Is Kindle Paperwhite really worth it? - <AUTHOR> http://dtsironis.net/posts/kindle-paperwhite/ <comment><USER2> I have owned every Kindle e-reader and currently use a Paperwhite (2012 model) which I find to have the best screen (which is really the most important part of an e-reader) however I much prefer the physical buttons on the regular Kindle. I find the touch screen annoying. The only time the touch screen was a nice to have was the initial setup when I connected it to my wifi.

I still jump back and forth between the Paperwhite and my older model with the physical page turn buttons. What I would really like is a non-touch screen Paperwhite. I would also like to be able to totally disable the backlight rather than just put it to the lowest setting (which is still actually on and more than good enough to read in a pitch black room).

<comment><USER3> > What I would really like is a non-touch screen Paperwhite

I would honestly pay almost _double_ the price for a Paperwhite that had physical buttons.

I love the Paperwhite - I stare at backlit screens all day enough as it is, so the frontlight is a welcome change - but I can't stand the touch screen. I really wish they'd bring the physical buttons back.

<comment><USER4> The issue I have is with the use of the touch screen for page turning. I prefer the touch screen to the awkward keys of the Kindle Keyboard's keyboard for everything else, but I really miss the physical page turn buttons. I would prefer awkward keys + physical page turn buttons to only touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice to see an example of a title ending in a question where the answer is a non-cynical "absolutely." :)

And my answer is exactly the same. It actually quite surprised me how much I've more I've appreciated and used the Paperwhite after upgrading recently from a Kindle Keyboard. You simply never have to worry about the lighting, whether too bright or too dim.

<comment><USER6> A rare counter example to Betteridge's Law. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER7> Man, I learned about Betteridge's Law a week ago, and ever since I've been having some serious Baader-Meinhof. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader- Meinhof_phenomenon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_phenomenon)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Paperwhite is the first Kindle I ever owned, and I like it.

I do not like Amazon's DRM encumbered walled garden though, especially the fact that it doesn't acknowledge anything not bought through Amazon as "books". In general the software and online service, with the exception of Whispernet, is shit.

My next eReader will definitely be something neutral, like a Kobo, and I'll just un-DRM stuff from Amazon via Calibre.

<comment><USER9> >>it doesn't acknowledge anything not bought through Amazon as "books"

I have a Kindle and this is patently not true. I have multiple DRM-free .mobi "books" that I have sideloaded. You don't even need a cable; just add the book as an attachment and email it direct to your kindle (email@example.com) and it gets synced over WiFi.

<comment><USER10> this only works for a few formats and small files.

wife bought a kindleDX to replace the mountain of books and huge withe papwr pdfs she have to read.

kindle will refuse pretty much all files for one reason or another. and none of the books are available in the amazon walled garden.

unfortunatelly we missed the return date. worst misleading purchase ever.

kindles are only good for people reading novels.

<comment><USER11> I have a kindle DX and this is false. PDFs are relatively easy to read in the landscape orientation and dont require any conversion whatsoever. If you can convert any ebook format to mobi you are good to go. Try calibre for starters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've owned every Kindle (except the DX) and while the Paperwhite is my favorite, I really wish they would remove the touch screen page turning and add the physical buttons on the side. The touch screen works great for searching Amazon or even making short notes, but I find that I accidentally turn the pages way too much.

<comment><USER13> I would be fine with them keeping the touch screen (so they don't need a physical keyboard, navigation buttons, etc), but I can't for the life of me figure out why they removed the page turning buttons. This feels like a basic UI thing - 95% of what you are going to do is turning pages, so that should be much easier and reliable than anything else.

<comment><USER2> I was pretty shocked they removed the page turn buttons. They are the most used buttons by an order of magnitude and tapping the screen is a crappy interface as it is too sensitive and I often jump forward or backward a page when I reposition myself in a plane seat or similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You can also get a Nook Glowlight in the UK for £49, less than half the price of the Paperwhite.

Spec isn't as good but it does support standard epub books.

[http://www.nook.com/gb/tablets/nook-simple-touch- glowlight](http://www.nook.com/gb/tablets/nook-simple-touch-glowlight)

<comment><USER15> i've seen both (the new paperwhite and the 2012 glow) side to side and for me kindle's backlight crushes the nook's. your mileage may vary.

...also half price sounds like a really nice deal!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > I use it more than my smartphone in an everyday basis.

Once i found out that there's an Android Kindle app * my Kindle use has gotten much less over my cellphone use. I'll still use the Kindle when i don't want to have my phone around, but where my phone is, i have all my Kindle stuff, so i don't need the physical device.

* [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.kin...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.kindle)

</comment><comment><USER17> I love my Paperwhite. My _only_ complaint is that converting PDFs of programming books (or any books with text formatting or tables) results in some pretty unreadable code snippets.

<comment><USER18> Are there any e-readers that connect to an app store of some sort? Squashing an A4 PDF onto a small e-reader screen is a difficult process, and it seems like it would strongly benefit from competition between different rendering software.

<comment><USER19> Its really more of a limitation of PDF. It is intended as a static format based on layouts the size of a full sheet of paper. Its internal representation does not lend its self to layout changes. Most attempt to fit it to a smaller screen are problematic in one way or another.

It would be better to start with a document format that was always intended to be flexible, not fossilized.

<comment><USER18> You make a fair point, but on the other hand many pdfs have massive margins, or multiple columns, or can have text reflowed in a reasonable way. You can't use pdf readers for all circumstances, but with good software you could handle 80-90% of cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a Kindle Paperwhite, and while it's great and I use it all the time, I feel like there are a couple issues with it that I never see mentioned:

(1) The front light is a really weird ghostly blue. Wit the light, the kindle looks blue; without it, gray. There's nothing "white" about it in my opinion.

(2) Because of the presence of the touch screen (and maybe the light?), the text is pretty recessed under the screen, and you can quite easily see glare that highlights the depth the text is recessed. When I use my kid sisters base-level kindle, I'm always struck by how much more "book like" it is, because the text sits closer to the surface.

The touch is a wash-up -- it makes navigating and looking up text much easier, but it can be annoying for turning pages. Also the overall responsiveness of the system is light-years behind something like an iPad (which is to be expected with an e-ink display, but I also feel like I'm waiting a lot for the Kindle itself).

If it weren't for the super-duper convenience of being able to read in the dark, I would prefer the baseline kindle. (If you're thinking about a kindle vs no ereader at all, the answer is GET AN EREADER -- overall they are amazing devices.)

Postscript:

A couple other small gripes that may be deal-breakers for you, depending on how OCD you are:

(1) Sometimes the screen doesn't turn off for a long time, even after you've 'locked' the kindle, emitting an annoying glow.

(2) You can never turn the light _completely_ off, which can be annoying when the faint glow is distracting while reading in a low-light (but not low enough to want kindle-light) environment.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't have either, but have been thinking of getting one. When I compare the original Kindle to the Paperwhite in the store, the Paperwhite contrast seems almost too high; I think I would find it hard to look at that brilliant white background for very long. The original is easier on the eyes.

Is the Paperwhite contrast adjustable?

<comment><USER22> The backlight is what makes the background so brilliant; the backlight is adjustable. It ranges from "tiny sun" to "faint phosphor glow"

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've used a Paperwhite, but for most of my reading I'm switching to an iPad Retina mini. The battery life is suitable, the screen is gorgeous (326 PPI vs 212: more than double the number of pixels per glyph) and I hope it will be easier to take notes (possibly even with voice dictation) and fire off emails and TODOs inspired by what I am reading. Most of all, though, I want fast PDF and Pocket/Instapaper in full color.

EDIT: I have not yet tried the Retina mini as a Paperwhite replacement except for an hour in the Apple Store. It's on the way. The in-store experience satisfied me sufficiently, but there is a chance I will come across a deal breaker.

<comment><USER24> I've not tried the Retina Ipad mini yet, but from reading on tablets in general they all feel like I am reading on a tablet. With my paperweight it actually feels like I am reading a book. Now that said technical oriented stuff I will take a tablet over a kindle everyday of the week.

Thats 100% subjective, and not having used the new Mini perhaps it really is that good.

<comment><USER11> Ive used the kindle dx and the regular last generation non-touch kindle in addition to the ipad air. The air is spectacular for reading programming books and the reading experience is great for anything else, especially when you need to look something up.

iBooks will sync bookmarks and notes for 'sideloaded' epubs and will automatically transfer new books onto the air. For PDFs the kindle app is great because it actually shows the table of contents(!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know if the new Kindles are more rugged? My classic Kindle was in a protective cover when it dropped a short distance from a table to a wood floor. The screen did not crack but the e-ink display was permanently frozen.

<comment><USER26> I've dropped my paperwhite at least three feet onto concrete, and a shorter distance several times onto tile, no protective cover, no problems so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The paperwhite is lovely. The screen is a delight to use, and doesn't annoy anyone next to you even in low light conditions. It's also really easy to read in the sun.

I have the one generation back paperwhite, and it's the best ereader I've ever had. My only critique of the new version (and it's a minor critique) is I've heard it's really hard to hack, which is a pity because I love having the jailbreak on my paperwhite that lets me add my own screensavers.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have a Kindle paperwhite and my partner has an older Kindle touch.

