skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am dreading the first time I visit someone with one of these. I wonder how they will respond to my request to turn it off? offense? understanding? pity and ridicule?

Amazon and Google have both figured out that the current commodity of value isn't oil, and isn't energy in general, it is information. The people with more information have an advantage over the people with less information. That advantage can be tactical, commercial, or personal. So collecting information while being helpful gives you a much better asset than simply being helpful does.

We've read stories of cops misusing information databases to check up on their ex-spouses or future dates, Google SREs reading people's mail, and NSA analysts passing around "juicy" intercepts with prurient but no security value. We've got people on the other side of these piles of information and those people are fallible, and susceptible to bribes, and generally susceptible to poor judgement.

What is worse, is that the "service" that something like Alexa offers is pretty credibly offered in a modest cluster of modern machines with GPUs. I would expect that a 32 node Jetson cluster could provide reliable general speech recognition and execution. But the illusion is that you need a "big cloud" of machines to do this. You don't.

So I'm all in favor of these interesting technologies helping folks out, but I really wish we would step past 'cloud' and into a 'house cluster' which, like your furnace or HVAC system, does the work locally and protects your privacy. It is a company I have seriously considered starting twice now. Even in the US people can get multi-megabit connectivity to the Internet from their home, there is no reason any more why you shouldn't be able to access your pictures, your media, your email, and communities by talking to your server in your house. The challenge is turning it into an appliance. That is doable I believe.
The author seems to be mixing some valid observations regarding the difficulty of stateful containers with some paranoia about the growth of cloud deployments and ownership of data. Or maybe it's not paranoia. I don't know. But it's different.

First off, containers don't absolutely have to be stateless. The first and foremost benefit of containers is dependency isolation and configuration management. Once you use them for any length of time this becomes clear. You make them, put them on a machine with a compatible kernel and network access to the right stuff and they just run.

It's a pretty short leap from containers that just run to the idea of container orchestration systems like kubernetes. We just deployed a new staging environment built on Google Container Engine, an implementation of kubernetes, and it's pretty damn amazing what you can do at the services layer, and yes, even at the gateway and persistence layers. But you have to treat the needs of these layers differently.

Statelessness is important at the services layer because ultimately you want to scale up and down seamlessly and automatically, and kubernetes allows you to do just that.

In the persistence layer it's the opposite: state is all that's important and scaling is a more complicated affair. That doesn't mean containers aren't useful in that layer. They still provide the above-mentioned benefits. The aforementioned staging environment uses elasticsearch running in a dedicated kubernetes cluster, where each pod is bolted to a persistent disk at cluster creation. It also uses a mongo replicaset that is just deployed on instances in the old manner, but we have a prototype containerized install and will be moving toward that. Lastly it uses mysql via Google's cloudsql managed offering.

So you have a lot of differences in the persistence layer, and a lot of choices for how to manage those differences. Things are a lot simpler and cleaner at the services layer, but that doesn't mean the benefits of containers in one layer are somehow less of a win than in the other. After three years of using and deploying them my feeling is it's pretty much all win.
Nero Burning ROM 2016 Crack Download [Latest]
The Real Reason On-Demand Startups Are Reclassifying Workers
I think it only had spheres to terminate each pipe.
why do your kids need to use it "easily" ? Why not be a father and show them how to use things ?
If my echo is listening to you, it's because you're in my house. So uh, keep out.
Delicious irony 20 years later: the mobile era. Apple, yet again, makes really good devices. However, the most numerous devices are now Linux/Android. Now we have to ask "Is Microsoft ready for mobile", but it's too late, and the answer is "nobody cares".

God, it feels so good to watch Linux kick the crap out of MS, after all those years of putting up with their slow/buggy OS's and development torment-ware.
That's true. Wired devices have the power to listen passively indefinitely and to record as much as they want. As I updated my post to mention, Google apparently added Google Voice search to Chrome at one point.

With wired devices, I've comforted myself with the analysis that users could detect subterfuge by looking for unexpected network traffic. A device can't record my voice and transmit it centrally all the time without generating noticeable network usage. It could, however, record for a while and send in a burst later, perhaps concealed within other traffic like a weekly software update. Nevertheless, I think a close examination could detect foul play. I do wonder whether phones could conduct the same type of subterfuge:

Perhaps there ought to be a "phone surveillance challenge" that's kind of like the Underhanded C contest. Each year, contestants submit a phone app that runs in the background on a phone over a 48 hour contest period simulating normal usage. At several points during that period, an important conversation will be overheard. The app that does the best job recording the conversations and remaining undetected is the winner.

