Show HN: Neural Japanese Transliteration - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Kyubyong/neural_japanese_transliterator <comment><USER2> Interesting project! Does anyone know what iOS is using for it Japanese transliteration predictions? Mine worked well for a long time, but in the past 3 months it's gone haywire for common kanji suggestions. The other day it had "機能" as the first/only suggestion for "きのう," and I had to dig down into the menu to arrive at the intended, "昨日." Had a lot of similar experiences recently.

<comment><USER3> Does it act up on your desktop OS as well? I know there's an alternative from the ATOK developers for iOS ([http://www.justsystems.com/jp/products/atok_ios/](http://www.justsystems.com/jp/products/atok_ios/)) but I haven't tried that one.

<comment><USER2> No, just my phone. But I didn't know about that alternative. Thanks, I'll check it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > In the digital environment, people mostly type Roman alphabet

Might be selection bias but I mostly notice people using the 10-key click one

<comment><USER5> True on the smartphone. On the computer most Japanese speakers I know just type romaji. However, this is pretty much irrelevant to this article, as romaji->kanas (the phonetic alphabets) is a pretty straightforward and solved problem (there is a clear bijection between both).

The real problem is transforming the phonetic transliteration into the correct word in either kanji (for most Japanese words) or katakana (for words with foreign origin).

This problem is akin to disambiguating between two homonymes (which are much more frequent in Japanese). In some cases it is easy by looking the previous words, but in some it is heavily context dependent.

Nowadays, most japanese typing system will propose a list of kanjis as you type that corresponds to the most frequent writting of your transliteration, but sometimes for unusual kanjis o(or people's name) you have to dig deep into the list.

I can see how such a system could improve typing speed in Japanese.

<comment><USER6> Do people really use romaji on keyboards in Japan? This strikes me as an odd way to type, as it means that you first need to learn romaji in order to type. I thought that hiragana keyboards (hiragana mapped onto the normal layout) were the norm, especially on laptop keyboards.

<comment><USER5> A typical keyboard will look like this: [https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main- qimg-2394848830a7526592f3a1...](https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main- qimg-2394848830a7526592f3a182e18966d2)

But none of the Japanese I know use the hiragana directly. They told me it is mostly old people who use it. Almost every Japanese knows romajis now, there is no additional cost of learning a new alphabet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome! Where can I get this keyboard?

</comment><comment><USER8> Have you tried Google Japanese Input? It's probably more accurate at word prediction than anything else just because Google has more data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet. This is just a preliminary project for my paper. Probably I will add more keyboards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm more interested in (kind of) the reverse.

Given a Japanese sentence (that uses kanji), figure out the proper reading for each Kanji character, using a neutral network.

I know there are already hardcoded analyzers, like kuromoji, but they produce incorrect answers in a lot of edge cases.

<comment><USER10> its very hard to do that since there are cases when you can read the kanji In multiple ways, like In peoples names for examples. Japanese is full of exceptions because the writing system was imported very, very late In Japan (300ad) without much effort to standardize its application.

<comment><USER11> No need to shoot down an NLP task because it can't be solved with 100% accuracy. That's every NLP task.

The kanji -> kana direction should be considerably easier than the kana -> kanji direction. There are many fewer sources of ambiguity, and the space of possible answers is smaller.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool! So, would it be correct to say that this is in essence generates a disambiguation model for a language with a lot of homonyms due to having relatively few sounds (but also with some variation in morpheme boundaries, e.g. "an-i" vs "ani")?

<comment><USER12> For what it's worth, this is basically just the same as any popular Japanese (or Chinese) input method. Usually the approach is to greedily form the smallest set of the longest words from the given syllables, because people tend to give inputs where all the words are complete. Sometimes people use markov models to fix situations where that falls over.

Not sure how well this model performs, but the task is not novel.

P.S. Mandarin has a fair few homophones as well (yes, tones and all). English has tonnes of phonemes, and still we have loads of homophones (and in some of the most common words, no less!). Japanese, to my elementary-level ear, doesn't sound an order of magnitude more ambiguous than English.

<comment><USER13> _Spoken_ Japanese isn't any more ambiguous than English (for a human, or a speech-to-text AI) because Japanese people pause between spoken words just like anyone else.

But a stream of romaji furigana _with no spaces_ is quite ambiguous—since there's nothing to indicate word boundaries, any substring of the input might turn out to have actually intended to be e.g. a katakana spelling of a name.

If CJK IMEs expected and required people to hit the spacebar between the "words" (lexer tokens) of the provided input for matching, they'd have a much simpler job. But as it is, they fall over quite badly when you type multiple words into the IME input box, and are mostly only usable if you resolve single words at a time (which, sadly, throws away a lot of the inter-word context that would otherwise be available for matching.)

<comment><USER14> >because Japanese people pause between spoken words just like anyone else.

This is (surprisingly) not true. People do not pause between words, however when listening to a language that they understand, they do perceive pauses between words; even though such pauses do not exist.

<comment><USER15> I disagree. There's a subtle difference between breathing cadence and inflection, and a completely monotempo monotonal string of sounds.

<comment><USER16> It seems like it'd be useful for one or both of you to cite any research than has been done on this.

Seems more productive (and enlightening to all) than the agree/disagree dialogue here.

<comment><USER14> Unfourtuantly, this is so well established that it is hard to find research. I did find this paper [1] which looks into how babies acuire word boundries. As you identify, there are probably phonetic cues; but not pauses.

The best way to see this is to try listening to a language you do not understand, and try to identify word boundries.

Indeed, the paper I link argues that some phonetic cue must exist because babies can recognise word boundries.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8176060](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8176060)

<comment><USER14> It seems I linked only to the abstract. Here [1] is the pdf.

[1] [https://www.sissa.it/cns/Articles/94_doInfPerceiveWordB.pdf](https://www.sissa.it/cns/Articles/94_doInfPerceiveWordB.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I feel like I've read that readme file a few 2-3 years ago, but everything says 14 hours ago.

Anybody familiar with the history of this project?

<comment><AUTHOR> I created this repo early this year.

<comment><USER17> Then it must be my memory playing a trick on me. Thank you for elaborating.</comment></comment></comment>


Police asked 3D printing lab to recreate a dead man's fingers to unlock phone - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/327145/3d-print-dead-mans-fingers-to-unlock-his-phone/ <comment><USER2> Well... that's one way of doing it. Person is dead, so, do I care about privacy? I'm not sure, to be honest. Should privacy survive death?

<comment><USER3> Some of the people with whom he used to communicate may still be alive.</comment></comment>


Why people think computers can't - <AUTHOR> http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/ComputersCantThink.txt <comment><USER2> _So why is genius so rare, if each has almost all it takes?_

Simple statistical distribution. Compared to monkeys we _are_ all geniuses. Compared to a hypothetical super-intelligent alien race we are all as children. Individuals on average could easily be much more creative or much less; it's all relative. The fact that we recognize and elevate genius within our ranks is just an emergent psychology of being a sentient species.

<comment><USER3> Personally I think environment plays a huge roll in this as well. If you grow up in an environment that constantly enforces that learning/growing/etc. are pointless, most people _will_ eventually stop trying. Your environment also has a lot to do with forming your "id" [1]. I personally believe that if you could go back in time, take this same person and put them in a different environment they would be recognizable only in appearance.

I think most people are capable of being so much more than they are.

[1] pg has an article that talks about "id". Your environment will often influence how much you allow to become part of your "id" and what to do when various parts of your "id" are impugned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you assume that our brains are completely physical objects (no soul), then you should be able to model them with a computer, like all other physical objects, and create a thinking computer.

Just because we have an incomplete understanding now doesn't mean we always will, or that it's impossible to have a complete (or reasonably complete) understanding.

Or there's the idea of a non-physical, impossible to model soul. I don't see much data to support that conclusion though, it seems the equivalent of cosmic ether to me.

<comment><USER5> It's not that there are "data" to support the idea, but there is the fact that consciousness is unobservable. That is weird and different from all other physical phenomena, wouldn't you say?

<comment><USER6> Unobservable? You mean it doesn't emit visible light, right?

It's complex, it's hard to define, but it's definitely not unobservable. Also, as a mere physical manifestation, you can fiddle with it in a pretty physical fashion. You can put in on drugs and watch it warping. You can toy with its physical structure surgically and see how it gets messed up (wonderfully discussed in Oliver Sacks' books), you can bump it with a boxing glove and literally switch it off.

Too much interactive for an unobservable phenomenon.

<comment><USER5> Sorry I forgot the qualification: excepting one's own experience of one's own consciousness. That was silly.

What makes it weird and different from physical phenomena is the fact that it is not generally observable, even though it is posited to exist for all people.