I love my paperwihte and it is much better than the previous generation. I read about two hours every day on it on my commute in the train. Resolution and display lightning are great for readability and I always find something to read in the shop for fair prices (some of the self-published books on Amazon are amazing and the rating system shows where to look).

</comment><comment><USER29> I still have an original Kindle, but would like to upgrade to the Paperwhite at some point. Normally I would say that a full tablet like a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10 is more worthwhile, since Android has a perfectly capable Kindle app. But in my case, the Nexus 10 gives me terrible headaches. So I still carry a Kindle around for extended reading.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just checked amazon.co.uk and it says "Usually dispatched within 13 to 14 days.", for the wifi only model. Huh? Does that mean they are selling them as hot cupcakes or what?

And I don't understand how the old model is only 10 quid cheaper? Surely everyone will go for the newer one at that price?

<comment><USER2> I have found that Amazon tend to be a little over the top with the "usually dispatched within N days" line. It is clever as it makes it look like they are selling loads and so if you don't order NOW you might have to wait even longer than 13 to 14 days if you order it next week (OH NO!!!!). However when I have ordered all my previous Kindles they came in a few days (not next day but always within 5) even with the two week notice. They are not actually flat out lying as they use the word "usually" but it is a little misleading. Then again it is all part of the marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The answer to the question is YES, but the article is inaccurate on the main features of the Paperwhite. Unlike smartphones and tablets like the iPad, the Kindle Paperwhite isn't back-lit, but front-lit, which make all the difference in the world for your eyes.

</comment><comment><USER32> Seems inaccurate. He says it is backlit, but it is front-lit according to amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Touch- light/dp/B007O...](http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Touch- light/dp/B007OZNZG0)

</comment><comment><USER33> I am loathe to upgrade from my trusty Kindle Keyboard, just because of the free worldwide internet access. Although recently, it has failed in a few countries that I've been to. Perhaps Amazon won't support it for much longer?

<comment><USER34> This is the other reason that I bought a new Kindle Keyboard. The free internet access has saved my butt a few times travelling in foreign lands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The main question is do you need the the back light. For me it is essential, i tend to wake around 3 am every morning and read for an hour, without interrupting my wife, which is worth the extra money.

</comment><comment><USER36> Most people are answering the question "is it better?", but the question is "is it worth it?"

i.e. "Is it worth 2.5x the price of the standard Kindle?"

</comment><comment><USER37> The best discontinued feature is the experimental browser on 3G. Traveling abroad and being able to pull up nyt or gmail is like a permanent tether to home.

</comment><comment><USER38> mediocre for programming books - you have to be in landscape mode and still code snippets will wrap often. Books with terse code (like functional programming books) work mostly well, but books with less terse code are unreadable even with smallest font in landscape mode. EmberJS in Action comes to mind as totally unreadable on my paperwhite.

A++++ for regular books of all types.

<comment><USER39> Similar for math books in most cases. Equations will often be rendered as images, so they do not scale when you change the type size.

Fantastic for most novels.

Also pretty good for chess books. I've got a book of 1001 tactical problems [1] on it. They formatted the e-book version of this so that each problem starts on a new screen, with the solution starting on the next screen so you don't risk a spoiler. This is basically my default book--I usually put the Kindle to sleep with the next problem open, so that any time I have to kill a little time (commercial while watching TV, bathroom break, and so on) I can grab the Kindle, open it, and have a go at the problem.

My only complaint with this would be that the dark squares in diagrams aren't as dark as I would like. It makes the diagram look a bit faded. It wasn't anything I couldn't get used to.

I've also got FCO [2] on my Kindle. The only problem I've had with this is that sometimes I want to compare diagrams a few pages apart, and that is awkward on Kindle. With a paper book, it is faster to flip through to find a page visually, and when you have two or three pages you want to rapidly switch between it is easy to mark them all with your fingers.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Tactics-Chess-Games-Everyday- Players-e...](http://www.amazon.com/Tactics-Chess-Games-Everyday-Players- ebook/dp/B009TBYA7U)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/FCO-Fundamental-Paul-Van-Sterren- ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/FCO-Fundamental-Paul-Van-Sterren- ebook/dp/B009YOM2L8)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Yes, you're right about the front-lit screen. Sorry about that, corrections where already made.

</comment><comment><USER40> Just to clarify - the Paperwhite does NOT have a backlight!

</comment><comment><USER41> What does front lit mean?

<comment><USER39> It means the light source is in front of the screen [1]. There is a transparent light guide covering the screen. The lighting comes from 4 LEDs at the bottom edge of the screen, and enters the light guide. It exits the bottom of the light guide all over the area of the screen, reflects off the screen, passes through the transparent light guide, and out to your eyes.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/26/technology/lig...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/26/technology/light- reading.html?_r=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Yes</comment>


Ask HN: What software do they use to create Orielly webcasts?  - <AUTHOR>

I happen to see this webcast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9C2x54Of-M I am wondering what software is used for that purpose. <comment><USER2> 05-06 sec. shows Adobe Presenter. Try Adobe Connect</comment>


Why a No-Moonlighting Guideline Benefits Employees - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/02/03/no-moonlighting-protects-people/#.WnccyZc17Cc.hackernews <comment><USER2> Hmmm. I'm not convinced this policy is good for employees. You know what is? Having multiple income streams and lots of extra money.</comment>


Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine - <AUTHOR> http://ijr.com/wildfire/2016/11/731642-edward-snowden-demonstrates-how-easy-it-is-to-hack-a-voting-machine-all-for-just-30/ <comment><USER2> Looks like we're about to have the same voting/election discussion we've had at least 5 times over the past month or so. If anyone's interested in reading what's already been discussed, here are links to the previous threads:

"American Elections Will Be Hacked" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921967)

"Maryland will audit all votes cast in general election" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885396)

"Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883356](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883356)

"In Pennsylvania, Claims of a Rigged Election May Be Impossible to Disprove" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790247)

"Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178)

<comment><USER3> I remember the discussions of Bush rigging the 2004 elections (not on HN).

<comment><USER2> Secure voting came to my attention after the 2000 Bush-Gore election and recount. There's been a lot of work really interesting work since then. If you're interested in what can be done to improve voting security, I encourage you to see [https://www.verifiedvoting.org](https://www.verifiedvoting.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? I mean, it just prints out their choice at the end right? What benefit do they actually gain from having pressed buttons instead of using a pen? It just seems to fuel the hacking conspiracy every time a president is elected.

In the UK we turn up, go into the booth with the paper slip, and tick our choice with a pen. Then we fold it and post it into a container which later gets shipped off to the counting room. I just can't understand why you guys have to physically turn up if you are just going to select your answer on a computer anyway.

<comment><USER5> A former co-worker of mine wrote software for voting machines in Brazil. He described to me a few reasons why electronic voting machines are important. To be honest I forget the majority, but one story that stuck with me:

One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes. A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it. He then comes to you and threatens you and your family. Says hand in this pre-filled ballot and bring me back your empty ballot, or else... You comply, he fills out the empty ballot again, and repeats.

The electronic voting machines protect your identity. They allow you to vote anonymously. They provide data integrity that is harder to spoof than paper voting methods. I explicitly asked why they don't just vote on paper ballots like they do in Canada (or the UK as you describe). His response was that we take for granted the inherit trust our societies have to _allow_ us to vote in such a fashion without it being tampered.

<comment><USER6> Voter coercion is something to be concerned about but the scenario you describe won't keep me up at night. The number one problem is it's hard to scale up to a level that would actually sway an election. It only takes one hero to call the police while they're at the polling station or after their family is released and the sequence is broken. There's no need for the victim to actually submit the pre-filled ballot, they can throw it out or do something to it to make it invalid then come back with the blank one. The ballots where I vote are on a heavier stock paper that are not trivial to conceal bringing in and taking out; most could do it but one victim slips up and the scheme could fail.

Where I vote, my paper ballot in no way identifies me. I identify myself upon entering the polling station, they find my name on the list of registered voters and mark it. When I'm turning in my completed ballot, I again identify myself and my name is marked on a separate list. So there's a record that I voted but not for whom I voted. How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this?

BTW, where I vote, the paper ballots are the bubble scan kind and the voter feeds it to the machine themselves. This provides very fast tabulations with a paper record for security and recounts.

<comment><USER5> > How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this?

I am just theorizing here: Someone now takes the box of paper votes and runs it through the scanner machine. And passes this number along to someone. What is stopping them from tampering at this step? I think this is precisely what my co-worker was describing. There is an inherent trust that your paper ballot is scanned and recorded in a fashion that matches your vote.

An electronic voting machine could potentially communicate votes in real time over a secure connection. Or in the case of Brazil's machines, I believe stores it locally, encrypted, with a verifiable cryptographic signature of some sort.

I'm sure we all know the multitude of other attack vectors this introduces. I guess I am just not convinced that paper makes things more secure.

<comment><USER2> There are many steps along the chain that have to be secured in both electronic voting (which has a variety of meanings) and paper ballots. Paper ballots enable audibility, which is a separate issue that's also important for voting.

