skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now, when was the last time you came to book a haircut or restaurant table and concluded that the task was so onerous that you would ideally delegate it to a machine? And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to?

I hate talking on the phone. If I can't fill out a web form (login-free please) or send an email to complete some task like that, I'd love to have a robot do it for me. I don't see anything unethical about this as long as the robot performs the task reasonably well, doesn't waste the receptionist's time, etc....

The classic hacker ethic says it's bad for humans to be required to waste time on something a machine could do, and Google has just expanded the list of things machines can do. Of course, under that framework, it would be preferable to automate the receptionist taking the call as well.

I'm eager for this technology to become more general-purpose. For months, I've had a case open with an airline over an item that went missing from my checked bag. The only way to get updates is to call them on the phone. It first goes to an IVR, then a call center in India where the call is screened by a person, and only then to the actual department that can give me useful information. There is no direct line (I asked). The process is obviously designed to frustrate users so they give up. The hassle is arguably not worth the $90 they owe me, but I don't want to let them get away with it. I really wish I could have a robot talk to them.
I immediately assumed, upon reading the title, that this was some sort of Facebook Addiction group, rather than addiction groups on Facebook. I live a pretty shielded life as far as knowing/seeing legitimate drug addicts, but I found it interesting that I know many people who would definitely benefit from Facebook/social media addiction therapy. Probably communicating over email.
What is the real technical achievement behind Duplex? What we've seen is a rather short tech demo.

Speech synthesis has improved, but are you saying that Duplex is a massive step forward in speech recognition and natural language processing too?
> Ive had repo agents posing as customers looking to "get their car," which is pretty funny, but ive also seen agents harassing the front office staff with demands for a vehicle being worked on. Sometimes a driver will park their car to suddenly find theyve been "hitched up" to a seedy looking tow apparatus on the back of an often ironically leased light duty truck. Repo agents in this case show up as "innocent" middle men while a driver pleads and begs over the phone with a lender to not tow their car for any number of humiliating excuses.

So, are these not actual repo men, but just people trying to steal a car?
Why the pharmaceutical industry is giving up the search for an Alzheimer’s cure
There is no in-place replacement.

Most likely your app relies on database performance for a lot of queries, that can be fast only on local databases. This makes a serious rewrite necessary if you want to go with distributed solutions and requires knowledge and experience in distributed systems. Which takes a lot of time and that's why choosing distributed databases from the beginning instead of MySQL/PosgreSQL is so important.

Judging by your description, your best bet is probably pre-sharding. It's not a proper distributed solution, but it doesn't sound like you need one. It works like this: you partition your data into N shards, where N is two orders of magnitude higher, than the number of server you plan to have, then split each table into N tables belonging to each shard and use a static mapping of shards to servers in the application. Queries won't be able to cross shards. Some work on the app will be necessary and on the infrastructure tooling to manage servers, shards, replication, monitoring. As you would need to be able to move shards between servers, restart them, backup them and so on.
Manage your passwords with pass
to be fair that was not science fiction
Supreme Court Says Employers Can Bar Worker Class-Action Suits
My company has a "real" HQ and then satellite teams at a few different WeWorks. Anecdotally, lots of other people in this WeWork are in similar situations. But I'm still not sure it totally invalidates the larger point; if business were to slow, these offices would probably be the first to go.
Primer on Hardware Security: Models, Methods, and Metrics [pdf]
You're both violating the community standards here (by calling people idiots) and really reaching by suggesting that a methodological paper about inferring information from C. elegans literature is somehow a clear rebuttal to the parent post.
In France there where major demonstrations and direct actions to try and get one of the northern TSV's to stop in their city - they wanted the tourism benefits.
Google Kubernetes Engine 1.10 is generally available and ready for enterprise
The weak, the desperate, the vulnerable--these are always the first to be victimized by the self-interested and unscrupulous, the scammers, the cons, the gutter scum.
> If you bought a sensible car, your monthly costs could be much lower.

$12,041 over 6 years is $2006 per year, which is about $167 per month.

All of my friends pay about that much just for car insurance every month. Throw in a car payment ($200/mo. - $500/mo. depending on the terms of the lease), gas, and maintenance (regular oil changes, tire replacements, etc.) and you'll end up way north of $12,000 after 6 years.
Google Products as flags
Previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bzarg.com%20kalman&sort=byPopu...
Have you tried to opt out of Google services, especially if you got in early on? It's not easy, let me tell you.
The free edition was discontinued in 12/6/2012 and only supported 10 users. The new lowest tier, G Suite Basic, has 24/7 phone support.
Personally I’d rather see Orlando to Tampa, but it definitely felt like 80% of the people I went to college with in Orlando were from south Florida.
Selecting the right secure hardware for your IoT deployment
Great, so Google can get even more data. Huzzah!?
Why is that a good thing, and what benefit does it provide to consumers? The only thing you mentioned that has even marginal benefit to the public is better search data, and I get less and less convinced that this will happen. I may be an outlier, but I have found Google search less useful in the past year, unless I go through steps to avoid personalization. Rather than search the part # that I requested, it just thinks I want to go to digikey.

