Dumbass Home 2.0. How modern IoT works, how to automate your rented box today - <AUTHOR> https://vas3k.com/blog/dumbass_home/?ref=sn <comment><USER2> That cartoon about Siemens and wires etc...it's actually more horrifying than you think. All that industrial control stuff with MODBUS and SCADA and other brain damage: it has even less security than the IoT junk, i.e. none!

I worked on a safety critical system in which we designed security and fail safe right from the beginning. Hardwired state machine controllers for things that could explode. The hardware engineers think that way (thankfully) so we should too. After I left they junked it all and replaced it with Siemens "HMIs" (very expensive Windows XP systems), fancy process control stuff, and then spent even more on fancy consultants every time they wanted to make a change. But at least it was familiar. (I could still access the systems long after I'd left). At least it explains why the real hardware guys (as in actual iron) don't trust the silicon jockeys or software guys: what they have access to us crap.

Bad as home automation is, it is, incredibly, better than your run of the mill industrial automation!

<comment><USER3> > All that industrial control stuff with MODBUS and SCADA and other brain > damage: it has even less security than the IoT junk, i.e. none!

Right... because industrial automation networks should never be connected to publicly accessible networks without security in between. PLC's and sensors don't need internet or intranet access so why would you connect them?

The problem is Industrial engineers aren't IT or security experts and that's why we have security issues. Plus they're under constant pressure to get production running and meeting deadlines. Next you'll say "but what about stuxnet! that proved that even air gapping isn't secure enough!" Yup. It also proves that using insecure general purpose operating systems (hint, windows) is stupid as well. But it's cheap and familiar so here we are. The problem isn't with the protocols or hardware, it's ignorance with a side of laziness topped with corner cutting.

Also many industrial protocols don't run over tcp but instead use raw ethernet packets and have dedicated protocol processors running to keep latencies down to microsecond levels for flipping IO bits. An example is Beckhoff's EtherCAT. So security does not apply to those networks and would be difficult to implement.

> Bad as home automation is, it is, incredibly, better than your run of the > mill industrial automation!

Apples to oranges.

We recently bought a machine which has an internal automation network between a Siemens 840d, a Siemens safety PLC and a DSP controller from Adwin. Real time communications is over Profibus and CANopen. between that machine and the rest of the world sits a humble PC Engines box running a custom FreeBSD image that gives them secure remote access to the machine. I'd trust that more than any home automation built on webshit.

<comment><USER4> _> between that machine and the rest of the world sits a humble PC Engines box running a custom FreeBSD image that gives them secure remote access to the machine_

What hardware + hardened OS would you recommend for jump boxes? OpenBSD, Linux, pfSense?

<comment><USER3> At work I build, upgrade and maintain existing machines for in house processes so I don't use jump boxes. I have pfSense running on a PC engines APU2 for the company lan, isolated visitor wifi, and isolated 3rd party machine network. We're a small company so I do some IT and contract the rest to an IT pro friend of mine. I do unixy stuff and automation, he does windows stuff. So I would recommend the BSD's as they have been pretty well battle tested in that arena, OpenBSD being my top pick if rolling your own or pfSense if you want easy. PC Engines hardware all around and I order direct.

As for our 3rd party machines with jump boxes: I view jump boxes as a security risk if directly connected to corporate lan as they can bypass firewalls. So I kept it simple and created an isolated jump box network from the pfSense that gives them 24/7 remote internet access with zero ability to see anything on the company lan.

Our Internal machines are on an isolated network, all hardwired and have static IP addresses, zero internet access. The engineers frequently have to write new CNC programs so I make it easy to share files while isolating the networks; I bridged them using a Debian server running a SAMBA server with two network interfaces. One is connected to the company lan, the other to the dedicated machine lan. The file server has a single share for the engineers with RW access and each machine gets RW access only to its directory in that share. Operators go to the P (program) drive and retrieve the programs. There is no network bridging or routing between the two networks. As far as they know, it's just a file server. That network also terminates in our office and we can connect to it for programming and troubleshooting.

One Idea I've been toying with is developing an internal jump box that allows our machines to connect to the corporate lan giving engineers file access while maintaining network isolation. That way I can ditch the second network and go DHCP with reservations all around.

<comment><USER4> _> There is no network bridging or routing between the two networks._

If a fileserver vulnerability helps an attacker to take control of the host, they may be able to move traffic between the network cards.

Might be better to have two file servers. The less-exposed server could periodically connect to the more-exposed server to sync files. Would not need open ports on the less-exposed server.

<comment><USER3> This is very true but I look at it like this: If they make it that far, they're in our network so we're thoroughly p0wnd. It's a compromise as air gapping was generating too many complaints from engineers and operators until the boss had enough and said fix it. so we compromised and fixed it.

<comment><USER4> If one-way data replication is sufficient, a DIY data diode would provide strong isolation, [https://www.sans.org/reading- room/whitepapers/firewalls/tact...](https://www.sans.org/reading- room/whitepapers/firewalls/tactical-data-diodes-industrial-automation-control- systems-36057)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite quote from the article:

"Remember, S in IoT stands for Security."

<comment><USER6> what is the "h" for?

<comment><USER7> Hope. Or hell. Depends on the protocol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only way to win is not to play. It is completely daft to me that all these devices require an Internet connection to function. I will never allow something like that into my house (along with home assistants like Alexa).

I have achieved a decent level of automation using simple timer switches (they have ones that adjust on/off times based on your latitude), completely disconnected motion sensing lights, and by simply reading the manual on how to program my thermostats.

I have considered using ZWave to enable me to use some cron jobs or openHAB, but I will not use WiFi.

<comment><USER9> Not all, no.

HomeKit and ZWave don't require an Internet connection. I use a bunch of ZWave devices connected via Ethernet through a Raspberry Pi with hassio and a ZWave USB adapter - controlled from my phone when it connects to my wifi network.

To protect your wifi network, make sure you have a decent gateway in place. OpenWRT does a great job, but there are many others as well.

<comment><USER10> Phillips Hue lights also don't require an internet connection, I've tested mine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love this. Someone who recognizes the cesspool of modern tech and actually gives reasonable advice on how to sort of fulfill the promised future.

It's too bad people forgot how to make and sell a thing, and instead are selling a (surprise!) business model.

</comment><comment> T3OU-736 The version in Russian is significantly more entertaining, though it requires native-speaker level at the language to appreciate it fully.

<comment><USER12> Now I'm sad. If translation even slightly resembles original version then I'm sad that I'm unable to read it in Russian due to not knowing language. I like this style of writing, another blog I know where author has slightly similar style is dedoimedo.com

<comment><USER13> Nice recommendation, thanks. Also a great blog name. "Dedo i Medo" literally means "Grandpa and the Bear" in a bunch of slavic languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wired vs wireless... With anything securityrelated, it should really be wired. At least cameras. It's very, very easy to just run a simple $2 sniffer (eg an esp8266) that sends de-auth packets and thus kicking devices off the wifi.

In our neighborhood, we've had quite a few thefts of skiboxes (the ones that go on top of the car) recently, and several say the security cameras seemed to be unconnected at the time, hinting at some use of de-auther/jammer.

<comment><USER15> That's just not practical for most people. Wiring a house is difficult and/or expensive. It's also not necessarily an applicable argument for z-wave/zigbee (there may be similar attacks, though, I'm not sure).

There's also "hybrid" options for usecases like the "unconnected camera": a wireless camera that has local storage, for example.

<comment><USER16> > That's just not practical for most people. Wiring a house is difficult > and/or expensive.

That's because we do it stupidly. Why are we running wires in walls where we can't ever get at them? Trim and quarter round could double as conduit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I run Domoticz. While development on, say Home Assistant is a lot more active, Domoticz is far from dead! I chose it because it plays nice with the latest Xiaomi Aqara hub and sensors, as opposed to HA.

</comment><comment><USER18> This article has a cynicism that feels born of a ton of experience. I've only gone as far as a couple different colored lights (Hue and LIFX). And I think I might be replacing most of them with dumb bulbs when I move to a new place in a couple months. They're just not worth the hassle.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I went all-in on smart bulbs (Philips) and they are just impractical. I do however recommend dimmable dumb bulbs along with smart switches like Lutron. They are easy to install, "just-work" and give you 90% of what you need.

<comment><USER20> Why are the Philips smart bulbs impractical? I was thinking of buying a bunch of them for use with google home.

<comment><USER10> Good question. I've never had any problems with mine. The official Phillips app has some limitations, such as insisting on using their cloud when you're not on your own LAN. But there are many alternative apps and it's easy enough to write your own. I like one called Hue Pro, which does let you connect from outside without using the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What an entertaining read. I tried it and then gave up on home automation a long time ago. The reason why home automation can't be made 'smart' is because it lacks the ability to create precise situational awareness. Ie, so much of the 'automation' relies on human input. I started on a side project that would use cameras and facial recognition to provide 'eyes' to the home automation system. I planned to use Home Assistant, that way I can keep everything running without an internet connection, but the software was simply not ready. Lots of missing documentation and constant change deterred me. I'm hoping Home Assistant has gotten better over the years.

</comment><comment><USER22> Oh my god, as someone who works in the consumer IoT space this is hilarious AND informative for people who don't know how MESSED UP this space is. OP expect a donation when I get home tonight.

