Introducing OpenAI - <AUTHOR> https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ <comment><USER3> > _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._

In a sense, we have no other defense. AI is just math and code, and I know of no way to distinguish good linear algebra from evil linear algebra.

The barriers to putting that math and code together for AI, at least physically, are only slightly higher than writing "Hello World." Certainly much lower than other possible existential threats, like nuclear weapons. Two people in a basement might make significant advances in AI research. So from the start, AI appears to be impossible to regulate. If an AGI is possible, then it is inevitable.

I happen to support the widespread use of AI, and see many potential benefits. (Disclosure: I'm part of an AI startup: [http://www.skymind.io](http://www.skymind.io)) Thinking about AI is the cocaine of technologists; i.e. it makes them needlessly paranoid.

But if I adopt Elon's caution toward the technology, then I'm not sure if I agree with his reasoning.

If he believes in the potential harm of AI, then supporting its widespread use doesn't seem logical. If you take the quote above, and substitute the word "guns" for "AI", you basically have the NRA, and the NRA is not making the world a safer place.

<comment><USER4> > If he believes in the potential harm of AI, then supporting its widespread > use doesn't seem logical. If you take the quote above, and substitute the > word "guns" for "AI", you basically have the NRA, and the NRA is not making > the world a safer place.

Guns are not exactly good at healing, making or creating.

A better comparison would be knives. Knives can be used for stabbing and killing but also for sustenance (cooking), for healing (surgery), for arts (sculpture). So perhaps this is akin to National Cutlery Association (not sure if such an entity exists but you get the idea).

<comment><USER5> You're right, guns are pure evil. Clearly, we should take them out of the hands of cops, bodyguards, hunters, and civilians defending themselves.

<comment><USER6> Ironically, you're absolutely right. Cops, bodyguards and civilians defending themselves generally only need guns because their adversaries have guns. Just take them out of everyone's hands. I know this works, if you can make it happen, because I've seen the gun death statistics for countries with effective gun control.

Hunters are a different case, but their weapons are rather different too. To be honest I wouldn't that much care about depriving them of a pastime if it meant turning US gun death figures into European ones. But that's probably unnecessary.

<comment><USER7> >Cops, bodyguards and civilians defending themselves generally only need guns because their adversaries have guns.

Not at all the case. Guns allow for the physically weak to still have a chance to defend themselves. On NPR I remember calling for the police to help as her ex was breaking into the home. They didn't have anyone anywhere near by and the woman had no weapons on her. The boyfriend ended up breaking in and attacking her quite badly. He didn't need a weapon and a weapon wouldn't have made what he did any worse, but it might have given her the chance for the victim to defend herself or scare him off.

<comment><USER7> To clarify, I meant on NPR I remember hearing a story about a woman calling for the police. Not sure how I forgot to add in about 4 words there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a key takeaway: "...we are going to ask YC companies to make whatever data they are comfortable making available to OpenAI. And Elon is also going to figure out what data Tesla and Space X can share."

Money is great, openness is great, big name researchers are also a huge plus. But data data data, that could turn out to be very valuable. I don't know if Sam meant that YC companies would be encouraged to contribute data openly, as in making potentially valuable business assets available to the public, or that the data would be available to the OpenAI Fellows (or whatever they're called). Either way, it could be a huge gain for research and development.

I know that I don't get a wish list here, but if I did it would be nice to see OpenAI encourage the following from its researchers:

1) All publications should include code _and_ data whenever possible. Things like gitxiv are helping, but this is far from being an AI community standard

2) Encourage people to try to surpass benchmarks established by their published research, when possible. Many modern ML papers play with results and parameters until they can show that their new method out performs every other method. It would be great to see an institution say "Here's the best our method can do on dataset X, can you beat it and how?"

3) Sponsor competitions frequently. The Netflix Prize was a huge learning experience for a lot of people, and continues to be a valuable educational resource. We need more of that

4) Try to encourage a diversity of backgrounds. IF they choose to sponsor competitions, it would be cool if they let winners or those who performed well join OpenAI as researchers at least for awhile, even if they don't have PhDs in computer science

The "evil" AI and safety stuff is just science fiction, but whatever. Hopefully they will be able to use their resources and position to move the state of AI forward

<comment><USER9> 'The "evil" AI and safety stuff is just science fiction, but whatever.'

umm... you can offer proof that we have nothing to worry about?

Does the proof go like: Just as all people are inherently good, therefore all AIs will be inherently good?

Or is it more like: since we can now safely contain all evil people, therefore we will be able to safely contain evil AIs?

Sounds to me like there is some risk, no?

<comment><USER8> As I've said many times on HN over the years, there is currently no clear path to science fiction like "AI". To return your question, hopefully without being rude, is there any proof that AI capable of having a moral disposition will ever exist?

Andrew Ng (I believe) compared worrying about evil AI to worrying about overpopulation on Mars. Which is to say, the problem is so far off that it's rather silly to be considering it now. I would take it a step further and say that worrying about the implications of AGI is like thinking about Earth being overpopulated by space aliens. First we have to establish that such a thing is even possible, for which there is currently no concrete proof. Then we should start to think about how to deal with it.

Considering how hypothetical technology will impact mankind is literally the definition of science fiction. It makes for interesting reading, but it's far from a call to action.

<comment><USER10> Improvements in AI aren't linear, though. Artificial Superintelligence, after reaching AGI, might happen in the span of minutes or days. I imagine the idea here is to guide progress so that on the day that AGI is possible, we've already thoroughly considered what happens after that point.

Secondly - it's not necessarily about 'evil' AI. It's about AI indifferent to human life. Have a look at this article, it provides a better intuition for how slippery AI could be: [https://medium.com/@LyleCantor/russell-bostrom-and- the-risk-...](https://medium.com/@LyleCantor/russell-bostrom-and-the-risk-of- ai-45f69c9ee204)

<comment><USER11> > Improvements in AI aren't linear, though

This is a point everyone makes, but it hasn't been proven anywhere. Progress in AI as a field has always been a cycle of hype and cool-down.

Edit (reply to below). Talk about self-bootstrapping AIs, etc. is just speculation.

<comment><USER10> Sure, though you can't extrapolate future technological improvements from past performance (that's what makes investing in tech difficult).

Just as one discovery enables many, human-level AI that can do its own AI research could superlinearly bootstrap its intelligence. AI safety addresses the risk of bootstrapped superintelligence indifferent to humans.

<comment><USER12> >Just as one discovery enables many, human-level AI that can do its own AI research could superlinearly bootstrap its intelligence.

Of course, that assumes the return-on-investment curve for "bootstrapping its own intelligence" is linear or superlinear. If it's logarithmic or something other than "intelligence" (which is a word loaded with magical thinking if there ever was one!) is the limiting factor on reasoning, no go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _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._

This is essentially Ray Kurzweil's argument. Surprising to see both Musk and Altman buy into it.

If the underlying algorithms used to construct AGI turn out to be easily scalable, then the realization of a dominant superintelligent agent is simply a matter of who arrives first with sufficient resources. In Bostrom's _Superintelligence_ , a multipolar scenario was discussed, but treated as unkikely due to the way first-arrival and scaling dynamics work.

In other words, augmenting everyone's capability or intelligence doesn't necessarily preclude the creation of a dominant superintelligent agent. On the contrary, if there's any bad or insufficiently careful actors attempting to construct a superintelligence, it's safe to assume they'll be taking advantage of the same AI augments everyone else has, thus rendering the dynamic not much different from today (i.e. a somewhat equal—if not more equal—playing field).

I would argue that in the context of AGI, an equal playing field is actually undesirable. For example, if we were discussing nuclear weapons, I don't think anyone would be arguing that open-source schematics is a great idea. Musk himself has previously stated that [AGI] is "potentially more dangerous than nukes"—and I tend to agree—it's just that we do not know the resource or material requirements yet. Fortunately with nuclear weapons, they at least require highly enriched materials, which render them mostly out of reach to anyone but nation states.

To be clear, I think the concept of opening up normal AI research is fantastic, it's just that it falls apart when viewed in context of AGI safety.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web > Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research are donating to support OpenAI. In > total, these funders have committed $1 billion

Funny how they just slipped that in at the end

<comment><USER15> Note that this is "committed $1 billion", not funded. "although we expect to only spend a tiny fraction of this in the next few years."

<comment><USER16> > Note that this is "committed $1 billion", not funded.

That same caveat could apply to any fund raised by a venture fund - <USER2> funds are committed, and the actual capital call comes later (when the funds are ready to be spent).

It's an important caveat in some circumstances (e.g. it hinges on the liquidity of the funders, which may be relevant in an economic downturn), but in this one, I'm not sure it really makes a difference for this announcement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> $1B in committed funding. Just, wow.

Side note: I wonder if the Strong AI argument can benefit from something akin to Pascal's Wager, in that the upside of being right is ~infinite with only a finite downside in the opposing case.

<comment><USER18> Finite downside? What about Skynet?

<comment><USER19> Technically, even the extinction of humanity is a finite downside.

