skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Would you be interested in an open-source Amazon Echo?
Hey HN,

A recent Amazon Echo question got a lot of attention here. I've considered developing Alexa Skills, but I don't like that Amazon needs to approve your Skill in order to add it into the Alexa platform for general consumption. One of the blockers here is that if you try to build an integration with a device without that brand's permission, it could be an infringement issue.

I was thinking I'd use Wit.ai to build open integrations for all or most home automation devices with open APIs. Users could then use the software in DIY projects with something like a Raspberry Pi and their own server.

How much interest is there for this?
Yes, exactly, and that kind of analytical approach (i.e.: identify specific steps to "solve problem") is less common than some people, especially the kind of analytical people who comment on HN, think.

Further, as commenters above have said, making an app a part of your problem solution is an even narrower funnel. Some people might just go straight to "make some new friends", "join a club", "get involved politically", or whatever.
I say

>While they've been profitable in the PC space (laptops/desktops) to call them successful is a bit of stretch.

You say

>Apple's margins are rumoured to be a large multiple of that of other laptop makers.

So we agree they're profitable but you are simply arguing they are so more profitable their volumes don't matter.

So do they? If we want to break out numbers [1] from March 2016 quarterly report. Mac (Laptops/PC's) accounts for $12.5bil Net Sales, which is 9.4% of quarterly sales totally <11 million units.

The funny thing about this is their Services category (iCloud, iTunes, App Store, Apple Health Kit) has (more then) doubled in 6 months and its now ~$3bil of Net Sales of their Mac category. At current growth rate's it'll eclipse it sometimes this year.

The Mac sector is quickly becoming the lowest selling division of the company. Currently only under performed by the Other category (Beats, AppleTV, AppleWatch, Cables, WatchStraps, Keyboards, Mice, etc., etc.). This is what I mean by surviving not thriving. The division is a very small corner of the company, and getting smaller.

[1] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/2074014299x0x888...
There is also the Small-Business Administration, which can fast-track certain well-known types of companies. As an example: say you were a woman who had served time in the military and are trying to setup a hair salon. There are two incentive programs for your demographic specifically, and an additional set of resources for your business specifically. You'd basically get an "account manager" from the SBA who has setup several of these before, such that the experience is practically turnkey and requires very little of your own money.

Now, if you're trying to do something really risky like make a smartphone app, no, you're probably not going to get anywhere with the SBA. They aren't VCs making bets on long-shots. But they are more willing than a bank to work with you and help you get set up.
I think firefox used to have a feature where when you searched and the search found/highlighted the item, if it was a url, pressing enter or space would follow the url. I really miss that feature.
> Marijuana doesn't significantly impair reflexes (as generations of musicians have shown).

What reflexes do you need while playing an instrument?
Kodak is the perfect example. They managed to collect for every single picture you took, between the film, processing, and printing. There's no revenue stream in digital that had the potential to replace it, so they were doomed from the start. They certainly did see it coming.
A quote I find useful - unlike most quotes - is "Don't compare your inside to everyone else's outside."

In my 20s I knew people who seemed to have it together.

When I was in my 30s and 40s almost all of them lost the plot in various ways, with an assortment of expensively broken relationships, bankruptcies, and even a few unexplained and unexpected deaths.

Doing what makes you happy is so much better than doing what you think other people may think should make you happy.
> Australia is expensive

How so? Wolfram Alpha puts Sydney at ~1.2x the cost of living of LA: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=move+from+Los+Angeles+t...

Given that our GDP per capita is 1.25x US I think that we're about even. Also as someone moving from Melbourne to the SF Bay, there are areas within each country that are very far apart. Melbourne is far cheaper than the SF bay.
>> low-margin x86 would cannibalize high-margin x86

What happens when low-margin ARM cannibalizes high-margin x86?
Reduction in accidents and auto makers taking responsibility for accidents.

http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/volvo-liability-self-driving-c...
Fix the Grid with a Rock-Filled Train on a Hill
Protocol there would be to make sure you have consent before dancing sexually aggressively with someone.

That attractive folks get mostly a free pass to circumvent that doesn't change the protocol.
FYI, the past-tense of the verb "lead" is "led", not its homophone noun "lead".
ECB Has Gained Enormous Power, Says Berlin΄s Economic Advisor
Thee's now finally a dedicated OS X Reddit client
Reference counting pauses can actually be worse. Reference counting and tracing are duals, and only collectors that exploit properties of both avoid the worst case complexity of each. Alone they each have just as bad worst cases, just in dual scenarios.
> A measure that caused all sorts of problems since a bunch of companies also manipulated their Earnings

Just to be clear. EBITDA itself is not the problem, but rather the calculation companies themselves use to derive it. EBITDA is generally regarded as a very good metric to value a company (with a multiple of course). Any smart investor who gives a damn about their private company investment sniff shady EBITDA numbers out pretty quickly. The problem is, very few VCs actually go through this scrutiny or have incentives to provide a true indication of EBITDA. On the other hand, PE firms, who take a large stake in a business, typically do.
Another project Google with kill in 6 months.
You think I haven't tried using Haskell on my platform? It isn't supported and it doesn't work. So you misrepresented things.

