skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A graphic programming environment for ROS based on Blockly
At the Robotics laboratory of Ben Gurion University in Israel students developed a graphic programming environment for ROS (Robot Operating System) based on the Blockly framework. This allows programming using blocks that are being plugged to each other to form a program. Then it automatically generated a C++ code for ROS nodes to be compiled and used while programming robots.
For their Atlas human powered helicopter, their pilot had an average output of 772 watts (or 1.035 horsepower) for 1 minute.

"At 772 Watts for 1 minute, our pilot’s power output exceeds the power requirements of the helicopter by a safe margin."

From: http://www.aerovelo.com/projects/helicopter/tech-info/
That Lawfare post is talking about the same case I mentioned, Clapper. It was posted in 2012, half a year before the Supreme Court held in February 2013 that plaintiffs did not have standing to sue the NSA.

If anything, that Lawfare post punctuates how the courts have been ineffective in curtailing NSA even before the Clapper decision, and how Congress has expanded surveillance. Excerpts:

"in its first-ever decision in In re Sealed Case, the FISA Court of Review held that such legislation [Patriot Act] did not itself violate the Fourth Amendment..."

"Congress in the FAA (building on the Protect America Act of 2007) specifically authorized programmatic warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance in a manner almost guaranteed to sweep up a substantial volume of communications involving U.S. persons..."

Nice try, though. Still waiting for that list of successful court challenges that reined in the NSA. :)
Perhaps my consumer lifestyle strangely aligns Amazon's incentives with mine, but I'm actually really happy how they solved the problem of me buying more stuff from them. It seems that they observed very common patterns people already use poorly and streamlined them.

Case in point, almost everyone I know takes pictures of books and items they want to buy or investigate further later. Currently this 1) clutters my Photos app with this overloaded behavior and 2) additionally requires me to then manually re-enter the information/remember to look it up. Just having Amazon scan and put it on some list for me is killer in my opinion.

Additionally, I've wanted something like X-Ray for so long and it seems so obvious. Shazam style movie/tv show detection and bringing up IMDB and other useful info on my phone is great. Having Airplay style functionality built into Samsung TVs and play stations is also great (hopefully we will move to a standard protocol to stream video content to TVs in the near future, but this is a positive step in my opinion from just Apple TV in Apple land and just Amazon TV in Amazon land).

I think Mayday may just be the feature though. People like me will have no use for it, but its definitely the case that most people don't really know what they're doing at all with their devices. The threshold for "user friendly" is so laughable right now. iOS AND Android really are quite complex for any non-standard task ("What does it mean I've run out of iCloud space??"). And this is not easily implementable I think -- it will take serious investment to copy this feature on other platforms, you can't get away with a half-baked software solution.
The Solarwinds brand isn't as flashy as the Pingdom brand. It makes sense that they'd want to maintain as much independence as possible until they decide whether to eat it or not.
Wow.

A construction or implementation is secure if an adversary, given a certain level of power, is unable to achieve a given objective. The level of power an adversary is assumed to have and their ultimate objective is called the threat model.

If a new construction is secure under a new threat model that either increases the amount of power an adversary can have or makes the adversary's objective broader, the new construction is said to have a higher level of security.

This is what we need more in security discussions. So many discussions, here on HN but also, well, everywhere, are really misunderstandings about which threat model to assume. People get into hot-headed fights about whether some solution somewhere is or is not "secure", when really all they disagree about is which definition of "secure" to use.

Well done! I propose that security related blog posts take some time out to casually define these terms over and over again, for a while, until we can all just assume them known and be done with all the vague imprecise nonsense.
The market positioning here seems very un-Amazon.

"Your margin is my opportunity" is probably my favorite Bezosism. Given that perspective and Apple's very cushy margins, I expected Amazon not to approach the market with an expensive phone packed with new features, but to approach the market from the bottom, with a good phone that is free or nearly free. The problem, of course, is that Google seems to have that segment wrapped up.

Instead of competing with the iPhone, this seems to more targeted at Android -- only priced uncompetitively.

The features themselves seem slightly gimmicky. I tend not to want to move my phone physically as a way to interact with apps. (Doing that figure "8" when my GPS goes out for some reason is incredibly awkward.) Searching via photos is awesome, but the only use case it seems well suited for is shopping. The built-in Genius Bar is cool, but it seems targeted toward smartphone noobs, which is oddly coupled with features targeted to smartphone pros.

If I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, this will probably be a novelty, like Windows Phone, for a while to come.
Thanks. Its the no-contract feature that I missed. That makes perfect sense and lines up with the way T-mobile prices everything right now.
Nevermind. Found it. http://recordit.co/lEDhliAAuU
That would be really cool, especially if lots of OSS projects where to enable such reporting.