You would have to posit a sort of hell simulation into which all human consciousnesses are downloaded to be maintained in torment until the heat- death of the universe for it to be an equivalent downside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is about 100 years too early. Seriously why do people think neural networks are the answer to AI? They are proven to be stupid outside of their training data. We have such a long way to go. This fear-mongering is pointless.

<comment><USER21> The linked site says nothing about neural networks.

<comment><USER20> _" we've also started to see what it might be like for computers to be [creative], to [dream], and to [experience the world]."_

All three of those links are about neural networks.

<comment><USER21> So you've turned "what it might be like" with a couple examples of mild AI-ish tasks that caught the public's attention this year into "the answer"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a serious question:

Should there be an update/amendment/qualification to the laws of robotics regarding using AI for something like ubiquitous mass surveillance?

Clearly the amount of human activity online/electronically will only ever increase. At what point are we going to address how AI may be used/may not be used in this regard?

What about when, say, OpenAI accomplishes some great feat of AI -- and this feat falls to the wrong hands "robotistan" or some such future 'evil' empire that uses AI just as 1984 to track and control all citizenry, shouldnt we add a law of robotics that the AI should ___AT LEAST_ __be required to be self aware enough to know that it is the tool of oppression?

Shouldn't the term "injure" be very very well defined such that an AI can hold true to law #1?

Who is the thought leader in this regard? Anyone?

EDIT: Well, Gee -- Looks like the above is one of the Open Goals of OpenAI:

[https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y- combinato...](https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator- plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over-17e0e27dd02a#.yllxt7nqd)

</comment><comment><USER23> Where does this leave MIRI?

Is Eliezer going to close up shop, collaborate with OpenAI, or compete?

<comment><USER24> MIRI employee here!

We're on good terms with the people at OpenAI, and we're very excited to see new AI teams cropping up with an explicit interest in making AI's long-term impact a positive one. Nate Soares is in contact with Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, and our teams are planning to spend time talking over the coming months.

It's too early to say what sort of relationship we'll develop, but I expect some collaborations. We're hopeful that the addition of OpenAI to this space will result in promising new AI alignment research in addition to AI capabilities research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not the first. Back in the 1980s when expert systems were thought to be the way to AI, there was OpenCyc. Its still around.

<comment><USER26> And just how many microLenats of bogosity does OpenCyc have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills..."

I realize that today machine learning really is purely a tool, but the idea that ai will and should always be that doesn't sit quite right with me. Ml tech absent of consciousnesses remains a tool and an incredibly useful one, but in the long term you have to ask the question - at what point does an ai transition from a tool to a slave. Seems some time off still but I do wish we'd give it more serious thought before it arrives.

<comment><USER28> The idea is not that we should build and (try to) suppress a sentient AI; that would be a bad idea for numerous reasons. However, we don't necessarily need to build a sentient AI in the first place; we can build a process that has reasoning capabilities far above human _without_ actually having agency of its own.

<comment><USER27> See I think that's exactly where it becomes complicated. Can an entity with reasoning capabilities far beyond that of humans have its agency suppressed successfully? And is it ethical to do so or is that internally designed suppression somehow ethically different from the external suppression applied against human slaves?

If you could engineer a human being with his/her agency removed so that you could use their reasoning skill without all that pesky self will would that be ethical?

<comment><USER28> The way you're asking the question implies that reasoning inherently has agency/sentience that needs suppressing. It doesn't need to; there's nothing to "suppress".

<comment><USER27> We don't know that one way or another since such a machine doesn't yet exist. I'm suggesting that perhaps high level reasoning and sentience go hand in hand although I can't say that with any certainty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So the idea with differential safety development is that we want to speedup safe AI timelines as much as possible while slowing down unsafe AI timelines as much as possible. I worry that this development isn't great when viewed through this lens. Lets say that DARPA, CAS, and whatever the Russian equivalent all work on closed source AIs. The idea here might be that open source beats closed source by getting cross pollination and better coordination between efforts. The issue is that the government agencies get to crib whatever they want from the open source stuff to bolster their own closed source stuff.

</comment><comment><USER30> I can't think of another field of research that's simultaneously brought the potential to solve all the world's problems and the potential to end life as we know it. Very appreciative to see so many great minds working on ensuring AI heralds in more of the former, and none of the latter.

<comment><USER31> nuclear research.

<comment><USER30> How does nuclear research have the capability of solving _all_ the world's problems?

<comment><USER31> It doesn't, just like AI doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So I assume this is one of the projects Sama was talking about in his research initiatives. Sounds promising.

</comment><comment><USER33> Congrats! It's a brilliant team, looking forward to great things.

</comment><comment><USER34> This reminds me a bit of all the hype around space elevators several years ago. People were talking about it like it was an inevitable achievement in the near future, nearly oblivious to the huge challenges and unsolved problems necessary to make it happen.

I haven't seen anything but very rudimentary single-domain problems solved that point to incremental improvement, so I'm wondering if these billionaire investors are privy to demos the rest of us are not, and thus have real reason to be so cautious.

<comment><USER35> AI has been progressing in a fairly predictable way as computers get faster and gradually ticking off milestones like beating us and chess and driving cars with less crashes. There are only a finite number of such skill areas to tick off.

<comment><USER11> This is a weird reading of history. AI progress has been anything but predictable or steady.

<comment><USER36> I'm not sure it has been anything you'd define as "progress" either. "AI progress" is a lot like progress in controlled nuclear fusion as an energy source. Aka, there is no such thing, really, though people work on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> AI is a pretty huge field, what area are they going to focus on specifically?

<comment><USER23> Given Musk's public comments about existential threats, I assume the focus will be on friendly AI theory and implementations, akin to what MIRI does.

<comment><USER38> Friendly AI? That's no AI!

I don't understand how Yudkowsky came up with such a ridiculous idea. That's simply not a constraint you can apply to true AI.

Even if friendly AI was possible, it wouldn't make sense to have it, nor would any form of regulation enforce it.

<comment><USER39> You should read this! [1] Unfortunately, the problem is not nearly as simple as you make it seem to be, otherwise this thread wouldn't be here. :)

[1] [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolu...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolution-2.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> In the spirit of openness, it would be great to see public responses to the downsides of this approach.

In particular, Bostrom Ch5.1 argues that the lead project is more likely than not to get a decisive strategic advantage, leading to a winner-takes-all scenario, which would mean attempts to foster a multipolar scenario (i.e. lots of similarly powerful AGIs rather than one) are unlikely to work.

In Ch11 he explores whether multipolar scenarios are likely to be good or bad, and presents many reasons to think they're going to be bad. So promoting the multipolar approach could be both very hard, and bad.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is great news! I think distributed access, control, and contribution to the best AI's will help create 'safe' AI's much faster than any AI created in secret. One thing this does not address, and is something that Jerry Kaplan has an excellent suggestion his recent book "Humans need not apply", is the distributed ownership of AI where tax incentives to public companies that have larger numbers of shareholders, encourages wider distribution of the massive gains AI will bring to these companies.

I really hope that the training data, as well as code and research, will be opened up as well, since the public could really benefit from the self-driving car training data Tesla may contribute[1]. By opening up the development of this extremely important application to public contribution and the quality benefits that it brings, we could get safer, quicker realization of this amazingly transformative tech. As of now the best dataset for self-driving cars, KITTI, is extremely small and dated. [plug]I am working on a project to train self-driving car vision via GTAV to help workaround this (please contact me if you're interested), but obviously real-world data will be better in so many ways.

[1] [https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y- combinato...](https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator- plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over-17e0e27dd02a#.xvtga98va)

</comment><comment><USER42> Anybody knows if there is any chance of OpenAI sponsoring H1B visas?

I love the idea but being in Europe my options for doing serious AI research outside of academia seem pretty much limited to Google and Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER43> What I want to know is whether there's collaboration with MIRI. On safety, especially.

<comment><USER24> I replied to this here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10721068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10721068). Short answer is that collaborations don't look unlikely, and we'll be able to say more when OpenAI's been up and running longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you want to get a job in this area, we wrote a guide: [https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top- careers/profiles/art...](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top- careers/profiles/artificial-intelligence-risk-research/)

</comment><comment><USER44> interesting, and I hope they fund some outlier, less established forms of AI.

For example, we may find that massive simulation yields more practical benefits in the medium term than stronger pure AI / ML, in some domains.

By analogy with research on possibly harmful biosystems, one can extrapolate the need for a set of agreed / self imposed safeguards on certain types of strong AI research - eg. make them read-only, not connected to physical actuators, isolated in a lab - just as you would isolate a potentially dangerous pathogen in a medical lab.

OpenAI would be the place to discuss and propose these protocols.

A quote from a future sentient AI - "don't you think its a form of racism, that strong AI abide strictly by the three laws of robotics, but humans do not?"

<comment><USER11> They wouldn't get $1B if they didn't do deep learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is really great, I think. At least, I admire the motivation behind it as it was outlined by Sam.

However, it seems, YC Research started by bringing in accomplished and well- known academics in the field. I wonder whether it would've been more appropriate to focus on providing PhD Scholarship and postdoc fellowship. Though, I understand and somewhat appreciate the motivation behind bring the "top-guns" of research into this, I wonder whether bringing passionate and hungry for knowledge early career researchers could've been a better bet. I am bias on this, but overall think it would be great to diversify the group and level the field -- let the randomness of ideas play its role :) Just my 5c.