Or do you disagree even with that? If you do: I _don't_ just mean that it doesn't emit visible light. I mean it doesn't emit _anything_. Consciousness is just the fact that the universe exists from a perspective. It is not an object, "out there", "in the world", but something _only experienced_ by _each consciousness for itself_. The mere fact that we could create a perfectly convincing AI and then still have doubts about whether there really is "anything in there" is a result of the fact that consciousness is unobservable. Does that explain well enough what I mean?

<comment><USER7> If we're to assume that consciousness only exists where it is observable, only I exist. All of you are automatons.

In fact, because of the fact that it is unobservable, you cannot even make a reasonable argument that the netbook I'm typing this on lacks consciousness.

I for example can argue that anything that is executing a series of algorithms as part of a system has consciousness, and therefore this computer is quite conscious, just as I am (even though my series of algorithms is much less well-defined and reproducible.)

<comment><USER5> I personally do not assume that consciousness only exists where it is observable. I am merely interested in the fact that it is unobservable-- and in how that makes it weird and different. Do you agree with me on this point?

<comment><USER7> Yes, but in that it's empirically indistinguishable, from an ethical standpoint we should assume it exists when we see the hallmarks of consciousness (though perhaps the primary hallmark is an intrinsic understanding of the concept itself.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article doesn't really do a good job of explaining the real problem, which is understanding what consciousness is, as a requirement for a thinking 'being'.

Obviously Penrose's book 'The Emperor's New Mind' came out some time after this post by Minsky, but as one reviewer summarises:

"The Emperor's "new clothes," of course, were no clothes. The Emperor's "New Mind," we then suspect, is nothing of the sort as well. That computers as presently constructed cannot possibly duplicate the workings of the brain is argued by Penrose in these terms: that all digital computers now operate according to algorithms, rules which the computer follows step by step. However, there are plenty of things in mathematics that cannot be calculated algorithmically. We can discover them and know them to be true, but clearly we are using some devices of calculation ("insight") that are not algorithmic and that are so far not well understood -- certainly not well enough understood to have computers do them instead. This simple argument is devastating. " <http://www.friesian.com/penrose.htm>

<comment><USER9> I believe Minsky is arguing that because these "devices of calculation" are not well understood, you cannot conclude that there is anything special about them that puts them beyond the reach of any computational (algorithmic) processes.

I think he's right. There's been a lot of progress in understanding information processing in the brain (especially the neocortex) since Minsky wrote this, and I really believe someday soon, notions such as "insight" that we, in our ignorance of how they work, reserve exclusively for humans, won't be such a big mystery anymore.

<comment><USER8> That is exactly what Penrose demonstrates in his book - within mathematics there are things that cannot be calculated algorithmically. Which is also why the above summary makes the point that this simple argument is devastating (for proponents of Strong AI).

A summary of his position can be found on his Wikipedia page: "He claims that the present computer is unable to have intelligence because it is an algorithmically deterministic system. He argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer. This contrasts with supporters of strong artificial intelligence, who contend that thought can be simulated algorithmically. He bases this on claims that consciousness transcends formal logic because things such as the insolubility of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem prevent an algorithmically based system of logic from reproducing such traits of human intelligence as mathematical insight."

I searched for some decent refutations by Minsky, and was disappointed to only find this: <http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/doc/minsky.html> "Thus Roger Penrose's book [1] tries to show, in chapter after chapter, that human thought cannot be based on any known scientific principle."

Disclaimer: I'm not a student of AI, and only realised just now that Penrose and Minsky represent the two opposing schools of thought on AI!

<comment><USER10> "within mathematics there are things that cannot be calculated algorithmically"

What is missing is the proof of the opposite: that the human brain can calculate those things. I don't think it can - mathematics is the tool we use to think about them, after all.

<comment><USER9> I think you're right. The brain is a very specialized computing machine, and it evolved for a specific purpose.* Evolution doesn't reward general computing capabilities. Hence, computers are vastly more general than brains. If something is, in principle, uncomputable, than there is no chance that a brain can compute it.

*Sure, a networked system of neuron-like "units" might have general computing capabilities. It's as if you saw a fully functional modern computer for the first time, and it only gets fed arithmetic problems - the system itself is much more powerful and general than that, and you could hack around and make it do other things once you understand how it manages to do arithmetic. The brain is kind of like that too -- it gets fed stimuli and it has evolved to process those stimuli. Yet it might be that a computational system made of a network of neurons could be a lot more powerful and general than that in principle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some of the OCR mistakes were humorous in light of the content.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Can Computers Think?_ debate graph, <http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nID=75>

</comment><comment><USER13> > I don't believe that there's much difference between ordinary thought and > highly creative thought.

And I do. This quote says it perfectly:

In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the "ordinary" and the "magicians." An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician's mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an "ordinary genius,"

(Quoted from Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography, by Mark Kac. Harper and Row. 1985. p. xxv.)

<comment><USER14> What a load of horseradish. Feynman was adored by his students, and was often quite introspective about how he goes about solving problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I believe computers will one day be able to think, but certainly not using Von Neumann architecture.

<comment><USER16> Why do you feel that the key to thinking is the separation of program memory from data memory? Or is there another characteristic of Von Neumann architecture that I'm not thinking of?

If thinking can be done with a universal turning machine then it would work on a Von Neumann architecture machine as VN arch is a class of UTM.

<comment><USER17> Milesf might be implying that he thinks a different type of hardware might be necessary to have true cognitive abilities, e.g. Quantum computing or something taking advantage of quantum effects as described by Roger Penrose et al. (I don't buy that requirement, personally)

<comment><USER16> I think that we'll just end up gluing neurons onto transistors for the near future. With the latest research they have rat brains flying flight sims. The primary stumbling block is going to be the ethics committee or finding an animal that has a large brain that ethics committees aren't particularly fond of. Or networking the brains of rats together to form a much larger neural net that interfaces to ethernet. Think EC2 with a rat brain on each server. Or conversely a network interface for the human brain.

I do think it's possible to think with a UTM but I don't think that discovering that ability is going to be economical compared to fusing transistors to neurons.

<comment><USER18> So, how at what ratio of biology-to-technology does something seize being a thinking person, and start being a thinking computer?

Clearly, a few rat cells hooked up to big processors are a thinking machine. But someone with an electronic implant in their brain that prevents seizures is a thinking person. But at which point do we say, "you're a robot, beep boop"?

<comment><USER19> you want "cease" (to stop/end), rather than "seize" (to take hold/control of).

no offense or anything, I am just assuming you are a non-native english speaker (by your name)

<comment><USER18> Oops! Well, you're right - my first language was Russian - but at this point English is my primary language. I'd attribute that mistake less to my heritage, but rather to all the wine I drank last night :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I posted something tangential to this topic, but none of you philistines upvoted it.

Bam! There it is. --> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526734>

</comment><comment><USER21> This seems to conflate consciousness with creativity, which are not the same thing. Computers can be creative combinatorically with evolutionary algorithms provided you can provide a fitness test.

<comment><USER22> But that just moves the creativity bit into designing the fitness function, does it not?

(I do agree with your sentiment though; just pointing out the obvious hole)

<comment><USER23> It depends on what are you measuring.

Let's say that your job is to solve some problem and want to use a genetic algorithm to solve it.

You probably have to build a model, a simplified version of the reality, and find out a fitness function which makes sense in that model, which is fast to calculate etc.

Probably you have to be clever, you have to somehow have an intuition of what matters and what doesn't. That is, you have to know when your cow is too spherical.

This task requires intelligence, and I'm sure that creativity will certainly help making a leap forward, especially if the problem is not well known in advance, or you benefit from solving it in a completely different way.

But, this doesn't mean that each fitness function that will solve the problem, given enough time, will require creativity, or even intelligence!

Natural selection provided really ingenious solutions to a huge set of problems of any kind. The fact that we are discussing this very fact is an astonishing achievement of that very fitness function which is natural selection.

But nobody designed this fitness function, and so long we are interpreting the word "creativity" meaning "created by a mind", no creativity was required to design this "fitness function" or any of the products of that "genetic algorithm".

Of course, one could argue that "creativity" the very act of "creating" things, even without creators, even just emerging properties of a complex system (like natural selection).

Well, redefining creativity that way is certainly not wrong, but I don't think normally people think about creativity in those terms, but as an intrinsic characteristics of minds (and perhaps also human mind only, to most people, but that's another topic)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think computers can think, thinking is only a human perception and most of it is useless. Being creative to direct an orchestra that other humans may like is pointless to survival. Too think I think you need to have a purpose, If I were to give humans a naive purpose I would say to find the meaning of life through survival and attaining great knowledge. I believe a machine will be able to do this better eventually if not soon. All it needs is problem solving and to start with a set of resources that its allowed to use.

</comment><comment><USER25> Thinking is defined as the thing that separates humans from nonhumans. Computers aren't humans. Therefore, even if computers can perform every task that humans can perform, what the computer is doing is, by definition, not thinking. Also, the question of whether X can think is completely without value.

