Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,107 posts.
In a rare public filing in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Justice Department today urged continued secrecy for a 2011 FISC opinion that found the National Security Agency's surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional. Significantly, the...
This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this p…
( This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some typos, I'll fix them next week when I get home. )
The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Co…
An independent nonprofit research lab, whose mission is to enable universal literacy in a humane dynamic medium. This involves inventing a humane form of computing, and developing educational and community-based institutions in which a culture can grow. [more]
I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
Websites in South Korea often require installation of “security applications.” Not only do these mandatory applications not help security, way too often they introduce issues.
Every user of Rocky Linux is valued and their contributions matter. From software engineers to IT professionals and hobbyists, together, we are all pa...
Michael Thaddeus Professor of Mathematics mt324@columbia.edu thaddeus@michaelthaddeus.org February 2022, revised March 2022
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
This is a bit long. Apologies. I'd meant to talk about other things, but I started writing a reply this morning to the letter that follows...
It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.
When Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo toiled for four years on his master work. Renoir spent six months painting Luncheon of the Boating Party—the painting featured in the film Amélie. Even Guernica, which Pablo Picasso painted quickly to publicize the…
After paying fines for violations in Hungary and South Africa, Microsoft agreed to stop the practice—but I have evidence that I believe shows they continue to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act elsewhere.By Yasser ElabdI was recruited by Microsoft in 1998, and I helped bring the company’s products throughout…
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
A timeline of CIA atrocities.
Sitting for more than 1 hour has been shown to induce biochemical changes in lipoprotein lipase activity (an enzyme involved in fat metabolism) and in glucose metabolism that leads to the deposit of fats in adipose tissue rather than these being metabolized by muscle, and extensive sitting also relates to heart…
We need scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us. To solve this problem within four years, we’re starting a new team, co-led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, and dedicating 20% of the compute we’ve secured to date to this effort. We’re looking for excellent ML…
Published November 2020 Lately, it has become fashionable to debate what is, or is not, “money-printing” by central banks. This debate is natural, due to the extreme policy nature of 2020, with massive fiscal expenditures, huge increases in central bank balance sheets, and changes in central bank inflation targets…
I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping up with Bubble City. I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks lying in bed and drinking fluids. (With occasional breaks to play Rock Band, much to the annoyance of my neighbors.) Once again, I’ve been sick — this time, with four different illnesses.
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
This is the mail archive of the gcc@gcc.gnu.org mailing list for the GCC project .
On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order. A couple things struck me about this video. First, I’m surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting…
We invest in smart people solving difficult problems, often difficult scientific or engineering problems. Here’s why. A. INTRODUCTION The Problem We have two primary and related interests: Finding ways to support technological development (technology is the fundamental driver of growth in the industrialized world)…
All vehicles lose efficiency and range in very cold weather. Electric cars are no different. The good news, however, is that this range loss is temporary and not as limiting as many people may think.
(in which I bring this blog back to the “safe, uncontroversial” territory of arguing with people who think they can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time) A few people have aske…
