Google Memorial: the small museum of projects abandoned by Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2015/03/06/google-memorial-le-petit-musee-des-projets-google-abandonnes_4588392_4408996.html <comment><USER3> I really don't like things like this. A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects.

Google checkout turned into Google Wallet. Google latitude ended up as part of the Google+ Identity overhaul.

There's also a lot of projects that are "labs" or "beta." Clearly they didn't gain the traction Google wanted from them.

Google's like any other startup on a project-by-project basis. If the idea doesn't work they pivot and drop it.

<comment><USER4> To me, this is evidence of Google's rather awkward relationship with consumers (i.e. they toss tons of branded endeavors at us, see what sticks), and not a knock against fearlessly trying things or whatever. The best brands are coy and careful with their identity... google sorta slops it around. this is a list of failed consumer facing products more than it is a list of "bad ideas".

<comment><USER5> I don't really see how it is awkward or hurts relationships with consumers (especially when most all products and services are free) -- it's a form of market research and product testing. Who needs focus groups when you have the world?

<comment><USER4> I think focus groups are inherently embarrassing. Not commenting on their utility, but the act of showcasing something to "normal people" for their "feedback" is, at its essence, pathetic.

While Google's 'everything in beta' mentality is endearing in a 'democracy'/'transparent fun-loving engineers' sort of way... it is also evidence to the fact that our information behemoth is rudderless.

Google Buzz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> RIP Google Code Search, aka the best code search ever. No credible competitor has yet emerged, and this is a real loss for all programmers: no more easy searching for sample code in obscure WIN32 Api, easy searching for arch- specific POSIX implementation details used by various open source projects, global error message grepping, and countless other little things which are not incredibly painful and difficult. I am still puzzled that we suffered such a tremendous regression.

<comment><USER7> You don't think github is all that and more?

<comment><USER8> GitHub's search doesn't support regular expressions.

(I'm aware you can clone the repo and search it locally, but that somewhat defeats the point - especially for large projects.)

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, and probably a lot of other github employees, lurk around here... if you harp on it enough they'll probably make it happen.

<comment><USER10> What do Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have to do with Github?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was one of the (apparently few) people who used Google Sets a lot. Even though its results were often hit-or-miss, there were enough hits for it to be a valuable resource.

And unfortunately, I don't know of any comparable alternative. (But please tell me if you do!)

Here is the problem it solved:

It let you discover members of a set by entering a few members that you already know.

For instance, if you enter "terrier," "bulldog," "German shepherd," it might return, "beagle," "poodle," "chihuahua."

Obviously, in this example, it would probably be just as easy to Google "list dog breeds."

But what if you know a few members of a set ... but don't actually know what the set is, or the proper way to describe the set to a search engine?

Or what if the search engine results take you to pages that list some related terms, but you've got to sift through a lot of other content to get to them?

That's when Google Sets really came in handy.

Edit: I admit, Google has gotten a lot better in recent years at returning this sort of information in search results. And Wolfram does a good job, too. So my need for Sets has decreased, but I still miss it.

<comment><USER7> What were some real-world situations where you used Google Sets? It always seemed to me like a cool toy without much practical use, and certainly not the most worthy sink of a good engineer's limited time.

<comment><USER12> Naming servers. Doesn't matter if you use colors, or star trek characters, or nautical terms: plug the existing servers into a set and get a couple new name suggestions.

<comment><USER7> That doesn't work if you plug them into regular web search?

<comment><USER13> Have you tried googling for "kirk spock"? You don't get a list of other star trek characters.

<comment><USER14> Searching for "list of star trek characters" will give you a comprehensive result on Wikipedia though. As would many similar searches.

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

<comment><USER13> I didn't say it's not possible to find a list of characters. Wikipedia has a list page for everything. But the specific claim was that one could plug set elements into a regular search to find more set elements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Remember this before you rely too much on a Google product. Google isn't Microsoft and that's okay, but one of Microsoft's strong points is that they keep things around forever. Google still has the start-up culture where you can throw things away that aren't working. The difference is, in most start- ups, you don't have millions of people using the product you just threw away.

<comment><USER16> I'm using Gmail. Should I be worried?

<comment><USER15> I doubt Google would kill Gmail outright but they might go the Twitter route and remove generic IMAP access. I would be surprised if IMAP was still an option after the next 2-3 years.

<comment><USER17> I could see them pulling the ability to pull in your own POP/IMAP accounts into Gmail - to force more folks to use Apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do.

Google Answers was destroyed by Yahoo Answers - you could see the approach they were going for though - a properly answered question can be shown again and again. SO seemed to strike a balance between the two.

<comment><USER19> Google Wave was a collaborative editor. It was nothing like Slack or HipChat (unless I've managed to _really_ misunderstand Slack despite building a few things on top of it). It's problem was that it didn't have a purpose - no one really knew what to do with it because a "Wave" was presented an amorphous blob of "knowledge" that people could contribute to at the same time. It was an online notepad, sketchbook, and spreadsheet all at the same time, yet it was also none of those things because you couldn't easily get the document out of Wave.

Wave was a textbook example of how you can fail if people don't understand why they should use your product. They gave up on it (by handing it to the Apache Foundation where it continues to be developed), rolled the clever collaboration technology into Google Docs, and told everyone they'd made it so you could edit a doc at the same time as someone else. Everyone continues to love it to this day.

<comment><USER20> Google Wave was an XMPP-based protocol¹. It allowed communication and collaboration with revisioning. It could have been embedded into applications such as office suites, giving you collaboration and communication right inside the app.

Wave.google.com was an example product using said protocol. Since the protocol was barely spoken of, even by developers, everyone assumed the website _was_ the (only) product. Since the website did a lot of things, and none of it well, often being compared to email, it flopped and the entire project folded..

Now the project lives on in obscurity under Apache: [http://incubator.apache.org/wave/about.html](http://incubator.apache.org/wave/about.html)

¹ Technically, the "Wave Federation Protocol", but anyone that really looked into Wave would know that the protocol was the most important element of the project.

<comment><USER10> > It could have been embedded into applications such as office suites, giving > you collaboration and communication right inside the app.

You mean like google docs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've had this persistent nagging feeling that I shouldn't use Google Keep for anything important because it could be gone tomorrow.

<comment><USER7> The chances of it being "gone" tomorrow are basically zero. The worst thing that could happen tomorrow would be an announcement that in 60 days, no new Keep items could be added, and you'll have a year to download all your old ones as text, HTML, or JSON.

<comment><USER21> You're right, I meant "gone" in the sense of deprecated more than vanished. The data is safe but the disruption to my workflow would be annoying enough that I'd rather not get too used to it.

<comment><USER22> exactly. sure i exported my rss feeds as opml to feedly and ttrss. but none of them worked like i expected it, so i stopped reading rss feeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They forgot Google Code[1]. It's still "up" but it's obvious it's been abandoned by the amount of spam issues that have been building up. I know people like github more than google code - but I personally liked Google Code for it's simplicity.

[1] - [https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=...](https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=-id&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Stars%20Owner%20Summary)

<comment><USER24> Should Google just kill it and suggest people move to GitHub?

<comment><USER23> Well - Google should offer a way to export your data that way people can easily move to another source code hosting service.

Preferably - it should be a one button click of "copy to github repo". Which would include conversion of SVN and Mercurial history to git.

<comment><USER24> That makes sense. That's what I'd want for my projects on Google Code if it got shut down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Google Ride finder • 2007 - <USER2>

Wow...killed the same year Uber was founded. Missed out on a nice market opportunity...probably just needed to be refined, remarketed and keep it going. (I never even heard about it.)

</comment><comment><USER26> It's sad to see Sparrow there. It has been almost 3 years and I still didn't find any good alternative.

<comment><USER27> I came here to say the same, I use sparrow every day and all day. Best email app I have ever used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I preferred the Slate Google Graveyard with flowers: [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> Can't believe nobody mentioned Google Reader yet - that was such a great product and they killed it, still haven't found anything that comes close (and I'm paying for a theoldreader.com subscription, they're good but no Google Reader).

