skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm..but I'm not getting a confirmation prompt on Firefox or Chrome? Visiting a zoom link in either of those browsers takes me directly into the meeting
...and this is before you get to hacked/compromised devices. This is just devices working as specified.
I would count a recording of my voice as "personally identifiable information" right off the bat. Voice printing is a thing, and anyone will also tell you that they recognize the voices of people they interact with regularly. If someone played an audio clip of someone I know talking to Google Assistant to me, I would recognize who it was based on their voice.
Yep, astrological measurements require data going back all the way to the Sumerians...

If you're interested in astronomy, on the other hand, and dealing with a radio burst lasting a millisecond or less, relying on the wisdom of the ancients is not an option.

Fortunately enough though, you can go out and by off-the-shelf electronics capable of measuring distances at sub-cm level using the time of flight of photons. If you've ever used a (newer) Kinect, or a RealSense camera, you've already seen it in action:

https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/147024-what-is-a-tim...

https://www.dronezon.com/learn-about-drones-quadcopters/best...
How about not oligarchs putting their fingers on the scales... Russian, European. American, Chinese?
Isn't that considered more democratic, bit less?
I hope something like elinks, but on top of Servo (the parsers and JavaScript interpreter parts) would appear soon. While able to process modern Web, it would "render" in the console instead. And disable a lot of features.
slides: https://github.com/strangeloop/2011-slides/blob/master/Sussm...
Scary though isn't it ? With increasing moves in these companies to govern human thought, I can imagine a time when it'll be extremely difficult to have any independent thought of your own. It's already this way in the academia/media, where anything outside the norm is considered 'blasphemy'.
I believe mine expires every five years, but the first time I renewed it I did it through the mail. The last time, I only had to retake the eye test (at ten years). And the DMV made me wait a long time, with the eye test at every window clearly visible (and I think the same one, but I could be remembering incorrectly). I can see fine, but it would have been trivial to memorize it. Even if you can't see it while waiting, take a picture on your phone and zoom in. Memorize the lines you can't see. Plus, I'm not sure the employee was even listening to me as I rattled off the letters.

In my old state they had a machine you looked into. I had a harder time with that one, I'm guessing due to my mild astigmatism. But no chance to memorize it, because you don't see it until your face is in the machine; and all the lines were the same size, so you could have gotten any of them.
Sure, some is better than none. But, my comment specifically said the best way.
This is art, my friend...
Most people unfortunately are specialists in at most one field.

Outside of that specialisation they are distinctly average.

We because of who we are entirely expect this stuff but I'm sure I miss all kinds of things that are outside my specialization.

Modern society has become so complex no one person can keep track off all the moving parts to know if they are been taken advantage off for example.
Not sure why you don't like C#, as to me it's the most sane and powerful of the Java-esque languages.
I'm familiar and have used all the usual suspects, and IMHO I like the .net stack. I said F# because you said you liked both Haskell (ML-style languages) and ELM. (F# however of course eager-eval like OCaml/Reason and doesn't quite have higher-order types.) And you said, "Haskell is not as ideal for web development" - and you can't really beat asp.net core on the back-end side of things. With F# you get back-end code and front-end code - the SAFE stack, ELMish, transpilation of F# to front-end JS using Fable or Xamarin WebSharper (which creates transparent proxies to exec code client-side purely from a meta-data annotation on your fn), Electron on the client, mobile (droid, iOS...) using web-tech, bindings to ReactNative, or the new Fabulous, etc.
I mean. Of course they are. Do you expect to be able to do any meaningful level of training on data that hasn't been properly labeled? At some point, a human has to go in and correct the software when the software gets it wrong. If you want services that do what Google Home does, you have to have this.

Even with that, I'm sure that the engineers are flagging voice requests that happen more then once, or where some one has to manually change or correct what the software thought was the request.

This is only creepy if you don't understand how the software works.
"The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using a new type of language."

The genetic mutation story is not the most commonly accepted view in anthropology, regardless of what Harari suggests. Perhaps it was more popular at one time when archaeological evidence for "behavioral modernity" abruptly ceased beyond ~50 kya, but if anything, it has been waning as a convincing hypothesis as alternative interpretations[0] and evidence for modernity continues pushing back the ~70 kya date[1].

This isn't to say that a real uptick in complex behavior and cognition didn't happen in the Upper Pleistocene; of course it did. But an absence of archaeological data is a pretty poor basis for inferring a single mutation that caused artefact data to go from sparse to abundant/ complex. Beyond the obvious (simply lacking data), it also seems to gloss over, for example, the possibility of cultural evolution, demographic shifts, etc., all of which require no "Tree of Knowledge mutation".

