skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if the example calls at I/O were not staged, and real calls, I suspect the recording of them would be illegal in many jurisdictions, including California.

Interesting implications there for how Google will measure / improve the effectiveness of Duplex. Where is the line drawn between recording a call and recording data derived from a call? e.g. clearly recording the call unilaterally is illegal. Presumably just storing a hash of the audio data would be legal, but also useless. Is there some middle ground that is legal, but also useful?
Creating collaborative parenting documentation sounds like an invitation to endless flamewars. People are intensely emotionally involved in their decisions, and the outcomes are very noisy, hence difficult to measure the effect of parental decisions.

You're probably better off asking for collaborative documentation on the relative benefits of Democratic and Republican polices.
The German entity is now https://syncwerk.com/
I don't know if this is sarcasm or not but that's pretty standard in the Windows world. Your ops team wouldn't blink at tweaking reg values.
The irony of someone named ‘...trekkie’, a fan of a future where a military alliance of uber powerful weaponry capable of destroying populations, while continually proclaiming they’re on a mission of peace, featuring computers pretending to be people and doing work for them, androids, and synthetic holographic ar/vr people criticizing primitive AI tech is a bit rich.

We’ve arrived at full Luddism now where life saving and time saving technology in fields like health, transportation, and customer service will be inhibited by hyperbolic fearmongering.

Are you going to pass laws against realistic sounding synthetic voices? Against computers that understand queries “too well”? Against self driving vehicles that drive better and safer than people? All on theoretical harm that actually hasn’t taken place because you’ve watched too many dystopian Netflix sci-fi episodes?

I don’t know what’s more dangerous, the real Skynet, or people who might harm millions by voting for political policies that inhibit real improvements that could be made to help them.

At least, if you want to talk AI being used for harmful things we could discuss feed optimization that parasitizes people’s attention spans and keeps them glued or wasting money on pulling more slot machine levers. Technology that wastes people’s time and money as opposed to things that make people more efficient.
Favourite feature: When you place your phone face down on any surface it is automatically set to DND (Do-not disturb) mode.
Not to mention recalibrating your sense of "normal" from your life before children. Totally not saying that one has to let the child completely take over their life ... but it's also unhealthy to expect everything to stay the same as it was before the kid arrived. Aside from the kid _demanding_ more of your time for fulfilling their basic needs, you will likely _want_ to spend more time bonding with them.

I did kind of a poor job at this at first, and it resulted in me getting completely burned out from trying to maintain work, side projects, community engagement (ie. the user group/meetup I had started), etc etc etc ... once I re-evaluated my priorities, I realized that for the next few years I had to cut back on that other stuff a bit to focus on my family (and work of course, gotta bring home that bacon after all ;) ). Resulted in a significant QoL improvement for me ... and the kids eventually got older, which opened up more time for "stuff" again :)
Hmmz, i'm not convinced. The quote in the article says:

“To improve security, for a locked iOS device to communicate with USB accessories you must connect an accessory via lightning connector to the device while unlocked – or enter your device passcode while connected – at least once a week.”
The Enquirer is real (gossip/trash) news, at least at the level of carefully worded exaggerated rumor that some real person claimed to have observed.

Weekly World News is fictional satire about aliens.
That's what the theory of panspermia is about.
It's not clear how OP reached that number, though. If they went by the number of results reported by Google, that's only an rough estimation.
Smartphone Choice Is a Better Predictor to Lenders Than Credit Score
Its a concerted effort to discredit expert opinion which the shorter term goal of allowing people to equate their own laymen's understanding with that of someone versed in a subject.
The absolute worst department on Amazon for this, IMHO, is kids electronic toys. I've been scammed multiple times on this, to the point that I won't buy R/C product there anymore.