<comment><USER30> I tried half a dozen replacements after the Readerpocalyse and finally settled on [https://kouio.com/](https://kouio.com/) \- been very happy with it ever since. The only real gripe I have is the lack of sane sidebar feed list ordering by default.

I wish they'd start charging for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow, I've forgotten how many Google products I used that were abandoned at some point. I counted 15 that I've used.

To be fair, some of these didn't die - they were renamed, graduated, or folded into another project. Google Talk actually still works on Google Chat if you have the old client. Google Listen became Google Music, Checkout was mostly folded into Wallet, etc.

Sidenote: if you are the developer, that yellow-on-white is almost completely unreadable. I know flat pastels are in, but I have to either strain or open the box to highlight.

<comment><USER14> Google Listen didn't become Google (Play) Music, it was completely abandoned. There is no support for podcasts within the GPM app or website.

Google has actually moved away from supporting podcasts without 3rd party software, whereas Apple introduced a dedicated app with iOS 6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I always wondered why Google didn't spin off some of this as open source projects.

It seems to me that the bottleneck wasn't the hosting, but the man hours being wasted on them. Google could have reduced their involvement to providing an API and the development could have been managed by community.

It's easier said than done, obviously. Maybe the bottleneck was psychological and focus related, and they wanted to wipe the slate clean?

<comment><USER33> I suspect that most used large amounts of internal Google libraries and was structured to work on Google's storage backends. Consequently it would be a phenomenal effort to strip that out, or make it sufficiently abstract so it has a hope of running elsewhere.

It is notable that Google doesn't internally use services. If for example they wrote everything to work on appengine/cloud in exactly the same way and APIs as outsiders do, then spinning out would be a lot easier. [http://steverant.pen.io/](http://steverant.pen.io/)

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands How many of these were companies acquired by Google, and then dismantled after the project didn't gain traction?

Not bashing Google, but there's always posts on Medium about how some startup got bought by Google, promised they wouldn't change anything and within a few months, simply dropped the project and laid off the employees.

<comment><USER34> Some, but while being an acquisition is a small risk factor, Google is pretty ruthless about killing its own stuff as well. In my dataset from 2013 ( [http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns](http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns) ) there were 63 acquisitions vs 287 internal products, and being an acquisition increased the odds of death by an OR of 1.13 (small and not statistically-significant).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Google Graveyard [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/2013/03/google_reader_joins_graveyard_of_dead_google_products.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> I liked Google Squared a lot and it could have been a great comparison tool. For those who never tried it, you could search for "Ultrabook" for example, and have a table with different models, the screen size, autonomy, price etc ...

</comment><comment><USER37> Um, Google Videos is on the list? [https://www.google.com/videohp?gws_rd=ssl](https://www.google.com/videohp?gws_rd=ssl)

<comment><USER38> Google Videos pre YouTube was a video hosting service, rather than a search engine.

<comment><USER39> I remember this, it was very short lived but it indeed existed; I think it wasn't pre-YouTube though, I remember it as a direct YouTube competitor prior to the take over by Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am still super unhappy about Google removing the "Discussions" filter as a search option over a year later. It was insanely useful. I think you can still do it by adding something to the URL, but the quality of the search filter has dropped drastically (which is maybe why they removed it). I don't know of any other search engines that have a Discussions filter.

</comment><comment><USER41> Please add a hand icon when I hover over a box. It will make me think that each box is clickable (they are) and the UX is improved that way.

<comment><USER42> Interestingly, the HTML spec indicates that only hyperlinks should change the cursor to a hand when hovering. Nowadays though, everyone expects that hand == clickable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This flakiness is really hurting Google's B2B business. Google tends to do things in a particularly proprietary Googly way that locks companies in, but the history of killing off products makes nobody want to commit to that.

Thus the B2B offerings underperform, making it more likely they'll get killed off.

I follow google reasonably closely and I haven't even heard of a good 40% of these.

<comment><USER44> One of the worst designed products I've ever used was the Google Search Appliance. I'd never recommend it to another developer, the user interface is just terrible. We'd pay a bunch of money and what we got was a hard to set up box that was kind of buggy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Picnik was a Flash based photo filter editor. Can one recommend a Flash/HTML5/WebGL based alternative service?

Picnik was best of its kind and IMHO better than Photoshop default filters.

Google bought the service, there were plans to add it to Google+ Photos, never saw the great Picnik filters again.

</comment><comment><USER46> [http://newstechnica.com/2013/03/14/spring-clean-google- searc...](http://newstechnica.com/2013/03/14/spring-clean-google-search-now- part-of-google-plus/)

</comment><comment><USER47> RIP Google Notebook. I still haven't found a good replacement for you.

</comment><comment><USER48> I feel like Sarah Mclachlan should be playing in the background

</comment><comment><USER49> Is it really so terrible that they try out new projects and abandon those that don't either don't work or aren't profitable?

</comment><comment><USER50> I will save the link for every time someone points out only Microsoft changes its mind.

<comment><USER17> Not sure who you're talking to (probably 20-somethings) but Microsoft is the champion of backward compatibility. They may have floundered recently but traditionally their adherence to old models has actually been a hindrance.

<comment><USER50> Yes, you got that right.

My first computer was a Timex 2068. Like many I eventually went through a love/hate relationship with Microsoft products, to eventually realise, that when compared with many enterprise companies, Microsoft is quite good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> if they're going to include Sparrow in there, surely there have been loads of other acquihires that closed their products after purchase

</comment><comment><USER52> Is this website written in Dart? (sarcasm)

</comment><comment><USER53> While these are free, there is something to be said about standing by your product.

</comment><comment><USER54> Sparrow was a sad one.

</comment><comment><USER55> Coming soon: Google+

<comment><USER56> One can hope.</comment></comment>


Future of DeepSpeech / STT after recent changes at Mozilla - <AUTHOR> https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/future-of-deepspeech-stt-after-recent-changes-at-mozilla/66191 <comment><USER3> Maybe we should try to find a list of exactly what they are focussing on going forward instead of the slow drip of things they're cutting back on (servo, MDN, DeepSpeech...)

It's a sad sad day when you have an organisation getting hundreds of millions in funding and turning away from what's its good at. The decline has begun in my eyes, it may not become apparent for a few years yet.

<comment><USER4> Cutting out DeepSpeech seems sensible to me, it's out of place in the general portfolio of products.

It would be nice if Mozilla could tell us what their focus is going to be, but I doubt that Mozilla management know at this point.

At this point I'm somewhat concerned that Firefox will be irrelevant in fives years, and I don't currently feel that Mozilla is communicating clearly that they still care about Firefox. I assume they must, but it would be comforting to know that Firefox is still at the core of Mozillas strategy.

<comment><USER5> > Cutting out DeepSpeech seems sensible to me, it's out of place in the > general portfolio of products.

I disagree precisely because of the point you make later: _" I'm somewhat concerned that Firefox will be irrelevant in fives years"_.

Functionality provided by deep learning is going to be an important component of many types of software interactions going forward. The logistics of this will be quite different from what we are used to in open source, with the need to fund and coordinate compute, collect and handle data being a more vital aspect compared to the past.

There are STT software, some mentioned in this thread, that match or are even better than DeepSpeech but none of them are as ergonomic. Accounting for the value of time, this means it will be more cost effective to outsource such capabilities to the cloud. Which comes with trade-offs that are difficult to appreciate in the short term: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24236489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24236489)

I'd say DeepSpeech fits in the mold of Mozilla as a company providing solutions to complicated software problems that are better at respecting the user and their privacy.

In the old days, the most accurate TTS and STT models were built into the OS. These days, you need to call into the cloud to get the best stuff. In [1], Internet Archive complains about the quality of their OCR software. It's not that OCR is so bad, it's that the best OCR is found on Google's and Microsoft's computers. It's possible to cobble something together using open source solutions like EasyOCR, Tesseract+OpenCV but that will only get you part of the way there. What makes the cloud offerings so good is they have enough resources to devote to pre-processing pipelines and architecture tweaks and settings better able to handle edge cases. Most of the mass resides in edge cases.

