skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually what we're doing at Plum. We're making WiFi and Bluetooth enabled dimmer switches that are running Linux on-top of an ARM9. The primary software for controlling it is written in Erlang and we're using distributed consensus for providing "advanced lighting configuration and control features". Your light switches form a cluster in your own home.

That's the first step (we're trying to launch a product) and ultimately the goal is enabling customers to completely sever the Plum cloud dependency. Right now if you want 100% of the features (schedules, scenes, provisioning, what-not), you have to connect them to the internet, but we want users to have all of the features without any need for Plum's servers. As it stands, about 40% of the features do not require Plum's cloud and actually don't even use it if it's available, so we're working in that direction.

We've also talked about open sourcing a subset of the cloud infrastructure so that users could prop-up their own servers if they really wanted "remote control" of lights (which does matter to people).

Privacy sensitive IoT devices are certainly possible but until more people care about their privacy, it will unfortunately be very niche and a bit of an after-thought to go the extra mile to provide services that can be decoupled from the "smart devices" in the home. Particularly so, considering there's a land grab happening in the IoT space right now and corporations are trying to dominate the home IoT platform.

Humans, in a capitalist society, pretty reliably follow "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Which is interestingly at odds with the more fringe ethical philosophies of free software, privacy respecting software, and generally "ethical" software (that obviously needs explication but I won't go into it here).
There absolutely no hope right now. The idea (for better or worse) is that there will be some scientific breakthrough in the future (e.g., nano-scale medical robots) that will make it possible to repair the damage done by the current, very crude, freezing technology. You're taking a gamble on future technology. My impression is that the typical person signing up for cryonics thinks that there's a small chance of success, but almost no downside if it fails (you're already dead).
Scientists produce graphene 100 times cheaper than ever before
Applied Cryptography is a good book. I first read it more than 15 years ago :). Schneier actually designed the CSPRNG that is used by OS X. It's called Yarrow and is SHA based. It does more or less what you suggest, but with many subtle improvements to mitigate attacks. It has features that you're unlikely to properly reproduce in user-space. Trying to improve its output by re-hashing in user-space is, even if done properly, unnecessary. If you screw something up and do it improperly you could easily reduce the quality of the generator.

I'm not sure how your link is relevant. If there's not enough entropy on the system for the kernel, there's not enough for you either.
> The problem is there is no coherent programme on how to counter the privacy-encroachment trend.

IMO, there sort of is: FOSS

I have my own "Alexa". It uses FOSS, and recognizes simple commands, like: lights off. Play/pause music. Add something to the grocery list.

Unfortunately, it's a lot less feature-full. I really want an Alexa (or the like), but I personally refuse to get one until I can run it on my own servers, and block it from getting on the internet. And unfortunately, that doesn't look like it's gong to happen anytime soon.

I think the big problem is the inability to run these systems without "big data" behind them, and I'm not sure what's the answer to that gap.
Details of the battle for the Bataclan emerged as French police answer questions
Running out of stack space compiling a machine generated program would be a bug in the automatic source code generator then.
Did you try looking at Solr or Elasticsearch? Inverted index (Lucene) is what they are based on. You even said "search" in your own article....
> The place where those restrictions have to happen is in the laws we need to develop to keep them all in check.

IMO we need that, but we also can't rely on that. Things like the NSA have shown that the laws don't really matter. Yes, we should be striving for those laws, but we should also not depend on them, when they can so easily be ignored.
Certainly. And if you believe Bitcoin will become a major way that Chinese evade capital controls, then you should invest in Bitcoin for a 100x return. Clearly the market doesn't currently believe that this will happen or the price would already be much higher.
Are you suggesting your study of two people trumps this study?
Also, Windows XP was released on October 25, 2001. Broadband wasn't pervasive at that point, but it was definitely available to many people, and and extra 30 MB wouldn't have slowed many people down.
> I personally know two people who abuse the welfare system

So? You performed what Daniel Kahneman has called "question substitution": replacing a difficult to answer question - "do welfare plans encourage exploitation" - with a simpler one: "are there people who exploit welfare systems".

> sounds like it's throwing any objectivity out of the window right at the beginning

Says the person who draws conclusions based on anecdotal evidence. My money is on the study with data, not the random internet person who actively looks for arguments supporting their existing beliefs.
There are also legal differences in corporate structures, e.g. benefit corporations, https://medium.com/@ystrickler/resist-and-thrive-1d36819853c...

