skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is correct! Google, Amazon, and Apple despite having vast resources don't have the ability/desire to pay for the bandwidth, storage, and processing needed to have 24/7 recording and analysis from every smart device, especially when you realize that includes cell phones.

Also it is ironic because all modern cellphones have the whole smart speaker thing built into them but people aren't freaking out about that in the same way. (Probably because they haven't realized it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
OK, but why? Do you do this frequently? I feel like there's a hidden assumption here that I'm just not getting. Do you have a whole ton of machines you log into on a regular basis? Where it's deeply unproductive / impossible to use the default configuration? What gives rise to this state of affairs?
World’s first startup decelerator opens on the island of Menorca
Do you have kids? I have three small ones, and they are just starting to desire technology. From my perspective, letting them control music (which they want, and I want them to have) is much better using a Google Home device than giving them access to my phone or tablet.

If you don't have kids, you have no idea how loud and aggressively they will scream when they want something, and especially when these devices are visible to them (if you "need" to respond to a text message, etc).

Yes, it is a devil's bargain. Yes, I'm sure some families are able to, through sheer force of will, completely restrict access to technology. In my family, we are acknowledging we have lost the battle to prevent them from using technology and are seeking solutions that help them manage their desires and create healthy boundaries. I guess we can all argue over what is "healthy" and "normal."

Things like Google Home and Family Link (all from Google) do allow us to control access in a way that I prefer.

So, this "hack" is really exciting because I do care that my two year old already knows Google as a brand.

I'm open to hearing suggestions and have even attempted to build my own open source alternatives, but using voice is a modality that is preferable for so many reasons, and I don't see alternatives that won't be worse.
These showed up in Chicago for months. It was a whole series, they said "Spam is not your friends", "Clickbait is not your friends", "Fake accounts are not your friends" and "Fake news is not your friends". It was funny to me, because it felt like they were reminding me of everything that made me hate (and subsequently abandon) Facebook in the first place. The whole ad campaign felt like a setup for the punch line "Facebook is not your friends.
That's really funny. My employer is one of the larger users of influxdb I'm aware of, so much so we had to write some software[1] (we did synthetic benchmarks of 500k metrics per second and it held up just fine) to overcome scaling limitations and I didn't know this. Thanks for the cluebat! TIL!

[1] https://jumptrading.github.io/influxdb/metrics/monitoring/de...
I get that this is an art project, but I think it would be more effective as a privacy device if it inserted a switch inline with the microphone, doing away with the "white noise" entirely. :)
"Project Alias offers an independent layer of protection to any privacy-minded person"

how>? that makes no sense. only because it wakes it for you?
i think its good that you need to talk to google or some company, at least then you have an honest picture where your data goes :D. most useless machine in the world, apart from the damn home-AI nonsense itself :D
>WHY?

Because China.

Having lived in China for a few months with an Android phone I can with absolute certainty tell you that this is needed over there. The amount of garbage apps, even from big companies like baidu is enourmous!

And without a Google playstore, or play services, or play safety thing it is an absolute wild-west of background alarms, API calls, battery draining and whatnot.
It's really just that they selected the wrong serverless architecture.

Code repo -> docker build -> AWS Fargate. Easy to set up CI/CD pipeline that doesn't require you manage servers and can support long-running, CPU intensive, and even GPU applications.

(You may have to manage the fleet a bit for GPU support, ie create your own ECS cluster with autoscaling -- but not actively manage the deployment of instances.)
As you get older, and your time becomes short, you're not going to want to retire to some completely foreign place you've never lived in. You will want to be close to people that matter to you, and enjoy the comfort of familiar things. Exploring new things becomes less appealing as you age. Exploration is for the youth.
HAnt Malware Burns Down Your AntMiner If You Don’t Pay
Thanks for the reply!
Did you submit this clause to them yourselves when you agreed to the work? I'm not working with an agency, I'm just scouting work myself. It seems like I could generate a lot of friction from potential employers by asking them to sign a clause like this.

I'm been searching online to see if the specific project I just left could be publicly connected to the company for which I worked, and I'm finding that all of my fellow contractors have listed the project on their linkedin. I think I'm going to take their queue and put it on my resume myself.
Show HN: Node.Js server-side framework
+1 on this. The paper doesn't really address the most typical usecases of Serverless which are typically API backends, streaming data processing (feeding off Kinesis/Kafka/similar), and reactions to one off-ish events like object uploads to storage or events from other systems. While folks like those building Pywren have found success with highly parallel workloads, FaaS still isn't the typical way people go after distributed computing workloads, and no one from the vendor side is pushing this. - munns - Lead Dev Advocate - AWS Serverless
the cost is there :D just no benefits, like most 'products' today... i can't imagine 1 unit being sold to anyone but some addicted person who needs to have all-the-new-things regardless of their use.
Then the dog would be the defendant, not a witness.
The game engine, no. But the game logic, the code that makes the game engine do the things that make what it's doing Halo as opposed to some-other-game-on-that-engine, is written in blamscript.

