skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a heads up, Helpful was actually the first Assembly product. (https://github.com/asm-helpful/helpful-web/pulse/monthly)

Its a community effort so some people have more time then others in a month and products on Assembly each have their own ebb and flow. It does look like just3ws did alot in October but those are probably mostly merge commits (just3ws is on the Core Team). All the partners still shared in last month's proceeds for their previous contributions though.

Disclosure: I work on Assembly
> why don't you trust Amazon

I think you're asking the wrong question. It's about the company's motivation.

Google makes money from your data, and by showing you ads.
Amazon makes money by creating services and devices that sell you products.
Apple makes money just by selling you services and devices.

Looked at this way, I certainly trust Apple more than Google or Amazon, and this is borne out by Apple's recent "A message from Tim Cook". http://www.apple.com/privacy/
I'd prefer Twiki from Buck Rogers.
My Mental Health Story: Depression, Plagiarism, and Analysis
I'm also curious about the algorithm, since a search for "google" results in a palette that only features one color out of the company's primary-plus-green motif. Seems like backgrounds (white in the case of Google, black in the case of demotivational posters) are weighted a little too strongly, perhaps.
I do have control over my laptop, the NSA or Amazon would have to actively hack me in order go get to that mic and luckily I'm not worth it anyways.

In order for someone (the NSA?) to track a phone and do whatever they need to do, they need to have a warrant and what-not.

That's like deliberately sending all your living-room conversations (yours and your family's) online for analysis for God-knows-what purpose.

You trust Amazon that's good for you then. I don't trust anybody with admittedly uncontrolled access to all table conversations my family will have in the future.
Well I think CMUSphinx and Julius have actually made leaps and bounds. Jasper is a thin layer built on top of those systems (sphinx in this case).

I guess I'm just easy to impress - I think the fact that we have off-the-shelf open source software that does voice recognition with any kind of quality is amazing.

And again, a lot of the time, it's about how well your model is trained. One of the ideas I had was to work training into the product, and have the user say sentences over time (maybe ~5 a week, at random times) to help the machine understand better (something like "hey, if you have a minute, let's work on our communication").

Also, even if the voice is a little bit computer-y, I don't mind, yeah you won't match on feature set right out of the gate, but I don't mind.

Also, there's an opportunity for advancement in that area -- if I were to build a site that collected voice/utterance samples from voice artists and had users pay a little bit for packs, I think we could fund the open-source teams doing the work to make more realistic voice/utterance.

I think of Jasper as a first step, but then again, I am biased, I like the idea and have been wanting to do it myself for a long time
Current generation of kids are using Google Docs in school right now. Can Office survive another generation?
So then you're sending every keystroke people make to a central server?

Even assuming that the connection is secure (never a good assumption), that still means that there is a single point of failure. And one with drastic consequences.
More here: http://www.space.com/27682-rogue-stars-between-galaxies.html
"It is an accident of history that society allows motorcycles. If they were invented today, there would be zero chance of them being allowed on streets."
So glad they were invented in a time when big old nanny state didn't decide for us what risk we are willing to take.
> I said "our paranoia".

Hmmm ... that's not what I see above.

Generally I can understand frustration with any issue getting too much attention and drowning out others.

> it's my choice to decide to allow Google or Apple, for example, to get my data.

It's not your choice really. It's hard to function in this society otherwise, and I don't just mean having phone service or traveling. For example, my electricity vendor insisted on installing a 'smart meter', which allows them to record what and when electrical devices are used, giving them a good view of my activities in the privacy of my home. My choice was to let them install it, get my own generator, or go without electricity.
The VIA C7 AES implementation could keep up with memory (ca. 20Gb/s). With suitable cipher modes you can use multiple pipelined units in parallel with negligible overhead.
How exactly does shifting 100% liability for fraud to the user make for a "better shopping experience"? No matter how many coupons they offer, this is a deal breaker.