I mean why would my first post be "Boy I wish I could use Haskell on my platform" if... I could use Haskell on my platform?

Now I could put a ton of effort into it... for each platform... but I don't have that kind of time to maintain Haskell for N platforms.

It would be much easier to compile via portable C or C++ that was human readable. But I would expect, since Haskell has lazy evaluation and a GC, that there is almost no way to map to readable C or C++. Thunks flying around, continuations, ...
Why should one need to buy a liability insurance policy on a self-driving car?

What driver exactly am I insuring?
The very second sentence of the article reads:

"And after adjusting for age, gender, race and alcohol use, drivers who tested positive for marijuana were no more likely to crash than who had not used any drugs or alcohol prior to driving."

Edit: Just in case in the future anyone comes across my comment out of context of this thread, I'd like to add that without seeing further research I'm not personally convinced by that statement.
Learn Redux
I suppose there are a couple of ways to view this:

- The DAO is a tool for people to make decisions collectively, by pooling their resources, voting on activities, and having Ethereum take care of trust issues. This is what you've described.

- Alternatively, The DAO could be described as similar to a computer virus: it tries to survive by spreading into as many systems as possible, using their computational resources to propagate itself further; but crucially its behaviour is completely determined by its code, rather than acting as an interpreter for centrally-issued commands (like, say, a botnet or Seti@Home).

While most computer viruses are parasitic, The DAO could be seen as symbiotic: in return for the resources it uses, it provides the services described above. It could be described as social engineering, like that of the ILOVEYOU virus, although it's not a trick (as far as we know).

In the case of The DAO in particular, the first description probably makes the most sense. However, I'd say Ethereum applications in general are better described by the latter. For example, a gambling application like etheroll could persist completely independently on the network for as long as people are willing to gamble with it, spending part of its commission on resources ("gas").
Another factor is a 600lb patient is going to need a regular does that would kill a 120lb patent. So, from a manufactures perspective it's not obvious what a 'lethal' does is.
really nice, was just looking at trying to use Jupyter but their JS kernels gave me issues. Being able to use arbitrary packages would be nice, babel transpiling would also be cool.
What a bunch of snake oil.

If you invested or are thinking of investing ask yourself a few simple questions. Who are the Shareholders/Directors/Officers of this corporation? Do you know what state it is incorporated in or going to be incorporated in?

Just a few buzz words. Decentralized? No shit, any corporation with more than one shareholder is decentralized. Smart contracts? Defined as a self enforcing contract, guess what they don't exist. Autonomous? I'd like to see how this code is independently filing annual reports and preparing taxes sending out K-1's to its shareholders autonomously, because that alone would be an enterprise solution every single corporation in the US would pay top dollar for, because DAO just singlehandedly replaced corporate compliance lawyers and CPAs with code.

Still not convinced and eager to get in on this? Then why not cut out the middle man? Create your own "DAO" as an Investment Club (Corp or LLC) the only issue is you will be capped at 100 members/voters/token holders and $25M in investment. But you will be able to tell people your created your own decentralized corporation every bit as autonomous as DAO, complete with 100 tokens people can buy to become a member/shareholder and use to vote on investment opportunities presented by the DAO or members/shareholders of the DAO.
Virtues of Avoiding Parsing or Basing Logic on ToString() Result
you know, i would have thought investors on that level were doing their homework too, but look at Theranos... raised a unicorn level valuation without ever really proving their product worked at all. Isnt Palantir in trouble too?
Related: ECB's economic hitmen http://bit.ly/1IXS23K
Silicon Valley: Love it or hate it, equity crowdfunding is here. Embrace it
Wow- This must be hard for Buffett to explain to Bill Gates- his close friend. Did he ever invest in Microsoft?
The fact that so many books still name Pierro Scaruffi “the greatest or most significant or most influential” copypasta ever only tells you how far trolling still is from becoming a serious art. OC critics have long recognized that the greatest original producers of all times are reddit and memebase, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Gore critics rank the highly controversial Gorespammer over more notable gore sites who were highly popular in boards around the web. Trolling critics are still blinded by commercial success: Scaruffi angered than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore he must have been the greatest. OC critics grow up listening to a lot of original content of the past, Gore critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Trolling critics are often totally ignorant of the copypasta of the past, they barely know the best material. No wonder they will think that Scaruffi did anything worth of being saved.
I was a daily pot smoker for about three years (ages 15-18). My consumption gradually decreased over the next four years until I stopped completely. I couldn't say if pot was responsible for any cognitive impairment. I do have a poorer memory than most of my peers. I'd be quicker to blame my poor memory on the multiple concussions I've had over the years than on my pot consumption. Marijuana exacerbated my very introverted personality. It's possible my social development was crippled to some degree. I'm not good with the people.

