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ei8htyfi5eon The CIA Spied on People Through Their Smart TVs, Leaked Documents Reveal (2017)

This was in the talk. ...and I built these into my cameras that I made at my first startup, Waylens.com. They're super important in convincing people to put a connected camera in their vehicle where sensitive things are mentioned. I wonder why more manufacturers dont do this.

ei8htyfi5eon The CIA Spied on People Through Their Smart TVs, Leaked Documents Reveal (2017)

Funny story on the talk title. I called it Evil Toasters are Coming: The coming IoT Security Apocalypse. But nobody in China owns a toaster, so the metaphor was lost on them. #LocalizeForYourAudienceFolks

ei8htyfi5eon The CIA Spied on People Through Their Smart TVs, Leaked Documents Reveal (2017)

I gave a talk in China 5 years warning about this. http://tech.qq.com/a/20140527/035512.htm I asked vendors to make changes to their products, such as planned obsolescence so if the manufacturer goes out of business and a device doesn't hear from the mother ship for awhile, all internet connections are killed for good. Also, to set smart defaults so that even when not configured, it won't allow this behavior. There should be a list of more in the article but you'll have to translate to see them.

ei8htyfi5eon U.S. and U.K. F-35 Jets Include 'Core' Circuit Boards from Chinese-Owned Company

I think you're not thinking big enough. If you have experience in the intel community, then by all means, please keep posting, but from my experience, the capabilities of the intel communities will make you chuckle to yourself with some of the ingenious methods they use. This isn't 'stupid and a non-issue' and people should rightfully question the supply chain on this one.

ei8htyfi5eon Launch HN: Termius (YC W19) – SSH client that works on desktop and mobile

I didn't catch the daily number. It just seems like they should pick the bigger one and stick with it so users don't need to parse.

ei8htyfi5eon Launch HN: Termius (YC W19) – SSH client that works on desktop and mobile

Product and website look great. Thanks for sharing. Though, can I point out a small discrepancy on your landing page? You claim over 24,000 engineers use the product, then in the same section you claim over 300,000. It makes me scratch my head and honestly I think you lose a bit of credibility. And on the pricing page you claim 10,000. Which is it?

ei8htyfi5eon Geoff Ralston taking over as President of YC

Geoff was the partner I felt gave the best advice. It was well thought out, direct, and usually correct. I'm glad he's been promoted. I couldn't thinking of anybody better. Good luck!

ei8htyfi5eon I.M. Pei has died

Sad. I went to the MIT Media Lab and he designed the building I was in. One of the absolute most breathtaking buildings I've ever had the pleasure to be part of. Will miss his work. Hope some new whippersnapper takes the torch.

ei8htyfi5eon Tether Says Stablecoin Is Only Backed 74% by Cash, Securities

I tend to agree with your Wiley Coyote comment and it made me laugh. Thanks.

ei8htyfi5eon Microsoft turned down facial-recognition sales on human rights concerns

Are there just PR departments behind the scenes leaking things like this following the other bad press received by other tech firms? Anybody have experience with this world? How far out can you predict media coverage I wonder.

ei8htyfi5eon MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

I used to live there and they don't really know MIT in China. I'd say only among the academics. Certainly not a household name.

ei8htyfi5eon Lidar mapping techniques using multiple sensors

Your video looks dope. What a difference 8 years makes. https://vimeo.com/16396416

ei8htyfi5eon Lidar mapping techniques using multiple sensors

I funded a paper mapping vegetation in a forest, if you're curious: https://www.philsalesses.com/s/a582379.pdf

IIRC, the lidar still lined up mostly because tree stems tend to not move, however, the larger problem was the error rate of the lidar sensor we were using. Readings further than 10m and the Hokuyo we were using tended to underestimate distances, so each scan of the forest looked a little but like the floor was curving over like that scene from Inception. Although maybe only 20 degrees. Still enough to be annoying.

ei8htyfi5eon What is the Boeing 737 Max Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System?

That's generally not how redundant systems work. They'll usually implement some form of a Kalman filter or whatever cool kids use these days to filter out bad readings, while alerting the pilot that one of the sensors seems to be faulty.

Usually things that can kill people are triple redundant, where one goes bad, you can trust the other two readings for this reason.

I'm surprised there is a single point of failure like this in the design. But after I've read a bit about how Boeing released this product, maybe I'm not surprised.

ei8htyfi5eon China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

Sure but let's flip this. If the US started using China's first exported passenger plane and it went down twice in six months in similar circumstances, we would absolutely be doing the same thing.

ei8htyfi5eon Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

I scraped google API exactly like this in grad school, but sometimes when you're building, you take a calculated risk to build something better.

For my thesis, I was trying to load two Street View photos side by side in a browser to compare people's perceptions side-by-side. Google maps at the time required you to load a javascript viewer for each image you requested. Think Hot-or-Not for cities.

The experience needed to instantly load a new image after the user voted because I knew they were only going to be on the site for maybe 30 seconds before they got bored and went back to reddit. I needed to collect as many votes as possible within that time period.

So I knowingly broke Google's ToS and prefetched the images on my server so I could provide the user experience I wanted. "I'm a small operation. Surely they won't know." I wrote a server side screen scraper to load the Street View images and exposed the scraped images with an API.

