skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities
Hey HN!

We are Jess and Oscar, the founders of Life Bot, a voice app that helps you complete daily activities.

It’s available on Amazon Alexa. To enable, say “Alexa, enable Life Bot” or click on:

https://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#skills/dp/B0749C8YD5...

Alexa is useful for things like timers, music, and news, but so far, most people don’t bother with Alexa apps. Voice apps are hard to find, they tend to do just one thing, and each has a different name and set of phrasing you need to remember.

Life Bot solves this by bringing the most-used features under one voice app. We’ve made the on-boarding process easy and have eliminated the need to visit the Alexa app. We also aren't tied to just an echo device, since users aren’t always at home.

A popular feature we have is morning news - Life Bot gives your morning headlines through Alexa, but can send the full article to your phone to read up on your commute. Or you can set up a reminder to
pick up milk through Alexa, and have it sent to you by text at 5pm the next day. SMS reminders are our most popular feature!

Oscar and I first started working with Alexa in 2015. We set up Europe’s first "voice design agency" to build Alexa Skills for large brands. We experienced first hand the problems of discoverability, setup, and usability with Skills, and saw a huge opportunity to create the first voice app that people love.

Long term, our aim for Life Bot is that it becomes the only voice app you need – providing a consistent experience across all voice platforms and devices.

We’re excited about voice as a new tech interface and are convinced of the trend in voice. In our view, it won’t be long before voice interfaces will become the first port of call over a phone.

We’d love to hear your feedback on the Life Bot voice app, and looking forward to discussing anything voice related!

We’d also love to know, what do you wish Alexa could do that it can’t already?
Launching the Speech Commands Dataset
They're saying it's a DDOS attack. Looks like it started right around the same time as their DOJ hearing this morning.

Update: There are reports that the DDOS is in reaction to DreamHost hosting PunishedStormer, the rebranded DailyStormer site.

https://twitter.com/OpStandUpToCFAA/status/90077016627919667...

And the tail end of https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/daily-stormer-punished-storm...
You should add one additional (CA|end-entity) pin regardless. If your key is compromised, there's a non-zero chance that you'll realize that your CA has stopped issuing certificates under the CA key you pinned at the same time. Most CAs aren't very transparent with regards to their root/intermediate lifecycles.
Would you mind giving the brand? I don't know if it would be available in the US, but it's always good to have more pointers.

Also, what size? At the smaller sizes, monitors are competitive with TVs and avoid the smart stuff, but at the larger sizes (40"+) monitors tend to be extremely expensive compared to "smart" tvs.
Does anyone use Firebird?? I'm curious why this as opposed to MySQL, PostrgeSQl, MariaDB, SQLServer, Oracle, DB2, etc.
That link doesn't work for me, even though the same link is presented in a Google search. Also, for some reason I can't find it via search by DOI.

http://research.nvidia.com/publication/interactive-indirect-... has the paper plus presentation available, plus abstract and other links.
The link was originally to http://isdebianreproducibleyet.com/ .
Lazy flowspec using large BGP communities
If it catches me dozing off during long drive, that's a perk in my view.
It also is really important how the question is asked.. if people are asked to say what the color is, then many people might say 'blue', but others might say a more specific shade of blue (navy, periwinkle, turquoise, etc).

That is very different than if they were asked the yes/no question of 'is this car blue?'
I don't have any experience with academia outside the US. For people wanting to go to college in the US, I would recommend Junior College for the first two years, then University for the second, and select in-state college that is close to where you already live.

I wish I had gone to JC my first two years. I was so thrilled with being out from under my parent's supervision that I goofed off too much in my first two years. JC is a little more forgiving, and in my experience, didn't have those huge lecture hall entry level course that spit out so many new students.

In state because it's much cheaper.