From my vantage, the future looks to be one of software as thin layers built atop APIs which call into programs running on the servers of a handful of companies. You might not think this a big deal but these software will be the ones scanning the environment, writing the emails, completing the thoughts and planning the calendars for the majority of humans.

[1] [https://blog.archive.org/2020/08/21/can-you-help-us-make- the...](https://blog.archive.org/2020/08/21/can-you-help-us-make-the-19th- century-searchable/)

<comment><USER6> Based on the testing I just did with Vosk, Mozilla DeepSpeech, Google Speech to Text and Microsoft Azure, I disagree with your arugment that SaaS has the best quality results.

Mozilla DeepSpeech was definitely trailing the bleeding edge, but Vosk using the vosk-model-en-us-daanzu-20200328 model produces very accurate results even on uncommon words, similar in performance to Google & Microsoft (which has generally better formatting than Google's STT)

Try it yourself:

Google: [https://cloud.google.com/speech-to- text/](https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/) See "Put Speech-to-Text into action" header

Microsoft: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive- service...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive- services/speech-to-text/#features) See "Upload File"

Vosk: [https://alphacephei.com/vosk/](https://alphacephei.com/vosk/)

Had Mozilla provided 4x to 8x more GPU resources and more staff, then their STT would likely be competitive. Other small STT developers can iterate and test much faster due to having more hardware at their disposal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure about Mozilla's efforts in STT, but they were lagging pretty far in TTS. [1]

Google/Baidu, universities, and an assortment of Chinese/Japanese/Korean social media companies (Line, etc.) are posting the most compelling TTS research, models, and code. Mozilla's TTS system [2] is an amalgam of some of these models, but it lags pretty far behind state of the art.

Mozilla should focus on getting additional revenue streams. We can help them out by trying to get Congress / DOJ to strip Google of its ability to have and maintain a browser with which they entrench their search and advertising moat. I think they're clearly in antitrust/anticompetitive territory.

[1] I'm pretty familiar with this field as I wrote [https://vo.codes](https://vo.codes) and [https://trumped.com](https://trumped.com) TTS systems. Neither of those are state of the art in terms of mean opinion score (MOS), but they're incredibly efficient.

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

<comment><USER8> It is explainable given that there was a single developer working on TTS. It is hard to compete with big academic teams/industry players this way.

I also believe Mozilla team was restricted by a lack of computing resources. They had just a single 8GPU server or so.

<comment><USER9> This is an area that I find unbelievably frustrating. A lack of computing resources in the current day is kind of insane. You can buy an 8GB GPU for <$1000. Even with the rest of the costs, the cost of hardware like this is a drop in the bucket when your main office is housed in Mountain View! Especially on a project that ends up being public-facing, these are missed opportunities where a little can go a long way.

<comment><USER10> I take your point but according to the release details on the repo it was not 8Gb on one card but a server with 8 cards, each a Quadro RTX 6000 with 24Gb, and they're around £4k each currently, so the cost of the GPUs alone is £32k

[https://github.com/mozilla/STT/releases/tag/v0.8.2](https://github.com/mozilla/STT/releases/tag/v0.8.2)

<comment><USER9> Ah, I see-- not an 8GB, 1-GPU server, but an 8-GPU server. That does make a bit of a difference, changing the cost from a new workstation to functionally a piece of capital equipment. Still, I'm not sure that my point about equipment costs falls short--even at (call it) $40K, you're probably talking less than 3 months of the company's all-in cost for the developer themself, amortized over multiple years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see a lot of what appears to be over reaction... doesn't sound like deepspeech is ending in the first part of the announcement

" Most of the technical changes were already landed, and we see no reason not to ship it. We'll be releasing 1.0 soon and encourage everyone to update their applications"

So looks like at least 1.0 is near and still gonna happen... I know these seem like dark times for Mozilla but I believe they will survive. As I recall the decline of Netscape was a pretty dark time and out of that came Phoenix - <USER2> Firefox and here we are today... I'm sure Mozilla and many of the great projects will survive

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't know what is going to save Mozilla, really I don't. I just wish there was a way to "reach" them and discuss how we the internet community could come to an agreement about what they could do to derive value we would pay for.

It's not for a lack of trying on their part for sure, but it feels like just using their browser isn't all there is to it any more

<comment><USER13> What would you personally pay Mozilla for?

<comment><USER7> Firefox, Rust, and privacy.

It'd be really awesome if they could develop a search engine or phone (I know they tried) that had an open standards / web-compatible development kit.

I want an anti-Google / anti-Apple. Something we own and can extend. Something that doesn't sell our data.

I'd also like to see Mozilla doing lobbying. Partnering with the EFF. We've strayed so far from the bright and open Internet of the 90's and 00's. It's depressing to think about how locked up and proprietary it's all become.

I'll buy Mozilla / Firefox merch. I'll pay a subscription.

edit: Talk to Shuttleworth. Fold Ubuntu in. I'll buy a Mozilla phone and a Mozilla laptop.

<comment><USER14> I feel bad for doing a "me too" comment, but you've _nailed_ exactly my thoughts on the subject. I feel like Mozilla hasn't really tried something like this. Every time it gets suggested, it quickly gets shot down (by other internet commenters) as "can't be done" and "wouldn't generate nearly enough money".

Well... maybe not with that CEO salary.

<comment><USER7> Mozilla can model itself after Microsoft somewhat.

Provide a development stack (they're experts at Web and Rust). Make themselves the go-to shop for developers in that realm.

Sell them on an OS and editor with support. Partner with Ubuntu. Hell, I would even reach out to Nadella and see if they'd be willing to work with Mozilla on hedging against Google. Mac is becoming locked down and kind of unpleasant to develop on/for. Mozilla could win this.

Block all the advertising and tracking. Build a Spotify-like news aggregation service you can access from your Mozilla subscription.

Build an email service like Hey and a file backup service like Dropbox. It's too bad Zoom bought Keybase, but perhaps Chris Coyne wants a new gig?

We should team up to beat FAAMG. Most of the FAAMG actors are actually quite damaging to open source despite benefiting from it greatly.

<comment><USER12> This all sounds to me like capital intensive businesses against entrenched players where even the not so average consumer would likely not do more than pay lip service to it unless there was some secret sauce to this that was more compelling to the options

They neeed a good out of the park product in those markets to make any real headway. Too idealistic.

My only thought on this is that they should pivot to be like algolia , focus on Firefox being a reference implementation browser and seek their expertise to the other vendors, maybe. It's one of the few verticals I can think of that would work strategically Without them having to pivot into things they have no experience with

<comment><USER9> Do they? I mean, most of these vendors are already competing, and unlike Firefox, they're not necessarily competing for the average Joe, but technical users who often have different priorities.

Those are also services that groups are used to paying for already, which means if they could eat the start-up costs, even at a reduced scale, they could make a profit at even a slight premium for things that they _already_ do very well, and go from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know of other open-source projects in the speech-to-text space? DeepSpeech was one of the most promising projects, especially the latest versions...

<comment><USER16> There are a lot of open source projects in this space. DeepSpeech is actually one of the outsiders (they are not represented well in the academic community), and also not quite competitive to other software (at least last time I checked).

E.g. some very active projects are:

* Kaldi ([https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi/](https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi/)) obviously, probably the most famous one, and most mature one. For standard hybrid NN-HMM models and also all their more recent lattice-free MMI (LF-MMI) models / training procedure. This is also heavily used in industry (not just research).

* ESPnet ([https://github.com/espnet/espnet](https://github.com/espnet/espnet)), for all kind of end-to-end models, like CTC, attention-based encoder-decoder (including Transformer), and transducer models.

* Espresso ([https://github.com/freewym/espresso](https://github.com/freewym/espresso)).

* Google Lingvo ([https://github.com/tensorflow/lingvo](https://github.com/tensorflow/lingvo)). This is the open source release of Googles internal ASR system, and used by Google in production (their internal version of it, which is not too much different).