Naively recording all audio and storing it will probably drain the battery. It also needs to be compressed, though bit rates as low as 5 Kbps seem to be intelligible. If we record at 5 Kbps, then it will require only 108 megabytes to store 48 hours worth of audio. The compression might eat up CPU, however. Perhaps skilled contestants will find a way to do it cheaply.

If we're a smart contestant, we don't indiscriminately record and store all audio. Instead, we want our contest entry to record the human conversations. I'd hazard a guess that our highly skilled contestants can come up with cheap passive methods of detecting human voice, comparable to the ones that listen for "Ok Google". So our contest entry only wakes up when it hears human speech.

Our contest entry won't transmit anything over the airwaves regularly, since that uses battery. However, we know the phone will be charged at least once in 48 hours. We'll wait until it's charging to upload our recordings. Even better, we'll time our transmission burst to be right after some other network activity, like a daily software update. Or if the phone is plugged into a computer, we can compromise it as well and extract data that way.

Sounds like a fun contest.
Not just the keyboard... the whole machine clogs up with nicotine and dust.

https://www.google.com/search?q=smoker+pc&tbm=isch
I've never understood why this is not a more popular idea. I'm a Bernie-supporting lefty liberal weenie and yet all my hardcore small government libertarian friends agree with me on this one. They tend to characterize basic income as, "I oppose wealth redistribution on principle, but since it's never going away, we might as well have the least shitty version possible." How has this not gotten done?
People tend to think of there being a unified "US government", but the reality is that there's a large number of mostly separate organizations connected only loosely by a theme. Sometimes they lie to each other. Sometimes they lie to the politicians in Washington, who are nominally in charge but who seem to have less real power with every passing year.
OK, so I'm a privacy fanatic. However, I'm not very troubled by Echo, because two-way verbal interaction is a core feature. So users know that they'll be monitored. There is the concern about loss of third-party privacy. Guests might not know that they're being monitored. Things that listen and watch without warning (such as some "smart" TVs, apps and browser extensions) are far more troubling.

But of course, there's also the concern that adversaries will intercept surveillance data.
So here's my confusion. CPU prices are getting lower and processing power is getting higher as time goes on.

We can emulate entire operating systems in a web browser now.

You can fit an entire routable, navigable map of the entire world on a mobile phone or usb stick. Every single named place and every single path or road between them on the planet on a phone, offline.

Why are we still thinking that we need the cloud to process speech? Why not do all the listening, all the private bits, locally, and optionally connect to specific services (Music, Shopping, hotels etc) as and when.

Why not?
Does the Moon Orbit the Sun or the Earth?
I'm not sure about what the situation in Kenya is, but what I can speak to is what I've seen in Botswana and Costa Rica. In essence the Chinese will come in to invest in something or give a gift of something like a road, mine, stadium etc.. On the surface that sounds great for the local economy.

The problem is that there is a catch, it's not. Why? Because they bring their own materials, food and labor with them in essence adding nothing to the local economy. So, rightfully some have begun to question their presence because in many instances it is about extracting resources while giving little, if anything back to the local economy.

I'm sure the workers are unfortunate pawns in this game, but while there is racism where-ever there are people, to me it sounds like this issue goes much deeper than that.
This reads as parody. Fawning over some self-important VC, doing 'analysis' that amounts to nothing more than shooting the shit with words and graphs that he doesn't understand. Decrying mistakes startups apparently always make, and using Buzzfeed as an example of some apparently satanic definition of success. Pushing a worldview, not a thought.

The music industry is immensely inefficient; the value of a piece is independent of it's economic value. It's smaller than the porn industry [3], and the top earners are not too distant from it artistically. It's a tenth the size of Apple, though much of the money is concentrated on zero-sum executives lacking a moral compass[5]. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Pitchfork's best album of the 90's, never went gold, even in their home country [1]. It bankrupt a studio and broke up the band, and to this day is about 1/100th as popular as Drake albums on Spotify [2]. Still, there is a vast swarm of people for whom Loveless means the world, in a way Drake has never meant to anyone. It's a stoic, effervescent, and unmonetizable titan.

It would be fallacy to assert that the developed world is improving emotionally [6][7], and for many in it music is a mood-regulating sidekick, thereby providing added value where TV et al. provide replacement. It is a levee against the disgusting world neoliberalism and tech utopianism has built for us. Final thoughts:

* Never use the word 'consumer' non-ironically.

* Or write that "there are in fact multiple paradigms that exist within the music universe, all of which operate according to very different rules." Amongst a few other choice phrases.

