skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music

I usually have trouble with the Kinect 2's microphone while I'm playing music or watching TV. It's nice that Amazon is concerned about this. Does anyone know how many microphones the Kinect has?
Nuance can recognize Bulgarian: http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-solution/customer-serv...
Wow, the embedded video highlights what a big difference a quality design agency can make. Amazon needs some advertising help.
Nevada hasn't turned out so well for the many startups who have moved there.

Bad companies and/or ideas will fail anywhere, and they will fail faster in high burn rate areas like the Valley. Good (internet) companies will succeed anywhere. When was the last time you refused to install an app based upon where the company behind it was based?

Tax decisions should never drive business decisions until the amount of tax actually becomes a material financial statement item.

Nonsense. You should plan for failure, but you should also plan for success.

Without Silicon Valley, nobody would remember or care about Zuckerberg today.

Also nonsense. Facebook was a great, viral product. No one cared, cares, and in the beginning, even knew, where it was based (and it didn't start in the Valley either).
We're proud to announce "Echo," developed by Amazon, and exploited by the NSA.

We're proud to announce "Echo," a Siri for your home.

lol
We wrote a blog post about the relaunch: http://stackshare.io/posts/leanstack-io-is-now-stackshare. We should probably link to the post on the homepage though.
similar, a bit of a workaround, but works fine:
http://learnjs.io/blog/2014/03/17/using-browserify-with-rail...
Your nick is deliberately obscene. I'm not a prude, but it doesn't fit the tone of the site.
How is it a "hack" for the federal government to assert jurisdiction over a crime that involved the use of a federal service?
Your original argument was that C++ and Swift fit the bill as well. Now, as far as I can tell, you seem to be saying that C++ and Swift are better choices because Apple owns compilers for them. That is a different argument, which is in direct conflict with the one I originally responded to. My response was based on the assumption that you meant what you wrote.

Anyway, onto your current stance. That Apple don't use Swift or C++ for their spider seems to indicate that the benefit of using Go outweighs the benefit of using a language they own the compiler for. Go has a BSD-style license, so as far as Apple implementing their own changes and doing whatever they want with the source code and their own binaries at will goes, they might as well have owned it. Go is also seems like a no-brainer choice for a web spider since it has concurrency modeled in such a straight forward and cruft free way.
I opened this thread and immediately started scanning through to see who brought up the blockchain.

While I agree, it would be interesting, in practice the only country you might be able to convince to adopt it would be Iceland (because they're awesome) and yet, they have probably the least disfunctional democracy in the world so have no need to adopt it.

Might be worth exploring for steering open source projects, or prioritising objectives within a company.
The original Alexa trademark Amazon acquired was based on the Library of Alexandria. So, it is in fact a coincidence. :)
To everyone worried about privacy:

We all trust our e-mail to be stored in the cloud, we store sensitive files etc on services like dropbox, we trust that our operating systems aren't collecting/sending data, etc.

You're already using and relying upon MANY services with the ability (if they really wanted to) to steal TONS of private information from you.

It all comes down to trust. But don't pretend like this opens up some new door for privacy concerns.

Ex. If Apple wanted to, they could watch us through our macbook cameras and listen to us all the time. But we trust that they don't. Same thing here.
Indeed, I think Robert Martin's "Clean Code" would agree that if you don't need to vary the "6 hours" part at run-time, then "findeventsfromthelast6hours" is actually better than passing in an "hours" argument ("Clean Code" advocates minimizing function arguments). Refactoring the name in the face of a one-time change in behavior (e.g. "4hours") should be trivial with any modern IDE.
I stand corrected http://jasperproject.github.io/
As it sounds like it was social engineering [e.g. Getting into the private/admin areas of the forum via an undercover agent] I'm not sure you can state that.
For the HN crowd, think of Boulder as the Marin County of the Silicon Flatirons.
What you are saying is technologically correct, possible and prevalent but I couldn't find Amazon saying it anywhere on their page. Can you point me to the part where Amazon says nothing is ever stored/transmitted unless "Alexa" is spoken?
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Well, you do. You just don't feel as comfortable when they make it apparent.
Seems like the scanning may be broken. I just tried it with https://seatgeek.com and it says the site isn't public.
Nice site. I've been the user since it called leanstack.io . It's pretty useful!
Show HN: Typegenius-Find the perfect font combo
504 Time-out.
Here's a link to the Google Cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CIBYb2V...
Other than the usual HN fear discussion, does anyone have any thoughts on the product itself? Doesn't offer any functionality that would be useful to the average person?
It's obvious what it's supposed to be for, the problem is that it can be so easily abused for other purposes. And listing a PO box does a fat lot of good when you still have to provide your name.
My favorite connected device is still an old iPad2 that I have connected to my TV. The advantages are:

1) The iPad has much better app support than most other TV connected devices. I can watch shows from Amazon, Hulu, HGTV, HBO, ... even the olympics have been well supported. The only issue I have is that there is no remote, and I don't see a good path to adding one.

