skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch HN: Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures
Hi HN — we’re Marlon and Neil, founders of Piccolo (https://www.piccololabs.com/). Piccolo is a smart camera that lets you control your TV, lamps, fans, speakers, and other devices with simple gestures. For example, you can point at your lamps with your hand to turn them on or off.

The two of us have had an interest in computer vision for a long time and were in Udacity’s first self-driving car nanodegree cohort in 2016. We started this as a side project to control one lamp and soon had our entire house connected. For some actions, we found gestures to be much faster and more intuitive. For example, pointing at a lamp to turn it on is way more natural than saying “Hey Alexa, can you turn on my left living room lamp?”

To set up Piccolo, you can place it anywhere (near the TV is usually best), and then on the app you can indicate with bounding boxes where the devices are. After that, you connect those same devices (Chromecast, Hue lights, smart plugs, etc.), and you’re good to go. Some processing happens on-device, but the more complicated models are run in the cloud. Since we’re not a security camera, there’s no need to store video and so no image/video data is ever stored.

We’re excited about the experiences you can build when you have a camera and apply computer vision techniques. With recent progress in human pose estimation, object classification, and object tracking, there’s really a lot you can do. We’re starting out with gestures, but our goal is to build a platform that lets anyone create and deploy vision apps. Here's a few things we're excited about:

- New apps. For example an app that detects medical emergencies (like an elderly person falling). We'd also love an app that can tell you where you left your phone and keys.

- App integrations. For example, letting Netflix know which people are in the room to get tailored recommendations for everyone vs. just the person signed in.

- Smarter hardware. For example, an Espresso machine that, with one click, makes your favorite drink because it knows who pressed the button.

- Voice-vision fusion. You should be able to trigger Alexa just by gazing at the Alexa device instead of saying "Alexa". You should also be able to hold something and say "Order 5 more of these".

We're giving away 20 pre-release units next month to anyone that joins the waitlist. We’re happy to answer any questions and look forward to your feedback. If you want to follow up, our emails are marlon@piccololabs.com and neil@piccololabs.com.
Jobs's job was to look at stuff and see what he could sell, and to demand that employees invent more stuff to sell. Holmes' job was to invent stuff on demand. She tried (and failed) at a much harder job.
Whats the demand?
Machine Learning Algorithms: Which One to Choose for Your Problem
ASICBOOST?
Linus Torvalds, he's a doer.
Can someone explain to me what these actually do? Doesn't there need to be a way to actually manipulate the airflow into each room (air vent flap motor etc)?
I know lots of conservatives whose desires are quite antithetical to what you ascribe to them. I'm more concerned about divisive moral high grounders.
You linked a nine-second video and didn't even quote the entire thing. "But we have to pass the bill to find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy"

What she was saying, which becomes more clear in the context of the full quote that you declined to provide, was that there was a lot of controversy and misinformation regarding the contents of the ACA; you may recall the term "Death Panels" being thrown around, for example. Trying to discuss the actual contents of the ACA had become impossible as a result of the density of misinformation and controversy, and Pelosi's point was that the only way to really find out what was in the bill, what effects the bill would have, was to pass it and then look at the actual effects on people.

If you want to talk about bills which were passed largely without reading or understanding, there are better options in more recent history that don't involve misleading paraphrases.
Nobody is too big to engage in tax or securities fraud.
'qualified and experienced economists' Name them!
Read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers for a mind opening perspective on how much "luck" and timing plays into individual "success".
That said, they provide a great value and I have an aunt that used them extensively to be with me grandparents while their health was failing, so apart from being a terrible experience for tall people I’ve very glad they exist.
Looks very cool, thanks for posting!

Can you give some examples of actionable insights you've gained from having these graphs? Are you using them in acute problem solving or in longer term prioritization of where to spend effort improving? What does your pipeline look like for trying to drill into more detail for a potentially concerning metric?
I'm a native English speaker, though whether I have an accent depends on your perspective! I can do either American or British somewhat convincingly, and I usually don't have any trouble being understood by Siri.

I suspect the problem with "50" is that whatever ML underpins it is heavily tuned/biased towards "15" because a lot of people probably set 15 minute timers all the time. 50 minute timers are much less common, I suspect?
Nest doesn't have to be accurate to the minute to be effective. A reminder based on before I leave work would be.

For instance, if I don't know what time aim getting off of work and I wanted a reminder to call my wife when I got to the car, it could do that completely accurately based on phone connecting to the car. It could only guess about doing something before I left work.
> Then how can we explain the large number of people exposed to radical media but only a small handful performing radical violence?