"Screenwriting" to me would sort-of imply that this was all just for human consumption during planning, and later implemented in something else.
A Distributed Search Engine for the Distributed Web – Dweb.page
Also that's only true for a narrow subset of people working in "rockstar" industries where the career decline is sharp after 30. Footballers, pop stars, models, some programmers. Everyone else expects to make more as they get older. Some industries (e.g. acturaries, medical) have really long qualification processes so you will only reach full pay after 30.

It might be "peak savings opportunity because you don't have a family", but that's not at all the same thing.
The designer said this:

"Now that you have in mind what the form of your logo should be, you can move onto drawing it. Every time I get a task to do logo design, I start by drawing. I draw millions of versions of the logo. That way I can put all the ideas on paper and visualize what works the best and what doesn’t."

you draw millions of versions? huh?
I agree, but curation is often considered censorship, which results in negative press.
Does that amount of RSS data include Atom? If so, what is the ratio, and if not, how much Atom do you serve?
Groundhog Day on Hacker News 2 years and running:

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon...

No one cares if you don’t want to use it. No one needs to justify why they want to use one to you.
I agree that your phone can delegate the same voice commands to your smart devices or do Q&A, but some of these devices are also decent speakers to stream music casually (eg. $75 Echo).
I found the fact that they're backing away from missile warnings and that Massachusetts has no provision at all for nuclear emergency response (see the footnotes) quite worrying.
> These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source.

It depends how you look at it. Take Kubernetes for example, Google open sources it, but there is a caveat, it's not really useful without all the necessary complementary services, that Google happens to offer you. Or take Android, exactly the same problem. Sure, there are some things they truly contribute to open source, but even among them a lot are not necessarily useful outside of those companies and are contributed purely to reduce costs or worse, to gain control. All of this is very different from Redis contribution for example. They never do things like that.

> What they aren't likely to want to pay for is a site license from some company trying to sell them a MongoDB under terms practically identical to what Oracle does for Oracle DB.

You are missing the point. MongoDB never wanted to sell a license to Amazon or to anyone trying to compete with their own hosted offering. Same goes for any company trying to make money through SaaS. So it's not just unlikely, it's by design. And Amazon making their own implementation is expected outcome of this. Although I suspect no one is going to repeat MongoDB's mistake and release client libraries under permissive licenses after that. Next time Amazon tries to reimplement something, it won't be as drop in of a replacement, as it is now.
"Medieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning. Modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional."

This essay seems to be mostly posited to critique the belief in individual narrative- i.e. the idea that we are free individuals who have the will to choose rationally, as the idea of liberalism is based in.

While I'm down for that argument, the above passage is of particular confusion for me. If no external, nor internal force provides meaning to life, what is there? If the passage was to claim there is no meaning at all, why not just say that clearly?
So in this case, you have two machines, and you want each one to have a different configuration -- why not just have a different rc file on each machine and not bother syncing them. Is there a lot of custom dotfile config that you do want to share between them?
Also large companies often value creating documentation and other "admin" much more than individual developers - individual developers appreciate this admin work having happened but often detest doing it themselves, where for a decent company the value of a smooth skills transfer process is more obvious and baked into the culture.

This is far from always the case, of course, but projects that get a lot of input from commercial entities often have documentation that is more complete and (more importantly) more accurate/up-to-date than those that don't.
Main Factors to Create a Robust Online Presence for Your Business
Maybe one would have to have a system where the websites were vetted by people, set up trees of trust, and then let people choose the top of the tree and the depth for the search. Probably too computationally intense, if one has many nodes and websites, but it would be interesting to try.
Commitizen and Auto-Changelog to enhance your release and feature management
> All too often [judges[ act merely as extensions for police departments

Empirical data disagrees with your assertion [1]. Judges act as an effective check on prosecutors. There are systemic issues which mitigate this check, e.g. cash bail and plea bargaining. But the difference between America and China in judicial independence and prosecution procedure is night and day.

[1] https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
Usually I just write down the easiest possible tasks that I know I can get done, and if that fails, I ask colleagues and mentors for ideas. Ask yourself what's an easy way to get started? Do you need to use a small carrot to reward yourself? Can you do it at a certain time of day under certain conditions? Can you collaborate with someone else to do the things you really don't want to?
tldr; uses raspberry pi to continuously feed the smart speaker white noise until it receives your new keyword, "ok alias" or "ok computer" or whatever. I think it's cool, there have been countless times when I didn't even say "ok google" and it has randomly woken up
But the question is could it be made to be good for that domain?