Also, unless you are already wealthy or have a family job waiting, get a degree based on what you like, but it must be fairly lucrative. Accounting, Finance, IT, CS, Engineering, etc. Stay away from art degrees and English majors. The subjects are fascinating, but it's awful hard to land a good job in those majors. Also, being a professor is very difficult to get into and getting tenure is even harder, so you probably want to skip that route.
Crytocurrencies provide people with the ability to execute censorship resistant transactions.

Who else would want to send censorship resistant transactions other than people who are at risk of being censored?

The modern era is still relatively free of censorship, and thus the people using cryto are pretty far on the shady end of the spectrum.

But trend toward censorship in the modern era, is worrisome. Perhaps a whole lot more people are going to have to protect themselves against censorship in the future. And by censorship, I mean censorship done by ANYONE, including both the government, AND ultra powerful corporations that may as well be the government.
I miss the days when javascript meant changing the color of links.

It's hard to admire the work being put into javascript when you see the result every living minute of every day.
FYI if you're concerned about accessibility these SVGs lack any kind of descriptors; you'll need to add your own.

https://css-tricks.com/accessible-svgs/
It might also just mean enough people who do care did not see it. This is the first time I'm hearing about any of these things
It will most likely be a USB-like connection; HSIC, I suppose. BTW, this is the condition that all Replicant phones have to meet in order to be ported to it. So quite a lot of phones already have such an architecture.
Proposal for a Q&A Site for Nordic Languages. Swedish, Norwegian, Danish Etc.
https://redmine.replicant.us/boards/33/topics/7383?r=7569
The top answers are essentially well-thought-out probability arguments describing the Lizardman Constant [1]. Essentially, random humans who don't care very much about your survey are likely to respond in arbitrary or perverse ways, making them a very noisy data source. Small signals (e.g., 10% or less of a sample) are likely to be meaningless. Its nice to know that there's a solid argument that this doesn't compromise the validity of large signals, at least.

[1] Which for some reason doesn't have a Wikipedia page, even though it's a phrase that seems to turn up a lot in certain circles. I suppose the best reference is http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-....
I also turn off my location and get the ocean thing.

I don't think this is the reason.
It's not the supreme court of the US but the supreme court of MA. They are different and have jurisdiction over different things.
It is legal to re-create the logo. It is not legal to use your re-creation in a manner that infringes upon the trademark.
> This is scary as hell.

This is the future we chose. Sorry. :(
Most of the things by freedesktop.org in the last.. idk 5-10 years. Console-kit/logind, AppData, dbus being used for the lower parts of user-space, and probably many more that i don't recall now. Oh, and pulseaudio.

EDIT: How could i forget polkit.
HBO NOW’s app has pulled in $19M since the “Game of Thrones” premiere
I'm not totally convinced. Our brains are designed for perceiving a physical, spatial world, and pages provide standardised physical chunks of a reasonable granularity. I think that's useful. You can know that a certain scene was about 5 pages back. You know roughly how much further forwards 20 pages of text is.
Medium Enabling Integration, Collaboration, and Innovation with the Strava API
5.1M US Security Clearances Ruined Due to Exposed Secrets on Hacker News
When some folks wondered "how could you possibly persuade people to pay more for hydroponic vegetables?", my first thought was "get your vegetables, now with fewer bacterial brain cysts!" Vat meat vs incompletely cooked meat, is similar to hydroponic vs incompletely washed vegetables in this. I've no idea what the current state of research is on cysts vis autoimmune diseases.
Are you comparing child label to a a shitty corporate environment? And where did you get "hotbed for discrimination" from?
There's a Chrome icon, but no Firefox or Safari or Edge or any other browser. Not even a generic. Can we please stop with the implicit homogenization around Chrome?

