skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don’t think this is correct. A hijab is a scarf around the head that doesn’t cover the face. I’m sure I’ve seen women in France wearing them.

The Wikipedia article suggests it’s a straightforward ban on covering the face, not as you describe.

So in fact the welding mask or motorcycle helmet would be illegal (in a public place). The hijab would be irrelevant.

I still think it’s a bad law, but at least it seems basically consistent.

Are we talking about different laws? Is there a different one about signalling your religion?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering

EDIT: I think we are indeed talking about different laws.
You’re referring to an older one that bans religious symbolism in public institutions. So what you describe is correct, when we’re talking about schools and hospitals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_scarf_controversy_in...
That's true - and I suppose that some people are much more concerned about the former threat than the latter.
I feel like you're being purposefully reductive here. You know they're different right? The entire value proposition (and marketing strategy) of Alexa and related devices is that they are voice activated, so you don't have to physically interact with the device to make a request.

Given that, it would be ridiculous to expect paying customers to switch it off when not in use. The onus on Amazon is to protect their customers' privacy while the device is being used as intended.

If you really want to pick apart the car analogy, maybe this is closer to having automatic start and driving capability on a car, but the car sometimes randomly starts and drives away. Are you really going to blame the customer for that, even though they could disable the feature every time they exit the car?
There's Mycroft too: https://mycroft.ai/
We have a lot of alternatives but they are unable to get the sort of marketing and hence the attention mainstream devices like Alexa and Google Home do
I can't believe you're getting so much flak for saying something so obvious. There are plenty of good arguments for immigration but that doesn't mean it doesn't have negative effects as well.
Yea, I wish the girl mentioned what the message started with. Something had to have been misinterpreted as a voice command and a contact name ... and the device UI has to be broken to the point where it doesn't give you any audio acknowledgement or confirmation.
Just out of curiosity - what open solutions are you referring to?
Different technical solutions solving the problems of scalability, privacy, smart contract execution, governance, sidechain platforms, language and runtime improvements, etc. In any other tech, there exists a myriad of competing technical solutions, why should crypto be any different? And why should you presume that speculation alone is the driver behind all of them?
The one thing I spent years teaching my wife is that when there’s anything untoward on the highway, JUST STOP. I’ve avoided at least two major accidents by stopping instead of swerving — in a few feet you can get your speed down to levels where a crash won’t be fatal or severely injurious. And even if you get rear ended by stopping short, it’s usually at a much lower speed. All autonomous cars should just STOP when something is not right.
Duh, its been the same way with all of their hardware manufacturing errors. The standard template is:

Numerous social media posts about the same problem.

Denials and costly fixes for them. To the point of specialized third party accessories. Remember the iPhone antenna “bands”?

Apple acknowledges the issue.

Class action lawsuit filed.

Leaks about Apple knowing about the issue months before any corrective action.
I get what you are saying but I would say that Amazon does NOT take privacy extremely seriously or this couldn't have happened. Let me be clear that I'm not saying they don't care at all or they are conspiring with the NSA.

What I mean by the above is that the "call" skill is much different than the "weather" skill. All Alexa has to do is have a confirmation prompt in the "call" skill and this wouldn't have happened. That is what extremely serious looks like. This is exactly the same as the phantom laughter incident from a few months ago. Alexa "heard" someone say 'Alexa laugh' and laughed, but that wasn't the user's intent. It was fixed by moving to 'Sure, I can laugh,' followed by laughter.

Voice UI is very hard and still in its infancy but ability for personal harm (physical or emotional) must be considered in these interfaces. Turning off the lights may not need confirmation but unlocking the doors or turning off the alarm probably should. Sending recordings or answering calls or even calling people should require more hoops or at least allow the user to control the risk/reward.
And this is where "software" diverges from "engineering".

Bugs happen in architecture, aircraft, etc. too. the difference is that the actual engineers are paid to have a precautionary approach and spend significant resources to actively prevent bugs from making it into the final product.