2) I am a little less worried about privacy issues with it. Apple already has all of my emails, so the thought of them potentially listening to my living room with a connected device that has been well researched over the last few years isn't too big a concern.

3) The cost is low. For an older device that I no longer carry I would call it free. If you don't have a hand-me-down iPad to connect to the TV then the start at $300 new including an HDMI adapter, and you can find a used one much cheaper.

4) It is also a perfectly functional tablet incase you want to carry it around and look at the internet or something. It is old enough that new games are an issue, but it is fine otherwise.

5) It is already connected to the iCloud account with my shopping list, etc on it, so it can actually add things to a list or calendar that I use.

6) "Hey Siri", works well for me, and is enough to play the occasional song, or check wikipedia facts if I need one.

7) My dog is named Alexa, not Siri, so no conflict there.

Then again, other than the occasional electronic product I am pretty frugal. I know I am not a good target market for anything, so Amazon shouldn't try too hard to sell me on this. I think my old iPad is already working well as a better version of both the Fire TV and Echo.
I would like to point out that Longmont had already been doing this, a town of 90,000 near Boulder.
The other thread on this is completely dominated by privacy talk. Can we have one thread that talks about the tech instead?
Why couldn't the FBI land this case by itself? What are the responsibilities and special investigative powers (if any) of "Homeland Security Investigations." How do they justify their existence independent of the FBI? Their webpage suggests they do almost exactly the same thing.

http://www.ice.gov/hsi
It will be easy enough to test once it gets into someone's home who understands how to use a packet sniffer
Yeah, and you also have to use Google's ugly name spacing and global scope pollution instead of modern (sane) module approaches like CommonJS.

Following an old-school technique just because you might see it in some legacy code doesn't seem like a great argument.
> Authorities will tire quickly of complying with an endless game

Oh I wish that was true but we are in our fourth? decade of the War on Drugs, Authorities don't care, they just hire more people at tax payer expense.
>The largest memory server that I'm aware of uses up to 4 terabytes of memory

What is that server used for?
Scribd keeps plugging along. Is it still considered the "Youtube for documents/PDFs"? Has it stumbled onto a viable business?
Show HN: “Who is hiring?” redesign
I usually test my Rails/Angular projects with jasmine-rails jasmine-jquery and Sinon.JS. These three together let you test virtually any frontend js code.
Compare the success of Nevada's businesses with those of California's. Can you think of any major Nevada success stories outside of the casinos or Zappos? (Even Zappos found success as a Cali company before it moved to Nevada.)

As it turns out, having one of the "best business climates" is usually not correlated with actual business success. States with "favorable" business climates have such climates precisely because businesses would not otherwise succeed in those states. This puts such businesses at a disadvantage when they try to expand to non-favorable states: without the tax subsidies, they simply aren't efficient enough to succeed in a cutthroat, capitalist environment.

Tax Foundation's "best business climates" ranking is based purely on tax rates. It doesn't even take into account tax incentives! If they're going to rank states based on tax policies, they should be ranking based on effective tax rates, not hypothetical maximum marginal tax rates. The other major flaw with the rankings is that they don't take into account the other factors that matter far more to a small business: such as market opportunities, customer availability, employee quality, and support services, none of which you will find in any meaningful qualities in any of the states ranked in the top 10 of the Tax Foundation rankings.
The US would never extradite to Iran, so unless you are
so desperate to open a "dark net market" that you move
to Iran, you will stare down the US justice system, not
the Iranian tribunals.
The main selling point of a macbook is not that it can identify exactly what you say, when you said it, and send that data back to a central server that is "always getting smarter". There is also a VERY big difference for me between the things that I type into my computer and the conversations I have in my home. I say many things in an imperfect form or with a dry sense of humor - I rarely save incomplete or out-of-context thoughts to a .pages file on Dropbox.
That's the worst argument I've ever seen. "You either trust them with everything or you don't."
We don't need another Siri / Cortana sitting in our room. $199 for this seems like a waste when all of this is available on our smartphones.
One of the shortcomings of audio books is no appendix. Sorry about that. Write to me through my blog and I'll email it to you: http://www.nirandfar.com/contact

Regarding your question on triggers, when it comes to newsletters, the external trigger is unread email message in your inbox. The "action" then is opening the message to see the "variable reward" inside.
Show HN: Neat-looking lattice generator
Maybe use CloudFlare.
Announcing Confluent, a Company for Apache Kafka and Realtime Data
This sort of exchange is unfortunately the dominant mode of discourse--not just online either.