<comment><USER22> It's hard to give a more circular argument than that.

<comment><USER26> It's more or less the standard cynical joke in AI circles, though--- computers aren't intelligent, so when AI succeeds at something, it isn't AI anymore, and moves to some other field instead, so AI never has successes. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Obama Addresses Apple vs. FBI at SXSW: Don't 'Fetishize' Your Phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/11/obama-addresses-apple-vs-fbi-at-sxsw-don-t-fetishize-your-phone.html <comment><USER2> Apple should move os development offshore, citing a hostile environment for developing secure systems in the US .

</comment><comment><USER3> What about fetishizing the 4th amendment?

</comment><comment><USER4> Mind your own damn business, Barack</comment>


Why is the latest AMD hardware unsupported in libreboot? - <AUTHOR> https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd <comment><USER3> To be fair, see: [https://libreboot.org/faq/#intel](https://libreboot.org/faq/#intel)

<comment><USER4> I was wondering this myself. I was wondering why they were focusing so much on AMD when all AMD did was copy Intel's horrible idea.

It seems kind of pointless to continue the Libreboot project if they're not going to work on any modern hardware for the foreseeable future. Their recommended systems are all old and out of production. Fastest recommended laptop seems to be roughly a Core2Duo at 2.0Ghz.

<comment><USER5> They don't even do microcode updates, which is ridiculous when you are running non-free microcode to boot.

<comment><USER4> So if Intel discovers a bug in their chip that needs to be patched with a microcode update then Libreboot users are just SOL? That can't be right.

<comment><USER6> Linux supports applying microcode updates as part of the kernel boot process, so you are not dependent on the motherboard firmware to do it and you still get the microcode loaded pretty early.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whole page is an enlightening read, with quite a few disappointing discoveries, such as:

      There are several privacy, security and freedom issues
      with [Purism Librem laptops], due to the Intel chipset

<comment><USER8> They're probably talking about the wireless network adapter here, not the CPU. If that's what you're implying.

<comment><USER7> Alas, CPU. Namely ME[1] and FSP/SMM blob [2].

If you are wondering what's wrong with either of them, I would recommend Joanna Rutkowska's research as a starting point [3,4].

[1] [https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme](https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme)

[2] [https://libreboot.org/faq/#fsp](https://libreboot.org/faq/#fsp)

[3] [http://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf](http://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf)

[4] [https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustwor...](https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustworthy_x86_laptops)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> tl;dr: It's not just AMD, it's anything AMD after 2013 and anything Intel after 2009. So essentially all modern x86 hardware.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if VIA hardware could be supported. There are modern CPUs/motherboards coming out there, and even if they are on a different performance level (being embedded-focused hardware), in 2016 they must beat Intel-from-2009 and should get close to AMD-from-2013...

(disclaimer: I'm working at VIA)

<comment><USER11> It would be interesting to throw this URL as far up the internal chain as possible... and see what happens. :P

I'm curious myself, and there are a lot of other people who wouldn't mind knowing too. Fast AND trustworthy turnkey silicon is both a completely untapped hole in tech at the moment _and_ something that's desperately needed in this climate of NDA'd garbage-quality security systems (see [https://www.devever.net/~hl/smartcards](https://www.devever.net/~hl/smartcards) for one of thousands of examples) and increasingly locked down chipsets.

I'm not sure what else is out there, but I recently learned of RISC-V ([http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/why-i-will-be-using- the...](http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/why-i-will-be-using-the-risc-v- in-my-next-chip/) ); I'll admit I was impressed to learn a free (open design) CPU has just broken the GHz barrier ([http://riscv.org/download.html#tab_rocket_core](http://riscv.org/download.html#tab_rocket_core)), but this chip and ISA are still in the early prototyping stages, although the spec seems complete.

On the other hand, x86 is a widely (!) used, well-known ISA with a lot of legacy software running on it, and VIA already have proven CPUs and chipsets and motherboards. I only know about VIA as "the low-power alternative CPU company," so I have no idea what it's position or stance on secure applications is, but it could well net itself some unique contracts by investing in security.

One of the big problems in this space (or at least what's being made into a problem by the major chip vendors) is secure bootstrapping: I can verify the entire boot device (a 128MB boot image could read in a second or two from eMMC)... but how do I know that "I", aka the code doing the verification, have not been compromised? It's a chicken-and-egg problem.

Here's my back-of-an-envelope approach: create a CPU with a secure, write- once, write-only (executable) PROM of say 64KB (maybe 256KB? 512KB?), and ship the chips with this area blank. The customer writes whatever data they like to that area of the chip, and then the chip begins execution (ie, PC = 0, or close to it) running whatever code it finds there. Maybe you'd call this the "pre-BIOS area".

You could write a public key and a verification routine in there and use it to verify everything else the system wanted to load. Besides verifying the BIOS, which would be nice, you could verify the boot media..... bam. Trustworthy boot sequence.

This might be surprising to hear, but right now, the above is a pipe dream. It's 2016, and yet, even something as basic as this does not exist - <USER2> anything, we're moving away from such a position with the current state of things. The above cannot be done with any hardware/ISA/chipset I'm aware of. For example, the Raspberry Pi Zero (the latest one) _still_ uses the proprietary ARM core in the GPU to handle bootup ([http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/38585/raspber...](http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/38585/raspberry- pi-zero-usable-with-fully-free-software)), which is basically the opposite of what I've just described here.

Whoever says "I can do this!" is going to get some interesting offers. The military can of course afford to design/get whatever they want, and fat contracts from them are always fun... but think of all the private companies that would benefit from guaranteeably secure data acquisition and/or communication... that's everything from the stock market to secure money courier vans. All that industry, taken together, amounts to a lot of (untapped!) potential. What's more, the private sector is always going to come up with ideas that would be best implemented on a secure platform, so having something "anybody" can get their hands on, rather than only playing ball within the military space, might work out more profitably.

Besides contracts, whoever does this will inevitably get a LOT of publicity from the open source movement, so they'll need to have a good department to handle that, along with the sometimes OCD-to-the-point-of-being-awkward stance that GNU takes sometimes.

There are other issues, such as running the system off entirely free-software drivers; I'm not sure where VIA's at on that front, but that would be an arguably necessary part of such a platform as this (the argument against this type of thing being that if there are Components(TM) in the hardware that can do fun tricks, said Components(TM) need to be communicated with, and that might be happening in the drivers.)

And I'd finally get to build the secure communications device I've always wanted to make. :D

(Incidentally, current smartphones are a security nightmare: [https://www.devever.net/~hl/nosecuresmartphone](https://www.devever.net/~hl/nosecuresmartphone) is as non-theoretical as it gets without providing PoC explots, IMO).

[PS. Honestly not trying to big-note myself or anything - I'm just a tinkerer/hobbyist - but feel free to copy/forward this text.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given that AMD and Intel are both driven by large for profit customers and their requirements, these concerns will probably only get worse.

ARM is probably the closest open chip platform out there, but even that is not Free in the FSF sense or $ sense. It seems that the project is going to forgo user-base for principles, and then most likely no longer be relevant.

It's great to try and fight for and defend your principles, but if that means that you no longer have a user base on which to stand, then the fight will be of little value. I'd love to be wrong about this, but I can't logically see another way that this will play out.

<comment><USER13> "ARM is probably the closest open chip platform out there"

I don't know what you think is open about ARM. AMD even uses the ARM locking- down technology to implement _its_ system management processor.

<comment><USER12> I meant that it's a spec, my point wasn't perfect, but there really aren't OpenSource chips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yet another battle in the War On General Purpose Computers is lost.

</comment><comment><USER15> From the Intel section ( [https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme](https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme) )

> If the manifest isn't signed by a specific Intel key, the boot ROM won't > load and execute the firmware and the ME processor core will be halted.

So if I just overwrite a few bytes of flash on my motherboard (i.e. corrupt the signature), the whole thing is disabled? It says the _ME_ core is halted. But the main CPU continues to run? Are there side effects? Why is this not a solution?

Also: is there more (probably community reverse-engineered) documentation on the ME's specifics?

</comment><comment><USER16> I guess the better question would be why they're even bothering any more when they only support a few ancient Thinkpads and a couple of decade old Apple laptops.

For better or worse, I think they've lost this battle.

<comment><USER17> I'm still using one of these "ancient" Thinkpads (an X200S). It's good enough for my purposes (audio recording, live audio performances, hacking on free software, Emacs, browsing the web).

I don't often find myself wishing for a more powerful machine. When I do, I run computations on remote servers.

<comment><USER16> I didn't say the hardware wasn't useful anymore.

But it seems like a losing proposition to run and promote a project that's only ever going to run on a handful of ancient laptops. The FAQ explicitly says it's not going to run on any new Intel or AMD processors, which essentially makes it useless for modern desktop, laptop, and server systems. As others have pointed out, it's almost not even possible to buy hardware that's supported.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think I'd rather have a machine that has a verified chain of trust from boot than one that will happily run anything.