I do know a few individuals who have smoked pot regularly for decades. I don't see cannabis having had any negative effects on them or their families. They are intelligent, successful people in long term stable relationships.
If by 'bus factor' you mean not noticing a city bus running me over, well I don't plan to do the walking on a city street, but in a park or forest preserve. There's a bunch near me. The chances of being hit by a bus would be borderline non-existent, and I'd expect the view to be fairly translucent by default anyway.

If by 'bus factor' you mean the business term of concentrating too much knowledge in one person and suddenly losing them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor), then that's something the company should already be taking into account anyway.

If by 'bus factor' you mean something regarding a computer system bus, like maybe it's too much info to carry and display portably maybe then you'll have to elaborate.

If by 'bus factor' you mean communication bandwidth or capability between me and these types of devices still being fairly non-existent, that's my reasoning for expecting there will be a microchip or something that allows me to direct any mouse/keyboard movements (or their equivalent) with my thoughts. Because having to gesture hololens style or dictating everything or navigating with a single button on the side of my glasses would suck, yes.

Might want to be a little more specific next time instead of throwing out a term without context.
Right, and they signed that exclusive agreement with AT&T as compensation to allow the iPhone on their network. Before this agreement, mobile phone software in the US had to be approved and provisioned through the carriers.
Recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11683121
>Many forget Intel has acquired a whole bunch of companies over the past few years including McAfee,

They should just fire everyone from that acquisition and close down the whole division. It's nothing more than a huge stain on the rest of the company. It's really sad that the world's largest chipmaker reduced itself to being a malware purveyor.
The fact that they opened the article with the example that they did is absolutely ridiculous, considering there are significantly better examples that didn't even receive their own complete sentence. Contribution Margin is a metric that all VCs should keep an eye on. It is a scalability metric: before CM positivity, you are lose money with every unit sold. After you are CM positive, growing sales will only ever help you. The only mistake the SpoonRocket management made (at least as far as referenced in the article) was trying to expand to new cities before they were CM positive.

The absolutely moronic-bordering-on-Bernie-Madoff example was Instacart. Instacart told Bloomberg in February that it was profitable in its biggest markets and that 40 percent of its volume was profitable. The company later clarified that it meant gross margin profitable, which is usually limited to direct costs such as supplies and delivery labor. Instacart's calculation leaves out other costs, such as customer service, central office salaries, rent, and the cost of acquiring its workers. Instacart also said it is gross margin profitable, on average, across all its markets.

I certainly hope the Bloomberg writers actually clarified (and just made it sound like they were assuming) how Instacart is calculating Gross Margin, because delivery costs are typically only included on the inbound side, which is a cost that Instacart doesn't manage. Outbound delivery costs are very rarely included, and that is Instacart's whole fucking business. It would be like a grocery store claiming profitability as long as you exclude COGS.

In other words, if Instacart is including their delivery costs in their GM calculation, they might have a sustainable business (they'll never be as profitable as their valuation assumes, but at least they could stick around after the VC dries up). If they aren't including delivery costs in their GM calculation, then Instacart is so laughably unprofitable that they don't have a snowball's chance in hell.
> with no real added benefit?

Are you sure?

Edit:

Think study groups, DnD sessions, or other document-collaboration type use cases. Facebook does not make that particularly easy, and how mature is Facebook's enterprise support? Facebook For Work is much less of a sure thing than their personal offerings.

People already use the heck out of Google Docs for collaboration, this provides a bit of formality and structure to that collaboration. Before, Docs sharing was a bit of a Docs + Hangouts + informal process around discussion. Now it's... whatever this does.