<comment><USER46> Pretty sure a group like that will be looking for postdocs etc.

Andrej Karpathy only completed his PhD this month, so I guess he'd fit into that category. I imagine he had a few options to choose from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I am surprised nobody mentions stupidly smart AI. We can create AI that is capable of self-replicating very fast and fulfilling some goal.

It could start with a noble idea to build a machine to recycle our garbage and use the garbage to build more recycle machines. At the end we can have stupid machines that are perfectly doing their job but because they are capable of replicating and getting better what they do. They determine if they kill human, less garbage is created and thus so less work for them.

At the end they will wipe out us. Because the thing that will kill us doesn't need to be smarter. It needs to be faster and more effective than we are.

</comment><comment><USER48> I hope more great researchers recognize the importance of the mission and take part!

</comment><comment><USER49> Did not expect Infosys or Vishal Sikka along with what is mostly SV who's who.

</comment><comment><USER50> How is the group structured and operated?

</comment><comment><USER11> I find it a bit disappointing that despite originally stating that YC Research would target underfunded/underserved areas of research, they've decided to fund and dive into one of the most-hyped, well-funded areas of research: deep learning, an area of research where companies are hiring like crazy and even universities are hiring faculty like crazy. I'm reasonably sure all the research scientists had multiple job offers, and most could get faculty offers as well.

Instead of funding areas of research where grad students legitimately struggle to find faculty or even industry research positions in their field, YC Research decided to join the same arms race that companies like Toyota are joining.

<comment><USER51> I'm disappointed that you're disappointed. There's $1b coming from primarily not YC.

<comment><USER11> The $ figure is not really my point. It's the focus and attention. The world is not lacking in research interest in deep learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> If I develop any advance AI I will use it for my own wellbeing, perhaps to live longer and obtain a higher finantial status and fullfill some of my dreams. Then I would develop a shield to protect myself and the AI from big corporations and to retain the advantage I got. Perhaps I would try to make Mars a paradise to live in my a thousand year old life, and find or design a partner for that long period. Let the machine create the dream.

<comment><USER52> The first and main test for an advanced AI is to be able to provide its creator with a big sum of money in a sustainable way. Why would anyone wish to share such a useful technology? What I think should be handy is to find experts or partners for protecting the research with strong closed walls, a womb for the baby AI device to grow up aimed to take over the world of business to get the necessary resources, probably in a creeply way, to full expand itself and provide his creator with the best reward you could imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Cool that they have $1 billion pledged. Curious how they will decide compensation, seeing as a lot of these figures would be making a ton in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER54> My money (not a billion) is on "Open, Big Learning".

Elon will probably want to build a giga-factory of neurons, then open-source some pre-trained, general model with a free API.

This is a man building electric cars, off-grid industrial-strength batteries, rockets and hyper-loops...I don't think publishing more/better research papers or winning kaggle competitions is the vision.

</comment><comment><USER55> Will OpenAI be voluntarily subjecting itself to the same regulatory regime for machine learning research Sam Altman proposed earlier, or have they realized that would be a complete disaster?

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

</comment><comment><USER56> This is awesome.

I was literally just wondering when there will be open sourced AI. I only saw a few repos on github so figured it would be at least 3-10 years. The fact that things like this seem to surface so quick, including recent AI announcements from Google, etc, are a very good signs for AI in the future.

</comment><comment><USER57> Sounds great. I was hoping for OpenCog to be a good open source AI framework but is is difficult to work with (good team; I have worked with several of them in the past, no criticism intended).

I look forward to seeing how OpenAI uses outside contributions, provides easy to use software and documentation, etc.

<comment><USER58> OpenAI seems to be taking a different approach from OpenCog. OpenCog aimed build a monolithic framework for many existing AI and machine learning techniques. This has been done many times before.

OpenAI is more about exploring new research areas and pushing the cutting edge, while publishing papers and sharing code along the while. Both are admirable goals, but what OpenAI is aiming for has never been attempted before.

Very excited to see what comes of it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> First in with my recent musings as to whether behemoth companies would own the AI space.

[http://www.dbms2.com/2015/12/01/what-is-ai-and-who-has- it/](http://www.dbms2.com/2015/12/01/what-is-ai-and-who-has-it/)

</comment><comment><USER59> What problem is OpenAI going to solve?

</comment><comment><USER60> Imagine you've programmed a spider-like robot which sole purpose is to maintain some energy level (by plugging into an outlet), gather resources, and create a clone of itself when it has enough resources. How do you defend against something like that?

<comment><USER61> That isn't really any different from say, a tiger, which is currently facing extinction due to our actions against it.

<comment><USER62> Or even a bacteria. Thankfully, no current biological entity is sufficiently versatile to take over the world ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> How to prevent Future ISIS from getting Future AI, or do we just shift from us trying to out-think them to our AI trying to out-think their AI?

If the answer to the latter is "resources" then we're back where we started. Whoever has the biggest AI wins.

The picture seems to be of many AI's all keeping each other in check, but that outcome seems less likely to result in the AI-UN and more like a primordial soup of competing AI's out of which a one-eyed AI will eventually emerge.

No matter how human-friendly an AI we build is, competition will be the final arbiter of whichever AI gains the most leverage. If a bad AI (more aggressive, more selfish, more willing to take shortcuts) beats a good AI (limits its actions to consider humanity), we're poked. If any level of AI can invent a more-competitive AI, we're poked. Once the cat's out of the bag, we have zero influence and our starting point and current intent become irrelevant.

<comment><USER64> ISIS does not have access to many CS researchers nor server farms, as far as I am aware.

<comment><USER63> Yes, but I did say "If the answer to the latter is "resources" then we're back where we started."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hope there was some consultation with existing AI researchers as this might screw with their funding (willingness of donors etc.). Would not be a good sign if this announcement is about coordination and it failed at that right out of the gate.

</comment><comment><USER65> My greatest fears lay well outside the realm of AI.

[http://bit.ly/nitrogenandphosphorus](http://bit.ly/nitrogenandphosphorus)

1 Billion dollars invested in it seems exciting though. Hopefully something epic comes out of it.

</comment><comment><USER66> OpenAI might be equivalent to an open global market of graph annotated microservices that can recombine automatically (and search as deep as budgeted) towards whatever goal a client will be able to pay for processing. Not sure if that is safer.

With the right microservices available in the market (including business model scripts etc - every service could be an automatically pay per use microservice) automated businesses could be budgeted to search for sustainable market entities models which could reproduce themselves (copy/create microservices should be basic) and evolve in global corporations with a life and objectives of their own. One might need immensely processing budgets to compete/control with such automated corporations.

Digital and/or biological, it seems, we are exactly in this business+market+life+AI game. Curious to learn what happens at the next levels?

</comment><comment><USER67> I'll just leave this here: [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese- room/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/)

<comment><USER11> Searle (hearsay): "I don't remember what I wrote. I'm not sure I even believe that anymore." Source: [https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-objections-to- Searles-Ch...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-objections-to-Searles- Chinese-Room-thought-experiment)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> So, um, what is Open about OpenAI? Is it Open Source? Not AFAICS.

</comment><comment> a-dub Oh shit. Say goodbye to reasonable g2.8xlarge spot prices...

<comment><USER11> I'm not aware of any research lab that uses AWS for these things. It's cheaper to just buy the GPU yourself.

<comment><USER69> AWS is a sponsor of this, which probably means a bunch of free resources.

<comment><USER11> g2.8xlarge also only has 4GB of VRAM per GPU, which is too small for most recent deep learning models. The TitanX GPU has 12GB, by comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> What if we put "untouched" limitations to AI, that the AI can never break, as we cannot break certain limitations in a physical world.

</comment><comment><USER71> Who are the actual staff involved? What sort of things have they worked on and published before?

<comment><USER72> > OpenAI's research director is Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in > machine learning. Our CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe. The > group's other founding members are world-class research engineers and > scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, > John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua > Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, and Vishal Sikka are advisors to the group. > OpenAI's co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Sutskever is a researcher at Google, worked with Hinton in Toronto and Andrew Ng at Stanford.

Karpathy studied in Toronto and at Stanford, worked under Fei-Fei Li, worked at Google. He also has an awesome blog and seems very active and passionate about computer vision and ML.

Kingma also works with deep neural nets, worked under Yann LeCun (who works at Facebook)

Schulman is a PhD Candidate at Berkeley with publications at top conferences.

Zaremba is an PhD student at NYU, intern at Facebook. Impressive publication list and awards.

Abbeel is at Stanford's AI lab.

Bengio is one of the "stars" and celebrated figures of the deep net revival.

Levine is a researcher at Google working on deep nets with many serious papers.

\---

Basically these are the main domain experts among them. The list is quite skewed to Google/Facebook, Stanford/Berkeley/Toronto and deep net researchers, working primarily on computer vision.

<comment><USER73> > Abbeel is at Stanford's AI lab.

Uhhh.... [https://www.google.com/search?q=Pieter+Abbeel](https://www.google.com/search?q=Pieter+Abbeel) That's a lot of results showing how he's been a professor at Berkeley since 2008.