/rant
Just pre-ordered one. These folks have done a great job on their Librem laptop line, and I have wanted a "FLOSS-ier" phone for a while now. And if it goes nowhere I get my money back! (allegedly)
FWIW I've seen medieval recipes containing almond milk (referred to as milk or equivalent period word), so calling such substances milk is not a newfangled idea.
Edge support for touch screens is considerably better than chrome.
Directionally, AMP does make the Google search page start to look more like the semi captive AOL interface of old. Content producers upload stuff to AOL, and pay for things like ads and "AOL keywords" to get an audience. AOL, meanwhile, controls the UI, puts whatever they want in the sidebars, has all the analytics data, etc.
By the same token the issues which Uber faces really have very little to do with publicity and everything to do with operating at a substantial and constant loss, all bet on a dream of automation which is probably decades away. Uber with drivers simply doesn't work as a profitable business, and the self driving cars they need are simply not going to be here in time to save them. The rest is more or less academic.
> An idea Vonnegut explored at least a couple times is that recorded media killed the value of (relatively) mundane creative expression by putting everyone in competition with the greats in a given field, and that the lives of those who might have given some joy and been valued by their community for their small talents are deeply, negatively affected by this.

Could you point me to where I can read more about this? I've explored this thought myself and it's really frustrating. It used to be if you were the best skateboarder (or Smash Bros player, or yo-yoer, or cup stacker, or...) at your junior high, you were hot stuff. Now you've got to compete with all skaters, everywhere thanks to Youtube.
I'm not sure what you expect them to learn.

Only use "cleaner" ads ? It will pay less, ads don't pay much any more, you need the big, splashy, if-possible-exclusive-and-targeted ads to get money now.

Offer subscriptions ? They already do that, and they publish quality original content, so it's not the case of journal-X publishing the same press release as everyone and complaining that people don't subscribe.

At this point, they can only do two things with people who don't subscribe: block them from accessing content, thus losing lots of traffic and conversion possibilities, or show them intrusive ads, make a little money off of them, and hope a few subscribe.

One argument could be that "those ads are turning people off of subscribing and ultimately makes them lose money", but in every debate on this matter I have never seen it substantiated with actual numbers, and especially in the case of a household name like National Geographic I sincerely doubt it, at least not in any meaningful way.
Bork didn't say that the Bill of Rights is exclusive, he said the 9th amendment is unclear about what other rights it is talking about: "We don’t have much evidence about what the Founders meant; they may have been trying to protect state-constitutional rights; we have good reason to doubt they meant the amendment to magnify the power of the courts to overturn laws."

> They do this because it's a logical pre-requisite for overturning Roe v. Wade.

I don't want to see Roe overturned, but I think the entire Griswold line is nonsensical. We have a perfectly good legal foundation for protecting abortion, which doesn't rely on conjuring rights out of "penumbras": https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/the-forgo....
Fermion – cool visual prototyping tool for React
Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory is quite remarkable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_distributed_memory

it's a book though: https://www.amazon.com/Sparse-Distributed-Memory-MIT-Press/d...
I hope they could do better. GOT is way better than certain movies that had pulled in hundreds of millions.
So I looked into kitty a bit more. Kitty is heavy. It seems to use 2-3x as much CPU for my benchmark task (scrolling around a big text file in an editor) compared with VTE-based terminal emulators, and 5-6x as much as urxvt. Everybody's got different priorities, but for me I'll stick with urxvt and save my battery.
Coca-Cola.
Show HN: Workit - JavaScript utility for managing child processes in Node.js
Okay, but I still think mobile app apis served over SSL that don't pin to a specific signer are making their lives way harder.
The Scrum Master Salary Report 2017
If your service is down, there's nothing to hack anyways.
This what what youngsters should do at night
Yes, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned child processes or the Cluster module.

https://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html

There are a lot of knowledgable people commenting, but it's starting to seem like they haven't familiarized themselves with the tools available within the NodeJs base.

To another point, I could put the time into writing a server and back end application in Go or Rust or C++ or whatever, but it would take (at least me) 10x as long to build out the application I need as it does to pull express into a project and build out a server, back end computations, file manipulation, authentication, and roll a MongoDB store with a fully-fleshed out front end (even if it's not so stylish).

Mind you I work in an enterprise environment where these kinds of things are required to serve maybe twenty people and run on a single multi-cored machine at any given time and not tens of thousands users.