Rather than building it into the rust tooling, it'd be cool if they built a collection service and then provided hooks into things like Jenkins / Travis CI that are being used by OSS projects. That way you could gather data regardless of the language used.
Yep, but (a) that was 40 years ago, not within the last 30. and (b) that was Congress, not the courts, and (c) as you say, the effects were not as lasting as many observers thought.
Continuing on that train of thought, I'd guess the "Amazon experts" basically just know the UI pretty well, but they won't help much with questions the hackernews community might have.
But they are not the same thing.
It is NOT open source.
This is why I stopped coming to Fapper Jews.
Velotilt is a very interesting tilting velomobile design meant for practical use and with potential commercialization
in mind

http://bicycledesign.net/2012/10/velotilt-design-of-a-low-dr...

Its progress is detailed (in Dutch) on Wim Schermer's site

http://wimschermer.blogspot.nl/search/label/Velotilt
Is there a place I can see these plan changes?
I don't see why I'd want to pay for this.

It doesn't change the world in any way.

Bringing something fast and practical to the masses would be a different story, but this doesn't move technology in that direction.

It's just paying for some kids to make it into Guinness....
hence their reason for stopping development is flawed.
> You just don't put any VoIP services (or any other over the top services) under Title II, because Title II is for the physical network.

But the FCC already decided, in 2006, that VOIP is subject to USF contributions.
Please come to Ontario. Please!
To make it easier to buy stuff from Amazon. Right down to the "press dedicated button, get picture of arbitrary product you're looking at, get Amazon.com product page for it". Just like Apple making a closed ecosystem that deeply persuades users to buy apps from the App Store, music & video from the iTunes Store, store data on iCloud, buy more same-ecosystem devices, etc.
Ah. Thanks. :)
Yes, I consider that, but CL has low quality leads anyway, and I am not so aggressive with scraping them anyway. Thx!
No Youtube in list of apps...interesting.

Not cheap either...
That hasn't stopped Xen from having bugs that have allow an attacker to escape the domU and gain access to dom0 and the hardware.

The key really is: "Don't rely on visualization for security".
I was hopeing the Amazon phone would do something really novel like lower digital rates? I saw AT&T and the steam
was gone.
Yo – It's that simple.
Ask HN: Startup School Livestream
Anybody have a working link for the livestream of the NYC startup school that is taking place right now. Link on the startupschool.org website doesn't seem to be working.
I think you need to learn to read your own links man.

As far as we know, all existing free software would qualify as open source.

If it's free software it's also open source.
Why does this seem to be targeted at Android? If anything, I would say the price differential between this and good android phones reflects that it might be more an iphone competitor if anything, and so it seems to be more targeted at Apple.
It depends very heavily on duration. According to the power charts they published from their earlier human-powered helicopter, their rider put out about a horsepower for the 1 minute flight duration.
> However, they were shit, because they didn't involve 4 years of AI research to develop the world's most sophisticated head positioning system ever, like Amazon apparently did.

As someone with some experience with amazon's kindle labs, IMHO, the only accurate part of this statement is that Amazon invested 4 years in it.

Also Bezos isn't focused - he's a micro manager, who is constantly muddling the work of the people he's hired, to ill effect.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. My comments:

1. I agree, main problem would be to get users to keep using the app in the long run.

2. Yes I started researching now and think that it's probably too crowded and not enough way to differentiate yourself

3. I was thinking along the line of promo codes. Send a code in the email, and keep it in the database until the user redeems it. Then over time we could add mobile apps and play with geolocation and beacons.
From the Amazon RDS documentation:

When the backup retention changes to a non-zero value, the first backup occurs immediately. Changing the backup retention period to 0 turns off automatic backups for the DB instance, and deletes all existing automated backups for the instance.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Overvi...
For music, I agree. But there is other content - TV shows, Movies, books, etc. My iTunes purchased video aren't going to play on an Amazon Fire unless I remove all the DRM from it.
This! Celery is well supported and powerful but often it is just too much to manage. Everytime we have an error crop up in our deployment it takes too much time to figure out whats going on.
Since most engagements are going to be at beyond visual range, they might as well be cruise missiles.
Ok

I used to be in house SEO for a large publisher (wont say which one but you would know the name) one project we did was a recovery after a botched transition of a property website (similar presence to Zillow or right move) they screwed up their browse structure migration

I also detected and got fixed a mistake on a large UK recruitment site that was costing them £500,000 in 5 days.

Btw I am available at reasonable rates for consulting/ explaining to your developers how to do their job properly
Mapping and push notifications are both Google Play Services APIs, not Android APIs. So it's not that Amazon forked the APIs as much as the app that implemented those not-platform APIs isn't installed.
Insurance companies would start charging more for letting potential buyers drive your car.
A great paper for understanding topic modelling
I've been studying the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model this summer, and the literature can be very confusing for those without a rigorous background in Bayesian statistics. This paper provides a great intro to Bayesian Networks and Bayesian inference in general. It also gives a very clear explanation of topic modelling and derives a Gibbs Sampler for LDA inference.

