skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you use Sphinx for speech recognition and use pyttsx for text to speech (Windows Speech API, OSX NSSS, or ESpeak on Linux) it all works offline - see the "Jarvis's Brain" section.
...as we ought to. Internet of Things Designed To Spy On You. Yay.
Super impressive.

My wife just spoke full-speed Vietnamese into a Google Doc, 100% correct, even the tone marks.
I see. Thanks for correcting me.
Actually if you are a firefighter in San Francisco, you can qualify for a special downpayment assistance loan of up to $200,000 that requires no payments for 30 years

http://sfmohcd.org/first-responders-down-payment-assistance-...

Also starting salary for SFFD is from $72,670.00 - 112,190.00/year which doesn't include overtime.

https://www.jobaps.com/SF/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1=CCT&R2=H002&...

Firefighters are actually some of the highest paid city workers. In 2013, 31 of the top 50 earners were from the SFFD.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Fire-Dept-dominate...
Yeah, but I appreciate the things they say instead of some kind of stock "It was my fault, plain and simple". It's an interesting perspective. And I think that some fault lays at their feet is kinda built into it being a postmortem discussion about their failed business.
Even more people are making good money developing in the language/tooling they know/favor, while it is (comparatively) poorly suited to the problem at hand.
How about you simply encrypt your data store? There's no reason you can't encrypt things in such a way that your operating system does not have direct access to it.
It really shows the staggering difference between having a Samsung phone with fingerprint security versus an iPhone.
Indeed!
That was a solution used 30 years back =)
If you use UKTI to help you, especially if you're a fintech startup, they'll help you through that.
I've often wondered this but it feels like they're very siloed. Google Now seems to improve every year; it almost never gets anything wrong that I speak nowadays but just a few years ago it could get rough if I'm trying to get it to type a bunch of stuff.

But YouTube auto captions? They seem just as horrible today as they were years ago.
Yeah, that's harsh, but i've worked on both sides as well, and can't say you're wrong. Maybe there are some top-quality agencies building maintainable sites, but I'm yet to see any.

Unless it's a throwaway, postcard-type site, design agencies seem a holdover from print, pre-internet, where that model worked. But lower end they're not needed, and once there are real things to do, I don't see how they can compete with internal teams that know the business and can build incrementally refined, VC controlled applications.

I work for a big B2B company with a multitude of subcompanies, and maybe it's just bad experiences, but every agency-designed site we have is a badly-architectured piece of crap. Some look shiny, but they're all clearly rushed out, massively overpriced, and integrations with product databases/vendor systems/factory systems are close-to-impossible. And the latter part is key; building UI over those is the key part of my job, I'm designing interfaces to allow people to buy things easily, and agencies don't seem to be geared toward interfaces, rather they're set up to make pretty pictures.
And what doesn't "fit the narrative" you ignore. As you you ignore other possible narratives.
The Horror Show That Is Congress
Mechanical Planetary Models Gallery
"More than three-quarters of the cost to bring a medical device from concept to the U.S. market is spent clearing regulatory hurdles, according to a Stanford University report."[1]

I am not saying the companies aren't profitable. They aren't profitable the way people make them out to be.

And if there are indeed windfall profits to be made what is preventing smart-ass entrepreneurs from jumping in and making those profits ?

Tim Cook says that the Apple Watch won't become a regulated medical device, but Apple might make another product that is. Cook made the comments earlier today in an interview with The Telegraph, stating that putting the Apple Watch through Food and Drug Administration testing would slow its release cycle down too much and "hold [Apple] back from innovating."

