As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/us/international-enrollment-drop.html <comment><USER2> There are really three different downsides to this.

First, the foreign students cross-subsidize the locals' education. There are large fixed costs to running a university and these students pay way above their marginal costs. So now the universities have fewer resources; hence cutting the newspaper funding etc.

Second, the foreign students increase the schools' reputations and can collaborate with the faculty. Research is a public good. We do not have a research system so that we can think of things for nerds to do; we have it to produce valuable knowledge. In my own PhD program, the productivity of the Americans was much lower than the foreigners. That productivity led to discoveries that benefit everyone.

Third, immigration: some of the foreign students would have wound up staying. We should want these people to stay here and have families. Educated people who work hard and are ambitious enough to go overseas and stay are good for the country.

<comment><USER3> > In my own PhD program, the productivity of the Americans was much lower than > the foreigners.

I think the bias has swung way too far the other way. Racism against Americans is still racism.

Also, this applies mainly to undergrads (full paying students), not PhD students who are generally fully funded.

<comment><USER2> Regarding PhDs, grad international enrollment is declining.

Regarding the full-paying foreign undergrads, their tuition contributes towards the costs of the university that are shared. American students, especially at middle-ranking public schools, are hurt when schools lose their funding.

Regarding the "racism against Americans," there is no such race, and if there were one it would not explain research productivity. What would is the self- selection of who will go across the world to study something technical, the much better high schools in other countries, and in the mere fact that the rest of the world is a larger talent pool than the US. It is easy to think of reasons.

<comment><USER3> > Regarding PhDs, grad international enrollment is declining.

Your source on that? All the schools I'm in contact with are still as international as ever in their CS PhD departments. I'm not sure what the trends are outside of CS, but I can't imagine they would be very different. I think you are just pulling this number out of thin air.

Research is funded quite differently from undergrad programs. Sure, fewer TAships are available, but your research funding is much more detached. DARPA and NSF aren't going to become stingy all of a sudden.

> Regarding the "racism against Americans," there is no such race, and if > there were one it would not explain research productivity.

If I claimed (without any evidence in fact) that "Indians or Chinese are less productive than Americans" I would totally be accused of racism even though both India and China are multi-ethnic. It is especially a stupid thing to say as foreign and domestic students are pretty diverse, with slackers (or dreamers) and very focused students on both sides.

<comment><USER4> > Your source on that? All the schools I'm in contact with are still as > international as ever in their CS PhD departments. I'm not sure what the > trends are outside of CS, but I can't imagine they would be very different. > I think you are just pulling this number out of thin air.

So you're asking for a source when your own view is based on anecdotes? Great.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the number of international graduate students is at an all time in 2016, and I'm sure for 2017 also. It isn't rocket science:

[https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international- studen...](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-students- united-states)

Growth has been falling, but that wasn't the claim that was made, which was actually ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is bad news. People like Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, not to mention CEOs of Google, Microsoft and Adobe all came to the US as students. Without the immigration of the brightest on the planet, the US will, over time, lose its edge.

<comment><USER6> As other have pointed out, this is mostly about the schools losing full- tuition international students, ie.e "International students pay double the $6,445 tuition of Missouri residents" \--which is insane. I mean, it's insane for in-state students to have to shell out 6.5 thousand a year for higher ed...

The international students are typically those kids of parents who are perhaps middle to upper middle class in a foreign country (JP, KR, TW, IN, CN, UK, AU, etc) who want to send their kids to an American school and get an "American" degree and go back home for a job --those who come from non-English speaking countries get the bonus/cachet of now having a degree from an English speaking country which potentially gets them an international station or at least a slightly better slot.

<comment><USER7> >go back home for a job

Haha. Not really. American salaries, standards of living are among the highest/best in the planet. Plus an abundance of economic opportunities and relatively low discrimination compared to what one may face in other developed countries.

These are the __only __factors which decide whether a family sends their kid to the US for higher ed or not. The degrees themselves aren 't worth much at all.

Unless on course you are talking about the very elite, who have well established businesses and properties in their home countries, who then want __Ivy League __degrees for their kids. They won 't give a f __k about the average mid western universities that the article is actually talking about.

<comment><USER8> You underestimate the value of an "overseas" degree in "developing" countries like China. A student who comes back to China with a US/UK degree will get preferential access to first-tier city resident permits, direct financial "housing" benefits from the city, a good job and faster career advancement and more besides. Some of those benefits are starting to get scaled back but it's still a big advantage.

<comment><USER9> U overstated it vastly...In China, UK degrees got so inflated, many of which being one year master, that they are pretty useless now.Oversea working experience is still valued

<comment><USER10> _In China, UK degrees got so inflated_

This is driven by ex-poly degree mills cashing in. If you're studying in the UK it's Russell Group is still prestigious for the right reasons. Otherwise the value is questionable.

<comment><USER11> Even that is changing. I know of a masters course in a UK Russell group uni where Chinese students outnumber any other group including locals. The result of this is terrible, terrible English skills and huge pressure from the "sales" department to give better grades to keep that sweet Chinese money flowing. Essays written in broken English that suddenly and suspiciously transition into perfect prose are common and no longer punished. When one of the students was asked why they picked that course at that uni, they said it was because the entry requirements were easiest and the level of English required was low.

Now, obviously, this course at this uni is clearly going to crash and burn at some point, having used up all good will pandering to rich Chinese students. The problem is that this is an industry race to the bottom. Sure, the main stem subjects at Cambridge or Manchester are in good shape, but all the fringe subjects are going to shit, especially the one year masters courses.

I can't name the specific course or university as I was told this in confidence by a faculty member, so believe what you will, but the race to the bottom is happening and is causing immense harm to UK institutions at all levels, not just the ex-poly degree mills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would highly recommend to Indian students not to study in the US going forward. At least until the generally hostile attitude towards immigrants and meaningful reforms in GC attainment is done. If you plan to lay down your roots in America after school, it will simply not happen in the current climate. Go study in Canada, Australia, UK, and India and contribute to those societies

<comment><USER13> All you have to do is get married to an American.

You could be the best and brightest or the dumb and dullest, won't matter.

<comment><USER14> Indian/Chinese men are much less desired than whites and sometimes blacks and latinos in the US dating market. Marrying an American is probably harder than alternative approaches, at least for males from these countries.

<comment><USER15> Or you know, put up an ad on craigslist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Even my old community college stuffed itself on mediocre kids from overseas paying 3x market rate, but god their parents were probably really stoked to see them be someone else's problem.