</comment><comment><USER23> Entertaining and informative article. Great State-Of-IoT in 2019.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't know why this article keeps saying HomeKit doesn't do bluetooth.

[https://developer.apple.com/support/homekit-accessory- protoc...](https://developer.apple.com/support/homekit-accessory-protocol/)

>[HomeKit Accessory Protocol] supports two transports, IP and Bluetooth LE.

<comment><USER25> And this article doesn't even mention Bluetooth Mesh. Yes, it's still very new and yet to be deployed to the extent of Z-Wave and ZigBee, but with the ability to directly connect to smartphones Bluetooth Mesh could overtake those protocols in a few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is an amazing post. Every couple of years, I look at the massive clusterfuck that is the IoT ecosystem, and decide it's not worth the bother. This post nicely encapsulates why.

</comment><comment><USER27> "fancy case to hide that you have no live" hahaha

</comment><comment><USER28> i moved house recently. people keep buying me IoT housewarming gifts.

i'd rather receive a potato with a telnet chip jammed into it because at least i can turn it into gnocchi.

<comment><USER29> What is a "telnet chip"? Quick google came up empty.

<comment><USER28> not a technical term, had hoped that was clear.

<comment><USER29> Words have meaning, though, don't they?

<comment><USER28> yep. will try to write better jokes in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is the most accurate description of IoT I have ever read.</comment>


Using Google to Find the Best StackOverflow Result - <AUTHOR>

Google's search engine is better than SO. Here is how I search google to find the best results on SO:
#this limits the google search results just to the SO website
site:http://stackoverflow.com/
#searches for an exact match of a keyword
site:http://stackoverflow.com/ "nested forms rails"
#searches for synonymous words
site:http://stackoverflow.com/ *nested forms rails" <comment><USER2> But tags. If I type in [android] in the stackoverflow search box, it gives me all questions tagged android. This doesn't work if I use google.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks! Simple stuff that some of us know, but I'm still not in the habit yet of using it. Great reminder!

</comment><comment><USER4> I always just type stackoverflow.com and hit tab in the chrome address bar.</comment>


Bank of Canada increases overnight rate target to 1 per cent - <AUTHOR> http://www.bankofcanada.ca/2017/09/fad-press-release-2017-09-06/ <comment><USER2> The commonwealth countries are all facing a property bubble (Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc). The household debt levels and property prices didn't taper off nearly as much following the 2008 US housing crisis and has pretty much continued unabated: [http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/stephen-punwasi/real- estate-bub...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/stephen-punwasi/real-estate- bubble-commonwealth_b_12385078.html)

Which is fascinating to consider that the Bank of Canada, et al, have let this happen for so long and are only reacting now...

By artificially keeping rates near 0% the idea was to 'stimulate' the economy by making capital freely available, so for example, banks can more easily loan money to businesses generating long term economic growth and add new jobs. But the side effect has been that retail banks were incentivized to hand out cheap mortgages and the public was incentivized to speculate on the 'hot' property market.

If this bubble doesn't deflate smoothly this will be yet another very expensive side effect of mainstream monetarist policy.

<comment><USER3> I believe the official stance of the bank of Canada is inflation is below target hence the low rates being acceptable for so long.

What I don't understand (and I hope someone can shine some light on!) is the basket of goods they use to measure inflation doesn't seem to be very impacted by low interest rates - therefore how will the low rates increase inflation? i.e. banks will only lend to me at below 5% if I'm buying fixed assets like a house - which isn't included in the inflation measure. If I want to borrow to buy groceries, gas, or the other things they measure for inflation I would be borrowing at >19.99%. Therefore all low rates does is cause the price of fixed assets to skyrocket. But those assets are tremendously difficult to convert into consumer spending - i.e. You sell your now inflated house, but rather then spending that "profit" (due to the value of your house increasing) on more groceries and gas most people just roll it into another expensive house as they gotta live somewhere. I guess ultimately there will be a trickle down where everything will get more expensive, but seems like it would be a very long process...

<comment><USER4> Another thing I don't understand about the basket of goods approach to measuring consumer prices is how we're getting inflation figures which are so low. Since goods we buy priced in USD have gone up massively in 2-3 years due to a falling Canadian dollar (electronics, smartphones, computers, SaaS, etc.), the only way the basket stays at 2% YoY growth is if that's offset by other things falling in price.

But, anecdotally, home services, energy cost, health services, food and clothing are _all_ more expensive now than a few years ago, the only exception I can think of off the top of my head is gasoline, which has fallen.

Edit: This StatCan paper ([http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/62-553-x/62-553-x2015001-eng.pd...](http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/62-553-x/62-553-x2015001-eng.pdf)) explains CPI in detail and it seems like the basket is thorough and well- thought-out. Appendix B outlines all the components and their weights, and both homeowner costs, rents, and mortgage interest costs do factor into the shelter calculation.

<comment><USER5> The cynic in me suggests that the basket might intentionally be chosen to hide the fact that the cost of living is going up. Lots of people with money have incentives for inflation numbers to be low. ex: COLA raises are common and benefit if the CPI hides the true costs

Ex2: many government benefits are tied to "inflation" . If your personal basket inflates faster than their example basket then they can get away with paying you less than promised (in spirit).

<comment><USER6> I do not appreciate random unfounded conspiracy theories like this comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those not following Canada's economy. Two weeks ago no one was sure if they'd hike the rate again, and no one thought they'd do it so quickly (though it seemed likely they'd do it ~oct/nov).

But, Canada posted exceptionally strong growth numbers (4.5%) at the end of August, which kind of made this very likely.

Also, the government just sold bonds that mature in 2064 (at 2.2%) and has indicated that it might issue more "ultra-long bonds" in the coming months.

All this to say, money's going to stop being cheap.

<comment><USER8> Why would any entity buy bonds that when matured will not have kept up remotely with inflation? Obviously I'm missing some key idea here, I just have no idea what it is.

<comment><USER9> Government bonds are seen as ultra-safe, comparable to cash, and while 2.2% is not great it's better than 0%.

Maybe they think inflation will stay low. My sense is that at the moment there's a lot of money sloshing around chasing not-so-great returns, so returns on everything are low - capital is subject to supply and demand like anything else.

<comment><USER10> > Government bonds are seen as ultra-safe, comparable to cash, and while 2.2% > is not great it's better than 0%.

And much better than anything < 0%.

<comment><USER11> swiss and some german bonds have been known to sell for negative yield because losing a small gauranteed amount is better than losing a lot

<comment><USER12> How would you lose value in cash in a way that you wouldn't with a bond?

<comment><USER13> When you're talking about billions:

If you hold it physically, you have to store it and secure it, which costs money.

If you deposit it in a commercial bank, it'll be less safe than German bonds.

<comment><USER14> Wait, what? Isn't most money electronic anyway? How does it cost (O(n)) money to keep an entry in a digital record?

<comment><USER15> > keep an entry in a digital record

A record where, though?

Bank "clearing" means that ultimately a bank is keeping its money either with other banks or with the central bank. They're records, but not necessarily interest-bearing, and keeping it with other banks is _not_ risk-free.

<comment><USER14> How about keeping it with the central bank?

<comment><USER13> ECB deposit rates are also negative.

[https://www.ecb.europa.eu/explainers/tell-me/html/what-is- th...](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/explainers/tell-me/html/what-is-the-deposit- facility-rate.en.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those like me who didn't know what the over night rate is: "The overnight rate is the interest rate at which major financial institutions borrow and lend one-day (or `overnight`) funds among themselves; the Bank sets a target level for that rate."

[http://www.bankofcanada.ca/core-functions/monetary- policy/ke...](http://www.bankofcanada.ca/core-functions/monetary-policy/key- interest-rate/)

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure I understand "target" in this context. Does it mean "a suggested rate" or "lowering/increasing the current rate over time toward this target" or "the actual rate"?

<comment><USER18> It is a rate they attempt to achieve through their actions. They can influence the rate, but not outright set it due to market conditions.

Think of it like setting the temp on a thermostat. You are attempting to achieve a temperature through the use of a device to put energy into a system, but there are other factors that contribute to the actual temperature achieved.

<comment><USER19> Just to be clear, the Bank of Canada can control the overnight rate if it moves outside of the "operating band" by directly intervening in the market with overnight repo and reverse repo operations [1].

[1] [http://www.bankofcanada.ca/2015/10/overnight-repo- overnight-...](http://www.bankofcanada.ca/2015/10/overnight-repo-overnight- reverse-repo-operations/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Informational note: The notion of fixed rate mortgages does _not_ exist in Canada. You can lock in for about 5 years, but otherwise your mortgage rate floats with prime.

If prime rates rise, borrowers can be on the hook for large amounts of defaults as incomes fail to keep up with higher payments.

(canadian housing market exhibits higher sensitivity to interest rates)

<comment><USER21> In Canada, banks offer fixed and floating rate mortgages; the mortgage rate is always prime + some %.

If you get a fixed-rate mortgage, you're locked in to your rate for 5 years regardless of how the Bank of Canada changes the prime rate. This has been the product of choice for Canadians for the last several years because it protects you against rising interest rates, and rates have had nowhere to go but up.

