Beluga whales adopt lost narwhal in St. Lawrence River - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/belugas-narwhal-stlawrence-1.4820602 <comment><USER3> What an outstanding example of positive second order effects from the advance of technology - in this case, drones. This project might not even be possible without the advent of cheap consumer quadcopters. I love it.

With all the negativity about tech sometimes, it's lovely to see a genuinely positive use.

<comment><USER4> You know, the whaling industry looks like it could use a disruption - <USER2> with harpoons, coming to you YC Summer 2020!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Closely related (the only extant members of Monodontidae), very vocals and imitators and probably loosely similar languages. Babies are also similar in shape and colour.

</comment><comment><USER6> I bet they think they're special for finding a unicorn.

<comment><USER7> Good luck finding somebody paying them 1b in raw fish...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They probably just think he's an ugly Beluga.

<comment><USER9> Or a very pretty one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> unicorns are real, they live in the sea

</comment><comment><USER11> I might be alone here on HN to think humans are just an intelligent virus that is gradually destroying a very beautiful harmonious life structure called the planet earth.

Our only redemption might be devising some system of protecting the planet from a future catastrophic meteoric collision.

<comment><USER12> Picture a peaceful forest. Tall trees, underbrush, sun-dappled leaves, the smell of loam on the gentle breeze. A rustle in the distance. You feel at peace, and harmony surrounds you.

This peaceful scene is an endless orgy of violence, death, and deceit as living things work constantly against one another. Animals stalk prey as plants wage chemical warfare against plants and animals alike. Creatures pretend to be other creatures, and plants pretend to be insects in order to attract them for selfish reasons.

"Harmonious" is not a word everyone would use to describe nature red in tooth and claw.

<comment><USER13> Nevertheless, the ecology you describe has sense of harmony in the way it is self balancing; humans are quite anomalous in that respect.

In nature a species population usually self correct and balance through either becoming prey or resource depletion (their prey). We can too easily protect ourselves from any potential natural predators (technology) and have found more and more ways to exploit the earth to allow unsustainable growth (technology). Modern humans are quite unbalanced and inharmonious... This point of view is also interesting when considering our predecessors, tribes who lived in the forests, not Mayan civilisation or whatever, but tribes, they leave no trace because everything they take or make is of the forest and goes back into the ground just like every other part of the ecosystem - _they_ were the only harmonious humans and there still are small numbers of tribes who live like this.

<comment><USER14> Around 2.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria caused the Oxygen Catastrophe ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event)) and is generally regarded to have killed off nearly all life, as well as triggering the Huronian glaciation lasting some 300 million years.

We are not unique in our ability to overwhelm ecosystems. It's true that as intelligent life we should be far, far more aware of our actions.

<comment><USER13> > We are not unique in our ability to overwhelm ecosystems.

We are not unique in that respect, but we are unique magnitude and consistency, we aren't an "event" like others, we are an _adaptive_ species.

<comment><USER15> The cyanobacteria literally terraformed thr planet so that it's habitable animal life. If only we could do the same!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Look, Jimmy, if you're gonna keep playing with us you have got to stop poking everyone with that thing!

</comment><comment><USER17> Liz Climo drew a comic about this: [https://me.me/i/no-dont-pass-it-to-larry- memes-conm-dont-pas...](https://me.me/i/no-dont-pass-it-to-larry-memes-conm- dont-pass-11707404)</comment>


Google is trying to patent video compression use of Asymmetric Numeral Systems - <AUTHOR> https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Storeleap/page3 <comment><USER2> Is it too late to consider killing software patents? I guess the battle is over and we just have to bite the bullet and be happy with these half-assed "countermeasures".

I'm probably biased because I mostly read about software patent stories on HN and other similar outlets, but it seems like 99.9% of the time they're only used for patent trolling or killing the competition.

Patents are supposed to protect the inventors by giving them the time to license and market them before the competition can swoop in and create a similar product without having to pay for the R&D.

So do people around here have "success stories" regarding the use of software patents to actually reward creativity instead of just playing the "patent cold war" game?

<comment><USER3> I think the CMU hard drive patents are a good example: [https://www.google.com/patents/US6201839](https://www.google.com/patents/US6201839). But ideally, a patent is never litigated. It simply allows an R&D house to exist as an independent entity without forcing it into becoming a product/manufacturing company. I don't know about SV, but outside SV, investors do care if your tiny little company has defendable IP.

I worked at a startup doing cognitive radios. We were an R&D shop only--our competitors were companies like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin that had manufacturing muscle. We patented everything, and most of it was what you'd call a "software patent" (even though in the long run it would be partially implemented in an FPGA or running on a microcontroller). It was expensive to pay PhDs to spend a year doing Matlab simulations to figure out what algorithms would work.[1] Even more expensive was then spending years testing those in the field (because lots of things that work in simulation fall flat in uncontrolled real-world environments). Copyright was pointless. Writing the code was the easy part.

I'm a bit on the fence--I think the problems with patents are overstated, but the benefits often are too. But carving out "software patents" from other kinds of patents strikes me as odd. There is no clean line--it's often easy to take something that might be done by an ASIC and move it into software and vice versa.

[1] _E.g._ one project involved getting disjoint listen-before-talk networks to synchronize their "listening" periods without being able to communicate with each other directly.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Summary from Reddit ([https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6h08z5/google_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6h08z5/google_is_currently_trying_to_patent_video/)):

Asymmetric Numeral Systems ([1]) is entropy coding family currently replacing Huffman and arithmetic coding in data compressors, among others, of Apple, Facebook and Google, thanks to being up to 30x faster [2]. Its author has made it public to prevent pathology of arithmetic coding, which wide use was blocked by patents for many decades ([3], [4]). However, currently others are trying to patent basic applications of ANS – including Google for AV1 video compressor (initially suggested by ANS author, who has helped them for the last 3 years: [5]) in very general patent application, to prevent others from using it in image and video compression – claims and sources: [6] [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_Numeral_Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_Numeral_Systems) [2] benchmarks: [https://sites.google.com/site/powturbo/entropy- coder](https://sites.google.com/site/powturbo/entropy-coder) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents) [4] Charles Bloom comment: [http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/05/05-21-15-software- pa...](http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/05/05-21-15-software-patents-are- fucking.html) [5] [https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/co...](https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/codec- devel/idezdUoV1yY) [6] Google claims and sources: [https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by- Stor...](https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by- Storeleap/page3) Clarification: the "30x speedup" is for decoding of the fastest arithmetic coding (~50 MB/s) vs of ANS (~1500 MB/s) in benchmark [2] for similar compression ratio (better than Huffman, which standard implementation: zlibh from gzip has ~300MB/s). The inventor of ANS is Jarek Duda.

</comment><comment><USER4> The title sounds like Google is doing everyone a favor. From reading the thread on encode.ru it appears to me that Google is patenting it so that they have the patent, not for purely altruistic reasons.

If it was for the public good, the patent would be filed via a non-profit that Google can't control.

<comment><USER5> > If it was for the public good, the patent would be filed via a non-profit > that Google can't control.

Couldn't they just publish the techniques by some other means? E.g. some scientific journal. I mean, a publication is strong evidence of prior art.

<comment><USER6> I've been wondering this, and I'm not a lawyer so I have no experience in this regard. But!

If you patent something, and don't have a licensing fee or anything like that, I would imagine that it would deter some patent trolls from getting a false patent and suing people using that technique. Fighting in court costs a lot of money for people like me (and probably you) so anything that keeps me out of court is a good thing.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, so actually we need a different construct. Perhaps USPTO could add a checkbox to the patent form, saying that the patent will not be used aggressively in a court of law. Still not ideal, since I suppose the patent application procedure will cost the same.

<comment><USER2> That would mean that the USPTO tacitly admits the fact that the patent system is broken and they need hacks to work around it. I think that would be strange coming from them.

If the patent system was working correctly there would be no need such a thing, either something is patented or it isn't. If it isn't it shouldn't be possible for a third party to patent it post-facto since there's already prior art. At least, that's the spirit of it as far as I'm aware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will not repost the entire thing here, as there's a few naughty words born of frustration, and this might well be a family forum for all I know.

My take: [https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html](https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, very interesting take on the matter. Would you mind explaining "...it has to code everything in reverse. The latter especially is a technical showstopper. " ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A previous post about this on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14583691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14583691)

Link provides steps for people to submit prior art to USPTO for this patent application (patent is not granted yet)

<comment><USER7> The patent does not cover rANS. rANS has been independently discovered a few times at this point. The patent filing covers Google's use of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> To me what would make the most sense would to have a consortium of companies do this. Imagine Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. all chipping in in a coordinated effort to prevent trolls from lapping up bullshit patents.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQniEobrNU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQniEobrNU0)

</comment><comment><USER11> So much for publishing your work in hopes of creating prior art and preventing patent takeovers.

<comment><USER7> I blogged about this elsewhere. From reading the filing, Google is not patenting his work. They're patenting their specific application of it, and the claims seem to me fairly tightly tailored to AV1.

<comment><USER11> so 'email .. on a mobile phone' patent? not to mention He was the one helping them with this particular application, and even mentioned it almost 10 years ago in his original paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can someone please summarize the patent?

</comment><comment><USER13> Intellectual property is one of the worst things ever created, used extensively by that certain group of humans to hold back progress for the entire species. People in the future will view these laws as barbaric and evil. We would probably have advanced space ships, and certainly world peace and material abundance by now if not for people treating abstract ideas as property.