See https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.04024 [cited by this paper] for promising results doing linear algebra using aws lambda.
Women Don’t Belong in Combat Units
I lost track of the detail and am vaguely aware of a Java renaissance, but not clear whether that's real or whether Oracle are responsible or whether it's Clojure. So now I don't know whether I have reasons to hate Oracle. But I keep a little resentment warm just in case.
For those that prefer algo, there is an open issue to add Pi-Hole (https://github.com/trailofbits/algo/issues/1258) and in my fork I've added Pi-Hole support: https://github.com/dan-v/algo. It's a really nice setup especially on mobile devices where you typically have to choose between using a VPN or using adblock as they typically require a local VPN hack to function.
>* like the GPL did before companies found that a SaaS model let's you side step the release changes requirement*

Unless you use AGPL where the trigger for releasing your modifications is making the change available by any means (direct or otherwise) rather than with the standard GPL where the trigger is distribution of outputs compiled from the modified version.
Yeah, this is a big problem. I set up a Streisand instance last year just to play around with, and while the set-up was pleasantly simple and the results were great as far as the VPN functionality, it shut down Netflix entirely for me. Definitely a deal-breaker.
It's interpretable as a subtle threat to Yang. The message looks on the surface like solidarity: "We'll step up tensions over your arrest. We're on your side. Hang tight." But really, it says, "We have no issues whatsoever with judicial murder so keep your mouth shut." It's not like Canada is going to release her to get a convicted drug smuggler out of jail after all.

Maybe it is not so subtle!
Firefox should still be better for your use case here. They're just changing the behavior for people who don't have Flash enabled.
I wouldn't say so. I got my grandma a cheap Android phone and a book to help her learn because I thought it'd be better since I also have Android and can help her.

My grandma is 89 now, she uses Whatsapp, Youtube and whatnot and I am not kidding but within 2 months she had:

- AVG antivirus (an ad told her she had a virus)

- She had batterylife for 7 hours before a charge was needed due to shitty apps

- Ads on her lock screen?!

- Ads on her homepage

After 6 months and 3 house calls to fix her phone we gave up and she got my aunts old iPhone 5s with a new battery.

It runs iOS 12 now and it runs flawlessly and protects her from all the stuff I mentioned.

From a guy that has always had Android: most users need iOS level protection. Just simple facts.
Pihole and Pivpn on Google Cloud Platform free tier is working great for me: https://github.com/rajannpatel/Pi-Hole-PiVPN-on-Google-Compu...
> I have never seen a legitimate use for it that wasn't misplaced adolescent tech fantasies

This seems a lot like "old man yells at cloud". The same could be said for personal computers 40 years ago.
That was my first thought too, you would have to train the device to use your voice sample for the whisper of "hey google", which is totally doable. My main concern is speed.
Couldn't the device use voice-to-text and upload the text, possibly tagged with which voice profile said what? The same goes for phones, obviously.
What’s to stop you from configuring it so it says “Hey Google” differently based on the person talking?
> CBT doesn't work for everyone. I found it infuriating.

This is where I'm at so far. I don't want to condemn it, even as a match for myself, with a sample size of 1, but I know a lot of people for whom it was successful, but my one therapist that worked with me on it thus far only caused more strife and anguish.
Yes, my naive assumption was that if people presented their real names and their jobs in the same place, the discussion would be more civil — aren’t we in the era where people lose their jobs for Twitter rants? - but the negative content persists to the point that people are making memes(!) to push the idea of making LinkedIn more civil. Strange times.
suspended.
Checking even a few sites routinely for new content is a huge waste of life. You have to figure out if there is new content, then you have to remember where you left off and, assuming a site even makes that easy (most don't), while figuring it out, you have to avoid falling into a bottomless pit of click bait. I have 12 feeds in my reader; HN, a handful of YouTube channels and a handful of personal blogs. Some have posts every minute, some have posts every day, some have posts months apart. Of all these feeds, only 1 contains the actual content (Planet GNU), everything else is a link and maybe a small summary, and I'm perfectly fine with that, I just want the uniform process of notifications that RSS provides because the alternatives are all horrible.
I very much agree with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xLgr6Ng4qQ
tl;dr: the most important code I ever wrote saved us millions of dollars by setting `disabled="disabled"` on an html element

I don't know if this is the correct measure for "most important" but it is provably and measurably the most valuable (in terms of dollars) code that I have ever written.

I used to work at a fintech company. This company gave out loans. One of the main reasons you might get a loan at this company instead of a bank is because the bank refused to give you a loan. So, as you might imagine, this company needed to deal with a considerable default risk, and be very, very careful in its underwriting.