Surely there's some various in the predisposition of individuals to become radicalized, but I don't suspect that means that people who do become radicalized would inevitably have become radicalized regardless of their exposure to certain ideas. The fact that terrorist groups put a lot of effort into radicalizing people indicates that they are under the impression that their efforts are meaningful. Even if the predisposition for an individual to become radicalized is already determined and unchangeable, there is an incentive for various radical groups to radicalize those people under their banner rather than some other banner.

> Everyone is against radical violence and media that contributes to that end. But what about media that makes someone a Trump voter? Rhetorically some argue that they are just as dangerous as any shooter because they create a social environment that precipitates violence, even though the causation isn't direct.

I agree that there's a continuum here, and that it's extremely subjective. I think most people agree that explicitly inciting violence is not (and should not be) protected speech/communication. But what about communication about groups dedicated to violence that don't explicitly mention violence? Then what about groups espousing philosophies which are strongly correlated with advocating violence, like blatant racism? Then what about groups that espouse philosophies described to just barely not quite be blatant racism, like "white nationalists" who explicitly advocate for "peaceful ethnic cleansing" of certain people from certain regions, but claim to not be racist and not support violence? Do we throw up our hands and say "well, they said the word 'peaceful,' therefore they're not technically advocating violence, therefore it's protected speech"?
for work: nodejs + react (usually serverless, but if not, then with k8s/ecs)

for experimenting: golang + react (want to see what the fuss is all about)

for fun: elixir + pheonix (since I never got on the rails bandwagon)
I don't think that's how it works. A model doesn't become a good model simply because it's hard to or nobody has bothered to make a better one.
GM had a prototype car a long time ago with a 'drive by wire' system (as I'm sure other manufacturers have had). There was a steering wheel but it wasn't connected to any steering column/shaft. It just had sensors that recognized the actions and turned the wheels accordingly.

A system like that could work where the steering wheel doesn't respond to the user when self-driving but is enabled when needed. Prevents accidental steering.
Pinscreen: DNN-Based Instant 3D Avatars
A Travellers Companion for Deep Learning Frameworks
Out of curiousity, how tight are the preservative:blood ratios before Bad Things (i.e. things that would invalidate the test results) start to happen?
Would switching to a magnet school or a gifted program help? Asking this for others whose kids might face the same situation.

It appears there are pockets of academic excellence in many US cities. I don't know how widespread they are though.
Cryptocurrencies are predicated on networks. So is cash, wrt meatspace networks of humans. Cash is only worth anything because we can transact with it in the meatspace. Cryptocurrencies are worthless for use in the meatspace, just as physical cash is worthless on the network.
Sorry. I thought you didn't know about Ataris. $ff8240 seems to actually be an Atari address: http://atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=8327 not an Amiga address.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1867:_Physics_Con...
We have to use it at work, and unfortunately the gateway was not enabled for us. In general slack just sucks so much more than IRC that it is almost unbearable. Searching the logs is one of the worst tasks ever. The easy accessibility is their pro and marketing guys will fall for it. Consent among develops is that it just sucks. It is really bad that they close the gateways because the lucky few that could use slack via an IRC client will really grieve. mosh/tmux/weechat beats the crappy client on flaky connections anytime. If the mobile client was as good as WhatsApp or telegram I would not dare to complain. But the mobile client lags and shows messages multiple times.

Horrible
I tell you
Great disaster
No longer necessary
Catastrophic mistake
Very creative cinema mobile car crash awareness ad
“There is much fake news published about me, but let me make clear that I have never uttered those words.”
I have read about the sensor suite on Teslas on the road being different from the suite on the Waymo cars, for example. So, the sensor data from Tesla may be more or less valuable, regardless of the amount of it. Wait and see is certainly the game.
Nice one! I forgot about Michael Widenius. Any more names or pointers? Feel free to share more of them. Thanks in advance.
>...One of talents greatest contributions is knowing how to let your winners run and cut your losses...

>...talent would understand what events are more likely to succeed...

If we already know that these things are the result of talent and not luck, and if it's a foregone conclusion that the model gives an "oversized role" to luck, then I guess these kinds of investigation are doomed from the start.
>Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

edit: what's up with the downvotes? i'm providing a name to the phenomena and providing a wikipedia link to it.
Cessna's New Skycourier Twin Turboprop Plane Will Make a Wonderful Weapon
The referenced article concerning the speed of Latex vs Word can be read freely online [0].

I remember reading that article shortly after it was published. They conducted an experiment in which participants were instructed to typeset a piece of work from scratch in thirty minutes in either Latex or Word. Since Latex is most valuable and efficient when writing a large document such as a book, containing multiple chapters, citations, cross-references and potentially images, the study is almost meaningless. The only conclusion I would draw from it is "if you want to type something small up real quick, maybe consider something other than Latex".