He received his PhD at Stanford, then went to be a professor at Berkeley.

<comment><USER72> His website didn't load for some reason so I just went with the Google hit's title. Maybe that was his old page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> The future seems to be very interesting on this. I'm very curious.

</comment><comment><USER75> where can we get resources like API and documentation of this cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER76> Isn't this the plot for Avengers: Age of Ultron?

<comment><USER77> > Isn't this the plot for Avengers: Age of Ultron?

It is. Also for Terminator Genisys.

I suspect it was a PR stunt that took a life of its own. These rich/famous people with zero understanding of the AI field got somehow convinced that they need to save the world from the highly improbable and they keep going, long after the movies ran.

It's ridiculous, of course. They might as well pledge funds for OpenTelepathy and OpenRemoteViewing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> nice addition

</comment><comment><USER79> Man I dunno about some of this media hype surrounding the topic of AI. I understand how powerful ML/AI algorithms are for general pattern matching (with a big enough computer, gradient descent can learn a lot of things...), but this whole skynet/doomsday fear thing seems ridiculous.

I guess the risk is embedding into systems that manage missiles or something. But you don't need sophisticated algorithms for that to be a risk, just irresponsible programmers. And I recon those systems already rely on a ton of software. So as long as we don't build software that tries to "predict where the this drone should strike next", we're probably fine. Actually shit we're probably doing that.. ("this mountanous cave has a 95% feature match with this other cave we bombed recently..."). Fuuuuck that sounds bad. I don't know how OpenAI giving other people AI will help against something like that.

<comment><USER80> In my opinion the biggest danger is letting AI to sort our news and search engine results, social media feeds etc. There was research on Facebook how they can affect people's moods by using different weights for posts. What happens when intelligent bots start writing news, blogs, comments, tweets?

In essence, I mean the dangers of using AI for large scale propaganda through Internet services. The best tools of the most dangerous people and movements have always been manipulation and propaganda; what if a _perfect_ AI does it? Could we even notice it?

Even when the AI is given a seemingly safe task, such as "optimize for clicks" in a news web site, something dangerous might happen in the long run if that's optimal for clicks.

<comment><USER81> Short-term, yes. What's the filter bubble already, if not the outcome of a super intelligent centralized AI silently and invisibly deciding what's best for us to see, molding our own artificial world dynamically based on our supposed preferences, excising away every possible serendipitous misalignment with our digital self as it is perceived by the machine?

<comment><USER82> I's easy to build uncensored search engines and news feeds to counter the bubbling effect. Much easier than building AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> >unconstrained by a need to generate financial return

The incentive, not the constraint, provided by financial return is what drives innovation the most, aside from (but not mutually exclusive to) necessity.

</comment><comment><USER84> In all seriousness... does "just, wow" communicate something different from "wow?"

<comment><USER85> I think it's an interesting language question too! But we detached this from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10720212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10720212) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER84> What does detached mean? You just removed the comment? I'm certainly not complaining; I'd just like some clarification on the jargon. Thanks.

<comment><USER86> As far as I can tell, detaching a thread moves it from the parent comment to the parent post. Marking it as off-topic moves it to the bottom, just above downvoted comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Disappointing to see Infosys associated to this initiative.

EDIT: looks like the infosys brigade is downvoting me to hell.

<comment><USER88> I seem to have missed a story here. A quick Google search turned up a letter on Quora, [https://www.quora.com/Is-working-in-Infosys-as-bad-as- this-l...](https://www.quora.com/Is-working-in-Infosys-as-bad-as-this-letter- claims-to-be), is that what you are refering too?

<comment><USER87> YC is lobbying to change the H-1B system in order the let startups get more H-1Bs. Infosys is blatantly abusing and cheating the H-1B system so bad that startups are getting penalized when sponsoring H-1B visas.

And now YC is getting in bed with infosys...

<comment><USER85> The relationships of large organizations can be surprisingly complex; consider Apple and Samsung. YC isn't large, of course, but Infosys is. The information content of the OpenAI funding announcement for immigration questions is probably zero. (No special knowledge behind this comment, just a general observation.)

Edit: Please don't break the HN guidelines by complaining about downvoting. Downvotes to your comment upthread are not because of any "Infosys brigade"; they're most likely because it combined oversimplification with negativity and because it points discussion toward a pre-existing controversy that is off topic here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER22> Off topic: But I have always wondered why we have a threashold to hit before we can downvote comments - but why can we never downvote posts? Or is the karma threshold just really high to have that function?

<comment><USER85> By posts do you mean stories, i.e. the kind of submission that appears on the front page? If so, HN doesn't have downvotes for those. The flagging mechanism is arguably something similar though.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I did... thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


On Composition (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://shalabh.com/programmable-systems/on-composition.html <comment><USER3> This could've been the introductory chapter to "Why my new operating system won't be like Unix."

Unix provides a very spartan UI (the shell) with very spartan composition primitives (yay pipes? how many of you are still writing real programs in shell? regret not doing that little script that expanded to 5000 lines and tries to manage multiple processes, in a real programming language?) and a programming environment where you implement all the rest for yourself. Everything is a file, except when it's a process or a function or a thread or a file descriptor or an address or a socket or a ... you get it. We might be building lots of impressive products on top of Unix, but when looking at the code, it's more like we're mostly working around Unix (often trying to wish it away altogether by abstracting it out) because it doesn't solve our problems.

Files don't scale and lack transactions (i.e. are full of races, until you dump them and get a real database), pipes don't scale (and are too limited due to unidirectionality), text streams don't scale, shell scripts don't scale (and are full of races). Unix originally didn't even have a mechanism for waiting on multiple fds and then they came up with the hack that is select(2), which doesn't scale, and we still don't have a good API for asynchronous I/O (read the docs for e.g. libev for fun). Unix just makes you cross too many narrow one-way bridges, or build an island for yourself.

<comment><USER4> Composition is as powerful as the basis functions it rides on and as you outlined the basis fn of Unix are a mess.

To me the elephant in the room is how we use the heap and why there are 10k serialization techniques. Why are we serializing anyway?

<comment><USER5> Because it's the lowest common denominator between different implementations of a type. The real question is why every language and subsystem invents its own binary type implementation.

<comment><USER6> Right. We should all be using OpenTheory [0].

[0] [http://www.gilith.com/opentheory/](http://www.gilith.com/opentheory/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is very reminiscent of VPRI (and Kay's) efforts to shrink code size using shared abstraction written in OMeta.

Also a lot of attempts have been made around meta editors (eclipse tried, and probably still does with EMF/xText)

Honestly.. I cannot help but to think that most programs are parsers. My vue app is a weird GUI to assemble a tree of things by swallowing (reducing) over a stream of events (not unlike a stream of bytes).

Anyway one day it will happen.

<comment><USER8> > Honestly.. I cannot help but to think that most programs are parsers

In some sense that is true. The idea that most programs are just layered interpreters has been explored in: [http://degoes.net/articles/modern- fp](http://degoes.net/articles/modern-fp)

<comment><USER9> The idea of program as an interpreter of an input stream of instructions seems very intuitive to me.

On the other hand pure functional programming with all those monads IO monad hacks doesn't even seem to map to what we are trying to use computers for.

I would go as far as saying that not only functional paradigm but also Turing machines and lambda calculus are inadequate mathematical models for how we are using computers. In those computational models the computation is bounded - <USER2> converts a set of inputs to a result and then dies until somebody runs it again.

Most modern applications of computers are unbounded computations. The machine reads an input stream (eg. keystrokes and mose clicks) and produces another stream od outputs (such as instructions to modify pixels on a screen).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even within a language there can be barriers to composition, as described in What Color Is Your Function [1].

When you have a sophisticated type system, it's very tempting to make fine distinctions that prevent mistakes by _preventing_ unlike things from being composed. But whenever there is more than one way to define an API, interfaces can differ in detail, so things can't easily be plugged together even though their interface does basically the same thing. (You can have different kinds of strings, for example.) The result is having to write a lot of adapter code. (Rust in particular worries me due to its way of exposing fine-grained detail in public API's.)

Enabling composition in practice means coming up with nice common interfaces and promoting the hell out of them so everyone uses them. This is basically about standardization. Cross-language standardization is pretty hard.

[1] [https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color- is-...](https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your- function/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Too bad Lisp machines never took off! The basic Lisp operations would have made a good composable foundation.

<comment><USER12> They did make a great foundation. Symbolics Genera was super nice apparently: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk)

<comment><USER13> Seems so. Also this twitter thread: [https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/1213484071952752640](https://twitter.com/RainerJoswig/status/1213484071952752640)

\- all commands have uniform introspection \- console contains 'live views', not dead text \- embedded REPL inside apps with commands that mirror the menus and buttons \- seamless jump to source, live edit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice discussion of a problem pretty much everyone is probably at least sub- conscious of.

Passing mention in a footnotes of many failed attempts at solving the problem.

No proposal for any solution of the problem.

Can't wait for the follow-up article.

</comment><comment><USER15> > If I write a program in Unix using Java or Python, can I reuse the Unix sort > to sort an array of items inside my program?