My grocery added an extra tap for their CC/loyalty card at checkout - tap once for points, then again for NFC payment - and it so infuriated me that I changed grocers until they changed it back to a single tap.

It cannot be overstated how important reducing payment friction is to a buying experience.
Well, it says: Tucked under Echo's light ring is an array of seven microphones. These sensors use beam-forming technology to hear you from any direction. With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music.

I've been working professionally with digital audio for nearly 20 years now so I know a fair amount about DSP, acoustics and so on. Very basically, you can measure the acoustical properties of a space by playing a sound known as an impulse and recording the response, and then extracting the acoustical information by a mathematical technique known as deconvolution. This is used in various commercial products for allowing you to simulate, say, the reverberant space of Sydney Opera Hall on a recording made in a vocal booth, or reproduce the signature tone of a hideously expensive guitar amplifier in a cheap DSP-powered device.

When you have hardware where the speaker and microphones exist in a fixed physical configuration relative to each other, as here, then the math gets that much simpler because a lot of your coefficients become fixed quantities. With multiple microphones at fixed distances from each other you can use small discrepancies in the phase of the input audio to infer information about spatial characteristics of the environment. I don't know the exact dimensions of this thing but just eyeballing I'd guess that you could hack this thing to produce a reflectance map with a resolution of maybe under an inch.

Wow, thinking about it I hope it is hackable. Even if you were only able to get the raw input stream from the microphones and had to import the audio to another machine for all the DSP, a perfectly-calibrated speaker + phased microphone array for $200 is a steal.
Looks quite promising!
But:
"It will sniff out all of the objects which also need to be built to make it work, and it will build them first."
Seems like every source file will always be compiled regardless whether it has changed since the last build or not. So it's just for rather small projects.
Warrantless echo tapping?
Just curious for case like this:

Can someone take a missing person report from Police department and take it to Cell phone company and get any cell location traces for those period of time? Assuming the cell is on.

Can anyone do it or just someone from police department?
That sounds a really interesting device, thanks. I too have noticed that voice recognition has been shifted "to the cloud" despite the improvement in local processing power; even 15 year old Nokias had voice recognition of some sort (BLUETOOOOTH you would shout), and old single-core PCs had Dragon Naturally Speaking working on them; I am sure modern devices have more processing power (and storage).
I'm still looking for a decent OS for my U3 [1], and last time I checked BSDs were not a (serious?) option.

1: http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php
Why is some customer torrenting movies supposed to be the ISP's problem any more than some customer powering grow lamps to grow marijuana supposed to be the power company's problem?
SenseFly's EXom Drone Uses Vision and Ultrasound to Fly Precisely, Safely
Is it better if cities have more compact shapes?
Haha what a great idea.

I laughed at you, but I'm unsure as to whether it was a terrible joke......
This is the first time I've laughed reading HN. :)
Most people do, and the few that avoid such things will avoid this too.
And yet, if you just google "polyfill", there are no results referring to that usage. So, although polygon filling would also be interesting to read about, it's not really fair to complain about the OP's idiomatic usage of the term.
The value of the product is undermined by what we now know the Agencies do. Before Snowden we all thought it was an idiotic idea we'd have pervasive surveillance, now we know it happens. Before Snowden we'd buy nice to have, harmless gadgets, or use easy Google speech recognition (your reference), now we shoot them down. As an investor i'd be thinking about this kind of reaction to a product. Maybe a table-stakes feature would be privacy in a way our community had some confidence it was well thought through.
10 things learned while failing spectacularly as a freelancer
The previous announcement refers to beta, this is the final.
If you don't trust your friends, there are much worse ways they could betray you.
The talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUZvvvIFU9c&list=PLAc7HoDe-0...
Of course. The point is that it's an absurd Hollywood-fed cliche to think that this represents all corporate lawyers and thus that they have no social value as a profession.
This might be of interest to people.

http://procbits.com/2014/01/06/poor-mans-firebase-leveldb-re...