If you get a floating-rate, your rate moves when the Bank of Canada moves the rate. This is desirable if you think the BoC is going to lower interest rates.

Self-plug - I made a tool to look at how sensitive your monthly mortgage payment is to movements in interest rate: [https://pycal.github.io/real-time- ammortization/](https://pycal.github.io/real-time-ammortization/)

<comment><USER22> Yeah, but locking in a rate for 5 years is so different from locking it in for 30 that it seems kind of misleading to say "both places have fixed-rate mortgages." I'm actually a little unclear on the specifics here; is it that you have a balloon payment and the typical thing is to get another, smaller loan to pay that off?

<comment><USER23> Technically, yes, you are on the hook for a balloon payment. In practice, however, you would get a new mortgage for the remainder owing. You can, of course, be screwed in the event of rising interest rates or collapsing property values.

Unlike the US, there are hefty fees for early payoff of the mortgage, so if you were in the position to pay it off, you would probably want to wait until the end of the current mortgage (depending on lots of different factors, of course).

<comment><USER22> OK, got it. Frankly, it seems like a system that makes owning a home less attractive, but I suppose US policy has been driven by the idea that home ownership should be encouraged.

<comment><USER23> Other differences: Canada does not have a mortgage interest tax deduction nor does it have low/no down payment mortgage options. Generally, the more conservative approach to banking makes things more sane and is part of the reason that Canada rode out the global financial crisis relatively unscathed.

<comment><USER22> Well, it also makes people less likely to own homes, and I'm not really convinced you couldn't have a relatively cautious system that still had long, federally backed mortgage terms or tax deductions or even relatively low down payment options. The big crash was preceded by lots of outright fraud.

<comment><USER23> I got curious, so I did a google search. It appears that the home ownership rate is very similar between Canada and the US. At the moment, it is higher in Canada as the US is still recovering from the effects of the mortgage crisis. That said, I don't disagree with you. The US has made a policy of promoting home ownership, more so than other countries. That has potentially come with adverse side effects. On the other hand, Canada's relative banking conservatism has arguably prevented Canada's own housing bubble from bursting which could be, itself, a bad thing.

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't have guessed the rates would be similar. That's interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Relatedly, the Toronto housing market that kept shooting up even as the US hit its 2008 housing crisis now have hit their top: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-06/toronto-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-06/toronto- housing-market-continues-slowdown-with-august-price-drop)

<comment><USER25> Toronto's property market is insane. I am still seeing condos (e.g. Gibson near North York center) being priced at 600K+ for 1+1 and larger units well over 1 million dollars. Not sure who can afford this.

Places as far as Vaughan and Milton are expensive. We're talking decent detached houses (slightly above starter home) for over 1 million.

<comment> 52-6F-62 It's just as bad or worse downtown. I rent in Liberty Village (paying a blessed 300 dollars a month below market and crossing my fingers it stays that way for now), and around here studio units can start in the mid 500's. The larger units easily run upwards of 2 - 4 million dollars if you go for the trendier, older buildings like the old Irwin Toy factory.

Rents are feeling it as well. I think the numbers just came out yesterday or today and an average 1 bed is about $1950. I've seen one bedrooms rent in this neighbourhood for upwards of $4000 a month -- again for the trendier buildings. And this is by no means the upper limit.

I remember approximately 2 years ago, when the average attached houses in the downtown were ~600k (usually 2 or 3 bed, kitchen, living, dining, basement, yard, garage). They hardly exist for anything less than 950k

Back then the average 1 bed rented for 1200 - 1500 a month. That's a long lost dream now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This will be very interesting to watch. The Toronto real estate market has already started to correct. Prices are down 20-30% seconds nice earlier this summer. A ton of people eager to buy "before prices go even higher" are getting creamed.

Interest rates going up will only make this worse.

Hold on tight!!

<comment><USER27> Prices aren't down 20-30% - you're referring to average sales price. Big difference. It's been attributed to the sales mix (people opting for condos/townhomes)

<comment><USER28> They are. You can check the prices by categories. Detached houses -20%, condos are still holding up. Houses went from 960K to 720K since April

<comment><USER25> Sorry. Your info doesn't match the same reality I live in. As the parent said, sales went down (don't know about mix). Prices for detached homes have not. We were seriously putting offers in March and got outbid for INSANE sums. e.g. 720K offer in Milton .. property went for 100K over. In Mississauga, homes listed for 850K went for 950K-1million. I am looking at data now and it has slowed but not gone down yet.

<comment><USER26> Real estate is local. I've seen multiple listing in the Toronto area, SFH, that haven't sold and are delisting at 20-30% below comparables from 3 months ago.

<comment><USER27> I call BS unless you provide proof.

<comment><USER29> Unless I'm reading the reports wrong, according to the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) the average price of a detached housed in the "416" (Toronto) area in July 2017 was $1,304,288. In August it was $1,191,052.

So that means a -8.7% change from July to August alone.

Numbers for recent months - Detached houses in "416" area code: August: $1,191,052 July: $1,304,288 June: $1,386,524 May: $1,503,868 April: $1,578,542

[http://www.trebhome.com/market_news/release_market_updates/n...](http://www.trebhome.com/market_news/release_market_updates/news.htm)

<comment><USER30> You are talking average selling prices going down.

We are asking about examples of actual prices of homes going down. They are not the same thing.

The price of homes can actual stay flat or even go up while the average sold price goes down.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I get that - I was responding to a comment above about the "sales mix" between detached, townhouses, and condos. The data I referenced directly contradicts the assertions made above that the price declines were due to shifts in the "sales mix" between those three types of homes. Sure, you could argue that the prices declines were shifts _within_ the detached housing market, but I haven't seen anyone provide data on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Quick summary:

Overnight rate directly affects the prime rate, the rate at which commercial banks loan to their least risky customers. In the US, prime rate hovers 3% above overnight rate (federal funds rate). You can see that relationship here: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=eY9Y](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=eY9Y)

In basic economic theory, when interest rates go up, the economy slows down. Higher interest rates encourage saving/purchasing safe assets, and make lending/investing in risky assets or new business ventures more expensive. Banks generally make less loans that fuel direct economic activity when interest rates are higher.

Context/So What:

Canada's economy showed strong signs of growth and low unemployment, so the central bank decided to bump up the interest rate a bit while the data supported the decision to "cool off" the economy.

OK, so commercial loan interest rates will rise 0.25%. Not a huge deal for majority of the economy.

More importantly, the central bank is slowly gaining back the overnight rate as a tool for monetary policy. Many central banks are unwilling to drop the overnight rate below 0%, effectively taxing banks for the reserves they are usually mandated to hold with the central bank.*

If the Bank of Canada can continue to bump the overnight rate up to traditional 4-5% level, it can then cut the rate again to spur economic activity in the case of a downturn. The closer the overnight rate is to 0%, the less effective the rate is as a monetary policy tool.

Personally I believe it will be a long time before we see 4-5% overnight rates again, but overall this is a reaction to good economic news. It happened before investors expected, so the markets are buzzing about it a bit, even though the small bump will probably not have a large impact on Canada's economy.

*BoC actually has no reserve requirements: [http://www.bankofcanada.ca/1997/04/working-paper-1997-8/](http://www.bankofcanada.ca/1997/04/working-paper-1997-8/)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm still learning all the tendencies of these macroeconomic trends...

So, this should mean mortgage loan rates, savings account interest rates, and inflation are all now on an upward trend. Right?

And thus housing prices should begin to curb, since the cost of loans making buying houses more expensive and less appealing, thus lowering demand.

(I've already noticed increasing savings account rates and mortgage rates, so it definitely seems like this is an upward trend, though I haven't seen much curbing of housing prices yet)

<comment><USER33> > and inflation are all now on an upward trend. Right?

Not inflation. Inflation isn't going up much anywhere. It's a conundrum for central bankers. The old model may no longer work.

Normally, when unemployment goes low enough, wages and then prices go up. That hasn't really happened. Instead, house prices (in Canada) and consumer debt are rising.

<comment><USER34> > It's a conundrum for central bankers. The old model may no longer work.

It is (and has been for a while) the goal of the Bank of Canada to keep inflation between 1% and 3%: [http://www.bankofcanada.ca/core- functions/monetary-policy/in...](http://www.bankofcanada.ca/core- functions/monetary-policy/inflation/)

And it is not doing too bad: [https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/inflation- cpi](https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/inflation-cpi)

<comment><USER33> They're raising rates while inflation is at the low end of their band. Normally, they wouldn't do that. Or rather, normally inflation would be going up now that the economy is. My point was that inflation and growth/employment may have decoupled.

This article expands that argument at length: [http://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/the- phillips-...](http://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/the-phillips- curve-is-broken-heres-why-that-is-keeping-economists-up-at-night)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> [http://www.ctvnews.ca/bank-of-canada-raises-overnight- rate-t...](http://www.ctvnews.ca/bank-of-canada-raises-overnight-rate- to-1-per-cent-1.3576893)

> The move, which will likely be a surprise for some, came less than a week > after the latest Statistics Canada numbers showed the economy expanded by an > impressive 4.5 per cent in the second quarter.

> "Recent economic data have been stronger than expected, supporting the > bank's view that growth in Canada is becoming more broadly-based and self- > sustaining," the bank said.