Universities need to cull their bureaucracies and stop wasting their time, money and effort with their spin-out accelerator programs. Research, teach and keep the roof patched. Problem is, they will probably double down on out of state tuition and patent grabs.

<comment><USER17> A lot of my professors in undergrad engineering hated teaching. They openly derided it as a chore. This was very disheartening as a student to hear.

<comment><USER18> More a consequence of the schools happily trading teaching quality for research prestige.

And for sports prestige, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > International students pay double the [...] tuition of [in-state] residents

> Nationwide, the number of new foreign students declined an average of 7 > percent this past fall

I mean, perhaps Trump can be blamed for some of it, but maybe these schools might consider lowering tuition a little to become more attractive to foreign students?

</comment><comment><USER20> The only surprising thing about this article was how lowly paid a language professor is. $47,000? What?

<comment><USER21> Seems right to me, given the job prospects for someone whose talent is speaking two languages. Do you think the market for Italian / English specialists is super hot?

<comment><USER7> Leaving everything to be decided by market factors definitely has it's flaws. There should be room for authorities\patrons to intervene and prevent a certain skill set from being wiped out because it doesn't make business sense to preserve them.

<comment><USER22> It's not being "wiped out", it's being scaled down to sustainable levels.

If "the authorities" protect price levels for every job that is in a larger supply than demand, that money goes straight out of the pockets of the people who perform jobs that _are_ in demand, i.e. the people performing the tasks that are needed the most by _all the other people_.

You have a less efficient economy as a result, which makes people poorer on the average.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, why come to a country that is openly hostile to you after all?

<comment><USER23> $$$ is why

<comment><USER9> Unless u get a job. It is pretty hard by itself, even harder under Trump. As an investment, its return is diminishing.

<comment><USER6> I can see the difficulty of getting in to make a degree even more valuable in some countries.

<comment><USER9> True for Good Schools. It is a great privilege to get into Ivys and top US institutions. Those Midwest public schools in the article don't really have a reputation for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So they're cutting the french tuba and Italian professors, but keeping all the far more expensive deans?

Seems backwards.

<comment><USER25> Are you saying they don't need to have a dean in order for the school to function?

That might be true but, assuming it's not true, the best they could do to reduce the cost of deans would be to reduce the dean's salary by half. And laying off 2 or 3 faculty from departments that are not in high demand will lead to a much higher cost savings than half of a dean's salary. Removing a whole out-of-demand department even moreso.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's really sad that research institutions are leveraging international student's high tuition to increase their revenues.

<comment><USER27> Not just that but those same students want GTA positions. To fund those positions the universities are increasing fees and no-credit courses on students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This can be largely explained by the drop in birth rates in China associated with the one child policy. The number of college-aged Chinese in 2020 will be roughly half what it was a decade before[1]. People have seen this coming for years. The administrators blaming this on politics are most likely scapegoating for their poor planning.

[1] [https://www.indexmundi.com/china/age_structure.html](https://www.indexmundi.com/china/age_structure.html)

<comment><USER12> If this was the case, it would be a gradual decline, instead of a dramatic decrease in one year. Also, anecdotally, none of my family members want to study in the US anymore.

<comment><USER28> How gradual would it have to be for you to find this plausible? The prior NYT article referenced in this work mentions that first-time international student fell 3% from 2016. Those were numbers collected prior to the election, mind you. And a 50% change in the largest cohort of international students over only 10 years is going to make for a pretty big impact. Especially considering that these middling American schools are seen as alternatives to better domestic choices like Tsinghua. If the schools being discussed here were low on the priority list of potential students, the change would be even more exaggerated.

Imagine the hypothetical where there were 2 schools, each of which could educate 50 students per year and where all students prefer school 1 to school 2. If the population drops from 100 to 80, school 2 would see a 40% decrease in enrollment, even though the general population only dropped 20%. Now if school 1 is in China and school 2 is in the US...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Losing international students is bad, but the cuts they claim are hardly draconian. Given the current environment (high change, bloated costs, online education) we should expect massive changes at non-flagship public schools. Should local students working full time pay to subsidize a money losing swim team? (Independent of internationals)

</comment><comment><USER30> Apparently I'm the only one who is happy about this. I went through undergrad/grad school just as the explosion of foreign students occurred. Don't get me wrong, I'm open minded and liberal but I saw class rooms go from a dozen English speaking students with close connections to the professor to rooms stuffed beyond the fire code specifications of 50+ students who I couldn't even communicate with, not to mention the precipitous fall in education quality associated with this transition. Foreign money and skill is nice but I saw top tier programs go to shit to cram in a bunch of high paying mediocre foreign students. Domestic students deserve access to high quality education, and I personally saw major US programs fail at that.

</comment><comment><USER17> Universities should not make up budget short falls and high administration salaries in the backs of students.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is also due to Obama era scholarships/money provided to refugee students aren't done by the Trump administration anymore. The universities were indirectly subsidized by the US government and aren't done so anymore.

</comment><comment><USER32> ...and rural college towns. That ought to be in the headline, too.

</comment><comment><USER33> Finally. Time for the sword of Damocles to fall on those overpaid administrators.

</comment><comment><USER34> Trump is going to ruin the American economy.

Attack universities by discouraging foreign students. Cut federal funding for research. Encourage political attacks on universities. The most damaging will be not forgiving student loans from people who went to scam universities, like Trump university.

What Trump and others don't recognize is that the American university system is a distributed system of factories that manufacture knowledge, innovation and the future.

Just look at self driving cars. Much of the tech and the talent came from various universities.

<comment><USER35> >> Trump and others don't recognize is that the American university system is a distributed system of factories that manufacture knowledge, innovation and the future.

There is another side to this. And that is that the American university system has a distinct political agenda that is opposed to the interests of the Trump- supporting half of the American electorate.

It is a bad thing for innovation when there are fewer smart people immigrating into the U.S. However, when you have a system of institutions that adopt adversarial political positions toward a large chunk of the electorate, you should expect that at some point you will end up in a situation where the electorate elects leaders who work, to some degree, against what the winning side of the voting public regard as powerful institutions firmly in the hands of political opponents.

There is not, unfortunately, an easy solution to the adversarial relationship between academia and half of America. The shift toward a mono-cultural academia (from a political standpoint) has occurred over decades; the left is now firmly entrenched in American universities and unlikely to relinquish its position any time soon.

We can't ban politics from universities either; you will never get politics out of any organization in which humans are involved. We are distinctly political animals.