Yes, if you split your program into smaller programs (one which generates the unsorted data, and one which consumes the sorted data), at which point you could run 'generator | sort | consumer'. Or your program runs 'sort' as a subprocess and communicates over STDIO. In either case you'll need to serialize and deserialize the data in question.

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe rather then composing things we should have compilers that create systems across these barriers.

For example a programming language that compiles to three application servers and a queue. The application itself exists across multiple barriers but the source code is a single project.

</comment><comment><USER17> It sounds like the author is talking about interfaces being impediments to composition.

The point of an interface is to permit changing an implementation without changing _every_ implementation which uses it.

So maybe the complaint is that there are too many different incompatible interfaces?

ObXKCD: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

<comment><USER3> The complaint is more about bad interfaces. One of the examples (unix command line tools) has a _very_ clumsy interface if you're trying to use it from within a lower level program: create pipes for input & output, fork, exec, use i/o on the pipes to feed data in and get results out, waitpid, figure out how the tool exited... this is slow, annoying to implement, has many failure modes that would not exist if the interface were a direct function call, and it's inflexible in that you'll be unable to use the core functionality provided by the tool if your data cannot be realized as a simple text stream that still makes sense to the receiving tool. And you can't extend the core functionality e.g. by passing another function to it. That's a huge amount of friction to using _code that is already there_ , because of bad interface. And that's why people reimplement those tools instead of composing programs using those existing tools.

Likewise, FFIs exist, but often it's just easier to reimplement something in your language instead of trying to use the existing implementation from another language.</comment></comment>


Fuck Nuance [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf <comment><USER2> I call this the "abstraction paradox".

There is no way that an abstraction can fully equate what it abstracts. "Apple" could never equal a real apple. But abstraction allows us to think about real apples. In science, all theories and models are abstractions. Hence, they are always approximations, and can be invalidated or nullified with edge cases that can indeed be backed by evidence.

But the opposite is also true. If a theory is based on evidence, then it will always be an approximation of the truth to some degree. Hence, there will always be hard evidence that validates the theory also -- ideally the evidence the theory is based on.

The ultimate test is application. If a theory or model has purpose, as in, has a use, then the value of that theory can be measured by its consequences. Otherwise, frankly, academics arguing over what has no consequence will have no consequence outside the circles of those who argue over it. I sense "fuck nuance" as a message to them.

We still use Newtonian mechanics where objects are big and slow enough. But we also use general relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, etc, where more accuracy is required. So we already know theories have limits and degrade with constraints, and we switch theories.

This is true of EVERY THEORY. And that is the abstraction paradox.

If you're arguing over someone _just_ to prove them wrong, congratulations, you've just proved you're completely redundant. So fuck you. (in the spirit of the author)

<comment><USER3> Abstractions need not be approximations. Schroedinger's equation is an abstraction, but as far as we know it's exact.

<comment><USER4> Schrodinger's equation doesn't even include special relativistic effects. It's not exact (at least not if you mean it exactly describes nature in general). Neither is Dirac's equation; it includes special relativistic effects for a single particle, but not general relativistic effects or multi-particle interactions (at least as far as I understand it).

<comment><USER3> The general form using the unspecified Hamiltonian operator is compatible with relativity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I realized as I was reading this that I know very little about sociology as a discipline. In particular, I'm unaware of any of its "Great Theories", _a la_ General Relativity for physics, or Darwinian Evolution for biology.

Any candidates? I'm not trying to be snide, I really would like to learn more about this. The Wikipedia page for sociology describes "theories" that sound more like schools of thought.

<comment><USER6> I would posit the social signalling theories of Robin Hanson as perhaps a theory of this magnitude.

The problem is, though most of Hanson's theories have plausible explanations and "feel" right, there is very little experimental evidence and very few studies are directed in that area. In fact, you might even say it is a symptom of that type of signalling itself: as homo-hypocritus, we _don 't want signalling theories to be proven true_ so we make up reasons for deriding signalling explanations as not rigorous enough to even merit being properly tested or studied. Of course, this too is no better, because then do we just actually have no evidence to believe in signalling explanations, or are we using signalling excuses to suppress the meaning of that evidence? It's somewhat self-defeating.

The next most important theory I would posit is Prospect Theory by Kahneman and Tversky. But there again, many aspects of it have not been successfully replicated, and too often limited experiments are generalized too much.

One set of social theories that I would love to see given more quantitative foundations is the research from the book _Moral Mazes_. Robert Jackall carried out some lengthy longitudinal studies in which he collected anecdotal narrative and interview data from employees at all seniority levels through a couple different firms. He was able to see people rise up the corporate ladder, people get fired, executives fired and replaced, large layoffs, etc., and conduct informal interviews with employees all up and down the ladder.

Based on his interviews, he put together a series of theories about how morality and ethical identity form within bureaucracy, and particularly how managers develop an understanding of ethical obligations to subordinates, and how certain factions of an organization (notably HR) come to function when there are competing concerns between ethical expectations and bureaucratic mandates.

In every job I've had, it's been a frustrating experience of basically saying, "Yep, I know this chapter from Moral Mazes ..." because companies operate almost as if they've read the book as a field guide.

Yet at the same time, it's still just a qualitative study that is scaffolded by academic sociology. If it were actually possible to collect that kind of data from corporations, I'd love to see some theories from the book explored more quantitatively.

<comment><USER7> Great comment. I'm saving it for when I look this stuff up. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is a truly fantastic critique of how modern social sciences (besides economics) are carried out and publicized in modern society. Any critique one dislikes - typically "your theory predicts X which is false" \- can be dismissed by "nuance", "things are more complicated", "that's different in unspecified way", etc.

In statistical terms, these dismissals are little more than a call for overfitting - if I can arbitrarily add more dimensions to a theory, I can make it fit any data set.

This is a fantastic article that can be applied in so many places.

In applied social sciences this critique is far easier to work around. "Yeah, my theory is pretty one-dimensional and does lack nuance. My code is in $REPO - feel free to run an experiment and see if your multidimensional theory generates any alpha over mine."

<comment><USER6> Why do you exclude economics? I see economics as practically leading the way with regard to dismissals like you suggest.

One example I have first-hand experience with is the low-volatility anomaly. CAPM-like theories predict a roughly linear, positive-sloping relationship between risk and return.

Yet decades worth of various empirical measurements of the riskiness of assets and portfolios unequivocally demonstrates that it is a negative-sloping relationship (e.g. for your willingness to bear an additional unit of risk, you actually receive _less_ return).

But everyone says basically the same thing. "Things are more complicated in real markets."

It would be reasonable to say that CAPM is a mathematical result, and the evidence suggests the mathematical model required for CAPM simply fails to correspond to reality. But many finance folks, especially in academia, won't admit it. For them, CAPM must also be a _descriptive_ theory.

Two sources that illustrate what I'm talking about:

[0] Baker, Bradley, and Wurgler, "Benchmarks as Limits to Arbitrage: Understanding the Low-Volatility Anomaly" FAJ Volume 61, 2011. < [http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdf/10.2469/faj.v67.n1.4](http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdf/10.2469/faj.v67.n1.4) >

[1] Baker, Malcolm P. and Bradley, Brendan and Taliaferro, Ryan, The Low Risk Anomaly: A Decomposition into Micro and Macro Effects (September 13, 2013). Financial Analysts Journal. < [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2210003](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2210003) >

*disclaimer: The authors of these two papers were my bosses in a previous role, and I wrote the code and generated the results for the second paper.

<comment><USER9> >t would be reasonable to say that CAPM is a mathematical result, and the evidence suggests the mathematical model required for CAPM simply fails to correspond to reality. But many finance folks, especially in academia, won't admit it.

In other words, "Things are more complicated in real markets". I don't see any problem with wanting descriptive theories. Economists are interested in building models whose parameters can be tweaked in ways that correspond in a clear meaningful way to a possible actions (e.g. change government expenditure on X by Y). If you try to just maximize predictive power you're missing the point. Economics can be used to predict the future, but I would say the main goal of the field is to produce theory that will provide valid methods of altering the future.

<comment><USER10> So you're saying that we need wrong theories that can guide policymakers in the right direction? That sounds like a bad idea. It's basically "I want you to do this thing. Let me invent a theory that makes me sound more persuasive. Don't worry about the details!"

Yes, we need theories that are easy enough to reason about that they provide useful insight, but I don't think this is even close to being too complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would distill my understanding of this paper as "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held"

[http://www.saffo.com/02008/07/26/strong-opinions-weakly- held...](http://www.saffo.com/02008/07/26/strong-opinions-weakly-held/)

<comment><USER12> ... with Weird capitalization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13>
      By calling for a theory to be more comprehensive, or for an explanation to
      include additional dimensions, or a concept to become more flexible and
      multifaceted, we paradoxically end up with less clarity. A further odd
      consequence is that the apparent scope of theories increases even
      as the range of their explanatory application narrows.

This seems analogous to poor imperative programming to me: as your code becomes more complicated, the range of it's application narrows.

<comment><USER14> I think this is better understood as a consequence of Bonini's paradox ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonini%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonini%27s_paradox)).