* NVIDIA OpenSeq2Seq ([https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq](https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq)).

* Facebook Fairseq ([https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq](https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq)). Attention-based encoder-decoder models mostly.

* Facebook wav2letter ([https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter](https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter)). ASG model/training.

* (RETURNN ([https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn](https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn)) and RASR ([https://github.com/rwth-i6/rasr](https://github.com/rwth-i6/rasr)), our own, although this is currently free for academic use only. It is used in production as well. Supports hybrid NN-HMM, CTC, end-to-end attention-based encoder-decoder, transducer, etc.)

And there are much more.

You will also find lots of ready-to-use trained models.

<comment><USER17> Can you run audio files through any of these or do they only support audio from microphones?

<comment><USER10> At the point of them taking in input to process, audio that comes from a microphone or comes from a file is basically just a series of numbers and is the same. So there's no barrier in terms of feasibility.

Whether they're all set up to do that "off the shelf" is a different matter but it should be fairly straightforward to add this to any that lack it and because they're open-source anyone could do a bit of Googling etc and find suitable code to adapt to do it. I know DeepSpeech definitely can take audio from files directly as input as I've used it that way before, and I strongly expect many (or possibly all) of the others could too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Between this and Servo I guess Mozilla is just giving up on relevance. That really sucks.

<comment><USER19> That's what got them in this mess in the first place, fifty pie in the sky projects to be relevant instead of focusing on Firefox or just saving revenue aggressively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I work with Mozilla's DeepSpeech every day. Mozilla's STT is critical to the survival of important indigenous languages throughout the world.

I sincerely hope we can help make this project continue and that Mozilla can help us do that.

Ensuring indigenous languages have digital representation is essential to their survival. Speech recognition and synthesis are a vital part of that. Indigenous communities are often ignored by Big Tech because they bring little financial value to their bottom lines, but financial bottom lines are not everything. Culture is more important. Open source tools like DeepSpeech allow communities to build the tools they need for themselves.

Māori have been working to help build tools for te reo Māori, and our project is at the forefront of using open source tools like DeepSpeech to revitalize the Māori language. The core of a good speech recognition system helps us in many practical ways, such as improved transcription, support for pronunciation, correct announcements in public transport, correct information on maps and in many other ways. We may well continue to support and use DeepSpeech if the project can continue.

But there are also many other projects in other countries in the world who may follow on - such as the Kabyle people of Algeria who are using DeepSpeech, or the Mohawk nation in North America who have been looking into it.

By the way we are working on our web presence but for now this quick one pager gives some idea of the work we are doing - [https://papareo.nz](https://papareo.nz).

<comment><USER8> Is your current data public? Do you have sufficient amount of untranscribed data (1000+ hours)? We could help you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are they still collecting data for Common Voice, or is it both projects that they're terminating?

<comment><USER8> CV is also in some not quite clear state

[https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/mozilla-org-wide-updates- imp...](https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/mozilla-org-wide-updates-impacts-on- common-voice/65612)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ugh this is a deep gut punch, as this is one of the most interesting recent projects Mozilla was working on in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yikes. All this because they refuse to trim the fat at the C-level. A company can't be profitable by only employing overhead. They'll all be forced to take the ultimate pay cut when Mozilla closes up shop.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was hoping DeepSpeech would lead to in home cloud-less "Alexas". Just ask me for a subscription on it and productize it please.

<comment><USER8> There are many cloud-less Alexas already, a good one is rhasspy [https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), it is not based on deepspeech though.

<comment><USER10> In the repo/docs, it suggests that DeepSpeech is an option for some languages (English & German). Haven't tried it, but with recent(ish) performance improvements in DS it can run on somewhat less powerful computers than used to be the case.

Other options for similar assistants that can also use DS are Mycroft ([https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft- ai/customiz...](https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft- ai/customizations/stt-engine)) and DragonFire ([https://github.com/DragonComputer/Dragonfire](https://github.com/DragonComputer/Dragonfire))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> DS is by far the easiest to use/most promising ASR library/kit/thing I've used; really hoping it keeps going

</comment><comment><USER26> Are there other foundations like mozilla we can donate to? For initiatives that are in the interest of the public? The Apache foundation is all I can think of but they focus on corporate use projects.

</comment><comment><USER27> Really a shame. I find so many of Google's STT quirks infuriating enough I'd love a robust alternative.

</comment><comment><USER28> Where does it say DeepSpeech is on hold? I don't see that anywhere.

<comment><USER29> Submitted title was "Mozilla to put DeepSpeech project on hold". We've replaced that with the article title per this guideline: " _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't editorialize._" [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER30> I guess that explains why I was under the impression the project was being shuttered after reading the comments, but not the actual post yet.

The actual forum post just says they don't know anything about the future of DeepSpeech yet, for those doing the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Mozilla let politics take over its corporation to the point where it's basically a far left extremist group now that's relying on semi-bribe funding from Google.

There's no technology left anymore.</comment>


Facebook's next big media move: Comments - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20030106-36.html <comment><USER2> Facebook already has a "plugin" for commenting, so I'm curious as to how -- if at all -- this will be different.

[http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/commen...](http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments)

<comment><USER3> Or how it'll be superior to Disqus.

<comment><USER4> Disqus already has the added bonus of not showing my profile picture to the world.

<comment><USER2> With the pervasiveness of Open Graph (nee Connect) I'm not sure it'll necessarily have to be "better" than Disqus in order to win its marketshare

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook once again trying to be the foundation on which all communication and exchange is based on.

<comment><USER6> For better or for worse is certainly up for debate too. On the one hand, closed systems suck and these valuable comments could get locked out of search engines. On the other hand, I've seen article commenting go through the roof with a simple Disqus include. Ease of sign-in and uniform appearance probably has a lot do with it.

It'll be interesting to see how they implement this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> According to Facebook, they've been testing it on their Developer and Facebook blog. I remember seeing it last week and thinking, "Oh, I've never seen that Facebook commenting system before".

Example: <http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=486790652130>

</comment><comment><USER8> Hasn't this existed for over a year now?

<comment><USER9> Exactly. I really don't know what the news is... Also, having Disqus is better since users can still do anonymous commenting

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They should (try to) acquire Disqus.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do you think that Facebook starting to add more and more features that people might find creepy (it could take a while) can negatively impact its progress?

</comment><comment><USER12> All the more reasons to comment less on the websites.</comment>


Chevron Is Trying to Crush a Prominent Climate Lawyer - <AUTHOR> https://earther.gizmodo.com/chevron-is-trying-to-crush-a-prominent-climate-lawyer-a-1844685508 <comment><USER2> DuPont did something similar in West Virginia with Teflon waste.

Mark Ruffalo made an excellent movie about it.

Dark Waters trailer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY)

The way public opinion, journalism, and justice work in America, unless Ruffalo makes a great movie about the "Amazon Chernobyl", Steven Donziger is going to spend a lot more time in his apartment, and Ecuadorians are not going to get that $9.5 billion.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...except that this guy was convicted of corruption, in US court. And while this article tries to insinuate that judge Kaplan was corrupt...the conviction was upheld on appeal:

> In 2014, after a full trial before Judge Kaplan, Donziger and the other > defendants were found guilty of engaging in conspiracy and criminal conduct.

> "Donziger and the Ecuadorian lawyers he led corrupted the Lago Agrio case. > They submitted fraudulent evidence. They... falsely presented [a damages > assessment] as the work of the court-appointed and supposedly impartial > expert, and told half-truths or worse to U.S. courts in attempts to prevent > exposure of that and other wrongdoing. [They] wrote the Lago Agrio court's > Judgment themselves and promised $500,000 to the Ecuadorian judge to rule in > their favor and sign their judgment," Judge Kaplan found. "If ever there > were a case warranting equitable relief with respect to a judgment procured > by fraud, this is it."

> The ruling was affirmed by a decision issued by the Second Circuit Court of > Appeals in August 2016, with the appellate court finding "no basis for > dismissal or reversal" of the district court's judgment, noting that "the > record in the [case] reveals a parade of corrupt actions… including > coercion, fraud and bribery, culminating in the promise to Judge Zambrano of > $500,000 from a judgment in favor of the [plaintiffs]."

