skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've got this basically figured out. The differentiator is whether their actions engender voluntary cooperation (leaving themselves open to competition) or whether their actions underwrite a quest for singular control over others.

Musk is worrisome because after the innovation honeymoon is over, he could easily end up functioning as a closed-world promulgating autarch - just as Gates and Jobs did.

But Assange and Snowden? Their very popularity is founded on forcing open centralized amalgamations of power. They have localized power and surely an assortment of groupies etc, but these structures simply cannot scale to dominate a medium city, never mind the world.

So even if they are run-of-the-mill psychopaths playing their roles solely for self-advancement, the possible damage they can do is quite limited compared to say any unnamed multinational executive.

Capitalism created a Schelling point for getting useful public goods from self-interested parties. Compared to the prior most-lucrative path of government (likely via revolution), it raised the average amount of control for everyone while constraining the maximum control a winner could obtain. The general belief in free exchange of information advances this cooperation point to even smaller power structures, leaving the supernodes with even less privileged leverage over the rest of us.
>How many passwords do you have to type and licences to accept to do that on your Apple cloud?

No out-of-the-ordinary licenses, I just have to use the find-my app on iOS or my password + the iCloud.com website to locate any of my missing devices (including laptops), and make them play a sound. Apple's internet services are often behind, but I don't think this is a good example here - it just works, the UX is very discover-ably named "find my x", and it's reasonable to require a password for this.

I think we need real competition as consumers. I know I don't want to see Apple's approach of the phone being the product and privacy as a feature being "killed". But I don't think they're in any danger yet.
Google is just trying to get you to switch to their own cloud service - "Say goodbye to those “storage is full” notifications."

It's not a differentiator from the iPhone it's a marketing bite. Not a lot to pull me into this phone either.
Well every other manufacturer has looked to Google (largely) for the sw and built the hw. It's this bundling together of the two that's being presented as unique and is different to every other Android manufacturer.
The pricing has been copied 1:1 from that of the iPhone 7. Whether in USD, CAD, GBP or EUR: exact same figures.
Standardization typically comes 5-10 years after the initial wave of hardware innovation. During the early years, it benefits individual companies to be able to iterate on both the hardware/software quickly. Once hardware stabilizes it's much easier to begin discussing software standardization.
So if I'm understanding this correctly, this is basically a productized Google Cardboard?
Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for US intelligence – sources
Only until they act like bad cab drivers and their average rating drops below 4.2. Then they are unemployed.
Notably, the source for the voice call server is not available as far as I know, and there's no guarantee that the text messaging server is running in an unaltered state on their production servers.
They do, made by Chinese (Xiaomi for example). They don't boast with 12k screens, 32mpix cameras, but are rather simple and perform fine for daily apps, while costing from 120-250€ and sporting expandable storage/2nd SIM and huge battery (3500-4000mAh). They don't perhaps bump the Android version, but basically all phones released in last 2 years will get MIUI 8, with Android monthly security fixes.
The usual sporadic usage of Google now with voice controls, for me, comes from playing music and setting up alarms/reminders. I like waking up in the morning and going "Ok Google, play some music". If I had a more integrated system (right now I just have a Pixel C tablet that I use to listen to music, not the best) with Google Home and the appropriate stuff then I would probably use it more. I also get especially frustrated when I have to repeat my "Ok Google" trigger like 5-6 times before it catches on but I think that might be due to the poor reception + distance of my tablet which is a bit sloppy.
The encoder option -Q<quality> (that's a capital Q, lowercase -q is used to decode a lower quality preview by only reading part of the file) can be used to do lossy encoding, where -Q100 is lossless and -Q0 is usually the most lossy you would want to go. But you can go lower if you want, using a negative number (e.g. -Q-50); there is not really any lower bound.
I wouldn't kick a 500-year lifespan out of my genome, would you?
> You see, cancer was a tiny spot on radar just 50 years ago. Or 100 even more. So the question is - what happened? Have we somehow changed overnight as a spices? No we haven't.

First, variety is the species of life.

Second, the reason cancer wasn't "on the radar" is because we didn't know much.

If you look into the history of cancer, it has existed forever. Wikipedia claims Hippocrate himself wrote about it! [1]

And as late as the 19th century, survival rate was around 10%.[2]

Your concerns have very little, if anything, to do with cancer. Monsanto didn't even exist in the 19th century.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637126#12637350
Or it would have been if the programs really were simple, and not a wild mix of itty bitty trivial doodads and monsters with a huge collection of switches for special cases and extra features, many of which were added and used by exactly one person, collected into non-standardised toolkits which differ significantly across every single variant, and often between versions of the same variant.

And if they really did one thing well. Which - not infrequently - they don't. (See also: critical bugs in ssh, etc.)