<comment><USER14> I broadly agree that intellecutal property isn't really property at all, and that copyright laws are unjust indeed, though I think it is hyperbolic to say that we'd have world peace and abundance just by their abandonment. More broadly the concept of property as a whole ought to come into question if we wish to go that far. Proudhon's essay _What is Property?_ and Kropotkin's _The Conquest of Bread_ shed light on this debate, making the case not for the sharing of private property by all but rather the very abolition of the concept itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> >The inventor of ANS is Jarek Duda.

Google has thrown few grants for ANS research to Jarek and folks of encode.ru community, then patented their research behind their backs

Update: they did not, but they did approach Jarek's university with specific interest in that research work, and vaguely expressed interest in funding them.

Jarek's stance - "this is my work, not yours, this ends this discussion."

Google - "we have grounds to do so, and nothing you do will move us"

Update: I put things in a more neutral tone.

<comment> shawn-butler Can you provide some context or links?

This seems to contradict directly with what user SquareWheel writes in another comment and who now seems to have deleted that comment.

<comment><USER15> Who is Jarek - his page [http://th.if.uj.edu.pl/~dudaj/](http://th.if.uj.edu.pl/~dudaj/)

His original publication from - [https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540](https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540) . That work was a result of two years of research that was well documented, and was making noise in encoding community. His first notes on use ans for quick entropy coding date to 2008.

First production grade code was published under GPL at around late 2013 with explicit intention to enforce copyleftness of derived works, and the patent poison pill clause.

Jarek claims that Google has abruptly ended communications with him few month after the time of first code publication

Update: it seems Google never made any grants to the group, but were only vaguely feeding them with "may bees" for two years, while requiring more and more detailed "research scope declarations." It is better now to let Jarek give his own first hand account of what was going on in between his university and Google's research people

<comment><USER16> It sounds like all these copyleft-warriors (like Stallman) could litigate. Isn't it what they are for?

<comment><USER17> No, that's not what they are there for. Why are you so snide?

<comment><USER16> I'm not. I quite literally mean it. It's their purpose, it's why all these organizations (I cannot remember the names now) are created, isn't it? They don't design anything, they don't write code, they do talking and litigating, which might, for once, be actually useful.

<comment><USER18> > They don't design anything, they don't write code

I don't like the tone you've taken. I'll assume you're merely uninformed.

Stallman's organization, the FSF, was created to protect the open-source nature of things that he was a primary creator of or significant contributor to such as gcc and emacs.

The Python foundation was created by the creator of Python, and so on.

To claim that there is no creative endeavor in these entities is to ignore the fundamental reason they exist.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Make School is accepting applications for BS in Applied Computer Science degree - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/make-school/make-school-is-applying-for-accreditation-8b69da832386 <comment><USER2> Congratulations! This is awesome!</comment>


Fred Wilson Vs. John Doerr - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/18/doerr-wilson-video/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is such an amazing discussion between two legends, who are both watching the same events unfold, but with widely varying perceptions of them.

What I find particularly fascinating is how much more real this feels, and how much more I think I learned from it, than I would from conversations held over blogs (as it had been for quite a while). Real-world communication is still much higher-bandwidth than the virtual world, apparently.

<comment><USER2> I agree, it's great to hear two experienced and varying perspectives.

I found the argument on location, and varying perspectives on where growth will be in the future around the web.

I enjoyed Fred Wilson's perspective on the developing markets in the New York City. Maybe there are some great advantages to New York that might be missed in Silicon Valley. Great ideas come from knowing external markets whether business, social, personal, global, etc., and NYC is a good place to be in the middle of a lot of external markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> John Doerr is clearly a visionary, but it seems he's trying to play catch-up with the likes of Fred Wilson's USV, Sequoia, Benchmark, Accel, etc. as Kleiner has taken a backseat when it comes to recent hot deals. His enthusiasm is almost a marketing tactic to get entrepreneurs excited about the iFund and sFund (further marketing attempts to generate interest, vs. having their main fund focus on social and touch-screen technologies regardless of having specific funds that should do that).

John Doerr is clearly a legend, and if anyone can race back to the top in this current "bubble", it's him.</comment>


The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

<comment><USER2> Remember, folks, this is a joke. Please don't use any of these in real code ;)

<comment><USER3> Actually, most of the techniques presented there do have some use cases in real code.

Calculating factorials is not among them, though.

<comment><USER2>
      > Actually, most of the techniques presented there do have
      > some use cases in real code.

Really?

Even the sane-looking entries ("Freshman" through "Another senior") are going to have performance problems. "Yet another senior" through "Combinatory" have some minor applications to real-world code, but none of them are demonstrated here. "List-encoding" and onward degenerate into type-class wanking and absurdity -- they don't belong anywhere near a compiler.</comment></comment></comment>


Resume Reviewers – Submit your resume and get a personal review by email - <AUTHOR> I run a service called Resume Reviewers. What we are is a small startup that is solely dedicated to providing high quality, personalized resume reviews. All of the reviews are done over email because we feel that it makes for a more personal conversation between the reviewer and the client.
I am just looking for some feedback more than anything. Thanks!
If you are interested the site is: https://resumereviewers.com/ <comment><USER2> Posting this three times in one day makes it look spammy.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10742764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10742764)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10745382](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10745382)

</comment><comment><USER3> Caveat: I offered a similar service to HN (for free) about five years ago and I've been working in the 'talent' space for the majority of my career.

>...who will make sure every detail of the resume that he is reviewing follows all of the industrial standards.

I'm not entirely convinced that's a good thing. In fact, the last thing I want is a resume that conforms to traditional standards. It's boring, impersonal and tedious to read.

>...and makes sure they will pass ATS tests and move your application higher in companies resume databases.

I think you might want to take another look at the ATS platforms out there. Greenhouse, Lever and Workable are currently nailing the ATS market and those platforms don't rely on keyword searches. In fact, they actively discourage users from keyword searching.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't seem to complete the stripe checkout either. I would love to make use of this service!

<comment><USER5> Ha, the minute this guy launches, Stripe fails. Awesome timing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tried to use your service but I got a internal server error after checking out with stripe.

</comment><comment><USER7> fyi the transaction process went through perfectly but I received an immediate fraud warning alert from my bank.</comment>


Google winning 98% ad spots it auctions off, after order to treat others equally - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-rivals-ask-eu-to-toughen-measures-in-antitrust-case-1517334038?mod=e2tw <comment><USER2> > Kelkoo CEO Richard Stables says the firm's revenue from general search > traffic dropped by 62% last year, to €2.3 million. In 2018, he projects a > two-thirds drop to €800,000.

I decided to go to [http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/](http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/) to check it out. This website is so clearly a scam created for this antitrust case.

I went ahead to compare two cameras: the Canon EOS 1D X Mark II (a $4k camera) to a Canon Ixus 275 HS ($200 camera), here are the descriptions of each:

Canon EOS 1D X Mark II

 _The Canon EOS 1D X Mark II offers a good sensor resolution, allowing you to take an astonishing quality of picture. The Canon EOS 1D X Mark II has a very reasonable weight for this type of camera, with its LCD display providing a decent screen size compared to other similar digital cameras. The Canon EOS 1D X Mark II comes with internal memory, which is extendable with an external memory card to match the size of your photo and video collection. The lens aperture (the 'eye of the camera'), which makes your lens contract or dilate to allow more or less light in, is good for a digital camera in this price bracket. You can compare prices for the Canon EOS 1D X Mark II, read the full product details and check out expert reviews at our web site._

Canon Ixus 275 HS

 _The Canon Ixus 275 HS offers a good sensor resolution, allowing you to take an astonishing quality of picture. The Canon Ixus 275 HS has a very reasonable weight for this type of camera, with its LCD display providing a decent screen size compared to other similar digital cameras. The Canon Ixus 275 HS comes with internal memory, which is extendable with an external memory card to match the size of your photo and video collection. The lens aperture (the 'eye of the camera'), which makes your lens contract or dilate to allow more or less light in, is good for a digital camera in this price bracket. You can compare prices for the Canon Ixus 275 HS, read the full product details and check out expert reviews at our web site._

This is pure bullshit, and bullshit journalism.

<comment><USER3> >This is pure bullshit, and bullshit journalism.

It's the "Wall Street Journal", a Murdoch business publication that approves of every business as long as it isn't Google.

<comment><USER4> _> It's the "Wall Street Journal", a Murdoch business publication that approves of every business as long as it isn't Google._

Please don't bring politics into this. If you have a substantive criticism about the WSJ's article, make that criticism. The one you've made is ideological and unpersuasive.

<comment><USER5> Is this honestly a question? Murdoch disdain for Google is well known.

<comment><USER4> Rupert Murdoch can have well documented dislike for Google without his dislike intrinsically kneecapping the Wall Street Journal's journalistic integrity. The comment I replied to criticizes the article we're discussing _categorically_ by origin, instead of _specifically_ on merits.

Murdoch's agenda can be a thesis statement for _why_ the WSJ has poor journalistic integrity with respect to Google, but it doesn't _demonstrate_ that failing on its own, nor is merely calling out that someone in a position of power has an agenda a well-reasoned thesis.

Basically, it's not contributing anything more interesting to the discussion, and is just going to attract other comments or upvotes that agree. That's not insightful discussion, it's just ingroup commiseration.

<comment><USER6> Appreciate the demand for precision, but you won't get more than anecdotes in this case.