> The rate increase means governor Stephen Poloz has now reversed the two cuts > he introduced in 2015 to help the economy deal with the plunge in oil > prices. The bank said Wednesday the increasingly robust economy shows it no > longer needs as much stimulus.

> Others predicted the bank would refrain from moving the rate out of concern > such a move would drive up an already strengthening Canadian dollar and pose > a risk to exporters.

> In its statement, the bank also said headline and core inflation have seen > slight increases since July, largely as expected. It noted, however, that > upward pressure on wages and prices remain more subdued than historical > trends would suggest, which has also been seen in other advanced economies.

</comment><comment><USER36> Previous rate was 0.75%

</comment><comment><USER37> The exchange rate between the USD and CAD jumped by over 1% at the announcement despite it being widely expected:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDCAD:CUR](https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDCAD:CUR)

<comment><USER38> A hike was expected, but many believed it'd be another month or two, and as such was surprise to many.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Are inflationary measures in an age of technological deflation and rapidly shifting consumer baskets still really a valid view into inflation?

<comment><USER22> Have you stopped buying fuel or food?

<comment><USER39> I don't buy fuel (don't use a car) and aside from the rates set by the electricity provider (essentially a monopoly provider in California) and public transit provider (a city monopoly), fuel costs don't affect me and I actually choose to spend a higher amount with discretion since I moved to the Solar Choice program.

Food is such a small part of my discretionary spend (I buy grains in bulk, specifically quinoa, and greens from the farmer's mart).

Looking back at my spend, the majority of it is in technology that is undergoing massive deflation, or my pet hobby of collecting rare books (neither of which is accounted for in the basket).

I am probably an edge case, but the point remains -- the basket that is set seems outdated. I can't imagine that people are spending as much on food as you think. ex: "USDA data shows that in 2010 Americans spent 9.4 percent of their disposable income on food"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> On a side note, can you believe it's been 10 years since 2008 economic crisis?!

</comment><comment><USER41> So what exactly does this entail?

<comment><USER42> More expensive loans, higher interest rate on mortgages and credit cards. Traditionally saving accounts won't be affected and still have near zero return rate thought.

<comment><USER43> >saving accounts won't be affected and still have near zero return rate

While the big banks have near zero savings interest rates, most of the credit unions and low-fee banks (like Tangerine) have higher rates. I've used Outlook Financial for years, as they tend to have the highest rates (1.7% for regular savings, at the moment).

I don't understand why you say "saving accounts won't be affected", as savings rates are ultimately tied to mortgage rates (the difference between the two gives the bank their profit).

<comment><USER44> "the difference between the two gives the bank their profit"

I don't think this is true. Banks don't lean the money from the deposits.

About, why banks shouldn't increase saving accounts interest, the answer is, of course, profit. They would avoid that so much as possible.

<comment><USER43> >Banks don't lean the money from the deposits.

Credit unions do, and banks have to compete with them. Also, CIBC's chief economist says "Recent history suggests an increase to the overnight rate will translate into a corresponding increase in interest earned from savings accounts", so I think I'll take the word of CIBC's chief economist over an anonymous HN user :)

>About, why banks shouldn't increase saving accounts interest, the answer is, of course, profit.

Credit unions will increase rates, and if banks don't they'll lose profit. That's business 101, and it's why all gas stations have virtually the same price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > Did you know that your browser (Opera ) is out of date?

Erm, thanks... but I'm using Chrome on a Google Pixel?

</comment><comment><USER46> Zzzzzz - wake me up when they hike it to 10 per cent.</comment>


Why I will never, ever, use an Instant Pot - <AUTHOR> http://ovens.reviewed.com/features/how-to-clean-an-instant-pot-electric-pressure-cooker <comment><USER2> Here's a shocker: Things get dirty when you cook and need to be cleaned (sorry, a bit crabby this morning).

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you use disposable cookware?

</comment><comment><USER4> Misleading title.</comment>


Google Scholar Metrics for Publications - <AUTHOR> http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2012/04/google-scholar-metrics-for-publications.html

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to note that the 5th highest ranked publication is arXiv. For those who aren't familiar with it, arxiv.org is an open-access repository of academic papers, mostly in quantitative science. In my field (computer science) it is standard practice to deposit a copy of one's papers in arxiv before submitting them for publication, and arxiv is the place to find the latest research.

There is currently a lot of hand-wringing in academia about open access publications. Everyone wants it, and it is trivial to switch a field to it (machine learning has done so, for the most part), but it requires the leaders in the field to lead the change and they are normally too invested in the status quo. What the high ranking of arxiv suggests to me is that while people maintain lip service to the idea that the (mostly closed) publications are important and the maintain the definite version of a publication, the reality is that no-one gives a damn and goes to arxiv when they want to read something.

<comment><USER3> It's still surprising that arxiv is that high up. You'd think most people would cite the definitive publications, not the preprints at arxiv?

Anyway, given that in some fields _everything_ that's written goes to arxiv, arxiv will [by definition][1] have a very high h-index. The thing is, the h-index was conceived to compare individuals, not journals.

[1]: <http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0508025>

<comment><USER4> Google Scholar also indexes papers that are only published on arxiv, which likely often include citations to other things on arxiv.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So it looks like with this method, if a journal publishes more papers, this will give it more of a chance to boost its h5-index? This probably accounts for the high level of arXiv, and PLoS One beating out PLoS Biol.

One problem with impact factors is the way that a few articles can account for the majority of citations. For instance, a bioinformatics method that is widely used could attract thousands of citations, boosting the impact factor of the journal by a few points. This method doesn't solve this, as it expressly focuses on the top n articles and ignores the impact of the remainder. For instance, PLoS One's score of 100 is because the top 100 articles got 100 citations - it says nothing about the distribution of the rest.

<comment><USER6> That does seem to be the case. I'd be interested in some kind of median- citedness measure as well, to distinguish a venue that publishes 100 high- impact articles a year, from a venue that publishes 10,000 articles a year, of which 100 are high-impact.

In particular, it's not robust to one factor often mentioned in the bibliometrics literature, trivial changes in agglomeration size. Say a set of 200 articles are published by either: 1) a single journal; or 2) two journals, which publish 100 of them each. In each of the hypotheticals, individual articles have the same citation counts. Under this metric, #1 gets a higher ranking, meaning that you can raise rankings without increasing paper quality by just agglomerating journals. (You can even run the two former journals separately inside the new journal if you want, with a two-track review structure, as long as there's only one title on the front page.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's nice to see that Google is adding features to Scholar. There's concern in the library community that it will go away since its not a revenue producing service.

Incidentally, Microsoft Academic Search is pretty impressive so far. They've added many features. They also have an API that is pretty easy to use, which Scholar doesn't.

<http://academic.research.microsoft.com/>

<comment><USER8> I just looked at Microsoft's offering, and while it has a lot of nice features it seems like the citation counts are wildly wrong when compared to the numbers produced by Web of Science and Google Scholar. Perhaps they have not completed their indexing yet. A few other concerns that I have besides inaccuracy are (1) The interface is significantly more cluttered and confusing, and (2) In their decision to auto-generate profiles, rather than wait for authors to create their own, you have a glut of profiles that again are incorrect in the papers that are attributed to them. The chances that a significant number of people are going to go in and curate their profiles seems small, instead of having a limited but accurate collection of profiles, you end of having a majority of incorrect ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are definitely things that skew the index that might not necessarily reflect the quality of the journal. For example, the 20th ranked journal by H-5 index is Nucleic Acids Research (NAR). However, when you look at the H-index articles for NAR, you see that they are dominated by articles announcing or simply cataloging an important database. These get cited very extensively, becuase anytime you use a database you need to cite it, but they aren't what I would call high impact research articles. NAR just happens to be a journal that has a special annual Database issue where bioinformaticists can drop an article describing their useful database.

EDIT: It would be fair to say that since a database is so widely cited it is important. So maybe the index is more robust than I originally considered. But something still seems skewed here.

</comment><comment><USER10> Rob J Hyndman has a very nice review on Google scholar metrics [1]. Here is his ending quote:

      In summary, the h5-index is simple to understand, hard to
      manipulate, and provides a reasonable if crude measure of
      the respect accorded to a journal by scholars within its
      field.

      While journal metrics are no guarantee of the quality of a
      journal, if they are going to be used we should use the
      best available, and Google's h5-index is a big improvement
      on the ISI impact factor.

[1] <http://robjhyndman.com/researchtips/google-scholar-metrics/>

</comment><comment><USER11> The only CS conference/journal I saw on the list was "IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR". That's not the top CS venue I know of.

<comment><USER4> That conference probably has a lot of biology stuff going on and, if you noticed the list of journals, they're almost all biology related. CS is a relatively small field, in comparison.

<comment><USER12> Nope. CVPR doesn't have too much biology in it (it does have a little). It tries to do a bit of cogsci, but it's mostly ML applied to vision. It generally doesn't use applications in the medical field either (there are bigger conferences for medical imaging).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there any reason to believe this h-index method of ranking is a good idea? Why not use PageRank?