And if they didn't have unintuitive names that are impossible to guess.

UNIX isn't just not a spice rack, it's an entire industrial area of tool sheds, grouped with absolutely no foresight or consistency, and impossible to get around without expert assistance.

It kind of works if nine square miles of warehouses connected by bicycle paths with free paper maps of small disconnected areas is your idea of a fun thing. But it's a bit of a stretch to call it an unqualified success.
Wasn't saying it was an iPhone killer. Actually specifically said I have no idea. More addressing OP's questioning that there was anything of real import in the article.
But spawn enough threads in Python and you risk entering scheduling hell, thanks to the global interpreter lock. EDIT: if you are CPU bound at all. If you are really really IO bound it's not a problem.

Event-driven programming is my go-to for nontrivial backend async in Python, and in Python 2 you almost certainly want to use a third party library for that.

(But maybe I'm just lazy. I try to avoid the headache of threads in python if I can.)

Python 3 has asyncio, which looks good, though I havn't used outside of toy projects at this point.
Sure, in theory they can. In reality the same people who are too lazy to walk 1.7 miles also get to vote on whether those taxes go into effect.
I had opted for android beta and got Nougat update just few hrs ago.
Even then, you're going to be paying in battery performance.
How much trouble would someone like Google be in if they gave a "warrant canary" style answer? "I'm sorry, we are unable to answer your question" would speak volumes without actually saying anything.

But I suppose that the order forbids "disclosure", and that statement is arguably disclosure...
Aren't there a bunch of flights coming in every minute, all day at a major airport like Dulles? If the pinged them when flights were coming it'd be pinging all day.
The idea that releasing documents uncensored has anything to do with courts is nonsense. Assange claims to be doing journalism. You know what a court can do when a real journalist publishes redacted materials? Ask for unredacted copies.

Publishing unredacted documents does help sell their authenticity to the general public but I think too often the harm is too great, especially to innocent parties.
I really hate that every messaging app nowadays requires a phone number to use, sure it makes some things easier but its very difficult to get a phone number anonymously.
They should include an email signup option or even better just a username/password option although that would cause some issues with spammers, which can probably be mitigated in other more creative ways.
I grew up (white) in rural NC, and it's happened to a family member of mine.

If we were black, he'd be in prison. Since we're white, he got off with just probation.

Rich have it better than the poor, regardless of race. And whites have it better than blacks, regardless of income levels.
I don't like Google because they're gonna use my data against me.

I don't like Apple because it's a walled garden and millions other reasons.

I don't like Samsung because they bloat Android.

I don't like Huawei because I don't trust the Chinese government to not do stuff to it.

I don't like LG and HTC because the smartphone market is slipping away from them.

Am I just getting old?
I work for a company that does machine learning on clinical notes. The challenges the author introduces are real, but he misses the mark on the last point "Only Partially a Problem: Regulation and Fear."

Actually, regulation and fear are the main reasons that machine learning hasn't taken off in clinical medicine. More precisely, the provider's fear of getting sued and the regulations that require a licensed practitioner to "have the final say." There is one more problem as well --> machine learning doesn't solve a problem that providers think they have. It's lesson #1 from The Lean Startup or The Startup Owner's Manual. You may have the best EKG-reading software in the world (I have no doubt computers could surpass providers on this task), but if the providers don't feel they need it, it simply won't be adopted. This is the Watson situation at heart.

Conversely, here are some areas in medicine where machine learning has been adopted:

1. Medical billing code generation: Several companies have systems for reading notes using natural language processing and predicting billing codes using market-basket analysis.

2. Identifying bacterial cultures: Inpatient bacterial cultures are placed in a big incubator and constantly scanned for growth. When growth is suspected, there are emerging algorithms to automatically classify the bacteria. Similar work is being applied to other areas of pathology (see: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12474)

3. Image-analysis in radiology: There are a few radiology companies that are demonstrating superior results by applying novel algorithms. While not "machine learning" per se, the existence of such algorithms is encouraging for future advancements in radiology, since it's a step beyond just viewing the image. Here's one such company that has gained FDA approval for their blood flow mapping technology: http://www.ischemaview.com/
"Being Awesome By Being Boring"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iheymi5QFEY
Cardboard works on iOS, and I can't imagine there's any technical reason not to make this work on non-android devices.
"Pixel ships with the newest Android operating system, Android 7.1 Nougat. Phones will get software and security updates as soon as they’re available, directly from Google. " https://blog.google/products/pixel/introducing-pixel-our-new...

It's the same as Nexus phones, carriers did not interfere with them.
The price makes me a bit sad tbh

One of the best things about the Nexus range was they offered the Google vision of android at a reasonable price. The Nexus 4, 5 and 6 were affordable.