[1] http://www.massdevice.com/study-fda-related-activities-cost-...
I posted[1] asking specifically about this, a couple of days ago. But didn't get any response.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11152976
Pavel Durov backs Apple in not unlocking iPhone
If the "establishment" didn't want them there, they wouldn't be there, believe that.
Hi,

Its not right what FBI wants to do. Every company has some policy and its not right to break a company's integrity.
Welcome to the future (of 2013): https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?t=9m5s https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?t=16m22s

Don't forget to see the entire talk (28 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
Dark Side of Gates Foundation's Charity
Τι Θα Χρειαστείτε Για Να Φτιάξετε Μια Πετυχημένη Ιστοσελίδα; – SEO – WEB DESIGN
Sorry, not sure how much I can say in public. (There's lots of stuff that's public, but I can't just do a knowledge dump, because it's not clearly separated in my mind.)
Interesting links, thank you.
No kidding. I had a toy "robot" that responded to 4 or 5 voice commands when I was a child in the late 80s...
Works pretty well with Hindi, too, neat!
Not to mention SQL Server.
Beware: the bridge for Milight bulbs also communicates outbound to a mystery server for Internet control of the bulbs. The actual RF protocol has been documented and implemented as Arduino code, though, which is what I use for my installation.

https://github.com/henryk/openmili
Uber China Rival Didi Kuaidi Raising $1B at Valuation
Indeed, it will be interesting to see what Google can think up compared to the other big researchers.

Though I wonder if the goals are slightly different, as Google is focusing on "Cloud Storage", rather than single hard performance.

Which as they mentioned, the Cloud doesn't need to have great reliability (since data is assumed to be already redundant), this may allow them to decrease the cost of hard drives for exchange in cheaper disks that may fail more.

Doesn't sound like they are expecting to increase size/performance alone with this effort.
I don't use SES, but a quick search led me to this page[0] which suggests they do have an SMTP gateway.

What I'm more curious about is things like deliverability stats (in aggregate and for individual emails), which is the biggest value-add Mandrill provides us right now.

[0] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-em...
> Easy VC money has prompted companies to hire full time

Perhaps the most insightful comment of the thread.

The bubble will burst, and while it could be the .com bust all over again, it will mean the freelance market is a) massive and b) popular again.
Well Taiwan is special case due to Chiang Kai-shek. The relationships between him, japanese and the civil war in china are very interesting.
MakeSpace Raises $17.5M for Hassle-Free Storage Units
State of Connectivity 2015: A Report on Global Internet Access
Care to say why? I've coincidentally just been referring to this guide whilst I explore some CLOS. It seemed adequate to me. (Not saying gigamonkeys isn't great - it is just a bit more long winded..)
The JavaScript code linked suggests that it indeed uses 19 levels of brightness and 256 levels of (rotated) hue. [1]

[1] https://github.com/mwittig/node-milight-promise/blob/c52d3e4...
Simon Wardley puts it very well in his Pioneers / Settlers / Town Planners model:

http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-tow...

If you spot that new frontier do share - it's what attracted me to the web.
Tesla has finally solved the problem with one of its most essential features
Completely agree with all of your points. I just finished migrating from Mandrill to a new Sendgrid account and it was pretty seamless (although I had a head start because I have used Sendgrid before). It took me about 45 minutes to update everything, including: creating an account, adding appropriate DNS records for whitelisting, and updating my application and server settings.

It's extremely unfortunate that we have to do this, but no way would I stay with Mandrill after this decision.
Best of luck with that. As someone who has taken medical imaging software through both, my preference would be to get CE marking first and allow the market and the device to become establish before going for a 510K. The FDA predicate device process together with the glacial speed of the agency means making modifications to a system is unnecessarily difficult which is something you will need to do when innovating in a market. I find the CE process to be a more pragmatic approach.

On some of the darker days with the FDA - and despite their 90 day target we had over 900 days between submission and final clearance - I found it helped to remember the famous Churchill quote; "When you are going through hell, keep going."
One-third of US tech 'innovators' are immigrants: study
Small nit but probably more like 1000000 codes since apple moved to 6-digit pins.
1. Not human readable in serialized form. Unless you have concerns about traffic or storage costs, human readable formats win.