It's a fantastic tool that works from small to mid-large projects, and would serve as an excellent prototyping and MVP-dev environment for even the naysayers who are probably more skilled than I am in other areas.
Yup. All my clients' sites are down. I wonder what the internet-wide impact is. And I wonder if I can migrate DNS providers while it is down.
eh... beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The author has every right to describe them beautiful if he thinks so.

In this case I'd call them really cute.
My bet is in the exact opposite direction. I think that the internet will be increasingly ambient, driven by virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Now. Most interactions will be short, personalised and push-oriented. Rich VR experiences will exist, but they'll represent a very small proportion of internet use.

Consider the development of phone technology. In the 70s and 80s, most futurists thought that video calling would replace voice. They thought that richer, higher-bandwidth experiences would dominate the market. In fact, the opposite happened - voice was surpassed by SMS and IM. Users overwhelmingly prefer to communicate in a medium that is less rich, but more convenient. Asynchronous messaging came to dominate because it's "snackable" and doesn't demand your full attention.

I think that the future is an Amazon drone dropping off a box of goodies that you didn't order, but is exactly what you wanted. It's Google Now booking you an Uber to a restaurant that turns out to be your new favourite place. It's Spotify using heart rate, galvanic skin response, pupillary dilation and a thousand other data points to compose the soundtrack to your life.
> Don't you think it depends on a lot of factors, not just the use of a different icons?

Of course - it all adds up. The trick is knowing where and when it is worth differentiating.
What about the derivative works right? Although not a literal copy, one could argue that making one's own similar version of the logo could constitute a derivative work that could be construed as infringing.
Now if only it didn't feel like when I'm asking Siri to do a task it has a very small pool of pre-set options I get to choose from. It still feels rather restricted, but I'm excited they're really investing into it.
Translation: Going public is a pain in the neck. And other tech bros are the answer to those annoying banker bros!

Ugh, when did Kara become so political?
My personal opinion is that what applies to big companies offering "free" products applies in tech as well.I call it the good enough concept.
The product is not exceptional but it is good enough when you consider all things involved (price in case of big companies (it being free) and performance in case of javascript.

So for a lot of people web apps are good enough. They do not need native apps. The same applies to developers. Sure you can avoid transpiling to JS but JS also became good enough for people to just stick to it. And while they were at it they found out it is also good enough on the backend (nodejs) and on the mobile (react native) and also on the desktop (electron).

Only time will tell if it is or was the right choice.
A very slightly different question is much easier to answer:

>900 out of 1000 people say a car is blue. What's the probability that, when asked, you'd say that the car is blue?

This is, IMO, 90%. Whatever skew there is between car-is-blue and survey-response-is-blue should be about the same between you and the general population. Unless, of course, you have some reason to believe that you're different than the overall population.

It doesn't matter how the question is asked either, or why people are saying what they're saying. 10% of people could be trolls who say that the car is colored "like a lizard person".
Do you use this approach with everything?

"Poop tastes bad." "How PC, I'll eat some!"
They're refusing to hand over data to the FBI about visitors to a Trump-protest site, so if this is more than a co-incidence, then we're possibly looking at internet-savvy "Pro-Trump" folks. Since we know 4chan was a huge congregation point, I'd wager they're just a bunch of folks using LOIC to attack DH, or some DNS amplification attack.

Edit: Interestingly enough, this is going on even though the DOJ amended their request to be more focused (they claimed to not understand exactly what they were requesting, which is just as scary). So, DH will probably comply now, but the attack rages on. http://fortune.com/2017/08/23/doj-dreamhost-anti-trump/
So true. Most people just don't care.

I've used this to my advantage over the past few years, as soon as a "big corporate scandal" breaks the stock tends to fall. Check their financials, buy the stock if it looks good, then wait a few months for it to all blow over.

My most recent was Wells Fargo during their opening accounts scandal. Bought early Oct, Sold late Jan. 20.06% profit.