<comment><USER19> I prefer secure boot without backdoors.

[http://www.tianocore.org/](http://www.tianocore.org/)

<comment><USER20> That has non-free code to read the FAT partition.

It also really needs a security audit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They promote freedom but specifically forbid the use of Windows. Not everyone has the choice to not use Windows at certain points in the day, VMs aren't perfect. Forbidding the bare-metal usage of Windows is ridiculous.

<comment><USER22> I mean, they're promoting the freedom to use a bunch of 2006–2009-era ThinkPads and MacBooks, and if you use the git release, a couple of motherboards from the same time period and maybe one 2015 Chromebook if you're lucky.

I appreciate that this work is being done (though I'm unclear on where the coreboot/libreboot line lies, but anyway), but calling it "freedom" is a stretch. It very much feels like the freedom to move to an abandoned island and not pay taxes or be subject to any government.

<comment><USER19> > It very much feels like the freedom to move to an abandoned island and not > pay taxes or be subject to any government.

It might be a stretch to be able to use Coreboot for work or entertainment at the moment, unfortunately. But consider that those specs are just fine for most privacy sensitive stuff. Tor, email, banking… etc.

So for a separate, trusted, privacy-focused box a few years old, slightly slower CPU is not a big deal. And you get the compartmentalization for free!

That's my perspective, at least.</comment></comment></comment>


Planetary Scientist Colin Pillinger has died - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27322166

<comment><USER2> I remember he came to my school and talked about beagle when I was in my early teens and I found it very inspiring - part of the reason I'm working in tech today.

</comment><comment><USER3> A very inspiring guy, RIP

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what caused it? I know he'd been battling MS for the last decade nearly. Can these things just happen randomly?

<comment><USER5> Basically yes. Assuming it was caused by an aneurism, then this is something that for all intense of purposes can be considered random _.

_ Yes I know nothing is truly random, but being born with a inherent weakness in an artery in your brain is as close to random as anything.

Sad news though.

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_all_intents_and_purposes](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_all_intents_and_purposes)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the this - I knew this, but checking my spelling is something I need to do more often.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you get macOS windows to have square corners? - <AUTHOR> I'm experimenting with Yabai which is a tiled binary partition window manager much like bspwm on say Arch and I'd like square corners for my windows. You can imagine rounded corners being strange with a tiled layout. Does anyone know of any hacks or patches to get window edges square? <comment><USER2> I actually had achieved this effect (with the same setup, just replace Yabai with chunkwm) a very long time ago (before El Capitan). I just spent an hour or so searching for the particular theme I used but couldn't find it. From what I remember, you can use a tool like [https://github.com/insidegui/AssetCatalogTinkerer](https://github.com/insidegui/AssetCatalogTinkerer) to change the System Appearance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome stuff this tool looks great. I guess I have some .car files to go through. If you do remember which .car file has the window edges in it and the name of the "file" inside the .car package please let me know.

<comment><USER2> /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemAppearance.bundle/Contents/Resources/Assets.car

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't seem to delete or replace assets, I _think_ I've located the correct file which has an alpha mask for window edges but I cannot replace the file in it with my own patched version. I copied `Assets.car` to the desktop so I don't bork it and I cannot do anything but copy assets out of it, not place them in. Do you know how to do this? Annoyingly the GitHub repo for this has no way to create Issues and the Delete option on the Edit menu is always greyed out. Ahhhhhhhh.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got it working!

[https://github.com/tsujp/square-macos- windows](https://github.com/tsujp/square-macos-windows)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: What's the best solution for geotargetting by IP? - <AUTHOR>

My startup is interested in building a simple ad targeted ad solution for our site. What's the best geotargeting DB / server solution? <comment><USER2> You are building the ad targeted site or you are looking for 3rd party targeting? Or do you mean, you want an IP-to-location lookup? Those dbs are available on plenty for free or a small fee(simple googling would find those).

</comment><comment><USER3> Digital Element has the best data, but they are on the expensive end and their software isn't all that flexible in terms of deployment. Maxmind GeoIP is weaker in terms of accuracy but are far more flexible.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using hostip.info, but have had mixed results - it's free. I suspect i'll be moving to a paid service in the future.</comment>


Least resistance weight loss - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/least-resistance-weight-loss/ <comment><USER2> Whereas it is correct that you COULD lose weight on White Castle alone, it definitely won't be healthy and it definitely won't build up the necessary habits.

The goal should never be the number on the scale. The goal should always be fitness. With good fitness you will see body composition changes and, likely, weight changes.

<comment><USER3> I agree that there could be negative side effects to living on White Castle alone.

I'm certainly not advocating a deliberately unhealthy diet either.

But, I've noticed among friends and relatives trying to lose weight that when they start, they focus so much on nutrition (% carbs, % protein, % fat, supplements, etc.) that the complexity of the diet overwhelms and derails them.

The calories-only (or calories-first) approach requires you to track only two variables: calories consumed, and calories burned. The mental load is manageable.

It was relatively straightforward to modify my diet into a more nutritious one _once_ I'd lost the weight. (I also didn't have to run a 1000/cal deficit each day too.)

That's why my advice is focus on weight loss first, and nutrition once you feel that you're at a healthy weight that feels right for you.

<comment><USER2> The white castle was hyperbole, of course :)

I understand what you are talking about as I have lost a lot of weight and gained a lot of muscle mass in the past few months. I used MyFitnessPal to keep track of my diet for the first month or so. It's great because you can scan the bar code and 9 times out of 10 the nutrition facts are already there. I go back and track my food one day every other week or so to make sure I'm still sticking to good eating habits.

However, starting with only the concept of calories in - calories out actually winds up being more difficult. If you have a candy bar and a soda today, you just wasted 400 of your calories. You mentioned a 1,000 calorie deficit, which is where I was at and I was eating 1,200-1,400 per day. So, you essentially just ate 30% of your calories on items that will not make you feel satiated at all. In fact, they often times will make you feel more hungry and lead to sugar spikes.

Now, compare that to someone who cares about healthy eating. You could eat: 6 ounces of chicken with salsa on it, grilled bell peppers, a piece of whole grain bread, a handful of almonds, and more broccoli and spinach then you could feasibly eat in one sitting. Eating healthy makes you more full (which makes the 16 hour fasts very easy to follow through on) and gives you better macros for fat/carbs/protein.

I eat more now than I have ever eaten before, and all I had to do was change the contents of my meals a bit.</comment></comment></comment>


Toyota to Sell All-Electric Car in 2012  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703652104574652301810464802.html

<comment><USER2> Unless it is very cheap, few people will buy it, it will be a commercial failure, and there'll be another half-decade of people complaining about GM killing the electric car before somebody tries again.

<comment><USER3> It depends on the range. Personally, I think the sweet spot is 80 miles of range with a 8 hour charge. Electric cars should be very cheap to operate. The volt is expected to cost $32,500 after a federal rebate, which doesn't seem excessive.

<comment><USER2> Meh? Not excessive? I could buy two Honda Civics for that price, or operate one for a hundred and sixty thousand miles. Of course, maybe it is a higher quality car, but it doesn't seem to offer a serious value proposition. It's a charitable luxury, basically.

<comment><USER4> Huh? What kind of cars do americans buy? My parents aren't exactly super rich and they just bough a run of the mill, middle of the line Mercedes for $10,000 more (30,000€).

I know quite a few people who would be comfortable spending that amount of money on a car. That's not luxury, that's a standard car for your middle class dads and moms in their fifties.

<comment><USER2> Heh, my wife and I bring in a lot more than the average middle class family. But I still consider $30k a luxury, especially for a car that'll have trouble getting you from here to sf and back.

<comment><USER4> Well, it depends. Your average European will probably need to travel shorter distances. 80 miles would probably be enough for my parents for maybe 330 days in the year. That's not bad at all. But you are probably right that this pesky month when you really need to drive farther and really don't have any time to wait for the battery to recharge will kill it.

And buying a second car for $30,000 is probably a bit too much. I guess that all goes to show that some sort of way to just change batteries (and not charge them when driving long distances) really would be a good idea.

(Psst, we are on the internet. Didn't know if you noticed. I have no freaking idea where your "here" is :)

<comment><USER2> Here is Palo Alto. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some more info:

Toyota, the leader in hybrid car sales, plans to have a battery-powered compact car called the FT-EV on the market by 2012 - a lightweight four- seater, modeled on its gasoline-powered iQ, that will have an all-electric range of 50 miles.

[http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/toyota-to- build-...](http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/toyota-to-build-all- electric-car-by-2012-5494/)</comment>


Unicorn Fears and Stopping Stops - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-19/unicorn-fears-and-stopping-stops <comment><USER2> It's risky to draw too many conclusions from Square. Jack Dorsey's situation is unique; it's hard to think of an example before (or ever again?) where a CEO decides to take on another CEO position of a struggling company weeks before an IPO. Think what you will about his capabilities but it was always going to create real drag on their IPO; if only because there wasn't enough time to know if he can pull it off.