[0] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Reverse engineering has never been illegal.
One problem rarely mentioned regarding VR is input. Jim Sterling mentioned this in a recent Jimquisition[0] video, and I think it's a valid criticism - the complexity required of modern games can't often be replicated with VR as well as it can with a controller and/or keyboard, certainly not improved upon. Motion controls are often not precise enough - players can do more with buttons sitting down than they can waving their limbs around.

[0]https://youtu.be/7_h6GYI8ddA?t=6m56s
Probably stops the annoying warning alarms that would be constantly pinging.
I think Cruise/GM is winning. Waymo has distance, cruise/gm has velocity and acceleration. Retrofitting pacificas is not scalable. You basically have to be or buy a car company to actually deploy a profitable self driving taas at scale (and it still won't be profitable overnight) imo, and that will be true until you can buy self driving cars directly from manufacturers, which will probably happen like ~2 years minimum after the first car manufacturer starts deploying their self driving taas.

Why is this? Because self driving cars require shit tons of wiring (and quality wiring at that) and redundancy, and you want to do that in a plant, not by hand; moreover you can save a lot of capital costs by making your taas car more like a model 3, that is, stripping everything out of it, but you can't get those savings by just retrofitting pacificas. Google isn't playing to win at this point - maybe they don't yet believe it's ready for deployment any time soon. Personally I think there will be (perhaps somewhat small) geofenced publicly available commercial deployments within 2 years though.

Also I would rank tesla dead last, less sensor capability than everyone who's trying it seriously (this impacts data collection ability)... model 3 is a botched attempt a self driving taxi, serious financial issues, there's been a lot of turnover in their self driving team with people leaving for places like argo ai (self driving startup ford bought), and, ideologically, they can only deploy electric self driving cars without hurting their brand (though all self driving cars will be at least hybrids).
Beyond what the government has gifted, tech companies have gifted their technology to China on a silver platter, too.

They chose to do business there, knowing their tech would be stolen, and they even stayed when the Chinese government made the tech stealing official, by forcing US companies to accept "joint ventures" where basically they'd only be allowed to sell their tech locally through a local provider. That was the final nail in the coffin of American technology.

I still think ultimately China will fail because it will shoot itself in the foot with all of that authoritarianism and censorship, which will get worse and will kill creativity and chase away the brilliant creators. But in the meantime, they have all they could possibly want, and it's mostly given to them.
Ideally we just have something that can handle fast transaction volume without wasting a lot of electricity. Hedera Hashgraph looks like it might be able to do that. It's still very early, but lightning networks aren't the solution.
There's reasonable room for disagreement over features of Netflix and Amazon's video UIs, but I think we can all agree that Hulu's interface is horrible and consistently gets worse every time they change it.
Thunderbolt 3 runs at 40Gbps, so it wouldn't require very much foveated rendering to get the bandwidth to that spec.
> Or it's just cargo cult?

Yes, it is. Like much of the rest of programming.

I think it's weird for an IDE to tell me which command keys to use. It should have a set of default keys, and ideally those could be remapped as well.

The biggest benefit of directional keys (up, down, home, end, etc...) is that they are universal across keyboards and languages. Control-F may be great if you're on a VT100 terminal, but maybe I'm on an AZERTY keyboard, or one of those funky square keyboards. Or a Chinese keyboard that's largely input by writing characters on a little pad. Or on a Mac using gestures or Ink. Or a dozen other possibilities.

If I was only programming in Pascal and only on one computer in one environment for the rest of my life, then it would make sense to learn those keystrokes. But like is more complicated than when those were first coded.
I think this is a great idea, it reminds me a lot of the OpenPose library. I found very interesting how you found each other via Udacity's course. Could you expand on how you went about actually teaming up and starting out? Thanks and good luck with the final pitch!
Then Bain Capital must be lying to themselves if they think they can help the company. I think they skip the middle step of trying to help the company and just sell off assets.
A rock spinning too fast will melt more ice in front of the stones path reducing friction and lubing the ice in front and possibly pulling water over to the inside curl side leading it to fall forward more and catch less on the curl side.

P.S. This is just my speculation, not from physics but from being a curler.
Publix does this at a few stores as well[1]. In my particular local Publix which doesn't have the full kits, they still have the recipes, ingredients, and even someone handing out prepared samples of one or two final products all in one place in the store. The ingredients are just normally packaged, not perfectly portioned out.

1. http://www.publix.com/recipes-planning/aprons-meal-kits
> need liquidity provided at both ends

False. You can open a bidirectional payment channel where only one end deposits money at first.

> (kyc/aml)...