In contrast, software is often written to "ship first", be "agile", and "move fast and break things". Yet when it causes problems, they just say "bugs happen", and "it is unfair to vilify them".

Features are not better than reliable security.

And yes, negligence is less bad than malice, but it is still damaging and developers and managers need to be held to account.

If your manager is pressing you to do unsafe crap in too big a hurry, it's your responsibility to push back, and if unsuccessful, leave for saner pastures and make it more difficult for that management to proceed.
About $1.2B in cryptocurrency stolen since 2017: cybercrime group
I'm going to blame any communication breakdown on the fact that I know nothing about ReasonML or React-Reason. However, the point of having to store state so you have something to compare against strikes me as a really odd choice for the React-Reason library to introduce, since it deviates from the functionality of React itself.

I was curious enough to glance at the React-Reason doc's and they say that `shouldUpdate` is passed a record called `oldAndNewSelf: {oldSelf: self, newSelf: self}`. Does that not have what is needed to implement the method without extra storage? For example, in standard React `shouldComponentUpdate` is passed `nextProps` & `nextState`, and since the method is in context of the previous render, we have everything we need to make the comparison without explicitly taking extra steps to store previous/next.

Maybe we are saying the same thing in different ways, I seem to be pretty good at that :).
To me this sounds like "why make murder illegal in the EU? What perverse incentive are they creating to move murder offshore to China?"

You can't defend doing bad in the world by saying it's not yet banned everywhere. It's kinda defeatist. We can't allow women to drive because then Saudis will have less incentives to come here to spend their money.
Right, but then you need a universe where string replicators then proceed to evolve to the point where they paint the Mona Lisa and come up with general relativity. That might be the much harder problem.
Ask HN: I received total of 827 GDPR emails. How many did you get?
Suck a berg is liar
I wrote it carefully and I stand by it. If it can't deal with it because your system is getting too confused for any reason, you don't have a self-driving system. Being able to function enough like a human that the safety features on the car don't produce an unacceptable result is a bare minimum requirement to have a self-driving car.

This isn't horseshoes, as the old saying goes. I unapologetically have a high bar here.
Not sure which carrier you have but Tmobile has spam protection for free. I get about 1 call a day from "unknown" which I ignore, most other spams are flagged.
If we assume each router has, on average, 0.5Mbps upstream (hopefully it's higher!) then that's a combined capacity of ~250Gbps.

Some quick searching says the average DDOS size at one point in 2017 was measured at ~14Gbps and some larger attacks were peaking at ~120Gbps. Cloudflare's "biggest DDOS ever" was 800Gbps.

Even if we assume a lot of these routers are clustered on specific ISPs or networks and the effective capacity will be less, just on sheer bandwidth we're still well into or above the range of some of the larger DDOS attacks.

Whatever way you look at it, I'm sure 500,000 routers is enough to cause some trouble for most people.
> A simple speaker and microphone is all you need to make a functioning motion sensor.

You could just use an infrared motion sensor. They are dirt cheap and widely used for controlling lights.

The AC unit at work has one, too.

So, all of this already exists. Without spying capabilities, that is.
Show HN: Stacks – A bookshelf for your online courses
A great story. It's similar in a lot of ways to how people believe that Buddhas (according to Theravada Buddhism, many, many Buddhas live among us and almost all of us will become one) fulfill his path to enlightenment this way--reincarnation after another, absorbing all experiences along the way until he is ready to become the Enlightened one.

Disclaimer: I was born Buddhist, but no longer. But I still admire a few aspects of Theravada Buddhism.
1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond
I think this is a bootstrapping problem for all new coins. As you say, novel mining methods are vulnerable to cloud-based "attacks", and existing mining methods mean that the economics of competing with the main coin's mining power can make you vulnerable to sharp swings in mining power.