2. Requires code generation. Not a big hassle especially if your IDE hides it, but a hassle nevertheless.
Don't forget binding posted form data to a model, and then validating it. It seems like 60% of my web development time is spent getting that right.
Foxconn of Taiwan Buys Sharp for $6B
Get ready for turmoil if Salesforce fails to deliver in its earnings today
Ya know. It's probably the best restaurant web site I have ever seen. It has the phone number, the address, the opening hours, and the menu all available on the first page. And it loaded in less than a second on my mobile. What an amazing restaurant website. I wish other restaurants would start emulating it.
Yeah, you're right. I am generalising and cynically caricaturing; though a fair bit of that stuff does go on. The current system of self-regulation is sorely in need of reform and legislation, but those tasked with legislating are the ones who benefit from the current system.

I have a lot of respect for the lads and ladies at the GDS. They're doing some sterling work.
AMD Unveils New G-Series Embedded SKUs Using Excavator and Jaguar+ CPU Cores
> You also often have injection-molded parts (e.g., the transducer handle itself) that are expensive to produce (the molds for the injection molding machine are done with 3D solid modeling tools, then CNC machined from steel, etc.

Just to point out injection molding, 3D solid modelling, and CNC machining don't have to be super expensive these days.

Large volumes, and especially high end stuff... sure that takes a lot of up-front cost. But for smaller volumes (eg prototyping, short run) the costs are very reasonable now.

It seems due to continuing development of Open Source hardware and software in these fields, which created good virtous cycles for them. Hopefully this continues... :)

Note - saying the above as someone who's into 3D solid modelling and CNC machining already. Haven't gotten into injection molding yet, but it's on my personal ToDo list for not far off. :D
Good move. I've been looking for a security-focused registrar. Will CloudFlare Registrar open its doors outside of an Enterprise plan?
Vaporizers and Vaporizer Accessories
I feel like the network needs random data. Perhaps random recombinations of a larger training set. It would lower the accuracy of the network, but be more resilient against these sorts of attacks. Sort of like sort algorithms that include randomness.
Instagram’s Cracking Down on Weed, but These Apps Love Pot
3) Work remotely from Detroit
How to Initialize Database with Values in SQLAlchemy After Database Creation
I wonder when there will be headers like "homeownership is unsustainable".
In the long run anything that moves in DC is way less reliable than systems without moving parts. On the top of that, these systems also need more energy to maintain the movement. If you increase the size than you need better materials to keep up with the increased mechanical load. I bet by 2020 we are going to have better ways of storing large amount of data than a spinning disk. The new optical drive would be a good candidate for some use cases, mostly for archiving though:

http://www.sciencealert.com/this-new-5d-data-storage-disc-ca...

For continuous read/write workloads SSDs are the best for many reasons (energy efficiency, latency, IO bandwidth) and I think the world is moving that direction to replace spinning disks with these. I am hoping to see a bump in the SSD capacity as well. We are here now:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/221303-the-worlds-bigge...
Let's not forget that because terrorism is ambiguous, our own government can create mock attacks and blame them on 3rd parties. Furthering their own agendas. Invoking fear and loathing in the citizens.
Indian Railway Budget 2016
Microsoft's translation API has 1 million characters/month free version for text to speech with male/female voice.

It is good enough quality and a good start for those who can not afford paying for Google's API.
I got a bad feeling when the simplest, most obvious, clearest solution that solved the problem was rejected. Isn't that what Python is all about?
The title should have "in America" added, as it is entirely US specific.
I think there's an important distinction between firewalls for client security and firewalls for server security.
Don't tell Lenin: making money from communist nostalgia
Also, an interesting observation: a "computer programmer" (presumably with median income) will be able to afford 100% of homes in Detroit! Each one of them!
By default you can't. You have to install an app on your OS X that Google makes, then it opens a file browser that lets you drag and drop files out/in of your phone. It's a pain.
>Total "PC" units are shrinking

Yeah? Care to back this up with some data? Because I'm looking at a very expensive market research report which disagrees. Sales of new PCs are down, because people don't need a new computer every 2 years. This doesn't mean total PCs in usage are down.
" computer that can run a MHz frequency transducer is easy and cheap these days, e.g. a raspberry pi’s GPIO pins can run that frequency."