<comment><USER15> I thought of the map-territory jawn, as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think when debate comes down to differences in ideology and idiosyncracy, it's at the end of debating because these differences are impossible to compromise (they are all legitimate).

And the world is at a point that everybody can believe in everything and all these beliefs are all grounded and justificable (using the available tools and knowledge we've accumulated).

To deal with the somewhat disturbing thought that the world doesn't need to be saved, I resort to the mantra that: eventually, the reason we read, the reason we write, the choice we make, everyday, is just because we feel like.

</comment><comment><USER17> I assume simple theories are very good for advancing the science itself. But I don't think they are as actionable as complex ones, because reality _is_ complex, and you need to account for that when creating policy.

<comment><USER18> Nuance is lethal for scientists, but lack of it is lethal to practitioners.

And practical experience consist mostly of knowing what kinds of nuance are important for what kinds of problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought this was going to be a rant about voice recognition

</comment><comment><USER20> Can we un-capitalize "Nuance"? For a second I thought it refers to the speech technologies company.

<comment><USER21> Same. I actually clicked hoping to read a rant against my least favorite speech company and their bad habit of buying up competition for the patents and then sitting on the technology. They own the rights to the speech synthesizer I use every day, Eloquence, which is no longer developed and will probably never improve, but is easily the most intelligible synthesizer at high speed.

<comment><USER22> Yap same here ;-) They squeezed us with their pricing model for years. I was nodding as I was reading the title, then found something else. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The amount of nuance in this article is overwhelming.

(The abstract/text ratio is ridiculous)</comment>


Bitcoin up 166% over the past month - <AUTHOR>

What are some theories as to the cause of this unbelievable surge?<p>https://coinbase.com/charts <comment><USER2> China. Some have noted that the rate just crossed ¥2000.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/08/from- walm...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/08/from-walmart-to- bitcoin-the-ceo-behind-the-chinese-exchange-sending-bitcoin-to-new-highs/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm assuming this was all triggered by the DPR/Silk Road bust and subsequent seizure of 30M USD in bitcoins.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps because it is the first half of another up/down swing?

<comment><USER5> If this bubble "crashes" into $1000, it's a good news to many people. This spring it went $14->$266->$100, this time it started at $140 and thus can easily go to $1000 or $2000.

<comment><USER4> Then that would make $2000 the midpoint of an even bigger up/down pattern.

<comment><USER5> In relative terms it can be the same. If it just repeats history (most probably it won't), the price goes to $2660 and then stabilises around $1000.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nokia considers buying Juniper - king-coconut http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/20/juniper-nokia-idUSL6N0LP2NQ20140220

<comment> king-coconut Very interesting if this plays out. NSN would have capability to offer full stack mobile networks made all from in house equipment. NSN probably sees this as a tool to fight Ericsson, also Alcatel probably does this already.

On the IP security side Nokia has history in firewalls with their IPSO business, which was sold to Check Point in 2008.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh, please $deity, no.

I love JNPR and their products and would hate to see how Nokia might butcher them. Although as long as they left the software alone (particularly on the SRXs), I'd be happy. IPSO, while nice and "advanced" (for its time), was an overly complex beast.</comment>


When a Chinese PhD Student Meets a German Supervisor [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/bitstream/handle/123456789/35697/Zhang_0-349300.pdf <comment><USER2> One of my most important suggestions to Asian (Indian and Chinese in particular) students is to expand your horizons both professionally and personally. You are going to a new country - don't ONLY mingle around with your kind. There is a far broader experience to gain that will only help you professionally and personally in the future. There are many ways you can do it

* Share an apartment with someone from a different country

* Make acquaintances and talk to people _outside work_ with diverse professions - don't stick to scientists ONLY

* Try to understand difference between cultures

Especially once you move to a new country, you have a great opportunity to understand difference between cultures. Don't miss it!

<comment><USER3> While I agree with your advice, there is one important point that you missed.

The fact that Chinese and Indian students tend to form cliques or enclaves, is a perfectly normal and natural behavior, because of the sheer large number of students in the same community.

Do not mistake this as "Chinese and Indians are not good at mingling with the locals because of their mindset and culture." It is mostly just because their social circle is large enough to sustain itself in a typical overseas community. In fact, it requires much more effort for them to get out of the comfort zone than students from countries that do not have so many students studying overseas. Another easy way to see it is that, they literally have a "larger comfort zone" to jump out of.

To put it into perspective, consider a US college where there is only a few Chinese or Indian students, chances are they will naturally interact more with locals.

Then consider a group of exchange students in an Asia university, chances are they are going to be mingling around within themselves all day with minimal interactions with locals.

So my point is, do not judge them negatively because of this, and do put in some extra effort in reaching out to them if you are kind enough and want to change the status quo.

<comment><USER4> I am an Indian in UK. Culture of heavy drinking and partying even in age group well past 30 is a real hindrance for me. If you don't drink or want to stop at a few, you are not really a sport.

Many Indian face similar predicament.

<comment><USER5> That is a stunningly racist thing to say. "All English are dunks so I'm forced to avoid them." Think if a visitor to India made a comment as wrong and silly as that about Indian people. British people will brush it off and it won't hurt them, while the converse may not be true it's the same sin and you should think on it a little bit.

<comment><USER6> Setting aside the odd use of the term "racist" (counting Englishmen a distinct race sounds very 19th century)...

> "All English are dunks so I'm forced to avoid them."

That's not what drieddust said at all. His (her) problem isn't with the English being drunk or not - it's with the English _expecting him (her) to drink_ if he wanted to be part of their in-group. Which is a reasonable complaint.

<comment><USER5> Taking any nationality as a race is stupid. The whole notion of race is stupid. And racisim is now impossible because race doesn't exist. It's a shorthand wherever it is used. Read culturalist if you prefer.

There are a large number of teatotallers in the UK. There are large numbers of people who don't like to drink much and don't drink often in the UK. There are people who like to drink often to excess. Rain is wet, sugar is sweet...

It is difficult to find a group of friends when in a new country. I've heard expats claim Indians don't accept white people and scoffed similarly. I'm sorry if you haven't (yet) found a social group you like. Blaming the inhabitants of a country because of their culture, attitudes and practices for that is not something I have to treat with respect - whoever does it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's hard to start from scratch in a language.

Chinese and German share virtually no roots.

For instance, if an English speaker started a PhD program in German, he can probably figure out some stuff since there are a lot of cognates and the writing system is similar. Sure, you'll sound like a sedated five year old, but you can figure out where stuff is in stores and how to ask for things, and grammatically you'll be in the same zip code.

Coming from Chinese, you really are starting from nothing. You're doing a lot of memorizing, not only of vocabulary but word order.

<comment><USER8> Especially if you pursue a degree in a technical field, German quickly gets wierd. You encounter a lot of long, composite words ("Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" or "Motorsteuerungseinheit") for which the language is already famous for. Then there also are old terms like "Krampe", "Tülle" or "Flansch" (staple, sleeve and a widened section of a pipe), which are just standing terms for a certain part but are absolutely nonobvious and hard to find in dictionaries. I'm a native German speaker and only recently learned about Tüllen.

Add regional dialects to that which often contain grammatical shifts and even more obscure synonyms for high German words and you'll get a lot of cunfused foreign students.

<comment><USER9> "Krampe" and "Flansch" look a lot like crimp and flange to me.

If I've understood "Krampe" correctly, crimp is a better word than staple.

<comment><USER10> Good call on crimp / krampe, I was trying to identify the origin by phonetics on that one. Using krampe as a noun for the action of what something does or have happen to it sounds like a German language thing to do.

<comment><USER9> I'm not convinced it's a correct interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The fallacy of sunk cost - "the result of his careful consideration was that he could never give up, because he had already invested too much."

Ming should have quit. An instructive example is the Chinese physics PhD student who exploited the system for his own benefit, [http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in- science](http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science).

<comment><USER12> You could read that part different ways- if some of his "investment" was allowing other doors to close (such as becoming a salaryman), then truly, he has "invested" too much to turn back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > It seems to be a norm for Chinese students to "report only the good news but > not the bad news" when they talk to their supervisors, as reporting bad news > could be seen as complaining. In Germany, reporting bad news is as important > as reporting good ones.

Yup, I've seen this.

<comment><USER14> That's for Asians in general. But it's creeping into US with the Smile-or-die push everywhere.

<comment><USER15> > But it's creeping into US with the Smile-or-die push everywhere.

Including Hacker News.

"Speak the truth to power!"

"Oh, and be polite."

...

Then it comes to the point you don't know if anybody agrees with you or not because they're being so coy.

<comment><USER16> I don't see how speaking the truth and being polite could ever rule each other out.

In fact, HN is the one place where i've seen the phrase "I disagree" the most often. Not because people are so disagreeable, but because they openly, and politely, state their disagreement if there is any.

<comment><USER15> > I don't see how speaking the truth and being polite could ever rule each > other out.

Saying something negative or critical can be interpreted as being being impolite. It happens all the time.

There is a spectrum of civility and we're ascending that spectrum towards political correctness, not away from it.

How I know this is:

If you articulate your premise, don't use abusive language, but still are attacked for taking a bite out of something, then there is a bias.

This is natural. I have it. You have it. We all have it.