One thing that is rarely discussed is how bubbles burst. Stock markets have incredible visibility and liquidity so they'll burst in a matter of days (minutes?) and weeks. Housing markets have strong visibility but less liquidity so they're measured in weeks and months. Private valuations have poor visibility ("show me a valuation and I'll tell you the terms") and very poor liquidity; IPO'ing, being acquired are rare and difficult events.

So if there was indeed a bubble it was in the private capital markets and the only way we'd know is when those companies leave that market for another market (public market/acquisition by company) There are so many variables but right now Square is telling us that the private markets were overinflating prices by at least 50%. That's bubble stuff. The thing is it'll be a slower/gentler correction due to the above issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> The one thing I'll say about Square is that this is the first tech IPO in the last 5 years where the investment banks are literally begging hedge funds to take stock.

In an IPO process as a hedge fund you find out just where you stand with the banks by how many shares you get issues at the IPO.

In squares case there I haven't heard of any one getting cut back on their allocations.

I"m not sure if that's a good or bad sign, but its out of the ordinary.

One interesting note that bloomberg just popped up:

> 11/19 10:01 Market makers (Barclays) still indicating $11. That's an > unofficial indication at this point, and above the $9 IPO price.

So I guess it could pop

Side note:

Burred near the bottom of Levin's daily letter is an interview with Cliff Asness. If you are interested in quant finance, check out his blog that he hosts on AQR's site. He's one of the stars of "The Quants" and started one of the giant quant funds AQR out of Goldman.

[https://www.aqr.com/cliffs-perspective](https://www.aqr.com/cliffs- perspective)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is hysterically funny.

 _Anyway don 't do any of this. Don't say "sodomy" unless you're sure you mean it, don't call yourself a sapiosexual even if you get the word right, don't give interviews during an IPO quiet period, don't found Tinder, all of it, just don't._

Rad is such a fatuous, unhinged pinhead I think he needs his own Sheenesque TV show.

<comment><USER5> > The unicorn massacre continues. Lyft is having a rough tyme

I feel this is the article all writers wish to write one day.

<comment><USER4> Or _not_ write!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worked for a startup in the mobile payments industry for a while. While I wanted to hope it would work out, deep down I never felt mobile payments at the register (vs. credit card) was enough of a value proposition to the consumer. I mean, I never felt like I would want to use this even though I was working on it.

I think the industry over-emphasizes the minimal hassle of having a physical card. Mobile payments are not that much easier. And unless you research how the platforms are protecting your information and identity, I also imagine the average consumer trusts a physical card more than a 3rd party vendor app on their phone.

Finally, the mobile payments vendors are just one more middleman in the payments game that needs to make a cut on transaction fees. Someone is paying that fee somewhere and if a mobile payment platform becomes sustainable over the long term that cost will likely trickle down to the consumer if the platform hasn't already directly built in a consumer fee.

</comment><comment><USER7> Funny read. Got me thinking that at any given point in recent history, at least I can vouch for the past couple of decades, there's something terribly wrong in the money industry. At least one thing at any given time. This industry seems to be just hopping from one _terribly wrong_ thing to another.

Is it because there's too much money in the hands of mostly random, clueless people?

<comment><USER8> I think it's the finance industry's version of the hype cycle. Every time a new financial instrument is invented it gets used, overhyped and oversold, there's a crash, and then it becomes a boring/useful tool in the toolbox. E.g. options and the dutch tulip bubble, derivatives in the '80s, CDS in the '00s.

<comment><USER7> Alternatively, it's meta-consumerism. We buy things we don't need, while people with big money buy big things they don't need. Except big money movements make waves and backfire on everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My view on Square is that it does not have unique differentiation. I mean yeah, they have cute little readers that plug into your phone or tablet, but there are a large number of other payment vendors which are very similar and no sign of a "moat". Square does not even have the two sided market moat -- the one thing that is certain is that using Square makes Mastercard, Visa and American Express rich.

Banks have been fighting back against smartphone-based systems by pushing contact chip cards instead of NFC cards (out of all the cards I've had replaced this year, all of them are contact chip cards)

<comment><USER10> The chip and pin cards have been in use outside the US for a fairly long time now, NFC ones for several years too, Square won't be able to match the economies of scale of the standard systems if they need their own reader hardware.</comment></comment>


Amateur investor turned $15,000 into 1M then lost it all: cautionary tale - <AUTHOR> https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trader-made-million-lost-it-all-cautionary-tale-investing-2020-7-1029383192# <comment><USER2> It's a long article of a dude trying to convince others that he's not responsible for his own actions and it's someone else's fault when he does something wrong.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Day traders generally say "Don't fall in love with your shares" and he very clearly did. I don't think it is Robin Hood's duty hold customers' hands and influence their strategies, and it probably isn't even legal for them to do so. That duty belongs to a financial advisor. You probably don't even need a financial advisor to know when its time to sell some of the shares to put money into other companies that'll hopefully be on the rise. The increases he claims to have had is as clear a sign as any.

Besides, I think all the information he complains wasn't available to him is right here: [https://learn.robinhood.com](https://learn.robinhood.com). If he thought that was too boring or complicated to run through, then it is only his fault. If investing was as easy as he was treating it, Warren Buffet would be the average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Back button highjacking. The article not worth it.</comment>


Why aren't more books written like this? - <AUTHOR> http://www.onderstekop.nl/articles/120/

<comment><USER2> L: Why aren't more books written like this?

R: Because the style can be _really annoying_.

L: Congratulations. Now go make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

      [

      ]

This space reserved for JELLY STAINS!

...

I found the Little Schemer and especially the Little MLer to be helpful for learning their respective modes of thought, but once I finished them, they were _gone_.</comment>


Online YouTube Video Cutter - <AUTHOR> https://youtubecut.com <comment><AUTHOR> Online Youtube video cutter</comment>


Secure Mail for Devs - <AUTHOR> https://developermail.io/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting, but without more details on what you can configure or how much it will cost, it's hard to get excited.

<comment><USER3> yes agree. a little bit more information would be nice

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it really annoying if you have to watch a 1:20 minute video just to get a rough idea how their service works.

<comment><USER5> The entire video is simply a terminal session, not even doing any curses-like. Why not just paste the terminal session output in a <pre> block? Would have saved me 1:15.

Also, bug report: If you seek to very close to the end, the timer shows 1:21 and keeps counting with nothing happening on the screen... I was wondering why he didn't hit enter after typing "ls matte" and let the timer run to 2 minutes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It says secure, but I see no mention of encryption or legal protections that would make it so. If you're going to use the word 'secure', it has to mean more than "hosted in a country that is known to bow to the USA."

<comment><USER7> Their FAQ mentions luks. I guess, their storage is encrypted.

<comment><USER8> But how is it decrypted after booting? Is the service down until they login and mount the drives manually?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey, Chris & Matt here. We are the guys behind developermail.io and we really appreciate all your comments and feedback! We are in a private beta phase at the moment and will be sending invitation keys to more people very soon.

There were a lot of questions regarding security and privacy, so we preponed the release of the updated website. Please check it out and let us know what you think: developermail.io

You can reach out to us at firstname.lastname@example.com also.

Have a great week and thanks for your support! Chris & Matt

<comment><USER9> We want to build an awesome product! Can you help us by taking the following survey: [http://goo.gl/forms/KHp5BimFs6](http://goo.gl/forms/KHp5BimFs6) (takes ~3 minutes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Our __bare-metal__ servers are located in Germany.

I've seen this term used a lot recently to describe dedicated servers, even Leaseweb does it now. Someone please tell me why.

<comment><USER11> They're saying that as opposed to virtual servers or server instances, they have actual physical servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Hosted in Germany" is a good selling point, and that is incredibly sad to me. America has _lost so much_ in just 15 years.

<comment><USER13> Is it a selling point with much substance, though? Genuinely curious. Seems to me that if the American government wanted your data for some reason, obtaining it from Germany wouldn't be so hard.

<comment><USER12> I am not an expert on these matters, but I would imagine that the process for legally obtaining data from foreign countries is both more difficult and more public (a National Security Letter would have no teeth in Germany). Additionally, Germany has a better reputation (perhaps unearned?) for privacy rights, especially as the greatest pillar of the liberal EU, and because when the NSA bugged Merkel's cell phone they soured the intelligence relationship considerably.

<comment><USER14> I live in Germany. It appears to me that the outrage from the government was largely theatre for the public, than serious. There is an election coming up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Postfix when installed has pretty good defaults and works safely pretty much out of the box. Are people actually looking for third-parties like developermail when it's really not that hard?

<comment><USER16> What about spam? What about antivirus? What about mail filtering rules?

