ai/paixi.htm](http://www.hutter1.net/ai/paixi.htm) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BCrer%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BCrer%27s_algorithm)

<comment><USER10> I saw Shane Legg's talk recently and I understood the main idea but I had a question I wish I could ask him:

He said general intelligence is 'as long as you provide a goal, the intelligence should optimize over that goal based on experience'.

But my problem is: general intelligence is supposed to come up with its own goals.

Take for a example a couch potato who has some steady stream of monthly stipend, and sits in front of tv all day. This person is in possession of a functioning general intelligence yet has no goal. One day this person decides to assign to self a goal of going out and getting a degree and so on and so forth. That's also part of that person's general intelligence.

It's not clear to me that AIXI is self-driven in that sense. It would be great if someone could comment on that.

<comment><USER11> I think the idea is to build something usefull (learn from experience and optimize goals)instead of something dangerous (own goals). And I dont think that own goals are a neccessary condition for general inteligence. But it depends on the definition of general intelligence, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For me, the question addressed by the article isn't even the interesting one. The author talks about "intelligence" as in how we process environmental information and perform reasoning tasks. From that perspective, it does seem obvious that some form of computer will one day be able to do it. I don't really care if the algorithms for doing so are simple or complicated.

For me, the real question of interest is not about that kind of intelligence, but of "awareness". Computers may process environmental information and perform all sorts of logical operations based on it. But there is zero reason to think that any computer has any awareness whatsoever. It has no experience. There is something it is like to experience the color yellow, as opposed to merely classifying observed light as being of a certain wavelength; no computer has begun, in any way, to make that leap.

It seems like a lot of people, including the author, don't even notice that this is a question. They seem to assume that computer-like information processing is all that happens in a human mind, and that awareness itself doesn't even exist as something to ponder. So they equate any doubt about whether a computer can do what we do as a form of vitalism.

But with just a little bit of introspection, the fact that there is something it is like to experience the color yellow, as opposed to classifying a visual stimulus as being of a certain wavelength, or logically classifying it as having the attribute of "yellowness", is absolutely clear -- and absolutely fundamental to our existence as human beings (although many would assume that many other forms of life also have this basic ability to experience, if not the same ability to process information in computer-like ways).

This is why, for me, the Turing Test is orthogonal to the question of whether a machine is actually conscious. I have no problem imagining that a software system, even on hardware that is basically the same as what we have now but bigger and faster, will one day be able to pass the Turing Test. But that doesn't prove it has any experience of the color yellow; it merely means it can mimic the output of an entity that does.

<comment><USER13> How do you know other humans can truly experience "yellowness"? What if we're all just pretending and you're the only one?

Let's not talk about realistic AI for a moment, let's talk about hypothetically building a human protein by protein (or whatever building block you're comfortable with saying doesn't have qualia on its own). We're going to write the computer program to build this human. Nanobots will carry it out, every part of the process is understood and nothing is left for biology to do for us. We're just putting together lego blocks and at the end is a human indistinguishable from any other human.

Does this person experience qualia? How would you know? Apparently you can't just ask, since this isn't a valid thing to do with a computer (it's not _really_ experiencing qualia! It's just saying that!).

Let's just say you come up with some objective qualia test. Now we can build a slightly more deficient human protein by protein and test it for qualia. In fact, we can do a qualia binary search and...

Once you take apart the argument like this, it's easy to see that arguments that computers can't experience qualia are arguments against materialism or reductionism, or are patent attempts to sneak souls and other woo into the discussion.

<comment><USER14> I believe his point is, such a process wouldn't ever be feasible if we can't "create" awareness. You'd have a sack of meat that would not interact. Or if it would, it'd be a vegetable capable of computation but little else (that's my random assumption).

If you forget your fear of "soul" and other terms not ratified by science journals, you'll find out there are plenty of theories in metaphysics and spirituality on what it means __to be __and what awareness __is __. It requires you to at the very least __read __those philosophical /theological concepts instead of dismissing it as "woo". Cattle dwellers in India wrote many things about it eons ago. Joseph Campbell's work is a nice place to start.

<comment><USER13> > you'll find out there are plenty of theories in metaphysics and spirituality > on what it means to be and what awareness is

I have encountered these theories. In the past I have been under the sway of them. They can be interesting to think about, but without any evidence for them there isn't any reason to give them particular consideration. (I am including rational, mathematical, or logical arguments based on experimental evidence as evidence here)

Without evidence, how do we pick which of these myriad theories to believe? How do we decide what the actual answer is? Science and materialism have repeatedly produced predictions that pan out in experiments. Theories of souls and sprituality have repeatedly had to retreat from testable predictions.

To take another tack, how did these spiritual theories come about? If they're true, then the ancient theorist must have seen some phenomena in the real world, and extrapolated correctly from that evidence. If that's the case, these ancient theorists were unparalleled geniuses, but we don't need to worry about ancient spiritual theories themselves, we'll rediscover them in time through our plodding (but safe) scientific method. If we don't rediscover them, then they were interesting theories that didn't pan out.

<comment><USER12> "They can be interesting to think about, but without any evidence for them there isn't any reason to give them particular consideration. (I am including rational, mathematical, or logical arguments based on experimental evidence as evidence here)"

I'm glad we're discussing this because you're an example of the kind of thinking that is a mystery to me.

The fact that I have qualia when looking at, for example, the color yellow, is directly knowable by means of just a little introspection. This is not "rational, mathematical, or logical" or based on "experimental evidence". It is simply direct observation. Observation is where the scientific processes you name start. Observation does not depend on those processes. They depend on it and build from it. Observations are the most fundamental thing.

From the direct observation of your experience of yellowness, which I think you must agree is something more than merely classifying the wavelength as being in a certain range, I would think you would know that qualia exist. That is enough evidence.

"How do we decide what the actual answer is? Science and materialism have repeatedly produced predictions that pan out in experiments. Theories of souls and sprituality have repeatedly had to retreat from testable predictions."

So, let's not have a theory of souls or spirituality at this point. We don't know enough. That doesn't mean that those things don't exist, it only means we don't understand them.

Suppose a cave man-level creature on another planet encounters an iPhone because we somehow send one there. This cave man creature knows how to build fires and has used reasoning to make weapons, etc. In doing those things, he probably tried different ideas about how best to make fires and rejected the ones that didn't work well. In other words, he has a rudimentary understanding of the scientific method.

Now he tries to figure out how an iPhone works. He constructs theories based on what he knows. The theories are all shown, over hundreds of years, to be wrong. Therefore, he is told, iPhones don't exist because when he constructs theories about them, they are wrong.

But he directly observes the existence of the iPhone because he holds it in his hand. He knows they exist. He doesn't need a scientific theory to prove that they exist. Maybe, eventually, he will have a correct scientific theory as to how they work; it will just take more time. Or maybe he never will. Either way, iPhones exist.

Awareness is, in my view, exactly the same, and it is mystifying to me that people such as yourself come to a different conclusion.

<comment><USER13> Oh, I'm not saying qualia doesn't exist. Our experiences are definitely an actual phenomenon. And we can't currently explain exactly how it works and we should try to find out what produces the experience of qualia.