I realize this post is kind of random, but I thought I'd pass this paper along in case others here are interested. It would have saved me alot of time if I had come across it four weeks ago.
It's interesting that the author gets to a valuation of ~$6B, because that's approximately the current valuation of a number of unprofitable internet startups (Yelp ($5.52B) and Pandora ($5.67B) leap immediately to mind).

I've been joking with my friends that you can probably subtract about $4B from current internet company valuations to get to the "correct" number given revenues and market sizes...but really, if you take Yelp and Pandora's current valuations down to 35% of their current value (35% is the ratio of $6B/$17B), the number is about right (e.g. $2Bn for Yelp, which gives a price/sales of ~7).

It's a little scary to think that the market for growth stocks may be overvalued to the tune of 65%, but the ratio passes the sniff test for a lot of stocks that I'm following.
Never really got talking but they sent me some friendly warez when I released an ARP-based remote OS detection script in like 1999. As I recall they were all Germanic. Doubt there's any 'reach out' from groups today, too much profit/loss going on...
> this is a stupid gimmick until proven otherwise

I actually agree with you, I'm just saying "Hold on guys, a rational argument can at least be made that this isn't just a stupid gimmick"

...but we have to try the device to know for sure...
> this is a stupid gimmick until proven otherwise

Thus my objections to Fire Phone. It seems like a lot of gimmicks and little actual solving of real problems.
At this point, the head tracking is a gimmick. It's not something people chose or switch ecosystems for. Might attract truly new smartphone users, but isn't a "killer feature". Apple already uses 6D accelerometer applicable to much of what the Fire's head tracker will be used for.
> import and share with your team for feedback

Ah, got it. At first I thought this was a service which actually provides the (people) editors who read over your material, which would be great for me, since I don't actually have a 'team' to share stuff with, and there are times when I'd really want a 2nd or 3rd opinion before publishing.

I tried out the product anyway, and it's nicely oriented around editing. I'm used to collaborative editing using MS Word ('track changes') or Google Docs, neither of which come with the fancier hand-written-looking edit design.
Come back in five years. You may find out that Facebook was not in fact worth as much as people thought. That doesn't mean that you were wrong (except in the very near term). And, if you aren't going to jump on the bandwagon based on the greater fool theory, then figuring out that the market is temporarily wrong is a good way to avoid losing a lot of money.
i still dont understand why someone hasn't put a sensor to scroll on the back or the side of the phone- i would prefer that you tilting since thats so imprecise
Unfortunately the finger constantly gets in the way so I have to move it.
Tortured by Experts – New kind of Wire from D'Addario
You can negative seo a site out of existence in about two hours and for about $75. It is actually super quick. Once you do it, it can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months for the site to loose it's position or be removed.

Just go to freelancer.com market. Buy several xRumer packages. Now do the same thing on Fiverr with some other various packages. Now go to Text-Link-Ads and buy some $8 dollar links and link them to your target website.

Personally, I do not do this except for a couple of years ago when Google first created negative seo. If you are trying to create backlinks to yourself it is too risky because Google will penalize you even if you are a small fry. I just make sure all of the local listings are set up (I only market small businesses that are local) and then do social marketing. Social marketing is the new backlinks. They don't last as long as backlinks and it is more effort, but that is where it pretty much is in my estimation now. To be successful in Google you can do it with about 10-30 backlinks and social marketing. Things have changed a lot since the Caffeine update.
> If the enemey's autonomous aircraft can't discriminate between friend and foe effectively, then when you launch a swarm of them, they'll all fratricide each other. It's a fundamental requirement that they be able to differentiate between friend and foe.

I would guess that identifying your own teammates is much easier than distinguishing strangers who are combatant from non-combatant, and among combatants distinguishing allies from enemies.

Also, suicidal autonomous aircraft are common, in the form of missiles. If these more intelligent missiles kill the enemy, it doesn't matter if they kill each other too (beyond the financial loss). Maybe you give each a 'kill area', in which they are instructed to kill everything, and spread them out enough that they don't overlap too much.
grsec + containers is nicer.
It depends on the timespan required. Can take a look here:

https://www.princeton.edu/~maelabs/hpt/pro/human_3.htm

One HP is 750 Watts, which looks like roughly 20-30 seconds of endurance for a 'first class athlete', which should be enough time for this.
Sensors and radars take more space, power and weight. So the drone will need to be bigger and more expensive and before you know, you will probably end up with something that looks and costs just like a normal jet fighter.

The F-35 is $200M. The Global Hawk drone is about $50M already and that's without any weapons systems.
Amazon has extremely tight security, including 2fa, fine-grained IAM permissions, instance security groups, VPC, and more.