Yeah, but actually you need an ADC that runs at MHz frequencies and a frontend amplifier to capture the signal and put it into the ADC

Definitely this falls into the "not expensive" category, but not in the "trivially cheap" one
Ubuntu shows off a hybrid handset
You should avoid to repeat stupid comments. JS was invented in 1995 (and the last version in 2015), C# was made in 2000, so 5 years after.
WW3 RUSSIA SENDS 7,000 CRACK TROOPS TO ARMENIA AND STRING OF JETS
Have you looked at Elixir?
It's indeed not new at least for some markers it was known to be unreliable for a (relatively) long time: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9365861
Kafka Producer Latency with Large Topic Counts
Foxconn Bailout of Sharp Throws into Doubt Solar Future
You could also say if you don't want people photographing your genitals, don't use a third-party restroom or dressing room or tanning salon. The expectation of privacy really has (or should have) nothing to do with the existence of someone's ability to violate that privacy.
Google Fiber Is Coming to Certain Areas of San Francisco
It's 2016 and Hacker News, this very site, works fine w/o JS (except for search). That's how I'm using it right now. That's how I've always used it.

I can access most of the sites I routinely visit without JS. E.g. The New York Times works better w/o JS because it doesn't block articles or count how many I've read.

And I don't really care if you you will or will not try to hack me if I visit your site with JS on. There are countless other sites who will try exactly that, so why shouldn't my default be "NO"? And if it's not the sites themselves, it's the shitty ad networks they all use; I don't trust those at all.

IMO it's the epitome of hipster arrogance to display nothing useful to people w/o JS.
Zarabianie przez internet
my short list between Amazon SES and SendGrid, please let me know your suggestions and why?
HP meets the Street's expectations in its first quarterly earnings
Making GitLab Faster
Aristotle (384-322 BC) already advises us to be cautious when applying pure mathematical averages to human daily life:

By the mean of a thing I denote a point equally distant from either extreme, which is one and the same for everybody; by the mean relative to us, that amount which is neither too much nor too little, and this is not one and the same for everybody. For example, let 10 be many and 2 few; then one takes the mean with respect to the thing if one takes 6; since 10-6 = 6-2, and this is the mean according to arithmetical proportion [progression]. But we cannot arrive by this method at the mean relative to us. Suppose that 10 lb. of food is a large ration for anybody and 2 lb. a small one: it does not follow that a trainer will prescribe 6 lb., for perhaps even this will be a large portion, or a small one, for the particular athlete who is to receive it; it is a small portion for Milo, but a large one for a man just beginning to go in for athletics.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Let's hack on the OCaml in Facebook's flow, full steps included
Terrafugia’s flying car will be a reality by 2018
Show HN: Slize, 7 seconds random videochat to meet and laugh. now in beta
Animated icons with mo.js
Clearing Google's hurdle, Brave's ad-blocking browser arrives
AddThis – Get more like, shares and follows with smart website tools
Why was this downvoted? The parent comment clearly shows a lack of familiarity with statistics.
UK Government Report Finds UK Best for FinTech (YMMV)
BMW are sending their software updates unencrypted
With his accent, it is the same in Swedish. Combined with the song playing way too much in commercial radio, it created some resentment. Someone on a festival had a sign saying "You have a boat up your ass".
"(San Jose, for the purposes of the study, was defined as the San Jose commuting zone, which includes the counties of Santa Clara, Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz.)"

That's like defining "New York City" as the five boroughs plus all of New Jersey, West Virginia, and central Pennsylvania. It's a meaningless mishmash of a definition.
San Francisco Is Strategically the Worst Place to Barricade, Techbros
Real Estate is the official state religion of California, and Prop 13 is our gospel. God willing, if we all just lock arms and make sure nothing new ever gets built, we can all enjoy the free money that comes from our artificially-limited housing supply, at least for those lucky enough to have gotten in early. (Everyone else can go pound sand.)