What we shouldn't do, is say humans have qualia and jump to the conclusion that machines can't have qualia, and can't be "aware" in the same sense a human can be. I apologize if that wasn't your intended argument.

<comment><USER12> OK, good, so we have in common that we both believe qualia exist. I didn't get that from your preceding posts.

"What we shouldn't do, is say humans have qualia and jump to the conclusion that machines can't have qualia, and can't be "aware" in the same sense a human can be. I apologize if that wasn't your intended argument."

No, we can't make that jump. But my intuition as a programmer (and one who is interested in A.I. and does A.I. in the sense that some of my mathematical ideas were incorporated into a number of spam filter products) is that they don't. There is simply nothing there that would "add" awareness to the algorithm. All there is is information processing. It can classify something as either having the attribute of yellowness or not. But something beyond that functionality is required to have it experience the qualia of yellowness.

My point is that we have no idea what that something extra is. Somehow, people have it. But we don't know how. There are hypotheses, like those of Roger Penrose who discuss quantum phenomena as possibly being behind it, as made manifest in certain microscope structures in the brain. Suppose Penrose is right. Then, maybe one day a quantum computer can incorporate the same phenomena and be conscious for the same reasons we are.

But I do not believe that, for example, a spam filter as we know it today has the slightest experience of qualia. There is just no "room" for it. Everything in the spam filter has a specific function for the classification task and has nothing to do with experiencing qualia. The same is true for the most complicated deep learning network.

Maybe software as we know it can induce qualia as some kind of an emergent phenomenon, and the brain also induces it through some kind of emergent phenomenon. But I tend to hypothesize there would be something that causes that, some mechanism that the emergent phenomenon grows out of, that is not embodied in something like a current-day deep learning network.

My hypothesis is that to create a machine that experiences qualia, we will first understand the mechanism behind our own experience of qualia, and then reproduce that mechanism in a machine. I hypothesize that this would be a new and extremely fundamental, and transforming, scientific discovery.

And if we do reproduce that mechanism in a machine, and THEN that machine passes the Turing Test without us programming mechanisms to merely MIMIC human behavior, then I'll tend to assume that we've created a truly conscious entity -- though we may never be able to completely prove it.

On the other hand, there's no reason to assume we'll ever discover how it works -- for instance, we can't rule out the idea that there is a God who doles out souls to human bodies, and that we'll never have the means to understand God or souls. I don't believe that's the case -- but plenty of people do, and we can't presently prove they're wrong.

<comment><USER13> I don't disagree except that in order to produce a sufficiently human-like intelligence that can pass the turing test, we'll most likely need to have pulled the human experience apart enough to understand where the experience of qualia comes from. I think it's hugely unlikely we'll be able to create an intelligence that can carry on a conversation that can fool any human, and still not have a single clue what qualia is or where it comes from. We are a long way from that conversationalist, so it's not surprising we have no good understanding of qualia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _In the 16th century only a foolish optimist could have imagined that all these objects ' motions could be explained by a simple set of principles. But in the 17th century Newton formulated his theory of universal gravitation, which not only explained all these motions, but also explained terrestrial phenomena such as the tides and the behaviour of Earth-bound projecticles._

It turns out that Newton's ideas on gravity are a mathematical approximation that at least ignored relativistic effects. See: [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52165/newtonian-g...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52165/newtonian- gravity-vs-general-relativity-exactly-how-wrong-is-newton)

Newton's gravity was a theory about a single fundamental force - and it turned out to be not 100% accurate. Rather than be an example of how intelligence might be similarly possible to explain with a simple theory, I think it offers a perfect counter-example of why it almost certainly cannot.

<comment><USER13> Comets, and the planets and the tides, and apples falling from trees were found to be caused by the same underlying phenomena, despite seeming very different. Newton's insight that they were the same was not overturned by relativity, so the point stands quite well.

<comment><USER15> _Newton 's insight that they were the same was not overturned by relativity_

I almost feel like you're replying to someone else because I never said what you are contradicting.

I merely said that Newton's gravity is a simplification that doesn't take all variables into account. So to point to Newton's gravity as an example of, "Sometimes simple things can be right!" actually makes it more of a counter- example.

<comment><USER13> I was pointing out that the complex explanation is that comets have their own driving force, and tides have a separate driving force, and planets have their own reason for moving as they do, etc. Compared to that kind of hodge-podge, relativity is still a really simple theory. While relativity increased the complexity of the explanation of gravity, it didn't bring it anywhere near the level of complexity that might have been assumed before Newton.

The author's argument is that our intelligence is likely not solely possible by the interaction of a large number of separate principles, but rather by some simple principle that manifests itself in different ways. I think if we find some simple principle that explains intelligence, and then later have to make a correction to the math of that principle, the resulting explanation will still be simpler than the idea that intelligence is made up of many different principles all of which have to be present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Jacob Cannell has a recent blog post that goes into more depth about the neurobiological aspects of the master-trick argument: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/md2/the_brain_as_a_universal_learnin...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/md2/the_brain_as_a_universal_learning_machine/) (also good is [http://lesswrong.com/lw/meo/analogical_reasoning_and_creativ...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/meo/analogical_reasoning_and_creativity/) )

</comment><comment> norea-armozel Just from skimming the article it seems to me the problem with AI and probably just the whole matter of what people define as intelligence is that it assumes that the universe itself is not intelligent. Maybe the universe itself is intelligent but that consciousness is some other phenomena that gives intelligence an individual characteristic? It's just a random thought, I don't really know which way to go with it.

<comment><USER17> I can relate. While I consider myself an agnostic with a slight atheist streak, I still like to muse on these sorts of thoughts occasionally. The universe does seem somehow innately intelligent and alive. Everything is in motion. Everything appears to have some kind of structure. Gotta be careful not to fall back on the "G" word though (not that you did) :).

<comment><USER18> "The Universe" is huge and empty and completely hostile to life. Most matter is in stars which are not empty and completely hostile to life. (And which are huge compared to us, but which are like specks of dust compared to "The Universe").

Our planet is a speck of dust rotating at a fortunate distance around another speck of (shining) dust. By mass, the majority of the planet is useless to life. Everything alive on Earth exists in a very thin skin between lifeless rock and lifeless, airless, freezing space.

Then, on any timescale meaningful to "The Universe" individuals are tiny blips. Species are around longer, but not much. Vast majority of species are killed off by cosmic events regularly (we are on something like the 6th major extinction event, IIRC).

All of humanities struggles with itself, with ignorance, all of it's artistic expression, have taken place within the context of that thin skin of warm fluid surrounding Earth over a shockingly short time frame.

The best that can be said is that we now know the score: that "The Universe" is fascinating, vast, hostile, empty, silent, and our entire species is the rough equivalent not to a mewling baby, but rather to, perhaps, a single microscopic insect gestating in its egg, just beginning to break the shell and look around.

<comment><USER19> And yet here we are, living and experiencing the universe.