So perhaps the focus should be on returning academia to a more politically balanced setup... that we might no longer end up in scenarios like today, where half the voting public views academia as a shining part of the leadership of progressive society, and the other half views it as a once-great former pride of our country, sadly fallen and increasingly adversarial. So long as the universities remain a bastion of the American left and an enemy of the American right, they will continue to feast during the years in which the left holds power, and continue to starve during the years when it does not.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Disclaimer: I'm not American. But my view is that the American right has placed itself outside the Overton window of anyone with a higher education.

For example, the President is a climate change denier. How do you expect those views to be represented in universities when they fly in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence?

In most countries, this problem doesn't exist because parties with ideas equivalent to the GOP don't exist or are marginal.

<comment><USER35> Climate change isn't a very good example. Individuals who subscribe to anthropogenic global warming and individuals who are skeptical of it have equal levels of scientific comprehension. [1]

It's more accurate to note that either side of the political divide in the United States has its share of unscientific beliefs. On the right, you have things like creationism and anti-vaxxers. On the left, you have things like gender theory and anti-GMO. Dismissing either side as rubes because of deeply held (if unscientific) ideologies doesn't help bridge the divide any.

>> In most countries, this problem doesn't exist because parties with ideas equivalent to the GOP don't exist or are marginal.

As an American who has not lived in or visited America for quite some time, I agree there is typically more uniformity in most intranational political ideologies worldwide. Though I would not agree "most countries" don't have parties similar to America's GOP.

I think it'd be more accurate to say most Western European and Western European-descent countries do not have parties like America's GOP. Meanwhile, most non-Western European or non-Western European-descent countries do not have parties like America's Democrat Party.

For example, every major political party in Asia and Africa, with very few exceptions, pursues an ethnonationalist agenda. This is more akin to the modern American GOP than the modern American Democrat Party. On the other hand, in Western Europe, ethnonationalist parties tend to be not only out of favor, but illegal.

America is a rather strange country politically in that regard. Half of it is more like Western Europe. The other half is more like the rest of the world. In that sense, I suppose it is a bit like if you created a country made up half of England and half of China. The result would be a type of tumult similar to that of the U.S. (if a bit more extreme).

[1] [https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2016.1148067](https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2016.1148067)

<comment><USER4> The right and left are not equivalent. While anti-GMO may be a personal preference for many hipsters, its most certainly not the defining agenda of the left. Also the left seem to be much more willing to change their beliefs in the face of scientific evidence, whereas the Right is more theology, faith and other such nonsense. So don't say they're equivalent, because they simply aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Schools like Cal are still offering too many slots to foreign students despite being chartered to serve the families of taxpayers who provide their funding.

The same issue will eventually plague Canadian schools...foreign students will simply pay more directly for tuition even though taxpayers are still the core source of funds.

For private universities, no one should care..they should select students from wherever they like. But State schools should exist to serve their residents.

<comment><USER6> A question I would have, if I were an international student living in say, California, is why would I pay tuition as a legal immigrant on say a F-1 visa, but if I came in illegally, I would have a chance at getting a subsidy[1]? Could they just pretent to be illegal for the subsidy and then when done just go home on your F-1. It's not like the school would check or even less ask the feds about status.

[1][https://students.ucsd.edu/finances/fees/residence/ab540.html](https://students.ucsd.edu/finances/fees/residence/ab540.html)

<comment><USER37> You can't get an F1 visa without the school knowing, they are sponsoring the visa.

<comment><USER6> Couldn't you go AWOL and then register as undocumented? Or why not be able to register for Non-Resident Tuition Exemption? Wouldn't that be discriminatory in some sense?

<comment><USER38> > Couldn't you go AWOL and then register as undocumented? . Well, you can't > qualify for DACA without a time machine, so you'd need to estsblish > eligibility under AB 540 by spending three years as a California resident > attending a California high school to qualify. Having done this, you > wouldn't have to pretend to be undocumented, since you'd pretty certainly > lose your F-1 status. So, you'd potentially be eligible for in-state > tuition—but also potentially eligible for deportation. Plus, unlike an > actual good-standing F-1, you'll have a lot harder time ever getting legal > status in the US.

> Wouldn't that be discriminatory in some sense?

Of course it would; every status distinction made in law is "discriminatory in some sense."

The relevant issue is does it fail to meet the legal standard of legitimacy of purpose and adaptation to that purpose applicable to the basis and nature of discrimination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> George Mason University leans heavily on international graduate students. The school increased no-credit-but-required classes on undergrads to pay those same international students who wish to be GTA's. It's almost like a Ponzi scheme.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is good news. At the moment, universities are the primary gatekeepers to becoming a citizen in the U.S. Right now universities are capturing nearly 100% of the "citizenship cost" that immigrants pay start their path to becoming citizens. That is disgusting and greedy.

With 100K in loans paid to the university, anyone can come to the U.S. on a student visa, make contacts with companies, and eventually become a U.S. citizen. A U.S. graduate degree serves as the primary "citizenship cost" for a lot of immigrants.

Instead of New England universities shaking down immigrants, I would like to see midwestern small towns, red states, small business all get a piece of the small fortune that immigrants spend to come to the United States.

<comment><USER40> According to the article, it was Midwest (aka "red" state) universities which have mostly benefited the most from foreign students.

Also what visa allows immigrants to skip university enrolment and be directly employed in a small town small business?

<comment><USER39> > Also what visa allows immigrants to skip university enrolment and be > directly employed in a small town small business?

The student visa allows one to be in the country for an indetermine amount of time (until their degree is done) and that person is free to obtain employment while enrolled in university</comment></comment></comment>


An Overview of the Scala Programming Language [pdf] (why use Ruby for your startup when you can use Scala?) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/ScalaOverview.pdf <comment><USER2> I like Scala, and I think Lift is very promising, but to answer the rhetorical question, I'd use Ruby because Rails is at a more mature stage in its lifetime than Lift is (I think Lift list just had its 0.2 release). There are some very promising numbers, and developing with Lift is certainly doable (although tutorials and docs are relatively scarce compared to other frameworks), but this may be a good time to harken back to PG's comments about technology firms who bet on the success of Java Applets (I mean, it kind of feels like Lift is a one man production, which means you're relying heavily upon someone who doesn't even know who you are...).

Scala is fantastic though, don't think I'm disagreeing.

</comment><comment><USER3> For that matter, there are a dozens of other languages other than Ruby that would work just as well. Ruby just happens to have a decent framework for it, that happens to be well known.