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting... how is CVPR the only computer science-related publication in the top 100?</comment>


Irony is ruining our culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/04/13/david_foster_wallace_was_right_irony_is_ruining_our_culture/ <comment><USER2> And as always, something else came along to fill the void: comedy. Shows like "The Daily Show", artists like Louis C.K., and even web comics like "Dinosaur Comics" now do the job irony allegedly left behind of revealing the hypocrisies and absurdities of the modern world.

<comment><USER3> Because you mentioned Dinosaur Comics, I suppose someone needs to find a relevant one and link to it. Like relevant xkcd linking, except less mainstream.

[http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=166](http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=166)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is remarkable how diluted the word irony has become. More often than not it seems that people think "irony" is _serendipity 's evil twin_. The definition of "random" has also suffered a similar impotence by pervasiveness. It is not uncommon to hear casual conversations where the words random and ironic are used interchangeably.

The next word on the semantic extinction watchlist is literally. If you ask google for the definition of literally you are presented with two senses of the word:

      1:         in a literal manner or sense; exactly.
      informal:  used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true.

Sooner than later "informal" will be replaced with "2." and literally will literally mean not literally.

<comment><USER5> Where did the phrase "serendipity's evil twin" come from?

9 results: [https://www.google.com/search?&q=%22serendipity%27s+evil+twi...](https://www.google.com/search?&q=%22serendipity%27s+evil+twin%22&oq=%22serendipity%27s+evil+twin%22)

<comment><USER4> This is just my observation of the current definition of the word. I do not know if I unwittingly stole it from someone. I did not see this result in the list of google hits:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6786082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6786082)

<comment><USER5> It's a striking phrase, but not quite right. ... If you can recognize the way in which it is not quite right, I think you will have recognized the genius of the attempt.

<comment><USER4> I do not understand how my opinion can be judged "not quite right"? This is my impression of the concept people seem to have in mind when they use the word irony. I am not saying this is the definition of irony.

"From what I can tell most people's definition is something between 'serendipity's evil twin' and 'partially related.'" \--dfc[1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6786082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6786082)

<comment><USER5> One may have opinions about opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is all just symptomatic and the informalization of society. Seinfeld was snarky and shallow, but it was ultimately about laughing at social faux pas. We're rapidly running out of things that are morally acceptable but socially unacceptable.

<comment><USER7> Have you tried watching the show Royal Pains? It was hard for me to get through an episode because everyone was just incredibly awkward all the time. I don't think we're really running low on that kind of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have to admit I only made it about half way through this, by which time it seemed to me that the authors had little more grasp of the concept of irony than Alanis Morissette.

Irony is neither cynicism nor snark. It is an indispensable aspect of most forms of written expression; it is almost impossible to write a successful work of opinion or fiction of any length without mastering this classical tool of rhetoric.

Where would Shakespeare be without irony? And what of the ancient Greeks? It's not modern, it is a connection with our heritage.

<comment><USER9> I think you're just nitpicking here. You could replace the word "irony" with "X" and the intentions of the author may come through more clearly. Here's not saying "all irony is bad", he's saying modern culture has been permeated to the core with sarcasm and cynicism, to the point that no one knows what anyone actually wants or likes anymore. It's a call for sincerity.

<comment><USER10> Is it not the case that people are resorting to cynicism and sarcasm as a way to deal with not being wrong? When we're punished for mistakes like we are, doesn't it encourage this testing of the symbolic electric fence to find what's acceptable to another without the commitment?

That's what I see from those people whose personality is like shifting sands that mimics anyone or thing around them to remain safe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- postmodernism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-postmodernism)

I'd hardly say we're in a post-postmodern stage, though... whatever the fuck that means, I'm assuming it's a reactionary stage against postmodernism, which would make it plain modernism.

<comment><USER11> We've been in a post-pomo world since 9/11: see [http://www.bruno- latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I...](http://www.bruno- latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf) if you doubt this. What's odd is someone dusting off the irony-is-killing-us essay template again after a decade of stridency and self-assurance.

<comment><USER12> That's an interesting piece. You can see how some lines of thought have become verboten in respectable society. This era might be considered the Rise of Fear and the Return of Authority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Irony is an exercise in cleverness.

I can speak only about US pop culture, but to consider Stewart and Colbert, clever and amusing as they are, in the avant garde of political thought is scary.

Facile isn't wise, and for some reason wisdom is now (maybe always?) deemed boring.

Too much television, too much Web distraction. Turn it all off. Twitter, Facebook, football, futbol, campaign ads, dot dot dot.

Give me something useful: The Weather Channel and porn, in moderation.

It's difficult to think deeply about complex issues. And arguably meaningless. Still...

Jeez, I'm a codger. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Irony is a sedative. Absurdity requires revolt. Pass the bong. One more hit before I study for finals.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus)

EDIT: Not unusually, I popped off before reading the post. I'm not a DFW fanboy, but I've found everything of his I've ever read to be substantial. Very substantial. He dared.

<comment><USER4>
      > Not unusually, I popped off before reading the post.

Does "popped off" mean that you did not read the linked article and merely used the title as a cue for a freeform writing exercise? And this is not an unusual thing for you to do while browsing HN?

<comment><USER13> "Shit... charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do?"

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/quotes](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/quotes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _" This environment gave artists few choices: sentimentality, nihilism, or > irony."_

I suppose one could call it art to construct a giant synthetic angst generator and bathe in its effluent.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you remember the late 90s well enough, this reached a head with Jedediah Purdy's For Common Things.

We have come so far full circle in 20 years, that Aaron Sorkin quoted Purdy without a hint of irony on his latest HBO show.

This was my favorite response then, and maybe Stein'll do a reprise: [http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,992159,...](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,992159,00.html)

<comment><USER16> You beat me to the punch. Purdy's book has been far too obscure for far too long. He was the first to awaken me to this cultural deviance and I've been stuck with seeing it everywhere ever since. While it may be too simplistic I blame, J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield almost entirely for this plague of irony. I sincerely wish the creepy Salinger had been lost in the war. As a culture we would be the better for it.

When I read For Common Things I thought perhaps it could be the bell weather of change. Instead it was mostly ignored. He was remarkably young and remarkably brilliant when he wrote it and it gave me hope for the for the influence of his generation. Alas...

This article made me realize what it is that I find so absolutely compelling in DFW's works. I find his suicide not the least surprising in light of his remarkable sense of sincerity. How could one with such sensitivities continue in this brave new world of snark.

<comment><USER15> """ I asked Purdy if the book wasn't just an excuse for not having a sense of humor. He said, "That's a pretty nifty little piece of psychological deductionism." I took that as a yes. Then, to make conversation, I asked him his favorite movie. He paused and said, "I like movies, but I don't orient to them with the same sophistication as a lot of folks." """

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Skeptics reject sincerity because they worry blind belief can lead to such evils as the Ku Klux Klan and Nazism. They think strong conviction implies vulnerability to emotional rhetoric and lack of critical awareness. "

The article brings this point up, but I don't think it does a good job of dismissing it. I agree that irony can be harmful to culture, however, I think irony still has a job to do in our culture. There's a lot of people believing a lot of things which they don't have evidence for (religion being the biggest one that comes to mind), and I think having an approach of doubt to things can be a good way to be sure society/it's individuals believe the most accurate things.

<comment><USER18> How is believing in religion different than believing in irony and pluralism?

<comment><USER4> How does one "believe in irony"?

<comment><USER19> When one is sufficiently religious, faith/belief become the paradigm for all mental processes. It becomes impossible to fathom a non-religious capacity of thought.

<comment><USER4> But philosophus' point seemed to be that it was possible for a secular person to "believe in irony." Personally I think it sounds a lot like "I believe in dinosaurs."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "But David Foster Wallace predicted a hopeful turn. He could see a new wave of artistic rebels who 'might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels… who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles… Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.' "

Call me naive but I've thought about this before -- that this oversaturation of irony and the mainstreaming of 20th century-style rebellion could very soon have a backlash in the form of the rise of some kind of fascistic movement among young people.

</comment><comment><USER21> Until art can take religion seriously again, it's a pointless discussion. Great artists are authentic and, sans religion, the authentic position is nihilism: everything else begs The Question.

The authors clearly understand this, at some level, by pointing out the singular value of black spiritual music in american history. But, like most of today's elite, they are unable to look the obvious answer in the face, because it's so horrifying.

<comment><USER22> I find attitudes like this bewildering. I can't imagine being so uncreative as to assert that the only authentic non-religious attitude is a nihlistic one. How hard is it to take the human condition and it's joys and sorrows seriously and at face-value, exalting what we are and might become without resorting to silly supernatural fairy tales. We don't need religion for great art, we need to cultivate our expressions of humanism.

<comment><USER23> Like it or not, religion (or more correctly, spirituality) is a big part of being human, especially when expressed as art. I think ever since the Age of Enlightenment we've made a big mistake in dismissing anything that can't be rationally explained by science as "silly supernatural fairy tales". We're relying too much on our senses and logical thinking, and neglecting feeling and intuition.

<comment><USER24> Logical thinking, in the form of theology, is how you get Western religion in the first place.

<comment><USER23> How so? Religion doesn't seem very logical to me at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For a great counter-argument, see: [http://gawker.com/on- smarm-1476594977](http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977)

</comment><comment><USER26> I may be wrong but somehow I don't think creators/artists read social comment like this and say to themselves "Gosh, he's absolutely right, from now on I'll give irony a miss and head off in a new direction". If they do then I would guess they're pretty derivative and unlikely to produce work deemed to be outstandingly original.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is the font absolutely gigantic for any one else? I get 3 lines per screen on mobile chrome.