As unpleasant as it sounds, a centrally managed coin is probably the only effective way to bootstrap a new coin securely at this point. A trusted source or groups of sources has to sign off on a "main" chain periodically until there is sufficient mining capacity that the cost (in coin units) of bringing new capacity online has reached some sort of equilibrium, after which you could soft fork to remove the signing requirement (or just release the private keys for any miner to use and let the consensus algorithm take over).
great article but it kind of petered off at the end... why not highlight what folks have gone on to do post @stake?

they got acquired by Symantec.
Mudge went on to work with the DoD to development a cyber fasttrack program,
Weld started and recently sold Veracode,
Katie started the bug bounty at Microsoft,
Joe Grand is still doing his thing w/ HW
etc...

these folks really are self-made titans of the industry and a true testament to meritocracy and the hacker ethos. They legitamized security research as we know it.
What strikes me odd is that once an unknown is detected on the road, the car should already be alerting the driver and slowing down.

That buys you time for the ai classifier to do its thing and isn’t as dangerous as an emergency braking later on, so seems a sensible behavior all around.
Maybe a more general article on an anti inflammatory diet would be better. A quick search should gives results from some reputable liking sources.

There is also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109010
Deprecate glamorous in favor of emotion
The world is quite different now than in Dickens's time. Even in less progressive countries like the US.
I enjoy it each time I come back across it. :)
If a "call" skill is accidentally triggered, before it is sent to any email addresses, it should tell user "N seconds of voice was recorded and about to send to ....", please said "Send" to send, "Play" to play back the message, etc.

The default must always be voice recording will be auto deleted after 1 minute if no response is heard. It should let user know about that too.
> I've told my roommate I'm moving out if he ever buys an Alex/Google/Apple assistant device.

Do you have an Apple or Google device near you right now? Does it have a microphone, battery power, and a connection to the internet? What about your roommate? Do you ever have sensitive conversations near these devices?

Of course I'm not suggesting you should abandon such technology. I'm just wondering why you draw the line at "Alex/Google/Apple assistant device"
so apple is basically saying it's okay to make a defective product as long as you keep the packaging at the back of the store?
You have repeated this thesis several times without providing any support beyond a child-like belief in the invisible hand. Why not prove your point by showing that at times when illegal immigration dropped the nominal average wage for low-skill workers increased relative to the rest of the workforce, if you can.
Wouldn't that be a crime to record someone without consent and share that to a 3rd party? I would have called the police or is Amazon too big for the law to grasp?
I guess, in this case 'electricity' would be a the moving part. Just have a closable contact on the mic's power attached to an external switch.
Chase Freedom and Discover IT have 5% rotating, I also normally redeem my point for travel and get 1.5x multiplier for that
4) invest in a business that employs slaves

I think it is generally agreed that #4 is preferable to #3. Because local jobs!111

I mean, seriously? That is your argument?
How Logitech’s CEO used a 40 year old design philosophy to shape his company
These were the unlikely survivors after dinosaurs went extinct
Please, leave react off. Use riotjs, much much better choise!
Yeah, I didn't like the barb aimed at Vestager either, mostly because as I'm Irish and appreciative of her making our Government collect taxes properly.
Having a UI that gives the customer no audio confirmation that it got a command to record and send a message is a serious UI failure. This isn't a small thing here. If a bug like this makes it though, how can I trust that device.

I don't think the article is indicating what you say. The report says it's a bug, but it does bother me why Amazon won't comment on the specifics. This should be patched immediately with a full retrospective explaining what happened.
The desicive moment of the language name Ruby
Thanks, we've changed the URL to that from https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-self-driving-car-that-stru....
We have laws for all sorts of things to protect users from their own ignorance. You can't expect every consumer to be 100% aware of the dangers of things they don't fully understand.
Comcast has hiked standalone broadband to $75 - http://stopthecap.com/2017/12/21/75-month-broadband-pricing-...