At one point, we had a minor crisis. The default rate was considerably higher than we had projected, and this was threatening the business. Without getting into details: this was potentially an existential risk to our business.

Preliminary analysis of the problem revealed a few significant causes. One: our underwriting rules were complicated, and manually applied. At the time we were working on a rules engine that would offload a lot of fiddly rule checks, but this was still a few months out. In the interim, people would manually check the spreadsheet and they made mistakes.

I was tasked with fixing this with a stopgap. So what I did was I added about 15 lines of code to our front-end. It collected a handful of stats (that were already being exposed to the front-end) that covered ~80% of the underwriting cases, and hard-coded the current underwriting rules on them. If the stats on a given loan didn't meet the threshold, and would therefore be rejected by our manual underwriters, my code disabled the 'approve' button.

The entire code was a function that looked something like

```javascript
THRESHOLD_1 = 123;
THRESHOLD_2 = 123;
... //etc

function buttonDisabled(){
if( stat1 < THRESHOLD_1 ||
stat2 < THRESHOLD_2 ||
... //etc) {
return true;
} else {
false;
}
}
```

plus the react binding necessary to attach this to the approve button.

I got this done start to finish in about two days (most of those days spend talking to PMs trying to figure out what the values of the THRESHOLD constants should be), and it was deployed in prod by the end of day 4. It was cheap, terrible, shitty code, but that was ok! Because it was throwaway code. We had an existing project to replace this with an actual rules engine, and it was on track to get rolled out two months later. So who cares about shitty code, it's getting replaced in two months. In the interim, speed was more important, and they got speed.

By my own numbers (based on estimates as I didn't have access to real numbers), I estimate that this code saved somewhere between $500k and $2M in defaults. Whatever it was, the company agreed. Every Friday afternoon the CEO would hand out recognition awards for someone who went above and beyond, and for this code I won the award three weeks in a row.

tl;dr: the most important code I ever wrote saved us millions of dollars by setting `disabled="disabled"` on an html element
You are switching the subject.

This has nothing to do with the security of the protocol.
This is a neat git setup for managing dot files:

https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/02/best-way-to-sto...
If you don't trust these devices, you probably wouldn't trust your phone either.
I mostly agree with you but there is a legitimate use.

Imagine if you couldn't use your hands or interact with technology due to a disability - these devices would make the world so much easier to interact with.
HomePod Now Counts Toward Apple Music Device Streaming Limits
This is something that has really irked me the past couple years. I feel safer entering other countries than I do coming back to the U.S.

It feels like you’re entering a prison camp going through immigration. Everyone is screened by security before getting on a plane yet passport control officers are wearing swat team bullet proof vests and open-carry guns while checking your passport.
I cam across this solution not very long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070797.

The advantage to Chezmoi (or GNU Stow) is that it can handle things outside of your home directory too (if I understand correctly).
Compared to IOS, Android is very forgiving. That said, it also does a lot worse with battery life. As an Android dev it can be annoying to work around, but I appreciate why they have taken these steps!
developer notes: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/166916-halo-for-the-2600-re...
Fund managers contest on a financial crypto App
This is so annoying! Do you know what needs to be whitelisted?
Three Chinese movies I've seen get fairly widespread acclaim are: 1. Hero 2. Flowers of Shanghai 3. The Legend of the Drunken Master
Same here. Especially MenuetOS[1], because it was written in Assembly and originally fit on a floppy disk. That's a level of patience and programming (in Assembly) that I can only admire from afar...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS
I think it's great. Just because you cannot imagine the utility doesn't mean others can't.
The processing for the wake word is handling on the firmware. If you point Wireshark (or another network monitor) at a Google Home or Alexa device you can see that there isn't significant network activity while idle.
> Unless you have tons of blogs you want to follow

You mean you don't? I've got maybe about a hundred at this point. Even if it were only a half-dozen, that'd still be _way_ more than I'd want to check manually every day.
You can just download Chrome, it has Flash built-in. Until they kill it in Chrome as well, of course.
Are you in a position to delegate or outsource the tedious parts?
More than 100 talks on Open Source technologies at Percona Live 2019
The story of the USB
And I have a feeling many people who make a privacy case against Echo/Home forget that their phone does the same thing.
While I appreciate the sentiment...unless you actually think Google and Amazon devices are recording irrelevant ambient sound deliberately (they aren’t), this doesn’t help anything. Unless the software here is better than theirs at recognizing the trigger word (very unlikely), there will be even more false positive activations on this device than there are on the originals.

Edit: It’s very unlikely because Amazon and Google pay for false positives, so they have a strong incentive to develop really good trigger word detection.