skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes I know, but I thought it better to explain in a different manner than just point this out.

Another way to look at the problem is how optimised the current strain is for human transmission. As a zoonotic virus it is not very likely that Ebola is well adapted for effective human-to-human transmission. We should expect that the more people that it passes through the better adapted to humans Ebola will become and the more difficult it will be to contain. The unknown is we don’t know how well adapted it could become to humans, but personally I would rather not run this experiment in the wild to find out.
I read a few lines, and then for some reason right clicked into "View Source" intending to take a quick peek and read the rest. WOW. That is commenting your code done right.
First, these are two different problems to solve. Voice recognition and deep learning are different fields.

Is training really the issue for voice recognition? It has been a problem that has almost been solved for over a decade. Last year I saw this impressive use of Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC, running in a VM on a Mac, that pretty much worked to code by voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

The developer mentioned that he didn't have any luck with Sphinx.

Xah Lee summarized the talk here: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html
Is there a legitimate reason not to use a password manager for personal use in scenarios such as these?
> thank you for showing how gullible and vulnerable the open source movement is

This is such an important lesson. As people watch systemd/Poettering fall and everybody scrambles to pick up cleanup the mess, I hope this lesson is not lost.

PHK's "Operation Orchestra" talk, where he tries to explain this problem of over-trusting and gullibility even more relevant with regards to systemd than it is to the NSA.
> I cannot fathom a child eating a bowl-full for breakfast.

They don't do that. The page doesn't make it wonderfully clear, but some of these breakfasts are DIY buffet affairs where of some dishes only a little is used and the rest is put back.
We got to play around with these at CalHacks last weekend, the winning hack was actually a Myo controlled drone, if I recall correctly.
Really cool stuff!
"What does it mean for the economies of these up-and-coming world powers? Well, probably the same thing that it means for everyone else: The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do."

Or, you know, basic income. Why is the answer to "there are no jobs anymore" always "well, I guess you can starve, then"?
Rabois, Dixon, Naval to keynote event on early-stage financings in SF
Not sure why you're bashing on Git here, it certainly does scale to and handle this use case pretty effectively.

This is precisely the problem that submodules solve, much maligned though they are. It's essentially a dependency problem, and we have good answers for those.

Edit: Also I am fairly certain that the kernal experiences these kinds of issues, and is the flagship user of Git.
> The big problem for open source speech recognition is training data.

What exactly is needed for training - audio recordings with transcripts, human validation of recognized text?

There are successful crowdsourced efforts for proofreading of OCR'ed text. Archive.org could host a CC-licensed archive of sound & transcripts.

Recognition of the human voice is almost like writing, hopefully everyone could have access.

Edit: how much disk space would be needed - TB or PB?
My question is whether these are the same people that came up with coin and this is simply another ploy to get people's money for a product that will never make it to market. Both domains are private registrations from GoDaddy. If either was a genuine corporate entity you would think they would have real information in their domain registration.
I am confused about accessing the tools. My request got approved but how to make use of the credits? Like for Digital Ocean, I see in the comments people refer to promo codes. Where or how do I get those promo codes?
Things you gotta do to keep your job
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rise-of-the-robots...
I think the problem you're assuming here is that dependencies are automatically updated to use the latest version. That sounds like pretty strong coupling in a way that means other problems are lurking somewhere.

Team A should be able to develop without having to consult Team B constantly. That means you have to be mature about deprecating things before you just remove them, but I think that's what the whole article is about.
Currently this is only working to some extent; there is no sign of software development demand going down because of open source or saturation. It's going up, and fast. I would guess the reason for that is that we don't have any way of truly composing those open (or closed; it doesn't matter for your example; closed source works in the same way; if you could buy it you would) source solutions to do something a company needs. You have to find them, test them, hook them together, test them a lot more, deploy them, test them a lot more and then change them over time. Most companies fail at finding them (and write them themselves); if they do, the first testing is done badly, so after hooking them up the solution won't work as expected etc etc. There simply is no robust way of composing 'software' easily without actually blowing your budget (a few times over) to see if the solution(s) fits.

Intuitively I can see that, feature wise, SugarCRM, Solr, Hadoop, HBase, Postres and OpenERP would be a fit for your company if I could integrate them in a certain way; Google gives you enough clues for people who did this (years ago), so how hard can it be? Hard enough to spend massive amounts of money and then still not even be slightly happy about it. Happy meaning that your 1000s of employees can use it and your company runs on it as you, as CEO, envisioned. Is it more or less costly than writing only what you actually need from scratch? No idea, no-one is going to try that; you try SAP/Oracle/MS or this kind of thing and that's it.
> So what you're saying is, "golden keys" are no less secure than any other form of encryption.