<comment><USER17> Something like Sovereign[1] is your friend then

[1] [https://github.com/al3x/sovereign](https://github.com/al3x/sovereign)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I agree with other posters that there could be a bit more information, I think the git based config is a pretty interesting approach.

Nice work guy, look forward to seeing it a bit more fleshed out.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd like some more info on the security side.</comment>


Huge methane belch in Arctic could cost $60 trillion - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23923-huge-methane-belch-in-arctic-could-cost-60-trillion.html#.UfDR96a9LCR <comment><AUTHOR> According to this link this is 6x more money than exists

[http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-much-money-is-in-the- worl...](http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-much-money-is-in-the-world.htm)</comment>


US teen died after drinking caffeine too quickly, coroner says - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39932366 <comment><USER2> Randomly, this happened in the county where I live.

But more pertinently, this seems like a horrible fluke. One time my dad, a chaplain, was called to a scene where a girl was hit in the chest by a tennis ball and killed. The ball stopped her heart. Crazy accidents happen, but that doesn't mean caffeine is suddenly the silent killer.

Very sad though.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. How many times have you heard of a person dying from caffeine? It's very unusual for _any given person_ to have a fatal reaction to some drug. It's not at all unexpected for 1 person out of a billion to have a fatal reaction to some drug.

<comment><USER4> Depends on how much of a rockstar you are. Dave Grohl was famously hospitalized for drinking way too much coffee: [http://www.nme.com/news/music/them-crooked- vultures-14-12945...](http://www.nme.com/news/music/them-crooked- vultures-14-1294541)

He had a conversation with his doctor about it that went something like "So how many cups of coffee do you have a day?" and his answer was "How many cups are in a pot? Because I drink like five of those..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article says the teenager had no pre-existent medical (cardiac) condition. Question is : Could it be an undiagnosed, latent condition? The kid was really young and it's not usual to have teenagers do heart check-ups etc.

<comment><USER6> This story is confusing to me. There are even studies where previous heart failure patients were given acute high doses of caffeine with no adverse effects. [http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article...](http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article- abstract/2569283)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The link to caffeine seems rather tenuous, given the low dose of around 0.5 g mentioned in the article. In another incident someone was given 30 g of caffeine and they survived ([https://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2017/jan/25/students-caf...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2017/jan/25/students-caffeine-newcastle-crown-court-northumbria)), and the same article mentions a reported death at 18 g of caffeine.

I can't really see how the causality is established from the article between the caffeine and the death.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if the deceased had an underlying, diagnosed heart condition as well.

<comment><USER9> The article mentions that he had no preexisting heart condition.

<comment><USER10> that they knew of. I doubt that most teens with underlying heart conditions (like atrial fib) go to a cardio center.

<comment><USER11> They did an autopsy, this is the coroner's report. He would have checked for heart conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Like many others here, I consume more caffeine than this on a regular basis. I'll bet many of this kid's fellow students do too. Wouldn't be surprised if his parents and the coroner also fit that description. So it's not _just_ the caffeine intake that's involved here. Possible factors:

* Latent undiagnosed medical condition or unusual sensitivity

* Dehydration or intense exercise

* Potentiating effect from some other ingredient, or somethig else he had consumed

* Other substances that might have shown up on a proper toxicology scan (mention of which is notably absent from this story)

Without addressing these alternate hypotheses, "it was the caffeine" is premature and a bit irresponsible.

</comment><comment><USER13> A lot of people are questioning the coroners conclusions because they don't believe that the dose could be harmful. But he makes it clear that the issue is not the dose but the speed at which the drinks were consumed:

>"We're not saying that it was the total amount of caffeine in the system, it was just the way that it was ingested over that short period of time, and the chugging of the energy drink at the end was what the issue was with the cardiac arrhythmia."

Energy drinks weren't all that popular until recently, we we can expect that we are only now going to see the effects of high levels of caffeine intake on the general population.

</comment><comment><USER14> Caffeine's ld50 is estimated to be 80-100 cups of coffee worth in a single sitting, more if any time is given to eliminate some of it. Seems like the kid just got incredibly unlucky or had some sort of latent sensitivity.

</comment><comment><USER15> People have been drinking coffee for ages, if caffeine would be so dangerous wouldn't it be very clear by massive evidence?

Me and basically every friend I have exceeded this intake several times.

<comment> nv-vn Caffeine is dangerous in a way. It's very addictive and lethal at relatively low doses. Not everyone experiences lethal effects at the same dose: "The LD50 of caffeine in humans is dependent on individual sensitivity, but is estimated to be about 150 to 200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass or roughly 80 to 100 cups of coffee for an average adult." Maybe this teen had some condition before hand/was taking other medicines? I guess if they were very thin that might do it?

<comment><USER16> > relatively low doses

> roughly 80 to 100 cups of coffee

You and I have different definitions of "low dose".

<comment><USER17> That would also be well over the volume of pure water that can also cause death by water intoxication - see the "Hold your Wee for a Wii" incident.

<comment><USER18> Assuming the caffeine was delivered in liquid form (in coffee, energy drinks, sodas, etc). It would be fairly easy to exceed lethal dosage via caffeine in tablets, powder, or capsule form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A bit of an aside: I cut caffeine out 8 months ago except for the occasional caffeinated coffee or coke. Felt great after the first week, even, and haven't looked back since.

<comment><USER20> I genuinely don't follow: "Cut caffeine ... except for the occasional caffeinated coffee" \-- what does that leave? Do you mean you just reduced your coffee intake?

<comment><USER19> adenadel is correct. I am a coffee snob and will pour over or brew espresso every day. However, I switched out caffeinated coffee for decaf for all of the 6 months and have recently been tempted by some new beans. I'm really into trying different origins and roasters, which makes doing decaf hard over time.

I probably do < 1 caffeinated beverage per week on average, and never drip coffee due to the caffeine content. Lately I've been having a bit more as I experiment re-introducing it with L-Theanine.

The biggest reason I cut it out initially is a type of heartburn that I couldn't explain the source of. It vanished once I cut caffeine.

<comment><USER20> Cool. Yeah-- I've had various stints with going with decaf instead, but (somewhat like you) the wider selection always pulled me back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I doubt it was purely caffeine. The last time I consumed a small energy drink, I had heart palpitations. Pure caffeine (from No-Doze) doesn't give me heart palpitations; but energy drinks contain more than just caffeine.

</comment><comment><USER22> The LD50 of caffeine in humans is dependent on individual sensitivity, but is estimated to be about 150 to 200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass or roughly 80 to 100 cups of coffee for an average adult.

</comment><comment><USER23> "may have consumed about 470mg of caffeine in just under two hours"

I find it hard to believe that caused a problem for a 200lb person. I'm 150 and drink more than that every morning and have for years (2/3rds or a full pot, big cup, it's gone pretty quickly--like 1.5 hours). I also pretty regularly will drink 3 or 4 (150mg/ea) venti lattes in a couple of hours. As far as I can tell, I'm still alive.

<comment><USER24> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_tolerance)

<comment><USER25> Tolerance generally does not affect the lethality of a drug.

<comment><USER24> Hospice patients on morphine would strongly disagree.

[http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/562216_3](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/562216_3)

> Pharmacokinetic changes occur, for example, if the drug up-regulates the > activity of a metabolic process that represents a major pathway for its > elimination from the body. Enzyme induction results in a gradual reduction > in plasma drug concentration while the daily opioid dose remains unchanged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I never drank caffeine until college, got hooked on it for the last 5 years or so, just stopped using it last week. I feel great now. If you don't drink coffee for pleasure and only for the caffeine it's worth trying life without it.

<comment><USER27> You have to stop the caffeine intake for 2 weeks every 2 months, otherwise the adenosine receptors adapt and you won't feel the same effects.

<comment><USER28> I find it's worse than that. I still get the nervousness and eyelid twitches, but not the sharper focus. That's when I know it's time to cut back.

<comment><USER29> Is everybody really drinking coffee to become super workers? I think it tastes great and is nice to sip. It provides a _distraction_ from my screen. I don't even know if I'd notice its decaf.

<comment><USER30> I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, but I would go so far as to say that a vast majority of people have coffee (or another source of caffeine) in an attempt to boost their productivity.

<comment><USER29> It wasn't sarcasm. I was surprised that most of the coffee drinkers here were commenting about it in regards to productivity. I actually thought most people were like me and drink it for the flavor, provided distraction, therapeutic feelings it invokes, etc, along with productivity.

In fact, sitting my back yard and sipping a nice, warm cup of coffee is just about one of my favorites Saturday rituals, and I have no plans to be productive that day. Coffee is just... pleasant!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting how this story suddenly disappeared from the front page of hacker news.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is not passing the smell test. I, and many familiars, have greatly exceeded this kids intake. There has to be something else going on here. The media FUD surrounding this is deafening.

<comment><USER32> A lot of things can be triggers for undiagnosed heart conditions.