[0] http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I like your elegant thought experiment!

Quarks have -1/3 or +2/3 charge in the standard model and presumably(?) at high enough energies they separate out into a quark-gluon plasma thus exposing the universe to their unholy fractional charges. Above 2 trillion Kelvin according to wikipedia.
Pay beta testers who know what they're signing up for? Train the software with previously human transcribed audio (like TV/audiobooks/etc)
I'm not sure why it's unreasonable for customers to have assumed this is like every other product: they developed it with employees and voluteers before shipping.

After all, the voice recognition in my Prius doesn't send recordings of my "call mom and dad mobile" back to Toyota and it certainly doesn't send random snippets of conversations my wife and I have to low paid contractors around the world.
People often mistake plain and clear for shallow. I consider him an intellectual (and moral) giant.
> with more or less liquid assets

What's more liquid than cash itself?

I also have an hard time it's backed with MORE value and whether that value is fictional or not. The 2008 crash has shown that it wasn't actually backed by much.
Use test subjects who sign up explicitly and specifically for this purpose, rather than burying it in a massive TOS written in legalese that can change at any time and is applied indiscriminately to all customers
^This. I'm sure they're optimizing to only transcribe data they are pretty confident they got wrong (multiple requests; use has to go in and correct), but if you want software to do what the Google Home software does, you have to do this.
You forgot to mention the obvious use of reverse polish notation.
Assuming $0.3/audio clip and base wage of $10/hr, that equates to 33.3 audio clips/hr = 266.4 audio clips/day that are being monitored by any one 'language expert'.

However, Google does not specify how long a 'conversation' is. How many sentences make up a conversation? When is the cutoff point?

Google also says '1 in 500' conversations are monitored. That means for any one 'language expert', there are approx. 133,200 conversations/day that have a chance of being monitored.

So basically, you have a 0.2% chance that your conversation is being picked up by any particular 'language expert' per day.
It’s about incentives. We were told in no uncertain terms that as a 17 year old making this life changing decision: do it, or be poor forever.

Now. I personally didn’t listen properly, dropped out after two years and did something else. But I don’t blame those who didn’t. Everything in modern middle class society and schooling was based around it.

So focusing on the individuals responsibility above and beyond that of the broken system that we have no choice but to join seems, well, cruel to me — even if I did personally follow your advice.
In the end the consumer pays for everything, so there's very little difference placing the tax on the producer or consumer.
Http auth is a mess of a system that has been a net negative for security by making people screw up hostname parsing because they didn't expect the auth syntax.
Are Commercial Labs Stealing Academia’s AI Thunder?
Exactly. If I was them I'd claim that was precisely the objective - any press is good press. Labeling them a villain temporarily did more for Mozilla/DoH than labeling them the ultimate good guy would have.
But make sure you don't accidentally share torrents you're not supposed to.
High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera
That is because it is a company for business/professional users. Other than you skipping over most of their product line, gen 5 is just generation 5, gen 6 is generation 6 and the extreme is the more powerful version.

You might as well mention the t series the p series and the x series (if they still make them) all of which comes with a bunch of numbers after them.

Anyway apple is a porche and thinkpads were russian tanks, lately some have gotten a cosmetic update. When you look at it like that it makes a lot more sense.

Written from my iPad
Yes exactly. We're not even talking about the equivalent of selling used digital games, but rather the equivalent of reselling new in box merchandise.

You didn't address the core of my argument, which is why should "terms of service" be able to carry post-transaction restrictions meant purely to implement a tenuous business method?
exactly, if you really care about plastic in our environment, then don't get synthetic clothes. i live in a hot environment. i change shirts up to 3x a day. no way i am not going to wash those. the only item i never washed is a pair of leather pants. and also coats and jackets get washed rarely. and as for handwashing, i'd rather spend my time with more meaningful activities.
5 JavaScript Bad Coding Habits to Unlearn Right Now
Explicit op-ins?

"Google would like to use the last 15 minutes of voice data to improve Google Home. This may contain sensitive information. Do you approve?"
>The question is, is a world class teacher through a laptop better than a teacher that's under the 50th percentile?