So...it seems like he probably did engage in corruption to secure the original verdict.

<comment><USER4> The article also states that this Ecuadorian judge later admitted he had lied about the bribe, and has met with Chevron 30+ times before the trial.

<comment><USER3> The judge admitted that before the appellate court ruling:

[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160808006005/en/U.S...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160808006005/en/U.S.-Appeals- Court-Affirms-RICO-Judgment-Lawyer)

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neye7z/chevrons-star- witn...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neye7z/chevrons-star-witness- admits-to-lying-in-the-amazon-pollution-case)

The appellate court could have and would have considered this, and decided that it did not reverse the finding of the lower court.

<comment><USER4> Isn't then the court statement illogical? The judge admitted he lied, yet the appellate court states that they uphold the original verdict because Dozinger bribed the judge?

<comment><USER3> Probably worth reading the actual appellate court decision:

[https://theamazonpost.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/08/CA2-Opi...](https://theamazonpost.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/08/CA2-Opinion.pdf)

Notably, their appeal didn't even challenge the factual findings of the lower court with regards to their own corruption. So, there isn't even any real dispute about that. They did obtain the verdict corruptly, what they attempted to challenge was the legal authority of the lower court to overturn the Ecuadorian decision, and the appellate court rejected that.

<comment><USER2> Any thoughts, darawk, about the "more than 16 million gallons of crude oil, 80 times more oil than was spilled in BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster."? You do know that the oil wasn't "spilled" in the Amazon forest, don't you? It was placed in unlined pits, which were never rehabilitated.

<comment><USER3> I think it sounds like a bad thing, but it also seems that Chevron claims to have remediated it, and it's a little unclear what the real facts of the situation are at this point.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, and if I'm following all this correctly, part of the basis for the US court rulings is that the Ecuadorian court-appointed experts found that Texaco (now part of Chevron) had in fact remediated the first few sites that were inspected, and that the lawyer in question apparently got around this by using extremely dubious methods to get the court to cancel the remaining inspections and appoint a single "independent" expert instead who secretly let the plaintiffs write their report. The "controversial discovery process" seems to have turned up a whole bunch of e-mails and video records of this happening, and if I'm understanding the ruling correctly, Donziger even admitted to a lot of this in his own testimony and depositions to the US courts.

I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's a bad sign when your attorney doesn't want documents disclosed to the court because "the effects are potentially devastating in Ecuador (apart from destroying the proceeding, all of us, your attorneys, might go to jail)"... and then that e-mail gets obtained by the court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm struggling to see why this is a "Prominent Climate Lawyer" \- this case is about pollution, not climate.

Not that I'm defending the fossil fuel industry. They've always played dirty with cleaning up their messes (see also the mining industry, who use the same dirty tactics).

I get that there's a connection because Big Oil. And Climate Justice, kinda. But this is a pollution lawsuit.

The danger is that if we only oppose pollution if it's also about climate, then we won't fight when it's "just" pollution. We need to hold their heads to the grinder for polluting the places they operate in, because the money needs to be spent cleaning those places up. Which is also a danger - if any wins from this get diverted into fighting climate change, then who pays to clean up this mess?.

Or maybe it's just a journalist trying to spice up a story. Again.

<comment><USER7> When you use the word "pollution" what is that is being polluted. It's the climate and one of it's components. So it's totally reasonable to be both.

This is pretty insane mental gymnastics to say that a lawyer working on things related to pollution is not working on things related to the climate.

<comment><USER6> No, the climate is a specific thing. It's not affected by localised pollution. You can pour as much oil as you like into any given lake, river, jungle, desert and you're not going to affect the climate (unless you subsequently burn it, of course).

It is pretty insane mental gymnastics to say that everything related to pollution is also related to climate change. These are two separate Environmental concerns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Donziger was recently interviewed on the Chapo Traphouse podcast[0]. His case sounds utterly bizarre, almost like how Judi Bari was deemed a suspect herself when FBI put a bomb in her car[1].

[0]: [https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/418-the-cool-zone- fe...](https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/418-the-cool-zone-feat-steven- donziger-41119)

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

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm pretty confused by the article's handling of the case against Donzinger. As they note in the middle, there's been a ruling upheld on appeal that he's a fraudster, and that he faked evidence and paid bribes in his earlier case against Chevron. If that ruling is accurate - and the article doesn't really attempt to argue that it isn't - why does the author put any stock in what he has to say?

<comment><USER4> > Through a controversial discovery process, Chevron obtained, among other > things, Donziger's private diary entries. But the company's central piece of > evidence was the testimony of their sole witness: Alberto Guerra, a > disgraced Ecuadorian judge who'd been removed from the bench over > allegations of corruption and who had accepted hundreds of thousands of > dollars and other benefits from the company. After meeting with Chevron's > lawyers 53 times, Guerra testified that Donziger and his team had offered > the judge in the original trial a $500,000 bribe and had ghostwritten the > 2011 decision against Chevron. In a related case three years later, he > admitted he had lied in his testimony.

Maybe because of the above?

<comment><USER9> Maybe, but again, the article doesn't really explain. Is this the author's research, a statement the author was able to confirm, or just Donziger's unconfirmed characterization of how the case went?

<comment><USER4> Maybe if you read the article and follow the provided links, it would be revealed to you ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TikTok 'Is Getting Facial Recognition' for China, Official Warns Americans - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/07/15/tiktok-trump-warning-facial-recognition-data-sends-china-ban/#6921d0e82dea <comment><USER2> Facial recognition in Douyin (Chinese version of Tiktok) is real: a livestream was interrupted after a "foreigner" appeared for a minute [https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828](https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828)</comment>


Building a Serverless CMS Using AWS and Hugo - <AUTHOR> https://nickmchardy.com/2018/03/building-a-serverless-cms-using-aws-and-hugo.html <comment><USER2> This looks great! Imagine the author may not even know it hit HN.. if the author sees this, please consider open sourcing to GitHub etc!

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice, the screenshot looks neat. Is this the tool you built? Is this available as open source project?

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally did not build it. But you should be able to contact the author of the blog post on their blog and ask them for more details.</comment></comment>


HTC and Nvidia Give Major Boost to High-End VR - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/03/26/htc-vive-pro-vr-headset-nvidia-gpus/ <comment><USER2> I can't wait until prices come down for all this stuff. The future of entertainment sure does seem bright.</comment>


When flat design makes sense - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jogofwar.com/when-flat-design-makes-sense

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a short overview of how we graphically designed Jog of War, a strategic running game (real life and all) that we've been building for the past few weeks. We got the idea at a hackathon, where we also won, and we received crazy good feedback at the event already, so we knew we were onto something. We're steadily showing more of the game as we go along, but if you'd like to know more, shoot me an email.</comment>


Tell HN: Twitters stupid age blocks - <AUTHOR> So, I setup a new Twitter account for a new site of ours (https://diceroll.app) and have been configuring it for a few days and it kept nagging for a birthday...
On the nag it said it doesn't need to be an actual date of birth, can be a pets birthday day or the launch of the business etc.
So we go for the site launch date.
Goes in - says profile complete and then immediately blocks the whole profile for being under 13 years of age!!! Now requesting a scan of my photo ID to be sent to support - wonder how long that will take to process!
Moral of the story - don't listen to the profile not complete prompts on twitter! <comment><USER2> Pro tip: make up a fake birthdate for yourself. Use it anywhere that requires one.

Your mom's birthday with your year of birth. Your birthdate with month and day reversed. Etc. Use your own birth year - there's rarely a good privacy reason to mask that.

In cases where there is (can't think of any good ones, tho), always choose something over 21. That way you won't run into age restrictions.</comment>


Ask HN: Successful projects that weren't received well on HN? - johnx123-up Motivated by this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19260700 that talks about Redis, Dropbox, etc <comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't know an answer to it, but it would indicate to what extent the wisdom of the HN crowd is a wisdom one should follow.