* Or, in your profile bio, "Lover of Art, Poetry, Startups, Music, Journalism // Tech Founder and Deadpan Humorist".

* Walled-Garden doesn't exist on streaming services; your demented Grandma has recordings of her playing piano on her Soundcloud.

* Streaming does work... if only because nothing else does. And no, no one will tell you 'community'/'live' will work for artists who have enough integrity not to become a living meme.

[1]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveless_(album)#Certifications

[2]: look it up. There are a few reasons for this, including that MBV listeners probably skew towards torrenting, and that those who stream tend not to leave it on as background music.

[3]: nbcnews.com/business/business-news/things-are-looking-americas-porn-industry-n289431, statista.com/topics/1639/music/

[4]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

[5]: celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/lyor-cohen-net-worth/

[6]: monbiot.com/2014/10/14/falling-apart/

[7]: nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html
One of huge challenge in solving stateful containeres is being as agnostic to the orchestration tool Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesosphere, etc, all of which have different opinions of how clusters of containers should be orchestrated while also accounting for variety in what hosting a cluster of stateful container(s) means to the user.

I work at ClusterHQ, our team believes the tools we are building like Flocker are going to get the community there.

it's pluggable to both orchestration tools and has a model for creating backend plugins.

Storage backend provider plugins that work with Flocker.
http://doc-dev.clusterhq.com/config/configuring-nodes-storag...
> Indeed one of the reasons Echo wasn't a huge success is privacy invasion

Most modern phones passively listen to your voice too, and people carry those with them everywhere. They are present in the most intimate situations, rather than (e.g.) just in your living room. So I don't think there's a reason for people to feel differently about Echo than about Cortana on Xbox, or "Ok Google", or any other voice activated interface.
Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that your Echo was listening to me. What I was trying to say is that every purchase of an Echo is a signal to Amazon and to other big corporations that there is a market for these products. So they will improve the products and expand the market. I don't want that to happen; so it affects me in that way. Additionally, how long will it be until I basically can't go anywhere without there being an Echo in place? Must I stay at home and keep all electronics turned off, in order to avoid corporate surveillance robots? Will every cafe and grocery store also have them?

Edit: I'm not allowed to answer any more questions right now, sorry to Pyxl101 and others. Hacker News tells me "you are submitting too fast, please slow down". Maybe I'll be able to come back later and answer your questions.
No? okay.
There is a significant difference between private companies collecting data and the state doing wholesale surveillance.

I don't particularly care for the first one, I do very much for the second. These are separate concerns. If we can't have data-driven gadgets because the state may get that data, we're solving the wrong problem: we need to get rid of the state.
Coming soon: chicken meat without slaughter
The city is a big brain that can solve big problems (2014)
You can drop common core, but you're not going to get rid of Pearson. They were heaving involved in the curricula that came before common core, and they'll be heavily involved with whatever comes next.
"So I'm all in favor of these interesting technologies helping folks out, but I really wish we would step past 'cloud' and into a 'house cluster' which, like your furnace or HVAC system, does the work locally and protects your privacy."

This is the model, and it largely already exists.

If you're willing to give up the most candy and fluffy of high tech "features" (the ones that break all the time and are of questionable value anyway) you can have a very nice home control system that has no network connectivity and zero wireless emanations.

It's also more tasteful. LCD screens in the living area are the new formica.
The Future of the Web Is 100 Years Old
Yeah. Real men teach their kids TCP.
Super cheap short range transmitters already exist which don't require an audio frequency listening device (garage door openers, wireless doorbells, X10 type wireless controllers). The only thing missing to provide the same functionality for those devices as Echo could be built with a cheap SDR.

The smoke alarm and doorbells are exceptions (and I guess there are several other good exceptions: clothes washer, clothes dryer, dishwasher, coffee pot) but I think I'd prefer a purpose-built listener with a high pass or notch filter.

The Echo may have some unintentional funny failure modes, such as when a doorbell or other trigger sound plays on a TV commercial.
Here's the conclusion:

V. CONCLUSION
In recent years, there has been a large growth in safety net programs across the developing
world. If anything, we might expect this trend to increase as countries become richer: Chetty
and Looney (2006) show that social insurance as a fraction of GDP rises as countries get richer,
suggesting an that safety nets may be increasingly important as countries grow.
18
As safety nets have increased, so has the debate about whether they simply discourage
work, enabling a “lazy poor.” Aggregating evidence from randomized evaluations of seven cash
transfer programs, we find no effects of transfers on work behavior, either for men or women.
Moreover, a 2014 review of transfer programs worldwide by Evans and Popova also show no
evidence—despite claims in the policy debate—that the transfers induce increases in spending
on temptation goods, such alcohol and tobacco. Thus, on net, the available evidence implies cash
transfer programs do not induce the “bad” behaviors that are often attributed to them in the
policy space.
more like a suckmake... it sucks. too fast, ulgy joints, artifacts everywhere.