And dear God, spam calls are already bad enough, why do we want to make them even more realistic? I fail to see even one application where I would prefer to talk to a more realistic robot.
In whose interest is it to scan and tow such cars?
We only had 3-5 documents online. 1 of those documents was a spreadsheet VERY important spreadsheet. All documents disappeared after the reported error occurred. Google wanted the document URLs to retrieve the 'lost' documents. We only were able to get a hold of 1 URL for the critical shared spreadsheet, which was finally recovered.

All other documents were lost, but luckily they were not critical. But we still lost them. Hope this clarifies?
It's understandable to frame it in this way, and there are legitimate predators who take advantage of people in those environments. The common case is more prosaic: addicts are often codependent and will seek romantic companionship amongst each other, especially in close personal environments like that. Starting a relationship early on in the recovery process is a common (yet tempting) mistake and conventional wisdom warns against it, which is why the phrase exists.

[I spent a few years in the orbit of 12 step programs in my youth]
Google's ToS state otherwise.

> Our automated systems analyse your content (including emails) to provide you with personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, tailored advertising and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received and when it is stored.

https://policies.google.com/terms
Your newborn has a chance, and that chance goes up if you participate in research.
The type of person who buys a brand new car probably likes a brand new car (new features, status, reliability, etc) and that doesn't change after a handful of years. Or the other way around, the type of person who wants to maintain an older vehicle is probably not the type of person who will buy a brand new car.

Obviously there are exceptions, but the used car market is much larger than the new car market so most are selling.
How Russian Trolls Won American Hearts and Minds
The challenge is that when you're reporting on companies with legendarily strict NDAs and entire security teams dedicated to finding leaks and snuffing them out, news is going to come predominantly from confidential sources.

For example, in the Theranos segment that followed the Google segment on this week's 60 Minutes, the Theranos employee who first ratted them out stated that he used a fake name when he first contacted the government because he feared reprisal.

Presumably, reporters are supposed to seek adequate proof or confirmation of what they hear from "sources", and we are supposed to be able to trust that they did that job adequately or at least, they are reporting the news as they believe it, until confirmation is available in the form of an official investigation.
You should account for deletion, but in general this stuff doesn't keep me up at night.

In the rare event you restore deleted users, and even rarer, if they actually notice, just tell them you screwed up.
That's about 75 miles per hour. Acela (our high-speed intercity train) makes the 39 mile Washington to Baltimore trip (with a single stop in-between) at 68 miles per hour. The non-express intercity train makes a two-stop trip at 49 miles per hour. The commuter train is under 40 miles per hour.
Hookah Kingdom
A.I. Chatterbot Eliza v2
7 Accelerants for Team Learning and Business Growth
well in the UK the commute from my town to London (about 65 miles) is over $600
>> Well, we’ll never know from this page.

Apparently, you now know that there's "something very interesting" to investigate! So, investigate?
Taxi medallions weren't a huge win for organized labor, they were a huge win for organized crime. Taxi drivers have been getting the short of the stick for a long time, it's not like it was a lucrative position before Uber came along.
True, that 1 in 10 where you are faster is in cities like New York or Tokyo. And its not "a little faster".
Isn't Google a private company?
It seems like MoviePass is stuck between a marginal cost rock and user expectation hard place.

But if AMC adds their own pass subscription, I don’t think they would be. My impression is that theater chains have great margins and very low marginal cost to add one more viewer. In my area, there are only a few theaters playing the major hit movies, and I don’t think it would be a problem to subscribe to a particular theater.

I really think AMC is holding onto a $19/month plan for unlimited movies, which would be profitable for them out of the gate.
you can also do web app in DART (the language on which flutter is created) you can do mobile, web and server cli apps in DART

https://www.dartlang.org
What I saw over decades after Apollo was an unrelenting pounding by Congress, specifically Republicans in regards to cost and commercial payback, and Democrats in regards to why are we spending money out there when it is needed here, instead. Not a "deep state", of which even if it did exist would have then been filled with the unimaginative and risk adverse since because of my previous point.
I live in Helsinki. If you're pushing a buggy, with a child aged 0-6, travel is free on Trams, Busses, and local-rail/subways.

When it comes to long-distance transport (between cities) children travel free, but the parent with the buggy has to pay.