The social world is in constant conflict with reality. In fact it seems like some kind of game for people to increasingly be in denial of the extremely obvious so they can score points and be social climbers.

The result is a world where you have to have Straussian interpretations of everyday speech.

> In fact, HN is the one place where i've seen the phrase "I disagree" the > most often. Not because people are so disagreeable, but because they openly, > and politely, state their disagreement if there is any.

I disagree!

Well not quite. HN is better than most places where geeks gather to ponder thoughts. It is still heading in the wrong direction.

This is a testable proposition.

Make a list of five to ten statements, right now, that contravene majority held opinions. You don't have to agree with the statements and indeed you probably won't. Poll somebody to check if you're doing it right. Then post those statements on an active current thread on HN and see what happens.

You are likely to find that tone policing goes way beyond merely preventing spam and maintaining some kind of civility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are there good resources for learning how to culturally communicate with customers from different cultures? Even reddit groups where we can participate. I am not talking about speaking multiple languages but being multicultural.

Since 2003, I have been working directly with customers from more than 30 countries but there are cases when I am stuck at the project requirements phase in an already sold service. For example, I am talking with a customer in Malaysia to do something that seems almost impossible because of regulatory issues. He understands the difficulty but it seems like he cannot engage in a logical discussion about this and definitely change his idea. In a way he respects me but thinks I can do some magic to overcome regulatory issues with software only. If I were talking with a typical American customer he would realize that the problem doesn't have a solution earlier on and would try to reformulate the requirements. BTW, any recommendation will be helpful!

<comment><USER3> This is quite off-topic, but one logical and appropriate thing to do is approach a consultancy firm in Malaysia that specialize in business development/regulation/IT to learn how to talk in their "native language".

<comment><USER17> Yes thanks. I am not doing exactly this but contacting an American who is well versed in Malayan culture, language, and has studied there. Beyond this, I think it is interesting to fomalize cultural differences to learn how to handle these situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find it kind of funny that a guide for Chinese and German academics is written in Chinese and English. Is there even a German translation of this, or did the authors just assume that German academics are all proficient in English anyways?

<comment><USER18> Also the guide on German cultural expectations for Chinese is pretty hilarious. The thing about always making appointments and staying in queues is very different from how it is in China.

Also, do Germans seriously need to separate out green glass, clear glass, and brown glass bottles? Do Germans need to keep 7+ bins in their homes as well, or do they just separate it out later?

<comment><USER19> > do Germans seriously need to separate out green glass, clear glass, and > brown glass bottles?

It is indeed done in Germany.

> Do Germans need to keep 7+ bins in their homes as well

At home in Germany there are four bins: paper, organic waste, residual waste, Green Dot (recyclable waste) - at some places the recyclable waste has to be put in yellow bags (Gelber Sack) instead. I have also seen cans for metal waste at large apartment buildings in the past.

In a typical residential district there is a central place where there are bottle banks for clear, brown and remaining (including green) glass from non- returnable bottles.

Here is an excerpt which makes fun of the complications of separating the garbage from the German comedy "Otto - Der Außerfriesische", where the main actor tries to convince the people that if you throw away a teabag you have to separate it into tealeaves (organic waste), paper, staple (scrap metal) and string (residual waste):

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

<comment><USER20> You probably mean: Otto - der Ostfriese.

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Waalkes](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Waalkes)

EDIT: Ah, you're right, he made a film with that title: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_–_Der_Außerfriesische](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_–_Der_Außerfriesische)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Also a very cool read for a Swiss guy (Zurich) who moved to Beijing :D.

</comment><comment><USER22> Any mirrors?

<comment><USER23> it works for me, but you can access the content also via google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy- ab&...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy- ab&hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fkops.uni- konstanz.de%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F123456789%2F35697%2FZhang_0-349300.pdf&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fkops.uni- konstanz.de%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F123456789%2F35697%2FZhang_0-349300.pdf&gs_l=serp.3...7133.8378.0.8607.6.6.0.0.0.0.66.126.96.36.199....1...1c.1.64.psy- ab..1.0.0.irVMbpPfhzo&pbx=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is mentioned in the first line that this is the second book in the series. Anybody knows where I can find the first book?

<comment><USER25> [https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/handle/123456789/23719](https://kops.uni- konstanz.de/handle/123456789/23719) (Advice for (new) professors, only in German)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The language of this book looks like it is targeted to a mid-school teenager. Not sure about German students, but I would expect someone with masters degree to know a lot more than this. At least a guy should be familiar with German history/culture/philosophy/literature.

</comment><comment><USER27> May we assume that the Chinese side (how Chinese students get funded to go to Germany, etc) applies pretty well to Chinese students at other nations' universities as well?

</comment><comment><USER28> I am also a foreigner living in Konstanz, Germany. I've been here for the last 10 years and i can tell you out of experience the people around the Bodensee area (lake Constance) have a complete different mentality compared to those living in larger cities like Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, Köln or even Berlin.

-One thing i know works very well in Germany is that you need to learn their language and culture. Try to understand how these people think and why they think like that. That will make your life easier.

-As foreigners we also want meet and mingle with our own kind. And that's okey because it's the best way to beat homesick. However, sometimes it's also recommendable to mingle with other foreigners from other countries. Find out what works for them. At the university for example, you could find such English speaking people like the Americans, UK citizens and even established Africans living and working in that area.

-Also, thankfully there are 'meetups' nowadays. You are able to meet and connect with local and international people with different professional backgrounds

<comment><USER29> what i never understood is why learning the language and culture is not the immediate #1 priority, i think its the only way to really integrate and prosper in an foreign country. Of course there are more pressing issues (getting a place to sleep, get to know you working environment and responsibilities), but i would dedicate every second i can to practice the language and understand the culture (not in the academic sense).

<comment><USER30> It seems so, but in Germany it is not #1 priority. In my research lab in Germany, we were PhD students from about 15 countries, and the work language was English. This is very common for science and engineering research. So a student from China can either spend time learning German to improve his/her social life, or spend time reading and writing in English to achieve better academic results. Usually it is difficult enough for them to become fluent in English, which is necessary to publish papers. Guess what happens.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it good to set a personal goal of X much money by age Y? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> No. How much money you make has a large random factor to it, based on the opportunities available to you. Your goals should be things _you_ can control, otherwise you're setting yourself up for frustration and disappointment.

You're better off setting goals in terms of the specific actions you can take, eg. having finished X project by age Y, or learned A, B, and C skills.

</comment><comment><USER3> No. Be good at what you do, be smart with how you invest. If you set such a goal I can assure you that you will not perform as well as if your goal was learn X by age Y, or something similar. Money is an arbitrary and (IMHO) poor indicator of a successful life.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends upon what actions setting that goal lead you to take. Does it induce you to save regularly and well? Probably good.

Does it talk you into taking a job which burns you out or involves you in morally dubious activity? Probably not.

</comment><comment><USER5> X% of Y salary per year. As your salary grows your savings have to grow.</comment>


Most-Popular Lists Breed More Popularity - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124277816017037275.html

<comment><USER2> This is one of the reasons why I don't think the front page should allow for upvotes. Only in the new section.

<comment><USER3> Interesting.

Sometimes I scan the titles and give my votes to these articles on the frontpage thus having these links saved in an easily retrievable list for later consumption.

It would be nice to have a separate bookmarking capability distinct from the ability to vote.

<comment><USER4> Seems to me this kind of behavior grossly encourages linkbait.

edit: In fact I'd be all for preventing voting on links before following them. A nice, clean way to do it would be a bit of unobstrusive Javascript+cookies to track which stories you've been to and hide the upvote link if you haven't seen the story yet.

It's not secure but it doesn't have to. Implementing it this way has the advantage of not having any bigger load on the server and still being able to follow links to stories without contacting the HN server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would have assumed that their were algorithms which recognize that an article was retrieved from the 'most popular' list and therefore not weight it as much as a 'discovered link'.

</comment><comment><USER6> Even better, give each user a fixed set of random urls each day, and only allow voting on those.

<comment><USER7> The problem with that is that most stories are not interesting to any particular reader. I rarely even look at more than 20% of the stories, and vote on even fewer. I doubt many people read even half.</comment></comment>


Is 'Social' Over? - <AUTHOR> http://jfornear.com/post/30008201545/is-social-over

<comment> james-skemp I don't understand how the IPO of Facebook impacts the users of Facebook; the users are still going on as they were before. Unless they mean 'Social' as a moneymaker?

<comment><AUTHOR> A girl I used to like deleted her Facebook account.

<comment> james-skemp Okay. But I'm not sure that proves anything. Why did she delete it?

Or really, has there been a significant decrease in traffic to 'social' sites. Based on the stories I've seen, no. People are certainly leaving or just getting overwhelmed/bored, but as much as some people would like it, 'social' isn't going away.

Changing? Perhaps. But by our very nature we're social animals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> And yet you still felt compelled to share.