Both sides loudly proclaim the foolishness of the other without ever having an opportunity to establish some reasonable grounds on which an actual discussion could proceed.
no, not everyone does and i think reinforcing that belief is harmful because it makes people think they don't have a choice, when they really do.

there are a growing number of people who freely choose alternatives that respect their privacy/dignity/rights. i am one of those people. to the extent i can't control all data about me (e.g. to pay my taxes or get health insurance), that's pretty different than choosing to buy a consumer device designed to record and transmit your voice from inside of your home.
Wow, maybe I should look at other parts of CO? I just looked on zillow and saw some properties for sale in the mountains to the west, but they all seemed to be 1.5+ hours from Boulder. (even though they were less than 30 miles) I didn't see anything closer in my price range.
Sorry, I meant it in terms of the ominous "nobody is safe behind a keyboard"—not only do they seem to be proud to be so invasive, but they're even adopting a moralizing tone.
But the primary function of the Xbox is not to record data and send it back to its servers - the main selling point of the Echo is basically smart voice data analysis. Offline, an Xbox is still useful - the Echo becomes useless.
I think the only solution is to develop "personal AI" that runs on personal hardware... or an anonymous AI running 'in the cloud' but paid with cryptocurrency. Hopefully we'll be able to control what runs locally and what gets farmed out to the cloud on a more granular level one day.
What are the chances that the FBI set up a
number of "copy-cat-silk-road" hidden services, immediately
after seizing the original? That would provide them ample
opportunity to 1) build a profile of everyone who used them,
then 2) shut them down with an intimidating "sting,"
dampening the desire of potential copy-copy-cats.
Not quite, as you can see multiple posts from the same subs in the top 50 and it changes. They aren't fixed "slots" but just appear to be weighted like that.
By "its" do you mean the "public" or the US government? These are the government's laws, and it enforces those laws on said public.
Speaking of the Panopticon singularity, please buy four of these in order to bring it about more quickly. Thank you.
If you don't live in Iran, staring down the Iranian justice system [given the lack of love other nations have for them] is pretty easy.

Tbh tho, I wouldn't be surprised if you setup an Iranian site that you weren't accused of "funding terrorist operations" and the trial gets replaced with a US drone strike.
You mean huge losses, right?
https://twitter.com/Michcioperz suggested https://mediacru.sh/download/Q2HAoRHE-JvD.mp3 that seems to be working for now.
"successfully infiltrated the support staff" - This doesn't rule out that they didn't sniff out their credentials and logged in as them.
I don't understand why and how it periodically resets.
It's generally pretty easy in most frameworks to plug in to all XHR requests (see e.g. jquery's ajaxPrefilter). Then you can simply add a CSRF token to the header of every request (or possibly your authentication details directly).
How Efficient are Ruby Integers?
Well, they will record a lot of cursing and anti-Obama talk then - big deal! :)
Nuts and Bolts #3: Show and tail multiple production remote logs with Capistrano
I like the way you ask yourself critical questions and adjust!
Chattanooga is a great example of providing internet by the local government

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17...
One thing that bothers me about Dart is that the Angular.js team decided to go with their own language AtScript, even though they were quite experienced with Dart in AngularDart.

Do they know something about the health of Dart that we don't?
Class Bs for persons still existed in 1998.
A fair amount of those GC applicants are also the people who came here via consulting companies like Wipro/TCS etc.
Something something parallel construction, no doubt.
Hey Nir, you mentioned at startup grind the promise of wearable devices. Where do you feel the internal/external trigger gap will change greatest once traditional smartphones are eclipsed by different channels of interaction (vibration, physical movement, sounds, etc.)?
There are no words that are obscene.
Is DartVM in Chrome confirmed? I keep hearing it will happen, but haven't seen anything official.
> These are the government's laws, and it enforces those laws on said public.

Well, yes.
This sounds no different than the undercover police,
detective work the FBI has been doing since its
establishment. Infiltrate the perp, take him down.

They used the same tactics on gangs, mobs, etc. Now
violent crime is slowing, but they have hoardes of
agents trained in these protocols, so they're
redirecting energy into catching so called "cybercriminals."

A bunch of people who infiltrated the mob are now infitrating
groups of nerds in basements. It's frustratingly hilarious.

By the way: If the FBI is so successful using traditional
police tactics to infiltrate "cybercrime syndicates," why
do they need a "front door" to our devices?
You forgot to quote the second part of the paragraph that says:

> Once we have an initial version of Angular 2, we'll start to work on a migration path for Angular 1 apps.