Edit: For comparison-purposes an electronic ticket for unlimited (local) tram, bus, or subway travel would cost an adult approximately €50/month.
> Throw in a car payment

They said sensible car. A car you need a loan for is not a sensible car.
I feel the same about concessions. I realize it might all be calculated to the penny for peak income but I would be more keen to regularly buy concessions if I wasn't paying close to $20 for a soda and a popcorn. I would think dropping the cost a bit might increase the number of folks buying. (The margins on it all are what really piss me off.)

I also wish it wasn't essentially a flat price for everything. A small, medium or large anything is generally just fifty cents to a dollar away from any other size. I want a small soda and popcorn I get pressed to size-up for that extra few cents to get a gallon/barrel of each.
When Google bans your account, you no longer have 24/7 phone support.
SpaceX is a Los Angeles based company, and Elon Musk also lives in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if that counts as Silicon Valley.
On the other hand:

"Unsurprisingly, Manhattan (average adult ticket price of $12.59 when matinee pricing is included) was the most expensive of the city’s five boroughs. Not a single Manhattan theater we studied offered a sub-$10 price for a regular adult ticket. The average cost of the borough’s 28 theaters was $14.30."

This one just happens to be my closest, preferred theater:

"The most expensive regular adult ticket in New York City was for $17.49 at the AMC Loews on Manhattan’s Upper West Side."

At those prices, MoviePass is a ridiculous deal for me.

Source: https://www.valuepenguin.com/2015/04/movie-ticket-prices-ins...
And there are also thousands of metro areas for which public transport isn’t viable for some reason or another.

We technically have a bus system, but it’s a joke.
OK, then the question just becomes why people don't settle for older cars until that drives the prices into a new equilibrium where the choice isn't as obvious any longer.
It helps to remember it’s only business, nothing personal.
North of $12,000 and you'll own a car. The no-car-movement is great for cities and people with lots of patience.

You'll never, ever take Land Cruisers away from me.
And here I thought we only murdered scientists--or at least killed their careers--when they stopped publishing. "Publish or perish."
EU parliament to broadcast Zuckerberg hearing May 22nd
1. The two-word phrase sensible car was not defined by the comment I replied to; it was left up to interpretation.

2. Even if I take your assumption as the other poster's definition of sensible and remove any car payment, gas + insurance + maintenance yields a 6 year cost above $12k. My point stands.
Would be interesting to know. dang, care to comment if you see this?
You aren't locked out. It becomes read online and you can export it at that point.
That's because both were designed to specifically work with how the platform is designed. But compare Python/C# and, say Python/Java or Clojure/Java interop and code sharing.
How posting on IH helps me shape my ideas
It's kind of interesting that how particular fields chose to embrace certain particular methods; till I have worked with aerospace domain,I never had heard of the Kalman filter, whereas some of the newer and even more fundamental methods like wavelets and compressed sensing appear to have such low traction in Aerospace till now.
The effect that they observe makes sense, implicitly, but I struggle to see a causal link here.

The nucleolus is the site of ribosome synthesis, and ribosomes are needed to make proteins. Under caloric restriction, the growth pathways in the cell get turned down, and protein translation is held back until resources become available again. It makes sense that the cell would stop synthesizing ribosomes, which are HUGE structures that take lots of energy to make.

So I would say that reduced protein translation is a hallmark of longevity, and the methionine restriction experiments support that. The nucleolus getting smaller is likely one of the many effects of this adaptation.

I agree with the author however that this is a great and easily-measured microscopic phenotype. Perhaps this can lead to awesome assays of cellular aging, and perhaps even drug screening for compounds that are rejuvenating.
Why tunnels and bridges, specifically?
Does every traffic light or change to traffic that occurs after a fatality at long time known about dangerous intersection mean that traffic light manufacturers and traffic engineers collude to further their influence over shaping of our traffic? Or are people merely responding to issues as they impact society? You're presenting this with evil overtures. Sure the military industrial complex drains a lot of money from the budget. But they are responding to services needed by the government. The unfortunate squandering of money, spending money on unneeded equipment (that the Pentagon says they don't want or need) by Congress, or the lack of oversight on costs billed to the government, are other issues.
It's not really an excuse - it truly is convenient in such a way that you only have to go to one place to get the thing you want.

If I want Man in the High Castle, I have to pay for Amazon. But if I want Ozark, I need to pay for Netflix. If I want to watch Metropolis, or The Raven, or The Maltese Falcon, they're old and not any streaming service, even if the rights are owned by a studio. Where can I find them? Yup, bittorrent.

At least piracy more-or-less forced most music to be centralised onto a single service, i.e. in many cases you can get the same songs on Spotify and Apple music. It's a shame piracy didn't force Hollywood studios to sort their out, and allow you to just go to one or two sites. Just look at what Disney are trying to do.