I used to work for Google and I remember the 180 degree turn in WSJ's output after Murdoch gave a speech in which he announced Google News was killing journalism and the future of newspapers was the iPad (this was just after the iPad was new). Suddenly bullshit articles about us started appearing constantly.

The first one I remember was about the Safari cookie case, if anyone remembers that. Basically Safari had shipped a third party cookie filter that broke the web as a "privacy" feature. Because it didn't work and couldn't ever work Apple started adding in bizarre documented workarounds that were basically bugs in the filter, but they chose to document rather than fix, so important apps like the Facebook like button would start working again. Google started using these workarounds _as was intended by Apple_ in order to fix its own products. The WSJ paid some academics to go dirt digging and they found this, announced Google was hacking Safari's filter etc, Apple exploited the situation, this caused regulators to go and whack us and so on.

It's quite amazing how easily manipulated governments and especially regulators are by newspapers. My father used to hate Murdoch with a passion (he was in the tv biz), and after that I understood why... the power wielded by people who own newspapers is phenomenal. And they do not hesitate to abuse it!

<comment><USER7> > this caused regulators to go and whack us and so on.

proof? links? source?

Google is big, does and did a lot of things that could be a problem in the eyes of regulators.

<comment><USER6> It was specifically about the Safari cookies issue.

On the original story:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17076670](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17076670)

On the resulting fine:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19200279](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19200279)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tell me if I've got this right:

Say you have some businesses in industry X that all rely on advertising.

Say one of those businesses also happens to own the dominant advertising platform that businesses in industry X need to use, in order to effectively find customers. (Special note for those subset of HN readers who tend not to read: Yes there may be other platforms, but before you present that as an objection, note I just said let's say they need to use this one in order to effectively find customers.)

In this setup, the business that owns the advertising platform has an advantage over all other businesses in industry X, because it pays itself advertising revenue, where the other companies have to pay their competitor. So money is always being siphoned off to pay the advertising platform, with a cost to most businesses but a (near) zero cost to the business owning the platform. We can assume the platform is already paid for out of profits made from advertisers in industries A, B, C, X, Y, and Z.

It seems to me this is a fundamentally rigged game (rigged in fact, not necessarily by intent) in which all other things being equal, the owner of the advertising platform always has the upper hand. Even if the bidding process is made "fair."

<comment><USER9> >In this setup, the business that owns the advertising platform has an advantage over all other businesses in industry X, because it pays itself advertising revenue, where the other companies have to pay their competitor. So money is always being siphoned off to pay the advertising platform, with a cost to most businesses but a (near) zero cost to the business owning the platform.

I don't think this is quite right. If I have a fixed quantity to sell (approximately true for advertising space on the web) then units I buy from myself cost me the same as they would cost other companies.

Suppose I have $100, and 5 advertising spots worth $20 each. I have two options here:

a) If I sell the spots to others then I have $100 + 5 * $20 = $200.

b) If I "sell" the spots to myself (the other wing of my company that needs to advertise) I have $100 and whatever 5 advertising spots are worth.

You are representing the situation of b as if it were "free advertising", thus giving my company an unfair advantage. But in fact, compared with situation a, it is clear I paid for the advertising, as I am up 5 spots and down $100 I could have obtained by selling the spots. So advertising's cost is not lower just because I also own the company that sells the advertising spots. If I'm better off than someone without advertising spots that's because advertising spots are worth something, not because of any purported shady synergy I get from owning both the advertising spots and the company that needs them.

<comment><USER10> But let's say the spots are actually only worth $10, in terms of the ability to generate revenue. If you sell them to someone else for $20, you win because you get more money than the slots were worth. If you sell them to yourself for $20, you don't lose any money and you can still make $10 (which is more than the slots _originally_ cost you).

However, Google claims it is not doing this:

> As part of the change, Google said it would operate its shopping-ad service > as if it were a profitable, standalone business to ensure doesn't overbid > for ads.

Still, "profitable" could be by the slimmest of margins, and Google would still have a strong incentive to keep the "standalone" business going (that is, the profit to their _other_ business), whereas an independent company wouldn't.

<comment><USER11> If you sell them to yourself for $20, you have your original $100, plus the $10 * 5 dollars in ads, for a total of $150. Because $150 is less than $200, this means that diverting the ads to yourself loses you money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google: We compete against our competitors to see who can pay us the most money. And our competitors are complaining that they can't pay us as much money as we pay ourselves.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. Google can artificially raise the price beyond their competitors means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's kind of a clever solution by Google, if a bit troll. They can make that ad auction 100% fair and still win it because they have more expertise on running efficient ad campaigns than anyone. IMHO that just doubles down on the danger of their monopoly power, but perhaps it complies with the antitrust requirements.

<comment><USER15> Most importantly they have more _information_ about each auction than their competitors.

They know for each user every other search result clicked. They know what the users interests are. They know which users prefer stuff delivered fast, which prefer the cheapest items, and which will be wooed by 50% off deals.

They can use that data to present the best possible results, get the highest click through rate, and sell the most products.

Therefore they can afford to pay more for the ad spots than someone without that data, who gets less precisely targeted ads, and fewer product sales per advertisement shown.

<comment><USER16> Ad auctions have 100ms to reply to an auction request.[0] This does not give you a lot of time to display the perfect ad for a given customer or search. Especially when you need to do this at the volume that Google shoes ads.

[0] [https://www.quora.com/How-do-ad-exchanges-and-real-time- bidd...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-ad-exchanges-and-real-time-bidding- platforms-work)

<comment><USER17> That's unlikely how it actually works on Google's site.

Google doesn't have to connect to an advertiser's network, they already have the ad information and all targeting and bidding information, so they can mostly compute the results ahead of time and only do last minute checks for winners based on, for example, whether the most likely winners have exceeded daily limits and such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is similar to the old eBay scam where the seller bid on his own items under a different account. If the price was too low, the seller could always bid to drive the price up. If the seller won, it didn't matter. The seller is just relisting the item again after paying himself or cancelling.

I can't imagine how anyone thought this would work; Google participating in their own auctions. At least on eBay, sellers tried to hide the fact that the game was rigged.

<comment><USER19> There are variations where this works out in google's favor, but there is a big difference to the ebay situation where you just keep relisting the same item until it sells for a "good enough" price: each ad impression is only sold once, there is no relisting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Google is exceedingly good at extracting value from every ad impression. Even if the marketplace wasn't ran by Google, I have no doubt that they would still be bidding high enough to get the vast majority of impressions simply because they have a higher threshold at which bidding is profitable.

</comment><comment><USER21> Which is more expensive. The new system that google is designing? The fine that they will have to pay? Or the oversight they will have to have to comply with EU law? (or some combination of the previous?).

On the other hand could Google just quit putting ads on requests from the EU?

<comment><USER15> The system is cheap (it cost ~$15M of compute resources and $5M of engineering time).

The fine is much larger.

The oversight costs nothing now, but they're worried it might prevent them innovating in the future (as happened with Google Books)

<comment><USER22> Anyone can pull random numbers out of their ... :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just don't _really_ get why Google shouldn't be allowed to advertise on their own platform however they want. Say what you want, but there _are_ other options for people to use to advertise if they aren't happy with Google.

Google is powerful because they provided a product _so good_ that everyone used it. And now they're making other services that are also good, otherwise people would try the second link on the page. And, like all their competitors, they're advertising their new product.

If I owned a building next to a highway, I wouldn't have to auction off the side of that building for advertising - I can put my own ad on there (as far as I'm aware). I also think that dining Google billions of dollars is a tad ridiculous. Is there truly that much lost opportunity from whatever they're accused of doing?

</comment><comment><USER24> Paywalled, so obvious question. Does Google's deep pockets just bid high?

<comment><USER16> I believe if you access it via twitter or facebook, WSJ still lets you in. Try the link from [https://twitter.com/nat_droz/status/958396191531728896](https://twitter.com/nat_droz/status/958396191531728896)

<comment><USER25> I have this bookmarklet I use when I hit paywalls and I don't care if Facebook knows I'm interested in it:

        javascript:location.href='http://facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

<comment><USER26> How about this:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft- wsj/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/)

<comment><USER27> The page says that it's GNU licensed but where I can I find the source?

<comment><USER26> The .xpi file is essentially a .zip in disguise (all Firefox add-ons work like this). Unzip it as normal and read the source. Aside from the manifest, it's 5 lines.

<comment><USER27> Got it, thanks for explaining that. I didn't want to download it before reviewing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm not convinced that percent of ad spots is the right measure of market share. But it's paywalled, so who knows.

Edit: ok so it's 98% of _2500 arbitrary keywords_. Come on now, that's obviously a bs metric.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can we not link paywalls?

<comment><USER30> While it doesn't address your request not to link them in the first place... For anyone looking to bypass the paywalls when they are linked: you can copy the article's title and search Google for `site:wsj.com [title]`.

<comment><USER31> Worked for me. what? Bypassing the paywwall is this simple? Does this work for other news sites with paywall?

<comment><USER30> Most news sites, yes. They want Google's crawler to crawl their full text, and Google responds poorly to sites that treat their crawler differently than real search users, so if your Referer (sic) header is Google, news sites will often give you the whole article.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't stop calling yourself a UX designer – it's working - <AUTHOR> http://blog.handcraft.com/2011/08/dont-stop-calling-yourself-a-ux-designer-its-working/

<comment><USER2> _"If it's becoming cool, then sure, you've got the hipster crowd who like to go about saying they were designing UX before anyone had heard of it. That's great for those people. You know what? It's even better for the rest of the world because now people know there is such a thing as user experience design."_

Uh huh. It also means that every no-talent, former "business guy" with a strong opinion has latched on to the title, because they've realized that declaring themselves a "UX designer" allows them to get hired into plum, boss- everyone-around positions without having to go through the pain of learning how to write code or actually do graphic design.