I used it to create my own personal use mini-firebase.
I don't see what's stupid about that. Are you suggesting that anytime we want to talk about polyfills, we should instead write the following?

#include "config.h"

// ...

#if !HAVE_FOOBAR
void foobar(...) // missing: implement ourselves
{
}
#endif

Because that's nuts. This usage is actually more useful than the one that's a contraction of "polygon filling."
"ALWAYS GETTING SMARTER"
It's correct. Do you just not want to admit you've made such a rookie mistake?
Wrinq is an interesting idea that even I had thought about earlier. I pay my rent using a personal check which the landlord then encashes at the bank. I will prefer to pay my rent online using a credit or debit card. But from a landlord's perspective, wouldn't it incur an additional processing fee if he/she were to start accepting a credit/debit card thereby reducing the net amount for him/her? The only way for it work for the landlord would be to increase the rent which I, as a tenant, will not like. I understand there's convenience but don't think it would justify a rent increase of 3% (average credit card processing fee) which can be a lot depending on where you are. How are you handling this problem? I know some landlords already have the option of paying by credit/debit card. It may work out in case of a new tenant but what about existing tenants? How does the landlord or you as a service provider justify the not-so-insignificant increase for them?
You should try the HTML5 tag \<sarcasm\>\<\/sarcasm\> next time. Some browsers also accept the "\/s" at the end of sarcasm statements.

/s
In this case it appears that they have an insider, however, given the ability to analyze internet traffic, and given the ability to DDOS a hidden service which apparently happens quite frequently when new sites appear, with sufficient network analysis it should be possible to determine the end point of the hidden service.

Understanding of Tor

1. Hidden services can only exist on one node.
2. That node has a single IP or few IP addresses.

How to locate a hidden service given understanding of Tor.

1. Send pulses of traffic to the hidden service (DDOS)
2. Comb through internet traffic logs to identify which IPs saw traffic pulses.
3. Reduce to a few statistically probable nodes matching the pulsed traffic pattern
4. Pulse hidden service again to see if it matches the probable nodes.
Just like today it's way too late to stop the train of gay marriage acceptance. There are still a few crazy old people that rail against it though. Congratulations on being one of the crazy old people.
Show HN: Triage Ebola like an Expert
Which pentesting certificate is worth it?
This post is about the FT service http://polyfills.io/
I'm not sure "security by obscurity" applies to Tor, even in the context that you mean (which I understood as the routing-to-hidden-services bit of it, rather than Tor in its entirety).

Based on the info and understanding I currently have, the only information that can be used to track a hidden service is, basically, uptime* . If you own a significant percentage of both the network (Tor), and its carrier (Internet), you can start introducing latencies at will to exclude routes. That will basically allow you to find the IP by elimination.

As a passive adversary, you have to do the above passively - meaning loads of accurate uptime/time data for the hidden service, which you'd then have to correlate with known outages in various sections of the internet, yada yada. Passively it could take forever.

Security by obscurity is when the process being kept secret is the duct tape making it "secure" (think XORing against a fixed key and calling it "encryption"). This clearly not the case here, but rather that the protocol cannot protect a single server hidden service on an adversarial carrier network.

I can't imagine a HS with mirrors in 10-20 different DCs would be susceptible even with active capabilities.

> have to function to some degree on the clearnet

How so? They certainly don't have to, and AFAIK "marketplaces" don't.

* I'm obviously not counting leaking the native IP through the app layer, which is what the FBI claims happened with "Silk Road 1.0" (yes, I think this is what it's called now. Who got dibs on the silk road 2.0 name, and how?)

If not eliminate to just one IP, at least eliminate to few enough that you can DDoS them and see what happens to the HS.
I don't understand what is up with your site - this and the old LeanStack - but when I have Ghostery enabled I'm completely unable to click buttons. Mind taking a look at it maybe?
I built https://learnfrontend.com as an effort for me to A) teach people front-end development and B) to quit my consultant job so I can focus on making a difference in people's lives. The site features a news aggregate, videos, articles, goals, and interactive training platform.