"We want Kickstarter to be similarly in sync with society. Earlier this year we became a Public Benefit Corporation. This means we are legally obligated to consider the impact of our decisions on society, not just our shareholders. Though we are still a for-profit company, as a PBC it’s very different from the expectation that for profit companies maximize shareholder value above all. It acknowledges and embraces that you are a part of a larger community."
At $85/person for a 270 mile trip that's a little less than a dollar per mile assuming you can sell all three seats for every trip. The car itself costs more than that. The time and effort required to organize the trips isn't free.

Maybe the kid should have used the money he spent on the car to take some math and business classes.

Also... why is 'math' not in the Firefox spell check dictionary?
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http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Washable-Keyboard-K310-Window...
Some projects such as Jasper[1] actually do that.

[1] https://jasperproject.github.io/
> Unless there's a chance that at the moment of death the conscience is still there (due to great redundancy in the brain), it might be futile, after all. This is one issue that I believe all cryonics companies and advocates prefer to wholly overlook.

You seem to be arguing that death is a binary state, but I don't think this is particularly well established. There are all sorts of arguments over what constitutes definite proof of death [1]. It seems more likely to me that the process of dying is a transition, and that the exact point along that transition where someone is irreversibly gone depends on our current level of medical technology – which is exactly what cryonics is betting on.

As an analogy, when RAM loses power, the data on it doesn't vanish instantly, but rather degrades over some period of time [2]. Depending on how the information is stored, what you're willing to do without, and what you can piece together, you can declare the data in RAM "gone" at different points throughout that process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_definition_of_death

[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/h...
There is a technological aspect, and that's putting the voice processing back into the device itself. We can still get the benefit of mass machine learning on failed voice samples by asking users to submit the failed sample only, playing it back for them so they know what is being sent, and deleting the sample once it has been processed. Then an updated speech model can be sent to the device. Or, just do the retraining on the device, too.
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Compare the speed of the Moon in orbit, relative to the Earth, which is about 1km/sec, whereas the Earth in orbit around the Sun is about 30 km/sec.
Openstack is an equally terrible place to put stateful apps.
Yes, and to add to that we could also have a long discussion about what entails "work" in this context.
>This is a direct path to a totalitarian surveillance state...

My critique of this argument is that it has no bounds. Totalitarian surveillance states are very possible without modern (2000+) electronic devices and have existed for a good half century. To add to that, there are many other technologies that are essential to the kind of centralized bureaucracy that totalitarian states generally use. Without electronic communication, it would be extremely difficult to disseminate policy. Without electronic storage, it would be very hard to collate descriptions of suspects and centralize information. The parts of the Catholic church of the middle ages would very much have liked to run a totalitarian state - but it was beyond the technology of the time.

So, if you think we should oppose technology that allows states to survival and terrorize their citizens, there is a longer list to go after: police, vehicles, computers, electricity, etc. All of these technologies gave rise to fears that they would restrict freedom and those fears were ultimately realized. In many ways, we are far less free than people who lived in societies without electricity or cars or any of those things. However, we are also safer from many groups that used to use their freedom to take advantage of others (though not all, obviously).

I agree that this kind of electronic surveillance (or, more specifically, the ability for machines to collect and collate information) is transformative. It's similar to other technologies that changed things - the telegram, electricity, plumbing, etc. It will alter the balance of power and we, as citizens, should think about how we want this technology used and not used. However, I find the idea that this technology _in particular_ is any more or less totalitarian than ones that have come before it to be silly on its face.
But aren't most common illnesses (e.g. cold and flu) from viruses, not bacteria? I wouldn't expect this sort of culture to show the kind of stuff that causes most people to get sick, even if it is spread by things like keyboards or mice or door handles.
What kind of features beyond those that a normal dimmer provides do you add when you have a wifi/bluetooth enabled dimmer? Does that translate into 'you can control the light from your phone'? Or are there other things that I haven't thought of that a light can do other than being on/off or somewhere in between?
Well if that's true then it's basically eternal war. If perceived/reported "injustices" 10000km away in a language they don't understand cause these guys to massacre civilians ... there's nothing to do but use military force against them. Merely stopping a policy won't do anything to prevent more revenge.
Aerospace engineer here: I'm on mobile so I won't get into too much detail but if you know or have a good idea of the dimensions of the aircraft, you can get a pretty good approximation of performance characteristics with nothing fancier than an undergraduate flight dynamics textbook.

The shape and locations of the various control surfaces, wings, stabilizers, etc. will let you deduce a great deal of the aircraft's handling and stability qualities. You can make educated guesses as to the lift and drag coefficient curves and if you have any performance data (e.g. my friend Ilya saw it going this fast at this altitude) you can go even further by making inferences about the propulsion system.