You are of course right: "it wasn’t an insurmountable problem after all" - it's just that studios and publishers squabble. But I'm not holding my breath on Elsevier, MacGrawHill, AddisonWesley, OUP, SUP, etc. to come up with a commerical SciHub.
It was a story like this years ago that prompted me to switch to FastMail. Have never looked back.
"I have a problem and I want to share it with you."
Well you get your money back since its a deposit. Few hundred more is not ideal, but it is not much.
Last attempt to get them to switch to cloud.
Show HN: Real-Time Crypto Market Data Feed
> The no-car-movement is great for cities and people with lots of patience.

I don't own car (nor have any intention of doing so) due to being too blind to drive safely, but not blind enough for any sort of government assistance.

(I'm not legally prevented from driving, I'm being considerate of the safety of others.)
But to compare it to car and ride sharing you need to add insurance, fuel and parking cost.

Also, 165 k miles and you never had to change the timing belt, break pads etc? Does the 5 k$ include all those costs?
Pre-Steam also coincided with pre-Internet / online gaming. Having half your software assets lurking on company servers now makes protecting your IP considerably easier.
Isn't google doing the same thing. They are using their search dominance to get people to use their other services. If DOJ hadn't forced MSFT to stop making IE the default browser would google be as big. Most people don't ever change the defaults on their browser. If MSFT had been left alone are you sure google would be as big as they are today? I mean they took netscape from 90% market share to like 5% marketshare.
and that's not even including the part about talking with dolphins
Classical music in loop, such as this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzeRSsNHtsQ
Just re-hashing passwords, with a more secure algorithm implemented in an HSM.
The oxygen content is mostly the same (i think it's 20% instead of 21%, it's something like that)

What makes it hard to breathe is the reduced pressure.
It’s a major payoff of a lot of small research advances made by Google over the last few years. In and of itself it’s not a terribly groundbreaking research result, but a bunch of parallel AI, NLP, and systems research had to go into this to take it from toy experience to what will eventually be a robust service. This is the promise of AI in the 2020s: incremental services that chip away at various low-cognition but high-variance/pattern-based tasks that litter our home and professional lives.
There is theory and practice. similar concepts, but for so long we’ve heard big hassles with electron solution real life deployment solutions (some companies only don’t even deploy electron multi platform, if it were that simple more would).

Also with memory usuage which was mentioned elsewhere in this discusssion.

The idea is maybe it could be done better. On the other hand maybe Electron has made great strides over last year or so, it would depend on how much progress has been made.

Cross platform code is great but in the end doing that while getting something out the door end to end multiplatform as fast as possible is key, while at the same time not having performance significantly worse than it would normally be for the same code in an off the shelf browser.
sad but true. I think we have a few already
Exploiting people is almost never personal, no matter how extreme. I don't feel like that makes it any better
and your whole packet is text, without any compression?

I doubt that.
> It's nothing out of pocket though. And that's the point.

No wonder politicians can so easily manipulate the public. “I don’t pay money at the time the service is rendered, therefore it’s free!” It is coming out of your pocket, just at a different time.

> The US as a whole subsidizes car ownership to a huge degree.

Are you making hand wavy arguments about wars for oil or something? Last I checked roads are paid for by various taxes, including gas tax, which I pay.
If this looks familiar, it's probably because you've recently read Ben's post about making art from SSH key randomart: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-randomart-how-does-it-wo...
All Gmail content is scanned. If you get spam filtered, it means your email is scanned. They certainly aren't going to opt their paying customers out of looking for child porn either. And I'm pretty sure their Smart Compose/Smart Reply features are also trained on everyone's mail, G Suite included.

The only thing Gmail has ever said they won't scan G Suite customers' email for is ads, and they don't do that with consumer email anymore either.
Seems like something that would be solvable by technology. Facebook has a dataset of what billions of people look like, they could probably find 2 or 3 who look exactly like me
In a piece of software, there are a lot of things that might determine how long it runs before it crashes ...
Please ignore this comments, just for testing, #asmalltalk
Yeah "once you learn the proper method" is the key phrase here. The proper method being "use rote memorization to learn about things which could have easily been made available via some discoverable visual mechanism".

GUIs make things easy to learn and easy to do. Especially on an OS like Windows where you can drive the entire UI with just the keyboard and about a handful of well-known keyboard shortcuts.

So what's your point? Perhaps you're using a Mac or some other barely usable desktop system that has crappy keyboard acceleration for the UI?
Hasn't Yelp forced businesses to pay or else they'll showcase the negative reviews more than the positive ones?
Pot calling the kettle black when it comes to abusing dominance.
To some extent this is like the garbage for profit universities, for which Federal student aid is the target and the wrecked student finances are merely collateral damage. In this case insurance money is the target, and its not important whether anyone is helped.

What makes such problems difficult is that they precisely cannot be solved by throwing more money at the problem which in many cases can exacerbate them.