<comment><USER33> It turned out that "running to the river carrying a boat on your head" triggered my then 18-year-old brother's undiagnosed heart condition.

The fact that he was otherwise fit as an ox and his friend knew how to do CPR, meant that after a multiple bypass op he was back riding a bike in a few weeks, and has since turned out fine as a patent lawyer ... oh wait ....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _" We're not trying to speak out totally against caffeine," Mr Watts said. "We believe people need to pay attention to their caffeine intake and how they do it, just as they do with alcohol or cigarettes."_

What.

<comment><USER35> What's not to understand?

<comment><USER36> For starters, alcohol and tobacco are _massive_ killers, two of the biggest known, responsible for millions of deaths worldwide each year (and hundreds of thousands in the U.S. alone).

Mentioning coffee alongside these other two is patently ridiculous.

[https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol- co...](https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol- consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics)

[https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...](https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/)

<comment><USER37> Yes! I can't get over how people can think "smoking bad" but "alcohol ok". Alcohol is a fuel. Do you drink gasoline?

"But muh beers..."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deep Voice: Real-Time Neural Text-To-Speech - <AUTHOR> http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-production-quality-text-speech-system-constructed-entirely-deep-neural-networks/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey there! I'm one of the authors of the paper and I'm happy to answer any questions anyone may have!

Make sure to check out the paper on arxiv as well.

<comment><USER2> How close (# years?)are we to being able to replicate the voices of any given individual with sufficient samples of their voiceprint?

<comment><USER3> "My voice is my passport."

<comment><USER4> Verify me.

<comment><USER5> aahahahaha !

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. They are not TTS like we are accustomed to, they are replicating a specific persons voice with TTS. Listen to the ground-truth recordings at the bottom and then the synthesized versions above. "Fake News" is about to get a lot more compelling when you can make anyone say anything as long as you have some previous recordings of their voice.

<comment><USER7> > you can make anyone say anything as long as you have some previous > recordings of their voice.

That's not what this is doing. They're simply resynthesizing exactly what the person said, in the same voice. It's essentially cheating because they can use the real person's inflection. Generating correct inflection is the hardest part of speech synthesis because doing it perfectly requires a complete understanding of the meaning of the text.

The top two are representative of what it sounds like when doing true text to speech. The middle five are just resynthesis of a clip saying the exact same thing. And even in that case, it doesn't always sound good. The fourth one is practically unintelligible. But it's interesting because it demonstrates an upper bound on the quality of the voice synthesis possible with their system given perfect inflection as input.

To clarify, this is cool work, the real-time aspect sounds great, and I'm sure it will lead to even more impressive results in the future. But I don't want people to think that all of the clips on this page represent their current text-to-speech quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for clarifying this! We tried fairly hard to make this clear, because as you say, the hard part is generating inflection and duration that sounds natural. There's still a ton of work left to do in this duration – we're clearly nowhere near being able to generate human-level speech.

Our work is meant to make working with TTS easier to deep learning researchers by describing a complete and trainable system that can be trained completely from data, and demonstrate that the neural vocoder substitutes can actually be deployed to streaming production servers. Future work (both by us and hopefully other groups) will make further progress for inflection synthesis!

<comment><USER6> My "Fake News" comment aside, I think what y'all are doing could be transformational for many reasons. Imagine a scenario where a person loses a loved one, and similar technology is able to allow them to "have conversations" with the deceased as a form of healing and closure. Not to mention, this could add a personal touch to assistant bots that will make them a pleasure to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How soon before you make an API available? In other words, how do I make use of Deep Voice for my own applications?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, we do not have plans to make an API available. This paper and blog post are mostly meant to describe our techniques to other deep learning researchers and spur innovation in the field. However, we hope that these techniques will be available eventually, and we'll provide more information when that happens.

<comment><USER9> In order to not miss this announcement, do you have a mailing list we could sign up for to notify us when this becomes available? You have a LOT of people interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's great! when will the code / service be available to the public??

</comment><comment><USER11> Semi-related to the Baidu speech research: [http://chrislord.net/index.php/2017/02/23/machine- learning-s...](http://chrislord.net/index.php/2017/02/23/machine-learning- speech-recognition/)

The work is done by Mozilla

</comment><comment><USER12> does anyone know of good ways to do the opposite, speech to text?

<comment><USER13> Depends on how good you're talking. Chrome supports the SpeechRecognition API.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/SpeechRecog...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/SpeechRecognition)

<comment><USER12> i'm more thinking of ways to programmatically turn long audio files into indexable text.

<comment><USER14> Julius[1] can do this. But the accuracy depends on the language model you are using, and unfortunately the free English language model (VoxForge) is not the best.

[1] [http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php](http://julius.osdn.jp/en_index.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "We conclude that the main barrier to progress towards natural TTS lies with > duration and fundamental frequency prediction, and our systems have not > meaningfully progressed past the state of the art in that regard."

Who is working on this problem, and how?

<comment><USER16> We're working on this. Here is a very early demo of Julian. Don't be surprised, he sounds like a teenager with a high-pitched voice, recorded in his bedroom, because that's how the sample library was recorded. [https://soundcloud.com/komponant/julian-speech- demo](https://soundcloud.com/komponant/julian-speech-demo) NB the expressions (durations, F0) are manually adjusted, not predicted by a NN. We've built a fully flexible text-to-voice engine, not the brain that goes with it. But we're looking for people with experience in ML to work on this, so feel free to contact us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have A LOT of pdf's I'd much rather listen to than read. Can't wait for this!

<comment><USER18> I hacked a script on top of PDF.js to make it read the text by TTS while highlighting the words on page. I'm a big fan of having the computer speak to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> OK, that went from uncanny valley to flipping amazing. I could picture the person speaking. An old lady. A young woman. It was hard to picture an algorithm in a machine.

It's amazing that is all boils down to 1s and 0s and some boolean logic.

<comment><USER20> You've misunderstood what you're listening to, I suggest reading the post again.

The recordings at the bottom are just recordings of an old lady and a young woman.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I understood that. The ones in the middle are generated using their voices. You don't find that amazing?

<comment><USER21> I mean, it's sort of amazing, but it wasn't completely generated by machine. Those sound clips in the middle were generated by copying the inflections from actual recordings, not generating the inflections from scratch. It sounds like the current system they have sounds like the robotic voices at the very top.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone seen this yet? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcqBElF0ZI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcqBElF0ZI)

So many innovations happening with voice related technology..

</comment><comment><USER23> It says they trained on 20 hours of a speech corpus subset. Will larger datasets influence the future of TTS?

</comment><comment><USER24> how does this stack up against wavenet?

<comment><USER25> It's in the abstract. "... For the audio synthesis model, we implement a variant of WaveNet that requires fewer parameters and trains faster than the original ..."[1]

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.07825](https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.07825)

<comment><USER26> Disclosure: I'm one of the co-authors of the QRNN paper (James Bradbury, Stephen Merity, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher) produced by Salesforce Research.

There are many interesting advances that Deep Voice paper and implementation make but the part I'm excited by (and which might be transferable to other tasks that use RNNs) is showing that QRNNs are indeed generalizable to speech too - in this case in place of WaveNet.

"WaveNet uses transposed convolutions for upsampling and conditioning. We find that our models perform better, train faster, and require fewer parameters if we instead first encode the inputs with a stack of bidirectional quasi-RNN (QRNN) layers (Bradbury et al., 2016) and then perform upsampling by repetition to the desired frequency."

QRNNs are a variant of recurrent neural networks. They're up to 16 times faster than even Nvidia's highly optimized cuDNN LSTM implementation and give comparable or better accuracy in many tasks. This is the first time that it has been tried in speech - to see them note the advantages hold across the board (better, faster, smaller) is brilliant!

If you're interested in technical details, our blog post[1] provides a broader overview and our paper is available for deeper detail[2].

[1]: [https://metamind.io/research/new-neural-network-building- blo...](https://metamind.io/research/new-neural-network-building-block-allows- faster-and-more-accurate-text-understanding)

[2]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01576](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01576)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> very nice paper - one of my colleagues discovered it. I have been trying to understand the details but I do not see how your stacked dilated layers are arranged. "d" is mentioned once but no description given

</comment><comment><USER28> it's awesome~

</comment><comment><USER29> Great work!

</comment><comment><USER30> if i understand this correctly it's a pretty big achievement on the way to being able to replicate any persons voice in the future given enough audio samples. Amazing. Similarly i have seen lip movement (talking) be replicated using machine learning. Having completely artificial (or even real) identities saying whatever you want them to on video is not that far off i guess (simpler than general AI or even fully self driving cars), which is both amazing and terrifying.</comment>


Canadian cell phone service providers must unlock upon request - <AUTHOR> http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/info_sht/t14.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, cancellation fees must be reduced to $0 after 24 months.</comment>


Microsoft's new coding language is made for quantum computers - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/26/microsoft-new-coding-language-is-made-for-quantum-computers/ <comment><USER2> This isn't interesting, particularly comparing number of qubits in start-of- the-art to number of bits of memory classical computers had in the old days.