Most matter that you interact with is not in your body, and much of it is not in a usable form to your body, yet it still sustains you. Why should this not hold true at a larger scale?

We cannot survive in the colds of space, yet it is the tendency of matter to clump together, creating that space, which also gives us a sun and a planet and an atmosphere that was necessary for our existence. We cannot survive in the lifeless molten rock, yet we also could not have formed without its heat. It's usually at the edges of things where the most interesting and varied phenomena arise.

Much of the universe is hostile to human life in its current form, yet it is also the universe that gave rise to it. Whether human newborn or microscopic insect hatchling, the experienced world is at its most incomprehensible, and the organism at its most vulnerable, at the beginning. Growth allows for greater experience, and experience can lead to greater growth. Our knowledge of what's possible for a species extends only backwards, and only on one single speck of dust.

The universe has no inherent vastness, hostility, emptiness or silence without a conscious being to assign it those properties. I choose to imbue it with aspects of magnificence, intelligence, organization, perhaps even benevolence. We are not in a cosmic battle to conquer a dumb, hostile substrate; we are embedded in a rich, nurturing agar whose purpose it is, at least in part, to help us to flourish.

<comment><USER18> _> The universe has no inherent vastness, hostility, emptiness or silence without a conscious being to assign it those properties._

Agreed.

 _I choose to imbue it with aspects of magnificence, intelligence, organization, perhaps even benevolence._

Well, that's nice, but it's only possible at the space scale of, at most, the Earth. Or at least human scale - since it is _you_ who are doing the choosing. I mean, it's fine to change the subject, but at least be aware that you are doing so.

 _> We are not in a cosmic battle to conquer a dumb, hostile substrate; we are embedded in a rich, nurturing agar whose purpose it is, at least in part, to help us to flourish._

Again, I feel like you are confusing space- and time- scales. Earth's biosphere _is_ nurturing agar, no doubt, over a short time scale and small space scale. But the solar system, galaxy, let alone the universe at large, is most definitely not, and nor is the Earth's biosphere on any large time scale.

We have arisen in this universe, apparently the first intelligent life on this planet, and on any other planet. If there is intelligent life elsewhere, we are separated by impossible vastness: to get to another star, in any form, we must harness immense energy. More than is reasonable. And once there, the lifeboat must somehow found a colony, a self-sustaining biosphere, which itself is a gargantuan task.

Perhaps, though, this is a benevolent universe: maybe those great chasms of space protect intelligences from each other. It means that if any of us manage to make the journey, and we discover each other, it will be a meeting of great good fortune, and the travellers will _always_ be at the mercy of the inhabitants of the destination star.

There is hope for long-term survival of intelligence, but it is very, very small.

<comment><USER19> > Well, that's nice, but it's only possible at the space scale of, at most, > the Earth. Or at least human scale - since it is you who are doing the > choosing.

Hmm, my intent was to expressly claim those things at large scales, or more accurately, at all scales. It's just that it is easier for us to understand e.g. the organization and benevolence only in the things which are of the most immediate usefulness: we understand the biosphere as a resource because we can use that _now_ , whereas we don't really understand how to harness the full power of a star because it's too far beyond our current capabilities.

> Earth's biosphere is nurturing agar, no doubt, over a short time scale and > small space scale. But the solar system, galaxy, let alone the universe at > large, is most definitely not, and nor is the Earth's biosphere on any large > time scale.

I agree with you about Earth's biosphere space-wise though perhaps not time- wise. But if Earth is a cradle of intelligent life, surely we are not meant to stay here indefinitely? Even now the wild idea of mining asteroids, once relegated to science fiction, is reaching the point of feasibility. What was previously useless (not to mention unknown) to us is becoming useful, and will act as a stepping stone (or a catapult) to enable some other far-fetched ideas to come closer to manifestation. I believe this is a pattern that does not necessarily end.

> If there is intelligent life elsewhere, we are separated by impossible > vastness: to get to another star, in any form, we must harness immense > energy. More than is reasonable. And once there, the lifeboat must somehow > found a colony, a self-sustaining biosphere, which itself is a gargantuan > task.

There was a time, or more accurately various times for various peoples, that crossing an ocean was almost beyond imagination. As we continue to gain in knowledge and understanding of how the universe works, especially our understanding of spacetime, these problems become far less intractable. Interstellar travel is just a bigger ocean. The scale of the metaphor is logarithmic but so is the pace of the growth of our collective intelligence. My personal belief is that we will find a way around the immense time and energy requirements that we currently believe are necessary for interstellar travel. Terraforming is the harder problem: understanding ecosystems is IMO orders of magnitude harder than understanding fundamental physics, and building them from scratch seems like a pipe dream even for a dreamer like me. But if we figure out how to travel smarter then it becomes more a question of finding the most Earth-like planets that already have much or most of what we need. Still not easy, but probably easier and faster than trying to terraform Mars.

> Perhaps, though, this is a benevolent universe: maybe those great chasms of > space protect intelligences from each other.

This seems plausible to me also. Seeds need a volume to grow in that is often tens of millions times larger than the seed itself. There could be a cosmic ecosystem that we are still too young to see or understand, and we may not catch a glimpse of it until we have spread through the stars.

> There is hope for long-term survival of intelligence, but it is very, very > small.

If you mean small hope for human intelligence, then I would agree. I think this has less to do with the harshness of the universe out there and more to do with our own species' maladaptive behavior patterns. We are in a species- scale moment of crisis, which is to say one that has been going on for hundreds or thousands of years and may last a few hundred more, but there's no question in my mind that we need to get our shit together _now_ if we want the species (and/or its children) to survive. This is why I think it is important to view the universe through a lens of possibility: it gives us a direction to steer towards. A more hopeful outlook inspires activity to push towards a better outcome.

Thanks for responding!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I enjoy the planetary motion analogy immensely. However, a curious complexity is evident in biological systems - it's physics imbued with 'meaning'. A cell that behaves one way instead of another will die. This is true from e. coli up to skin cells. I suspect this adds a lot of complexity to the ultimate 'algorithm' of intelligence.

In fact, it's probably prudent to stipulate whether the goal is to specify the _developmental_ algorithm that gives rise to intelligence, or intelligence itself. The generating process might be a lot more simple than the finished product, in the same way that the output of a pseudorandom number generator is very complex in terms of entropy (but not kolmogorov complexity, I guess), but the generating algorithm is very simple. Or the Rado graph, which is sorta maximally complex in the sense that it contains all finite and countably infinite graphs as induced subgraphs, yet it has a simple generating scheme. As a last example, consider No Man's Sky - relatively simple algorithm compared to the astonishing complexity of the worlds.

I do believe there is a relatively simple high-level description of neural development. But it's curious how it's relatively robust to genetic manipulations. I remember early in graduate school listening to a lecture about a particular mouse model for autism, caused by just one gene. The lecturer excitedly told us that it had a very high rate of behavioral manipulation - 75% or so. Not coming from a mouse-model background I was astonished that it was 'only' 75%. What happens in the other 25% - the gene doesn't just magically reappear, there are other compensatory mechanisms. What drives those? I suspect that's the more abstract level of description that a simple algorithm might describe.