Here is a link to wikipedia if you don't want to read the whole PDF: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_%28programming_language%29>

<comment><AUTHOR> Unlike Ruby, Scala is statically typed. However, due to local type inference, you can often omit variable type declarations.

Scala has the Lift Web Framework:

<http://liftweb.net>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also see:

<http://blog.lostlake.org/index.php?/archives/45-A-real-world-use-of- lift.html#extended></comment>


Ask HN: New LLC; Bank Suggestions/Free Business Checking Account? (Boston) - <AUTHOR>

Hey Guys, here is a bullet point list of details.<p>- Multi-member LLC<p>- Looking for a bank near Boston, MA<p>- Have done a bunch of online research and have found mixed messaged and reviews (forums, review sites, etc.)<p>- I believe a No-fee Business Checking Account is what would work best with our company<p>- We do have an EIN, and want to make specifically a Business Checking Account.<p>- I know most if not all business accounts have fees for # of transactions over X amount. I believe the standard 300 transactions/mo free then $0.10 charge is fair.<p>- We will probably be doing mix business with Amazon fulfillment and some in-person (in boston) transactions.<p>Any help or words of wisdom are welcome! <comment><USER2> TANSTAAFL.

No fee business checking accounts typically come with minimum balances. This means that if you experience cash flow issues and have to dip below the minimum, you're likely to get hit with fees. On the other hand, if you pay per check, then you can plan. Consider that a $30 fee is 300 $0.10 transactions.

If you can't roll the cost of transactions into your price, there are problems with the business model in terms of scale and market segment validation anyway.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I understand that. I was also wondering if anyone have good experiences with any banks in boston.

<comment><USER2> The important relationship as in any other business situation is with an individual rather than a company. In this case with a banker rather than a bank. Barring the fortunate situation in which a person has so much money that bankers are calling up them, creating that relationship is going to boil down to sitting down with individual bankers. It probably won't result in anything better than a standard retail deal in the short run, but it may result in someone who can provide advice as the business grows.

<comment><USER3> While I generally totally agree, when it comes to banks anymore this is not nearly as true when you are small or the bank large. I had an amazing relationship with my prior banker who happened to be with Bank of America and it got to the point that he couldn't help us with anything even a simple notarizing of an important document because it didn't originate from his branch. He used to waive stupid fees for teller help etc but couldn't anymore. Given the amount of money I was pushing through his branch I also got very good terms personally before, not anymore.

So I switched to a smaller bank, not tiny but where we could get better service and have been much happier.

I researched carefully, PNC, TD, BBT and a number of regional banks. Finally went with PNC and have been really happy. And while they aren't perfect they really do stress the local relationship and do their best to help out. Even at that they still are a bank and it is no longer the old type of relationship where a branch manager could really do a lot for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lastpass acquired by Citrix - <AUTHOR> https://blog.logmeininc.com/welcome-new-logmein/ <comment><USER2> misleading headline.

Logmein, the owner of Lastpass, is acquiring a subsidiary of Citrix called GetGo (GoTo... products) that was spun out.

The new company is called Logmein, and has legally less to do with Citrix than even before!

Wonder why the poster chose that particular phrasing (acquired) because it was Logmein (parent of Lastpass) that was doing the buying:

[https://www.logmeininc.com/about-us/faq](https://www.logmeininc.com/about- us/faq)

What are the financial details of the transaction?

As part of the merger agreement, Citrix spun off its wholly owned subsidiary, GetGo, which then merged with a subsidiary of LogMeIn. LogMeIn issued an estimated 27.3 million shares of LogMeIn common stock to Citrix equity holders in connection with the merger. The transaction is valued at approximately $1.8 billion based on shares to be issued and LogMeIn's closing price of $65.31 as of July 25, 2016, the date on which the merger was first announced.

What's the name of the merged company?

The name of the new combined company is LogMeIn, Inc.

<comment><USER3> That sounds like the headline is less misleading, and just plain incorrect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Citrix has spun out the Goto* products, and that's what has merged with LogMeIn.

Citrix hasn't bought LastPass Citrix hasn't merged directly with LogMeIn, it's still a separate company.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just to clarify, LogMeIn (which owns LastPass) is merging with Citrix

<comment><USER2> This is incorrect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And i'll stick with the service.. last time the world freaked out and guess what.. NOTHING Happened.. actually, it improved and some paid features (mobile) became free.

</comment><comment><USER7> You mean logmein? Lastpass was purchased in 2015 I thought

<comment><USER8> Lastpass was purchased by LogMeIn, but yeah, strange way to word the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found the service significantly decreased when LP was purchased by Logmein, and I expect nothing good to come from Citrix now owning LP. I have had an enterprise subscription for many years, but will now look at an alternative. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER10> I'd love to hear what has gone downhill for you. I was initially really worried about it, but haven't seen anything terrible personally.

<comment><USER11> Same here, I actually think it's more user friendly now and it fills the fields at higher correctness than before. Maybe he is still on version 3x? You can choose that in the settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think you mean LogMeIn has been acquired by Citrix, no ?</comment>


Massachusetts Court Blocks Warrantless Access to Real-Time Location Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/massachusetts-court-blocks-warrantless-access-real-time-cell-phone-location-data <comment><USER2> Am I the only one surprised that this is allowed in the first place? What established practices/precedent does the state have that "it could warrantlessly get cell phone location data to find anyone, anytime, at any place as long as it was less than six hours old"?

That seems like precisely the information that should require a warrant, no?

<comment><USER3> The "Third Party Doctrine"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third- party_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine)

Everyone storing data in "the cloud" is also at risk, the cloud provider can voluntarily hand data to law enforcement at their discretion. IIRC this also comes into play when your email messages are hosted on a 3rd party server that you do not own.

<comment><USER4> Cloud data and email are protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Privacy_Act)

Under the ECPA they need to obtain a warrant for email and other cloud storage services, unless it's older than 180 days... then it's considered "abandoned".

There's been some effort to remove the 180 day limit.. some states have laws that protect older data + the 6th circuit already extended it past 180 days in US v Warshark.. but we need a national law like the Email Privacy Act that the House passed last year (but the senate didn't):

[https://www.natlawreview.com/article/house-judiciary- committ...](https://www.natlawreview.com/article/house-judiciary-committee- approves-email-privacy-act)

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

<comment><USER5> You're not wrong, but you've missed the main distinguishing factor between the Third Party Doctrine and the ECPA.