For me the only x-factor would be constructing a 3-view plot of the aircraft when given only a single photo. I guess it would depend on the perspective from which the aircraft was photographed.
You can get an ECAA visa and work in UK as a freelancer: https://www.gov.uk/turkish-business-person/overview
To the citizens of nations that are being bullied by those organisations it's NOT a feature.
Exactly right. But given the demand in those cities from non-Chinese buyers I expect it would take a while to see it actually reflected in prices. In the Bay Area at least there is also a lot of Russian money in the real estate market so it might mitigate some of the effect as well.
May I ask what tools you favor in the R environment? I just haven't found anything as performant for operations on irregular and poorly formatted time series as the pandas library, and in fact I just finished an ETL in pandas for my current job.

I'm always interested in learning a new tool, though.
What verifiably private options are there for speech-to-text? It seems like they'd have to be FOSS but most of the "FOSS" solutions I've seen still use a remote server for the actual processing.
Show HN: Easily configure different Git identities on the same machine
> If you asked me to turn mine off when visiting, I would happily oblige you- And then label you as a nutcase who has lined their walls with tinfoil.

That's an interesting response. So because someone does not like to have unknown third parties listen to everything that is said in a room they're right away tinfoil hatters?
While I appreciate your story, have you considered that you misread my post? It's the only way I can explain the myriad straw-men in yours.
I needed barbecue grill for my party and got it just in time.
It absolutely happens (as in I've seen it happen in lots of places) and serves an important value.

When cold calling the big thing that's missing in the communication is trust, why should the lead trust some guy who's phoned her up ? - building a personal rapport helps establish a feeling that "this person is like me and I can trust them" which is a key part of cold sales.

For account managers it serves a very different purpose, it serves to reduce churn (and enable upselling). It's much easier to switch away from a company that you have a purely professional relationship with than from your buddy at Acme corp who you always look forward to catching up with.
As far as I know nobody went through the cryogenic preservation process before they were declared dead due to legal reasons. It is a shame really. I hope at one point, somewhere in a country with less regulations, that will be done as well. Similar to the first heart transplantation.
Wouldn't it make more sense to clone her whenever the cure becomes available? since she was so young...
Don't use Tor this way; browser fingerprinting makes it useless regardless of WebRTC. Use a Tor bundle in a VM.
> We've also talked about open sourcing a subset of the cloud infrastructure so that users could prop-up their own servers if they really wanted "remote control" of lights (which does matter to people).

As someone who runs his own home-automation server: Have you thought about something like a stand-alone server, that I'm able to turn off net-access for (open-source or not)? I'm currently looking for something like that, and I'm not aware of anything that exists.
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They don't freeze, they vitrify. That's a very big difference.

http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html#myth2

We can debate the degree to which cryoprotectant perfuses the brain outside a laboratory test of tissue, but vitrification appears to preserve the fine structure of tissue very well:

http://www.brainpreservation.org/competitors/

There is evidence of synaptic preservation in preserved and restored nematodes:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/rej.2014.1636
That horse has left the barn and is half-way to Alpha Centauri. The right way to achieve private browsing is with isolated VMs with randomized browser settings and characteristics, and you can do that with or without WebRTC.
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Basic income is very cheap to administer — removing huge staffs and lengthy, error-prone processes disliked by libertarians and liberals alike – and it avoids the perverse incentives which do things like punish parents for getting a job which pays enough that they lose childcare support but not enough to come out ahead after replacing it. The other big win is that if it doesn't require a visible symbol, you avoid the cognitive trap where someone sees someone using food stamps to buy a steak and spends the next 20 years yelling about how wasteful welfare is (and, of course, never once asking how much it cost per calorie).
Would recommend looking into ElasticSearch too. Recently had my first hands-on experiences and I am pretty amazed.
I think it's a fair question, and I'll remark that I think it's a shame that we have to distrust everyone by default because there are a number of potentially wonderful things that can be done such as pressure.net with this kind of data. As far as that goes, I definitely prefer and would be more trusting of someone who is mindful of privacy concerns than someone like Larry Ellison who I believe would squeeze every nickle of profit out of the same types of projects without regard for anyone's privacy.
This scheme is different due to the way it handles times between the start of leap seconds and 2012.

And, as an astronomer turned technologist, I think your comments are completely inappropriate for civilized discussion. If you want verbal mud-wrestling, take it elsewhere.
> This is very easy to verify yourself with a network monitor.

Are you sure? Suppose, hypothetically, I was looking to circumvent this.

It would be extremely easy. I could monitor for key phrases (e.g. bomb, terror, NSA, freedom.) and then simply wait until the next "alexa" to send that recording to Amazon.
'omitted'.
> I asked him after what it was about and he told me this dude’s kid was sick this week. Why would I care? Why would our salesman care?