Not very intellectually honest of you, in addition you forgot to mention that you're an Ember contributor. Also, as have been said, this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dZdq2L8EkzimgvU93ypLF9GJ...
It's like you live in a parallel universe from me.

My water, electricity, etc utilities are far more reliable (probably by an order of magnitude) than any private service I've experienced. They don't cut corners in design or safety, and when there is a problem, it's far easier to get in touch with them (they're usually already aware of it and don't pretend to act surprised like say your Telco or ISP) and scheduling is more flexible.

Case in point: I was wondering if my home water pressure could be increased at the meter. I'd gotten conflicting advice from plumbers. I called up one afternoon. They said they'd send someone out to check. I got a knock on my door at 8PM that same evening. I told him I measured 42psi at the hose bib, which was over the zone's minimum of 36. Which was disappointing to me. But still. The level of service just floored me. I've never experienced anything close to that from Time Warner, DiSH, AT&T, T-Mobile, you-name-it. I replaced my 150amp electric meter with a 200amp meter (city provided), it was inspected for less than most people would bother getting out of bed for and I had a fire hazard from our "new to us" house replaced with almost no cost from the utility.

I also feel like I get a lot more for my dollar. Obviously the power grid is far more complex than Time Warner's cabling. Not to mention it can kill you. From TWC I get internet access. From the electric company I get 100% Wind Power generated electricity (for an additional $0.5 I believe), and hundreds of kilowatts of power each and every month.

I never give a thought to wether my sewer service is going to work. It doesn't have "off" days where it backs up a bit. My water doesn't decide to stop flowing every once in awhile so I have to try turning the faucet off and on until it works. When we moved in a couple years ago, I thought I smelled gas outside near the meter. Someone came out within 30 minutes. They found a minor leak (someone in the alley actually ran into the meter!), had it fixed up in no time flat. No charge.

If an ISP could come close to my Utilities experience I'd be overjoyed personally. And it'd be the last time I ever saw an Early Termination Fee, obscene equipment charges for commodity hardware, it'd actually work 99.999% of the time, and (maybe the biggest issue of all with ISPs) I'd actually get the service level I'm paying for.
I cannot imagine a way in which a single-server hidden service is safe from a global, active adversary like FBI, NSA & Friends.

This [1] discusses passive analysis over time.

Isn't it really easy to locate one if you can perform active attacks on the global infrastructure? (introduce latencies and/or break links temporarily)

If your hidden service is served by a couple of mirrors on each continent, though... then maybe you're safe?

edit: This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. Am I missing something?

[1] http://www.onion-router.net/Publications/locating-hidden-ser...
Hi guys. Quick question: would you say that building a product around an already established habit (such as watching TV or a particular series) improves the chances of building a successful habit-forming product?
Asana Adds SAML and Google Apps Marketplace Integration
>>Fleischmann later realized that the government wasn't interested in having her testify against Chase in court or any other public forum. Instead, the Justice Department's political wing, led by Holder, appeared to be using her, and her evidence, as a bargaining chip to extract more hush money from Dimon. It worked. Within weeks, Dimon had upped his offer to roughly $9 billion.

I wish I had half as much courage as the article's portrayal of Fleischmann. It's one thing to abstractly know people are pawns to be moved around the board game of life; quite another to belatedly realize titanic forces are using you as a pawn in their high-stakes negotiations.
"The following external libraries and tools are retrieved during the build process:
...
Mesa - Implementation of OpenGL (only the software rasterizer is available)."

From the readme
This is installing a general-purpose computational device with audio listening and networking. In addition, its normal use case is listening for a phrase, doing additional decoding in the cloud, and then taking an action.

It is not at all unreasonable to say "Man, that functionality sounds a lot like spying. I sure hope that nobody roots this device."

Are you 100% sure (beyond some marketing copy on a website) that this is purely on-chip voice recognition? That this chip's firmware isn't reprogrammable? That it can't decide to, once activate on-chip once, stay on continuously?

You can't. Unless the hardware and software was open-source, and then was verified on-site, you can't. That's the problem with these kind of things.

And yes, we have the same problem with cellphones, laptops, tablets, soon cars, and everything else; that doesn't somehow magically make this any better.

Also, please stop saying "pathetic". It conjures to mind some jerk swirling cheap booze in a glass saying "mmm yes how pathetic the plebes" and then waiting for their next r/atheists post to get upvoted. You just end up sounding like a pompous ass.
Ricky Jay is amazing. I went to a screening of the recent documentary about him, Deceptive Practice[1], which he attended and subsequently answered questions---enjoyed it immensely.

His incredible 52 Assistants show is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jljt5Ml28FU

[1] http://www.rickyjaymovie.com/