skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Almost certainly relevant is that Alexa is an Internet analytics company that Amazon owns.
Well that's an out-of-the-blue introduction. I'm increasingly unconvinced of the market for voice-driven devices (innate reluctance to talk when not to a person), but at a glance looks like this is as laudable an effort as can be attempted.

At $199 it's too pricy for most, given the untested/unfamiliar niche. At $99 (select Prime members), some of is might give it a chance. I'm reminded that Apple started its move into mobile devices with the iPod (established against a popular yet muddled market of MP3 players) with the brilliant low-friction addition of the iPod Touch (for a tiny bit more get the browser, email, etc), which then led to merely slapping a cell phone module on & creating a plus-sized version. This device, however, isn't (corrections welcome) building off anything people are already familiar with, save perhaps "bluetooth speakers".

Will be interesting to watch. I assume Amazon's prime interest is gathering more about what content people actually consume, and (if implemented well) observing shopping lists. I'm intrigued by the casual simplicity of "add _____ to my shopping list", something I could get used to fast.

ETA: you're right, iPod Touch came out shortly after iPhone. I was enthralled with the former at the time, while the latter was far enough out of my price range I didn't even bother paying any attention to it.
Conspiracy to traffic? Doesn't seem like it. Is it something that makes trafficking easier? Sure. But who did the trafficking? The seller and the buyer.

Wire fraud? If it's the sale of something illegal I don't think that suddenly makes it wire fraud. Further, he's not charged with that. The sale is still completed. It's an illegal sale, but not fraud. Fraud would be if someone said they were going to sell you cocaine and instead shipped you powdered sugar.
Sorry, I should have made my sentence clearer: as in you have a wife/daughter/friend/girlfriend in the room who happens to be called Alexa, along with this new Amazon device. Hilarity ensues ;-)
Million dollar Bitcoin mining equipment burned in Thailand
This is so cool. It feels like the future, especially if it has the capability to control other devices in the home.

I think you could do some really exciting stuff with an SDK or an API. Even just the ability to tie actions to custom grammars would open it up for some cool hacks.

Really disappointed that privacy isn't even touched on. This thing will be listening to everything you say 24/7 and its not like you know who won't have free access to that data. For that reason I don't think I could ever buy it.
Shame on the US government for threatening the public with the enforcement of its own laws.
We've now got Microsoft (XBox One), Amazon (Echo), Google/Motorola (Moto X) and maybe others who want to place some kind of "always-on" microphone in our houses. They all say the same thing, sure - that the microphone won't be listening to your conversations, that it won't be sending the data to any other servers, etc. Do we believe them? And will they change those policies in the future? Do they even have real control over the devices, or will they be hacked?

1984 was such an underestimation of the potential power of a surveillance society.
If you're gonna step to me, better make sure your framework game is tight.
Works fine with npm "inherits" module. Not that you should be using instanceof anyways...
Same sentiment. We all know, that the existing cloud voice recognition features such as Siri, Samsung Smart TVs and upcomoning feature etc etc will eventually hunt some uf us (or all of us) down.

We must build new tech concepts, where privacy and _full_ controll and 100% ownership of our data is controlled by us. From the ground up.

Not sure if SV and HN is the best location to put such a statement - but I do hope I'm not alone in this.
This is a scam to get the trial version of your product? If everyone's clicking and downloading the trial version, it's obviously not coordinated (why on earth would one entity to download the same copy of your trial product over and over again?), but your website just doesn't appeal to people in certain countries from some reason. It sounds like you're blaming other people "scamming" you for your own failures to analyze the market in many countries you're advertising to.

This is more worthy of a "we messed up in our marketing and here's what happened" blog post than an HN post saying "We're the victims of a Google adwords scam!"
There is absolutely nothing untowards or abnormal about their claim, nor are they threatening the "public", which overwhelmingly doesn't operate black market sites.

Law enforcement absolutely includes an element of making examples, and deterring crime. That is one of the major purposes why organizations like the FBI exist. Not quite sure what this has to do with democracy.
It looks like the original text was automatically processed by replacing various words by their synonyms from a thesaurus, leading to hilariously non-idiomatic prose.
Zen99 (YC S14) raises $2.5M to save freelancers from HR hell
...and then you get handed it to fix and find zero comments, undeclared variables (often single letters), and then 70 lines of "sheet scrolling" followed by the same loop 3 times in some internal function evidencing that half of it was done by macro record.

Not bitter at all. Nope.
yes, it'd need to be fully open hardware and open source software. What else ? :)
Whoops. After reading my own link, I saw that the god helmet experiments have yet to be recreated. I had heard about it in a Dawkins Documentary and assumed that the science behind it was more solid than it actually is. My apologies for bringing hokeyness to this conversation.
What can I only do in Erlang? (erlang-questions)
cool. I poked around, but couldn't see how this supports docker containers at the moment. I assume that at least for now it just runs KVM linux vms that can run docker?

