skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Respectfully, I don't think this is about 'kindness.' This is about BMW, a commercial entity, respecting the legal rights of the property creators as owners. The license agreement is clear, and certain actions must take place if BMW chooses to benefit from use of the software. BMW is free to NOT use the software if they feel these restrictions are too severe.

Or am I missing something?
Getting started with OAuth2 in Go
This is a better product than the original. They added one of the most requested features (audio out) and didn't remove anything important (unless you don't have a better plug-in speaker system).

The biggest oversight is now the fact that it can't work together with an existing Echo: Amazon is making us order these _using_ an Echo... but the two devices don't communicate at all and require individual wake words. I wanted this as an added mic for my existing system, not as a new independent system.

Big step in the right direction though.
rkt isn't built around systemd. It does use it internally and integrates well with it.

Inside of rkt there is an internal logical separation between the tool that sets up the container filesystems and the one that executes them. We call those things stages[1].

Now inside of rkt we have a few different "stage1" options today:

- systemd: this means that your container has a real init system

- clear containers: execute the container inside of a virtual machine with lkvm.[2]

- direct execution w/ fly: no init system is involved for special privileged containers.[3]

If someone wanted to contribute a stage1 that used a different init system that would be great. But, today systemd works fine and is generally an implementation detail. We also get some bonuses by using systemd on systemd systems like machinectl integration, and journald integration.

Also, I should note that rkt should work on non-systemd systems as well. Again, because, systemd is an internal detail.

[1] https://coreos.com/rkt/docs/latest/devel/architecture.html#s...
[2] https://coreos.com/blog/rkt-0.8-with-new-vm-support/
[3] https://coreos.com/blog/rkt-0.15.0-introduces-rkt-fly.html
New Research on Startup Growth
I really liked how this was done in the movie 'Her.' There's something especially nice about only having your attention distracted audibly and not visually, especially in public.

I wonder if the smartphone age will go away as quickly as it came. I picture a world where we just have smart wearables like a watch which has a tiny visual interface, but a powerful audio one (speaker, earpiece, put watch up to ear, etc). It seems a lot less intrusive. I imagine as we get better with AI and voice recognition, it'll be as practical as a phone. What I'm able to do with Google Now on my watch is fairly impressive today. We already have the technology to understand things in context like "Navigate to Katz's deli" brings up Google Maps to the deli as opposed to a google search results page about navigating to a cat themed deli, which was the status quo not too long ago with voice search.

I imagine carrying around this big selfie/facebook machine around, constantly charging it, whipping it out all the time, etc will be pretty gauche if wearable-only solutions become competitive.
It's not unprecedented. It's obviously more complex but it is well understood.

Something cool: there's a number of dual crane heavy lift vessels, such as the Thialf which has an insane combined lifting capacity of 14,200mt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSCV_Thialf
Your post has good technical information, but the attitude is not helpful. Please do not scold people for having less knowledge than you. It is not welcoming.
They do have something called Alexa Voice Services (AVS), which provides the underlying technology. You could take advantage of that and know that you are only sending along data when you want to.
IBM sues Groupon for patent infringement (including from Prodigy online service)
One does not feature a good speaker and is intended to connect to your existing speaker system. The other is portable.
I agree with this entirely. I've been waiting patiently for a way to add microphone distance to my Echo and this is perfect for that... except it doesn't work that way.

I am very much hoping they fix it in the future and add a software layer to combine/route commands with one single wake word.
It's kind of interesting that almost all of the top projects are programming tools. Programmers building better programming tools to help build better programming tools. I wonder what nice things we could have if we diverted half of that effort into end-user projects with the tools we've already got.
I think when we were kids we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with the outside world via the internet in order to perform its function.

If all of "Alexa" was included in a disconnected local database I bet it would still be as appealing.

Rosie on the Jetsons didn't have to "phone home".
The comment I was writing turned into a blog post, so I'll just post the links. IMHO these are trending towards solving many of the problems faced by alternative energy generation and storage:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/04/465568055/...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-storage-startup-lightsail...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel–iron_battery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium–sulfur_battery

https://www.littleboxchallenge.com

https://www.littleboxchallenge.com/pdf/finalists/56568-Tech.... <- PDF
Super interesting. My only concern is that with traditional braille, it's still printed on paper, and thus easily recycled. If you're creating building and/or city maps that changes regularly... it's not super feasible to keep printing new ones, even if the data is stored digitally and therefore easy to update. Very exciting stuff though.
> I have 3 separate devices nearby that are Google Now voice activated (the newer devices support this even if the screen is off), and they will sometimes trigger at the same time accidentally.

> Since the processing is cloud based, and they know my identity,

Interesting, so everything said in that room gets processed and potentially sent to Google for indefinite storage? What a 1984-style luxury.
Don't forget the harried parent of a child with low impulse control.