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

</comment><comment><USER21> > I believe it's not in serious doubt that an intelligent computer is possible > - although it may be extremely complicated, and perhaps far beyond current > technology - and current naysayers will one day seem much like the > vitalists.

Physicists (and this guy is one of them) certainly do have a robust set of taboos against considering consciousness as a quantum phenomena (whatever that might mean.) It's unfortunate because there is a huge resurgence going on in the physics of quantum many-body entanglement, quantum computers, foundations of quantum, etc. Alot of this meandering was just sidelined in the 1940s when world affairs intervened. However, in light of these new discoveries it's time to revisit the old vitalist arguments. Imho.

<comment><USER13> Let's say, for the sake of argument, that intelligence requires quantum effects to work. I don't see how going back to vitalist arguments will aid us in any way. Researching the phenomena, following evidence, making inferences from that evidence... that's how progress on that subject would be made. Not by going back to arguments made by people with less information than we have now.

Specifically, if we follow the evidence, and find that somehow, beyond all odds, the vitalists were correct (once you add "quantumness!" to the mix), then it's clearly only by lucky guess they were right. It would be something we could look back at and say "wow, that's an interesting coincidence" rather than "wow, those vitalists had it right all along, we should have paid closer attention".

<comment><USER22> Its often by intuition that we know where to look. Lets not be arrogant and claim "ok, you guessed it right, but its only true if I measure it and prove its true". That's correct but disingenuous.

<comment><USER23> That's still simply luck; unfounded intuition is meaningless as it's wrong more often than not. That's it's occasionally correct is coincidence.

<comment><USER22> I guess all scientific progress has been by coincidence then? That's what I mean by disingenuous; some credit has to be given to those that are right. There are an infinite number of wrong intuitions.

<comment><USER24> > I guess all scientific progress has been by coincidence then?

Correct hypotheses are, in a sense, a product of fortune, and scientific progress requires them to happen sometimes, so, in a sense, that's true. Without a certain minimal degree of luck, you would have no scientific progress.

The scientific method can be viewed as simply a method of filtering out the intuitions without utility and promoting those (if any) that have utility. It is a way to avoid _wasting_ the good fortune of the intuition of forming useful hypothesis, and avoiding the waste demonstrably fruitless intuitions.

> some credit has to be given to those that are right

But vitalism is so vague as to be untestable, and justifies no useful models. "Some (unspecified elements of) living things are not governed by physical law" is indistinguishable in effect from "We have not yet discovered the physical laws governing (some elements of) living things".

<comment><USER13> > Without a certain minimal degree of luck, you would have no scientific > progress.

A minor disagreement on this point. I think often our intuitions are shaped by experience, and lead us to conclusions that we don't have a rational line of inference to (at least one we can explain). Science acts as a good filter, saying "we don't care how you came up with it, test it and we'll agree if it turns out it's right". This isn't a random guess, but it's far from reasoning you could convince anyone else with. This is different from a lucky guess. Your brain has been seeing a lot of the data, and is picking up on patterns, in other words your intuition is correlated with the phenomena, and that's what leads you to the theory you want to test.

Second, sometimes purely rational arguments lead us to theories from other data. This isn't random chance, but it is exploiting regularities in the world around us to predict new things. For example, kepler's laws of motion weren't the direct result of observation. You can't observe equations that guide the motion of the planets. In between observations, the planets might have jumped all over the place. But it was assumed that the planets weren't doing that, and simple equations were inferred from the data available that fit the evidence. There is a step here between "observation" and "prediction" that doesn't involve a lucky guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > "I believe it's not in serious doubt that an intelligent computer is > possible" -

Yes, of course it is possible, if we change the meaning of "intelligent" to fit what a computer does. :)

Generally, I think the problem here - as in many other situations - <USER2> with the lack of rigor that computer science has when "naming" fields or, most exactly, appropriating concepts from other fields.

* Computer Vision: "vision" has a defined meaning, even "organic-related". Signal processing and a bunch of algorithms aren't exactly what vision is and what we define as "vision";

* Machine learning: does the computer really learns, as understood by the common definition of "learning"?

* Context awareness: if we consider common definitions, neither a few sensor readings are "context", nor acting according to said readings is "awareness".

This might sound like nitpicking, but I truly think it's a real problem. Talking about vision, learning or intelligence put's the stake at what people or the general scientific community commonly perceive as those concepts.

What's most frustrating to me is the contrast. Computer science research is thorough; why are we not thorough on naming our fields of study? Why do we appropriate concepts by "analogy", knowingly that analogies aren't truly exact?

<comment><USER13> > Yes, of course it is possible, if we change the meaning of "intelligent" to > fit what a computer does. :)

I don't think that's what he's doing. Otherwise he could just define intelligence to mean what computers do now. Clearly he has at least roughly the same idea of intelligence you or I do.

> "I believe it's not in serious doubt that an intelligent computer is > possible"

Do you have an objection to this specific statement when taken to mean general human-like intelligence being exhibited by computers? I have not heard anyone defend the opposite viewpoint often, and I'm interested if there are any compelling arguments why it's not possible.

<comment><USER25> > Do you have an objection to this specific statement when taken to mean > general human-like intelligence being exhibited by computers? I have not > heard anyone defend the opposite viewpoint often, and I'm interested if > there are any compelling arguments why it's not possible.

A few aspects which relate and shape intelligence:

1) Socialization; 2) Embodiment (the fact that I have a body and the body has feedback loops - affects and is affected by cognition); 3) Emotions (we have "hunches" and those hunches are surprisingly many times adequate); 4) Language (our sign system affects our perception of the world).

Will a computer be able to be a sociable, embodied person? I tend to think that it won't, so that's roughly why I believe a computer won't ever have "intelligence" (unless, again, we redefine intelligence).

<comment><USER26> 1) 2) 3) Are I think research goals of robotics. None are simple but I don't personally think they require anything that isn't possible to accomplish with computer + physical objects beyond the computer itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think a strong argument for 'no' comes from the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems:

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

The NFL theorems have been misused by advocates of 'intelligent design' \-- they do not factor against evolution since evolution doesn't demand a global maximum, only a local one. (There are other reasons but this is the most fundamental.) But the theorems themselves are incredibly interesting.

In short they show that _averaged over the space of all possible search landscapes_ , no search algorithm performs better than any other.

Obviously the universe does not provide "all possible search landscapes," since the universe has structure. Some search landscape structures and meta- structures are pathological and rare in nature. But nature does provide a huge diversity of them. The NFL theorem is to me powerful evidence that something as general as human or even animal intelligence must be a superposition of multiple "algorithms" rather than just one.

It also, I think, explains why all single-algorithm or single-approach methods of AI end up being domain specific. Obviously they'll be domain specific -- they only work against search landscapes with a certain structure!

The NFL theorems are a big reason I am a short term AI skeptic. I don't think human-level or beyond AI is impossible, but I think we are quite far from realizing it. I'll become more optimistic when AI researchers start studying biology more closely and deeply, since biological systems are the only existing examples of truly intelligent systems.