This is the fundemental principle in a way. People naturally care about each other and want to be cared about. It doesn't always work out in practice because many things can get in the way: Time, stress, competing concerns, fear, etc. But we're social animals, down to the biological level. Understanding that about others and about yourself can help you with sales and with many more important human relations.
Of course. So I would hope that the future holds this different sort of work. Not 'no work' at all.
> The device does not communicate with amazon.com until you say "alexa" and the code/hardware for that is all done on the device itself. So its not listening and streaming everything, all the time. It is listening all the time, yes- But only for the word 'alexa' - If it hears that word, then it starts talking to amazon.com and starts doing voice recognition. This is very easy to verify yourself with a network monitor.

My personal issue with this is: That could be changed at anytime without any warning. Yes, I tend towards the tinfoil side of things, but the fact is: You can't really always know that, unless you are consistently monitoring the connection.
Meteorological data collection is probably opt-in, and pressure+gps data is less invasive than speech+gps data.
No, because the device does not communicate with amazon.com until you say "alexa" and the code/hardware for that is all done on the device itself. So its not listening and streaming everything, all the time.

(in case you skipped that the first time)
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Watch Jeff Bezos Lay Out His Grand Vision for Amazon’s Future in This 1999 Video
Ronald Arkin (the robot ethicist in the article) says, “You see this in sci-fi: Star Trek, Knight Rider. It’s the natural progression.”

Yikes. IMO, the presence of something futuristic on popular TV does not establish it as something to naturally progress to. I look to (good) sci-fi for ideas and thought experiments and, often, cautionary tales.

I don't have a big problem with the privacy issue here, because Amazon's ecosystem is opt-in. But I hope that ethicist is more critical-thinking than the snippet in the interview paints him to be.
I've got a Moto-X android phone and I changed its voice activation function to be the phrase "Kirk to Enterprise" (geeky yes, but also very unlikely to be spoken in public) and what I've found is that the limited ML classifier in the phone hits it regularly. I suppose I could try something in Klingon. In the referenced article, the unit activated unintentionally as well.

That is a nice way to say that your argument is unconvincing in that it depends on the ML classifier to recognize the 'wake' phrase reliably, and I have ample evidence that it has a number of false positives. And when it "wakes up" it is trying to figure out what you're asking it to do, and if you're not then you are perhaps in danger of it doing something you didn't intend. I eventually turned this feature off on my phone entirely, I could not make it reliable.

And I expect to hear interesting stories of that time when someone's phone called or did something unexpected, because the technology makes it inevitable.
Or Xapian.
I'm a Kenyan, Runda is one of the high end estates in the country. They never lived in a 'military style dorm'. I think there is more to the story than what the article says.
came to say the same. "but everyone runs javascript !"
I wouldn't use this as an example. Last I checked, Jasper still shelled out to Google/AT&T to do the voice-to-text translation

EDIT: Oh, it looks like they have Pocket-sphinx and Julius now for internet-less systems. Interesting....
Strus: Libraries and tools for building a full-text search engine
slackpkg doesn't do dependencies.

slapt-get (http://software.jaos.org/) does, but it needs repo that has dependency metadata. Official repos don't have it. If a repository doesn't have dependency metadata then slapt-get doesn't resolve deps for that set of packages.

Some other repos (AlienBob's for instance) do have dependency metadata, which assume that you did a full Slackware install, so only dependencies that aren't part of Slackware are listed.

There is also slapt-src (same URL) that automates installing stuff from http://slackbuilds.org/, and it resolves dependencies. It's not fullproof, but is good enough (for me, at least).

There's a new repo on http://slackonly.com/ which offers binary packages built from scripts on slackbuilds, and it looks like it has dependency metadata. I can't vouch for the quality of those packages, I haven't used it yet.

UPDATE:
After skimming through PACKAGES.TXT for a few minutes, I'm not confident that slackonly repo has all dep. metadata correct, but hopefully they'll get better with it soon.
The $50K limit has had some interesting side effects. When I was in the process of selling ww.com I found a buyer, but this buyer then wasn't able to execute because they found that they could not move their capital out of China. In the end it was sold to another Chinese entity, who apparently could get their money out of China, either because of connections, or because they kept their money out of China to begin with (I don't know which).

Apparently there is a trick to this where people inside China with lots of US$ will pay a premium to some party that has dollars on the other side of the line. So this $50K maximum has created quite the little black market, probably the opposite of what it intended (capital flight from the Country). But it seems to be 'ok' as long as the right people profit from it.