Once you give a gift to a kid, you can't send it back without a fuss and I think that the sellers know this. The return rate for kids stuff must be a fraction of that for other consumer electronics.
Browsers, not apps, are still the future of mobile
I already love serverless architecture, but this is crazy good news. Ordinarily you'd need to chain functions with events, but this allows you to coalesce workflows where the event is always FAILURE or SUCCESS.
What are your main use cases?
In fairness, it BuzzFeed might automatically replace Amazon URLs with either their affiliate version of the link when an article is published or the reporter's affiliate version of the link. I think slickdeals does this when someone links to Amazon.
A Nuclear Reactor for Space Missions Passes Final Major Ground Tests
In a smaller town, "voting with your wallet" is just choosing between Wal-Mart and Amazon. Wal-Mart for many is just a bad, but for different reasons (well, not that different). Either way, you're only getting a choice between the two big companies that are killing smaller retailers.

Eventually, politicians that like to (pretend to) champion small business (but then write law helping giant corporations at the detriment of small business) will have to put their money where their mouth is.
That perils applies to every single synonym for "false", including "level", "slander", "lie", "troll", etc. You can't police the dictionary as strategy to stop falsehood and false claims about falsehood.
There's a reason ed is the standard text editor. Everything is possible in ed.
Not backwards compatible. :)

(I mean that as both a joke and a real comment - you could never force every restaurent in the world to learn REST, but you sure can call a bunch of them)
Wow, that’s actually a pretty cool initiative. An extra push to start giving back to the community. I’ll find myself a project and start contributing!
In my city I can recognize that google has two different 'voices' or voice libraries. They sound slightly different. I'm curious how that works and why it's not all done with one.
No, but that's actually not a bad idea. I agree with what most commenters here have said: don't listen to advice from strangers on parenting. But at the same time, I would expect that advice to regress to some sort of mean if enough contributors were involved.

Why not make an "awesome-parenting" GitHub repo? :)
Please don't post funny jokes on HN.
Oh, that's really neat! I didn't know Google's LB was directly integrated with their CDN like that.

A generic way to delegate to an arbitrary CDN might be nice too.
Equifax breach exposed millions of driver’s licenses, phone numbers, emails
China’s Tech Comeback Outpaces the U.S
As someone who's had one failed SaaS and one that is on track to be a success, the biggest takeaways have been:

1. Make sure there is significant a market for your service
2. Get funding
3. Expect things to take twice as long and cost twice as much
4. Talk to your customers constantly and don't be afraid to ask them to pay
5. Go back to point 1 and double, triple, quadruple check there is a significant market for your service
Since when Erlang is weakly typed? It is dynamic strongly typed.
My Android One Moto x4 has that feature now. It's awesome.
This landmark tracking on the mobile is new for tensorflow . The benchmark here is dlib which does an implementation of One Millisecond Face Alignment with an Ensemble of Regression Trees paper by Kazemi and Sullivan.

Anyone know comparison benchmarks?
Thanks for your feedback! I submit that Facebook/Twitter/etc. are in fact consulting/relying on several external oracles for identity verification (i.e. - email service provider for email verification, telecom provider for cell phone verification, government sources for photo ID/SSn verification.) Of course, some identity data points (location, relationship status, career, etc.) are unverified and thus do not require any oracles.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "self-sovereign identity"?
> [...] we trained Duplex’s RNN on a corpus of anonymized phone conversation data.

That's alarming, and thinly cloaked in euphemism (IMO). "Conversation data" here means recordings of actual human-to-human calls, as well as their automated transcriptions. Both were used.

Where did that source audio come from?
I wonder if it would be able to tell if it was talking to another Duplex bot and instead of speaking in English, it would communicate more efficiently.
> Also, if the new version is anything like its predecessor, it will also become accessible to third-party developers through Google's public cloud service.

I wish this could be bought for home use. Cloud based machine learning is great (I mean that, I love it) but sometimes a one time hardware purchase is easier to swallow than a hourly rate.
TPU V3
That's why it's not going to happen with Apple's two faced position on privacy.