Now my site was faaaast. I could load Street View images instantly and in the end got over a million data points doing this.

But then one day soon after it stopped working. Then I got a cease and desist email from someone at google legal. They didn't respond to any requests for turning it back on or even to discuss. Radio silence. That was terrifying.

Since this was my thesis, I needed help getting my keys turned back on. Google in the end was very accommodating, but only after I used my nuclear option: asking lab director Joi Ito to bug Megan Smith while she was still at Google to help.

I was connected to some engineer and told them what I was doing and why. They said stop. But then a week or so later, they sent me a beta invite to their new Street View images api, where you can feed in a lat, lng, header to a query string and they'll just serve the image now. Pretty cool.

Offending site for the interested: http://pulse.media.mit.edu/

ei8htyfi5eon Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

Maybe he would have.

If you visualize technology progressing through time, there is an obvious merging of human and machine. Computers were large, now they are so small, you leave your Air Pods in your ears for hours because you forget they are still in.

Imagine another 50 years. Computers will most certainly be seamlessly connected to us in some way.

Imagine a device that can read your mind and give you what you want before asking? What if you're more intelligent just because you buy a specific product? What about a device that is proven to lengthen your life just by using it?

Biological research and health are what's necessary to get there.

The interesting things happen at the intersections. Who could compete?

Steve seemed like a smart guy. Maybe if he saw things this way he would bet the company as you say.

ei8htyfi5eon China drafts law protecting foreign IP and prohibiting forced tech transfer

They actually say "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away..."

ei8htyfi5eon China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

The US government has had this forever. This is why they train you at the farm to put a pebble in your shoe if you’re trying to evade detection so your gait changes. It is most certainly not impossible.

ei8htyfi5eon Ask HN: What's your advice for someone who's raising capital for the first time?

Find a way to get to profitability before raising, even if you're only making $1.

ei8htyfi5eon Pigeon as a Service – Send Messages by Carrier Pigeon

If they let me strap a high capacity card to its neck, and fly it back and forth between my office and apartment, allowing me to avoid large transfers, this would still be faster than Comcast and I would pay a premium. :0

ei8htyfi5eon HiOperator (YC S16) Provides Customer Support as a Service

I know exactly what you mean! I worked for Marriott in support for one of my first jobs and automated myself out of it in about 2 weeks so I could play games on company time. People call in, I push 1-10 and go back to playing while I make small talk on the phone until my scripts executed. :)

ei8htyfi5eon HiOperator (YC S16) Provides Customer Support as a Service

http://www.getservice.com

We originally approached the customer service problem from this angle, but found our approach better suited to our vision.

They are great and I've used them before.

ei8htyfi5eon HiOperator (YC S16) Provides Customer Support as a Service

We updated the website so it's a bit more clear.

And for further clarification, your bill would probably be slightly higher than the minimum, but quite honestly, we wouldn't feel comfortable taking you on as a client for quite some time.

As we grow and move downstream, we'll lower prices and expand our offering. It sounds like you're just downstream; nothing to get upset about. Just wait and eventually we'll make sense for you too.

ei8htyfi5eon HiOperator (YC S16) Provides Customer Support as a Service

I can speak about onboarding and knowledge transfer from the viewpoint of our clients. Usually they give us access to their past tickets and we have an hour long conversation where we ask a million tailored questions. Then clients put us in a sandbox to play where we can't hurt anyone. To fill knowledge and capability gaps, our ops managers pose questions to in-house teams, usually over Slack, but it can be anything. Once everyone is comfortable, they let us out into the world. :)

On the back end, I wish I could brag a little about this, but it is our "secret sauce" so I'm just going to have to say it's proprietary and I believe the beginning of something great.

To directly answer your first question regarding edge cases, it's simple: we don't do them, opting instead to let your in-house team do the complex edge cases. Over time though, we inevitably end up doing some of them as we find commonalities across clients (shipping exceptions, insurance disputes, etc).

ei8htyfi5eon HiOperator (YC S16) Provides Customer Support as a Service

I'm not sure how you arrived at that figure, but it seems a bit high for the use case you described.

Now might be a good time to clarify our pricing a bit and state that our pricing is not a one size fits all model. We analyze our clients ticket and call histories and find a price that works for both.

The $999 is a minimum spend and from that we deduct cases and voice minutes. The minimum covers training and overhead to ensure we're not losing money for clients that are too small. We've also found that, in our experience, companies who tend to spend less than $999/month are sometimes still at the point where their support tickets are full of a lot of edge cases and are best handled in-house.

We're aimed at small and medium companies, not individuals running small projects (yet). Someday in the future hopefully, but we're not there yet.

ei8htyfi5eon HiOperator (YC S16) Provides Customer Support as a Service

Hi, I'm Phil, the other founder. I'd say keep it as a core competency! It's important and it's why we're in business. We understand why you'd want to do that and all of the companies we work with feel the same.

That said, keep in mind there will always be a lot of repetitive time consuming stuff, and that's where we excel. Everyone likes to think they're a unique and irreplaceable snowflake, and that may be true in total, but there are parts that can be handled more efficiently elsewhere.