<comment><USER28> Yes. If I pinched out it would turn into a normal size, wait a second, and then return to being terrible. I couldn't get through more than a paragraph because of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> These kids these days! Why back in my day...!</comment>


Identify Plants with an App - <AUTHOR> http://www.plantsnap.net/ <comment><USER2> I use the flowerchecker app [http://www.flowerchecker.com/](http://www.flowerchecker.com/) where you have to pay a small fee per plant identification. It actually uses real human biologists to identify the plant.

<comment><USER3> You mean college students?

<comment><USER4> College students are in fact real humans....

<comment><USER5> > College students are in fact real humans....

That is _mostly_ true. The existence of animals with diplomas[1] is the exception to the rule.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_with_fraudulen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_with_fraudulent_diplomas)

<comment><USER6> But having a diploma doesn't necessaraly implies the animal studied in college. So your argument is broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did this for common plant diseases using Tensorflow on Android when learning how to use TF last year. Found the accuracy to be not that great with real world images that are not in the dataset (with a dataset of 50,000 images from PlantVillage). I think there are just too many visual similarities between various plants (especially when taken from various angles) that the network doesn't focus on the right things. Did a short writeup here:

[http://helminen.co/plant-disease](http://helminen.co/plant-disease)

It could work for a subset of plants, or potentially with a much larger training set - but I think NIR spectral/hyperspectral imaging would be the way forward here with more differentiating data points.

<comment><USER8> Not an expert -- would this be a result of training data doing a much better job isolating the subject vs a real world photo that may have other plants in the scene? Not that this is a solution in all cases, but is it possible your results would have improved with better real world pictures?

<comment><USER9> Likely but the whole point of 'AI' is that it should be able to identify flowers that don't look like what it's seen before. If not, it's just a huge lookup table that's like a memory repository.

This is, of course, a critical challenge in data science and is definitely not a trivial one to solve.

<comment><USER8> In some cases these are the goals, but dharma1 said the goal was to identify plant disease. If you can improve your results by taking better pictures then it becomes a tradeoff between training someone to take pictures and training someone to identify plant disease.

I think we have a tendency to treat AI as a silver bullet when we should be treating it as a tool we can use to help augment what we're already doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This product already exists. It's called Google Image Search. For instance, I was actually able to identify the second flower he takes a picture of in the video as Camellia Japonica simply from a screenshot of the video. I'd be blown away if they were able to assemble a better training set than Google. Kind of disappointing, as from the headline I was expecting something based on NIR spectroscopy, like the SciO molecular sensor ([https://www.consumerphysics.com/](https://www.consumerphysics.com/))

<comment><USER11> In fact. There is a better product, Google Goggles - [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.unveil&hl=en)

<comment><USER12> I don't know if the mention was intentional or not, but Goggles is actually dead as a product. They removed it from the iOS app, and the android app is not supported, while staying in the store.

In this respect, as the GP says, image search is currently the best option

<comment><USER13> Goggles (the concept) isn't dead. They moved the functionality into Google Assistant so you didn't need the app. Just hold down the home button so it takes a picture of the camera view.

<comment><USER14> Huh, I had no idea. An Easter egg, almost, as I've never seen this mentioned by Google.

It works ok, send pretty beta right now. I pointed my camera at a business card and pressed the home button. Google Assistant appeared and I asked it to tell me about what was on my screen. It noticed one piece of the address, and brought up a listing for that general area, but there was no way to further inquire into any of the rest of the card.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I should have been more clear. It's moved into the "now on tap" feature, which now links to Google Assistant. You're right though, if you ask what's in your screen it has the same effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A great app, collaborative tools and community around plant identification is the french pl@ntnet [http://identify.plantnet- project.org/](http://identify.plantnet-project.org/) from Agropolis Fondation, Tela Botanica, INRIA, CIRAD, CNRS, INRA, IRD and Montpellier University

</comment><comment><USER16> > Fast forward to today - the tech is available and the team is assembled to > make PlantSnap a reality. With a beta version completed, and 250,000 images > in the database

250,000 images doesn't sound like a large enough training set to be effective on anything but the most common plants.

<comment><USER17> To help others understand why, the "Deep Learning" book, which summarizes current state-of-the-art DL, advises having at least 5000 samples (images) per class for OK performance (equal to non-DL approaches) and 50k to 100k for state-of-the-art. A class here would be a plant species.

So even with 5k samples, the 250k image corpus would only have 50 species, using this rule of thumb. A good engineer could pick up DL and build a system that performs to this standard, because the tricks are all written down in the literature.

If they do better, they either exploit unpublished methods, or researched those methods themselves, with their researchers.

<comment><USER18> But there is a lot of transfer learning between classes. For example, the network may learn to detect "broad leaves" or "red stems" for a common plant. It will then be able to use those feature on less common plants, and require much less training data for them. Transfer learning has been shown to work with just a single image of a desired class.

It's also nice that life naturally fits into nested hierarchies because of evolution. So if you can recognize what family it belongs to, then that narrows down the possible sub families it can belong to. That in turn narrows down the possible clades it can belong to, etc, which narrows down the exact species. You couldn't find a more perfect use case for hierarchical softmax!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We did this [http://www.luontoportti.com/suomi/en/](http://www.luontoportti.com/suomi/en/) a couple of years ago. It is based on an elimination process – you describe what you see and the application narrows down on the options. Works very well in practice, and can be applied to all sorts of indentification purposes in the wild, such as fish, birds and butterflies.

We also gave the image regocnition path a thought but it seemed to be quite a tall order. Hopefully they come up with a novel approach on this!

<comment><USER20> Is there something like this for Android? This app seem to be restricted to iOS.

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately we did not get to the Android App. Maybe some day :)

<comment><USER21> I am almost certain I once installed it and paid for the birds. Even emailed support suggesting a Swedish version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When can we get this for identifying plants/animals/rocks/fungus/etc in the wild? Would love this on a phone when hiking.

<comment><USER23> For fungus you could try [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pingou.cha...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pingou.champignouf) [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/champignouf/id1227854971](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/champignouf/id1227854971)

I made it as an experiment, results vary and can be awfully wrong but it's funny to see the confusions the neural network can make. Funny until somebody eat a deadly mushroom because of me, I guess. I already put plenty of warnings, so fingers crossed, but it's hard to be sure it won't be misused.

<comment><USER24> This is an interesting problem that almost all guide book authors have to contend with, bringing knowledge of a topic may expose people to risk, but I think it's maybe a false conclusion.

It's a given all guides have false information, it then begs the question are guides worse than no guides? I think this can be easily answered more information is better.

You can give people information but you can't understand it for them.

kudos for making the app :)

What do you think your app would identify this as? Carpet mushroom? [http://imgur.com/a/Rqc64](http://imgur.com/a/Rqc64)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A similar app was released a while ago, I'd love to compare the two. For reference: [http://leafsnap.com/](http://leafsnap.com/)

<comment><USER26> thats the one i remember; worked well enough. not a big flora person but was curious and wanted to try out the image rec.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I use this android app for recognizing plants by picture: [http://identify.plantnet-project.org/](http://identify.plantnet-project.org/)

It's made by french researchers I think. It doesn't work perfectly but I did identify a lot of plants I don't know with it.

You can snap multiple pictures of the same plant, for example, 2 pictures of the leaves, 1 of a flower and 1 of the bark, and then use the combination to search. You can also submit your observations to have them identified by experts.

<comment><USER28> It doesn't work very well in Singapore at all. I guess the training set didn't include much from this part of the world.

<comment><USER29> In the app it does say that

      Pl@ntNet only works for the plants of the French metropolitan flora.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Only slightly related, but I've always wondered about an app that told you what crop was growing in the area you were driving through. Often they're recognisable, but sometimes they're not. No business case for it, just to satisfy curiosity.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is very cool. I've been thinking about something similar, but only about mushrooms. Some people in my country pick wild mushrooms and sometimes it's very difficult to distinguish between the edible and the poisonous types. Such application, if existed could save many lives. The same concept could be used for other plants that people gather, like herbs and wild berries.

<comment><USER18> But if the algorithm screws up and gets someone killed you could be sued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Finally, I can identify mushrooms that will kill me and eat the ones that won't.

<comment><USER33> I hope, for the author's sake, the app has robust Ts&Cs ...

<comment><USER26> exactly. something like not resposible for what you do with this information where the info is correct or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've had good luck with plants.usda.gov identifying plants by geographical location. Just use the advanced search, choose the location you found the plant, e.g. state:county, and as much information as you can deduce, flower color, growth form, etc. It'll usually provide pictures and interesting things like whether Native Americans used it medicinally, etc.

</comment><comment><USER35> [http://www.gardenanswers.com](http://www.gardenanswers.com) app has the ability to automatically identify plants. If you can't find your plant, because it isn't blooming or is immature, or just isn't distinctive enough for image search, you can ask a horticulturist for a small fee.

</comment><comment><USER36> Definitely an interesting concept. There's a bit more information on the indiegogo website [1].