Given the number of comments you've made on this thread, it seems this is an area of interest to you. I encourage you to look though the previous HN discussions on this topic. Here's a list of some of those from the past month or so:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13032743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13032743)

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is missing the point though.

The american voting system is actually very secure.

It's highly decentralized, machines are not connected to the internet, implemented in many different ways, which means that they would have to do many attacks many different places without being discovered to even have an effect.

75% of them have paper trails which would require an even bigger achievement to change enough off as it's again highly distributed and decentralized, and it would require mostly physical presence to do it. And thats just a few of the things that makes this more or less impossible.

A bigger concern is access to the actual voter databases but what they can there there is mostly creating chaos which would obviously be horrible but have no effect on voting.

The biggest problem is actually when examples like these spread without the above consideration as that can trigger the population to loose faith in a system that is probably as safe as it has ever been.

P.S. I am highly supportive of whistleblowers like Snowden but this is missing the point.

<comment><USER8> The election was decided in its totality by 107k votes in WI, MI, and PA (the sum total margin of victory in those three states).

You don't have to manipulate many votes to have an election-deciding effect.

<comment><USER9> I forget the statistical term but after the fact, you can't go back and say "look at this, only 107K votes determined the outcome" because you can always find such explanations post hoc. I tried to search but couldn't find the discussion but one example is how couples use this type of fallacy to "prove" their love was fated. Typically on the day the fated couple met there were a number of unusual events or circumstances (a missed bus, sick grandma, a power outage, etc.) that played a key role in their meeting and the probability of all these coincidences occurring together must mean they were fated to meet.

Moreover, you have to ask; How could the Simon Bar Sinister have known prior to the election that these three states (and probably one or two counties in each state) would be the decisive counties to hack to manipulate votes and win the election? He can't.

<comment><USER10> So perhaps one can only practicably rig close elections.

<comment><USER7> You would still have to know where it was close.

<comment><USER11> A lot of online companies classify millions of people by lots of variables each day. You can pay for this information.

<comment><USER7> Thats not what we are talking about at all. You need access to these machines somehow it's not about classifying people it's about getting access to the ballot machines and altering them or their results. Quite a different task.

<comment><USER2> I think your parent was implying that some sort of classification would be used to predict where the vote would likely be close, so you would know which precincts to target. As I'm not the poster, this is just speculation of course, and can be worth the electrons used to transmit the comment :)

<comment><USER11> Yep, that was the idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Relevant video:

Was YOUR vote counted? (feat. homomorphic encryption) - Numberphile : [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting to view recent events in the US as a crisis of measurement. The news media measured the voting public with polling samples, we then measured the voting public with a vast government apparatus. Clearly, the measurements did not agree. Logically there are three possibilities: the media was right, the polls were right, or neither were right.

It's actually quite a good thing that we start to speak openly about threat- models against all voter sentiment measuring tools, especially the official ones.

<comment><USER14> The idea that an electoral poll incorporates a random error (and maybe a systematic one too) is alien to the discussion about recounts etc.

<comment><USER9> Yes, this was one of my questions. What is the accuracy and error margin of the voting system itself (and each state seems to have different methods so its not even uniform). Of roughly 126 million votes cast, 1% accuracy would be 1.26 million votes which would be of the same order of magnitude of Clinton's "win" of the popular vote. I have no idea if 1% accuracy is close or wildly too high or too low but we can't have a meaningful discussion without it.

Correction: Actual total was 126M votes for the presidential election not 160M votes as I stated. But the question remains.

<comment><USER14> Don't hold your breath.

Consider the case, in the technology of proportional representation, of the Hagenbach-Bischoff quota: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagenbach- Bischoff_quota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagenbach-Bischoff_quota)

It's (it seems to me) obviously arithmetically unfit for purpose compared to the Droop quota. In some cases more candidates can meet the quota than seats are available. Yet it remains in use/part of the credible discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This headline massively misconstrues Snowden's role and technical capacity in any such voting machine hack. Snowden merely said that it could be done, and pointed to a video published by Cylance.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why hasn't some state used a hash to allow trustworthy online voting? They could add a unique id on the back of your driver's license and then allow you to use your unique id to generate anonymous/one time use id's. They could then have a publicly accessible server that at all time displays a column with anonymous id, vote and every person can verify that their personal vote is correctly displayed.

<comment><USER17> In general, any process that allows an individual to verify their vote after the fact will enable coercion over voting. For example, in your proposal, an unscrupulous boss could make a demand before the election: "You must tell me the one-time ID you're voting with. If you choose not to, or if that ID doesn't show up in the registry having cast a vote for <candidate>, you're fired." I think that, no matter what the process is, if I can check how I voted I can also be _made_ to check how I voted while someone watches over my shoulder and threatens consequences.

<comment><USER8> Potentially, a canary id, "show this one and it'll claim you voted for ____ and also alert the state election board that it was accessed"

<comment><USER18> That solves the boss problem. What about the government?

<comment><USER8> vote manipulation by a foreign government is solved by having a verifiable id/token in the first place.

vote manipulation by the government the election is happening for isn't really something you can solve because in that case the election isn't the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> More and more I think our election system is ripe for foreign manipulation. I'd love to be proved wrong in an audit.

</comment><comment><USER20> E-Voting can be easily solved with ID cards combined with something similar to the blockchain so that you can verify your vote if you need to.

The technology is there but I don't think there is any incentive to make it happen.

The only problem that I can see is that we cannot be certain that any e-voting technology will survive future information security research and as a result the design needs to factor continuous upgrades.

<comment><USER21> The problem is that if you can verify your vote you can be coerced into voting in a certain way. There would need to be some sort of plausible deniability built in.

<comment><USER20> Only you will be able to verify your vote. All votes are anonymous. You should be able to verify the very first vote as well and as a result of that verify the entire chain up to your vote. The last vote should also be verifiable to ensure that the chain is complete.

<comment><USER22> That doesn't solve the problem of verifiable votes. If you are able to verify your vote you can be coerced the verify it in the presence of someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wouldn't a voting system that let people confirm that their vote is taken into account be trivial to implement?

I can't believe we still rely on trust for this kind of thing.

<comment><USER24> > Wouldn't a voting system that let people confirm that their vote is taken > into account be trivial to implement?

How do you verify that your vote is actually "taken into account?"

You may be shown that your vote matches what you intended, but then it can be manipulated or discarded somewhere else in the process, beyond your ability to verify. It's like reading open source code without validating the operating system or physical machine it runs in - the _entire environment_ contains the potential for hostility, and it's too complex for one person to comprehend in its entirety.

Also, any such system, assuming it works as intended, may also give interested third parties a way to spy on someone's voting habits. Historically, knowledge of a person's vote has been used by governments and employers to coerce votes and to retaliate against political opponents or supporters of unpopular causes.

<comment><USER23> Let's start with a simple example. A spreadsheet with your name and your vote. You can be sure that your vote is taken into account by the SUM function.

<comment><USER2> If this is an area of interest to you, I encourage you to take the time to review the work that's already been done in this area. The example you provide doesn't even address the concerns in your parent, much less others that have been identified by those working in the domain.

As a starting point, you can review Rivest's slides for an overview.

Ron Rivest, "Auditability and Verifiability of Elections", March 2016. [https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf](https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf)

Edit to add: I see I've already suggested this to you earlier today.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sweden's Decades-Long Failure to Integrate - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-01/sweden-s-anti-immigration-wave-is-based-on-a-failure-to-integrate <comment><USER2> > People settled in them for the ethnic support networks, learned the > language, got better jobs and moved out in a few years, always replaced by > more immigrants.

>Now, people get stuck. Everyone I talked to named the Swedish real estate market as the reason. It's almost impossible to rent an apartment in Stockholm or other big urban centers, and few can afford to buy one. Swedish housing prices were up 44 percent last year compared with 2012, and they've almost tripled since 2000.

To me this is one of the most interesting parts. How can politicians let home prices triple?

<comment><USER3> Sweden is a place with large amount of land and a sparse population. Home prices has not tripled overall in Sweden.

Those 23 regions are all districts of cities. When we talk about people moving out of those area, we are talking about people wanting to move from one part of a city to a richer part of the city. It is relevant from a integration perspective, but it is a rather important distinction. If people want jobs and cheap housing all a person need to sacrifice is the willingness to move to any of the smaller towns. A fact very easy verified by looking at the government department for labor which list job offerings. From construction worker, health care worker, to IT professional, I would claim that being flexible in where you want to live is the most important aspect (and the government will usually pay the moving costs).

<comment><USER4> Yes it has, except maybe were the economy is in serious decline. I am guessing you haven't been to many smaller towns. Smaller cities with jobs, like say Lund are still very expensive. Sweden is just in denial over its complete failure.

[https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Ekonomi/Hushallens- ekonomi...](https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Ekonomi/Hushallens- ekonomi/Bostadspriser/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Integrating low educated people who don't speak the language is hard in a modern economy. Being a nurse is considered the low end of the jobs market and that is a 4 year course.