<comment><USER28> Solomonoff induction seems to be an useful innate bias for the current approaches at general intelligence. It's basically a formalization of Occam's razor that states that instead of being completely random, the surrounding environment is mostly lawful and simple, and therefore most of the processes in it can be described by algorithms with short rather than long source code.

Hutter has written a bit about NFL: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.3846.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.3846.pdf) [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.5721.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.5721.pdf)

<comment><USER27> Thanks, those look interesting. Will give them a read when I have time. My naive reaction though is: a lawful universe does not necessarily imply well- behaved fitness landscapes. Many lawful and even very simple processes give rise to chaotic and complex results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The author discusses concepts around intelligence without articulating what definition of intelligence he is adopting. When he discusses the innovation in understanding planetary motion, or chemical substances, it represents examples of where scientists could place observed data amongst a common frame of reference (ie, a meaningful definition to contextualizes observation leads the way to a theory which explains the data).

A more meaningful direction for article, imo, would have been to adopt a concrete definition of intelligence, and then talk about how ferrets, chimps, babies and adults fall on this continuum. Perhaps, connectomics, molecular biology, psychology or neuro-anatomy help us approximate the 'atomic number', giving us the opportunity to speculate about the underlying equivalent of quantum mechanics.

Like the article states, evidence is lacking, and we're somewhere between 1-100 nobel prizes away. But, the power of a concrete definition helps point to what we know we don't know, and discussion about whether the definition of intelligence itself needs to be re-framed to answer a question like this.

</comment><comment><USER30> Arguably, yes: [http://phys.org/news/2013-04-emergence-complex-behaviors- cau...](http://phys.org/news/2013-04-emergence-complex-behaviors-causal- entropic.html)

Basically, if you act to maximize the adjacency of possible futures, you act intelligently, and an agent that does this can dynamically figure out the inverted pendulum, tool use, cooperation, and cooperative tool use. (By "dynamically" I mean "without prior instruction".)

However, in order to use this process, the agent must also have a way to predict the future states of a system. When you stop and think about what THAT part entails, shit starts to get even more interesting.

PS - It gets even more interesting when you pick up on how this mimics entropy, and then this: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new- physics-theory...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics- theory-of-life/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Since I did not see it in the article or in the comments here: Intelligence is compression / dimensionality reduction. Finding the essential parts of a problem/object/concept and creating a code book for it. The better you can compress things, the better you understand them. If you know that the left wing of a plane is the same as the right wing of a plane, but rotated/flipped, then you would not need to store (redundant) information about both wings. The upper bound to an intelligent action is the Kolmogorov complexity (upper bound to compression) of the problem it aims to solve.

[http://www.hutter1.net/ai/pfastprg.htm](http://www.hutter1.net/ai/pfastprg.htm) (The Fastest and Shortest Algorithm for All Well-Defined Problems)

</comment><comment><USER32> >So 125 million base pairs is equivalent to 250 million bits of information. That's the genetic difference between humans and chimps!

I don't mean to nitpick, but epigenetics is a thing.

Also... how up-to-date on the research literature is this essay supposed to be?

<comment><USER33> The information isn't just in the base pairs. It's in the entire evolved ecology (with optional industrial add-on pack) that makes the base pairs do something useful.

How much of that could you take away and still get a human brain?

<comment><USER34> Craig Venter says here[1] that Franz Och (of Google Translate fame) has done some analysis for his new company Human Longevity Inc that shows that about 50% of the genome is responsible for the brain. So the number is quite big and much larger than I would have thought. Excited to see more results from HLI.

Comment at 13:12 [1] [https://youtu.be/D3nIIKwwiLc?t=11m43s](https://youtu.be/D3nIIKwwiLc?t=11m43s)

<comment><USER3> Which is interesting considering we share about 85% of our genome with Zebra Fish.

<comment><USER34> Source? That sounds a little high.

<comment><USER3> From memory, but maybe a slight overstatement:

[http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/article01036.html](http://www.sci- news.com/genetics/article01036.html)

70 per cent of protein-coding human genes are related to genes found in the zebrafish (Danio rerio), and 84 per cent of genes known to be associated with human disease have a zebrafish counterpart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If there were a simple algorithm for intelligence, and assuming the presence of intelligence confers a competitive advantage, then why wouldn't natural selection have created many examples of it by now, after some billion years of multicellular life? Yet it hasn't.

In fact intelligence manifests rarely in nature and only in long lived species with big complex brains which spend years educating their young to develop their cognitive skills. This implies that intelligence requires both a nontrivial nervous system and substantial nurturing thereof.

Ergo, I conclude that intelligence itself is inherently complex and unlikely to arise simply or spontaneously.

<comment><USER36> Every animal is intelligent. Using the google dictionary definition, "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."

What they are are intelligent about varies, and the assumption that intelligence arises rarely is dangerous to ecological and environmental decision making. Rather, we don't know how to communicate with animals well and we don't think the same ways.

[http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100909/full/news.2010.458.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100909/full/news.2010.458.html)

[http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/08/17/metatool- use...](http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/08/17/metatool-use-and- analogical-re/)

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/catch- the...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/catch-the-wave- decoding-the-prairie-doge28099s-contagious-jump-yips/)

[http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/dolphin- intelligen...](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/dolphin- intelligence/foer-text)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Another imperfect analogy: say someone (maybe from an earlier time) was looking to reverse engineer a modern CPU but could not see what was going on inside it very well. Surely the whole thing would be very confusing. The CPU has many many clever designs based on the needs of people who buy it and use it, but the whole thing is based on how you can make AND/NOT using transistors. Maybe if the person was to discover this, then they could start getting past the complexity of reconstructing some of the mechanisms of the CPU; and they could start making their own CPU for their own needs.

<comment><USER38> Take it one step further: say person from the past sees OS X running on a computer. They take the CPU and try to reverse-engineer OS X just from the CPU. Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yes, there is a simple algorithm for intelligence. It's just a few lines of code. However, it requires a terabyte-sized table of data which has yet to be filled in.

<comment><USER40> there's a simple algorithm for running the latest version of windows. It's only a few lines of code, and a hundred gigs of compressed C++.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I believe there is research to be done in hardware that resembles neuron networks. Im sure one could build a dedicated chip with rewirable programmable gates. I still wonder if gpus are really efficient at simulating NNs.

It might get very expensive, but like he said, im optimist that replicating nn in hardware could be the way to go. i think its a problem where classic turing machines are too different from networks of neurons.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd think a 'simple' algorithm for intelligence would be even more distant than artificial general intelligence itself.

<comment><USER40> Simplicity is always only a little ways off. If I sat you next to god and told you to pair program and write an OS equivalent to Windows XP, with you driving the keyboard- you'd be sitting there for quite a while.

But if I told you guys to pair program an AGI, you could probably finish in a day or so.

A simple algorithm is a matter of finding just one or two basic discoveries. It could happen tomorrow! It probably won't, but that's the nature of discovery.