There are genuinely talented designers out there, but the many of the "cool" kids who have glommed on to the movement in recent months have done little more than read _The Design of Everyday Things_ , written opinionated blog posts (on blogs designed by someone else) and gone to trendy parties. But hey...it's great when there's a profession with vague/undefinable job responsibilities and lots of authority over the product features -- you get to take a disproportionate share of the credit, which makes that next UX Design gig easier to get! Maybe you can even become a product manager!

<comment><USER3> Personally, I think the right position for this kind of people is Product Manager in the first place anyway.

<comment><USER2> Heh. Personally, I think the right position for the kind of people I'm talking about involves asking "do you want fries with that?" That's "product management" too.

<comment><USER3> I am particularly thinking of Steve Jobs. Of course, not all of them are as good as Steve Jobs, but it proves the concept is not flawed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The day I stopped calling myself a UX Designer was when I attended a "UX" meetup in Toronto. The extent of skill of every person there, who called themselves UX Designers, was creating wireframes for corporate gigs.

They were the guys who handed off wireframes and stories to the photoshop designers who handed it to the HTML/CSS coders.

I was hoping UX Designer would encapsulate someone who knew the full spectrum of ux research/design/photoshop/html/css/marketing for building software.

But thats not the way it turned out.

<comment><USER5> ^ this.

That is 100% my experience too, and it's complete bs imo.

Between the co-opting of "interactive designer", "web designer" and "ux designer" I am just happy to call myself a developer now.

A developer who also knows a thing or too about design, and yes, user experience too (duh! isn't that a given?)

I will do this until people realize that developers, in this web/app/tech industry, are really the designers -- and it will happen one day :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 3-4 years ago I started to call myself a UX Designer because I wanted to distinguish myself from the other designers I knew who did brochure websites, or had just started a transition from print to web design.

I work almost exclusively on software design and UX design is the best term I know of to sum up what I do.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interaction designer was previously the preferred title for many designers...until it became completely co-opted.

I wouldn't get too attached to the title UX Designer either, since that term will no doubt get diluted as well — but as the article states it does give people something to grasp immediately.</comment>


Show HN: Pictureddit – different subreddits different photos - <AUTHOR> https://pictureddit.com/ <comment><USER2> Works with any subreddit, multireddit, username and parameters

[http://redditile.com/r/SkyPorn](http://redditile.com/r/SkyPorn)

[http://redditp.com/r/SkyPorn/top/?sort=top&t=year](http://redditp.com/r/SkyPorn/top/?sort=top&t=year)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you add a description / about to the site, so there's less guessing on our part of what it is all about?! ;-)

</comment><comment><USER4> Please add reddit.com/r/cablefail and reddit.com/r/cableporn (same general category, one examples of "don't do this", the other "do this").

<comment><AUTHOR> i added [https://pictureddit.com/?subreddit=cablefail](https://pictureddit.com/?subreddit=cablefail), [https://pictureddit.com/?subreddit=cableporn](https://pictureddit.com/?subreddit=cableporn)

thanks for comment!

<comment><USER4> If I can make one other suggestion, have the dropdown box at the top sort alphabetically by subreddit name, cablefail and cableporn should be next to each other.

<comment><AUTHOR> alphabetical sorting added. I would be glad if you write if you have any other suggestions.

<comment><USER5> Navigation of the select box would be improved if "/r/" prefix was stripped from every item. Ex, I clicked on select box and start typing "cable" expecting for it to navigate to one of those entries, but it just hung on the first item. Alternatively, can use some fancy select component with search function, like Chosen etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why are you spamming this here?

<comment><USER7> As a basis of your claim, it has been posted 9 times so far. [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pictureddit.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pictureddit.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good idea. I didn't see any obvious bugs when I was using it. My only suggestion is to allow users to be able to select which sub they want to view images from instead of this drop-down pick from the list method.

As crude as it sounds, I could see this site being heavily used for the porn subs lol.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/pictureddit](https://twitter.com/pictureddit)

</comment><comment><USER9> I wish it was continuous scrolling instead of having to click for the next page.

</comment><comment><USER10> Aren't the full res images copyright violations?

</comment><comment><USER11> Flagged.</comment>


Pacman in 512 bytes of x86 boot sector machine code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nanochess/pillman <comment><USER2> just to put into perspective how little 512 bytes is, here is 512 ascii bytes (including 8 newlines)

       pacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacman
       pacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacman
       pacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacman
       pacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacman
       pacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacman
       pacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacman
       pacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacman
       pacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacmanpacman
       pacmanpacmanpacmanpacman

that's it. That's 512 characters/ascii bytes.

<comment><USER3> 4 times more RAM than the Atari 2600 has.

<comment><USER4> True, but let's not forget that the game code is usually in much bigger ROM on the Atari 2600 (and I forgot whether bank switching hardware and similar cartridge extension hardware was common there). Still mind boggling how little RAM you had for game state. And that you actually did not have a framebuffer at all, meaning that you essentially had to draw each pixel (or scanline?) when it came up!

<comment><USER3> I'd say about 10% of games had some sort of bankswitching. I think about 2 or 3 games even had a 256-byte expansion RAM.

Not only was there no framebuffer and only 128 bytes of RAM, but the graphics chip didn't generate any interrupts (it could halt the CPU until the start of the next scanline though). You had to wait and spinlock on a timer for the proper amount of time after finishing your frame and processing game state to start drawing the next frame.

You also manually had to tell the graphics chip to output VBLANK lines so you had to do that at the right time as well. If you got the timing wrong on that the vertical hold on your analog TV would lose sync and the screen would jitter or roll.

<comment><USER4> Oh, interesting. Do you happen to know how that bank switching and, more so, the RAM expansion was implemented? I heard before that this wasn't common, because of a fatal omission in the cartridge connector. And indeed, looking at the pin out, it seems to lack a Write Enable line, or really anything else besides Address and Data lines! [https://old.pinouts.ru/Motherboard/AtariCartridge_pinout.sht...](https://old.pinouts.ru/Motherboard/AtariCartridge_pinout.shtml)

Are the Data lines still bidirectional? Or was this achieved by strobing the Address lines in a certain pattern?

<comment><USER3> All I know is the majority of carts with it had a few specific addresses that triggered the bankswitch when written, toward the top of memory right before the 6502 vectors. I'm unsure how they were implemented electronically.

At least one chip (the FE device for Decathlon) is sniffing the 6502 instruction stream because it triggers on JSR/RTS being executed.

[http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/Atari%202600%20Mappers.txt](http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/Atari%202600%20Mappers.txt)

[http://www.classic-games.com/atari2600/bankswitch.html](http://www.classic- games.com/atari2600/bankswitch.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reflection:

\- Machine code is very dense. Really, this is not an accident, although maybe it's not entirely on purpose either, more just common sense at the time. In the end, there were probably many platforms using this or predecessor CPUs with very little RAM/ROM and bytes still counted even on IBM PC.

\- Assembly code is still very readable. The trouble is not that machine code isn't readable, and it probably never really was. It just doesn't offer ways to build abstraction beyond what the machine supported (like routines, sw interrupts, etc.) Only gets worse as hardware gets more complicated. Imagine avoiding VGA and instead attempting to support initializing a modern graphics card all the way through! It would probably be quite ridiculous even with documentation. This is part of what bugs me about a lot of non-x86 platforms, since that's kind of the environment you're dropped into in many of them.

\- Speaking of compatibility, one must wonder how many new layers have been introduced on top of things like VGA since the original VGA.

<comment><USER6> > Machine code is very dense.

It's _intriguingly_ dense. If you're writing an emulator or a bytecode VM, and you can't just slap a JIT in (because you need to ensure that e.g. data races resolve the same way they did on the original machine), it's very hard to come up with a data structure to represent "decoded" code, that is more performant than just keeping the original code around in memory in its packed-stream-of- opcodes form.

One would think, for example, that it would make sense to do the "instruction decode" pass ahead of time, to end up with an array of pointers-to- instructions plus literal-values... but the resulting representation of the code is usually much larger in memory, and so less of it will fit in cache (and it'll also fight the VM interpreter itself for cache-lines.) You might gain from your instruction impls not having to trampoline back to the interpreter ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code), basically), but you'll lose in cache coherence.

Really, the best you can do in such a situation is to translate the stream of opcodes to _another_ stream of opcodes, just ones that you can execute more efficiently (i.e. create your own "microcode" ISA for your VM.)

Either way, "a loop that walks/jumps through an in-memory buffer of variable- length CISC opcodes using a byte-granular program-counter pointer register" seems to be an optimum somehow in design space.

<comment><USER7> > One would think, for example, that it would make sense to do the > "instruction decode" pass ahead of time, to end up with an array of > pointers-to-instructions plus literal-values... but the resulting > representation of the code is usually much larger in memory, and so less of > it will fit in cache (and it'll also fight the VM interpreter itself for > cache-lines.) You might gain from your instruction impls not having to > trampoline back to the interpreter > ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code), > basically), but you'll lose in cache coherence.