I purchased my Nexus 5 for a shade below £300 when it came out, which I thought was excellent value for money in comparison to how much I had paid for a Samsung previously.

This Pixel line seems to have abandoned that ideal to compete directly with the iPhone.

Personally I'd feel very uncomfortable walking around with a £600+ phone.
> the proposal Colin Schmidt and I put together for a RISC-V Birds of a Feather session was rejected

Wow, that's lame.
"An Introduction to SQLite" by Richard Hipp (who wrote the library) is actually a pretty good intro on to how to build your own DB engine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giAMt8Tj-84
Even a limited Github account is pretty useful... I have older code that I will use for reference on there as well as some newer, but less curated bits.

If I'm working on something that can be made modular and isn't a core component of a work project, sometimes I'll do it at home open-sourced, then pull it in from the open source repo, or get permission to release it from work. You don't need a lot of examples to show what you can do. And they don't all need to be masterpieces.

If you can, make something useful, get it on github, and push it into an appropriate language repo (npm, nuget, cpan, gems, etc)
Ask HN: Your thoughts on new Google's AI assistant?
Will this become an ubiquitous equipment at home ?
From https://developers.google.com/vr/daydream/dev-kit-setup

"Caution: The 6P's thermal performance is not representative of the consumer Daydream-ready devices that will be launching later this year. In particular, expect the 6P to thermally throttle CPU and GPU performance after a short period of use, depending on workload."
When they say, "take a look at the devices designed and built for virtual reality", and the only device is the new Pixel, I have to wonder if this means that the Pixel has a display with an unusually high refresh rate or resolution, or if Google just really wants to kill the ecosystem before it begins with needless exclusivity.
I used to believe this. But reading and deep understanding aren't that correlated, so speed is secondary to me. Videos have just less content than books and don't bring a lot compared to textual encodings of ideas. Maybe the context help with a book, you're by yourself, trying to imagine ideas rather than hearing it from someone else (which could cause more "acceptance" rather than understanding).
Extensive discussion of Pixel:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12636826

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12636520
Alan Kay is my favorite tech curmudgeon.

1) Alan Kay: Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY

Take note that he is not giving the talk using Window & PowerPoint, or even Linux & OpenOffice. 100% of the software on his laptop are original products of his group. Including the productivity suite, the OS, the compilers and the languages being compiled.

2) Bret Victor: The Future of Programming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMiCo2Ntsc
Be Awesome, and Learn How to Advertise Better Than Your Competition
Visual TDD and awesome documentation
Hardware keyboard is never, ever coming back. Ever.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf

A write-up of the same talk. Fantastic read and watch.
Strange that weight is missing from the spec. You want the lightest phone stuck to your head.
depends on where your priorities lie, and which group matches them best, IMO
From the article: "Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time."

The first case to surface. Anybody else could have been doing it for just as long, but we don't know yet.
Fast test, slow test by Gary Bernhardt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAxiiRPHS9k
Why do I care that my mass transit is public? Once the market can solve logistics we can regulate it, but we don't need it to be public any more than we need a public shoe ministry.
Good note. Funny how many users are mentioning price as their main reason for dismissing the Pixel
> I do not recall in which of his talks he defines "complexity"

that'd be "Simple Made Easy"
I agree. But isn't this limited by the fact it runs from a phone? Otherwise Oculus and whoever else are wasting their time developing custom hardware, no?
Nexus 4 was released 2012 while Nexus 5 in 2013.

Believe me, batteries and power management on Android has improved since 2013.
$27 a month is pretty dang accessible for a developer, in my opinion.
Something similar from a project I'm working on. Just a silly debugger tool but turned into a way to show how how lots of components in a system are interacting:

http://status.eventdata.crossref.org/thing-action-service/in...

(if you want to know what this is about, the service is under development, you can read about it here http://eventdata.crossref.org/guide/ )
Brave browser starts paying Bitcoins to adblocked sites
No, not just for using it that I am aware of. Just meaning that pure anonymity on Freenet is not the absolute best and they suggest trusted peers only. Traffic analysis (among other things) is a hard problem to solve without introducing noise and requiring large bandwidth. I think what the parent was saying was that [1] is possible is unfortunate (without making any statements supporting the criminals of course).

1 - http://www.thedickinsonpress.com/news/north-dakota/3885239-p...
I'm glad I finished the series of questions because it was fun to see how my values compared to others on the results page.

They were exploring moral relativism scenarios in schools back in the 1960's. The open machine intelligence part seems to be just good window dressing (I clicked after all). It isn't about machines as much as human psychology. I doubt autonomous cars are going to be programmed to take potential fatalities fitness, gender, or profession into account.
For that matter, I think RSS is still needed for blog aggregation and reading... Since google killed reader and iGoogle, I find myself only reading a handful of sites regularly.
Great post.