The encryption is using the usual cryptographic primitives. The problem is that the encryption is not the problem.

> Escrows are well understood, secure, and generally regarded as a good idea.

They are not. Because they're the same thing as back doors.

Using key escrow as a method of e.g. password recovery is a security vulnerability. And at least then you're choosing who you trust and the trusted party doesn't have a nuclear neon target painted on it because the keys in escrow are only for specific parties rather than everybody everywhere.

That's really the main issue. It is manifestly unwise to create a system which, if broken, yields the keys to everything. Because it makes the ROI of breaking it so enormous that the quantity and strength of the attackers you attract will overwhelm any imperfect system, and all systems are imperfect.
Toon-bunny
Totally agree with you. In terms of hiring, any factor other than job-related capability shouldn't be considered. Trying to optimize diversity metrics violates this principle.
We hand a drone project at Hack The North that we wanted to use with the Myo, but all of us were using Linux machines and they only had support for Mac OS and Windows.

We stuck with a Leap Motion, although we wasted too much time trying to get the Myo to work (VMs and python wrappers) we didn't get to finish our hack in the end..
Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything...

Yes, this is a popular theory, but it doesn't appear to be happening. To quote Larry Summers:

> the Forbes 400 list also provides only limited support for Piketty’s ideas that fortunes are patiently accumulated through reinvestment. When Forbes compared its list of the wealthiest Americans in 1982 and 2012, it found that less than one tenth of the 1982 list was still on the list in 2012, despite the fact that a significant majority of members of the 1982 list would have qualified for the 2012 list if they had accumulated wealth at a real rate of even 4 percent a year.

http://www.democracyjournal.org/33/the-inequality-puzzle.php...

For comparison, I'm personally achieving well over 4% returns by trading my own account. Those with the most money can't possibly do the same thing (my strategies won't scale).
I am really impressed with this especially because it's already making money and has so much potential.

Have you considered licensing out your tech platform for use in other countries? Licensee would basically just need to do sales/marketing and run with it and you take royalties. I'd be interested if you're open to it (for a country lightyears away from Germany).
I'm surprised the Myo doesn't have default actions for various finger flicks or wags. If I could flick to scroll up and down pages or zoom in/out, then make a fist to close, that would be incredibly useful for something like using a TV.

Edit: Another really cool thing would be if you could put it on your thigh and use toe movements as input. Four myos for four discrete types of control!

Edit 2: How about something around the neck? It could be a huge step in enabling people with certain types of disabilities to control things more precisely.
That's from 2011. Amazon bought Kiva Systems to install robots in their warehouses. No more walking around in Amazon's newer warehouses; the pickers stand in one place as shelving units of products are brought to them by hundreds of mobile robots.

Picking from bins is still manual, but Bezos has Rethink Robotics, which he owns personally, working on that.
Thanks for that pointer to the Python library which integrates with Dragon/Nuance to enable arbitrary commands, https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dragonfly/
I know of no such models. Perhaps someone smarter than me has thought of them, that's why I asked the question initially.
Because real-life harassment isn't protected by first amendment.

A large part of the problem is people, like you, who view all of this as someone just expressing their opinion equally with others. That has nothing to do with targeted harassment and death threats to one's family.

In real life, people get prosecuted for this stuff. Unfortunately there's so many obstacles and hurdles to prosecuting Internet harassment that it only happens if the harassee is someone famous.
This is nonsense. Various funds available to ordinary people, including pension funds, do invest in the hedge funds and private equity funds. If anyone were actively buying businesses and replacing people with capital equipment, it would be these groups.
I came very close to including a "Longhorn" example in my original comment.
This is the philosophical explanation for government taxation. In this particular case I think we can say that it is now beyond voluntary funded NGOs to solve.
I've been in most of those countries (long enough to know about their breakfasts) and can attest these are very accurate. But stepping back a bit, it's not too surprising a somewhat in-depth piece of investigative journalism on the new york times is more accurate than someone on the internet's ... "wild guess".
In case anyone doesn't get the Monty Python reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso
I don't really see the problem here. Indians are willing to work under these conditions, which honestly don't sound worse than the US. It sounds like even though they might shrink/grow teams at will, because the building has many teams, the risk for the individual is low. And you said that companies are happy with the work these teams do. So what is the problem?
"In other words, we would need to imagine what a project, that could be accomplished with half-a-million (or more) people working in cooperation toward a single end goal, would look like today.
I can guarantee you that would look something along the lines of a partial terraforming of Mars."

A vastly more realistic projection of what "a half million or more people working in cooperation towards a single end goal" could accomplish, based on the AR(1) model, would be the rip roaring success the US has had in bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, and keeping the world safe from terrorists and evil doers.