These things would be a lot less "Big Brother" for me if I had a mic key in my pocket that would only turn the mic on when I squeezed it.
From idea to an MVP with over 300 beta testers in 1 week – part 1
That seems weird to me. High-minded principles about keeping weapons out of space, or hypotheticals about crazy crewmembers, seem to pale in comparison to the potential of landing in the wilderness and encountering a pack of wolves or worse. Off-course landings have happened several times before, and while I don't think any of them encountered hostile wildlife, it seems like a serious possibility.
Built in speaker is for alarms, not media, I think.
Yes, but GUIs have two or three dimensions available (up/down, left/right, time) whereas voice just has the one (time). We humans can also full-duplex GUIs much more easily than voice-based interface. And GUIs at least can be hooked up to full-powered grammar-based interfaces whereas voice, somewhat ironically considering the nature of human communication, has more trouble with it.

(I'd suggest this is actually a combination of the still-non-trivial nature of NLP, combined with a lack of feedback, combined with the fact that giving instructions is quite hard. Humans overestimate human language's ability to communicate clear directions, as anyone who has done tech support over a phone understands.)
But it's limited to 3 words which is weird. I'd rather three "Office, order socks" than try to remember that the one in my office goes by "Amazon".
This article goes on about Trader Joe's "cousin" Aldi USA, seemingly misunderstanding that the two companies do not share a parent.
This is probably a function of the amount of bad news you've read over the years about people getting exploited, taken advantage of, spied on, etc. When you're a kid it doesn't even really seem like a thing.
When I hit Wired and their ad-block detection I do a select all, copy and paste into a text editor... wonder how long it will take them to block this work-around!
How old are your kids? Share the list pretty please!
Since it told me "yes" (because the weather is nice?), I still kinda think that's what it is.
The Cunning, Unprecedented Hack of Ukraine’s Power Grid
Schmidt is a technocrat-for-hire. He is able to effectively lead and represent an organization's views. However his worldview is out of the industrial age. He was largely responsible for building Alphabet, a modern IT conglomerate built on the same principles as any conglomerate. We need to demand more from our government than competent technocrats.

I would not say Schmidt is corrupt, he is acting fully in the interest of his firm or organization. Like a defense attorney helping a murderer avoid jail his actions are broadly ethical, but if you consider in aggregate all of the betrayals of "don't be evil" that Google suffered under his command, it's clear that he is not in any sense a leader in any area where values or principles are important.

Net Neutrality is a perfect example of an issue where Google has a big stake in a particular outcome, and there is nothing idealistic or principled about its advocacy of one side. This is fine as an aspect of the incentives of capitalism, but the scary part is that so many people bought into the propaganda and did not see Google's true motivation.
Connecting them will be as simple as a future software update. Amazon's challenge right now is to get the hardware in place before its competitors (Nest, Apple) - and it seems to be pressing hard to get a wide range of devices in every room of the house.
Or they can move to one of the BSDs and use jails which are much more stable, secure, and tested than linux containers.
MSR page for the video would be here: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=262... , but they hide the link to the paper surprisingly well :/ (bottom right)

So yeah, your link makes more sense than I assumed, sorry.
Using VROps to Understand Your HP Server Landscapes
I mostly agree with you, but I actually think the original poster was incorrect in calling such low-level details "basic computer science" concepts. They are basic systems programming concepts. One can know a lot of computer science without knowing such things - you can probably find computer science professors who do strictly theoretical work that wouldn't know these details well enough to explain it.
Do you share a parent with your cousin?
A car is not an investment. I lease a new car every 3 years as a daily driver because the opportunity cost of dealing with maintenance and other issues is so high.

I have no ownership, it is an expense just like gas and insurance. I am buying the ability to get around freely and not indebting myself as I would with a purchase. At the end of 3 years I can simply walk away.

You can get a lease for a silly small amount of money if you play your cards right. Check out leasehackr.com . Right now I could walk into a Ford dealer and walk out with a Ford Fusion for $147/month. Or if I don't want to deal with gas I could get a Fiat 500e for $99/month. I spend more on coffee than that!
>What a 1984-style luxury

exactly why I think none of this is worth it (echo, google now, siri, smart tvs etc) - especially given the current applications of the 3rd party doctrine - you are giving up the right to privacy for everything that is said in your home.
The Binary Tree City
The specific update here is just a delta update, and doesn't contain the entire firmware. But it does contain shared libraries built for running on a linux system, so it stands to reason there's linux kernel running somewhere there.