There were so many headlines calling for boycotts of Wells, and to teach them a lesson with your wallet. In the long run people just don't give a damn.

For every one person saying: "Uber is evil, don't use them" There are ten saying "Meh, its cheap and convenient."
Wanna buy one of mine? Thinking of positioning for sale a Business SaaS app, a Sales/Marketing Automation app and a transportation related app. Keeping the one that's earning the most... sorry.
The actual paper is available here:
http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/abstract...
Well this finally gave me the bump to move my DNS away from Dreamhost, which I have been meaning to do for literally years, now to sit and wait for the new name servers to propagate.
Wow yeah I instantly hit "Back" and have now blacklisted national geographic. Seriously, national geographic? Thing's have gotten that bad I am now blocking NG? Sigh.

I liked grubbers dubbing of a "dickbar" but this kind of ad deserves its own moniker. PrickPage?
Not really related to the article (well..perhaps it is..) but we recently acquired a Subaru that is officially "gray" but looks quite clearly blue most of the time. Strangely though it looks non-blue sometimes. My best theory is that it is reflecting the sky color. I've since come across other people who own the same color Subaru and report the same controversy over its color.
I'm a cat person.
For a lot of us the built in TV tuner is that annoying thing we occasionally trigger by accident, and the cause of annoying inputs to skip over when selecting display source...

The bigger issue is the size limitations.
The problem is much wider and is faced also by content creators (e.g. youtube): What is the probability that my videos are good based on the likes and dislikes I get?
Let's be honest, these people's names aren't displayed prominently for precisely the same reason as early Atari game developers names weren't.
I couldn't find the single most important piece of information for me, the battery life. Is that not decided yet or has it been omitted for marketing convenience? I was thinking of signing up to get one but with that missing bit I don't want to take the risk.
Let my online persona take the criticism? Yes. My offline persona too. Alan Watts used to point out that even the 'real' persona is only a mask (the word coming from the ancient greek πρόσωπον which originally referred to a theatrical mask).

>the “online disinhibition effect” is what enables your mild-mannered neighbour to become a hate-spewing bigot on social media

It's complicated. The fear of enemies keeps our 'ego persona' firmly in charge like a wartime leader. Because we identify with this persona we therefore unconsciously seek out people to hate in order to feel safe. Because open hatred isn't socially acceptable we designate the target group a 'hate group'. It's then OK to hate them because they're the real haters! And so these opposing groups create and sustain one another, making the participants feel safe and all the while making the world decidedly less safe.
Are you more likely to use Google products now too?
DocGrok has a leg up on mockup tools like Figma/UXPin because it is designed so that it's easy enough for the entire product team to create and edit user experiences. This is cool because brainstorming on something more tangible than a whiteboard sketch early in the process is pretty useful in coming up with the right APIs and system architecture.
1. Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron)

2. The hope is to piggyback on one of the existing native Matrix SDKs or clients rather than write a whole new one.

3. One of the biggest complaints we hear about Matrix is that there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet. So this is our chance to fix that.
Inasmuch as Mars with our current technology offers no back up for civilization, the same can certainly be said for the moon. I would argue over that the moon actually has some benefits Mars lacks, in addition to proximity it has a much lesser gravitational field and therefore a much lower delta V. Moon colony could realistically jumpstart space and vacuum industries beyond LEO, and frankly it would probably give us a chance to test the many technologies we'd eventually need on Mars without having to actually make the trip to Mars.

Most of all the moon would be an excellent way station for asteroid mining .
Where did they say there? Their twitter[1] doesn't mention DDOS at the moment.

EDIT: I didn't realize they have 3 twitter accounts. Their status account has a tweet about this[2].

[1] https://twitter.com/DreamHost

[2] https://twitter.com/dhstatus/status/900761746767364098
The inverse is also possible.
It was an Insignia 48" NS-48D510NA17 https://www.insigniaproducts.com/pdp/NS-48D510NA17/4807700
Will the Earth Ever Fill Up?