Ie - the article mentions a potential 40-qubit machine for their enterprise customers. I remember how quickly computers evolved in memory size or speed from k to M to G.

But 40 is just such a small number, almost like number of bits in magnetic core memory units or CRT phosphor screen storage units.

Probably in twenty years our kids will be using megaqubit or gigaqubit machines and laugh at the top-end-yet-still-nonexistent 40 qubit machine we're drooling over today.

(And in case anyone thinks I'm mixing up the performance/calculations like scope of classical bits vs qubits, no I'm not, it's just an observation of ordinality)</comment>


Has Airport Security Gone Too Far?  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704658204575611031585381708.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

<comment><USER2> _Even the most modest of us would probably agree to a brief flash of quasi- nudity if it would really ensure a safe flight._

Direct quote from the article. I am rolling my eyes. I've never been particularly body-modest, but I know I'm not normal. I know for a _fact_ that my wife would not agree with this, I'm pretty sure my dad wouldn't, either. My kids wouldn't - which brings me to the realization that I _still_ don't see why the bare mention of kiddie porn is enough to send anybody to jail with their computers seized - unless they're the TSA.

</comment><comment><USER3> "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." \- 4th Amendment

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing you were voted down[1] because the Supreme Court recognizes administrative searches as not being Constitutionally prohibited.

However, top officials—including Mr. Pistole at the TSA who, as FBI Deputy Director swore to protect the Constitution—have started referring to the new pat-down procedures as "Law Enforcement Pat-downs" and "Law Enforcement-Style Pat-Downs", and it is clear from descriptions that these are, in fact, akin to pat-downs given to arrestees. TSA employees are not law enforcement, but these extreme personal searches have no doubt led to law enforcement action when they detect non-threatening contraband (weed), which the TSA has been using to prove it _would_ be effective against threatening contraband (semtex underwear, although the GAO questions this).

Maybe, in that case, there is a Constitutional problem with the new searches, whether they are called administrative, or not.

[1] edit: parent was at -1 when I wrote this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why people are acquiescent to this! Every single time I read about this or watch a news report about the scanners, whoever is doing the talking invariable says at some point "I support security and the fact that we have to give up some rights in security's name". Hell, there's a video on Youtube right now recorded by a reporter of his own little girl getting manhandled by TSA, and he says the same damn thing on the 6 o'clock news or whenever. HIS OWN FREAKING DAUGHTER!

Its time that people stand up for their damn rights and say NO. You will not microwave me to see me nude. NO, you will not see my child nude. NO, you will not touch my genitals. NO, you will not touch my child's genitals. NO, you will do proper security that actually works.

It needs to come down to protests at airports. Volunteers need to stand in public areas and pass out information describing what the hell is going on. People that are flying need to get the balls to say that their personal rights as human beings are more important than making their flight on time.

<comment><USER5> Really? You're going to vote me down for saying you should stand up for your rights?

<comment><USER6> Some people are downvoting anything related to standing up for our rights -- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898362>

<comment><USER7> Given the amount of us that do consulting and on-site work, that seems absurd. It is directly professionally relevant.

<comment><USER6> i see things the way you do ... oh well, such is life

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There must be a reason why Silicon Valley has resorted to using social networks to identify good people.

Maybe it's time to use social networks for airline security as well.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?companyId=830630&...](http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?companyId=830630&sortCriteria=R&keepFacets=&facet_CC=830630)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes</comment>


Proposal: Hack Free CSS with the @unsupported Directive - <AUTHOR> http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2009/10/19/css-unsupported-directive/

<comment><USER2> I simply can't stand it when someone's solution to a problem is "I know, I'll put the code inside a comment!"

Now, as a human looking at a syntax highlighted source file, my parsing is broken. All the differently-colored comments that I _should_ be able to ignore suddenly have to be scanned because they might affect runtime somehow, and certainly any machine-based parser gets unnecessarily more complex.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your syntax highlighter can be trained to understand that syntax and not color it like a comment.

<comment><USER2> Well, sure, that takes care of the symptom but not the underlying issue: comments shouldn't affect runtime! To put it differently, if I remove all comments from a source file, the compiled/interpreted result should be 100% the same. If it isn't, something's wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> In this case, the something wrong is that the specification didn't have the foresight to create a syntax robust enough to support actually upgrading the spec for real users. Discarding unrecognized syntax is a nice, robust behavior, but it doesn't cut it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the meantime, one could use JavaScript to detect a browser's capabilities, and add a flag via a class on the body or html element.

For instance, with jQuery and a getStyleProperty helper[1]:

      if (typeof getStyleProperty('borderRadius') != 'string') {
          $('body').addClass('unsupported-border-radius');
      }

... then in the CSS:

      body.unsupported-border-radius {
        ... alternate code goes here ...
      }

[1] [http://thinkweb2.com/projects/prototype/feature-testing- css-...](http://thinkweb2.com/projects/prototype/feature-testing-css- properties/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a decent work-around. There's two reasons why it's an inferior solution:

1\. It slows down rendering or causes a potentially huge reflow when the feature support classes are added.

2\. The specificity of body.unsupported-border-radius .box is greater than the original rule, and this is going to cause issues with the rule ordering.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, definitely on #1 -- it's a performance hassle.

re: #2, a higher level of specificity acts like a ham-fisted override when the original rule you prefer can't be applied. that seems the right order of precedence to me.

EDIT: i see what you mean now. an @unsupported attribute as you describe acts like an either-or. the javascript solution i'm talking about cascades like a "this-and-also-this".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know...can we really trust all browser vendors to only claim @supported for a given feature when it's genuinely compliant, including all edge cases?

<comment><USER5> Or, as it historically been the case, a browser vendor implements the feature (so it's "supported") but they do it wrong.

As much as people hate to hear it, the only real solution is some kind of browser-version tagging. If it wasn't for Microsoft's browsers supporting browser-specific conditional comments, we'd have a much harder time writing standards-compliant web pages that work the same for every browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Using hacks to work around bugs, is tolerable, perhaps. But for the common case where a feature is only partially implemented across a swath of browsers, I think feature inspection works great. It won't be a panacea, but it will be a step in the right direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How many CSS hacks are necessary because a browser acknowledges support for something or doesn't support something versus having a totally broken implementation of something? In otherwords, this wouldn't fix at all being able to conditionnally choose CSS for IE's busted hasLayout oddity, nor would it allow non-hacky CSS to work around different box models, because we didn't even have names for these things when they were discovered and parsing bugs were discovered to allow some browsers to see the rules and others not to.

</comment><comment><USER7> You can already do this with the Modernizr javascript library, it works just like the blog post described:

<http://modernizr.com/>

It's a good approach - target only supported features through CSS inheritance. It's what I used to make my first commercial site with HTML5 and CSS3:

<http://theprbootcamp.com> (happening this Thursday in SF)

It was great, it made certain visual effects completely painless and degrades to a very similar but more square layout in IE6. It's not that you can't do rounded corners, dropshadows, multiple background images, gradients or have an IE6-friendly site design w/o it, it's just a giant time saver - I whipped together that site in less than a day - and the markup came out way cleaner.

No need to wait for the W3C to make a proposal or browser makers to integrate it, and you could remove the javascript if they ever come around.

</comment><comment><USER8> This would be nice, but it's not really feasible since it requires the browser vendor to implement a feature for backwards compatibility (kind of an oxymoron, isn't it?)

<comment><USER9> Or it's just forward-thinking to the point where every browser in use is already on CSS3 and we're trying to decide what CSS4 features to use in our sites...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is what I've been doing and it has worked relatively well.

      <!--[if lte IE 7]>
         <body class="ie67">
      <![endif]-->
      <!--[if !IE]>-->
      <body>
      <!--<![endif]-->

This allows me to target IE6/7 with the .ie67 class

<comment><USER11> How do you validate your markup like that?</comment></comment>


Disney Revel uses electrical fields for tactile feedback - <AUTHOR> http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/08/10/electrostatic.field.generator.offers.multiple.touch.sensations/

<comment><USER2> Yes, yes! The flexibility of a touch screen interface combine with intuitiveness of variable tactile feedback is like my holy grail of UI tools. Can't wait for this to trickle down to consumer gadgets.

</comment><comment><USER3> I imaging that the adult entertainment industry would be very interested in the this technology. It appears to be very inexpensive and could significantly enhance the experience. It might also provide a value add service to their "free" content; you can watch the movie for free but if you want the full experience it will cost $9.95 / month.

Getting Disney to license it to them is another matter all-together. Then again, isn't Touchstone studios a Disney property created to handle grownup movies? Maybe they could/would do something similar with this.</comment>