Hacker News Reader

larakernson No Spanish reading crisis?

We have all these features and more. In private beta now, sign up for the waiting list at: https://noveltree.ca

larakernson Police target CUHK university as it holds HKIX which routes 99% of net traffic

Some articles (not in english)

https://tw.news.yahoo.com/%E6%B8%AF%E8%AD%A6%E6%94%BB%E4%B8%...

https://www.epochtimes.jp/p/2019/11/48996.html

larakernson Police target CUHK university as it holds HKIX which routes 99% of net traffic

Some articles (not in english)

https://tw.news.yahoo.com/%E6%B8%AF%E8%AD%A6%E6%94%BB%E4%B8%...

https://www.epochtimes.jp/p/2019/11/48996.html

larakernson Police target CUHK university as it holds HKIX which routes 99% of net traffic

https://tw.news.yahoo.com/%E6%B8%AF%E8%AD%A6%E6%94%BB%E4%B8%...

https://www.epochtimes.jp/p/2019/11/48996.html

larakernson Police target CUHK university as it holds HKIX which routes 99% of net traffic

Most US outlets are not reporting on this part of the story of the siege of CUHK university.

If the police seize control of the university, they can monitor / filter all traffic. The whole city can go dark.

larakernson What Bots can do with parallel group interaction, that websites and apps can’t

The unique value proposition of bots is that they're embedded inside groups of people, as naturally as group chat. I think we'll be seeing more of this trend in the coming year.

larakernson Amazon, the world’s most remarkable firm, is just getting started

Not that AliExpress is much better with counterfeit, but it is the "fresh" contender to the West. There might be a movement away from Amazon's core business as AliExpress / Ali* expand here.

larakernson Why chatbots must be cross-platform compatible

Protocols are very important (R.I.P. XMPP). The article argues for bots to be the protocols that stitch the services back together, but we still need a standard for these bots to operate within...

larakernson Why you can't copy-paste WeChat into the West

The example about Uber as truly "getting" the power of cross-platform distributed bots in the US is spot on.

larakernson The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972)

Here's a rebuttal to the original piece, The Tyranny of Tyranny: https://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-levine

larakernson Why Bots Are the Next Industrial Revolution

I'm somewhat worried about this upcoming wave of bots replacing jobs. There seem to be 2 paths forward:

1. Star Trek outcome: People will have time to pursue interests outside of their job.

2. Mad Max outcome: Money and resources are hoarded by the people who own the bot industry, everyone else suffers.

3. ??

larakernson Facebook is King, Other Networks Fight for Scraps

The inability to monitor their whole network for scam advertising might cripple facebook's dominance as their main revenue source becomes less trusting but the scale of their operations relies on that consistent revenue:

More on the ad scams: http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/say-no-to-the-dress

larakernson Designing Chat for Commerce: UX Research in Invisible UI

Thanks for posting, our startup in Berlin is moving into the conversation-as-commerce space and this will help us with some design hurdles around user engagement.

larakernson Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet

This needs to happen in more scientific fields, like a field-specific consensus publishing platform. Everyone agrees to publish their research to benefit everyone else.

larakernson AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

It might look something like attention detailed in Show, Attend, Tell: http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03044

Which attempts to visualize machine areas of attention that look like: http://www.wildml.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot...

larakernson Co-founders of conversation-commerce chatbot Kip, on future of AI assistants

Reminds me of Dennis Mortensen's (founder of x.ai) recent article on the rise of Vertical AIs: http://thesbjournal.com/1165-2/

larakernson Getting Deep Speech to Work in Mandarin

I'm surprised it doesn't use Character Aware Neural Language Models (CNN -> LSTM RNN) but instead a layered RNN. Interesting!

larakernson Genetically modified mosquitoes used to fight dengue, zika in Brazil

Powerful new viruses will continue to birth as the Earth warms. A zombie apocalypse might occur regardless of human intervention at this stage.

larakernson Advice for companies with less than 1 year of runway

It's discouraging when new employees expect a certain lifestyle on joining your startup but you're runway is less than a year. Startups have been portrayed as having so many perks that there's an impossibly high standard to strive toward.

larakernson ‘Clock kid’ Ahmed Mohamed and his family will move to Qatar

This is a depressing consequence of media-fueled racism/discrimination that will further drive the disintegration of the US as a strong competitor in STEM fields on the global stage.

larakernson Kip lets you build and personalize searchable worlds

I hate splash sign ups but this looks cool. I've never seen world building like this before

larakernson New York Magazine's Boy Genius Investor Made It All Up

The average news consumer expects bite sized, outrageous chunks of information to wash down with lunch – it's a two way stream of degradation.

larakernson Before Snowden, a debate inside NSA

NSA employees are so siloed from each other that it limits dissent and self auditing

larakernson Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program

There are now a few Android apps in development to keep track of the towers your devices use day to day to hopefully detect rogue IMSI catchers.

This one is the most promising: http://signup.spideyapp.com/

larakernson Hyperlocal Mesh Networks

They also use tidepools (http://tidepools.co), a platform designed alongside the Red Hook mesh, for local apps on the network (stop & frisk, maps etc.)

Case study: http://www.scribd.com/doc/147627564/Red-Hook-Initiative-Tide...

larakernson [dead]

This kind of article is so much more realistic than any glamorized startup story. As the article says:

"Here’s what people never tell you about startup life. A lot of it is mundane, boring, grunt work. Imagine being stuck in an MMO game where you’re grinding levels without knowing whether you’ll ever make it beyond that 2 by 4 patch of 8bit forest waiting and slaying the same stupid monsters over and over again and then going back in for respawn."

larakernson [dead]

I think this article says a lot about the tribulations of doing your first startup from scratch. I particularly love this part:

larakernson Google reveals tablet that can sense the world in 3D

Project Tango is going to be revolutionary, but I'm also interested in how psycho-geographic (situationist) style landmark mapping might complement 1:1 3D representations of the real world…humans tend to navigate based on abstract geometrics

larakernson Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud

This is super smart – Soundcloud needs to integrate more deeply with the hype / discovery abilities of Twitter.

Soundcloud songs overlaid on Vine vids, etc. could prove amazing as well.

larakernson Browse and build geo-fenced data bubbles in physical places and specific times

This is theoretically interesting! I want to see this become ubiquitous – connected device apps should be consolidated into one interface, indexed by place (do you need your one lightbulb app outside your home?)

When you walk into a new room, shouldn't all light switches automatically popup on your device?

This almost feels like Wordpress for places and times, with all the widgets and themes…but it needs traction first, tricky.