The site is built on Symfony 2.5, PHP 5.5.x, Postgres, AngularJS 1.2.x, and SCSS. I use Jenkins for CI, Doctrine2 as the ORM, Redis for session I/O, Composer/Bower for dependency resolution, GitHub for documents, tickets, code reviews (pull requests to my self). HAProxy is on standby for the need to load balance and I have a job on Jenkins to scale up and down to a box if needed. I'm currently adding a Docker/Vagrant setup to I can easily manage dev environments (I don't think I'll do the same for production, we'll see). Stripe handles payments, I bought some cheap SSL cert (Stripe handles PCI info outside the server I/O). New Relic is used to monitor both QA, production and my jenkins deploy box. DNS is handled by GoDaddy. I have a Cron handling the news aggregate refresh, diff logic to populate new articles to a mobile curator app I built, and an approve/deny system that determines which articles are allowed to be propagated to the users. Videos are hosted through a third party service and assets internally are handled stored through S3 with CloudFront URL signing assets.

Although it just released, I have received a large amount of important feedback thats going to dramatically change the site. This includes offering more to the user for free, create more interactive components (my writing is too boring / too technical), and improve the marketing (showing the actual tools). I have some POCs in the works for a simulated IDE on edge Chrome/Firefox (uses WebWorkers to observe stackoverflow-able code w/o crashing browser, ScalaJS and Angular port on ScalaJS as MVC frontend; the experience is very much a level up from CodeAcademy's IDE-tutorial).

I'm also in a transitionary period where I want to build the new tools and reconstruct the existing ones in Scala (using Play as the framework). I have more time than before since I saved a significant amount of money to pursue this (I built v1 part time, 30 hours a week for 6 weeks with 30k lines of code added). The force behind this decision is I want more experience with functional programming while leveraging what I know already (JVM / Java).

One of the critical experiences I've had was actually materializing an idea and shipping it. Failing fast and often is an important strategy that's working for me after launching v1.

TL;DR: Built an e-learning site. I learned from failures. Building next version thats going to be rainbows and shit (thats the plan at least).
That's not why it's popular today. It's popular because it's inconvenient to save messages, not because it's impossible. Nobody is under any illusion to the contrary.
Feet-On With Boosted Boards’ New Faster And Cheaper Electric Skateboards
RaiseYourIQ Launches FREE Brain Training Software to Schools – PRUnderground
This is what happens when your production facility is on an Indian burial ground...
I had never thought of that, but it's true. My mum has diabetic retinopathy and used to use a laptop running at a blurry blurry non-native resolution (everything was MASSIVE). She struggled with the dark Vista theme and reading on a non-native resolution.

She bought an iPad4 and hasn't looked back. She dictates her emails and it really has helped her out significantly, including the use of Siri.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine
Swiss Gold Initiative – Referendum to Peg Swiss Franc to Price of Gold
Pfft. Not Ed448-Goldilocks? I'd rather not use a long term identity key with less security than the 4096-bit RSA that people are already widely using for long term keys.

Or really, wheres the SPHINCS+Ed25519 option for pgp master keys? :P
Particularly at the level of last-mile infrastructure, it's inevitable that there's going to be a monopoly on high-speed service.

What about federal legislation to regulate municipalities, such that competition is enabled between municipalities and broadband companies? Could there be something akin to the telephony monopoly breakup? Could we address cable lobby objections to government monopolies while also enabling local governments to address constituents needs?
So you'd just move servers every X months no matter what, or would you be tipped off somehow during that time window? If it's the first, that's pretty hardcore. Migrations are a pain for most people. Unless the system was built to migrate painlessly... Hm.
What do Americans use to buy drugs? Hint: It's US dollars.
Build the world's first quantum supercomputer – Rigetti (YCSU14) is hiring
This depends on where you are located, but for the most part the answer is no - unless you are a member of a law enforcement agency you will not be able to get this data from the cell phone company. Depending on the country, cell phone provider and law enforcement agency, they will probably need a warrant or court order as well.
He probably pays taxes on that money, too. Does that make the government an accomplice? Really, you just can't apply logic and consistency to laws across all members of society. On the one hand, they contradict themselves in application, and on the other hand you have special exceptions for state-actors among others.
Is a Global System the Future of Graduate Education?
If it is as intelligent as "computer" on Star Trek (which didn't get confused when you finished giving it commands yet would struggle with some commands "SPECIFY PARAMETERS"), then it'll be great!