Interestingly, you can get a cheaper promotional rate if you bundle local TV channels (cheaper than $75/month for both internet + tv) so Comcast can inflate its video subscriber (to boost their stock price) amount and they hope you forget you're on a promotional rate your bill jumps $30-40 after you drop off promo. You're free to negotiate (most people do) to get back on the promo rate; many people have success with this, but it's just a cat/mouse game and a hassle.

And Comcast also has a 1TB monthly usage cap. When the era of 2160p + HDR arrives in the next few years, people will chew through that cap rather quickly.

Comcast will continue to jack up standalone broadband prices to hedge against fleeing video subscribers. Why? Because they can, and have very little competition in most markets.
What grates my nerves isn't primarily Bitfinex/Tether, it's the other exchanges. Why did they accept Tether? Of all the 'altcoins', one backed by an asset like cash is the easiest to verify (or be skeptical of if verification requests are dismissed or ignored). When I signed onto Bittrex, USDT was one of the prominent trading pairs. It was a useful trading pair, because instead of seeing numbers like ".000000314121 : 1 BTC", you'd get a dollar figure you could mentally parse. Of course, the damned software could have done that automatically with a currency of the user's choice. That's kind of a tangent, though. Why weren't the other exchanges more critical of Tether and kept it after months of controversy and skepticism?
> Replaced my Mac with a Pixel Book also for example. As well as our AirPort Extremes with Google WiFi.

Some of your examples make sense but why replace your Airport with a (data mining built-in) Google WiFi? Why not a known good provider like e.g. Ubiquiti? I use their Amplifi and it works great, no "cloud" crap and their brand is reputable.
There is still one more possible alternative, if only we can get the physics to work: room temperature super conduction. That - if it ever comes to fruit - is going to cause a whole pile of revolutions and unlike most other ideas that rest upon unobtanium actually has a chance of success.
ReasonML is a big con.

It is clothed in ALGOL's syntax, but underneath it is a LISP with functions that can be stored, curried, passed around, and composed on top of one another. It doesn't have a Lisp-y syntax and thus no homoiconicity nor macros, but it does have PPX. (https://whitequark.org/blog/2014/04/16/a-guide-to-extension-...)

The biggest one that Reason pulls however is its syntax. ML based languages (Hope, Haskell, Miranda, F#, Elm, Purescript etc.) have historically used the ISWIM syntax (refer Peter Landin: The next 700 programming languages), which was designed to be similar to mathematical notation. Reason ignores this great tradition and brings ML to the bread-and-butter programmer with a syntax that is more ES6 than ES6 itself.

Reason is also the first language where the four major thoughts of PL design comes together.

It packs ML's type system, which lets you create user defined types on data, unlike Simula/C++/Java/C# which commingle user defined types and classes. Interestingly enough, Stroustrup had worked with Pascal the grand-old language of commercial programming, before he went on a great rage and wrote CFront/C++. Pascal was statically typed similar to how Reason/OCaml is. It allows you to define new types that work simply on the shape of the data without the ceremony of classes. But Pascal's type system at the time was quite limited - Stroustrup referred to it as strait-jacketed in HOPL II (Prof. Wirth had meant it only to be a language for teaching after all). Simula's types and classes however appealed to him, and that paved way for the class-based type system in statically typed object-oriented languages ever since.

But this doesn't mean that Reason doesn't have support for object-oriented programming. Reason is OCaml, and the O stands for "Objective", a nod to its object system that knowledgable people like avsm has averred to as fantastical.

The Lispy roots of Reason/OCaml makes it functional, which in simple term means value-based programming, primitives like fold and map defined with recursion, and linked-lists are used for almost everything, except when it isn't. Xavier Leroy, who is both the author of Coq and OCaml is a pragmatist - the OCaml compiler code is choke full of mutation and OCaml has strong support for imperative programming but tastefully cordoned with an explicit syntax.