<comment><USER42> Well, supposing I'm not programming with god, rather I'm with a bunch of programmer friends, I still doubt the first artificial general intelligence (assuming we happen to be the people who make it) will be a beautifully simple piece of software. It'll probably be horribly hacked together and hard to maintain, and only in time will a simpler way to do things emerge.

For example, I'd reckon we'll find that a lot of things that today only make sense to solve with a neural net are actually perfectly representable using a simple(ish) algorithm, but it's unlikely we'll find that out until after we create an artificial general intelligence and know more about the problem of intelligence.

In other words, we'll solve the problem, and then realise how much easier it could have been.

<comment><USER40> [https://xkcd.com/224/](https://xkcd.com/224/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Wouldn't there have to be? Given that we evolved from much simpler organisms.

</comment><comment><USER44> A k-nearest neighbor classifier could be an example of a "simple" algorithm for intelligence, assuming of course, that you've collected a tremendous number of accurate (input, intelligent response) pairs!

</comment><comment><USER45> I have a question: why do we even want a general artificial intelligence? Isn't human thought good enough? I can only think of one reason to make such a thing: to enslave it and use it to control other humans.

</comment><comment><USER46> There probably is a very simple algorithm for intelligence. It is just way to expensive to run it.

(The reason is very simple, namely that the rules for the universe are probably very simple.)

</comment><comment><USER47> I hold the same belief. I also think that we don't pay enough attention to the form of processes whereas nature seems to place lots of emphasis on it. In fact, the more it goes, the more a form factor appears to be somehow determinant. Molecular biology with enzymes, genetics with histones, neurobiology with firing patterns, etc. We can see that now because we have access to finer grained observation. Form could be a higher-order type of content and could also be approximated with an algorithm. This all feeds in a previous discussion about intuition. Top-down or bottom-up?

</comment><comment><USER48> It has to do with pattern matching. In particular, comparing vectors with one another for similarity or dissimilarity.

<comment><USER40> define "vector" in this context

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> tl;dr - "We don't know[but please read my blog]."

</comment><comment><USER50> No.

</comment><comment><USER51> There really isn't an algorithm that can make algorithms, so no.

<comment><USER52> There are algorithms that make algorithms. (Even if we assume that the brain doesn't run on algorithms.) Genetic programming has made algorithms, for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Something something law of headlines something answer is "no".

</comment><comment><USER54> First define 'intelligence'. OED: 1) faculty of understanding, 2) quickness, 5) knowledge; exchange of knowledge. To abstract from Chalmers: cognitive software supervening on a conformal neural hardware substrate. OK but in everyday empirical-focused psychology, how are subjects tested for 'intelligence'? My brother and his colleagues draw from Gardner's eight 'abilities': rhythmic (musical), visual (spatial), linguistic, logical (mathematical), bodily (kinesthetic), interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. IE, there are subjective elements in evaluating 'intelligence' plus 'fuzzy logic' only supplies a useful fiction for quantifying the subjective. Now this article appears preoccupied with mapping-out neural hardware specs in its emphasis on processing capacity, memory, clock speed and whatnot. Would a savant mentally capable of calculating pi to a zillion places but incapable of communicating results be judged 'intelligent'? MRI maps of mental processing only would suggest such. Would a quantum MB capable of running MATLAB at warp speed but unable to render output in an ascertainable form be judged well-scripted? Not! Even a perusal of the current WAIS-R manual (no particulars since I'm not predisposed to be shot) exhibits classes of both objective testing and tasks which would be categorized also as measures of interpersonal engagement (Who was famous for ...). Would the Ava character in the movie 'Ex Machina' be judged consciously 'intelligent'? Consensus probably would be 'yes' since both her subjective and objective 3D GUI seemed correct by human standards towards the end. [wonder if anyone who saw the movie concluded that the affective agent of Ava's cognitive development harkened back to John Locke's premise that percepts functioned as something analogous to self-extracting .zip files which imposed real cognitive patterns on a subject's 'tabula rosa', not requiring any native cognitive modeling]. But would Ava really 'understand' anything or just be a 'Searle's Chinese box'?

<comment><USER54> strong-AI crowd eh?</comment></comment>


NASA is currently CLOSED - <AUTHOR> https://nasapeople.nasa.gov/shutdown/shutdown.htm <comment><USER2> For here am I sitting in a tin can

Far above the world

Planet Earth is blue

And there's nothing I can do

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like it was pretty well anticipated and planned

<comment><USER4> Doesn't the US government shut down like twice a year for at least a day or two? I assume this is a canned webpage used multiple times.

<comment><USER5> It might seem that way, but since 1997 there have been only 3 shutdowns:

2013 under Obama over the Affordable Care Act

2018 under Trump over Immigration

2019 under Trump over the Border Wall (still ongoing)

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

<comment><USER6> 4, there were two shutdowns in 2018.

<comment><USER5> Technically yes, but I didn't count it because that one ended before the next work day started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I must say this is really quite entertaining. Unfortunate how many people are suffering because of it though. Why exactly are government shutdowns a thing?</comment>


Is College Tuition Really Too High? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/is-college-tuition-too-high.html <comment><USER2> "these schools spend considerably more than $100,000 a year educating each student"

Averaged over 30 weeks, that's $3.3k. I could pay a private tutor $100 per hour ($150 including payroll taxes and benefits) for 20 hours per week and still pay less than $100k per year.

<comment><USER3> My University has five floors of library and a multi million pound budget that includes student access to online electronic versions of books and journals.

It also hosts regular events and guest speakers.

It organises paid industrial placements for students, foriegn exchange programmes at no extra cost, it's own concert hall, a super-computer and, until he stepped down this year, you got your degree handed to you by Sir Patrick Stewart (Capt. Picard) but for my graduation I will have to make do with Prince Andrew.

There are more benefits my tution goes toward.

Economies of scale are a thing.

<comment><USER4> Since 1987, higher education institutions have doubled the ratio of nonacademic employees to faculty. There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of the faculty.

Yet, the universities are pumping out roughly the same number of graduates.

Why such high growth in administrators? Is our education now better than 1987? How come every other industry is cutting costs, while higher education is increasing costs and beaurocracy?

<comment><USER5> It is interesting how produce-nothing bureaucrats always manage to multiply like insects. The same pattern applies to the government, health care, etc. That's why we urgently need to go back to free (or as close to free as possible) markets - to keep this scum in check.

And no, higher education is not a free market, despite appearances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This shouldn't be a question as college should be free.

<comment><USER7> Nothing is free. Even if the student isn't paying tuition, someone is.

So in your opinion who should that be?

<comment><USER8> Everybody, in the form of taxes. After all, education benefits the entire society so it makes sense everybody helps pay for it.

It's also a good way to take advantage of all potential instead of only the ones that happen to have money.

<comment><USER7> That's already happening in the U.S. - State schools are heavily subsidized by taxes. I went to one which was (and still is) relatively inexpensive for in- state students and delivered fantastic value for what I paid.

Saying "universities should be free" and that it should be paid for "by taxes" without being more specific about _which universities_ and _what taxes_ paid for by _which specific people_ doesn't really add anything.