(On that note - have someone sent a similar request to Tesla - they've at least semi-officially said they're running Linux)
>“The variety is too much to take on for the machines,” said Schaefer, who’s pushing to reduce the hours needed to produce a car to 30 from 61 in 2005. “They can’t work with all the different options and keep pace with changes.”

it sounds like they just have bad software

it's not like there are random variations or an uncontrolled environment.

in the end there's still only a finite menu of options.
don't they just need better software for combining the options?

like... it costs more to program the routines than to train and employ people to do the job?
While voice assistants are likely to become a big industry, I don't see such a limited solution as Alexa stealing any large spotlight. They are too heavily locked down to be able to gain any traction in the big picture.
>It's also less accessible.

For whom? To the blind this would be a godsend. From a practical medical perspective, audio is superior because we have decades of experience with effective ear implants to help the hard of hearing and the deaf, but the visual equivalent still eludes us.
When you're a kid, you generally assume people around you are all wonderful.

... Then you gain life experience.

/75% jokingly
> Allow me to be pedantic and say it is that being fully immersed in the context of the movie that really matters.

I hope to not be a super pedantic ass for pointing out that the 'immersive' media in films is the audio, not the visual components.
I've always been skeptical of the "Paradox of Choice". I'm not saying it's bunk, but I don't see it in my own life. My only problem when choosing, is when there is no list of differences easily available for the choice I have to make. I wish I could apply an "online shopping filter" to real-world situations: "give me mac and cheese" "OK, now, only ones with white cheddar" "remove anything made by kraft", etc.

I guess you could say it's an interface issue.
Couldn't legally the FBI get a court oder to be able to listen in on conversions in a room that has one of these? They already do that with car assistance services. [1]

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/court-to-fbi-no-spying-on-in-car-co...
Yeah! That would be a great Show HN.
It's also a bit annoying that the Android Wear version of Now doesn't work the same as the regular Android version. For example, the full-sized one seems much more flexible with wording, and supports listening in several languages at once, while Wear is limited to one language.
I was a Marine in Iraq from 06-09. We constantly built plans for the inevitable demise of this dam. Mostly just estimates of how screwed people would be.

I'm surprised it's not blown yet, I was constantly worried someone would bomb it somehow, but 7 years later, it's still standing, so I'm unsure about any estimates given now - the Iraqis were fairly liberal in their estimates in 2006 (it'll fall by 2007) and the same predictions followed every year. Of course, they wanted vast quantities of money to fix it (and skim off the top for themselves) so there was some bias.

Check out the Haditha Dam too. Another large body of water held back by aging infrastructure further destroyed by looters who dismantled huge pieces of machinery to sell as scrap for $0.05/lb.
It's painful to have it read back answers. The weather, for example, takes one quick glance on my phone but forever for Alexa to read.
The "play some good 60s rock" example isn't a VUI breakdown, it's a functionality gap in the backend. One that will probably be fixed pretty quickly, given the way things are headed.

A VUI breakdown would be inability to understand accents, or non-responsiveness to commands. As a user input, Alexa is pretty well buttoned up.
The single greatest feature of Echo that I use, (and too few others use) is turning on my Phillips Hue lights. You can give each individual light a name, as well as groups of lights their own name. Very convenient to turn on / off lights from anywhere in range of the mic.

I use it everyday multiple times a day. If anyone finds network connected lights useful, then they'll find controlling them through Echo doubly useful as it obviates the need to pick up your smartphone.
There's no rules, but for me it depends how you pronounce it, if you say Fitts then it's Fitts', if you say Fitts-es it's Fitts's
Salihin Kondoker's brief, husband of one of the San Bernardino victims, is in there. Worth a quick read.
Indeed. This was the big lesson from the MS Antitrust lawsuit. In comparison to the kind of entrenched, wasteful lobbying going on today, Microsoft in its heyday was naively pursuing market dominance and utterly overlooked the need to cozy up to officials.
So many indignant comments here by people who've surely never seen how large construction projects work in third world countries.

Try to keep in mind that the average civil engineer has the same amount of integrity as you do. Maybe more because lives are at stake. How construction projects get green lit in third world countries often follows an unorthodox set of practices far removed from the engineers who are told to "just make it work". Sound familiar?
Asking nicely why he did that is not an option? Without assuming malice, which you seem to do. Might just have refunded to make the customer happy, which isn't unheard of.
The Vive version? Absolutely not. I have a Vive Pre--before that the developer kit--and I've seen people new to VR spend over an hour straight in Tilt Brush. My Steam account shows 10+ hours logged.

I'm assuming you're either referring to the Google Cardboard version (which I haven't tried), or just trolling...
All of this is very well known and written much about in books, blogs, talks, etc. already...
Why the systemd hate? Because it's a big monolithic project that takes over your system? You do realize that Docker is much more monolithic and opinionated than systemd, right?
Almost. More specifically, we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with a corporation that wants our info to make (more) money. The government option doesn't sound any better, either.