Edit: I'm listing projects already talked about in the link of OP for convenience.

Bitcoin first time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793)

Bitcoin second time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852)

Redis: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494649)

Summarizing from other comments (yep, I'm bored):

ReactJS: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5789055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5789055)

AirBnB: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426120)

DuckDuckGo (arguably): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460877)

Dropbox (seems to be received quite well? Hmm...): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

Researched but turned out to have good responses:

Github: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124553) \-- query: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=github&sort=byDate&prefix&page...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=github&sort=byDate&prefix&page=8&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1170288000&dateEnd=1234483200)

<comment><USER2> > Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that > anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.

Not entirely inaccurate :)

<comment><USER3> It's true that not everyone has absolute faith in it, but there are quite a lot of people who have quite a lot of faith in it.

<comment><USER4> The claim was that no one would have any faith in it though ^^

<comment><USER5> "No one" in casual claims is not the absolute quantifier ("absolutely no one").

It just means "very few people".

Else we could never say "no one" in casual conversation for anything, because even the vilest/stupidest/most paranoid idea still has one/some proponents.

(And by "even the" I mean, "most", not "absolutely each and every vile/stupid/paranoid idea has one/some proponents").

<comment><USER6> Arguing the semantics is a moot point in this instance. Bitcoin was once transferring about $5bn on-chain daily and hovers over $1bn today. By comparison Western Union moves $80bn in one year.

The original comment was unequivocally wrong. People obviously trust it.

[https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction- volu...](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction-volume- usd?timespan=all&daysAverageString=7)

[https://corporate.westernunion.com/annual- report/highlights....](https://corporate.westernunion.com/annual- report/highlights.html)

<comment><USER5> Each day ~5 trillion dollars are moved.

Doesn't that mean that Bitcoin remains irrelevant -- (and 5 times less relevant today than when it was $5bn/daily).

So much for the future of currency...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AirBNB: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426120)

<comment> reading-at-work > You know, I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but this site should use it for > vetting. You don't know much from a name, picture, and some attributes, but > in all honesty I'd be more inclined to trust someone (at least to not be a > psycho killer) after looking at their drunk pictures and wall posts than > anything any central authority could issue.

Quite a prophetic reply, I gotta say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> HN is about as far from representative of the "typical user" as you can get. No reason you should think that the opinion of people here means much with regards to any specific project or idea.

<comment><USER9> If you ask me right now, I would still say that Twitter is a stupid product that no one will use because I still don't get it.

<comment><USER10> It's basically an RSS feed of people rather than sites. I get a lot of tech and programming info from it, as well as networking with high profile individuals.

<comment><USER11> Please elaborate about getting the tech and programming info. I never thought that was possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I dont know about HN but I remember CmdrTaco's famous review of first iPod on its release in 2001: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

For those who don't know, CmdrTaco is the creator of Slashdot, the previous HN.

<comment><USER13> hey, some of us still read /.

<comment><USER14> Yes, all six of us who prefer to read news a day late

<comment><USER15> It'd be very interesting to see the financials of a dwarf star like Slashdot.

What does it take to keep it running? How many people are still employed by them?

It has been over a decade since I last went there.

<comment><USER16> I tried logging in the other day. For some reason, the page linked from the reset password email was completely broken. I reached out on Twitter, but it remained like that for days. I'd be surprised if they had even one full time staff for the site.

I'd say Slashdot is sustained purely on inertia. Pretty sure it's just drifting towards the Sun and destined to blip out of existence eventually.

It's a shame, but HN has clearly supplanted Slashdot as a place for nerds to congregate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On just a small side note to remind our selves: Projects that didn't receive well in HN doesn't necessarily mean that HN didn't find it promising/useful or ignored it. It could have been posted at times when participation is low (e.g midnight), for example, so nobody actually saw it. Or people simply just forgot to upvote it, and it went unnoticed in the flood of too many other submissions.

I remember that I posted an article that I wrote to HN someday, and it got only 10 votes. Just a day later, some other guy posted MY article and got around 320 votes. I think it's just luck sometimes.

<comment><USER18> Sometimes just title rephrasing does wonders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> DuckDuckGo was roasted when it was initially introduced to HN (mainly for the thought-to-be silly name IIRC).

<comment> http-teapot I love DDG but I think it's a bad name for a brand.

Saying "DuckDuckGo" in a conversation takes time and using the acronym "DDG" makes it sound like some kind of arcane product that only tech-savvy people uses. It's a bigger problem with internationalization.

I wonder why they haven't rebranded to "duck" since they purchased "duck.com".

<comment><USER16> It might feel weird to say out loud, but it's definitely memorable.

Everyone I've referred to DDG could recall the name instantly a few days later.

That kind of recognition is important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> React.js. OMG what a shitshow that was.

<comment><USER21> For the lazy, mind linking to the thread when it first came out?

<comment><USER22> From another comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5789055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5789055)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Define "success" and "didn't receive well in HN".

I'd argue most of the most interesting projects I've ever seen are actually not successful. AKA they were received well, but weren't successful.

I'd argue, in most cases, the least well received are actually solving problems and not "cool". Take an enterprise product that automates some process, wont be well received, but may be worth billions.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd guess the majority of them weren't initially received well. It seems it's kind of characteristic of truly good & innovative ideas that they at first seem like terrible ideas to the majority of people (as once noted by Paul Graham / Sam Altman or some other famous entrepreneur, can't remember who exactly).

</comment><comment><USER9> It may have been a reddit thread, but I remember saying that GitHub seemed like a terrible idea and I had no idea how it could be a viable business. Honestly, I'm still not sure why anyone pays them for their enterprise services.

</comment><comment><USER25> Adblock Analytics: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662793)

</comment><comment><USER26> Precisely what are you looking for? Projects that were negatively received, or projects that nobody cared about?

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems to be both, when I look at the discussion he gave as an example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Redis

Dropbox

<comment><AUTHOR> How is Dropbox received badly? The second most upvoted comment said: "This is genuis."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

<comment><USER28> Some of it is negative, though, like the first. Although I think the main reason people bring it up is because the first point of the first comment is pretty funny/infamous:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite > trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and > then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this > FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Gosh, that's some awkward phrasing. "Popular projects that weren't well- received by HN" would sound much less jarring. To see "received" being used in the active voice is far too royal.

<comment><USER30> No need to be harsh, they might not be a native English speaker.

<comment><USER31> No need to be harsh even if they are a native English speaker.</comment></comment></comment>


Open-Sourcing Rearview: Real-Time Monitoring With Graphite - <AUTHOR> https://techblog.livingsocial.com/blog/2013/09/30/open-sourcing-rearview-real-time-monitoring-with-graphite/ <comment><USER2> At my company we've been using Graphite and StatsD for nearly two years now, we rely on it heavily for tracking performance and troubleshooting issues. We rely on Icinga, Pingdom, NewRelic and other tools to alert of us of problems.

Often, when things have gone really wrong (DoS, internal network issues, app errors, disk full) the affected machine(s) stop reporting to graphite (or under-report data). We get alerted by monitoring the services, not the stats.

Being alerted about low or unusual values might be helpful in some cases, but based on my experience, it would too noisy. Usually when something bad happens, we anyway investigate Graphite and analytics tools to understand the impact on traffic and KPIs.

I could see Rearview being useful for some cases, but not as a replacement for real monitoring and alerting tools.

<comment><USER3> In my currently non-existent freetime, I'm a Graphite co-maintainer (check github). If you have any improvements or suggestions, please feel free to send us pull requests. The current pull requests are a bit of a mess, but I blame myself and will be getting around to merging a ton of them "real soon now TM".

<comment><USER2> Thank you for your work on Graphite. For all it's UI strangeness and quirks, it is a great solution that a lot of people love (myself included).