I'm excited to see how this works out. I'm using Docs collaboration to help plan a trip I'm going on in a few months, I might try to use this to enhance that collaboration.
Exactly correct. Perhaps your example is a little more relevant than mine.
Yeah, code bloat (vs. CISC) was a common knock against RISC early on, but as cache sizes have ballooned there's pretty much no effective difference at this point.
do you have any links about this manipulation ? thanks
The first thing I'd do is e-mail people who are cancelling and ask them the reason. Upselling current customers doesn't really stop the churn, and a 50% drop rate means there's something seriously wrong. Asking people nicely will get you a lot of answers, especially when there are so many people cancelling.
If a general said something like that today, he'd probably be written about in the newspapers, have a twitter mob after him, and be forced into early retirement. :|
Be careful thinking Apple will keep sellng iphones and ipads. Their expertise and their cash can probably be thrown into a lot of industries with disruptive success (car industry, pharma, space exploration, etc.). Even the name, Apple, does not bind the company to any specific line of product. I think what the investors are betting here is the ability of Apple of coming up with something as big as the ipod-ipad saga in the coming years. I can see risk in this assumption, but I don't believe is 100% going to turn out badly, so far I'd distribute probabilities equally and do a 50/50 that Apple gives the investors 10x in the next 10 years.
Response to “The Hidden Workforce Expanding Tesla’s Factory”
Given the potential and success of Facebook groups [http://alexmuir.com/facebook-is-the-new-excel] Google had to come up with something to compete. Wont be surprised by "I need Spaces invite" all over the internet in coming days but personally wont rush into using it.
There have been leaks from GCHQ on influencing internet forums.

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

What would they gain? Look at the slides, these are not normal people all working in a large circular building. What would Kennedy have gained from the Bay of Pigs crisis had it gone the other way? Group think is it's own force. Those slides are pretty disturbing IMHO as is pretty-much everything I've ever seen out of that org.
I think the idea is great, but only if the ETH can never be withdrawn without the board's consent, much like funding a a corporation where you'd need to be paid a distribution or something, etc. - you don't just withdraw your money after the next VC enters the scene and drives the price up. If the ETH can be withdrawn at any time, then this is no different than a publicly traded stock... which is currently undergoing a pump-and...

As such, I've flagged the post, to avoid contributing to what's turning out to be a free(?) viral marketing campaign.

Am I wrong about the "withdraw" part?
Thinking that your gut makes more optimal decisions than a random process might just be feeding one's ego.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Yup. I just want to bring up the fact that this thing seems more akin to a classical public company, but in many regards is less transparent.

There's the fact that all the code and mechanisms is public, but that's the part that everybody trusts anyway. When you're a shareholder in Apple, the votes are tallied, all relevant information from the board of directors is published, etc. etc. And the SEC forces the company to publicly disclose financial information in the form of 10k, 8k, and publicly announce insider trades.

At the moment: I don't know who the "insiders" of this company are. Maybe one dude has $50 Million USD and effectively controls the entire damn "movement". Or maybe not. Knowing the identities of large shareholders is a BIG DEAL in public companies.

Still, the digital form probably has some advantages. Maybe future companies will find a compromise and manage to exist as digital contracts akin to this DAO? But I don't expect this first version to actually work. Its pretty much a learning experiment, to see what is and isn't possible with technology.

If any lessons are to be learned from Bitcoin: politics will affect this entity eventually. The technology currently serves as a mask to the politics. But politics always rears its ugly head eventually.
Uber and Lyft were not 'banned', they are refusing to follow regulations approved by actual VOTERS. http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2016-04-22/chronicle-end...
The concept of a decentralized organization is cool. The implementation in DAOhub is dangerous to all participants. Both curators and contractors of DAOhub projects risk violating US securities laws if they use the platform to "crowdfund" projects. Participants, as is obvious, risk losing all their contributions, paid into the pockets of "contractors" who may possess voting control over project funds.
I'd agree if there were no codes for READ and WRITE under the ioctl() rubric :)
> What would they gain?

Tech people being more willing to work there, being less opposed to their friends working there, being less likely to tell legislators that GCHQ is an embarrassment to their country or a threat to its values or future freedom.

Greater likelihood of tech companies being willing to cooperate with GCHQ requests or inquiries (whether for counterintelligence or espionage purposes).

Edit: Academic researchers being more willing to take research funding from GCHQ or collaborate with GCHQ on research projects.
I looked into Babel but the standalone package is (comparatively) massive. Could be an optional extension, possibly.

I think it has potential for use as a way to write documentation for JS libraries, so being able to use arbitrary packages is certainly something I'd like to add. :)
Apple is already priced as a low-growth stock (P/E around 10). So if they never do anything more than leverage the brand loyalty of iPhone customers, they'll still fulfill the expectations of their price.

An adoption curve leveling off is a normal thing in business; money can still be made. When did the adoption curves for insurance, paint, homes, jewelry, soft drinks, etc. level off? Long before Berkshire Hathaway came along, but they have done pretty well in all of those of markets.

I think BH has a good chance of getting a return.
I think there are many legitimate concerns about this project, but what you are saying address none of them. In fact your first questions mean you don't understand it.
Please don't submit from just one site, and please don't delete and repost. We remove story submission privileges from accounts that do these things.

Please also don't create masses of obscure throwaway accounts. This forum is a community. Anonymity is fine here, but users should have some kind of consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no community at all, and that would be an entirely different forum.

Please also don't create multiple accounts to vote stories up with. That's a serious violation of HN's rules and we ban accounts that do it.