Looking at immigration with American eyes doesn't work: there is no need for manual labour in European countries. What Europe wants is highly educated immigrants who speak English. What Europe gets is immigrants who are trapped in social welfare and public housing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Stop cry Bloomberg, everyone loves Sweden. That's just the way it is.</comment>


The economic statistic of the decade - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/12/31/the-economic-statistic-of-the-decade/ <comment><USER2> I couldn't quickly find a graph on Google, but actually the economic statistic of the decade is the rise of Chinese GDP per capita.

The US credit bubble of 04-10 is a blip compared to the rise of Asia, hundreds of millions, soon billions of people rising out of peasant poverty and into the global middle class. It's as historic as the Industrial Revolution or the Green Revolution, and so big we seldom notice it.

But it really is the defining economic fact of our era.

<comment><USER3> Google have a /publicdata/ URL that shows that kind of thing: [http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb- wdi&met=ny_gdp_mk...](http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb- wdi&met=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:CHN)

And here it is plotted against some other major markets: [http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb- wdi&met=ny_gdp_mk...](http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb- wdi&met=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:CHN#met=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:CHN:USA:GBR:IND:FRA:DEU:JPN:RUS)

China's GDP is notable for it's ascent in the last decade.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> the government is trying to stimulate aggregate demand by pumping credit into the system. they're just fueling savings (the negative household spending you see). so why not fund this demand to build up savings with a direct tax cut for the middle class instead of _& ^%ing bailouts for %^&_heads? lots of economists are calling for a payroll tax break to both fund savings AND create jobs (since wages tend to be sticky companies could soak up some of the excess and fund job creation).</comment>


Man found his grandparents vintage travel photos and decided to recreate them - <AUTHOR> http://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/05/21/man-follows-grandparents-footsteps-by-travelling-to-the-same-places-2/ <comment><USER2> For being '74 photos they have an astonishing quality, from the actual capture to the print.

My parents photo have that seventy grainy look plus very narrow gamut.</comment>


Ask HN: Does the Future Belong to Docker or Bare Metal Apps? - <AUTHOR>

Bare Metal App builders are rapidly maturing:
http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/bare-metal-application-builders-are.html
In many ways they solve similar problems to Docker.
So which technology will own the future? Docker or Bare Metal Apps? <comment><USER2> Most people are calling them unikernels.

Xen lock-in is bad.

Not having nano-sized VMs in the cloud is a problem that may or may not be solved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not all the ways to build bare metal apps use unikernels.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm creating an app that will help hospitals' processes. I need advice - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, I found a process that I can automate in hospitals (it's not a critical process with regards with patient's lives). It needs interoperability among hospitals.
My questions are: 1. How can I monitize it? Should I sell it to the government agency that governs the hospitals?
2. I know PHP and C# and bit of Python. Which language would be more beneficial and easier to sell?
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> > Should I sell it to the government agency that governs the hospitals?

I don't think you've done your market research.

> Which language would be more beneficial and easier to sell?

Neither. In my experience Java is the big language in Health IT these days. Just write in whatever language you feel will give you the best product.

</comment><comment><USER3> Beware of the red tape/bureaucracy. Healthcare is a lucrative industry, there are always those both inside the hospital organizations and their vendors who have a lot at stake with the status quo and will try to protect their lot. I worked for a large hospital system and I eventually left because I got to witness the dedicated, hard-working doctors and nurses on the front line struggling with a lack of resource and decent processes while the higher up administrators and bureacrats got to sit in their nice offices were often out of touch with the reality on the ground... And also, make sure you're pretty read up on the regulation and governance. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Before you start talking to hospitals make sure you fully understand HIPAA[1] regulations. Handling any personal health information is very regulated and if you are building a system for hospitals it will be the very first thing they will challenge you on. That is, if you are in the US.

[1]<http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Set up a meeting with a Hospital Administrator, if they aren't the person to talk to, they should be able to point you in the right direction.

Make sure the problem is worth solving (will someone pay you to solve their pain?)

</comment><comment><USER6> In regards to what language is best, it probably won't matter too much unless performance is critical to the application. Just pick the language you're most conformable developing in.

</comment><comment><USER7> As a word of warning, I should caution you that you are entering a domain filled with administrative red tape and bureaucratic obstacles. Regardless of which area of medical workflow you are targeting, I think it would behoove you to "team up" with someone on the inside, such as a doctor or someone in an administrative capacity in a large healthcare organization. The functional guidance provided will be a great boon, both in cutting through red tape, and by allowing you to focus on the technology aspects of the solution you are trying to build.</comment>


Launch HN: Zynq (YC W20) – Book meetings instantly with your team - <AUTHOR> Zerzar & David here from Zynq - we built a calendar extension for Google Calendar to help you easily book meetings with your colleagues, even if they are spread across timezones. You can check it out here: https://zynq.io/remote
Both of us worked on G Suite and quit last year because we felt enterprise calendars really needed an upgrade and they weren't a strategic priority for Google/Microsoft. As a product manager, I spent a bunch of time organizing meetings and moving them around which was probably the least valuable thing I could have been doing. David, as an engineer, would frequently get interrupted by meetings people would schedule in the middle of his day when he was trying to get work done.
We built Zynq to make scheduling intuitive: just tell us who you want to meet & how long you want your meeting to be and we'll find the best time that works for everyone. Our algorithm looks for open slots during work hours where everyone is free in their timezone & not out for lunch. We rank these slots via a scoring algorithm which prioritizes focus time for everyone invited & picks the top slot.  We then create the meeting and automatically add a Zoom/Hangouts link so you never need to set that up manually again.
We are launching this for free given the current WFH situation to help teams move faster, but we also have a separate paid product that optimizes for meeting room utilization and that's how we make money. We don't plan to charge for this version, but may release paid features on top in the future geared toward larger enterprises. Our goal is to build a complete end-to-end meeting solution for smart offices including meeting room tablet software, guest check-in experience, and an analytics back-end which helps plan future office space.
Our long term vision is to automate away the many boring tasks you do at work so you can focus on the creative aspects of your job. We hope this is a step in that direction - please let us know your honest feedback and how we can improve! <comment><USER2> Looks nice. The hardest part about scheduling meetings as a project manager in my org is when there's no timeslot available for everyone needed for a meeting. I have to check each of their schedules and weigh the importance of their attendance vs my guess of the importance/reschedulability of their conflict in order to decide who will need to reschedule/cancel/skip something. Sometimes this is simply a "do not book/focus time" block which (depressingly) works out best.

It looks like Zynq currently works based on the "available" slots on calendars, which is probably convenient for many meetings, but not really a big deal for me. Do you think any tooling/features could help address the issue I've described?

<comment><AUTHOR> One way we try to solve this problem is by prioritizing more urgent meetings (marked ASAP in our tool) and dynamically moving flexible ones around if possible to free up space. This is enabled by default on our paid version. Would that be useful to you? We don't currently book on top of existing meetings and have thought about a priority system but the challenge is keeping that updated as it would require everyone to rank thr importance of their meetings

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The company I work for uses Outlook/teams for booking meetings and it works incredibly well. The scheduling part you talked about is almost exactly like the scheduling assistant feature in outlook and teams. Sorry if this comes across as a negative question, but what exactly does zync offer over outlook and teams which have scheduling assistant?

Can you also briefly talk about your traction? Eg- no of users, growth rate and at what stage you were in before YC and currently. Good luck.

<comment><USER4> I haven't used teams, but from my experience Outlook's scheduling assistant just shows you a few open time slots. The biggest problem is when there aren't any acceptable open slots within a reasonable window into the future (e.g., this week), and the only way to make the meeting happen is to move stuff around. This then becomes pretty problematic if you have to start asking other folks if they can move conflicts around.

(I don't know to what extent Zynq resolves these issues.)

<comment><USER5> There isn't a general solution to this, which is why the typical scheduling tools just punt back to user.

I suspect the real difficulty for a company trying to offer something more powerful is balancing effort/input the user has to take against dynamism and principle of least astonishment.

I don't think it would be hard to write a scheduling algorithm in this space that basically works but everyone hates, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It took me a while to realize that this has nothing to do with FPGAs (or APAC, as they are trying to rebrand). Also, given that Zynq is not a common word, Xilinx really could hurt you bad if they want to.

<comment><USER7> Same; HN titles are already notorious for overloading existing words, and this just exacerbates it. HN is exactly the place I'd expect to find interesting FPGA news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Re: the comments on the name 'Zynq' being used for something else already: I had never heard of the SoC company before. I'd expect most of your target customers to have never heard of them before either.

Isn't what you're describing already built into Google Calendar via the 'Find a Time' tab?

<comment><AUTHOR> Find a Time tries to find the most recent upcoming free slots and suggests them. We try to be smarter - by automatically picking the most productive time for everyone. This means picking a time where everyone's uninterrupted focus time is maximized and their preferences are respected (eg if you're more productive in meetings in the mornings vs afternoons)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So have you talked to Xilinx yet about sharing the trademark "Zynq" ?

</comment><comment><USER10> > please let us know your honest feedback and how we can improve!

Don't name your business after a well established product? Because as soon as I saw Zynq I thought Xilinx FPGA SoC. And many people searching for Zynq will find the same.

[https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon- devices/soc.html](https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc.html)

<comment><USER11> Been in software for 20 years. Never heard of Xilinx or their Zynq product. I expect most of Zynq's intended customers will be the same.