I'm sorry, how is KYC/AML related to any of these technical conversations? I don't get it.
Would you consider wearing a big talking computer medallion on a chain around your neck, like Twiki wears Dr. Theopolis? Twiki presents as extremely masculine.

https://youtu.be/FfzGayknSn4?t=1m

http://buckrogers.wikia.com/wiki/Theopolis
> I think you can only "prove" things about the system you construct. Meaning, in reality it has (or could have) little to no basis.

I think the author is aware of that and the point is more that people generally assume that talent is guaranteed to lead to success, and they have no basis to make that assumption either. This model demonstrates that the intuition is fallible.
Played by who? Who made money on Theranos? Anyone who knew it was a fraud wasn't going to profit from investing. They wouldn't be able to cash out before the product failed at market. Maybe a supplier would profit from selling supplies, but not the investor/advisors.
If things working out better are predicated on rising tech stars admitting they're wrong and forgoing the accolades and adulation that accompany the identifier... I can see why things went the way they did.

That said, from a personal perspective, I honestly hope Ms. Holmes is either a sociopath or was actually in the dark about how bad things were (e.g. her direct reports were lying to her).

It seems like it would be a pretty excruciating mental burden to go into work every day for an extended period of time, knowing your company was inevitably failing, and just trying to keep the plates spinning. Ugh.
I don't get to listen to what I want on the radio if they keep closing stations I liked.
Shitty ice.

To add: Curling on ice used for other purposes too leads to shitty ice. The ice needs to be flat and level. Zambonis do not lead to level ice. Dual purpose rinks likely also don't shave the ice to ensure level and flatness. Likewise, gouges in the ice from skates causes unpredictability and some might compensate by over pebbling prior to playing. Also poorly/sparsely pebbled I've can lead to unpredictableness.
>I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.

It's worth nothing that lattice/DAG based cryptocurrencies offer different security guarantees compared to blockchain based ones, so it's not fair to compare them on transaction fee/volume alone. Sort of like it's not fair to compare SQL vs NoSQL.
its renamed to WearOs if anyone came straight to comment section.
I wrote Hello Web App to teach Django + Python web app development by talking readers through creating a unique project (using a project template described in the tutorial): https://hellowebbooks.com/learn-django

I'm actually fundraising for the new edition of the book, updated for Python3+Django2.0: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1868398473/hello-web-ap...
> Objects which have no explanatory power (magic, gods, etc.) are "bugs" in human thinking. No one ought believe that any of them exist.

To dismiss a pervasive category of human beliefs as a "bug" that serves no purpose is incredibly egotistical and arrogant. The sheer pervasiveness of these types of beliefs point at them serving an evolutionary / competitive purpose.

I believe your mistake is based on a lack of understanding of
the reasons why we hold beliefs and the purposes of knowledge.

Belief and knowledge are not purely about making predictions.

They provide the rules by which we operate as individuals and as a society. They provide the basis for value attribution and define our self identity.

While some knowledge derives much of it value from it's ability to accurately make predictions, that is not the core reason that we have knowledge. Knowledge is fundamentally judged by the utility it provides to individuals and societies.

Newtonian physics is my favorite example. It is not the most predictively powerful version of our knowledge about physics (since we know there are areas where its predictions break down), yet we still teach Newtonian physics because it is simpler and easier to understand and use than General Relativity or Reletavistic Statistical Mechanics.

> I am an atheist in exactly the same way that I am an a-leprechaun-ist. The proposition "God Exists" is one I believe to be false for extra-empirical reasons. Namely, that the inexistance of God is consistent with every given observation -- and the content of the idea seems deeply anthropocentric and psychological.

You claim that "God Exists" has no predictive power, this means that "God Does Not Exist" also has no predictive power. The existence of God is also consistent with every given observation. Thus your Atheism is another example of beliefs whose value arises not from their predictive power but from some other form of utility.

TLDR: It's not a "bug" it's a "feature".
There's still Entercom, SBC, and Cumulus to keep the oligopoly going.

Interestingly enough, Bain Capital has been involved with helping all four of these companies consolidate the media landscape of the US.
A similar thing was said about keyboard and mouse compared to dual analog.

And those things were true.

Games and people adapted.

Personally, I feel something work that can pick up nerve impulses as well as deliver modest feedback, tactile and or electrical will close much of this gap.

New input paradigms will advance too, just as they currently are for touch.

Touch today is getting good. The finger in the way problem is being chipped away.
Introducing Coherence, like FaaS built into your favorite language
Keep in mind Hashgraph and Blockchain are very different, in that Hadera is a permissioned network with public access (each round has a known number of nodes that must participate to exit the round).
Right - I meant bungled since then. Public education around tech is simply not good (on average), higher education very expensive. Hence foreigner have a leg up, as they get their BAs, MSc at home, far cheaper, then move to the US for the jobs.

Student debt is a very US phenomenon.