ECPA is about unauthorised access (think tapping a phone line, but for the digital age) to electronic communications/cloud data. The Third-Party Doctrine is explicitly about the Government requesting these records - thus they would do not fall under "unauthorised access" in the sense used under the ECPA. Basically they cover two completely different situations.

<comment><USER6> I think rgbrenner's point about the ECPA is actually on point in response to the "IIRC this also comes into play when your email messages are hosted on a 3rd party server that you do not own." comment.

The ECPA isn't just about unauthorized access. It also has provisions, such as the Stored Communications Act (a subset of the ECPA), that apply to the 3P situation you described where "Government request[s] these records." For example, 18 U.S.C. 2703(a) (titled "Required disclosure of customer communications or records") reads "[a] governmental entity may require the disclosure by a provider of electronic communication service of the contents of a wire or electronic communication, that is in electronic storage in ..."

In response to the original comment, the State's position that "it could warrantlessly get cell phone location data to find anyone, anytime, at any place as long as it was less than six hours old" was in part based on a previous Supreme Court case, Carpenter v. United States. Carpenter concerned federal prosecutors' attempts to get CSLI information using a court order pursuant to the Stored Communications Act -- 18 U.S.C. 2703(d).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I personally agree with the ruling, there's a good chance that it will get appealed (and potentially overturned), since US v. Carpenter, decided back in 2017, had a narrow holding.

The article mentions that the EFF:

> ...asked the court to recognize, as the Supreme Court did in U.S. v > Carpenter, that people have a constitutional right to privacy in their > physical movements.

But SCOTUSblog's reporting of that decision makes it clear that [1]:

> Roberts also left open the possibility that law-enforcement officials might > not need a warrant to obtain cell-site location records for a shorter period > of time than the seven days at issue in Carpenter's case – which might allow > them to get information about where someone was on the day of a crime, for > example.

There are two dimensions involved: who's being tracked, and how long it's been tracked. In Carpenter's case, someone was tracked for 7 days without a warrant, while in Almonor, it was only 6 hours. Additionally, the EFF post suggests that this was a much more targeted search (one for specific suspects only) than the one in Carpenter.

As much as I dislike the idea of warrantless phone tracking, since Roberts crossed over to vote with the liberals on the side of a narrow majority on Carpenter, there's a decent chance this might get overturned on appeal.

[1] [https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court- ho...](https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-holds-that- police-will-generally-need-a-warrant-for-cellphone-location-information/)

<comment><USER8> It appears this ruling is based on the Massachusetts State Constitution, not the U.S. Constitution. States are allowed to have stronger protections against searches and seizures than what the 4th Amendment requires, and the U.S. Supreme Court (the only court above the MA Supreme Judicial Court) is unlikely to have the jurisdiction to interpret state constitutions.

> "Although the defendant raised both federal and state constitutional claims > in Almonor, the court based its decision solely on Article 14 of the > Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which was drafted before—and served as > one of the models for—our federal Bill of Rights. Article 14, one of the > cornerstones of the Massachusetts Constitution, is the state's equivalent to > the Fourth Amendment. As the court notes, it 'does, or may, afford more > substantive protection to individuals than that which prevails under the > Constitution of the United States.'"

(From original article.)

> "the U.S. Supreme Court may hear appeals from state supreme courts only if > there is a question of law under the United States Constitution (which > includes issues arising from federal treaties, statutes, or regulations), > and those appeals are heard at the Court's sole discretion (that is, only if > the Court grants a petition for writ of certiorari)."

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_supreme_court#Influence_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_supreme_court#Influence_of_the_federal_Supreme_Court_on_the_state_supreme_courts))

<comment><USER7> Ah, that makes a lot of sense! I missed that part of the article. It sounds like the decision is safe in Massachusetts, then!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another sane decision from MA courts, now we just need some of that logic to trickle up to the national level.

<comment><USER10> We probably need legislation at the federal level more than a court decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As well they should; it sounds objectively like an abuse of privacy. I don't much care for Google's Sensorvault DB [0] either but at least it's not (AIUI) real-time and completely unfettered. It'll be interesting to see if projects like that are considered unethical in a few years too along the same grounds.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google- loc...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-location- tracking-police.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I think we well on our way to living in a world where corporations become the enablers for surreptitious yet legal government overreach.

</comment><comment><USER13> Small victory bit a great first step. Searches by ANY agent of the government without a warrant, even of private data brokers, that is meant for prosecution should be illegal.

</comment><comment><USER14> no problem. just route the request federally

</comment><comment><USER15> Does this include the FBI/Fusion centers?

<comment><USER16> The ruling was based on the MA state constitution, so it probably doesn't constrain federal law enforcement agencies. But it definitely constrains MA state and local officials, whether or not they're collaborating voluntarily with the feds in a fusion center.

<comment><USER15> The fact that this has to ruled upon shows how corrupt the institution is.

Rand Paul 2020.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think we're seeing lower courts quickly coming up to speed on the ramifications of all this data.

Hopefully it move up to SCOUS.

</comment><comment><USER18> 3rd parties (the corporations) are people, so why don't they already need a warrant to get stuff from them?

</comment><comment><USER19> how hard is it really to get a warrant against someone? it seems like all it takes is to create reasonable doubt and you now have the "moral highground" to violate their personal rights

<comment><USER20> A law enforcement officer would first need to have probable cause, then create a sworn affidavit, then present this to a judge and if the judge agrees, a warrant is issued.

Search warrants are narrowly scoped. If they find evidence of other law breaking while executing the warrant, it's inadmissible in court. (unless they witness these crimes taking place)

They're only allowed to go after the crimes that they are already aware of.

<comment><USER21> That isn't really how it works. The search warrant must be narrowly scoped to only what is required to investigate the crime for which they have probable cause. However if they find evidence of other crimes while staying within the scope of the original warrant they can generally use that evidence at trial.

So for instance if the police have probable cause that a wanted criminal is at your house they can get a search warrant to search it for him. If while searching they see illegal drugs on your coffee table they can use that evidence under the plain view exception. However if they open up your schoolbag and find drugs they would not be able to use that as evidence because there is no way a person can fit inside your bag so searching it couldn't have been part of the search authorized by the warrant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> this is why I donote to both the ACLU and EFF - thank you!

</comment><comment><USER23> It sounds dystopian, but I'm not really sure I disagree with the government here. We allow our personal data (to include real time location) to be collected and sold on third party exchanges. I'm not sure there is a strong argument for the government needing a warrant to access the data given how freely we already disseminate it.