As someone currently writing a (subset of an) x86 VM, I feel this pain entirely too much. My subset greatly simplifies things by not using segment registers and getting to (mostly) not have to implement the 16bit version of ModR/M.

The biggest problem with x86 is the sheer number of ways to do addressing within a single opcode using a Mod R/M operand. For instance, all of these lines of assembly can use the same primary opcode:

        push eax
        push [eax]
        push [1000]
        push [1000 + eax]
        push [0x11 + (eax * 2 + ecx)]
        push [0x11223344 + (eax * 8 + ecx)]
        push [(eax * 8 + ecx) - 10]

If not for the Mod R/M and SIB operands, x86 would be a static-width instruction set

I'm building an interpreter that goes the way of decoding to build a pipeline (really a "basic block") and then to execute the entire pipeline with minimal branching across execution. I'm less afraid of excessive cache use than the unpredictable indirect branch problem. The hope is that building a pipeline and executing it with a branchless unrolled loop will allow me to avoid that problem, while also greatly simplifying the implementation of each opcode where the actual logic just receives a set of operands it can get or set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Playable link: [https://parkertomatoes.github.io/v86/?type=mbr&content=uBMAz...](https://parkertomatoes.github.io/v86/?type=mbr&content=uBMAzRD8uACgjtiOwL54fb8gFC6tkbvwANHhuBg3cwO4OALooAEB34PrEHIK6JYBKd%2BD7wjr4oHHiAmB%2FqJ9ddKxBbgCAC6lq%2BL7tADNGjsWBPp09okWBPq0Ac0WtAB0As0WiOAsSHIMPAlzCLusfS7Xov75viDmrZetkzHA6CwAgDb%2F%2BYC4KA54B6Ai5rED0uDoMQG3IegbAbcu6BYBtyjoEQG3NOgMAeugdAPoFgGJ%2BDHSuUAB9%2FGI1AjEgOQHdVu1Nzht%2FxDkOK0AChDkOG0IEOQ4rcD%2BEOSE%2F3Qt9sMFdAw7FgD6sAJyDrAI6wo6BgL6sARyArABhMR1IojYhMR1HNDodfiwCOv0iRYA%2BqIC%2BqD%2B%2BYTEdQYg3HQaiNiIRP6oBbuA%2FXUDuwIAqAx0AvfbAd%2BJfPzDAELn5%2F%2F%2Ffjw8fvzw8Px%2BPP%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FPH7%2F%2F%2BfnQgA8fv%2F%2F%2F%2F9%2BPDx%2B29v%2F%2F%2F%2BlAAAAGBgAAAA8fj8PDz9%2BPAAA%2Fn8CQgJC%2F39AQn5%2BAgJ%2FAsADQAJ%2FAkAC%2Fn8CQv97QAp%2BfgJA%2F38AAJiqkFCYZKA8qFABAAAIAAIAAAStl62E5JOwMFDGRP8C6Ob%2BWFBTUVdQuzB9LteTuQgAiPjQ43ICMcCA%2FxByCoA9DnUD6Rf%2BMgWq4uaBxzgBWECoB3XSX1lbWMNPVao%3D)

</comment><comment><USER9> My older brother bought an 8086 kit in the 80's. He could afford 128B (bytes) of RAM which cost $50. It had a front panel with switches for toggling in a program (MITS 8800) and a serial display port. So I wrote a little game in 128 bytes that took one key input and you guided a little 'X' around the screen, trying to avoid the obstacles or going off the screen.

<comment><USER10> When I wad in college, we had something similar in lab. This was around early 2000s, and we had Motorola 68K minicomputers with around 512k RAM, IIRC. They were hand built, with wirewrapped connections between the various DIPs. To debug supervisor mode assembler, we had a clock toggle switch that could switch from normal running at 1 Mhz, I think, to a single clock cycle push button. We had a 2 character hex display that showed the 16-bit raw data on the databus. Spent so much time staring at those 16-bit hex values, I was able decode most of the instructions from memory (spent a LOT of time with the 68K ASM programmer manual - still have it on my shell).

Couldn't even see the register state. Had to keep track of that in your mind or on paper. I think we had some dipswitches to toggle memory values, as well. Helped save time for trivial changes because downloading a decently sized ASM program could take 15-20 mins over a 1200 baud serial connection. Got in the habit of inserting NOPs in the code so we'd have room to insert a handful of instruxtions here and there. When I say decently sized, I mean around a couple 10ks bytes of machine code.

We were working on a supervisor program to load user code, execute it in user mode and debug user code. Some other misc stuff, like commands to act like a calculator, sort arbitrary men locations, etc.

It was a really fun class. Still can't believe how much we got done in 1 semester. Lots of late hours, sleeping on lab stools. Beer and sandwiches in lab while we worked. Made some new friends, strengthened bonds with others, lost a few friends that weren't pulling their weight.

The lot of us later made an MP3 player around an Atmel AVR chip (forget the model) and a dedicated decoder chip with some wire wrapping and soldering and a crap ton of wiring. For expediency, we streamed the data over a serial port from a PC. Also a fun project. Discovered a lot of engineering stuff we'd been taught, but didn't really understand the relevance, was extremely important (like travelling wave theory and the importance of terminating a bus properly).

It was a lot of fun building things in a constrained environment. Can't say I don't miss the college years, when you couldn't just "throw more hardware at it".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Video of this in action: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALBgsXOq11o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALBgsXOq11o)

<comment><USER12> Does anyone know what are the artifacts at the bottom left corner of the video? Is it just an issue with the video capture or is he doing something clever like storing data in these pixels?

<comment><AUTHOR> To save 3 bytes I had to use the address in DI after drawing the maze (just below the last tile row), it contains the positions of the player and ghosts.

<comment><USER13> You say "save 3 bytes", we say "visualizing dynamic game state, for debugging and educational purposes, and highlighting how small the dynamic state is compared to the static art asserts"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's incredible is that there really aren't any special "tricks" here. The code is pretty easy to follow.

</comment><comment><USER15> > It's compatible with 8088 (the original IBM PC). So you now have to look for > a 8-bit compatible VGA card if you want to run it in original hardware ;)

I'd be interested in the thoughts behind this decision. CGA would have been more period correct and more compatible with the "real" hardware that's out there (I say this as an IBM 5150 owner). Not wanting to criticise the author of course - this is still a very cool project and, being open source, I'm sure we'll see new variations popping up before too long. I might even have a go myself.

<comment><USER16> The CGA 320x200 graphics mode is horrible to program for and would have made a 512 byte implementation much harder to accomplish. Even and odd rows of pixels on screen are separated in memory by 8k bytes, for instance.

VGA mode 0x13, on the other hand, is widely known as the easiest graphics mode to program for -- all you do is throw bytes one after the other into 0x8000 + 64K and you're immediately putting 256-color graphics on the screen.

8-bit compatible VGA cards are somewhat of a rarity to find nowadays but it wasn't entirely uncommon to see 8088 or 8086 systems paired with VGA cards in the late 80's, although generally they were more common and useful with a 286 and up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > It can be run as a COM file or put into a boot sector of a floppy disk to be > run.

Isn't "COM file" something specific to DOS? How does it differ from a machine binary file, i.e. what GCC (or a linker) would spit out of the ASM code? (The makefile uses nasm, thought)

<comment><USER18> COM is a machine code file to be loaded at 0100 then executed. There's no instruction difference, but you have to remove the headers. Even a .a produced by GCC has to be de-ELFed with -nostdlib -ffreestanding.

<comment><USER19> -ffreestanding will still produce an elf binary. You have to either use "objcopy -O binary" or set the output format in the linker script (or on the linker command lind) to produce a flat binary without headers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Standby for my upcoming 8088 programming book ;)

</comment><comment><USER20> While still very impressive, this does make use of BIOS routines for VGA, I/O and timekeeping.

<comment><USER21> ...as opposed to something much bigger that also eventually uses the same "library" of functionality.

<comment><USER20> I would be interested in seeing if an EFI version of this would also fit in 512 bytes. One may have to overlap some fields in the binary format.

<comment><USER22> Does EFI even have the same 512 byte restriction though?

<comment><USER23> No, it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> HN Title is misleading. The github author correctly calls it Pillman / yellow- thing-eats-pills-and-chased-by-ghosts . Even ignoring trademark issues; it's not Pac-Man -- there are no power pills, no teleporter/torus holes, no ghost house, no fruits, no score, etc.</comment>


'I've seen the greatest AI of my generation destroyed by Twitter' - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/ive-seen-the-greatest-a-i-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-twitter <comment><USER2> And here I was thinking the New Yorker couldn't get any worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> 4chan, to be exact.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it's 8ch.net/pol/ The threads documenting the take over of Tay are interesting and should be preserved for research purposes.</comment></comment>


HTML5 Boilerplate went 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://paulirish.com/2011/html5-boilerplate-went-1-0/ <comment><USER2> While I don't use HTML5 Boilerplate directly (just a heavily modified version of it that fits better into my web project templates), the skills I picked up from and learned from it have been invaluable. Thanks guys, and congrats on the 1.0 release!</comment>


What Every Frontend Developer Should Know About Webpage Rendering - <AUTHOR> http://frontendbabel.info/articles/webpage-rendering-101/?utm_source=CSS-Weekly&utm_campaign=Issue-117&utm_medium=email

<comment><USER2> Nice. Glad I stumbled on to this. Definitely bookmarking this one. Thanks!</comment>


HTTP + JSON for Redis: Now You Can Deploy Redweb on DotCloud in Under 30 Seconds - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dotcloud.com/http-json-for-redis-now-you-can-deploy-redweb

<comment><USER2> Ease of deployment via DotCloud will probably be quite useful for some folks, but other than that, why would you use this over say Webdis (which already has access control)?