It is a langauge that mixes imperative, procedural, object-oriented, and functional paradigms, sitting just at the confluence of the great PL traditions that includes ALGOL, Simula, LISP, Modula, ML, and ES6 (!). It is functional programming for the masses, finally delivered!
...which is why the Trump administration is bypassing congress using executive branch admin powers, which is the first paragraph in the link I posted.
You could also argue it's like a shoe company based in the US, where UK people are ordering from them and asking them to ship it to the UK, while UK government threats to set up import restrictions.
> The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.

If what you said is true, then the vehicle operator would not be relied on to intervene because the Uber self-driving software would apply the brakes. Since the vehicle operator is relied on to intervene, this indicates the Uber self-driving software has its emergency braking disabled.
> There's no way a team would get the "ok" to build a skill that randomly records private conversations then sends them to a random contact.

And then builds exactly that...
Not at all, sober people jaywalk too. They just tend to check their surroundings a bit better than their high counterparts for any cars coming to potentially hit them.
Right but I'll sit down and watch a reality program because I want to be entertained. That's understandable.

I can see buying a smaller or alt token because I hope to profit from speculating on it, that makes sense to me. What's the other reason?
You can think of it that way, but much simpler. Only one layer really.
Two things can be true at once. It’s unlikely that there is only one cause to a problem in something as complex as the economy of a country.

Both immigration (both legal and illegal) and employment regulation should be considered and evaluated accordingly. Dismissing one or the other won’t give us a good understanding of reality.
You are on the right track, but I don't think you are quite right. Amazon like systems are more vulnerable to mass surveillance.

Your vulnerability isn't a targeted attack: you are not valuable enough to be worth the effort to figure out your system. As an attacker on your system I'd have to figure out how to break in, and then how to use the hardware you have. You are more valuable as part of a botnet - attacks that already exist. (if you are a politician then maybe, but that person is also vulnerable to a targeted attack on their amazon system - probably more so because the target is easier to figure out).
It absolutely is not necessary to know how another object will behave on the road: you slow down because of the uncertainty!

"It might move out of my way" is no reason to get so close at such a high speed that you can't avoid it when it doesn't!
Is there an independent audit that can prove that?
Alternate Names for Gender Reveal Parties
That's addressed in the actual article to a small extent, but there is value in looking at both sets of data (total and per capita).
An LED light bulb uses 11 watts. You must be lighting your home with 33 bulbs if that only lasts you an hour. If you only use 4 bulbs, that will last over 8 hours.
It's interesting to learn where the intro to Logic's album Everybody came from.
Is your best guess at why this might impact someone's trust in Amazon products really that people would think it was an intentional design choice? (Seems kind of straw-man-y.) If not, then you should generally address the part that will matter to people -- not whether this was on purpose, but what issues caused it and how will they be fixed.
Worse, they knew they needed two people and previously had two individuals, but then felt that was unnecessary and went to only one person per vehicle.
Here's a fun "before he was famous" moment - Andy Weir did an AMA on Reddit pre-The Martian success where he talked about writing The Egg. Here he responds to a question about his other writing where he goes on to mention that he's disappointed that The Martian hasn't been successful.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/zt1n6/i_am_andy_weir_...
There's a whole class of tech like this for me. An Alexa/Echo/etc, a fitness tracker with GPS and sleep monitoring, a maps program that learns my routine and integrates with a weather app, and so on.

And ideally? All of it integrated. It actually sounds nice to say "I'm going home", and have Maps say "today that will take 35, should your oven start preheating when you're 20 minutes out?" IoT devices are overrated, but I can absolutely imagine a critical mass of integrated tools being very useful.

But I'm not even slightly willing to do that. It's too much information and too much risk surface. I'd pay a hefty premium to get local-data-only versions of these products, but no one is offering that, and it doesn't look like they're going to start.
Even though I like Apple stance on privacy, I always turn off microphone access to apps like 'WhatsApp' and others.