Their problems they mention seem to be quite standard for image recognition (scale- and perspective variance), however I could imagine that this could be quite disastrous for plant recognition, given the massive diversity of plants: e.g. a leaf viewed from the side could equally well be a more narrow leaf from a different species.

As they write on [1]: "Our challenge comes from adapting our image recognition platform to recognize different shapes and sizes of the same plants, flowers and trees. We know this is possible, and we are close to cracking it."

[1] [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/plantsnap-identify- plants...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/plantsnap-identify-plants-with- an-app-nature#/)

<comment><USER37> Honestly they don't seem to be that close to cracking it, like at all.

They may be using camera phone images, but they are well framed images of very distinctive features. Trying to recognize a literal tree in a forest is going to be far harder, and recognizing a tree based on a dead leaf (as a photo towards the bottom suggests) can be very very tricky. Also I have to admit to being concerned that adding "any known plant" won't kill accuracy. The more classification endpoints the less likely you are to get a decent result, and already you have to deal with far greater scale differences than are usual (basically it would be like identifying the breed of dog from anything from a full picture to a photo of a single claw).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's a nice idea, but I have a feeling it's never going to be better than human enthusiasts/experts, who you can get to identify plants from photos for free already[1].

I can immediately think of all kinds of challenges that are _really_ hard to overcome: diseased leaves, different seasons, plus all the usual glare/shading/background issues.

[1]: [https://gardening.stackexchange.com/q/9355/3346](https://gardening.stackexchange.com/q/9355/3346)

</comment><comment><USER39> Botantical classification is interesting but difficult. Once trained, it's fast enough, but can "deep learning" be anywhere near accurate enough?

I'd guess there'd be a focus on salient botantical features for classification, and perhaps the human can be enlisted to circle them out. There could be a "twenty questions"-type narrowing down, perhaps using images.

<comment><USER36> Dichotomous keys are the standard in taxonomy for species identification since centuries. It's basically a binary search tree, generated by hand.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single- access_key](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-access_key)

<comment><USER40> Dichotomous keys are mostly useless when you deal with photos. For some reason people always find the most useless chamera position when taking photos to unknown plants.

<comment><USER40> chamera -> camera

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I want do the same for mushroom, because they are hard to recognize. Google images works quite fine.

<comment><USER23> I did it, but the results can be pretty disappointing, I'm still working on improving them:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pingou.cha...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pingou.champignouf&hl=en)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/champignouf/id1227854971](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/champignouf/id1227854971)

ps: any improvement suggestion is welcome!

<comment><USER41> Nice, will give a try. Hope you didn't stole my spot where I get my mushroom :P

Google Image is really working quite good. I made a lot of test. The only problem is about there's TOS. I can easily write something but I don't want to be flagged because I don't want use there API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A pre-order on an app, seriously?

<comment><USER43> This landing page might just be a way to discover if there is any traction on the market without needing to build the actual product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I would imagine a series of questions that you answer about the plant would help increase the accuracy. (Leaf patterns, etc.) Or, at least, whatever answer it comes up with should confirm the defining characteristics.

</comment><comment><USER45> Having recently become the owner of a garden, this looks very interesting. I've been using the myGardenAnswers app, which purported to do the same thing. It's been singularly useless so far, though.

<comment><USER40> > It's been singularly useless

I'm bribable for the job... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I've been using this (free) plantnet app [http://identify.plantnet- project.org/](http://identify.plantnet-project.org/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Glad to see this as it is something I have been interested in for a while. There are some online tools I have tried in the past but nothing that really seemed to work well.

</comment><comment><USER48> or go get a book on plants and you will be able to identify them pretty easy. The guidebooks ask you questions to narrow it down (how many petals does the flower have? for example). you dont need any knowledge going into using one, and you'll learn to observe and appreciate plants more as well through the process of IDing! newcombs wildflower is the go-to for beginners on the east coast but there are many.

</comment><comment><USER49> I love the idea of an app to identify plants, I hate the idea of having to pay to use it... Definitely, I'm not in the target market.

</comment><comment><USER50> I wanted this app for a while, but it didn't seem feasible even with modern ML techniques? Also what do I get out of a paid version?

</comment><comment><USER51> Weirdly, the site disables the normal scrollbar but adds a new one inset, which doesn't respond to SPACE to scroll down.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wanted to do something similar for snakes once, but after some thought it didn't seem like the safest idea.

</comment><comment><USER53> Just a quick note to the site creator- the twitter icon in the footer is linked to instagram, and vice-versa.

</comment><comment><USER54> /r/whatsthisplant FTW

<comment><USER55> Now we need to write an app to post images automatically and distribute a bitcoin bounty (set by OP) based on votes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is really cool. IF only I could find an app that does this with bugs.

<comment><USER57> Why do you want an app with bugs?!

But on a more serious note, I would appreciate that as well, but it might be harder to take a good picture of a bug by which it is identifiable?

I'm always impressed by these type of apps though and would love making one myself

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I trained my kids, first for mushrooms, then for flowers and trees. They are better then any app :). But definitely would love to have an app to confirm our findings sometimes.

<comment><USER59> Train them to find truffle and you got a business.

<comment><USER58> Ha ha, good one. It is good that they love nature and it is nice if there are good companion apps. Some I saw, are not that great, so there is clearly need for more apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I really want this app. That is all.

<comment><USER61> would you pay for it? I also kinda want it, as I get curious when I'm out on a hike, but I'm not sure I'd pay for it.

<comment><USER62> Why not if the price is right ? The biggest obstacle for me is the need to register and create an account not the price itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> WTF 150K of his own money in 5 years? I don't think at a business level this is wise under any circumstances for a bootstrapped project. Unless you have a ton of money to waste and this is your caprice. Of course.</comment>


FESS your CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.fess.me/ <comment><USER2> This is just nice for people really being "paid by the line of code".

I am also certain that someone will do a very convincing benchmark that this actually renders faster.</comment>


Vectrex in a Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.twitchasylum.com/jsvecx/ <comment><USER2> That takes me back! I received a vectrex as a small child, as a discarded toy from my (richer) cousins.

The graphics were pretty different to anything I'd seen before, being vector based, but it was a nice device because it meant I didn't need to hog the family TV.

Their approach for improving the graphics, by providing colour via a transparent overlay was inspired, and lots of fun. My overriding memories of the device are the long-thin controller, which used to be clipped beneath the screen when not in use, tethered by a curly-cable, and the overlay system.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sweet. I wish there was a way to force a keyboard up in iOS however..

I had an intellivision growing up but the vertex always was interesting because I saw one in a store and the graphics were so clean. (Consoles of the last century had very very blocky graphics)

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

Vector displays always fascinated me (drawing the screen by moving around rather than scanning each line)

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

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty cool. I had one of these growing up. It's a bit before my time but I remember getting one with a bunch of games at a garage sale like 10 years past its prime.

Just a heads up, I nearly had a heart attack loading your page. That sound you auto-play is out of control loud.

<comment> mark-r I got a console and a bunch of games when the toy stores started closing them out. Still have them all in the basement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool! I can't wait to show a colleague at work - he worked at Smith Engineering back in the day for Jay and Ed Smith. He worked on a few games for the Vectrex.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks legit. I picked one up at a yard sale complete with games and overlays a while back. So impressive with 1 KB RAM and no frame buffer.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great work, just didn't like the key bindings. W-A-S-D is a better choice than A-S-D-F.

<comment><USER8> ...if you were born after 1976

<comment><USER9> An Apple II reference, I believe. But didn't only the Apple IIe have those arrow keys? [http://www.apple2online.com/web_images/RFP%20Apple%20IIe.jpg](http://www.apple2online.com/web_images/RFP%20Apple%20IIe.jpg)

<comment><USER10> Normally an Apple ][ would use IJKM for movement and space for fire (rarely did games need more than one action button, but control and return were also used for those) On the IIe/IIc which had apple keys, those were also used.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elizabeth Warren: Apple, Amazon and Google trying to 'lock out' competition - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2016/6/29/12060804/elizabeth-warren-apple-google-amazon-competition <comment><AUTHOR> "Google, she said, uses "its dominant search engine to harm rivals of its Google Plus user review feature;""

Maybe not the best example.</comment>


Startup Weekend, Lancaster, PA - <AUTHOR> http://diggingintwo.blogspot.com/2013/01/startup-weeekend.html

<comment><USER2> Nice to see some activity in Lancaster for once. Definitely looking into going as a developer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> growing tech scene... 47 founders make up Startup Lancaster</comment>


Say_what: Using speech-to-text to fully check out during conference calls - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joshnewlan/say_what <comment><USER2> This is the high tech equivalent of drawing eyeballs on your eyelids so you can go to sleep during a meeting.

I do kind of like the idea of dialing into a meeting but saying that you'll be AFK and then just reading the transcript afterward. It seems like it could be a real time saver in those cases where you're not really participating currently but want to keep up with the project.

<comment><USER3> couldn't you be fired for recording people without their consent?