The solution would be to not disseminate it, but we, as a collective, have agreed to not make privacy a concern so far.

The biggest irony of all is, as we saw with gdpr, most hn users are nominally for privacy until regulation is implemented and we realize that we(most programmers) are the people making a living off of the current state of privacy.

<comment><USER24> It's interesting how textualism/originalism vs the constitution as a "living document" plays out. Of course a conservative interpretation of the constitution might say "the right to bear arms includes rocket launchers" where a liberal one might say "the founders could not have imagined such a weapon". In the same way, one could say "if you don't want to be tracked, don't carry a tracking device on you at all times", where a more liberal interpretation might be "the framers could not have imagined such an ubiquitous and useful device, and it's not reasonable to have to sacrifice modern convenience to maintain the privacy we thought we were guaranteed".

And depending on the issue at stake, a more liberal or more conservative view might give you greater rights.

<comment><USER23> I don't think that applies here. I'm specifically not saying that producing data makes it public. Rather I'm saying allowing a third party to resell your data with impunity necessarily obviates your ability to control the dissemination. If you've given control of your data to a third party, you have no control. Full stop.

<comment><USER25> If that were true, then wiretaps would be A-OK as long as 1) the phone company willingly plays along; and 2) the tap never physically intrudes upon the subject's property.

SCOTUS ruled _explicitly_ on this question in Katz vs. US -- wiretapping is unconstitutional, regardless of physical intrusion. Just because you route your voice through a switch owned _and controlled by_ a third part does not mean you give up your expectation of privacy.

<comment><USER23> In that case, you haven't entered into an agreement whereby advertisers may know the contents of your phone conversations in order to better target you with ads. If you had, I imagine SCOTUS would rule differently. It seems to me that this debate is merely about price. If the police were buying your location data off of a service that offered it, how would they be any different than advertisers?

<comment><USER25> _> If the police were buying_

That's not what is happening here. The police are not purchasing access like an advertiser would; they are receiving special access for the purpose of tracking suspects.

 _> If you had, I imagine SCOTUS would rule differently._

The SCOTUS of the 1960s was very clear -- routing your communication through a corporate party does not, in any way, negate your expectation of privacy from your own government!

SCOTUS has changed drastically since the 1960s, and I will be unsurprised if SCOTUS rolls back every single 'privacy' case that it encounters. But that has nothing to do with the merits of these cases; it's a way of salting the earth so that Roe v. Wade can be overturned while appearing less overtly political.

<comment><USER23> > That's not what is happening here. The police are not purchasing access like > an advertiser would; they are receiving special access for the purpose of > tracking suspects.

Yes, but my point was that we're only arguing about how much someone should have to spend to gain access.

> The SCOTUS of the 1960s was very clear -- routing your communication through > a corporate party does not,

But my point, _again_, is that they were _not_ clear that you have some expectation of privacy after _selling your personal data on an exchange_.

<comment><USER25> I know what your point is. My point is that the courts have considered your point and don't agree... and for good reason. Your legal analysis basically amounts to "I don't like that other people use Google's services, and they deserve to suffer for their complacency".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> MA generally holds state authority in the highest regards and likewise gives the cops tons of leeway to do whatever. That a judge in typically authoritarian state ruled to curtail police power is a pleasant surprise. I'm not complaining.

<comment><USER27> What a weird thing to say about Massachusetts. It has a constitution and an elected legislature, so it's definitely not an "authoritarian state". It has one of the lowest rates of police violence in the country, so I don't understand the quip about the cops either. Can you clarify?

<comment><USER28> Check the post history for this person. There's a weirdly specific and persistent anti-Massachusetts vendetta.

<comment><USER26> Damn straight I do. I know how that sausage is made. If I worked in a pepperoni factory I'd hate pepperoni. The only reason I don't go around shitting on things that seem bad about other states is because I don't have enough information to comment with a high enough confidence that I understand the big picture as well as the specifics.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is email here to stay? Will there be an alternative? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> E-mail is here to stay.

* First social network * Fully distributed * Supports offline use

Why replace it?</comment>


HNSearch Feature Requests - <AUTHOR>

Please let us know about bug fixes and feature requests for hnsearch.com and the HNSearch API. <comment><USER2> Please don't break the spacebar key acting as page down. The search text box takes all the key presses regardless of focus. I find this annoying in a 'breaks expectations' kind of way.

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed

<comment><USER2> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd like a RSS for search result (want to subscribe to a topic and get a notification whenever it's mentionned here)

</comment><comment><USER4> If its Solr or Lucene running underneath then you could use phonetic analyzer to get expected results if the spelling is not correct. I got results with'Steve Jobs'but when I tried 'Steve Jbs' I got no results. I would say getting close results is better than no results.

</comment><comment><USER5> If there are only a few options for a variable, could you have them be expressed as part of the object returned by [http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?pretty_print=...](http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?pretty_print=true) Example: Type. Although it is a string, it isn't really a string field. It is a binary choice between two preset strings (comment or submission).

It would make using the schema for things much easier.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure why, but I've noticed that sometimes the points field is null, even though it shouldn't be. See for example the second result here:

[http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=sky...](http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=skype&filter%5Bfields%5D%5Btype%5D%5B%5D=submission&sortby=points+desc&_=1307314960533&pretty_print=true)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think points is null because that item is < 5 days old. The API should only return points for items > 5 days old.

<comment><USER6> why this restriction?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like items marked [dead] in HN will show up as zombie search results -- i.e., they get returned in the search results for the items collection but the discussion field is null.

For example: filter[fields][type]=comment&filter[fields][username]=pg

...the second result there has a null discussion field. Getting the submission title &etc. would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> The 'discussion' attribute contains info about the discussion that the comment belongs to. In this case the parent discussion is [dead] so the value of 'discussion' is null. Unfortunately, we don't have access to submission titles for [dead] submissions.

<comment><USER7> Is there a way to exclude values from search results in the ThriftDB API? i.e., say I want to,

        [filter][domain]=nytimes.com&[filter][username]!=ausername

...is there a way to do that? I tried the "exclude" operator after [username] and get an "internal server error" every time.

<comment><AUTHOR> &filter[fields][domain]=nytimes.com&filter[queries][]=-username:ausername

<comment><USER7> Great! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure US users have noticed, but I can't use the service from Europe, Hungary. It just keeps connecting to the api, tested with latest Chrome and FF.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you access ThriftDB (<http://www.thriftdb.com>)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's minor but sticking to conventional operators would be helpful. For example, I find myself typing "intitle:" rather than "title:" out of habit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just added support for the "intitle:" operator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be really great to have the ability to sort by hotness (i.e. get the top K hottest results (for a given search or not)).