<comment><USER9> Those subsidies have gone way, way down since at least 2008, for quite a few states. That's part of the reason tuition has been skyrocketing, to make up for the reduced subsidies. At one school that I know someone who works on the staff, the state was perpetually six months behind where it was supposed to be for payments and they had to go through a 40% reduction in their subsidy.

In Illinois, they even proposed a bill to _privatize_ their _public_ schools this year. I don't think it passed, but the fact that it was even proposed says something. Source: [http://www.dailyeasternnews.com/2015/03/24/senator- proposes-...](http://www.dailyeasternnews.com/2015/03/24/senator-proposes- bill-privatizing-public-universities/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes. End of article</comment>


Facebook Cambridge Analytica : A timeline of the data hijacking scandal - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica-a-timeline-of-the-data-hijacking-scandal.html <comment><USER2> This is a biased article. Obama mined data from Facebook before anyone ever did. It was okay for Obama, not okay for Trump?

[http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/19/facebook-trump-obama- cambr...](http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/19/facebook-trump-obama-cambridge- data/)

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

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism)</comment></comment>


Powerful New Amazon EC2 Boot Features - <AUTHOR> http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2009/12/amazon_ec2_boot_from_ebs.html

<comment><USER2> And so EC2 repents for another one of their design mistakes... finally fixing the problem that storage isn't persistent. Maybe we can look forward to EC2 one day becoming a standard Virtual Private Server environment!

<comment><USER3> They'll have to lower their prices a bit first!

<comment><USER4> !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974089> has a direct link to the news at [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/new-amazon-ec2-feature- bo...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/new-amazon-ec2-feature-boot-from- elastic-block-store.html) .

<comment><USER6> It is somewhat notable that _this_ entry was written (and submitted) by the CTO of the company in question.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it is useful to bring attention to that. Hacker News readers familiar with AWS will recognize the name. A certain amount of pseudo- anonymity may encourage people like him to post more on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People have been doing this using the Linux kernel's root pivot functionality. While it might be a bit more copious as you've got to launch the instance, wait for it to come up, then attach the EBS, it's not that much more complicated.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can't believe it took them so long to implement a feature that is so obviously useful.</comment>


Duncan Bannatyne drops £50k reward for 'breaking arms' of blackmailer - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/aug/02/dragons-den-blackmail-threats-twitter

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the item from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2836987> hitting the mainstream press.

I was unsure whether to submit this, as it doesn't really add anything new, but it is, as I say, in the mainstream press, and it does add the issue of threats being made openly on social media such as Twitter.</comment>


Russia censors VPN and Tor advice site - <AUTHOR> https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/20814/russia-censors-vpn-tor-advice-site/

<comment><USER2> Do you want real internet freedom? Ivacy is your solution to get rid of limitations that you have to face in the name of censorship. Reclaim your access to information with Ivacy! More Visit [https://www.ivacy.com/](https://www.ivacy.com/)</comment>


Amazing Disgrace: The 'Pride' of the Huffington Post - <AUTHOR> http://writerunboxed.com/2016/02/19/amazing-disgrace-the-pride-of-the-huffington-post/ <comment><USER2> By not paying their writers, they have created an environment in which ideologically driven and intellectually depleted content thrives. Is that a bad thing? Other outlets within the same market have been dumbing down their content and churning fact-free and tact-free copy. Unfortunately, I have not been paying attention to English-speaking media for long enough to know if this is a trend, if it ever was otherwise. (Except for the budget cuts—newspapers certainly do remember more lavish days.) If bad journalists are willing to work for free, why pay good journalists to be bad?</comment>


Show HN: GIFMaker for Mac - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gifmaker-easily-create-gif/id1015930892?mt=12

<comment><USER2> Just an idea, but would it be possible to add support for the GIFV format [1] so that the source images or videos aren't converted into GIFs?

Maybe it's just me, but it seems crazy to create a much larger and lower quality animated GIF from an MP4 only for it to be converted back into an .mp4 or .webm video after you upload it to Imgur for example.

[1] [https://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing- gifv/](https://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/)</comment>


"Concerns about privacy tend to be old people issues" (2010) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.com/watch?v=pexGCUPlUeA&t=12m59s <comment><USER2> I used to think that too - as an "old person" think "it's just me being old". Then I showed The Circle ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(2017_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_\(2017_film\)) ) to my two teenagers (11 and 13 at the time) and was surprised how angry they got about it and I mean _really angry_. For them the idea being permanently watchable (premise of the Circle is there are cameras everywhere watching everything) was really terrifying.

Now these are typical modern kids. Probably spending too much time with YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat et al. And I've told them many times about the data that's being collected on them and the reaction was always "whatever". But The Circle really got to them.

I assume it's actually me as their father they're ultimately afraid of as teenagers - that I could see what they're up to at all times and impose rules / punish transgressions. But underneath that seems to be a basic human need for privacy that's essential to personal development.

TLDR: show The Circle to your kids

</comment><comment><USER3> In Holland we just had a referendum on indiscriminant wiretapping, where the government was introducing legislation to allow more freedom for intelligence agencies to tap and store and share internet history.

The results were that the people rejected the proposal by a narrow margin, with older people voting in favor or the proposal, and younger demographics voting against. (Similarly, lower educated people were in favor, higher educated people against.)

So Privacy is not an 'old people issue' over here.

</comment><comment><USER4> as a german i have to ask: like those remembering ww2 and the stasi?

data tropes are a whole different deal, when power shifts to the ugly

<comment><USER5> On online platforms, It's a stigma to compare current events with things that Nazis did because you'll be ridiculed if you do.

According to the Godwin's law, the longer the conversation goes likelier it is that someone will mention Hitler. People know this, so it is very uncool to co-relate current events with Nazi Germany. You'll be called out even if you're talking about literal Nazis doing literal Nazi stuff. Memes are powerful, people don't like to be ridiculed.

But it feels like this is wearing out.

In Turkey, you can't show concern for privacy without being ridiculed because a very popular comedian made a joke about CIA targeting you personally while you're barbecuing. You'll be slapped with that joke the moment you mention about your personal data being collected.

Jokes are powerful.

<comment><USER6> Compare them to Communists

<comment><USER5> This won't work too because there's a joke about communist taking over the government this winter(It's a similar to the "Year of the Linux Desktop" joke).

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> OK so if privacy is not a real concern can I please have access to all the data in LinkedIn? Because if individual privacy doesn't matter why should company privacy matter either so can I please have all your data LinkedIn?

If you say no because you want to protect the privacy of your users you're contradicting yourself and if you say no because you want to protect the privacy of your company information which makes you money you're contradicting yourself. Either way I think it's pretty clear that this statement is just a hypocrisy designed to support the business activity of getting people to give over information for free to other people who can make money from that information.

<comment><USER8> you may have all the data, if you have 'the' money

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is quite stupid if you ask me; data is the gold of our times, we should have regulations in place that allow individuals to trade certain amounts of data with companies in exchange for money and/or a service - it shouldn't be one way only as it is now, they take everything a make a profit off of it.