Or is there a different way this is handled?
> It's dogmatic not idiomatic.

That's not accurate; there are actual, technical reasons for avoiding new hence why some advise against using it.
Agreed, well done for replying with good humor. I think HN is getting more and more of these types of exchanges, which is great.
Show HN: StackShare – discover and discuss software stacks
Why does Amazon think people want these products? If I want to search stuff like that I would use my smartphone that is always with me. If I want to search with my voice, then I'll use the voice search found on my smartphone. Why would someone want a device that is always actively listening? Why would I pay 200$ for something that my smartphone already does?
All the big stacks want to.

Google has nest and android phones.

Microsoft has XBox (also voice activated and motion-recording) and band (with GPS) and windows phone.

Apple has iDevices.
Is there any distinct benefit which this offers over Google Now other than the fact that it gives instant access to Amazon?
Wouldn't consider it at $199, impulse buy at $99.
With each new release I feel kind of nostalgic. I have been using this since year 2001.
> Lenovo launches the S90 “Sisley”, a blatant copy of Apple’s iPhone 6

except it doesn't really look like it and it runs Android... that is unless any smart phone that is thin, round 5" and touch screen is a "blatant copy of Apple's iPhone 6"
Or you can just filter them to create your own front page. Reading reddit becomes a much different experience once you start to customize it.
C++ depot build tool
The follow is CWACkery: Complete, Wild-Ass Conjecture... kery.

Are you familiar with the 90/9/1 rule of thumb? That for any site with user-generated content (message boards, social networks, etc.), only 10% of people contribute to the discussion and only 10% of those people start new conversations?

At first, I read your comment about "20% of 20%" and thought "wow, that would be 80/16/4, that's incredible".

But this adds voting into the middle of the equation. So perhaps the 80/20 rule continues, and we can estimate that 20% of voters comment, and 20% of commenters post original content. That would make it more like 80 (reading only)/16 (voting)/3.2 (commenting)/0.8 (posting original content). Which might be considered (with rounding) 80/19/1. The original content contribution is roughly the same, but the voting system seems to increasing the middle-ground of engagement.

Double sign-ups by adding a voting feature?
Website Monitoring Catches Crucial IE 7 Failure
Privacy is possibly becoming a generation gap issue; throw enough of these against the wall and people will just stop caring until they can quantize a real world impact
It's possible this is more in line with what you want: http://www.expandrive.com/strongsync

Agreed, if you want a HD mirroring that's not something Lima does (at least at the moment) but for data and photos Lima is pretty much exactly what you asked for: You don't have to store data on other people's servers. Buy two limas and two usb drives, install one set in your house and another in your buddies/mothers house.

From the kickstarter page[1]:

> You can install one Lima in your home and one in your office, for example. Your Limas will automatically work together to replicate your content. Two Limas are enough. But with each Lima you buy, your data gets more secure and also faster to access. If some of your friends have Lima, you can also ask your Limas to back up each other's content. Your data is encrypted[2], so your friends will not be able to read it.

The other company in this space to watch is http://www.tonido.com/ but I don't think their offering is as close a lima to what you want.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-bra...

[2] http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341497-How-...
I have found both android and iOS implantation to be quite poor at hearing you from afar or in any kind of noise. I was actually hoping someone would make a product like this, with much better microphones so it could hear me anywhere. Also, for battery concerns, you should only use always on listening on your phone when plugged in.
23 seconds into the video the guy says "It only hears you when you use the wake word we chose."
An Inside Look at Startups
I think the real place this device will shine is in "homely" environments: kitchens (music and getting questions answered while you cook?), study areas for your kids, maybe even hobby rooms. It's definitely a bit on the steep side, but knowing Amazon, I wouldn't be surprised if the $99 sticks around longer than a "limited time" and the $199 becomes a thing of the past early next year.
If you were in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska, you could move to Omaha or Denver, and you no longer have those problems created by not being in close proximity to a metropolis. You retain the advantages of being in an environment where housing and office space are cheaper, commutes are less onerous, and taxes are more affordable. The talent pools are smaller, but they are also less competitive. The investment pools are smaller, but their funding stretches further. Pitch opportunities will be rarer, obviously, so you would need to go farther afield to find them, and mid-continental businesses are far more conservative with new ventures than coastal companies.

The only real advantage to SV is that it has more money sloshing around, desperately trying to spill out onto the next profit opportunity. By comparison, everywhere else has already tightened their belts by at least two holes, and will look on your blue-sky babbling with extreme suspicion.