The fact that Code Space's didn't bother to use them is their own problem, not a failing on Amazon's side.

Additionally, storing all of your backups with the same service as your production environment was outright moronic.
Exactly. I've never felt like it was a fundamental issue because I can always move my finger. My biggest concern is this will be the new phone rotation that I always turn off because as soon as I want to read in bed it'll start to scroll constantly. Maybe they've figured this out but knowing the correct orientation plane to start, figuring out that I'm simply moving myself around or temporarily putting the phone down and I don't want it to scroll, or any of the many other similar scenarios seem very problematic to me.

That said firefly and the dynamic perspective looks very cool. Not sure how often I'll want to scan the world around me but maybe I'm wrong. The DP seems more like the thing that would affect everyday more radically. Hopefully it doesn't get gimmicky and annoying and instead seems like what it should have always been like all along.
> Searching via photos is awesome, but the only use case it seems well suited for is shopping.

If I was bitten by a snake, spider, etc. I'd love to be able to snap a picture to quickly identify it and know whether or not to rush to the ER.
As a first time phone maker it was probably easiest to work closely with one carrier so that the design team could work closely with a single certification team. I know lots of companies make phones now, but it is still a big engineering problem.
Let me say it again: As a user, you can't verify that you're secure against the attackers.This is my important point, not whether a particular chosen attack was blocked. Therefore, if you care at all about security, you can't trust the channel. You're only looking from the POV of the attacker, but you've got to consider all the POVs, including the users, and not impute to them knowledge that they can't have about the universe ("I am only being attacked by passive attackers") in order to declare your system "more secure".

Saying "I'm secure against passive attackers" doesn't mean that you're safe doing anything on your "secure" channel, because the bar for active attack is so low that that's hardly saying anything. You can be secure against "passive attackers", but you still can't verify that you haven't been attacked, in general. A definition of security in which a user blithely sticks sensitive data on a channel, unconcerned about whether the channel was attacked, is a useless definition of security... by definition, we're not talking about a user concerned with security, of any kind.

If we are talking about a security scenario where the equivalent of "active attack" is actually quite difficult and it takes a nation-state's resources, I'd be happy to discuss this argument. We've historically used some encryption at points in time where technically brute forcing it was feasible for very large entities, for instance. But the bar for active attack on the web is low here, very, very low.
Startup School NY Live Stream
anti-trust is broader than your definition. From wikipedia.

"United States antitrust law is a collection of federal and state government laws, which regulates the conduct and organization of business corporations, generally to promote fair competition for the benefit of consumers. The main statutes are the Sherman Act 1890, the Clayton Act 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act 1914. These Acts, first, restrict the formation of cartels and prohibit other collusive practices regarded as being in restraint of trade. Second, they restrict the mergers and acquisitions of organizations which could substantially lessen competition. Third, they prohibit the creation of a monopoly and the abuse of monopoly power."
Nutcache - http://nutcache.com

The thing about Nutcache is that is totally free and stable.
Both the object detection and that 3D tracking seems to be focused on consumption. Consume more movies, more music, more books, more apps!

How sad. A phone is the most intimate piece of technology we have, and all Amazon can think about making it a machine of consumption.

I wish they would have focused more enabling people to create things. You know, help them be active. Help change the world.

There's just a slight hint here that Amazon considers its users more like mindless money-spending media consuming drones.

A new device very rarely push the human race forward. The Kindle Phone is clearly no such device.
I have an opposable thumb, so I just move my thumb off the screen when it's in the way.

It's like when I'm holding onto something; I just move my thumb off to let go.
What's your opinion of using this for a kids' first computer? (Let's set aside the "toy" computers sold at Christmas). I'm assuming it's more than adequate for most things. Won't be used for video-encoding, playing hardcore games, etc. Literally for the family which means very simple needs. Is 1.4ghz really that slow? Really??!!
Dont forget the contract.
1. Drones do not perform anywhere near as well as a fighter jet.

2. There aren't even any autonomous UAVs right now, why do you think you will be able to make one that can also autonomously evade a missile?
Should have called it SnapFire
Mayday is cool. I had a kindle fire hd and the power button wouldn't work. The only way to get it to turn on was attach a power cord. I hit the mayday button, the rep talked with me briefly and then auto-ordered a replacement. I didn't have to turn on my computer, I didn't have to dig up a customer service number, I didn't have to sit waiting in a customer service chat (which is usually more like email with the amount of time between responses). Is saving me 10 minutes revolutionary? I'm not sure, but it sure was nice.
they've already spun up 'on demand' services for ice cream, pedi-cabs, mariachi bands, kittens... multiple times. so it's not like they haven't demonstrated they could start new markets.

Now, apparently, gimmick/publicity ‘for a day, in one city’ is “showing you are able to start new markets”? Seriously?