I'll peek at the pull requests and see if my company might be able to contribute some help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Server side graphs didn't work out for all our monitoring use, so we don't use graphite. You should make a version that works with istatd :-) [https://github.com/imvu-open/istatd](https://github.com/imvu-open/istatd)

<comment><USER5> I'll definitely check that out! I'm also thinking we may need to add support for a time-series database as Graphite does have its limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks really polished and definitely a great idea. I can see why you chose Ruby for the scripting of the monitors, being able to evaluate that code in a predefined binding can be quite powerful, especially with the aid of helpers being pre-defined as well.

Why not a full ruby stack, or was the "live" scripting done after the initial inception?

<comment><USER5> We have always used Ruby for the scripting (we're predominately a Ruby shop so this was key for future adoption.) The very first mvp for this tool was individual Ruby scripts running against Graphite and being scheduled via cron. The first real backend scheduler was built in Scala, but for various reasons we've converted to Rails/Puma/Celluloid running in a VM using Jruby. The monitors themselves run in an MRI sandbox for security purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure I'm ready to abandon a custom monitoring environment consisting of a shell environment, screen, ssh certs, lugubrious quantities of /proc/, and a fair bit of gnuplot. Seems to me thats all you need? Why commit to a Ruby install for an operator console?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure lugubrious means what you intended it to mean. :) At any rate, see my reply here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6646402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6646402) for a sampling of things Rearview brings to the table. The tl;dr is that it's not a NOC tool, it's more for process monitoring whether that be application processes, engineering processes, or business processes. It also does provide a central location for anyone to see the state and history of an application or business unit.

<comment><USER7> >The tl;dr is that it's not a NOC tool, it's more for process monitoring whether that be application processes, engineering processes, or business processes. It also does provide a central location for anyone to see the state and history of an application or business unit.

Ah. I've usually just used email for that. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mh- this looks fantastic. thanks for releasing it.

the UI is quite polished

<comment><USER5> Your welcome! We did a second feature release of our Ruby version today that has even more UI goodness. Basically we've added the ability to group categories of monitors under one dashboard. You can then switch between categories using carousel controls or direct from drop down. We're hoping to open source this version soon and crossing our fingers that the Ruby version will see more collaboration from outside developers.

<comment> mh- sounds really cool. looking forward to trying this out</comment></comment></comment>


What was it like to work in Silicon Alley on 9/11 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wwwac.org/wtc/911archive.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing that most of you reading Hacker News were actually kids on 9/11\. At the time NYC had a new tech scene, but it was going through the worst of the dot.com crash. WWWAC was an early networking group in NYC that brought together coders and creatives to explore what was then the new medium of the web. While they had meetings their mailing list was a hub of the community. So by reading this list you can get a sense in real time what what was going on that day, the day after and the day after that.</comment>


A math-aware search engine, enable the ability to search mathematics online - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/approach0/search-engine <comment><USER2> This is great! Now please extend it so that I can type in a system of equations and have it search the whole of the literature :)

<comment><USER3> Appreciate your feedback, could you illustrate a little more and show me what you mean by "a system of equations" and "the whole of the literature"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really interesting!</comment>


What my 11 year old's Stanford course taught me about online education - <AUTHOR> http://gametheorist.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/what-my-11-year-olds-stanford-course.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+GameTheorist+(Game+Theorist)

<comment><USER2> A lot of these course systems seem to overemphasize the real-time component. It strikes me that almost all of the negatives were the result of this kid trying to "catch up" to the schedule, which was of little benefit to him since he (like the vast majority of participants, I'd imagine) couldn't participate in the real-time elements. The way they're trying to encourage these rigid course schedules just seems unnecessary, anti-learning. They could create wikis with FAQs, addenda, videos of hangouts and vastly expand the impact of each course by orders of magnitude.

If anything, it looks like Coursera and edX actively bury the finished courses. I wonder what Khan Academy's impact would be if he'd gone with this approach.

Of course, this just reveals the conflict of interest - these institutions sell degrees, so they aren't necessarily excited about offering an easily accessible, thorough directory of courses.

<comment><USER3> Known deadlines help people schedule things. I've found them helpful.

<comment><USER4> This is what I always hated about school. My mind knows when it ready to take in certain kinds of information, but working on someone else's schedule leaves me trying to do just that at non-optimal times. The results end up being much poorer than when I'm able to control when learning happens.

With that said, I realize that everyone has widely different learning styles. Maybe these new digital classrooms have room for employing different techniques to personally cater to each and every individual?

<comment><USER3> Udcaity seems to have a course with deadlines and then then when that is completed the same course without deadlines.

You would just have to wait for the second run of any course to get the learn at your own pace track.

<comment><USER5> I took CS101 the first time around, which did have hard due dates. Now I'm in CS253 and the homeworks are much more flexible. They still have dates, but they are more for when the solutions are posted, and homeworks can be submitted after that. I think the actual grading will be on the final project. I like this method much better, as I have been in the same boat, falling behind because life gets in the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a lesson for _all_ online videos:

> The most important button for video lectures is not 'play' but 'pause.' > Students can always choose to pause at a point and, say, absorb a slide. > What that means is that when you are creating an online lecture, you can > build this option in and go fast. This is something that the Khan Academy > have already worked out. But that Stanford course was still in the old > style.

<comment><USER7> Yes, When I did he stanford course I just skipped from slide to slide and backed up if the slide was unclear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of the OP's comments about online education should be read critically by a lot of the teachers and professors out there who are currently experimenting with a "flipped classroom".

Short version: in a flipped classroom, you do the fixed content before the "lecture" period, and then during the "lecture" you do the "homework" in the prof's presence, with feedback, comments, and interaction. (There's a lot more to it; if you're curious, go look it up.)

The problem as I see it is that a lot of the "flipped classroom" advocates see the ideal pre-class prep as just video-recorded lectures: do exactly what you used to do, except in front of a video camera. I think that the flipped classroom has a lot of merit and have incorporated some of its ideas in my own teaching, but I really feel like the people videotaping their lectures are really missing the point and need to read this blog post for some of the many reasons their approach is problematic.

</comment><comment><USER9> A bit off topic, but something i've been wondering for a while. Imagine for a second (and it's a bit of a stretch) that a majority of the worlds population had the same tenacity as this young 11 year old. Imagine the world used these new tools for online education, and imagine the amount of people who understand & can apply advanced mathematical concepts that today is the domain of graduate students increases by several orders of magnitude.

How does the world change? Will we simply speed up the process by which we maximize value in all known sectors? Or does something new happen?

</comment><comment><USER10> Is no one else awed by the fact that an 11 year old kid was able to partially understand a college level course on game theory? Is he an especially gifted child, or am I underestimating the capabilities of kids?

<comment><USER11> It wasn't until 11th grade phyiscs that anyone bothered to explain what derivatives and integrals _are_ , let alone how to calculate them or what they might be good for. Let me reiterate: it took until high school physics, twelve years into my math education, before someone showed me that calculus is the best/only tool for answering questions about _nature_ , and that all the algebra crap matters because you can't do calculus without it.

Fourth-grade me had intuitively latched onto the idea that a curve's slope must itself have a slope. Limits (at least 11th-grade precalculus level limits) would have been well within my grasp in elementary school. In "helping" my dad with a basement remodel, I had actually wanted the area of a shape bound by a curve, but had no idea how to proceed. I developed an elementary understanding of recursion in my PHP and Python-hacking days (elementary and middle school - no time for that now) and had no trouble with time-complexity, object orientation, or introductory functional programming. _NONE_ of that was so much as hinted at in school until sophomore year.

I don't know why we treat these ideas like dangerous weapons whose existence can only be hinted at until one comes of age.

I am a much better thinker than computer. Because my experience with "math" was years of drilling arithmetic, doing long-form multiplication and division without a calculator (WTF?), converting between forms for lines and parabolas, finding the x- and y- intercepts, plugging and chugging the quadratic formula, simplifying/solving nasty algebra, etc, I hated it. Nobody bothered to show me the point, I got sloppy, and now I'm sitting here with A-es and B+es throughout high school math, 660 on the SAT math section, 26 on the ACT math section (not outrageously difficult conceptually but a high-pressure speed trial), and no shot at any decent university's computer science program.