And the best part? The press will willingly write article after article snidely implying that it's all the fault of the young tech workers who have the audacity to move here in hopes of having a career. No one will ever mention that it's actually the fat bloated homeowners who are the cause of it all.
Their vague definition of "San Jose" makes for strange stats -- San Jose proper has rent control.
Perhaps "infeasible" is a better word: "possible, but it would take about 300 years."
So what are the odds that this is just an act, whether Apple knows about it or not?
Why a Blog Is Such an Important Part of Your Site
Take it easy, I made my point in the first line.
> You don't "have" any personal liberties. You are not born with rights, you are gifted them by a benevolent society. That society can easily lose its benevolence, and take your rights away, and there is absolutely nothing you'd be able to do about it.

Certainly society is a secondary concept to any strictly individual notion (just formatively speaking) - of course one starts at a point where others have already built up what is currently the case, but certainly that's not saying anything about rights being 'gifted' to an individual - only that there is a threat of violence against individuals by society for all matters not included in said 'rights'.

You're free to play with definitions as you want - but it would help if you had rather spent that time on a clear argument then on statements such as these:

> You might hold a differing view, but the fact is, reality works as I've described.
They also have apps for smartphones and the like, and it's actually extremely popular!

The quality of the news reporting on Dutch teletext has always been great, that's one of the key things. No bias, no bullshit, no unrelated stock photos. Just the facts, and very quickly.

In 2006, the random killing of an 8-year old boy was in the news a lot. When his murderer was convicted, Teletekst chose to show the news at the top of page 101, in CAPITALS... and immediately the whole national debate shifted to that use of capitals, which was obviously outrageously sensationalistic. Use of capitals for national disasters, OK, but merely this...
I don't know, I don't really pay attention to the details of what's going on at Dreamhost... I haven't read anything weird in their monthly newsletter, either.

There are parts I like and parts I dislike about the Dreamhost backend. The email stuff is really clunky. The other stuff isn't great, either, tbh. I like how easy it is to upgrade to PHP 7, though...

Incidentally, I think I was using around 20 TB of bandwidth a month when Dreamhost "subtly" started hinting that I should move on from their $8/mo shared hosting.
Extended interview with Tim Cook on Apple/FBI case [video]
For 100TB disks to make sense the read/write speed would have to improve considerably, otherwise the disk will be useless other than for cold storage. I haven't really seen spinning disks speed improving much. It would take weeks to rebuild an array of 100TB disks at the current speed.
In about 4+ years using Softlayer, I didn't have a single problem with them. The bill at the end of the month was reasonable for the amount of servers and traffic, and even one time where an errant worker on our app generated terabytes of wasted bandwidth and our bill for that topped our monthly one, they figured out a way to make it go away by pooling out bandwidth from all the servers together. They could have easily forced us to pay it. I guess its all down to personal experiences, and mine was great.
Any idea on pricing?
Tried with Romanian, got a bunch of random words .. about 50% right, the resulting text is totally unintelligible.
I was expecting a lot more accuracy.. Apple's built-in dictation does way better than this.
I think its time for consumers to demand the ability to run open source operating systems on their devices! All consumer routers should have open device drivers. Right now its a lot of closed firmware from both router makers and the wireless radio chip manufacturers that prevents that. There is very few 802.11ac devices that is well supported by OpenWRT because of closed drivers and firmware.

Lets face it, the manufacturer are not that interested in supporting the operating system of your device after a few years. Device manufacturers profit from selling you new devices not maintaining old devices. Throwing a perfect working hardware device just because it has outdated software is bad for the environment and not good when we have global warming. Do we want to have a Wall-E kind of future scenario of the working junk we consume and throw to consume to throw?

This is of course not only consumer routers, all devices that run embedded software that the manufacturer stops caring for are in danger of getting hacked. If they can be hacked they will be hacked - hackers law.

Why does consumer devices have to be that different from a PC? A PC can load any operating system you like on including good open source operating systems.

This is also the same for cell phones, there are lots of Android devices with older releases that are not security updated.
And the bad ais are the easy ones to develop. So "yes"?
What about houses with more than one income?