I just hope its EPS conduits don't keep exploding all the time like on TNG. Or the bio-gel packs don't get infected like Voyager..... OK a bit sad I know
The Gotcha to Watch for When Buying AppleCare in an Apple Retail Store
Building a Ruby List Comprehension
Hi everyone - I built this tool with a couple of doctors and an infectious disease expert. We realized CDC protocols for handling Ebola were complex and wanted to put some simplicity to it, without losing on the medical rigour. Now anyone in the world can triage ebola almost like an expert.

Would be curious to hear if you like this format of answering medical questions. We're considering expanding it and doing it for more common conditions (flu, pregnancy, etc..).
You're making my point for me. The system largely ignores a large majority of the people, who therefore don't care much about this issue to feel deterred from buying the relevant technology. Hence the enormous popularity of smartphones with GPS functionality and so forth: never getting lost >> government tracking everywhere you go, for most people.
Probably because "echo" is too common of a sound as a component of other words.
One big downside with llvm as a compiler backend is that it does not support accurate relocating garbage collection, see: http://www.philipreames.com/Blog/2014/02/21/why-not-use-gcro.... I believe both Dylan and Julia uses conservative gc which is not at all as efficient as relocating gc.
So You Want to Learn Crypto, Part 1
Fair enough :-) thanks for clarifying.
It's worth noting that Iceland is currently in the midst of a large ongoing volcanic eruption, its largest eruption in centuries. Large numbers of people find themselves having to hide indoors to escape dangerous gases depending on which way the wind blows on any given day.

The current slow-moving eruption and seismic activity is fairly likely to lead to a catastrophic explosive event and massive flash floods that could destroy a significant amount of hydroelectric infrastructure.

Doesn't necessarily mean Iceland's not a good place to build huge data centers, but it's something to keep in mind.
Show HN: Freshly Baked Cookies Delivered in Under 20 Minutes
"My master made me this collar so that I could--SQUIRREL!!!"

First thing I thought of.
Maybe you should learn to speak in an american accent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8
> but how is this that much worse than all the other devices you use?

Because the other devices I have have useful purposes besides listening to my speech for sales and advertising purposes. The Echo exists solely for that. It's all it does.
Nice try, but I still use vacuum tubes
Simpsons did it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_of_Horror_XII
Did Rachel update bb or release a new version or something? Just curious why this is appearing here now.
If Apple coders are reading, I noticed exactly the same issue of User-Agent header not being used on redirects.

You can solve this by (ab?)using the CheckRedirect functionality of http.Client to set the User-Agent again.

Here's an example: https://github.com/lifeforms/httpcheck/commit/07440d952d1660... (The program is nothing special, just a little thing I use internally for monitoring)
I didn't mean go on a long vacation. I meant disappear and start a new life. You wouldn't post about that on social media, you'd just pack your bags and go. But social media will have your friends being detectives about where you've gone, someone from reddit might see you at the airport or grabbing coffee, etc.
Mobile App Prototyping and Design Tools I Am Using: Sketch 3, Pixate, Flinto
Cacao will be my wake word.
People fought the terminology for a while, but were overwhelmed. The only purpose it seems to serve is to make a simple discussion about a simple concept completely confusing to people not 'in the know', and in addition the confusing word in question is nearly ungoogleable. Greek does make things sound more mathematical/formal, though, so there's that.

edit: it does seem to be googleable now, but I think the search engines are taking hints from wikipedia.