does Three.js suck, or do you suck? i'll never know. i don't care. suck is suck, and this is suck.

goodbye.
i understand your argument and the distinction it makes, but unfortunately i think in a societal context, that ship has sailed.

the people chose to carry smartphones with them all the time, everywhere. that decision was given up without a fight, in fact it was welcomed as the best thing that has happened in the technology revolution to date.

not only has the developed world already made this decision, the developing world continues to make this decision on a day to day basis, and their choice is clear; devices on everyone, everywhere.
LGBTQQ isn't speech or an opinion, but I see your point. I think the argument is still kind of ridiculous though.
Why did you post two versions of the same story in the same minute?
I never though of it that way.

An interesting idea that I had was quite the opposite.

Run a program that does totally random searches and web page requests (with appropriate headers) in order to create so much info as to render it useless to anyone spying. Almost like if you were running a public proxy.

Reminds me of an old Perry Mason episode where he had 25 guys help him move a car to create a bunch of fingerprints. Maybe it wasn't Perry Mason but some crime show but that was the concept.
Most of my friends that have tried to buy a house in the San Francisco Peninsula have been outbid by Chinese paying 110%,with cash.
I'm curious
Would you be ok with being locked in with X provider's storage specific solution? (say a ECS only way of doing things)
Is the headache in the setup, config, or risk of being at the helm of orchestrating your own data?
Here's a link to the book's home page, where you can also find a link to the author's other free eBook ("Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!"):

http://www.erlang-in-anger.com
Limiting capital outflow to $50000 per person seems like an effective way to keep well off people trapped in your country.
While there are still millionaires in China who would prefer to live somewhere else, new 'banks' will spring up to help them. Morally this doesn't even belong on the same level as other banking problems around the world.
To make this litigation actually obsolete it will take a constitutional amendment to repeal the Copyright Clause.

The whole point of royalties is to reduce the amount of litigation by having an organized and honorable system of compensation.

The reason YouTube and Pandora have spent the last decade in the courts is precisely because they don't want to have to pay. Instead of being respectful members of society, they decided to hide behind lawyers and put a burden on our publicly funded civil justice systems.

There is nothing in our legal system that will ever allow someone to use someone else's intellectual property and profit from it without compensating the original author. That means that every time someone is selling advertisements on a website around content that is not being compensated, they can be successfully sued for damages, with hundreds of years of common law precedent and statute.

There is no doubt in my mind that intellectual property and copyright have changed drastically from the author-centric in to the corporate-centric form that we have today.

What's needed is reform and a return to an author-centric model, not the wholesale abandonment of copyright.
If you read what your quoted, I said it was much harder for non-anglo content, not impossible.
In this blog post[1], they link to one of Aphyr's "Call me maybe" posts, https://aphyr.com/posts/323-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch-1-5-...

1: https://labs.spotify.com/2015/11/17/monitoring-at-spotify-in...
>> France has seen similar decline despite pretty extreme cultural protectionism.

> Despite?

Yes?
Are women not supposed to like football? I actually went to the University of Oregon and found women both attending the U of O and those who lived in greater Oregon to be more passionate about the game then many of my male friends/colleagues/classmates.

It's a risk whenever you try to connect with someone over what you think might be a shared passion. Sports can be risky because not everyone like sports, but if you guess correctly and can form a deeper relationship then any other topic.

Trying football with people from Oregon is absolutely a reasonable decision.
New GIMP website design got pushed out today
Ask HN: What's been your experience working with management at startups?
I've been working in the startup scene in Chicago for a few years, and thus far have been pretty underwhelmed with the companies I've worked for. I get about a year into my gig and find myself apathetic and eventually frustrated with the company/product. The thing that I've found to be the biggest factor in my disillusion has been the poor quality of management. It seems like people who have been elevated (or hired into) management positions in startups/small companies have some technical expertise but virtually no management capabilities. Ultimately it destroys the confidence I have in the company and obliterates any hope I have for being happy with my position for the long term.

So I guess I'm just wondering what the greater community's experience is regarding this? Have you found the same pattern where you're at? How have you dealt with it? How have you avoided it?
Big retailers are already running analytics on their video surveillance.

This is sort of a cheap shot but I am honestly curious, how do you reconcile this point of view with your goal of building an all seeing barometer?