I would separate the question into different parts to isolate the different roles an in-classroom teacher performs:

(1) a 1-way communication -- the act of purely transmitting information: E.g. compare effectiveness of on-site teacher saying, "sine is the opposite side divided by hypotenuse" vs virtualvideo teacher saying the same thing. For this info-transmission activity, many high-quality Youtubers seem to be better at explaining the topic. They have more insightful metaphors, better graphics, better presentation, etc. (Unscientific survey.[0])

(2) a 2-way communication -- providing a realtime feedback loop of skills assessment to the child. E.g. watching the child work out the problem on the sheet of paper and immediately noticing that she's not carrying a minus sign across a calculation and intervening at that moment. Of course, answering any questions the child has is also in this category.

The emphasis in my previous comment is that laptop-led teaching doesn't have to detract from activity (2) because that's the superior value that in-classroom teachers can provide over virtual teachers.

-----

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21S9Wpi0y8

Some viewer comments in that video:

+ 2.6k thumbs up: "Crazy how an 8 minute video, helps more then a paid teacher"

+ 690 thumbs up: "you are better than my math teacher"

+ 115 thumbs up: "I want you to know my math teacher sucks and you're the only reason I get A's. Appreciate it dude"

For whatever reason, the viewers' local on-site classroom teacher didn't "click" with them but virtual Sal Khan did. This is the missing pedagogy angle the author of The New Yorker article didn't highlight.
You're just passing blame away from the people who are directly responsible for the excessive usage of cars to the users of cars, which solves even less.

If you want systemic change you need to approach systemic levers. Focusing on individual action is much less effective than focusing on the people who have power to change laws and reach the minds of consumers.
My point is that "ethics issues" with things like CRISPR and cloning are not real issues, and people talking about them do more harm than good.

For instance if not for multiple countries banning human cloning, we could already have human clones, which would have been very useful in studying how much of human behavior is determined by genes. There already should have been multiple clones of prominent scientists like Feynman, Gell-Mann, Penrose.
You paraphrased it in a different way and that might be why you're confused.

Google says "the excerpts are not linked to personally identifiable information." To me that means the metadata is stripped, not that they strip anything out of the audio.
Yes. Use JavaScript for adding rows and validation, and fallback to new requests for both tasks if JavaScript is disabled. This is not difficult to do.
Hire people to talk to the models?
Use employees, paid testers and, maybe, informed beta customers. Like every other product.
Doesn't mean you can use live data for tests. Should be opt-out by default, with the chance to opt-in if you wish to collaborate with your data.
You already consented by agreeing to the terms of service. If someone else is talking to their smart device while you're talking, it's ostensibly their responsibility. There's no reasonable laws that prevent you from being overheard in the back of a recorded phone conversation
I have this in my zshrc to save the trouble of pasting URLs manually:

mpv() {
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
command mpv "$(xsel -b)"
else
env mpv "$@"
fi
}
Just your dose of daily tech-bashing clickbait from NYTimes.
Is this it? https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the...

(I found it elsewhere among these comments)
So I meant "they" in the sense of the companies, not necessarily the home devices. Sorry about the confusion.

I know 100% that it happens with Siri. If Apple is excluding HomePod conversations from Siri's dataset, that I don't know.
This is a misrepresentation of your opposition. The issue is not with the means, but with the end. How will you force people to have fewer children? What if they resist? How will you handle foreign nations with massively unsustainable population densities?
Perhaps it's time to seriously reconsider our rejection of roaches as a food source. Anything that has the ability to survive well beyond us certainly has the ability to sustain us.
The U.S. Backs Down on Huawei Ban
Why should you consider contracting?
Show HN: Visuals for DJs
Yes, I can’t help but feel we’ll get the tyranny because countries will just want to start machine gunning people trying to migrate somewhere safe, and not because of any extreme environmental controls.
I understand the argument. I guess cash has a usecase where the law is meddling with things it shouldn't.

But there is btc and qr code scanning. I'm not saying we should ditch cash entirely.
Haven’t read the parent post yet, but in his book from the 1970s (outdated in numerous ways by now but still very interesting) “Dragons of Eden”, Carl Sagan presents the argument that it was our ability to use tools. Essentially, tools shaped us as much as we shaped them, and as our tools became more advanced, so did our minds.
Yeah, I had the same reaction
The internal structure of leptons being? :)
For what it’s worth, iOS 12 didn’t change that much. The main focus was performance, especially on older hardware.

The most visible change might be notifications, which are grouped by app and added a convenient option to revoke something’s notification privileges without digging through Settings.
>From a computer science perspective, what should Google do to train its models in a privacy conscious way?