Face it; you live in a declining civilization. The moon program was the last great accomplishment of the West: the end. Enjoy looking at HN on your iphone: that's about as much future as you're likely to get any time soon.
While you're not wrong, this is an important statement. Fact is, youtube, google search, and chrome are all best of class products (arguably). Google is an ecosystem that keeps you by offering the best of everything. And it's all monetarily free. But this keeps you looking at advertising. People pay good money to be the first result of google. Youtube ads are generally noninvasive enough to sit through. Would you pay for google search, or youtube? I might, but eventually a free competitor would pop up and shift the momentum. Google is interesting in that other than side ventures, they have tons of great products that all tie into their only real revenue stream - advertising. And for now, weighing the pros vs the cons of this, I'm ok with it.
This. Worryingly enough, I confess I've read the article back-to-back several times but I still don't see the author's actual argument. Maybe there is one, but I'm just too dumb.
There are more coming. This is some beta and dev kit level stuff. I know there are already some Chrome plugins for browsing.
Docker Security and Docker.io API(Tutorial)
It ended twice, and bounced right back again.

Come to think of it, I'm rather glad for those irrational investors back in '99, without whom Google might not exist.
> For example, if your job is writing custom software, it becomes progressively harder to find problems that don't already have open source solutions.

There's a lot of work to be done writing glue code.
Aha, thanks.

> (Note the Wayback Machine indexed it as zdnet.com.com only after 2002.)

I can’t find a link to the article from the web from before that date, and can’t figure out precisely what the original URL was, in that case.
>The US Congress and President Obama are all elected officials, whereas Xi Jinping and the CCP are not. Electing your own leaders is a pretty big deal

You'd be surprised. Tons of Americans don't bother to even vote, and when they do they vote for the same old shit parties, that are very much alike except for some token issues.
Thanks for the feedback - I am working on an improved splash page
This is a really important point to consider. We have already had health teams killed by people in the affected countries out of fear. If we were going to start implementing an effective quarantine and treatment process then we are going to need a large amount of security and enforcement resources to support the health care teams. This is going to have to come from outside as the countries affected don’t have the resources.
This all sounds very interesting as a research project, but if the goal is reduce exposure to online advertising they'd be better served by just making the site a "click here to install AdBlock" button.
There are two essays about awful work that I like to contrast. One is George Orwell writing about 1930s coal miners: http://www.george-orwell.org/Down_The_Mine/0.html

The other is "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" by Mac McLelland in Mother Jones magazine, writing about working in a fulfillment center in 2012: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...

It seems to me that mining was vastly more physically demanding and dangerous, to the extent that when McLelland complains about physical hardship at the fulfillment center I'm unsympathetic; and that fulfillment center work is vastly more dehumanizing, in contrast to the miners who, for all their toil, had pride in what they do.
In developing countries (INDIA) because many people do not have CC many good banks allow you to generate Virtual Credit Cards No with predefined amount for single use -- for 5+ years now.

So the point is technology and the idea is pretty old but finally someone has implemented it right.
Not to be contrary for the sake of it, but maybe your connection isn't as good as you think it is. I'm using a laptop from 6 years ago and it loads on time, so it's not because some JS took ages to run.
> Per person is flat.

Median income for fully employed males is flat.
I like both equally, so you've now "met" one person! I was born and spent my first 8 years in NZ, then moved to Australia.
Following can be used for healthy breakfast.
Boiled eggs.
Milk + oats.
Fruits.
Its almost like a signaling error. A farmer would gladly grow corn in exchange for a tractor and a mechanic would gladly supply that tractor in exchange for corn, but the corn that theoretically could be factory farmed by automation would be cheaper than the farmer can grown and the robot built tractor would theoretically be cheaper than the mechanic can build so neither do anything. Both farmer and mechanic starve and then the automated systems make neither corn nor tractor while the capital owner wonders why no one is buying.

The whole system would be made richer by injecting the small signal a basic income would provide into the negative feedback loop thats keeping it damped.
Yes - this is a common model. But those in the west should also recognize another opportunity: given a couple of months, you can also recruit a great team rather than simply a large one. You just need to do it a little differently than the bodyshops.

There are a lot of good workers stuck in the desk farms described above and they'd love to work for you. The recipe for hiring them:

1. Don't be a dick, your outsourced team here is just as good and deserves the same respect as a US based tech team.
2. Really, see (1). Treat your outsourced team with the same respect you'd give a US based team. Don't be a PHB or a know it all American.
3. Pay above market. Instead of paying $chipotle_wages, pay 2x$chipotle_wages.