But if you don't need outside investment, and you don't need to be physically close to customers, any metropolis in the U.S. (and quite a few in Canada) will do. Some are better than others, obviously, but none will be so bad that they will cause your business to fail--not even the declining Rust Belt cities, like Detroit.
The Xbox kinect already does this AND records video, millions of gamers own one as well.
I grow tired of this pathetic baseless fear mongering every single time anything is posted with voice control.

You people completely ignore the mode of operation and start making idiotic claims about "well NSA!"

In this case, as the website makes clear, you have to say the word "Alexa" for it to start listening. If you had been paying attention to the mobile scene even a little bit you'd know that this is on-chip listening for the term, rather than in the cloud.

So, no, you're in fact wrong. Nothing will be transmitted to the cloud unless it is the word "Alexa" or sounds similar enough to the term.
The Scholarly Study of Scientology
Have you ever recruited anyone here? The unemployment rate for good engineers is negative here: you're not just competing with their current job, but with the two other startups who are wooing them, and the one they're thinking about starting.

If you're building something that doesn't require elite technical skill (like most startups), locating in silicon valley is a net negative for recruiting. You're going to have a very difficult time convincing someone to leave Google to work on your social secret photo food delivery app for dogs.
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

I guess what'll happen with voice control is that we'll all have to keep quiet in case the ever listening devices interpret our speech as commands.
One small update: One could say that "because for each observer an "instant snapshot" of the Universe is "slightly" different (not exactly the same) there are many Universes.

This is nothing but word games. OK, for each observer it is not exactly the same "snapshot" (because two observers cannot be situated in the same location) and it is possible to claim that because two "snapshots" are not exactly same there are two parallel universes, but this is just an delusion.

An appropriate analogy could be of a tourists taking pictures of the same Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu. Each picture would be different, but the stupa is the same. To say that due to change in light and shadow, rains and moving particles in the air, the stupa is never the same would be a correct observation, but to say that there are multiple parallel stupas that are "colliding" with each other, is nonsense indeed.

Here we discarding the illusory conception of "sameness", of "unchanging" (looking at a physical object as a set of continuous processes on various levels) but we never assume that there are more than one such set.

Btw, things which are parallel (lines or planes) have no common point by definition. As long as they are "collide" they are not parallel but concurrent. So there are, indeed, multitudes of concurrent and parallel (they have nothing in common) processes which together form what we used to call Universe.

Claiming that two process which "happen at the same time" have "the same time" in common is also a delusion.

Suppose there are two beams of light from the same source which are propagating in orthogonal directions. Saying that they happening at the same time is just a mental construct. They are two "parallel processes" and have nothing in common. "Universal time" is just a mental construct. Each process has its own time.
Okay, give me your Facebook password please. Thanks in advance.
European satellite could discover thousands of planets in Earth's galaxy
Are you trolling? Do you know nothing about privacy?
There might be some interest from the DIY people to hack the hardware/software. But I am not sure if there will be interest from general consumers for this product.
I think you misunderstand the point of most of those comments. Numbers and Google Sheets for iPad have been available for months, so Microsoft's offering has to demonstrate value above and beyond those. Unfortunately, the 2014 offering doesn't really do that.

Having encountered an issue before (The workbook you are trying to open is an ISO Strict file), it's not clear if Microsoft actually leveraged the existing Office code in the mobile versions: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2960660
We're planning to release IPython 3.0 some time around the end of this year, and after that, we'll be focussing on splitting the project up and renaming it (the bits that run Python code will still be IPython).
To be fair, the portable devices are not yet monitoring all conversations due to battery life constraints. If it were a wall powered device, I would be very wary of it, but until then it seems highly unlikely it can achieve that behavior and not drain the battery in a noticeable way.
I don't know about the entirety of Unicode characters, but I've been using Audacious since version ~3.1 in 2011 (now 3.4.3) and it's never had any problems displaying Japanese and Korean characters--if you're not using the Winamp 2 theme with bitmapped fonts.
Seconded! I always expected my Nest thermostat and Nest protect smoke detectors to turn into Google Now endpoints, but Amazon beat them to it.

Just requested my Echo invite!
A couple differentiators:
-The speaker in Echo is presumably much better
-The microphone in Echo is presumably much better
-On most Android phones (I don't know about iPhone), you have to wake the phone up before you can talk to it
Tagging along in AWS: EC2 tags in action
Probably because it does two things:

1. Positions this as a product that is for "normal" people, not the stereotypical silicon valley techie (a la Google Glass)

2. Makes it seem easy to use, the "even a little kid could use it" effect.
Popcorn Time Now 'Impossible' to Shut Down
They located Silk Road 2.0's server in an unspecified way, not directly related to their undercover agent on the support staff. Given that two other darknet markets (Black Market and Cloud9) have been shut down today, and they didn't specify how they located the SR2 server, it seems plausible that law enforcement have a vulnerability to locate servers over the Tor network.