<comment><AUTHOR> the default relevance algorithm uses hotness to sort results

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> it would be nice to see the next "start" point based off your limit / total hits this would make implementing pagination simple!

</comment><comment><USER11> Search only titles, then order by points/date.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use the "title:" operator to search in titles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Work with Opera?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you using 11.00? Other users have had problems accessing javascript-heavy sites with 11.00:

[http://superuser.com/questions/234110/websites-not- working-w...](http://superuser.com/questions/234110/websites-not-working-with- opera-11-00-major-bugs)</comment></comment>


DeepSpeech 0.6 - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/12/deepspeech-0-6-mozillas-speech-to-text-engine/ <comment><USER2> I do not understand how to use Deepspeech even in the most simple use case.

1\. I want to teach it ten words. How do I do this?

2\. I want to speak into my microphone (available as a Pulseaudio device) and recognise the words and output the words as a text stream on stdout. How do I do this?

This is the documentation:

[https://deepspeech.readthedocs.io/en/v0.6.0/Python- Examples....](https://deepspeech.readthedocs.io/en/v0.6.0/Python- Examples.html) [https://deepspeech.readthedocs.io/en/v0.6.0/Python- API.html](https://deepspeech.readthedocs.io/en/v0.6.0/Python-API.html)

It does not answer the questions I have.

[https://deepspeech.readthedocs.io/en/v0.6.0/DeepSpeech.html](https://deepspeech.readthedocs.io/en/v0.6.0/DeepSpeech.html)

The introduction page is full of incomprehensible jargon.

<comment><USER3> So, funny story: I wanted #2 and did it myself. I was similarly frustrated with the lack of documentation.

It's been a little while since I got it running, but I basically got a siri clone working. If you want to test it out, I can try to answer questions / whatever problems pop up.

The code is here: [https://github.com/shawwn/DeepSpeech/commit/01f5cf8d39c356ae...](https://github.com/shawwn/DeepSpeech/commit/01f5cf8d39c356aecf84b9daaa5b38747d64c209)

As far as I know, you can simply run speech_to_text.sh. It will connect to your microphone and start dumping out transcribed audio to stdout.

It wasn't super easy, but once you spend a little time with the code you can sort of figure out ways to get it to do what you want.

EDIT: By the way, people will try to convince you that you're nuts and that the documentation is crystal clear and so on. Know this: It's not just you. I had the exact same experience. It's a recurring theme in AI programming.

The only thing to do is to either find someone else who feels similarly, or roll up your sleeves and dive into the code.

<comment><USER4> >By the way, people will try to convince you that you're nuts and that the documentation is crystal clear and so on

No it really is simple: the original implementation had a base of prefabulated amulition grammar, this was surmounted by a malleable logarithmic function in such a way that the two main spurving vocabularies were in a direct line with the panametric grammar fields. The latter simply consists of marzlevanes fitted to the ambifacient morpheme waneshaft to eliminate side utterances. This main winding is of the normal lotus-o-deltoid type, just placed in panendermic semi-boloid stators. Basically every second conductor is connected by a nonreversible tremmie pipe to the differential grammeters.

All these words are in: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _It achieves a 7.5% word error rate on the LibriSpeech test clean benchmark_

Anyone have a comparison for how good/bad that is compared to other solutions, and what it means for practical usage, if that can be guessed at from a single number?

<comment><USER6> Author here. I would add to what the sibling comments have mentioned by saying that SotA results should be taken with a grain of salt. Our engine is capable of streaming (processing the audio as it's being recorded), which is not doable with architectures that have bidirectional decoders or attention mechanisms that require the whole encoder input ahead of time.

For real world applications, this is absolutely crucial, users want latency numbers on the order of milliseconds, not seconds. This is why, if you run a standard test set like LibriSpeech on, say, a commercial offering from Google, it will perform considerably worse than state of the art according to Google papers.

This repository [0] has a benchmark of some commercial offerings. Our model beats all of those on Librispeech clean and other (except for Speechmatics on Librispeech clean), as well as on Common Voice. But note that the Common Voice corpus used in that benchmark is very old.

In sum, I would compare this against solutions that go for the same space: fast, client-side ASR, rather than state of the art.

[0] [https://github.com/Franck- Dernoncourt/ASR_benchmark#benchmar...](https://github.com/Franck- Dernoncourt/ASR_benchmark#benchmark-results)

<comment><USER7> Hi! I'm from the RWTH team ([https://paperswithcode.com/sota/speech- recognition-on-libris...](https://paperswithcode.com/sota/speech-recognition- on-librispeech-test-clean)). Our best system (2.3% WER) (trained only on the Librispeech data, i.e. much less data than your model) currently is a hybrid HMM/NN model, and you are right, the acoustic model uses a BLSTM. However, we have shown in other work ([https://www-i6.informatik.rwth- aachen.de/publications/downlo...](https://www-i6.informatik.rwth- aachen.de/publications/download/1009/Zeyer--2016.pdf)) that you can expect similar performance in an online system, or not much worse (there is also many related work, which often is maybe 5-10% relative worse than the offline system).

I guess you prefer an "end-to-end" model over a hybrid HMM/NN model, for simplicity, right? As far as I remember, you use CTC, right? I always wondered why you have chosen CTC, and not some better model, like RNN-T, RNA, or some of the streaming attention variants. They should give you all the same properties (online capable, low latency, simple, end-to-end), but much better WER performance. Or is this simply because there currently is no simple ready- to-use implementation for those? Note that we published some TF code recently for some streaming attention variants, and plan to publish some RNN-T/RNA code soon.

<comment><USER6> Hi!

> I guess you prefer an "end-to-end" model over a hybrid HMM/NN model, for > simplicity, right?

Simplicity and ease of targeting other languages, yes. We're a small team.

> As far as I remember, you use CTC, right? I always wondered why you have > chosen CTC, and not some better model, like RNN-T, RNA, or some of the > streaming attention variants.

We started DeepSpeech in 2016, before these recent developments for end-to-end ASR were mainstream/SotA.

> Or is this simply because there currently is no simple ready-to-use > implementation for those?

Implementing the model architecture for training is only part of the problem for us. We have a hand-crafted inference graph to allow for small and efficient client code and inference models, and the more complex the architecture is, the trickier it gets to make sure it all works on all platforms, including TFLite, with quantization, etc.

