I also own my company, zero is not a limit.

The primary reason I won't work for Google is because I'm nowhere near smart enough. But I like to tell myself that the ethical shortcuts they've taken in pursuit of the almighty dollar are a good secondary reason. It's just that I don't need a secondary reason, so yay, consequence-free ethics!

This is silly.

First, very few people become millionaire CEOs. If thats your standard for success, then every path likely leads to failure because no path reliably leads to that kind of success. Some paths are more likely than others, but none are very likely for the average person.

Part of the reason for flat-ish career trajectory is that programmers earn more at the start than most. Some professions have more of a premium on seniority and experience than others. Senior doctors and lawyers for a combination of the above 2 reasons probably have steeper salary growth than programmers. That said, good 10+ yrs programmers do earn pretty damn well. 10 years as a doctor or lawyer and you're still considered a youngin.

Anyway, if you're the CEO, you aren't a programmer. If he's claiming that being a programmer is not a good starting point for becoming a CEO, I think he's wrong. Look at all the over 40s who were coders at some point, many transitioned into management or something else. Programming actually offers a lot more of that kind of opportunity than anything else.

One of the reasons: Products are not taxed by their environmental real price. If environmental damage incurred with "new" (materials, shipping, disposing the older products after a only a few years) would be calculated in the final consumer price, then durable products, and fixing rather buying new, would be the better consumer option. New products are "cheap" in store, are "cheap" by saving manufacturer need to handle support and fixes, but they are very expensive for the environment.

Woz is, for me, the ISO standard geek, the distillation of all that I aspire to. Somewhere in Paris is a vault, and in that vault is a platinum-iridium Steve Wozniak, against which all of us are judged and found wanting.

If there is an economic cap on the value of a developer, it doesn't derive from how much code they produce.

Value differentials for programmers derive from knowing the right code, not typing up any code that suffices, and I think pay reflects that. 1 KLOC of the right code can easily be better than 10 KLOC of the wrong code, even if the 1 KLOC is buggy and the 10 KLOC has no bugs.

I think programmers are valuable in a power law way, and this can be based on intelligence, domain knowledge, experience, math skills, and other things.

You can command a much larger salary if you either have technical/math abilities that almost no one else has (like a Google search engineer), or you can have an economically valuable product sense (like a proven, high-paid early start-up engineer), or you can know a domain in an economically useful way (many technical founders).

Programming is an army-of-one kind of job, even if you work in a larger team. Insightful programmers are better than dogged ones by orders of magnitude. I look for programmers who are creative, self-driven, and knowledgeable.

EDIT: I ended up editing this for the first 18 minutes it was live. Premise is the same, but I wanted to work on how I said everything.

Could anyone provide screenshots? I hate to be a hater but authorizing an app to access all my private repos is little too much (not sure how GH allows OAuth scoping)

You would pay for Twitter, but you would not outbid the advertisers, who unlike you are willing to subsidize the people who won't pay for Twitter. Which is just a complicated way of saying that if Twitter charged for access, it would charge substantially more than you'd expect them to.

I'm still waiting on proof from Snowden as to Apple/Google/Facebook's direct, illegal cooperation with the NSA. So far, all I've seen proof of is compliance with warrants(which admittedly are questionable, but Google has a direct financial gain in fighting them, not helping them), claims that they've fought them, and evidence that the NSA is both tapping the trunk as well as decrypting SSL'd communications.

Perhaps a few people don't understand why OP takes this so seriously. This is the 'long game', the game for the betterment of human existence. (Cliche? yes, true enough? - probably)

If you still feel these huge corporations have our best interests at heart, you are being a touch naive.

They are not 'evil' ofc, but they're probably not the best idea for the future.

No, you won't need new certificates.

This is great news. The RSA handshake is a relic of the 1990s. It predates forward-secret key exchange. RSA is discernibly weakening over time (1024 bit keys are almost universally believed to be within the practical reach of governments), and the RSA handshake puts all the weight of securing TLS on RSA. Because it uses RSA to encrypt and not just to sign, the TLS RSA handshake also adds significant complexity to the spec; for instance, we're all just living with the fact that TLS uses PKCS1v15 padding and is vulnerable to Bleichenbacher's oracle, and just sort of hoping nobody figures out a way to operationalize the attack. But just a few weeks ago researchers found a way to do exactly that to JSSE.

Good riddance. A protocol competently designed in 2014 would not work the way SSL 2.0 did.

On my side, I am surprised that so many AI researchers are unable to take the long-term view in this discussion. It's presumably because AI in the laboratory is still relatively primitive.

No one is talking about magic. The human brain is not magic, neither is that of chimpanzees, rats, dolphins or gorillas. Intelligence is a purely physical phenomenon, which means it can be emulated by computers. Natural brains are also a product of evolution, which means (1) the development happens very slowly, (2) development is directed only towards evolutionary success and (3) there is no flexibility in how the thinking organs are constructed. Computer intelligence does not in principle have these limitations. It would be terribly anthropocentric to believe that humans are the most sophisticated intelligent entity that can exist in the physical world - after all, we are as far as we know the first such entity to emerge, so from our perspective the evolution of intelligence has now stopped.

That's the feasability argument. The risk argument is that the consequences of an independent, runaway intelligent entity significantly more capable than humans would have such devastating consequences for humanity's future that even a small risk merits a significant effort to map out the territory. Respected scientists have said "it is impossible" to hundreds of things that proved to be quite simple, so this is not an argument. Even if you don't buy the previous part of my reasoning, there is still risk here. In principle, there are any number of things that could preclude advanced AI in the near future even if the above reasoning is correct (too difficult, requires too much computing power, uses different computational techniques), but seeing as we don't know the unknowns here, taking the cautious route is the correct thing to do. This has been a scientific principle for decades, no reason to drop now.

Do AI researchers have any arguments opposing this that don't amount to "the AI we have created up until now is not very good"?

In case anyone else is, like myself, a foreigner confused as to why this article is on the front page of HN at this particular moment, two facts are germane.

Firstly, the Kentucky Derby is this weekend.

Secondly, Hunter S. Thompson was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame last week:

http://jat.uky.edu/ky-journalism-hall-of-fame.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/hun...