From the complaint:

"In or about May 2014, the FBI identified a server located in a foreign country that was believed to be hosting the Silk Road 2.0 website at the time. On or about May 30, 2014, law enforcement personnel from that country imaged the Silk Road 2.0 Server and conducted a forensic analysis of it. Based on posts made to the SR2 Forum, complaining of service outages at the time the imaging was conducted, I know that once the Silk Road 2.0 server was taken offline for imaging, the Silk Road 2.0 websites went offline as well, thus confirming that the server was used to host the Silk Road 2.0 website."[1]

Then, as a result of extremely poor OpSec (Benthall accessed the server directly, used his real email for registering the server), they got his IP's and, well, you know where it goes from there.

1. https://pdf.yt/d/RpyX9_xmapTkhmkb (Complaint)
Wow. It is a huge amount of work to take a product like manta and open source it. This is great work by Joyent and a testament to their commitment to open source.
In the video, the dad says something along the lines of "We just have to say the wake word we choose."
Bash isn't my expertise and I put this together pretty quickly. Please send pull requests! Forgive my ignorance, but what's the danger of the cd'ing in the EXIT trap? Also, I did set -e, so there's no problem of running "sudo make uninstall" from the wrong directory, afaict.
Since you mention fresh:

https://fresh.amazon.com/dash/

It still requires a jump to the pc to order; but no reason they couldn't add a way to initiate an order from it. It's also a tad less privacy intrusive then echo.
This video was so over the top I had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1.

Alexa, is this a joke?
Your dad seems to have taken a woodworkers attitude to building software, a true craftsman indeed. And it looks like you have taken his gift and used it to good effect, as a dad that's something to be very proud of.
I agree completely. At least this isn't the microsoft kinnect yet, that can basically scan the room for every little detail and is always listening. The first time I saw the kinnect, I thought, hm, I wonder how other companies will get this technology into the living rooms of every family.

To me, everything these big companies do is just a play to get information on people. Putting the kinnect in my living room and always have the mic on and it connected to my cable television and my internet, and constantly listening even when the xbox is off is freaky; just like this new echo. It's scary, but I bet personal recognition features are coming to this echo soon. Also, I can imagine being like, echo order me some stuff off of amazon, and then magically it appears from a drone in the sky.
Yes, the critical theory is what I'm talking about, and I think that knowledge is definitely associated with the political "left". The issue I had is that the skepticism is almost always ignorant and dismissive. It's just impossibly frustrating to try to talk to someone who refuses to do any background reading but wants to tell you you're wrong about concepts that live in an academic and historical context.

As for the military, I guess that one is more debatable. I agree that the Bush-era "support the troops" jingoism isn't around much, but I used to see a lot posts where it's implicit. Things like hugely popular photos of special ops soldiers followed by adoring comments of how "badass" they are.
Does anyone live in Boulder? It sounds like a nice place, or is it just a suburb on Denver? I couldn't tell from the map.
... request an invitation? Please, who do they think they are, Google? Or maybe expecting super long lines at their upcoming retail stores in NY?

Come on Amazon, do yourself a favour and come up with things that matter.
You're sitting around talking to a friend, you ask some small questions like, "is it supposed to rain tomorrow?" or "what was the name of that guy in that movie with the thing?" and your technology responds before your friend can. Especially if your friend is named Alexa.
I feel like this is a UX issue that touches on our natural desire to have private and public conversations.

If I'm talking to a device, I consider it to be the same kind of conversation I would have with a close friend. One that I would naturally want to keep between to two of us. You wouldn't find me screaming it for everyone to hear and think about.
Privacy Captcha
An always-on microphone with an ip address?

I'm filing this under "what could possibly go wrong".
The issue has very little to do with forgetting "new" and more to do with hiding implementation details and improving module composability.
It will be interesting to see if it has any easter eggs like Siri and Google Now. "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot"
Latest Ruby versions packaged as DEB or RPM for your linux distribution
Google Maps for iOS updated with Material design
You seize the server running the tor software serving as entry-point for your hidden service and grab the private keypair in order to impersonate the hidden service.

The .onion address is iirc a hash of the public key.
I really dislike having to start up a separate web server for every project I work on.
A high karma is a causal effect for popularity, however. (on HN, an article at #1 will receive much more activity than an article at #30.)
So the product is named "iPhone" but you ask it questions by calling it "Siri"? You don't buy a Cortana either, you buy a product named "Windows Phone" (?).

What's odd to me is that Alexa is way more common name for humans than Siri is. I wonder what false positives will do for households with a human Alexa.