<comment><USER12> that's a separate problem and unrelated.

zynq is a trademarked product name for another technology company that makes both software and hardware, and a major one at that. your never hearing of it, which while surprising, doesn't change that fact.

from a search result perspective alone, it is a terrible idea. unsurprisingly, searching for "zynq" will bring up results for xilinx zynq. the name is terrible from both legal and business development standpoints.

<comment><USER11> > _the name is terrible from both legal and business development standpoints_

I guess someone should tell UberConference and Box about that. They seem to have mistakenly thrived despite using extremely well-SEO'd software brand names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You might want to consider a new name - Zynq is Xilinx's flagship family of FPGA/ARM SoCs. With Xilinx being a pretty large corporation I'd be surprised if they don't immediately try to defend their trademark.

<comment><USER14> IANAL but the idea of trademarks is to avoid consumer confusion. I don't think there's much consumer confusion between the name of a SoC and a startup offering to manage your calendar. They're in completely different industries.

Now if you were Dell coming out with a Zynq line, that would be a different story.

<comment><USER15> They're both tech companies selling software solutions. It's quite similar.

If I were Xilinx and reading this thread. I'd be preparing the lawyers already. Just my two cents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "just tell us who you want to meet & how long you want your meeting to be and we'll find the best time that works for everyone."

FWIW, I used to have a very competent EA and would tell them basically exactly this and they would work everything out. But the amount of effort and intelligence (and phone calls) that went into that behind the scenes was, er, significant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, especially if it required others to move meetings around to accommodate. We've spoken to a few EAs at big tech companies that spend 3+ hours on some days doing just this and they were incredibly excited to try out the product

<comment><USER5> I bet. The tricky part here is the metadata. A good EA will know importance level of various meetings, flexibility, etc. in a way that is not typically encoded in calendars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Zerzar - this looks awesome! Right now we're a small team in the same timezone, but can definitely see value as we expand our team!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jay!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't this a trivial feature for Google to add to all Apps accounts? I can't imagine the logic for picking a meeting time being that complex and "next available" is likely the right answer for most people any way.

Shared calendars could easily be done by them as well for the entire GSuite ecosystem with one off "approve picking a spot" on a per meeting basis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google/MS can certainly add this feature (for enterprise accounts) but it would not be trivial. IME "next available" means urgent, and that was not true for 80% of my meetings at work. There were many times I booked a meeting one or two days/weeks ahead, so that I could spend X hours today/tomorrow getting something important done without interruptions or waiting for some progress to be made.

The paid version of our product adds another dimension to optimization by improving room availability/utilization. Our goal is to build an E2E product suite including room tablet SW, guest check-in experience & real estate utilization analytics, which would be more of a challenge for Google/MS to trivially add to their suite. By doing this, we are also able to gather more high-fidelity data about office spaces that doesn't currently sit in G Suite or Exchange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Which HDL do you use ?

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks like a great tool and would certainly help if it can intelligently suggest changes across calendars to facilitate meetings.

One question I have is all the permissions it requires. Amongst others, it's asking me for:

* View and manage the provisioning of calendar resources on your domain

* See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access using Google Calendar

I've no idea why it would need the first permission there? I'm assuming the second relates to seeing co-workers calendars, and perhaps it also needs to be able to move meetings. However "permanently delete all the calendars" seems a bit over the top.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @indigomm! The first permission is needed for us to book meeting rooms (not relevant in the current WFH environment, but historically what we have been doing)

The second permission is just read & write on your calendars (since we are booking meetings on your behalf). When we request "write" access, it automatically gives us delete access and there is no way for us to turn that off unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment> alex-wallish If this proves to be a feature that people actually want, what would stop google/microsoft from building it directly into their calendar? How do you plan to make this product defensible?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our main business is improving utilization of physical meeting spaces (via the same scheduling product) - we are building out an E2E solution including meeting room tablet SW, guest check-in experiences & real estate planning analytics. The idea is that this will more than just a scheduling tool on top of calendar but rather a full suite of products to help real estate planning & utilization. This will also allow us to gather a lot more data about office space than currently exists in G Suite / Exchange giving us a moat as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The real dream for me would be something solving the satisfiability problem of conference rooms (obviously not an issue this moment anymore). If it was possible for every meeting to have a priority the computer could figure out which meetings should be when to allow as many of us to have rooms as is possible. The current system is horribly inefficient, with the first person to book getting whatever room they happen to choose.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly what our paid product does: [https://zynq.io](https://zynq.io) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Good deal! I think this will require people to block off times on their calendar when they don't want to do a meeting. Not all available slots in my calendar are up for grab.

<comment><AUTHOR> We let you set what times in the week you want to have meetings - no need to block off your calendar!

<comment><USER21> Thanks @zerzar. Unfortunately this changes for me, and I'd think for others, from week to week.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah I see, is the use case for things like doctors appointments vs more repeated tasks like picking up kids from school?

<comment><AUTHOR> We currently look only at the logged in account, but we have been toying with the idea of looking at both your personal & work calendar -- especially during the current WFH times.

Out of curiosity, how do you currently handle the case of your calendar being open, but not being free? Do your colleagues book the meeting anyway and then you let them know that they should reschedule because you're busy?

<comment><USER21> At the moment I'm not using any auto calendaring app, but sharing my availability through external interactions. Happy to help further if you'd like. kkotak at gmail dot com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Will this handle the scenario of "I need to schedule a new meeting with a higher priority to me than others I've requested, triggering a wave of automatic rescheduling?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you explain what you mean by higher priority to me vs others? Currently each meeting has an urgency defined by the organizer (ASAP, this week, etc) and automatic rescheduling will happen based on that. We don't currently support priorities per meeting attendee

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Think this is something that fails Paul Bucheit's infamous "why won't Google just copy you?" test.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks cool. How many enterprise users are using the Google Calendar web app for booking meetings? Is it significant enough?

<comment><AUTHOR> Office has most of the market share but there are still millions of employees using G suite to book meetings so it is a significant initial target for us. We will expand to outlook in the future

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "All our team members are certified organic and non-GMO" Love it. Congrats on the launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Nick!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How is this different from x.ai?

<comment><AUTHOR> x.ai focuses on scheduling meetings with people outside your company (so there is still a manual step of choosing a time) and doesn't work great for 5+ people.

We're focused on internal company meetings, and so we can automatically choose a time without any party having to pick between several available times even for a 5-10 person meeting.

<comment><USER27> Hi guys, Ammon from x.ai here!

Killer app you built, looks like it has a lot of smarts. Love the native calendar extension UX. Really slick!

We just updated out user experience for 5+ users if 2 or more are not connected to x.ai and it is proving successful. However, if everyone is connected to x.ai, whether they are internal to your company or external, we find a time for everyone instantly.

For internal meetings, coworkers do not need to be connected to you on x.ai. If you can see their calendar, we can see their free/busy info and we book it instantly as well.

Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> ammon - thanks for chiming in! I have not used x.ai in a while and it looks like you guys have added some really awesome features since then. looking forward to trying it out again!

<comment><USER27> Absolutely! Installing yours, too, it has some very clever features!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This could be cool for recruiting, too, if it handles sequential meetings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to learn more about the use-case for recruiting! Are you thinking in terms of scheduling when the candidates come in / hop on the phone based on interviewer availability?

<comment><USER28> I'm just thinking for a series consecutive interviews. Like 3 people interview candidate over 3 hours, or whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> ah got it - yeah most large companies have proprietary systems to help with that since its not a simple problem at scale.

do you work in recruiting? If so, I'd love to understand the problem space more deeply in that domain!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> how is this different than [https://www.getclockwise.com/](https://www.getclockwise.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Clockwise allows you to move existing meetings to maximize focus time for yourself (and possibly team if everyone is using it)

We're a scheduling tool that helps you create meetings and optimize for focus time for everyone invited as well as each users' preferences.

<comment><USER30> Clockwise is an intelligent calendar assistant that will automatically move meetings to open up the most Focus Time for everyone. It also has a scheduler which will find the best time for a meeting automatically while respecting users' preferences.

The only difference I can see from the description is the meeting priority inference, which you get with a paid plan. Clockwise is currently free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the confusion - our paid product does more than just meeting priority inference, it allows you optimize meeting room utilization and is targeted to companies to help them better utilize office space.

We launched this free version with a subset of features since some things (like room utilization) don't make sense for an individual. We're looking to port over more features as we get adoption & based on demand. Our priority inference also works a little differently than clockwise -- there's no step of marking meetings as flexible, that happens automatically at scheduling time based on your urgency</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will Tech Leave Detroit in the Dust? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-detroit-become-a-software-business-1540008107 <comment><USER2> I suppose this article is musing about how the big car companies are responding to the pressure from tech companies, and how they are trying to pivot into tech companies themselves, which is a fine premise.

I do think the title is misleading though, by conflating "Detroit" with "The Big 3" (General Motors, Chrysler and Ford).

Detroit itself is already well on it's way to diversifying it's economy and particularly making investment in tech. There is what's known as "The Family Of Companies" (1) referring to a whole fleet of businesses supported by Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans and many of them are in tech and in the buildings downtown. Gilbert himself owns something like 30+ buildings in the Detroit area.