As for what I want Apple to be as a company, if their devices become the theoretical vault where I am the only one with the key, it wouldn't matter if they remain on my side or not. They fulfill the role of design and engineering, not data hoarder, and wouldn't be able to change that even if they wanted to. At least that is the image that they have been pushing recently.
100 petaflops per what? All of google’s deployment? Per rack? 100 Pflop / chip can’t be right.
> requires JavaScript, please enable it to ensure a joyful browsing experience

(followed by some horribly formatted content, at least on my phone)

Guess which product I will not be buying today?
*announces, not launches

Plenty of details to come. The TPU v2 in beta is available for customers currently. This is v3, not currently available.
It takes far more than one anecdote to outweigh the evidence in support of Piaget's model.
Daily Tech News Show Interview with Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon
The people who have strident beliefs about slavery and colonialism can’t tell that one might be justified and the other not. Which is why it’s dangerous to censor the web based on peoples’ strident beliefs.

I should also point out that it’s one thing to accept that slavery was an unmitigated evil and another to censor things based on that premise. It creates a powerful incentive to attempt to reduce peoples’ points of view to a straw man that you can then have censored. Without diving into the merits of Kanye’s recent statements, its a great example of taking a complex thought and reducing it to an easily-refuted straw man.
This is great news. It’s extremely important to the research community that large companies enter into the DL silicon space to contend with NVIDIA’s monopoly.

NVIDIA is now exerting pricing power to the point where they’ve decided to train their sales people to disregard the metric that is most important to customers: cost of training. Talk with one of their enterprise sales people and you’ll find they’ll say things like “FLOPS / $ doesn’t matter” to justify a 10x increase in price for their TESLA line. As history has shown, a monopolist sows the seeds of their own destruction and, by disregarding the metrics that matter, they alienate their customers.

Here are open source projects that you can contribute to to break the monopoly:

ROCm: https://rocm.github.io/

MIOpen: https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/MIOpen

TensorFlow: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow
Oh god this is even worse
https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant-impersonating-a-hum...
Ya I tend to think you need to run entirely remote, or entirely in offices. Or... you have your remote team running entire projects with an entirely sep organization, although that is hard and I am not aware of any organizations doing it well.

Biggest challenges?

Communications - I think every company has this problem but if you don't solve it when you are remote it will crush the company eventually. Whereas an office company can be shitty at communications and still do ok.

Execution... - LOL, I feel silly saying this but if your devs are split all over it is hard to collaborate, esp depending on speed and size. You need really great organization, focus, and just the right amount of meetings. You also need to do that in a way that gives them the ability to write code without checking in with someone every 10 min or stepping on toes. Esp if you are crossing big time zones, you have to really think and plan who is working on what, and it might even affect the entire design of the app...

quick background - grew a 100% company to ~135 people in 18 countries. Mix of software and dev ops and customer service.
How does that help? There are thousands of well-meant projects from overenthusiastic but inexperienced developers. The "interesting project!" graveyard is overflowing. Nobody knows this project or cares apart from some enthusiasts, and that won't change. Never even mind the discussion about the purpose of the blockchain here. Even if there was a purpose, I'd say tweets are the last thing that needs to be archived all over the place.

The unique service of Twitter is that it is famous, not that it is able to distribute tiny snippets of text. Just like Medium. By using the brand name service you get an increased chance to actually be noticed and read in exchange.
You don't have an email in your profile, so I'm just gonna hijack this comment. :)

I can't enable smart compose. My general tab doesn't have "Enable experiments" at the bottom. Is this getting rolled out in phases?

I logged out and logged back in just in case, but no dice.

My email is in my profile if you need it. Thanks!
Google have announced TPU v3.0. Highlights:

* Liquid cooled (oooh)

* 8 times the performance of the TPU v2.0 (allegedly)
> It is. It removes the color and nuance from typed communication. There's a lot of metadata in typos.

Oh puh-lease. Are you seriously trying to argue that TYPOS are the anchor upon which genuine human interaction hinges on?