<http://webd.is/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Webdis is definitely a great project. I'd say it mostly depends on your personal preference and feature requirements. Webdis also has a larger and more complex codebase, which has its pros and cons.</comment></comment>


AI Clones Your Voice After Listening for 5 Seconds (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adaptation/ <comment><USER2> I once got a call while I was lecturing some students. It was repeated three times in three minutes - I assumed it was an emergency and stepped out.

I was greeted by someone explaining that my father had caused a car accident, and they were calling on his behalf. That someone would need to send over some money for repairs or they'd call the police.

Sure.

They added that their cousin, the driver, is a parolee now holding my father at gunpoint. That if I don't send them money to make them whole, they'll kill my father.

This was super fishy, you know? But still, with things like "life of a loved one" at stake, it's hard to call a bluff.

I can only imagine what I'd have done if I'd heard my fathers voice pleading for help. They might have been able to get any amount of money out of me.

Well, if my father hadn't passed away nine months prior. They were not delighted to hear that.

<comment><USER3> How do you even prepare for something like that... Do we need to assign identifying keywords to each other when we leave home so we know we are really ourselves? Like a vocal pgp?

<comment><USER4> I told my wife that if I ever mention <redacted> while on a phone call, she should know that I am in trouble an unable to speak freely.

Sound like we'll all need more things like this eventually :(

<comment><USER5> how do you pronounce the < > symbols? i mean, 'redacted' is already a pretty strange thing to say by itself.

<comment><USER6> You just make static noises, like a radio signal being lost.

Also, you are lacking in the abstract thought department. Get that fixed, for your own benefit.

<comment><USER7> It's either a knowledge gap...or he is hopeless if he knew the symbol but didn't pick up on it. Nothing I know of can improve that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, impressive results! Already a few examples in the comments of what bad actors could do this tech. I wanted to share an example of something good.

I lost my dad about 6 years ago after a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis and a 3 month rapid diagnosis. I have some, but not a lot of video content of him from over the years. My mom still misses him terribly so for her 60th birthday I tried to splice together an audio message and greeting from her saying what I thought he would have said.

The work was rough and nowhere near what this Google project could produce. She listens to that poor facsimile every year for her birthday. It's therapeutic for her. With some limits for her mental health of course, I'm sure she would love to hear my dad again with this level of fidelity.

And so would I.

<comment><USER9> Philip K Dick wrote about people going to commune with artificial personality constructs of their deceased loved ones.

Unfortunately, it's been a long time since I read it, so I don't remember which book it was in. Maybe someone who's read him more recently can remember.

Update: Apparently, lots of other people wrote about this too, but PKD wrote about this before any of the ones mentioned so far, as he wrote about this in the 1950's or 60's. I'm not sure if he was the absolute first, however. So if anyone knows of any earlier references, it would be interesting to learn about them.

<comment><USER10> Ubik? Though that is not about artificial personality constructs, it's about communicating with loved ones in half-dead states.

<comment><USER11> This idea crops up in a few of his novels and stories, but I think it's most fleshed-out in Ubik, yeah.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Under the hood they are all about religious Gnosticism and the physical universe as a false facade to the "true" universe. VALIS is a pretty good explication as well as a really good book; if you are into mental illness+theology, only then is his Exegesis a good read

<comment><USER11> Very belatedly, yes, VALIS is strange and wonderful.

This is making me want to re-read some PKD!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reading this headline I begin to understand certain people's worry about having their soul stolen upon being photographed.

<comment><USER13> Images of us can be sourced from any number of places: social media, government surveillance, private surveillance. Video less so but from the same sources. Audio from phone companies, VoIP services, surveillance, etc. Health data easily from a number of private companies if you use new-age "health" services, or less easily (illegally) from health records.

Maybe we can find solace in the fact that is or will soon be infeasible to avoid, so we needn't try to avoid it.

<comment><USER14> "Don't worry, just about anyone can steal your soul and there's nothing you can practically do to stop it"

That doesn't seem like a message of solace to me.

<comment><USER15> The message is "Just about anyone could replicate your voice, its value in authentication is about as trustworthy as writing your name at the bottom of a letter"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At first glance there seems to be more more malicious uses than good ones with voice. Yes, hearing someone dear to me say things he/she never said maybe comforting. Anything else?

Maybe some movies with the deceased actor's voice?

But what if someone who wants to hurt me sends me files (or phone calls) from the deceased person saying horrible things like:

\- "I am still alive but left as I was tired of you"

\- "oh Jan, I love you" [fake phone call from the past, where Jan is a lover which never existed]

or even from alive people:

\- "I am leaving you"

\- or my live voice saying stuff which gets me fired or in prison.

We will never be able to believe voice again...how will we adapt?

<comment><USER17> People had the exact same concerns when digital image manipulation software became popular, including the "we will never be able to trust an image again" question.

To answer your question, I think the biggest step we took in adapting to the ever-present risk that an image may have been manipulated is acknowledging that it's possible. As soon as people knew that something could be faked, they realized that having a purported photograph wasn't irrefutable proof that it happened and learned to ask for corroboration before making assumptions.

I think we'll learn to deal with this new development too.

<comment><USER18> Luckily now people don't ever believe photographs as sole evidence in the court of public opinion, and always corroborate that evidence.

Wait. No. I had that backward.

How long has photo manipulation been around? And people still fall for it every minute of every day.

I have zero faith these tech developments will lead to anything good, or that we'll even learn how to deal with them effectively.

<comment><USER15> I don't think its so much that they fall for it but that people create fake images that confirm what people already believe and the viewers deeply want the image to be true and will not think critically.

Verifying an image is not impossible. You just have to consider:

* Who took the image

* Do they have any reasons for wanting to fake it?

* Was anyone else able to verify they saw or took a photo of the same thing

* Is anyone in disagreement with the content of the image

We don't need image manipulation to fool people on facebook. Recently a random image of a park full of rubbish was used with the caption that this was the result of a recent environmental protest but the image was actually months old from a totally unrelated event. People believed and shared it because they wanted to. You could just as easily write a text post saying you saw a bunch of rubbish after the event and you would have almost the same effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> AI can make decisions, create deep fakes, and now, clone voices.

It may be that the next big business opportunity lies in creating 'anti-AI' technology just as it did with antiviruses in the 90's and 2000's

<comment><USER20> AI that detects AI seems entirely plausible. And like all "anti" measures, is another arms race (and if I put my scifi hat on, is what may lead to AI self- awareness).

<comment><USER21> Sort of reminds me of a talk Valve gave about creating an anti-cheat for Counter-Strike using AI. When asked if they were worried about people using AI to create cheats to fool the AI, his answer was essentially that it was an arms-race won by the person with more data/processing power. That person would most likely always be Valve.

Link to talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc)

<comment><USER22> It's a nice sentiment, but there are popular and easy-to-find cheating projects (not sure if I can name them here) that are still widely used, these projects have been active for years, before that talk was made, and still active today. Based on youtube videos and comments it seems many users are still using these cheats with little issue. And afaik, the one I'm referring to (initials P.I.) doesn't use any machine learning at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Now we can have audiobooks read by anyone we like!

They can direct us to our destination!

They can speak at our funeral, being long dead themselves (as long as there is sufficient training material recorded).

The future is awesome.

<comment><USER24> I legitimately think this could be huge for self-published authors. It takes a skilled professional about forty hours of work to produce an audiobook from a novel-length manuscript. Tacotron could do it in minutes.

<comment><USER25> I don't see that coming soon. The voice is one thing, but the performance goes far, far beyond that. Without understanding the text, you can't get good prosody out of a single sentence, much less developing a character for a whole performance.

You'd have to "direct" this on a word-by-word basis: "Put the emphasis here. Speed up 10% here. Decrease vocal intensity 25%". You'd end up producing a whole "score", and it would take at least as long as the human actor puts into it.

Having done that, it would be amusing to switch it from voice to voice, as a party trick. But the result would still be much poorer than you'd get out of an actor. Really solving the work of an actor is strong-AI-complete.

<comment><USER26> What about using a tablet to direct the piece by drawing? You can get values for the intensity, speed and volume (up/down) pretty easily and intuitively.

Even better if its linked to the voice generation system in real time, then you can save/redo sentences etc. as you go along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What it is doing is not really cloning, but because it was trained on 18k different voices, it actually finds one that is closest to yours, and uses that one. It can do a bit of interpolation to create an embedding which is closer to your own, but only if it is well represented by a mix of other voices. Real voice cloning like at [https://replicastudios.com/](https://replicastudios.com/) can take just a minute or two of audio, and it does a fairly good job, and it is always improving. With more audio you start being able to also play with emotion and styles, which is very cool!

<comment><USER28> I'm not really sure where you're getting this. It doesn't pick a specific voice from a database to use.

From their introduction: "Our approach is to decouple speaker modeling from speech synthesis by independently training a speaker-discriminative embedding network that captures the space of speaker characteristics and training a high quality TTS model on a smaller dataset conditioned on the representation learned by the first network."