There is a start hub near by as well in Ann Arbor which has recently produced companies like Duo Security and FarmLogs.

Real estate/cost of living here is much cheaper than in most of the bigger tech hubs and it's bringing all sorts of companies.

There is a somewhat valid critique that salaries aren't quite competitive for tech, but I've found the quality of life has been quite nice. For ex: I know several people coming out of bootcamps with or without degrees and making 70/80~k with 1-2 years experience, but with rent being only 700-1k for your own apartment ( less with roommates obv ), you wind up putting away plenty at the end of the month.

In my opinion, it's actually a pretty great place to live and is handling the shift of becoming a tech city quite well.

(1) [https://www.quickenloans.com/about/partner- company#chat_clos...](https://www.quickenloans.com/about/partner- company#chat_close)

<comment><USER3> As someone who works in Detroit, I think that the city is a lot more fragile than people like to believe. Quicken Loans is just as vulnerable as the auto makers due to the fact that its core business is dependent upon consumer demand. Fewer people buying homes due to economic factors like rate raises and a general downturn in the economy is going to hit them hard. Sure, there's other companies downtown like GM in the RenCen, BCBS, and StockX, but Quicken Loans is the juggernaut.

<comment><USER4> as a young person i'm constantly looking for cheap areas to live with growth prospects. i went to detroit for a weekend last year and was just stunned by how cheap some of the property is, but also how run down the east side of town is, it's unfathomable to believe that could happen to an american city until you visit. on a block of 10 houses there would be 5 empty/stripped, 4 rundown, 1 artist commune.

i just don't see what the growth prospects are for detroit. i don't think manufacturing is coming back anytime soon to the US, and in terms of natural resources/weather detroit seems limited. the music scene is cool, but not the serious tax revenue generator the city needs. as a resident are you seeing any growth industries cropping up?

<comment><USER5> > just stunned by how cheap some of the property is

What kind of prices are you talking about?

<comment><USER3> Here's a selection of homes from East English Village, which has won the Detroit Curbed Cup competition 2 years in a row (for what that's worth):

3 bd / 1 bth / 2 car garage: $90k [0]

4 bd / 2 bth / 2 car garage: $190k [1]

3 bd / 2 bth / Garage status not mentioned: $120k [2]

[0][https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/detroit/5257-cadieux-rd- detroit-...](https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/detroit/5257-cadieux-rd-detroit- mi-48224--2050771507)

[1][https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/detroit/4800-bishop-st- detroit-m...](https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/detroit/4800-bishop-st-detroit- mi-48224--2050769906)

[2][https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/detroit/5042-grayton-st- detroit-...](https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/detroit/5042-grayton-st-detroit- mi-48224--1001626271)

<comment><USER6> Well, those are inflated prices from being listed on Trulia.

You can buy thousands of houses in Detroit at auction for $5,000 plus back taxes. They all will need rebuilding.

However, the soil is contaminated with heavy metals (I would check where the foundries and prevailing winds were) and the water supply has issues.

And if you want to raise a family, you will need to find an area with a credible school and police force.

<comment><USER3> The biggest issue in my opinion are Detroit schools, they're just abysmal. Directly to the south of the houses I posted is a separate group of cities called the Grosse Pointes. They're in the same county as Detroit, but they're their own cities complete with different schools. The same houses I posted above would go for 1.5-2x their price if they were less than a mile south simply due to the school districts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not just a struggle for control - it's a struggle for survival. The auto industry has reached one of it's rare inflection points with the arrival of pure EVs. They will have to offer a model that people will buy, or they'll lose the company.

Previously, this happened to the US tire makers in the post-1973 oil-crisis years. They'd been happy producing bias-ply tires, when suddenly everyone wanted radials because they got better mileage and lasted 2-3 times as long. Goodyear was the only one to make the switch, and they're still in control of their business. All the others - Firestone, General, etc. did not, and ended up getting sold to someone else.

[https://www.alixpartners.com/media-center/press- releases/pil...](https://www.alixpartners.com/media-center/press- releases/pile-up-awaits-auto-industry-investments-electric-autonomous-future- balloon/)

The car makers realize this, and will spend whatever it takes, _regardless of the return on capital_ , to stay alive.

<comment><USER8> I don't think EV's are that big a deal on the automative manufactor side of things. The engine is only one component of the multi-ton combination of steel, cloth, rubber that is the automobile. Sure it's one of the most complex parts, but that's just bigger reason to ditch it and replace it with something that doesn't give their industrial engineers panic attacks

<comment><USER9> > The engine is only one component of the multi-ton combination of steel, > cloth, rubber that is the automobile.

It's not just the engine. Some things EVs don't have or do differently: Engine, transmission, cooling system, fuel system, fuel tank, exhaust system, emissions controls, power steering (electric, not hydraulic), everything else on the accessory belt (which itself no longer exists), vehicle frame (designed for batteries in the floor instead of engine at the front), instrumentation, etc. It's a lot of stuff.

They have a huge infrastructure for building oil pans and belt-driven A/C compressors and decades of expertise in valve timing and equipment for compliance with vehicle emissions regulations, and none of that applies to EVs. They have to start over.

But at the same time they have billions in unfunded pension liabilities and debt weighing them down. GM's current total liabilities stand at seventy-six billion dollars. They also have tons of assets, but how much of the assets are facilities for the manufacture of mufflers and fuel filters?

They have the resources and incentive to make the transition, but they've also got a hill to climb and hungry competitors.

<comment><USER10> GM and Ford are one economic slowdown away from insolvency (due to the liabilities you mentioned, and most vehicle purchases having been pulled forward with easy credit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and came of age in the early 80s. Every time a "business cycle" came along, the leaders of Michigan swore that Detroit needed to diversify into something other than cars. Then, when things picked up, all was forgiven and we started making those cars again. Rinse and repeat.

"Detroit" meant all of the Midwest, since every town had a plant, small or large, doing something for the auto industry.

I hope it sticks, this time.

<comment><USER12> > "Detroit" meant all of the Midwest

Not entirely sure about that. Most of the midwest outside the rust belt was not under the influence of Detroit. Chicago for instance was fairly decorrelated to Detroit.

<comment><USER13> Chicago is an outlier in most ways, but, still, I'm from St. Louis and a connection to Detroit would be news to me. There are parts manufacturers all over Ohio, for example, but the Midwest is a lot bigger than Ohio.

<comment><USER12> Right. I'll bet entire states of Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana has very little interaction with Detroit either. They were more agricultural by nature so their interactions would be more with Chicago (with its mercantile exchange and transportation). Chicago has always had a diversified economy so has ridden ups and downs relatively well. It's still the largest city in the Midwest and 3rd largest in the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Auto companies already left Detroit in the dust. Will tech save it? Everyone in Silicon Valley forgets that the second part of self driving is the car part. The POC is done (waymo and cruise) The next next step is mass production. Google is notoriously bad at that phase. The companies knowledgeable about that are the established auto companies. Tech will come to Detroit to get close to that knowledge (the manufacturing may be gone but the offices remain). Detroit is going to be a happening place for the next decade.

<comment><USER15> Cruise is owned by GM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://archive.is/vs4Q8](http://archive.is/vs4Q8)

</comment><comment><USER17> Got out 5 years ago and headed south - was the best decision I've ever made. It wasn't until I left that I realized just how economically backwards and dysfunctional the region (and state) was. I remain dubious about the city's prospect at regained glory.

But I applaud those who stick around and think well of the city and the tri- county area, and who fight the good fight to improve it. I wish them better luck and fortune than those that preceded them in the prior 50 years.

</comment><comment><USER18> 'Some auto executives say they can hold on to their roles as hardware providers while also tapping into the growth of more-profitable services'

Simple question for anyone in the auto industry who thinks this statement makes sense: for every car put on the road by Uber / Lyft (or any similar service you invest in), how many net new car sales will you see? (hint: their passengers may no longer need to have a car of their own)

I hope that this is just them putting their spin on the story and that when it's all said and done they realize their future depends on minimizing how much they have to shrink rather than maximizing how much they can grow.

Kodak believed that the move from film to digital represented an opportunity. It would have been for them, had they been realistic as to the _size_ of the opportunity.

<comment><USER19> More importantly, how many _American_ cars will be put on the road by Uber and Lyft? I think I've taken my share of Uber rides and I can't recall any that were in a domestic car. The drivers are obviously very sensitive to the economics and they are all driving Toyotas.

<comment><USER20> In Seattle Uber/Lyft drivers drive 95% Toyota Priuses. High gas mileage == you can actually make a profit in the job.