Some Blockchain startups are coming up with ideas on how to solve a marketplace of data, but I fear it's not enough yet and it will die down with the ICO craze.

<comment><USER10> I like the idea of personal data regulation, but I can't imagine it being easy to enforce, when data can be passed with complete ease and without any detection when compared to moving expensive physical goods.

The big problem right now is that Cambridge Analytica/Facebook are about to set a precedent for large-scale data misuse by receiving little to no punishment. In a fair world you'd be right, and regulation would exist to give Facebook and co a big enough fine for their breach of trust to ensure that no one ever does this again.

<comment><USER9> GDPR seems to be on the right track, but I still fear that misuse will not be fined enough; if I remember correctly, it should be 20M or 4% of your gross profit worldwide, whichever is higher, and that'd be a joke to a company like Facebook.

The other problem to consider with GDPR is that it might set a barrier to entry too high for potential competitors to Facebook to emerge, which on the other hand has enough money to comply/pay the fines right away.

<comment><USER11> Wasn't it 4% of your worldwide gross _revenue_? That is much more substantial. But I guess it would still be profitable for FB to pay such a fine every few years in order to be able to continue doing business in the EU.

<comment><USER9> I think you are right on the revenue part.

Yes, it would still be profitable, the only thing I'm not sure about is if the fine would be cumulative for every misuse instance (i.e. in the Cambridge Analytica situation, 50M * 4%WGR) or if, every time a misuse is found, it's a una-tantum fine.

Might also be FUD to force countries in the EU to regulate tax at the same level, but I doubt Ireland/Holland will go down without a fight

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> LinkedIn only serves the employers. Who cares if I'm connected to X or Y ? Me ? no; X,Y ? infinitesimally. But the employer ? He's very interested in the way I connect to others, my reputation, the fact that social pressure implies my curriculum vitae is not "optimized", etc.

I would love to have a linkedIn where companies connect, display who they work with, show how they treat their personnel, etc.

(I know, this is "cliché", but well, it's true anyway)

<comment><USER13> Hey try this:

[https://www.kununu.com/us](https://www.kununu.com/us)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe when Reid was talking we were on our way up the curve to the Peak of Inglated Expectations, and we're now somewhere in or near the Trough of Disillusionment. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

</comment><comment><USER15> nobody cares because people do not have time or will or ability to properly evalute the implications and cost. the only thing i can see that could do something if there is some sort of regulation, without it facebook will be facebook and this is only the cost of the business.

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool what's your address, bank account balance and your kids names?

</comment><comment><USER17> Go ____youself Mr Linkedin Founder!!

This comes from an "old person" and wants to make sure that his "young person" offsprings will NOT been taken advantage by parasites and scum.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is this 2010 video getting so much attention now? Because of the recent FB "scandals"?

Just assume that _every_ online platform you are on is selling you and tour loved ones

</comment><comment><USER19> The first time I felt (relatively) old was when I realized portn stars were younger then me.

Now I feel even older...

</comment><comment><USER20> If you're unsure, it's Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn founder, talking.

</comment><comment><USER21> Would you hire someone for a security position that chose to do an autoblitz by logging into their email account on LinkedIn?

</comment><comment><USER22> Note: Video is from 2010!

</comment><comment><USER23> "Dumb fucks", part deux.

Yes, we will never learn.

</comment><comment><USER24> 2010\. Ah, how young and foolish I was back then...</comment>


Ask HK: How to legally protect your custom email domain? - <AUTHOR> On HN it's often recommended to setup your own custom domain for your email hosting, so you're not depending on a single email provider and can switch at any time.
However by registering your own domain you still have to trust the domain registrar to keep your domain safe.
How would you protect your email domain so that you can rely on it never to be taken away through legal action, or through social engineering attacks on your registrar?
For example, in the past I've had several of my domains whois privacy be removed without notice from my registrar because a law firm required to know my information (I only found out when I got physical mail from the law firm).
Secondly another domain of mine has been taken away when some big US company started a case through some arbitrage firm claiming the domain name was similar to theirs.
These incidents have not really given me any confidence that having a custom email domain is actually much safer than having a normal email address at any big email provider.
As I'm not a US resident I'm considering moving my email domains to a registrar in my own country to hopefully make it easier to hire a lawyer when something happens again, but I'd like to know your input on this before I do. <comment><USER2> You should definitely move your domain name to your own country's registrar, or at least to a registrar that's known to show resistance to such legal abuse (targeting legal firms and big corps playing the big guns through this sentence).

As always, Privacy Tools have some good resources: [https://www.privacytools.io/#dns](https://www.privacytools.io/#dns)</comment>


List of URL shorteners - <AUTHOR> http://www.honeytechblog.com/40-great-short-url-generator-collection/

<comment><USER2> If Twitter came out with its own URL shortening service (or would just buy bit.ly already), I'm sure the number of URL shortening services being 'launched' every day would drop significantly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here are some more :) (about 85 so far, I think): <http://www.listable.org/show/url-shortening-sites>

</comment><comment><USER4> i've got to agree with the other comments.... there's nothing impressive about url shortening. the idea behind it is incredibly simple -- nowhere near impressive. sites like this have been around for a while already so i'm not sure why all the new web2.0 folks have decided to make it their duty to make new ones. that and pastebins.

<comment><USER5> I think Twitter is to be blamed for this disease

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seeing yet another "X+ URL shorterning services" I felt like making a script to automatically daisychain every single one of them, then daisychain that around another three or four times.

Basically just to make a statement about how inherently useless (and fragile) URL shortening is. Because really: It is.

Instead I was lazy and did some googling. Have fun! <http://u.mavrev.com/1xk7></comment>


Ask HN: Why are there emojis in commits? - ____Sash---701_ <comment><AUTHOR> I've seen repo's use them as a way of categorising the type of commit (don't have an example at hand), which could be a good use if used consistently and the categories fit your workflow.

<comment><USER2> I use it for a CMD Resume ([https://github.com/bbody/CMD- Resume/](https://github.com/bbody/CMD-Resume/)), honestly though I can only think of one time the emoji helping me find where I broke something quickly.

I followed ([https://github.com/slashsBin/styleguide-git-commit- message](https://github.com/slashsBin/styleguide-git-commit-message)) but more recently started using Gitmoji ([https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/](https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> After spending a great deal of time and effort in tracking down some obscure bug and fixing the code, a bit of venting using emojis is almost a reflex action.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why do you post a random question with no examples, context, or explanation as to why it's interesting?

<comment><USER5> \\(^?^)/ ... (>﹏<) ... :-)

<comment><USER5> Why is it not possible to put emoji in HN comments?

<comment><USER6> What additional value do emojis add, that plain text already doesn't?

<comment><USER5> Getting open source pull requests accepted is a lot like pulling teeth

I agree emoji add ~0 meaning. But the added encouragement helps me

I got DragonFlyBSD support into Zig this week. The emoji tell me that people care (Edit: thanks to them)

But HN, dunno...

Maybe aswell as points, being able to thumb-up posts could be another way to encourage people to have constructive and positive interaction?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>