I mean, wow. If you're trolling that's amazing.
At that point it shades into ghostwriting, which can be done well or badly. If done well, it should be imitating how you'd write it yourself.
It's also pretty nice if you're a provider hosting a website for the client (e.g. Github Pages, Shopify, etc). Getting them to point an A record to us is hard enough, but at least it's only once. Then you can use HTML verification for setting up LE certificates, Analytics, etc.
I think every telemarketer just lost their job.
And if you are looking to defend it, you will probably need something more compelling than a correlation between prosperity and free speech.

Anyways, I'm not seeking to overturn it. I said specifically in my comment "I'm not saying we should get rid of it".

I just think we should be open to modifying any part of the Constitution. Many people refuse to consider this and think of parts of it as sacred doctrine. The first and second amendments, in particular.
Introducing the Rad 30 Crypto Composite
Per pod (256 TPUs)
Did we just reinvent dialup?
You’re totally right.

However while this is useful to bootstrap a new technology rollout, 10 years on its just technical debt.

The amount of tech debt in the system behind credit cards is crazy, because originally charges where phoned in to the card issuer manually, and everything from then on - magstripe, chip & PIN, online only transactions, etc, has all been built on top, and the leaky abstractions show through in daily difficulties with the card system for end users, like lack of real-time balance (in some cases), lack of transaction metadata, etc.
I wonder how this will work in situations in which botting for reservations has been frowned upon, e.g. the restaurant world's version of high-frequency trading:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/how-robots-are-stealing-y...
Doesn't most carriers heavily "compress" the sound, removing all sounds/frequencies that a human can't hear, etc? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2A8q3XIhu0
Dell is selling NVIDIA V100s for only about $20,000 for "home use". http://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/accessories/apd/490-bedx

At its priciest in GCP ($2.48/hr) that's still about 7800 hours before buying was an advantage (15700 hours on preemptible gear).

(Disclosure: I work at Google, but this is all public math)
Performance is a shape not a number
That is unethical, the human on the other side should be made aware that he's talking to a machine instead of a human.
What past productivity improvements and/or economic developments have ever pointed to your fantasy being realized? How will thousands of workers in the Philippines and India losing their call center jobs result in "higher and higher living standards?"

I'm sorry but given historical context and popular capitalist intent, this future you speak of is simply fantastical. The working class would sooner be made extinct before a Jetsons-esque future of leisure for all came to fruition.
I can see myself doing the same thing, particularly if I didn't have much free time when it happened. I wouldn't expect Google Alerts to warn me of a security issue!
Screenshot for reference: https://imgur.com/a/NMEOBgb
https://genius.com/Lin-manuel-miranda-ten-duel-commandments-...

[BURR]
Can we agree that duels are dumb and immature?

[HAMILTON]
Sure
But your man has to answer for his words, Burr

[BURR]
With his life? We both know that’s absurd, sir

[HAMILTON]
Hang on, how many men died because Lee was inexperienced and ruinous?

[BURR]
Okay, so we’re doin’ this
NYSE owner ICE weighing up to launch crypto exchange – Viral Docks
Ya, I agree that an API is the right solution but the benefit of this is that both sides aren't forced to adopt it at the same time, it's more resilient to changes on either side...
Do previous YubiKeys support FIDO2? From the post, I assume you need one of the new ones.
Where did I say it’s trivial? What I’m saying is, people ar anthropomorphizing and extrapolating what this system is doing far above what it is actually doing, and then using it to justify fears that Skynet’s around the corner.

This system can’t pass the Turing test, it would be fooled probably by a simple question about itself or a subject outside the domain, like the kind of food you like.

You’ve got people in this thread hyperventilating about AI duping your voice and the. Becoming a doppelgänger and therefore we need laws immediately to stop this dystopia? Let’s calm your cortisol levels for a second and stop acting like Thanos just got the last gem.
Lucky for you I'm not selling anything. Also, like I said, it's in alpha. Almost nothing is working. I just wanted to get it in production so I could start tracking my sites.

No worries etatoby, just wanted to share an alternative.