Install these devices in the homes of google employees, executives and offices and allow the public to listen in. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and all.

Maybe when google has trained the systems enough to not need to train them by collecting and listening to customers conversations, then they enter them into the stream of commerce.
cleaning also helps
> I'm sure that the engineers are flagging voice requests that happen more then once

As a user, I expect to see feedback declaring that it's having trouble and specifically requesting permission to send my unparseable requests to some review queue. I expect to see feedback indicating what could resolve the issue: was it something I said? was there too much noise in the background? was there a software fault and a fix will be deployed at such-an-such date?

The fact that I do not get any feedback whatsoever when things go wrong leads me to have no faith that the problem will be resolved in any satisfactory manner. When combined with a complete lack of consumer/business interaction options in general (w.r.t. Google), it leads to some very dissatisfied consumers.

You think engineers are flagging voice requests that happen more than once? How would engineers have access to that data in the first place if it's supposed to be anonymous and private?
When I was a kid my favorite toy was the Crash Test Dummies. They had a whole set of cars, people, motorcycles and other vehicles that would fly apart when thrown against a wall and could be put back together. :)
Hasura (https://hasura.io) is an awesome similar project for getting a GraphQL API (including live subscriptions) automatically from a PostgreSQL database.
It's precisely knowing how software works, and the limitations of the current technology, what makes it so creepy. With this system there's no way of avoiding humans hearing a clip they shouldn't have heard.
What are you funny apparently ass flogged in childhood?
It's not really a computer science issue, per-se.

Operationally, though, here are a few thoughts:

- Ensure that the persons doing this review do not have physical access to the systems outside of a secured environment (one in which outside audio and video recording devices are not allowed, and for whose presence is monitored, with physical access controls, etc.) Basically, not remote workers or a typical office environment. Most finserv call centers do this, so it's not particularly crazy to think they can do the same.

- Mask the voices such that they are intelligible but not identifiable. Maintain a limited set of "high access" taggers who can hear the raw clips if there is an issue with the masking.

- Limit the length of the clips (sounds like they already do this).

- Have pre-filters for anything personally identifiable in the audio. The metadata for the audio might already be de-identified, but what if the audio clip consists of the person reading out a phone number, credit card number, username, etc.? They should have their "high access" team building detectors for that and flag those portions of the audio or whole clips and route them to a limited access team.

- Make it more clear to customers that their audio, including accidental captures, can and will be sent to their servers. Make this very explicit, rather than burying it in TOS and using terms like "audio data". "The device may accidentally interpret your bondage safe word as a trigger and send your private conversations to our real-live human tagging team for review."

- Provide a physical switch that can temporarily disable the audio recording capability.

- Pay money, like cigarette companies do, to help fund a public education campaign that informs the general public about these listening bugs and mass surveillance issues so that people are aware of industry practices and how it affects them.

Edit:

I like what others are saying about explicit opt-in, as well as paid end-users. For quality/safety control, I don't know that they can exclusively use paid end-users. They probably need to sample some amount of their real live data. For that, explicit opt-in makes sense.
Discussions held in private can be very different from the ones held in public.

I think it's very human to want privacy. Having confidence that someone isn't listening/watching to you can have a tremendous effect on how you act. It's just human and I'm not sure if you can change that by telling people that it's not feasible in today's world. I know I acted differently in private when I was just a kid - it's not something I learned, but was natural to me.

The tech would actually be fine if it was provably contained to the local network. As soon as it leaves the local network, I can't trust it - doesn't matter if Amazon/Google says they don't use it for X purpose.
I've never seen once in Finland. When I lived in the UK I'd never seen one in the wild either, for that matter.
Not in the case of the device being someone else's. I don't have any Google or Amazon smart listeners, so I never accepted them. Yet if my voice is in any of these recordings, well...
are people really suggesting basic auth again, is it 1993 outside? Basic auth is horrendous security practice, you're passing a header that has your user and password in plaintext, it's insane to suggest that in 2019
Probably because it means they get federal money, not because they want to cut out the subsidies out of their own budget.
Well, that depends on how crazy the livestream gets.
Well-endowed private schools often offer more grant-based financial assistance than public schools, to the extent that the net cost for people who aren't upper income can be less than CC plus state school, as well as providing much better career prospects.
The number of people in this thread who believe that this is ok because, 1) it's obviously the only way Google could train their voice system and thus 2) people clearly knew what they were getting into, is horrifying.