In addition to the lack of (labeled) data, the deployment and adoption challenges, and the fear around regulation, I would add another challenge: patient data is very complicated and highly heterogeneous: think doctor and nurse notes, machine-generated imaging, all kinds of measurements, patient habits, patient medical histories, etc.
> Then why have they made this phone?

To drive consumer demand in a direction that favors their software and online services, even if its other manufacturers (and, especially, other Android manufacturers) actually selling most of the hardware in the long run.

Not that they'd mind if their hardware took off, its just not the primary goal.
I agree that it should be easier to talk about death. And tech really isn't the issue there -- unless the tech is keeping us in a cocoon.

Back when the U.S. Civil War happened, photography was still new. Some folks thought that the new tech would finally wake people up to the horrors of war.

Didn't work out like that. People already knew the horrors of war and dying. You could run a picture of ten thousand people dead on a battlefield and while people felt the severe pain of that loss -- it was not horrifying to them. They lived with it everyday. (In fact, some early uses of photography was taking pictures of the recently dead. So you could remember them.)

I don't know. I may feel completely different about all of this when it comes my turn. I am really glad that the voices of people about to be silenced forever can be heard. In fact I think it's such a special thing that it really shouldn't appear next to an ad for Spacely's Space Sprockets.

We should have open and honest dialogues about death, yes. That doesn't mean that we should think of death in the same way as we might think of buying a newspaper. There's a categorically different thing going on here, regardless of any extraneous baggage that anybody might carry into the discussion.
I agree with you. but the problem is working Americans are time starved, and in most places, it is much faster to drive. Especially for working parents who may only have two hours to see their kids before they go to bed. To change the culture, you would have to reduce working hours, reduce the huge time advantage driving currently has, and/or make driving prohibitively more expensive. I would be open to all three.
Please please make that site responsive. I do a lot of checking and things on my phone and if I can't read your site I will assume I can't use your project on my phone and go on with my life.
I only just discovered him too. It turns out we knew some of the same people in the UK. I'm very sad I hadn't heard of him or his work earlier.

>His life's work speaks for itself.

Very much this! A loss to all - but a life well lived.
Good comment. Some of my customers spend $10K or more. So, they might be worth more than $1, but I get what you're saying.
It's been rumored to be getting much harder, yes: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/178843/20160922/are-you-pl...
The guy who uploaded it (IIRC) also later took down the original upload and said he regretted what he'd done.

WL... not so much with the regrets. That can make a big difference in how people react; "I realize I did a bad thing and now feel bad about it" gets sympathy while doubling down doesn't.
To be fair, the new phones are supposed to have MUCH higher accuracy in tracking which is necessary to make it feel like you're actually THERE (what's generally referred to in VR as "presence").

The Samsung phones work around this by putting extra sensors in the VR headset itself.
I've used deep learning for segmenting brain anatomical scans, and I worked in a lab that used neural networks to detect cancerous tumors.

I suspect the first major hospital-facing implementations of machine learning will be in radiology, e.g.: http://suzukilab.uchicago.edu/, which has been diagnosing cancerous tumors in CT scans with neural networks since before it was cool (one reason you won't see the terms 'deep learning' in the literature since they were originally just 3-layer networks, before the term was even coined). IIRC it outperformed the average radiologist.

I wonder if the label problem could be less difficult for some low-hanging fruit. The CT scan neural network required something like 40k labeled scans from a radiologist, but it could come for free: many yes/no disease detections will eventually be resolved by human labeling anyway by your doctor. If you had access, say, to every CT scan taken, and electronic health records for the patients, your labeling is noisy and biased but at least at massive scale. The problem is (legitimately) restricted access to health records in the US. Maybe some European countries have better data access?

And the implementation problem will eventually disappear. I remember talking with a radiologist years ago, who remarked "some people in my field have no idea it's about to disappear". I'm not so sure there will be no more radiologists, but their role will definitely change. Hospitals would be okay with this, actually, since radiologists are expensive. Eventually radiology scans will probably be like ordering blood tests, where fewer and fewer MD's are required.
Rails dev who likes Ember, here. Well, maybe "likes" is too strong a word. Prefers, maybe?

Basically, you're right on the money. I like Ember CLI because it's the closest thing to replicating the ease of Rails development in the Javascript world that I've seen thus far. I'm keeping a keen eye on Angular CLI, but it's not ready for primetime yet.
A few years ago some friends and I did real-time sonification of a game of StarCraft 2. Granted I didn't do the musical part, it didn't seem to be too hard to make it sound good. I guess the challenging part is to not to be overwhelmed by the data coming in.

This [1] was the first performance of it at CCRMA at Stanford. We spruced it up a bit before we did the performance in Korea.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WisMhY5BWa4