EDIT: Thanks for your comment though, I just thought of some ways I can improve usability by using <noscript> to explain why JS is used for something.
Great - installing random (huge) binaries that have been compiled god-knows-how by god-knows-whom expecting god-knows-what other libraries to be on the target system.
Average income and wealth has massively increased over the last century, so we are slowly but surely getting to that utopia. But it happens at a pace that is too slow to be experientially perceptible.

I would add however that there does appear to be some barrier limiting the ability of ordinary people to accumulate financial capital, and I attribute that to friction/fixed-costs imposed by regulations.

New services, like Robinhood, and technology, like cryptocurrency, could address this, and allow wider participation in capital markets.
>> Maybe it's because I'm using an iPhone 5S

It's not.
Ask HN: I have an active list with 250k professionals to market any tool
Hello -- I have an active mailing list of 250k professionals and they need lots of tools. Does any developer or team want to partner? I promote, you develop, we equity / revenue?
> The big problem with trying to tune a guitar that way is that you're tuning a guitar so it's in tune when you don't press the strings, but then when you actually play it you do press down the strings.

When you press the strings, they will all press equally, playing a correct relative tune.
Unless they meant "Holy crap, everybody burn: you're dictionaries!"
What is illegal, IIRC, is a pre-recorded call, outside of certain prescribed bounds.

Duplex calls do not appear to be pre-recorded. It's unclear whether those regulating pre-recorded calls would have treated interactive automated transactional calls the same had they anticipated them, so I don't think it makes sense to blindly treat them as equivalent without new legislation.

Whether they should, on the merits, be regulated, and if so whether with the same or a different model, is perhaps an interesting debate.
This is the premise of Blockstack https://blockstack.org. It allows users to select their own datastore. I haven't used it so I can't say how good it is but probably worth a look.
Likewise (back in a days when i was doing web stuff).

Helping gullible people to get godaddy-free and move to more transparent and cost-efficient service was necessary first step.
This is amazing, but one thing I don't really understand is this: earlier in the presentation, they demoed some new Google Assistant voices. All of them sound like standard computer-synthesized assistants. On the other hand, the synthesized Duplex voices sound indistinguishable from human speech to me, even without the "disfluencies" they include.

If Google has gotten speech synthesis to this point, why isn't Assistant synthesizing speech of this quality?
Bow – Minimal embedded database for Go powered by Badger
You're not alone. This is deeply creepy, wrapped in candy floss.
I don't understand what you mean, can you elaborate? Who calls the 1-800 number, and what info do they get from the call?
It's only an alternative by the time you can buy them. Until then owning GPU hardware is a lot cheaper than renting it if you use it for a substantial fraction of the time.
Well until that actually happens I will be buying more NVIDIA stock.

I have done deep learning also and I don't see NVIDIA being an incumbent that is easy to be knocked out. I think we would need some distruption such as a new technique that is more performant or different design goals. Intel is still leading the way and I don't see NVIDIA being unseated with its head start anytime soon.
Can someone explain this to me:

"Shutting down disingenuous reviews is tricky for Amazon. By doing so, the company risks alienating sellers, a core part of its business."

In the next paragraph:

"Amazon is the place to be for e-commerce sellers and is increasingly seen as a utility. In 2017, Amazon accounted for nearly half of all e-commerce sales in the US (44%) with $196.8 billion in sales."

If Amazon is the place to be, alienating the bad actor sellers isn't going to be an issue.
I like this. So basically the old school modem sound, but in frequency that can't be heard. It would only take a fraction of a second to send out the feeler, and would not be noticed if a live human picked up. Could even detect a human and send the call over to a live representative without anyone noticing.
As I understand "Ar" means King or Lord in Adunaic. Curunir(aka Saruman in Westron, Curomo in Quenya) means "man of cunning arts" or "man of skills".

It's an odd combination to have Adunaic and Sindarin in such a name. Maybe it should be Tar-Curunir or Ar-Saruman?

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/King_of_N%C3%BAmenor
https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...

here are some more examples
I bet no one will stop you to continue contributing on a weekend and later.