I think society loses a lot by making elementary/middle-level education about drilling exercises instead of engaging students with ideas to think about with the mechanics treated as secondary. Especially at the elementary level when kids are still naturally curious and have time and energy left over after school/homework to think and process. If I'm exceptional, my grades and test scores don't show it - I think a lot of kids could have handled substantially more on the ideas front.

Also: Shortly after learning to read in kindergarten, I was reading well above "grade level." Either I was innately gifted or "grade level" is pathetically low. I don't mean to disrespect the education experts, but it seems I've been helped orders of magnitude more, even at 8 years old, by the ambient presence of public radio, reading "grown-up" books and news _I found interesting_ , and participating on internet forums than by identifying subjects and predicates or regurgitating plots onto tests. (Forced practice of composition is good - I've seen it help good writers get better, but I've _never_ seen a bad writer improve through schooling).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting that none of these criticisms apply to the Udacity offerings. I feel like that team has a more original approach than the university professors who are transplanting their lectures to the Internet.

<comment><USER13> It looks like Coursera is trying to scale rapidly. If you look at the potential course offerings, Coursera has much more. The problem is it's harder to control quality. The Machine Learning course is great, but the Computer Vision is much less engaging.

On the other hand, Udacity seems more focused on a couple of core offerings.

<comment><USER14> Isn't it great that at the beginning the coursera ML course was better than the Udacity AI. And now it seems like the tables have turned. We all are learning about this and the quality of the classes should go up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It amazes me that your 9 year old could distinguish between the ideas and the presentation. :) It's a skill I'm stil trying to make-innate (can't find the word for that).

<comment><USER16> grok

<comment><USER17> Every time I see that word it makes me cringe. It sounds like a disgusting bodily function. I wish we could all decide to let this "word" die in peace.

<comment><USER7> I feel the sake way about "bochs".

<comment><USER17> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochs

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > After all, this is what they were getting in class but could now pick and > choose where and when to attend. They would see the liberation. But for an > 11 year old, there was a more demanding standard and, on many levels, a > standard worth respecting.

This is, in my opinion, the most important point of this entire era of information, accessibility, and everything else. While everyone else is getting grumpy about how the kids are taking all this relatively new stuff for granted, we're ignoring the fact that _these are literally the people who will build "the future"_. People are motivated by what they take for granted– it's the baseline, it's what everyone deserves, and it's what we're responsible for making better _all the time_.

</comment><comment><USER19> I enjoyed taking the 11-year-old's perspective of university style lecturing because it really does force an examination of the established video-ed paradigm. I'm currently taking an online developer's course at Udemy and finding it sorely lacking in some key respects as well. They aren't the same issues as those with videotaped lectures, but in the end it shows that people have a long way to go before the new online medium is properly exploited. You have recorded lectures, structureless YouTube style videos, and 'gamification' of learning all vying to find that sweet spot of applied individual education. I just wish it was figured out already so I could learn development more efficiently...

</comment><comment><USER20> > But then if you think about it for two seconds you have to wonder why we > want a good signal of these students' ability. This is not assessment for > accreditation so who cares about getting such incentives right? What one > surely wants are problem sets that signal to the student whether they had > mastered the material or not

First, I think their business model (talent discovery and job placement) depends on good assessment of students' ability. At least, this is Udacity's business model[1].

Second, I think that the OP's assumption that this is not for accreditation is wrong. I think they do want Coursera's statement of accomplishment to be valuable on it's own (even if "Stanford" is not mentioned in it). For instance, if I were an employer, I'd hire anyone with Coursera's statement of accomplishment in a challenging class as the Probabilistic Graphical Models class [2]. Of course, the only problem is, as the OP mentions:

> For online courses, no one has cracked how to verify whether an identified > student is the same person as the one doing the assessment.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3859253>

[2] The class started with 44000 students [3]; by the 4th week there were about ~2000 left [4]; my guess is there are around 1000 left after the crazy 5th assignment... Though, One may argue that these statistics in part are due to rough edges and cryptic instructions in some of the programming assignments and quizzes.

[3] [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-01/daphne- kolle...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-01/daphne-koller- brings-the-world-into-stanford-classes)

[4] according to the published class' 4th week quiz statistics.

</comment><comment><USER21> The new crop of online courses is awesome, but what's even more awesome is imagining how much they can (and will) improve in the next few years.

Coursera's current production quality, style, and platform leaves much to be desired. Andrew and Daphne should realize that flipping the classroom is not enough. The whole point of flipping the classroom is that most learning happens _outside_ the lecture hall. In an online context, this means that the emphasis must be on creating engaging and useful exercises and a vibrant online community. It also means that lectures have to be _far better_ than those delivered in the classroom. Taking your old powerpoints and inking over them while running screen-capture software just doesn't cut it. Ask Vi Hart.

In addition, Coursera classes are run mostly within the framework designed for a university course -- complete with rigid schedules and limits on collaboration (dictated by honor code). If my goal is simply to "learn some subset of X", not "learn all of X in a given time frame and get tested on it", this is all unnecessary baggage.

When Udacity completely separated itself from Stanford a few months back, I thought it was a risky move putting them at a disadvantage. Right now, Udacity is producing better content. When we come to a point that it is the quality of education that matters and not the branding, they might be significantly ahead.

<comment><USER22> Is it possible that this is simply a personal difference? I love Daphne's lectures. They're short enough to be to the point while still making concepts understandable. I'm currently going through the "preview" of her PGM class. I, of course, don't have access to assignments or any assessments, but I still find it quite engaging.

In fact, the thing I like least of school is the repetitive homework, so this works well...for me. And perhaps that's the most important thing here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My favorite part is the kid using what he learns:

For school, the kid goes on the streets of Toronto to raise money for cancer research. He notes that a homeless man has likely already found the most attractive location to raise money (near the subway). Then, he uses backwards induction to infer that the homeless man will leave if he begins collecting for a more worthy charitable cause in the same location.

<comment><USER7> How is that backwards induction?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The kids feelings reflect my own. After the high standards I got used to thanks to Khan, I expected more of the same and was sorely disappointed. Most of the stuff on Coursera is not better than reading a book unassisted. In most cases, it's worse. Udacity fares much better, they've taken tips from the Khan book and tried to fit the medium instead of pointlessly replicating the university experience online.

</comment><comment><USER25> Side note: small gray text on a white background... I hope my fellow bloggers know better than to do this.

</comment><comment><USER26> Totally not relevant... I read this as "what my 11 year old Stanford curse taught me..." and had to click to see what a Stanford curse could be.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming, my apologies for this station mis-identification.

</comment><comment><USER27> _It is not simply the case that the elite institutions will be able to take their existing courses and pop them online. More will need to be done and lectures will have to be rethought_

I really liked what he said about online education design. The potential exposure of a university course to hundreds of thousands more students than before means that their quality will be under more intense scrutiny. Ultimately, I think that's great and hopefully viewership can pressure professors to construct more engaging lecture videos.

</comment><comment><USER28> It actually has a couple of very good points. I know that faculties are actively considering introducing on-line courses. It's a good moment to cast in opinions and shape it. Does anybody else have comments on good/bad sides of on-line education?

My note would be that there seems to be a clear difference between the courses which are lecture-based and the ones which are exercise-bases (later being the lest frequent ones)</comment>


Ask HN: Know anyone who makes money selling anti smartphone addiction software? - <AUTHOR> I am bothered by our current smartphone addiction. Plus I noted that a even though I spend a good chunk of my time on phone, it gives no feedback on whether I should be focusing on 'X' instead of browsing instagram or more reddit.
I believe smartphones (and desktop browsers) should be able to give feedback on our moods based on sites/apps we browse.
Do you know anyone who makes money(lifestyle businesses ok) from selling such anti addiction/quality of life improving products? I looked at a few "minimal" phone launchers with 100k+ downloads, but I do not know how much we make. <comment><USER2> Looking broader, there are markets for products to moderate use of other products.

Nicotine patches - cigarettes Fake meat - meat Gastric bypass - food</comment>