<comment><USER4> It varies by U.S. state...and seems to become somewhat more complicated if callers are all in different states:

[http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and- co...](http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and- conversations)

> _Eleven states require the consent of every party to a phone call or > conversation in order to make the recording lawful. These "two-party > consent" laws have been adopted in California, Connecticut, Florida, > Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and > Washington. (Notes: (1) Illinois' two-party consent statute was held > unconstitutional in 2014; (2) Hawai'i is in general a one-party state, but > requires two-party consent if the recording device is installed in a private > place; (3) Massachusetts bans "secret" recordings rather than requiring > explicit consent from all parties.). Although they are referred to as "two- > party consent" laws, consent must be obtained from every party to a phone > call or conversation if it involves more than two people. In some of these > states, it might be enough if all parties to the call or conversation know > that you are recording and proceed with the communication anyway, even if > they do not voice explicit consent. See the State Law: Recording section of > this legal guide for information on specific states' wiretapping laws._

<comment><USER5> I'd imagine this only applies if you keep the recording. What about hearing impaired people who might use this for accessibility purposes? One would only need to keep it for the following fractions of a second it takes to turn it into text. At that point, it turns into the legal equivalent of notes you write while on a phone call.

That said, IANAL.

<comment><USER6> It applies if you record. Whether you keep it or for what reasons you record are irrelevant.

The legal question is whether text-to-speech qualifies as a "recording" when the audio itself is not stored.

<comment><USER7> My guess would be no, as speech-to-text is no different than having someone transcribe the conversation.

If the law were as technical as you describe then VoIP calls themselves would be against the law since a person's voice is recorded, transmitted, and momentarily stored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried this a few weeks ago with Watson for that purpose (being able phase out during conference calls); complete gibberish came out on all my trials (about 40 conference calls) with 2,3,4,5 and 8 people, all in English. All come out complete garbage. You can't even _guess_ what we are talking about reading the entire transcripts.

Not sure if this is not just the same thing... If it is, I would love to hear your experiences.

Edit: shame I didn't publish it :) Edit2: I had one call for which I have a colleague speaking who speaks 'the Queen's English' and same result...

<comment><USER9> wouldn't that just mean that Watson sucks at text to speech? also since that's probably the case for most tts services (at least in my experience)

why not run the audio through all the tts engines you can find and compare results. keep what has the highest matches and see if you can get the other words using phonetics engines.

for words that are specific to your company train a tts engine on those words and weight your local engine higher than other services.

you can get a pretty decent translation back, but who would be so lazy as to work that hard..... ;)

<comment><USER10> A large part of the issue is that if you are dealing with phone meetings, audio is severely compressed, and not very similar to the training data that Watson has been taught with. Google Voice _might_ be able to do a better transcription, because they have much more data from phone messages to work with, but eventually it comes down to the fact that voices over a phone line are a lot harder to understand without context processing than voices recorded with a decent microphone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Answer to what we're all thinking:

> I do run the risk of losing credibility as to whether I'm actually listening > in meetings now, but I'm not too concerned about that. I made this as a > joke, and my coworkers know that

[http://www.businessinsider.com/josh-newlan-creates-say- what-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/josh-newlan-creates-say-what-to-tune- out-of-conference-calls-2016-5)

<comment><USER12> I think this answer--that Newlan's employer, Splunk, is in on the joke--is only a partial reason that Splunk tolerates Newlan writing and _publishing_ "Say What?".

From the "Readme.md":

> Installation (OS X)

> 1\. Sign up for, install, and run Splunk Enterprise

> ◦ This has to be enterprise; the HTTP Event Collector feature used here > doesn't exist in light

Kudos, to Splunk for having the guts to "allow" Newlan to unleash "Say What?" on conference calls everywhere, and cheers to Newlan for dreaming it up.

EDIT: formatting, readability, punctuation.

<comment><USER13> Oh, he works for Splunk?

My initial thought was, "who would choose Splunk for the datastore for _anything_?"

This now makes sense.

edit: by "anything", I mean "anything that isn't logs/security event data"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "How to get fired for sending audio of all you conference calls to IBM"

Pretty fun hack though.

<comment><USER15> Next post from IBM: "we trained our speech to text AI bot on your idiotic conference calls and it killed itself out of boredom"

<comment><USER16> Next next post from IBM: Tay turned out to be good for something after all. It turns out that project meetings are a lot more fun when no one is talking and 8 people are channeling an angry, racist, 19-year-old girl.

<comment><USER17> Tay was Microsoft, not IBM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "… what do you think about that Josh?"

"Sorry, I didn't realize my mic was on mute there."

"No problem Josh, we can hear you now just fine."

"Sorry, I didn't realize my mic was on mute there."

"... um, Josh?"

"Sorry, I didn't realize my mic was on mute there."

<comment><USER19> Or a conference call with a project manager (fully present) and 5 developers all using this. Perhaps a scene for Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER20> Reminds me of "A Conference Call in Real Life" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYu_bGbZiiQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYu_bGbZiiQ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is genius. How long before instead of dialing into conference calls, we just send our bots and have bot to bot con-calls? Could this be the killer Twilio app?

<comment><USER22> `Could this be the killer Twilio app?`

how so ?

<comment><USER23> ...by merging it with a bot that quotes a random sentence from any comment with "killer" and "app" in it, asks for free work from humans by saying, "How so?" (AKA nerd sniping) and submitting the results to a startup incubator automatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Most brilliant thing I've seen in some time.

If it highlights the complete waste of time that almost all conference calls are, it would be a service to mankind.

</comment><comment><USER25> Kind of related, I did something similar (as in purpose) for slack [1]. It can be used to set yourself away or... well, it can respond a canned message as you. It also disables the annoying auto-away after 30min. You can even close slack and let it send you system notifications for incoming mentions. Heck, you could even run it on a server and pretend to be you whilst you sip mojitos on a beach.

[1]: [https://github.com/eskerda/slack-keep- presence](https://github.com/eskerda/slack-keep-presence)

</comment><comment><USER26> Not usable for people named 'Mike'.

<comment><USER27> Turn up the echo cancellation, and you'll be fine.

<comment><USER28> 'Mike' and 'mic' are homonyms. Methinks it a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Or just use this: [http://docs.gridspace.com/](http://docs.gridspace.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> my solution: don't go to meetings where you don't/can't/want to pay attention. what a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER31> I had this idea once and routed my laptop's output audio into its own microphone and then opened a Google text document and turned dictation on. It didn't work too well, because of: noise/signal ratio and the strong Indian accent of the speaker. With normal paced pronunciation and clean audio it works definitely better.

</comment><comment><USER32> Pretty amazing. Makes me wonder what the current state of the art in general purpose voice recognition is.

I recently wondered if there is a a video-chat app that uses voice recognition for live subtitles? Would be awesome for talking to people who don't have perfect hearing. Could this be hacked together in a similar way?

<comment><USER33> I'm working on it, making more of a general purpose API for speech recognition to plug in during Hangouts calls, twitch streams, or any pre-recorded media. Called Spreza

<comment><USER33> * I should clarify as well, for your first question. State of the art is generally either IBM's 2016 English Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition System [0], or Baidu's DeepSpeech2 [1]. IBM's is a little more complex, but I'd actually argue Baidu is more promising due to the robust ability to learn new languages.

0: arxiv.org/abs/1604.08242 1: arxiv.org/abs/1512.02595

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Very nice, and I thought I was cool putting my end of video on freeze while I did other stuff during the conference.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if I can hire an intern or something to just transcribe all conference calls? Actually having a record of what was said would be lovely - too often audio is just too ephemeral and goes poof, with nobody remembering what was agreed upon.

It's got to be worth $10-15/hour in wasted time and recapping.

<comment><USER36> I think a note taker taking live notes that everyone can see, and perhaps edit, is a great way to record meetings. As a bonus, you even have something tangible to show the time you put in!

<comment><USER33> I'm working on this at the moment, in a way that also uses the edited transcripts to train our ASR system to perform better for later sessions. The difficult part is the speaker diarization, however. Multiple people talking at once requires some intricate signal processing to sort out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Obviously there is the potential for certain forms of abuse here, but it could be really useful for creating a record of what was said and what promises were made on the call.

"Oh, you thought it was due on Monday? Nope, transcript says you promised it by close of business Friday."

</comment><comment><USER38> Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is it's apathetic dad.

Kudos, sir. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER39> Disclosure: This is an astroturf ad for the author's employer.

It's a funny gimmick, for entertainment and to get visibility for the author's employer's name.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know it a joke and all but you're not supposed to record people without their consent, and I think this would qualify.

</comment><comment><USER40> Boggles my mind that gotomeeting doesn't have a feature to auto unmute when your name is mentioned.

<comment><USER41> That adds a ton of complexity and opportunity for embarrassing bugs/flaws while gaining only slight convenience. As a product manager I wouldn't touch that.

<comment><USER40> It may not be the simplest feature to implement but I do think we have enough tech now to build a pretty solid feature around this.

Also, I wouldn't call it merely a slight convenience when multiple times a day you see the pattern repeat of there being a long pause after you ask someone a question, followed by "sorry, I was on mute."

<comment><USER42> Voice-chat used for gaming has had unmute on speech for more than a decade. That solves the problem of background humming, while getting all the voice tgrough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I just want this as a call transcription service.... Good ones are hard to find.

<comment><USER44> Try steno: [https://s10o.com](https://s10o.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I like it, but it also sounds so wrong. Nice hack project.

</comment><comment><USER46> I approve of this. Gold star to this man.</comment>