<comment><USER21> 95% is a bit of an exaggeration, it's more like 30-40% inclusive of ALL Hybrids including the Prius. The one factor you're missing here is that many drivers consider a somewhat expensive non-hybrid luxury vehicle as an investment because they're able to solicit higher tips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Auto executives say they need to avoid a nightmare tech scenario that's become a common refrain at industry gatherings. They don't want to become the next "handset makers"—commodity suppliers of hardware, helplessly watching all the profits flow to software makers like Apple

Weird comparison since Apple has always made the lion's share of profits from hardware. Also interesting contrast between big automakers and Tesla. I see Tesla as being in the hardware biz primarily

<comment><USER23> > Weird comparison since Apple has always made the lion's share of profits > from hardware. Also interesting contrast between big automakers and Tesla. I > see Tesla as being in the hardware biz primarily

I disagree. Tesla is hardware + software just like Apple. And software (e.g. autopilot, self driving) is a significant part of Tesla's strategy, just like it is with Apple (e.g. iOS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was under the impression that tech left Detroit in the dust several decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER25> The jury is still out. Somebody still will have to make cars. Uber and Lyft are just information. Look at Tesla. It ain't easy. And especially now with the additional software.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure how helpful it is to think of the world's largest companies as "tech companies" anymore. The previous dominant companies simply failed to adapt to incorporate new technologies (witness the fate of Sears vs Amazon).

And Detroit's auto manufacturers aren't doing much in the way of electric or self-driving, so if they fail that's on them. The best self-driving company and the best electric car company are both California "tech" companies.

<comment><USER27> Detroit's big 3 are working on self-driving and electrication. GM is leading the bunch, but all three are pouring billions into it. I wouldn't call spending billions as "not much".

[https://www.slashgear.com/gm-cruise-gets-2-25bn-from- softban...](https://www.slashgear.com/gm-cruise-gets-2-25bn-from-softbank- for-2019-autonomous-launch-31532516/)

<comment><USER28> They aren't good at talking about it. Nobody has any idea what the hell Jim Hackett is doing at Ford for example. GM is much better but they haven't been able to position themselves as leaders yet.

<comment><USER26> There's nothing to talk about yet because they're so far behind. Tesla has four different EVs already on the market, and Nissan and BMW have had EVs on the market for a little while too. Chevrolet just got into the game this model year with the Bolt EV. Ford has _nothing_. The big US manufacturers are a decade behind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Given the current low valuations of the auto manufacturers, I see it more likely that a tech company like Google or Uber acquires one of them similar to Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods

</comment><comment><USER30> Non paywall version.

[https://outline.com/uvszzK](https://outline.com/uvszzK)

</comment><comment><USER31> The entire idea of specialized regions is incredibly frustrating. When will companies invest in remote work?

<comment><USER26> Kind of hard to do manufacturing remotely ...

<comment><USER31> This is true. Are all jobs manufacturing?

<comment><USER32> All jobs that require making stuff are in manufacturing. As tempting as it is to think that software is taking over the world, humans will always live in a 4D world, and we'll always need _stuff_ to help us live in it.

Manufacturing will change dramatically, but it's not going anywhere or becoming 'obsolete'.

<comment><USER33> I can quite easily conceive of manufacturing things becoming almost entirely remote, with only a skeleton crew on-site.

There are quite a few start-ups I'm familiar with manufacturing various widgets in China without ever stepping foot there, just sending CAD files.

<comment><USER20> Cars aren't built from iron ore in Detroit either. They're basically assembling parts put together in various countries around the world.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why bad taste rules in business endeavors - <AUTHOR> http://garry.posterous.com/why-bad-taste-rules-in-busines

<comment><USER2> I'd change it a bit: The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of [the talent or] whoever is in charge [whichever is lower].

</comment><comment><USER3> This was also discussed in an essay in The Mythical Man-Month. Funny how a lot of things have been discussed before...

<comment><USER4> "Conceptual Integrity" is the term used there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the 'Hacker News' guidelines:

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. "

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER6> In this case is the original source the Youtube video? 99% of the time it is better to submit an embedded Youtube video than the original, especially with reasonable commentary. Have you read Youtube comments lately?</comment></comment>


Deep Text Correcter - <AUTHOR> http://atpaino.com/2017/01/03/deep-text-correcter.html <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. I went ahead and tested:

> Alex went to the kitchen to store the milk in the fridge.

Corrected:

> Alex went to the kitchen to the store the milk in the fridge.

Gathering a large, high quality dataset from the internet is probably not so easy. A lot of the content on HN/Reddit/forums is of low quality grammatically and often written by non-native English speakers (such as myself). Movie dialogues don't necessarily consist of grammatically correct sentences like the ones you'd write in a letter. Perhaps there is some public domain contemporary literature available that could be used instead or alongside the dialogues?

EDIT: Unrelated to this project, I have this general fear of language recommendation tools trained on just low-quality comments or emails. A simple thesaurus and a grammar-checker are often enough to find the right words when writing. But a tool that could understand my intent and then propose restructured or similar sentences and words that convey the same meaning could be a true killer application.

<comment><USER3> > A lot of the content on HN/Reddit/forums is of low quality grammatically and > often written by non-native English speakers (such as myself).

Corrected:

> A lot of the content on the HN/Reddit/forums is of the quality grammatically > and non-native written by written English speakers (such myself). as UNK

Yeah. It's got a long way to go. No idea where "as UNK" came from.

<comment><USER4> UNK usually comes from the final sampling step: the distribution of words contains a special token UNK to represent all words with insufficient statistics in the training corpus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool. If you're looking for more datasets to train your model, here are a few relevant ones: \- [https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange) \- [http://trec.nist.gov/data/qamain.html](http://trec.nist.gov/data/qamain.html) \- [http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/OpenSubtitles2016.php](http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/OpenSubtitles2016.php) \- [http://corpus.byu.edu/full-text/wikipedia.asp](http://corpus.byu.edu/full- text/wikipedia.asp) OR [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English- language_Wikipedia) \- [http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/](http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/)

I'd love to see how good your model gets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the links! I'll have to try out some of these. The data is definitely the limiting factor at this point.

<comment><USER6> Have you consider project Gutenberg?

Is there any reason why that huge corpus would not be useful?

[https://www.gutenberg.org/](https://www.gutenberg.org/)

<comment><USER7> I think the issue is you need parallel corpuses of (sentences with grammatically errors) -> (same sentence but correct). Gutenberg has a lot of only the latter I think.

<comment><USER8> You don't need parallel corpora -- the OP was generating the incorrect versions of training data through random perturbation (dropping articles, etc.)

<comment><USER7> The author can probably get a lot of traction by doing random perturbation, but they won't be getting things in the correct ratios (i.e. lots of dropped hyphens but not many dropped apostrophes) and also won't probably make all the types of errors that humans actually make. It will work, but a huge part of machine learning and doing NLP is getting those ratios right. This is one reason Google slays with their translator, they have huge corpuses that allow them to get fine grained distinctions in their models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting idea! I think this is analogous to the idea of a de-noising autoencoder in computer vision. Here, instead of introducing Gaussian noise at the pixel level and using a CNN, you're introducing grammatical "noise" at the world level and using an LSTM.

I think that general framework applies to many different domains. For example, we trained a denoising sequence autoencoder on HealthKit data (sequences of step counts and heart rate measurements) in order to predict whether somebody is likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure, or a heart rhythm disorder based on wearable data. I've also seen similar ideas applied to EMR data (similar to word2vec). It's worth reading "Semi-Supervised Sequence Learning", where they use a non-denoising sequence autoencoder as a pretraining step, and compare a couple of different techniques: [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5949-semi-supervised- sequence-l...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5949-semi-supervised-sequence- learning.pdf)

Toward the end, you start thinking about introducing different types of grammatical errors, like subject-verb disagreement. I think that's a good way to think about it. In the limit, you might even have a neural network generate increasingly harder types of grammatical corruptions, with the goal of "fooling" the corrector network. As the the corruptor network and corrector network compete with each other, you might end up with something like a generative adversarial network: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.00160](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.00160)

<comment><USER10> It seems like it would be challenging to get the corruptor to generate examples that are of the same Kind that humans make, while still being "productive" (in the linguistic sense, ie. not just overfitting on examples from a corpus of low quality text).

It's easy enough to just drop random words or run Levenshtein-edits on single words to create wrong-in-this-context makes (then/than), but grammar errors include much more than can be covered by that method, and the method will generate many errors that are of a kind never made by humans. And if you restrict your method to things already seen in a corpus, it's easy to overfit and miss out on a whole lot of good stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The "correcter" is a worthy effort, and it needs to start somewhere. It shows the magnitude of the task considering that missing articles are not the most crucial grammatical issues in on-line discourse. The meaning of a phrase is usually comprehensible with or without the article, and native speakers can easily overlook this kind of error made by non-native speakers.

OTOH more troublesome to readers are common errors such as misuse of "its" vs. "it's", "to" vs. "too", and "their", "there" and "they're". These mistakes are quite prevalent among native-speaking writers so more ubiquitous than the missing article problem.

The "correcter" didn't correct the latter class of errors. Understandably this would be a much harder goal to accomplish given the highly contextual nature of grammatically correct word choices.

It prompts a question about how well the data-driven approach can handle the problem. Obviously that's what the research is trying to answer. It sure seems to point to something fairly easy for a human to do that's near or at the limit of what we can get a computer to do.