I think they are rather creepy, because it's so obvious there is (or, could be) a hidden agenda.
I think they were trying to say that the OSS community at this point in time doesn't need BMW to be "kind" and use OSS to help OSS gain popularity. Especially not if they can't be bothered to comply with licenses.
I agree with you on this, but generally they'd have an easier job of it if they worked as a connected mesh rather than independent controllers. I can't say for certain but it doesn't seem like the added engineering time would be that much greater.
Absolutely. It's just like Apple. They don't own a single factory, so they can't actually make anything.

In reality, there are contract food manufacturers in the same way that Foxconn is a contract phone manufacturer:

http://www.contractmfgdirectory.com/

I don't know how much of Trader Joe's stuff is contract manufacturing to TJs specifications versus TJs selecting already existing products and buying more of the same. My guess is that it's mostly existing products. But their house wine is custom made for them, so it's definitely not all commodity. And given the scale they work at, I'm sure the line's a bit blurry; a manufacturer who is nominally making a particular thing can certainly afford to make changes to get TJ's business.

Personally, I don't care much how much they "really" make. Trader Joe's is valuable to me mainly because of their editorial judgement. In a normal supermarket, the supermarket is selling a bunch of stuff of unknown quality. Trader Joe's is basically vouching for everything. As a bonus, I don't have to pay for a lot of irritating marketing.

And best of all for me, their store is filled with smart, effective staff. At Safeway, I can spend 10 minutes of a 20-minute visit wandering around trying to find things. If I can find a staff member to ask, they often won't know any better than me. At Trader Joe's, it's just the opposite; somebody's always around, and they can answer almost any question I throw at them.
My problem with the argument that menu bars should be at the top is when you have to return the pointer to where you are. Thus I prefer only using context type menus for everything, 0 movement of the mouse is infinitely better anyway. And you save screen space.
Sure, but the difference is that it's (almost) always obvious what actions are possible in a GUI. With voice interfaces you're back to trial-and-error.
High risk of bankruptcy for one-third of oil firms: Deloitte
I find this era as fascinating as horrifying. It's surreal dreamy and timeless yet inhuman at the same time.

ps: some scenes of Total Recall were filmed in a military school in Mexico which such design. As a kid not knowing that school, it made 30% of the realism of that movie.
Without knowing details, it's hard to say, but my first thought is that support person x asked if the Custer received the purchase, not if a refund should be given.

Maybe the support team has training/instructions to always refund but maybe note that a user is potentially scamming. That way they can't strike twice. Or maybe they give different responses based on receipt.

I wouldn't assume they are trying to waste your time or disrespect you, but if you're curious about standard practices ask your boss if they know the procedure.
> it's the antenna covers that explode, not necessarily the antennae themselves.

Ah, yes, that explains it. Thanks for the observation.
Nest thermostats can now be controlled with Amazon Alexa
Big-O Algorithm Complexity Cheat Sheet
Thanks for finding that. I literally searched the source of the blog article for the video src url and then searched the PDF hoping to find some match pointing to a more authentic source.
Mondo raised 1M in just 96 seconds
The great big awesome amazing unmissable Medium lifehack review
"To understand his tantrum one must understand the kinship he feels with the great men of history, with history itself. Lack of reverence for an image of Copernicus might suggest a lack of reverence for Saddam."

From : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/tales-of...

Dictators are violent, not stupid. They understand risks, and make decisions like any other leader.
The Long Journey Across Technoslavia
The most ridiculous donuts we've ever seen
Oh. Another one is Norton's Programmer's Guide to the IBMPC. Finally, one other book is Brown & Kyle's PC Interrupts.

I sold a shareware DOS file management program written in assembler (the file was about 30kb) for a number of years which is why I have all this obscure stuff :-)
Expensive Things That Are Worth Investing in for Startups
The enthusiastic kid would probably get distracted and discouraged when X can not do "What I really want, like Ironman." While the "cranky" old man has been mis-characterized as "cranky" because "cranky" is often confused with wisdom and experience.
I think that's simply an artifact of the fact that client projects using these open source projects are often not themselves open sourced, or hosted on GitHub.
Amazon Tap: Alexa-Enabled Portable Bluetooth Speaker
I think the main problem with voice interfaces is that it's not discoverable. You need a good understanding of what the system can and cannot do, its current state etc before even speaking.

CLI has the same issue, but at least you can man-xxx, which I imagine works a lot better in text than it does in audio.
Amazon.com: Echo Dot
About as realistically as the National Mall in Fallout 3, that is, smaller in scale and very simplified.
Google's projects for new gTLDs
This doesn't really have anything to do with audiophiles. Technics 1200s are notorious for DJing, not high quality audio playback. Nobody should purchase a direct drive turn table if they only care about audio quality.
Watch Tiny Neural Nets Learn
Lightbot. My kids liked the free version.
Yeah, thats my current plan of attack, but getting the sender to use the service has been a trial. They're not too keen on non-traditional money transfers.