I recently helped a startup recruit over here. It was a great team - I'd be very happy to work with such a team in NY or anywhere else. It took about 1 month to recruit them (good luck trying that in the west). Unfortunately they all quit 2 weeks after I stopped being involved - apparently there were failures with steps (1) and (2).
Yes, it's a classic false dichotomy. The options are not (monopoly, competition). A "the neverending competition that cannot be won" is best avoided--there is nothing redeemable about this "pure antithesis" to monoploy to make it more desirable.
> Another part of me thinks that automation has been part of our society for a
long time, and that taking it further only changes the kind of jobs everyone
has, maybe even promoting equality by eliminating the more menial tasks (and therefore making every worker's skill and experience important,
instead of them being just a replaceable cog).

This is the theory, but the realities of this promoting equality are really to be doubted. An increase in the supply of labour has two fairly predictable effects - it both lowers wages overall (more supply, less demand) and provides a pool of cheap workers should things pick up. When there are more unemployed there is also typically an increase in the intensity of work in the jobs that remain - people tend to work much harder for the same or less pay under the looming threat of unemployment. One prevailing myth is that the unemployed workers are simply retrained for new jobs created by automation, however even with government subsidized retraining this doesn't seem to work [1]. In reality automation seems to be a source of widespread immiseration beneficial to only a few.

[1]: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ir_21.htm
> Using key escrow as a method of e.g. password recovery is a security vulnerability.

I have no idea what you mean by "security vulnerability" in this case. Key escrows are the primary way asymmetric crypto is used in practice. An escrow recovers the symmetric key a message was encrypted with and you proceed as normal.

> the trusted party doesn't have a nuclear neon target painted on it

By that logic, government agencies should operate exclusively by typewriter. They don't because crypto primitives are designed to be secure against unrealistically strong adversaries. No crypto paper has ever said, "Our construction is secure in the standard model as long as the ROI is less than epsilon."

You can go down the path of "what if there's another Snowden, and it's a snow day in Kentucky...," but you aren't doing cryptography anymore--you're just developing mild paranoia.
> You can live a lot more luxurious than they do and still come out way ahead financially, and be ready to retire at 45 or 50, making an ordinary developer salary and not taking any unusual risks. You can make low six figures in Colorado or Texas or Georgia, pay off your house in 5 years, and have a family living on 25% of your take-home pay from there on out. It's not the right choice for everyone, but it's the right choice for some people -- find a place you love to live with low expenses, and you create a lot of flexibility and open up a lot of possibilities you wouldn't otherwise have.

I can't second this enough. I'm moving from Chicago (high cost of living) to Tampa, FL. Real estate is roughly 40% cheaper, and I can work remotely, paying off our new place in 3-5 years (we're ~30). It'll allow me to spend a lot more time with kids we plan on having soon.
Strategic provocation =P
Chase debit or credit? I don't see an option for that in the online menus.
Thiel has some good points about the lack of progress. Rocketry is only slightly better than it was 45 years ago. We've hit the limit of chemical fuels, and weight reduction can only go so far. In comparison, 45 years took us from the Wright Flyer to the first jet aircraft.

Fission power isn't much further along than it was 45 years ago, either. Nor is fusion power. Nor is power transmission. At the high-power end of things, there hasn't been all that much progress. Most of the action is at the low-power end.

Biology is nowhere near hitting a wall. Commercially, though, bio isn't generating huge new businesses. Nanotechnology has devolved from micromachines to surface treatments for materials such as Rust-Oleum NeverWet.

The robot revolution may happen, but robot manipulation in unstructured situations still sucks. Watch these two videos:

Robot assembling water pump using visual guidance and force feedback, 1974:
https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump

Robot picking up flashlight and putting key in lock using visual guicance and force feedback, 2014:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPD5tUlKGMM

Not much difference there.
Thanks for the link. Great to seed the initial db.
> The problem is in the US most of the bad ones don't end up getting a CS degree where in India they do.

The problem is of course that the world is placing too much emphasis on degrees and this doesn't scale, because education costs are going through the roof and because degrees are so desirable, the system is being gamed. I see this happening in my own country and everywhere really. Lets take the US as an example - how many software developers skipped college? How many founders skipped college? Quite many, compared with the rest of the world.

This is one of those cases in which you're not seeing the forest from the trees. Do you think those indian companies you're talking about aren't aware that they are routinely hiring mediocre people? Of course they do and they like the ability of doing so, because consulting scales only horizontally - the more people you have, the more profit the company makes. And if universities would get tougher, they would just hire people without degrees and still access the same projects they are accessing today.
I'm honestly surprised the latter is allowed at all since it gives anyone who wants to get their hands on a dangerous biological agent a grave to rob.