Section 2 of the paper explains how it works. Two minute papers also goes through it if you'd prefer a video. Link: [https://youtu.be/0sR1rU3gLzQ](https://youtu.be/0sR1rU3gLzQ)

<comment><USER29> They're saying that underrepresented voices will have trouble being modeled. That matches my experience with this project: for example, I had a very tough time cloning female voices compared to nerdy-sounding / deep male voices.

<comment><USER30> It's more that the sounds produced during the recordings didn't cover the entire spectrum of possible sounds, so the model had to estimate their sound. All you really need is a paragraph which you can have the person read to get sufficient coverage or just enough recordings that it's not an issue anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Two minute papers video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sR1rU3gLzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sR1rU3gLzQ)

</comment><comment><USER31> My bank's (HSBC) telephone banking offers the option do away with a PIN and instead a 'my voice is my password'phrase system.

I'm glad I never opted in.

<comment><USER32> Oh god, Sneakers

<comment><USER31> Just to be clear - I'm Robert Redford

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Saw this on Minute papers last night and had a discussion with my partner about if we needed a secret password or not to tell if it were really one or the other on the phone. I figured that we had enough shared history that that wouldn't be a problem. Then we realized that there's no such thing as a simulated sense of humor yet and that that would be the best natural encryption to any communication.

<comment><USER3> 2023: ai identifies your sense of humour after hearing you breathe for 0.7 milliseconds

<comment><USER33> Ha. There'd need to be so many more Ai breakthroughs to make that happen it'd be a little thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success."

—Oppenheimer

<comment><USER35> The thing is, these topics have already been discussed by philosophers! Questions of authenticity, human subjectivity, reproducibility etc are not new. But for the average joe and the non-philosophically-inclined techie, the thing has to actually exist before they start really talking about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The malign applications of this technology greatly outweigh the benign. Discuss.

<comment><USER37> Yes, I think there are almost no legitimate uses for the Farnsworth Device. [https://theinfosphere.org/A_Device_That_Makes_Anyone_Sound_L...](https://theinfosphere.org/A_Device_That_Makes_Anyone_Sound_Like_Farnsworth)

My personal hell: My mother has dementia and a land line telephone.

Scammers call all the time. All day long. (Although the last few days have been pretty good, I assume somebody somewhere is doing their jobs. The scammers will adapt.) One thing they do is spoof their number to have the same area code and prefix as the one they're calling, so it's like "Oh, is this a neighbor?" or something, but of course it's not. It's an automated machine abusing the telephone network to try to _steal money_ from a little old lady with dementia.

Evil men with robots are attacking my mom. Another one called while I was writing this post!

This is a goddamned sci-fi dystopia.

And now the robo-thieving bastards can _imitate my voice_!?

I'm going to have to get her one of those satellite-linked walkie-talkies or something. Thank God she doesn't use the internet.

<comment><USER38> Back when I worked as a telemarketer in high school a long time ago, we sold paper subscriptions, and usually the people that didn't cuss us out and hang up right away are the lonely old people who just wanted to chat. I lasted two months and had to quit; felt like we were just taking advantage of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder what the legal implications of this alongside similar developments like deepfakes are going to be in the next couple years. We're already having fraudsters impersonate CEOs using Deep learning-aided Voice generation[1] due to just how low the barrier of entry is now. There's already a public implementation of the paper out [2]!

[1]: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic- ceos...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos-voice- in-unusual-cybercrime-case-11567157402) [2]: [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning)

<comment><USER40> The latest episode of Blacklist had a dark plot based on deep-fakes.

<comment><USER41> didn't know new season was out! thx!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is from 2018 – does anyone know if there are pretrained models and code for this? I found [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning) , but the generated audio quality was much worse than the samples here.

<comment><USER28> The biggest missing piece is WaveNet, which is Google's proprietary voice- synthesizer. With only the models trained for this paper, the best you could build is a voice-recognizer. As far as I know, Google only allows people to do TTS with one of their provided voices.

I don't expect them to open it up until other companies/academics have achieved similar results. It's too much of a competitive advantage right now. Alexa, Siri, etc all sound like robots compared to WaveNet (google assistant).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> So....I'm going to paste the abstract here because the headline is incredibly misleading and should be changed.

>Abstract: We describe a neural network-based system for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis that is able to generate speech audio in the voice of many different speakers, including those unseen during training. Our system consists of three independently trained components: (1) a speaker encoder network, trained on a speaker verification task using an independent dataset of noisy speech from thousands of speakers without transcripts, to generate a fixed-dimensional embedding vector from seconds of reference speech from a target speaker; (2) a sequence-to-sequence synthesis network based on Tacotron 2, which generates a mel spectrogram from text, conditioned on the speaker embedding; (3) an auto- regressive WaveNet-based vocoder that converts the mel spectrogram into a sequence of time domain waveform samples. We demonstrate that the proposed model is able to transfer the knowledge of speaker variability learned by the discriminatively-trained speaker encoder to the new task, and is able to synthesize natural speech from speakers that were not seen during training. We quantify the importance of training the speaker encoder on a large and diverse speaker set in order to obtain the best generalization performance. Finally, we show that randomly sampled speaker embeddings can be used to synthesize speech in the voice of novel speakers dissimilar from those used in training, indicating that the model has learned a high quality speaker representation.

<comment><USER44> Do you want to elaborate on how the title is misleading? From reading the abstract it seems accurate to me.

<comment><USER45> "AI Clones Your Voice" implies there might be something on the linked page that involves an AI cloning my voice. Maybe a way to record a few phrases, maybe a text to speech that then uses my voice. Something like that.

This does not do that - only provides pre-rendered samples, kinda disappointing. Impressive, but disappointing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Lyrebird has had similar technology for a few years now.

[https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai](https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai)

<comment><USER47> An apt name for the technology considering the marvel of nature that the lyre bird is.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Autocratic regimes can rejoice...they can extract public confessions so much easier now...

<comment><USER48> Only ones that care about the appearance of propriety though, presumably most never had to try to produce convincing fakes when their word was already law?

<comment><USER49> >Only ones that care about the appearance of propriety though

Such as the United States?

<comment><USER50> USA is a plutocracy. Source - this study:

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on- poli...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on- politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups- and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B)

<comment><USER49> Thanks for the link, I was looking for something to read about this topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Will point out that it is cloning after a short sample and with an unknown speaker. So this is great for that type of comparison and in particular when the person listening does not know much or have great experience with the person speaking.

Now if you were to take something by a well known person (where there is a great deal of audio) it would be much harder to clone anything other than a really short passage.

This would be similar to faking handwriting. Easier to fake one word than to fake three pages. Easier to fake something where you have little to compare a pattern (less can go wrong).

Not saying this isn't impressive it is. But it's also a bit of a trick based on the very short clips (both samples and created).

I would say that a trained person could do a better fake because they could take into account all the info and be less likely to make a mistake.

Now sure you could manually change the AI as well doing the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER29> I used this repository to make Half Life's Dr. Kleiner sing "I am the very model of a modern major general":

[https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1171806394783326208?s=2...](https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1171806394783326208?s=21)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koU3L7WBz_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koU3L7WBz_s)

Then @jonathanfly deepfaked Dr Kleiner's face onto a live performance of the song, which was hilariously unexpected. The AI twitter scene is awesome:

[https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1171907301231513605?s...](https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1171907301231513605?s=21)

There is some promising new work in the GitHub issues. For example, someone has been training on ~10,000 additional speakers.

</comment><comment><USER52> VCTK p240: duplicates the (a) north of England accent well.

VCTK p260: all over the place accent-wise.

LibriSpeech: can't really comment on the American examples, but they seem decent.

<comment><USER53> Sample 9 is a good example. The pronunciation of "biographer" is consistent even when it should be very different. All of the examples stress the first syllable but an American would stress the second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wonder if this could be use on RPG games in which there are so many texts and dialogs that having a recorded voice for all of them is impracticable.

</comment><comment><USER55> Now a politician can deny any sound bite. "They just deepfaked my voice!"

</comment><comment><USER56> I heard a rumor that robot calls were harnessing your voice prints. Not necessarily true currently but an interesting concern

</comment><comment><USER57> There's a potential _upside_ to malicious uses - synthesized voices (and deepfakes) can give victims of revenge porn some plausible deniability. This would hopefully take some of the sting out of that experience.

</comment><comment><USER58> Not looking forward to the phishing that will exploit this.

Going to call my parents today and warn them. If they ever hear something from me that's not adding up, be skeptical, and verify it some other way before taking any action.

</comment><comment><USER59> Anybody else notice how that Scottish male reference voice sounds considerably more English in the synthesized versions.

<comment><USER60> Yeah, maybe it's just having a more sensitive ear to the Scottish accent but that to me was the furthest from the reference by far.

<comment><USER61> I heard that too; being a Brit (and working in languages) probably helps. It did pick it up occasionally though, which gives hope that increased sampling and training could fix the slight miss there.

It was that and the Swedish-accented English ("Sentence in Different Voices" section, middle recording) made it struggle. No traces of the Scandi-lilt were left in the synth version.

Final note would be the French speaker at the bottom of the page _seems_ to be English first language, despite having very good spoken French. Not quite as pure a test of that last part as I'd have liked, despite the ability for the speaker to perhaps read the synthesized version in English _back_ in English. That could be fun.

<comment><USER62> I can't hear any hint of an English accent in the French-language recordings, they just sound like regular Québec French to me.

However, I'm not convinced at all by these voice transfers across language. I can imagine the second Chinese one being the same speaker in both languages, but not the three others.