</comment><comment><USER3> i don't think so. but, Medium has incredibly good balance. Its potential to become a monster ridiculous.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone remember this link that was posted? - <AUTHOR>

I remember reading (several months to a year ago) a famous VC / businessman talking about the best cold email they've received asking them for advice. Among other things, it asked a question right there in the original email, that was easy to respond to with his expertise.<p>Does ANYONE know what I'm talking about, and if so, do you have the link saved somewhere? Or a clue in the right direction? We're reaching out to advisors and I remembered there was a really good example in there. <comment><USER2> If you upvoted the story, it'll appear in your "saved stories" list[0]. The URL is per-user and appears on your user profile page (or you can just change the id parameter in the URL).

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=zkhalique](https://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=zkhalique)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd definitely like to know this answer. I have had a lot of success with cold emails.

Usually, I think being genuine is the best way to go about it.</comment>


Joel Spolsky talks office space; might rent to startups.   - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/03/02.html <comment><USER2> dupe. I thought these were automatically getting caught?

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1884

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, me too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> dupe. I thought these were automatically getting caught?

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1884</comment>


Ask HN: What techniques do you use for personal goal setting? - <AUTHOR>

I've had a laundry list of goals for a few years now that I review every month.  I don't think it's working for me because I don't seem to be achieving them.<p>What methods, techniques and strategies do HNers use to set goals and achieve them? <comment><USER2> Goal setting and achieving requires one of two things in my mind; internal driving forces or external driving forces.

A long time ago I was both hired and fired by a pair of brilliant Hollywood producers. The mid-sized video game company I worked for had just been acquired by a major player; we killed ourselves for a year on a totally mind- blowing franchise game, yet the title was sh*tcanned near release (Oh, 3DO) and then they dumped the entire team off a ledge, myself included.

In the hiring interview the producer asked me "What is your six month goal, year, three and five year plans?" Oddly the hiring meeting helped me prepare for the layoff meeting and the next 18 years in my career. She referred to my near-term goals, which had changed, obviously but I was able to take the firing calmly because I saw it was a twist and event in part of a broader, longer-term plan.

The vast majority of people I know are nearly headless when it comes to goals. You don't have to define a 3,000 point plan, but if you can learn to set a horizon and a few steps towards the point you want to reach, you can in turn focus on the immediate and near-term and actually become much more flexible in your approach to the outcome. You learn from practice whether something takes you closer or further away from that 1, 3, or 5 year plan and make better personal decisions.

If you simply can't seem to meet any goals, there are tons of books and audio sources for basic goal and discipline building. Your goals may be unreasonable or you may lack the underlying strong habits to push for a better outcome.

I would suspect that you are lacking discipline. If you're undisciplined you may need to find other sources of drive to meet your goals. If you're an entrepreneur, you need to get some mentoring and find someone willing to help keep you focused and on track.

</comment><comment><USER3> Goals don't work for me. Habits do. See if you can transform your goals into things you can actually do, rather than things you want to reach.

<comment><USER4> An interesting post on habit-setting is on the front page right now.

[http://lifehacker.com/#!281626/jerry-seinfelds- productivity-...](http://lifehacker.com/#!281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity- secret)

& the comment thread

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262437>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Visualize the future (ie. dream), but don't worry about the short term too much. It tends to work for me. (ie. the big stuff that I imagined 10 years ago has come true, but all the little steps in between were quite unpredictable).

The hardest thing seems to be to dream big/bold enough.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you hire a freelancer? - <AUTHOR>

Recently I have been thinking about freelancing full time more and more.  One of the worries is always "Am I going to have enough work to keep me going" and "How am I going to win clients?".
I was just wondering if there is anyone on Hacker News that works with freelancers a lot and how do you go about finding a freelancer for a certain project?  I guess if you work with freelancers a lot you probably stick with people you have worked with before but how did you make the initial contact?
Also what do people think of sites like odesk and elance etc?
If I'm able to build up an understanding of what clients look for it will help to make me more appealing. <comment><USER2> Oops, here is the post. [http://danshipper.com/nothing-happens-until-the-sale- is-made](http://danshipper.com/nothing-happens-until-the-sale-is-made)

</comment><comment><USER2> Read this earlier HN post, it will help with how to find clients. Some good advice in there.</comment>


U.S. To Collect Social Media Data on All Immigrants Entering Country - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/us/politics/immigrants-social-media-trump.html <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=social%20immigrants&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=social%20immigrants&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story)</comment>


Homo floresiensis - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of debate as to whether this is a distinct species or just a population of H.Sapien's suffering from disease. Personally I'm not convinced this was a distinct species.

</comment><comment><USER3> submitter: any particular reason for this link? The Hobbit movies aren't due until mid December.

<comment><AUTHOR> No Particular reason for this actually, I found this interesting so I thought I would share it</comment></comment>


3D printed luxury homes for hermit crabs - <AUTHOR> http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130728-3d-printed-luxury-homes-for-hermit-crabs.html

<comment><USER2> Now this is brilliant!</comment>


How a secret Dutch mole aided the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran - <AUTHOR> https://news.yahoo.com/revealed-how-a-secret-dutch-mole-aided-the-us-israeli-stuxnet-cyber-attack-on-iran-160026018.html <comment><USER2> Interesting how the whole world was in an uproar over Assange endangering lives and this gets a free pass. We should make up our minds about stuff like this, either Assange should be treated as a reporter or this reporter is endangering lives.

I hope that whoever this mole was that he/she has good life insurance and no kids. Based on this info it should be trivial to figure out who it was and even if the journalist got it wrong there will likely be repercussions against the people implicated here.

<comment><USER3> The article heavily implies that the Dutch mole was executed years ago.

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily. All it says is two of their intelligence sources refused to answer the question of whether or not he was executed.

They reported Iran executed some number of people who were believed to be moles or otherwise guilty of harming the program. According to the sources, Iran doesn't seem to know with certainty if they got the right people, or if the executed individuals were merely unwitting carriers who got infected.

It's also possible they didn't care so much and considered this sort of incompetence/negligence (of course, not such a fair accusation given their adversaries) a capital offense. They may have executed everyone involved, wittingly or not, to serve as a deterrent and increase future OPSEC. Many it's just a bonus for them if a mole also got caught in the net.

This is kind of like a game theory puzzle: if he was executed and you say he was, you give them valuable information. Same if he wasn't and you say he wasn't. You could lie, but Iran's intelligence reading this article may suspect you'll lie. Or they may think it's a double bluff or something.

The safest move to cause the least damage and give Iran as little info as possible may be to say the mole may or may not have been executed. There's also the possibility that the sources fuzzed the story a bit: there may have been more than one mole, or, less likely, zero moles. Intelligence is always cat-and-mouse mind games, with fact and fiction often intermixed carefully.

<comment><USER5> Your little game theory puzzle actually just goes to show that 'intelligence' is mostly FUD.

There was a great article posted the other day on HN suggesting that MI5 had not, in it's entire history during the cold war, unearthed any concrete evidence of, or caught any, Russian spies (save for two instances uncovered incidentally by local police, and one who was a royal and hence never charged).

But none of that mattered. The appearance of subterfuge and counter, is much more important than any actual success. And as you suggested, there needn't have been any mole at all, for the events to play out exactly as they did.

<comment><USER6> Who was the royal?

<comment><USER5> Sorry, can't find the original article at the moment, but here is a wiki link about the royal spy.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Original article: [https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/aivd-speelde- cr...](https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/aivd-speelde-cruciale-rol- bij-sabotage-kernprogramma-iran~ba24df9f/)

<comment><USER8> Discussion (eventually, maybe): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20860056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20860056)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >Germany contributed technical specifications and knowledge about the industrial control systems made by the German firm Siemens that were used in the Iranian plant to control the spinning centrifuges

may be it is all just a smoke screen and parallel construction, and the virus was just included in the next patch update :) Wouldn't be the first time. The parallel construction is obviously needed to make Iranians and the likes to continue hunting for moles (sucks to be executed as a mole for an USB drive that you have no idea about found in your house), tightening security and wasting their money/resources in all the other ways while still continuing to buy Siemens/etc.

<comment><USER10> When has a vendor previously put a virus in a patch update?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Co author is Kim Zetter the Wired journalist who has been covering Stuxnet for years and wrote a great book on it "Countdown to Zero Day".

<comment><USER12> For those interested in this topic but not interested enough to read 450 pages about it, I would encourage you to check out the book and only read the chapters that seem interesting.

While the book is somewhat chronological and story-driven, there's still a ton of interesting info packed into it that I think a lot of HN readers would love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, but why reveal now?

<comment><USER7> It took Huib years of Investigative journalism to find this out. The official stance of the agency is that this didn't happen. And the state was trying to sue him for publishing his work [https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws- achtergrond/aivd-doet-aangi...](https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws- achtergrond/aivd-doet-aangifte-tegen-volkskrant-journalist-publicatie-over- digitale-spionage-bevat-staatsgeheimen~b45a9482/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's never been confirmed this was a "U.S. - Israeli" attack, if there was any attack in the first place.

<comment><USER15> > if there was any attack in the first place.

So Stuxnet just randomly self-assembled on the Internet, to attack very specific air-gapped industrial controllers?

<comment><USER16> Well that is basically how we came into existence, right? Its not like some all powerful creator programmed our DNA. So, the same random events can happen with computer viruses.

<comment><USER17> It is orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less likely.</comment></comment></comment></comment>