</comment><comment><USER12> Tried out some of classic Garden path sentences [0], and of the 4 examples, it got all but one right:

Original: _The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families._

Deep Text Corrector: _The complex houses married and a single soldiers and their families._

OT: does anyone know of a more substantial list of garden path sentences that people use in testing NLP software?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence)

</comment><comment><USER13> Deep Proofreading Tool Comparisons:

[http://www.deepgrammar.com/evaluation](http://www.deepgrammar.com/evaluation)

[https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/03/04/deep-learning- fix-g...](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/03/04/deep-learning-fix-grammar/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks like a cool project, I would love to see this as a browser plugin of some sort. As for the corpus, I suspect that using articles from Wikipedia would be appropriate. Especially large articles are routinely checked and cleaned up. It has the added benefit of being available in multiple languages.

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download))

EDIT: I see this has already been suggested, along with a large amount of other source in another comment by daveytea.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is the spelling of the name supposed to be ironic? ;)

<comment><USER13> (Comment removed.)

<comment><USER16> Well, I think the dictionary disagrees. [http://www.dictionary.com/browse/corrector](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/corrector)

I'm going to assume that it was meant to be ironic (or errorful).

<comment><USER17> The demo itself agrees. It changes the word correcter, but not the word corrector :)

<comment><USER15> So its name is a built-in test case?

Genius. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >> Thus far, these perturbations have been limited to:

      + the subtraction of articles (a, an, the)
      + the subtraction of the second part of a verb contraction (e.g. "'ve", "'ll", "'s", "'m")
      + the replacement of a few common homophones with one of their counterparts (e.g. replacing "their" with "there", "then" with "than")

Oooh, that's _very_ tricky what they're trying to do there.

"Perturbations" that cause grammatical sentences to become ungrammatical are _very_ hard to create, for the absolutely practical reason that the only way to know whether a sentence is ungrammatical is to check that a grammar rejects it. And, for English (and generally natural languages) we have no (complete) such grammars. In fact, that's the whole point of language modelling- everyone's trying to "model" (i.e. approximate, i.e. guess at) the structure of English (etc)... because nobody has a complete grammar of it!

Dropping a few bits off sentences may sound like a reasonable alternative (an approximation of an ungrammaticalising perturbation) but, unfortunately, it's really, really not that simple.

For instance, take the removal of articles: consider the sentence: "Give him the flowers". Drop the "the". Now you have "Give him flowers". Which is perfectly correct and entirely plausible, conversational, everyday English.

In fact, dropping words is de rigeur in language modelling, either to generate skip-grams for training, or to clean up a corpus by removing "stop words" (uninformative words like the the and and's) or generally, cruft.

For this reason you'll notice that the NUCLE corpus used in the CoNLL-2014 error correction task mentioned in the OP is not auto-generated, and instead consists of student essays corrected by professors of English.

tl;dr: You can't rely on generating ungrammaticality unless you can generate grammaticallity.

<comment><USER10> [https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22give%20him%20flower...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22give%20him%20flowers%22) – if your data set is good enough, you won't be suggesting insertion there.

Maybe calling the perturbed (and model-filtered!) sentence "ungrammatical" is too strong a statement, but that doesn't stop the system from being useful. We don't have a perfect model of NL grammar, but nor do we have complete dictionaries of any NL lexicons – we still rely on spell checkers because they have fairly acceptable false positive rates. Spell checkers also do these perturbations: Levenshtein-edits. And some times they generate sequences that the model (dictionary) will remove because it's already in there with some frequency and they generate a true negative, some times they generate sequences that were simply missing from their data set and they generate a false positive, and some times they generate a sequence that is neither in their model nor in the language and you get a true positive. The same general principle applies to grammar checkers (but they of course are much harder to make with an acceptable false positive rate, and it's much more difficult to generate confusion sets).

<comment><USER18> >> – if your data set is good enough, you won't be suggesting insertion there.

Generally, I doubt you should ever suggest any corrections to the use of articles. This tends to be colloquial, or even personal and there's no point trying to force one style on your users. Unless you like pissing them off (MS Word sure does).

As to spellcheckers- I think that goes the other way, doesn't it? You apply some edits to an out-of-vocabulary word you found, to see whether you can arrive at an in-vocabulary word to suggest as a correction.

In any case, I'm not disagreeing with anything you say. I'm just saying that "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" have strict definitions and you can't just throw them around like skittles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 'Kvothe went to the market'

Off-topic but I've been waiting for the third and final book in the trilogy for a long time ... I've come to the conclusion that Rothfuss can't find a way to tie all the plot threads together.

I'm also wondering if anyone else thinks Rothfuss looks like Longfellow in a lot of his publicity shots.

</comment><comment><USER20> > Unfortunately, I am not aware of any publicly available dataset of (mostly) > grammatically correct English.

How about books?

<comment><USER21> Guess who's got that massive amount of data nowadays ? Google, facebook and co. So good luck if you want to work on AI stuff...

<comment><USER22> And Project Gutenberg: [https://www.gutenberg.org/](https://www.gutenberg.org/)

The language in many of those books may be a bit archaic, though.

See also Distributed Proofreaders: [http://www.pgdp.net/c/](http://www.pgdp.net/c/)

<comment><USER23> There are a fair number of OCR mistakes in many of the Gutenberg texts. It would be interesting to try to correct them. They are however not the same types of errors which are addressed here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> While there are limited errors it can officially correct, I tried a few phrases:

Didn't fix misuse of its: "The tool worked on it's own power"

"He should of gone yesterday" gets corrected to "the He should of gone yesterday"

"To who does this belong?" doesn't get corrected

"A Apple a day keeps the doctor away" doesn't change

<comment><USER25> I tried these, which stem from the given example:

"I'm going to store" gets corrected to "I'm going to the store" (looks good)

"I'm going to store food" gets corrected to "I'm going to the store store" (I'll forgive this due to lack of a prepositional phrase)

"I'm going to store food in the closet" gets corrected to "I'm going to the store food in the closet" (yeah, this is wrong)

It seems like the AI is good at fixing sentences where adding a missing "the" is the solution. So when that does turn out to be the solution, it works fine. When that isn't the solution, well, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail...

Still really interesting, though. The AI may not [yet] be able to solve general grammatical errors, but it may good enough that it works in specific cases. It may even be the case that we'll design systems that depend on multiple agents offering suggestions and other aggregating suggestions into a more refined result.

<comment><USER17> It does seem to pick up on the specific cases where adding "the" isn't right, like:

Alex went to school, Alex went to bed, Alex went to prison

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a neat project . I think as a follow up step he should compare it to Word's grammar checker .

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice work! I was playing with exactly this idea for some time. Potentially it could be way bigger than simple grammatical corrections.

My list of things to try, in addition to what you've already done:

\- replacing named entities with metadata-annotated tokens;

\- dropping random words, not just articles;

\- replacing random words with rarer synonyms;

\- annotate with POS tags from some external parser;

\- run syntax corrector before feeding sentences in grammatical model;

I think this problem is easier that it appears on the surface. Generated deformation does not have to be a perfect replica of typical human errors. It just have to be sufficiently diverse.

Also, I think seq2seq module is getting deprecated, as it doesn't do dynamic rollouts.

</comment><comment><USER28> Alex nice work this is exciting. I've been wanting to work on something similar because the quality of common grammar checkers (like MS Word) has made such little progress.

Have you considered combining your approach with rules based system? Some systems using only an elaborate set of rules for common mistakes have had pretty good performance. I wonder if these two approaches could be combined.

Btw, what is the highest performing grammar checker you've found that's commonly available?

</comment><comment><USER29> This is terrific! Very coincidentally, we were thinking of implementing a sentence de-noiser using sequence-to-sequence models only today evening. I work in the NLP domain writing Machine Translation systems. But NLP parsers are accurate for grammatically correct sentences only which necessitates the need for something like deep text correcter. Thank you for this. Will try this out this week and let you know how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER30> Re. intent but with regards to spelling. I often wonder if there could be rules to correct errors due to key strokes in the immediate vicinity of the intended letter (e.g. "keu" vs. "key"). Would check combination of the surrounding letters, first oin (that's an unintended addition here) horizontal axis. That happens to me all the time, probably because I'm not a good typist but still.

</comment><comment><USER31> I can't make it work for anything other than the missing 'the' example.

For example:

> _Do you know where I been_

'corrects' to:

> _Do you know where I 's been_

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting project, and I love the example they used on the demo page. (Go Cardinals!)

</comment><comment><USER33> And so it begins: [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13184491-avogadro- corp](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13184491-avogadro-corp)

</comment><comment><USER34> "I gotta take shit"

->

"I gotta take the shit"

Sorry to be airing out my personal business and everything but... everybody poops!

<comment><USER35> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQTW7Pd1vqc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQTW7Pd1vqc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> For training data, you could try ebook torrents, eg. books with a creative commons license.

</comment><comment><USER37> Would the works archived in Project Gutenberg be a good training corpus?

</comment><comment><USER38> isn't a ngram bayesian model sufficient here?

also, isn't the test data linear dependent from the training set here so creating skewed performance measurement?

</comment><comment><USER39> What about using books such as from Project Gutenberg?

</comment><comment><USER40> but will it correct "lets eat grandma"

</comment><comment><USER41> > _" Kvothe went to market"_

This is not a grammatically incorrect sentence; it depends on context. Products are take to an abstract concept of 'market', for example.</comment>