<comment><USER61> That's no Quebecois I've ever heard. Sounds like a Brit who picked it up as a second language in the home or soon after.

Even struggles to finish the sentence due to the effort of reading in the 2nd to last one. Struggles with an extremely common word, 'grand', as well as stumbling over a simple sentence. To be fair, he has heard enough French (i.e. lived and studied there most likely) to get the intonations mostly right but there are a few other giveaways too... it's just not natural or native from where I'm sitting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> One thing is, voice over phone is so compressed that it actually took a long while for this kind of voice cloning (and associated frauds) are all over the place.

We are going to need 2FA over voice communications :)

</comment><comment><USER64> For those who were unable speak e.g. S. Hawkings, it would have been feasible to have had the computer speaking system use a voice that had sounded like him prior to his condition. Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER65> A staple of science fiction comes to life.

<comment><USER66> And conversely, Star Trek's frequent use of voiceprint authentication looks sillier by the day.

<comment><USER67> Fun fact: Several financial institutions (Vanguard, Schwab) allow your voiceprint to be an authentication mechanism.

<comment><USER68> There was a story a few months back about some British subdivision VP wired a million dollars to eastern europe because the CEO called him up and told him to do it or something like that.

It was the CEO's voice, but it wasn't the CEO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I was literally just researching tts (text to speech) programs yesterday and I believe Mozilla's open source (open source in this case meaning weak copyleft) TTS [1] also uses Tacotron and is trying to implement multi speaker tts currently [2]. I literally just posted Mozilla's TTS to hacker news [3] without even seeing this which made me experience a bit of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon [4].

[1]: [https://github.com/mozilla/TTS](https://github.com/mozilla/TTS)

[2]: [https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/blob/master/README.md#major-t...](https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/blob/master/README.md#major- todos)

[3]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532189)

[4]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Fre...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion)

</comment><comment><USER70> I have not been "wow-ed" by a technology in quite a while on HN. Wow.

</comment><comment><USER71> Do papers like this have code to play with anywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> from two minute papers video description: > An unofficial implementation of this paper is available here. Note that this was not made by the authors of the original paper and may contain deviations from the described technique - please judge its results accordingly! [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time- Voice-Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning)

<comment><USER71> Funny, it gives them all a slight American accent!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Yikes - don't a lot of financial institutions use your voice as a layer authentication?

</comment><comment><USER73> It will be interesting to see if these made-up AI voices can deliver jokes with the same tonality and delivery as good comedians can. I'm just a layman but it feels like a hard problem to solve.

<comment><USER74> The furthest right column in the first table shows that they might be a long way off from getting timing right. The 5-second sample happens to have a comma, at which the speaker pauses; this pause is in most of the generated output, at seemingly random places in the sentence. The one sentence that does have a comma doesn't use the pause, either.

</comment></comment><comment> seph-reed I think it's time we officially declare we're going the dystopia route, and really commit to it. The sooner we hit the great filter, the less suffering there will be.

</comment><comment><USER75> In a couple of years we won't be able to trust any media.

I wonder what the cultural implications will be, much like photoshopped models and actors have change the beauty ideals.

<comment><USER27> There are a lot of security features that are being put in place to help us all understand what is real and fake. Of course there is still a lot of work to be done and the technology is very new, but at [https://replicastudios.com/](https://replicastudios.com/) work in watermarking audio, as well as authentication of Replica voices and detection of fake, non-authorised replicas is already in progress.

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the likes, will then be able to let users know what is using real (actual real voices, or the authenticated Replica voice) or fake voices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> This is part of the process of truth being removed from all recording. Soon we will be back to a state where the only certainty is the person we speak to in person

<comment><USER77> > Soon we will be back to a state where the only certainty is the person we > speak to in person

That is until we are able to tell whether that "reality" is synthesized or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> "Hi Jim, it's Jane. How are you? I'm calling you on the phone to confirm the wire transfer instructions I just sent you via email..."

</comment><comment><USER79> This is awesome (in a crazy way). I was playing with Resemble.ai [1] yesterday and was surprised by how good it was in replicating my voice with just a few minutes of dataset. This technology is going to keep on getting better by the minute.

As with any piece of technology, there are always good and bad actors.

1- [Resemble.ai]([http://resemble.ai](http://resemble.ai))

</comment><comment><USER80> Maybe after all these years of people disconnecting physically, using more phones and apps to communicate or meet we will go back to the fundamental real world human connection because that's the only one that can be trusted to be genuine. And the digital world will be left out because not trustworthy. Is this where we are heading to?

</comment><comment><USER81> Awesome! can't wait to have some code to play with and start feeding ebooks to produce audiobooks with voices i actually like

</comment><comment><USER64> If acting was ever a good career choice, it isn't now. I am becoming convinced that actors will be replaced wholesale.

<comment><USER82> No, actors are still going to act. But their voices will be just an input feature to the speech engine.

<comment><USER83> Meaning that this democratizes acting. Celebrity actors won't be required.

I think this is a good thing for the field and gives a whole lot more people access to the opportunity they strive so hard to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Impressive but they still sound like robots imitating humans. I can only imagine the chaos this could cause, if used by bad actors, as it continues to improve. If someone took my voice I'm not sure that my partner would know it wasn't me. That would enable all kinds of social engineering attacks.

<comment><USER85> Exactly what I was thinking. We already have a problem with scammers claiming to be relatives who need some quick cash wired over. Imagine how much more effective that could be if it actually sound indistinguishable from a loved one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I wonder if we'll need a PGP signature for every kind of recording we might make in the future.

</comment><comment><USER86> Has anybody tried making an AI that generates 5 seconds of arbitrary speech to feed into this AI?

<comment><USER33> No to create an Ai for that. Just like with any neural network random noise can be fed into the detector networks, fedback to its self then used to create novel maps. Like deepdream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Unfortunately, the source isn't available. I was hoping I could generate my own narration of any book in the voice of anyone I could throw at the trainer. (Heck, even if it was just my own, anything is better than Scott Brick!)

</comment><comment><USER88> My bank is going to need to do better than a 6-digit account number and verbal password. Customer service is in for the ride of its life once this rapidly maturing technology is commoditized for criminal enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER89> Wow. So is that why I am getting incessant spam calls and they only need to hear me or my voicemail greeting for 5 seconds to be able to impersonate my voice ever after?

</comment><comment><USER90> There was an old Piece on Headline News 20 years ago where someone had done this with Whoopi Goldberg's voice. Never heard about it since. Presumably it went black.

</comment><comment><USER91> Ok, what happens to society when this gets to be really good?

<comment><USER92> Better memes, better apps, better scams

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> One more scene from Terminator that we can now do for real.

<comment><USER94> What's wrong with Wolfy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Anybody else thinking about the scene from the Bourne trilogy where Jason opens Noah Vosens safe using a voice sample he took of him on the phone?

</comment><comment><USER96> Oh neat. I would totally use this to make ASMR audio in a voice different than my own without having to ask someone else to read a script.

</comment><comment><USER97> Mission Impossible is now Mission Possible.

<comment><USER98> It always was. IMF never failed in the TV shows or the more recent films. :)

<comment><USER99> >the more recent films

Was there ever a film where they didn't succeed at the end?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> They turned the Scottish accent into an English accent. The American ones are very convincing though.

</comment><comment><USER101> So, now we can't trust text, images, videos, or audio. Any of them could be fake. What is left?

<comment><USER102> AI-generated scents. After you die, your body odor, sprayed on an article of clothing, as a monthly subscription to your loved ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> I was born in the wrong era. Christ.

</comment><comment><USER104> The synthesized voices sound similar but would probably not fool a good voice- print system.

<comment><USER105> No, but they would probably fool a friend or family member over a phone line. Yikes.

<comment><USER106> or some post on social media...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> In the future moms will no longer complain that their sons never call!

</comment><comment><USER108> How long until we have the napster equivalent of voices? Voicester?

</comment><comment><USER109> why do we need this kind of technology? cheating?

It seems anti-human

</comment><comment><USER110> Welcome to 2020. Crazy time to be alive!

</comment><comment><USER111> It means we can talk to anyone forever

<comment> seph-reed It means you can make someone talk, non-stop, for an indefinite amount of time.

Now I want to make an art piece that's just a valley girl droning on, and on, and on, and on about believable and obnoxious life experiences. The stores they go to, how they feel about certain colors, what "too spicy" is. It just never stops.

<comment><USER112> This sounds like a brilliant idea, and I'm almost wanting to build it myself. If we can tack on a visual head and sync up the lips to the words, it'd be amazing and would likely go viral.

<comment> seph-reed email@example.com if you're actually interested in collaborating on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> This is pretty scary.

</comment><comment><USER114> To not release the source is a a pretty bad distortion of research norms

</comment><comment><USER49> Jordan Peterson got it right months ago. "It's hard to imagine a technology with more power to disrupt. I'm already in the position (as many of you soon will be as well) where anyone can produce a believable audio and perhaps video of me saying absolutely anything they want me to say. How can that possibly be fought? More to the point: how are we going to trust anything electronically mediated in the very near future (say, during the next presidential election)?"

[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-deep- fake](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-deep-fake)

</comment><comment><USER115> This is cool. Hopefully soon I'll be able to use this to do automatic voice overs from written texts using my voice for podcasts and videos. Read pages of text without getting tired.

</comment><comment><USER116> 2018, FWIW.</comment>