We're investigating alternative architectures as well as mixed CTC/RNN LMs to deal with language model size, but no final decisions made yet.

> Note that we published some TF code recently for some streaming attention > variants, and plan to publish some RNN-T/RNA code soon.

Nice! Can you share a link to the streaming attention code?

<comment><USER8> I really hope you adopt the latest models particularly streaming attention variants. I think you should validate with users the assumption that latency is more important than WER.

IMHO the WER is more important than latency improvements in the millisecond range. The most frustrating thing is having to dictate over and over and the transcription is incorrect each time.

Consider that the time to a correct transcription is the latency plus error correction. If error correction is manual it will be orders of magnitude slower, so optimize for WER.

I'm terms of competition, Siri has latency in the 5+ second range due to the network call especially in area with poor data rates. I think a client side model like yours will easily win in this category. If you're already ahead here, why not focus on WER next?

Another great capability is to generate alternative transcriptions for words with low confidence values to allow for quick error correction. Do you offer something like this today?

Also, consider the long term view that new models are constantly being released and refined. It'd be best to have an architecture that allows quick replacement without a lot of hand tuning, or where the tuning can be automated to a greater extent.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for all the hard work you have put in so far @reubenmorais

+1000 to @mostlyjason's comment - Great latency figures mean nothing if the word error rate is high, since it dents confidence in the output (so why use DeepSpeech?) and (as the parent comment notes) necessitates manual error correction.

I would love to see a future release focus on optimizing WER for these reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just found [https://voice.mozilla.org/](https://voice.mozilla.org/)

Besides being a great resource for speech analysis, this could be a real game changer for acquiring listening comprehension in a foreign language.

I feel that even after a few years of learning a new language I still have trouble with listening. Part of that is that it's often all or nothing, even one or two unknown words in a sentence means I can't understand the sentence. But worse is that most language teaching materials use a very small set of native speakers, which deprives the learner's brain of being able to generalize.

<comment><USER11> Some of the English samples by non-natives were completely incomprehensible. I hope the system learns to be accent free.

<comment><USER10> They have a validation process, and the data is mainly meant to train speech- to-text.

For that, it's important to include accents and even non-native speakers, especially in English.

I think that those wavenet models for TTS were able to be conditioned by gender and maybe accent, if they had the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps there's an opportunity to create a demo webpage using tensorflow.js? Especially with the new TSLite support. To raise visibility and awareness. The posenet webcam demo[1] for example, seems to have ~2k links.

[1] [https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs- models/demos/posenet/cam...](https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs- models/demos/posenet/camera.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Congrats to the team on the new release! Following their progress since a while. It's an important project, and I'm very happy about the size reductions while they still delivered a WER improvement over the last release. Amazing!

<comment><USER6> Thank you for your work on the Rust bindings :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of something I would love to see happen but I don't have the skills to put it all together. I really think there's some potential merit to a reading coach app(lication) that listens to someone read and looks for weaknesses/disorders/etc compared to a trained model. It could provide those diagnostics to an educator, guide the content to focus on those, coach the reader directly, etc.

It all seems very doable based on what I see in the technology today, I just don't have the skills to do it.

<comment><USER15> I'll be honest... that seems like a pretty tough sell to me. You could be looking at anything from a speech disorder to a learning disability to a perfectly healthy normal child with idiosyncrasies and those things are usually left to professionals with graduate degrees. The liability seems high, you've got both the potential stigma associated with incorrectly flagging a child, or worse, missing an otherwise obvious issue that means treatment is delayed during critical years.

<comment><USER14> I totally understand where you're coming from, but the reality is that there is a lot of imbalance and delay in this type of assessment and educational support already. My wife has been an English language arts teacher and instructional coach for almost 20 years. While they definitely have standard diagnostics and regular assessments to try to keep kids on track, it's essentially best effort. And when you move out of 4th/5th grade in many districts you start getting to 90:1 teacher-student ratios with 1-2 interns available to do 1:1 reading support across maybe 500 kids. And this is in a middle class school district.

There's definitely some ways it can go bad, but even basic fluency monitoring without any active remediation attempts would be a good addition.

<comment><USER16> > even basic fluency monitoring without any active remediation attempts would > be a good addition.

How do you define fluency? I guess it involves some combination of speed and accuracy. Speed shouldn't be too hard to measure, but for accuracy you'll probably need a model that's more accurate than 7.5% WER and can handle the difference in vocal range between children and adults. Otherwise the speech disfluencies you want to detect will be drowned out by the model not correctly recognizing actually pretty clear speech.

<comment><USER14> In the US, fluency metrics in ELA vary across standards/states but are generally coarse grained and somewhat subjective. Here's an example of the standard that a student is expected to meet for fluency in the fifth grade (bottom half): [http://www.corestandards.org/ELA- Literacy/RF/5/](http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/5/)

You _definitely_ would have to use a model trained from content in the target audience (probably down to the grade level as things change so dramatically from year to year) as well as probably some labeled examples of students with various reading/speech deficiencies. This of course would lead to a lot of challenges from a privacy/regulatory/etc perspective and the entire thing would be challenging from an optics perspective (AI teachers taking over, etc etc).

Edit: One thing to keep in mind with accuracy is that there is no ambiguity what the word _should_ be, the question is how closely the utterance matches the expected sounds of the word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was very exited about this, then I tried it with the pre-trained model and I recorded "Hello this is a test message" 3 times and it was inferred as "a sassanian", "he is a paris" "he states that" ...

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't seem to find pre-trained models for other languages (French). How long did you training take for those in English? Do you think it makes sense to start from the English one? Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm starting to look into the MycroftAI. It sounds like with this release I could use Mycroft+DeepSpeech on a new RaspberryPi for a completely offline smart speaker, do I understand that right?

<comment><USER6> Correct. The latest release with the TensorFlow Lite model runs in real time on a Raspberry Pi 4. I'm not sure if the Mycroft integration is updated to the latest version though, as it was just released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > DeepSpeech v0.6 with TensorFlow Lite runs faster than real time on a single > core of a Raspberry Pi 4

This is great news.

I'm not very familiar with the deep learning framework ecosystem. Does anyone know what the simplest way would be to incorporate a DeepSpeech model into a WebAssembly project?

For instance, is it straightforward to compile Tensorflow Lite with emscripten? If not, can this TensorFlow model be run with tensorflow.js? Or can it be converted to some other format that is easier to use with WASM?

</comment><comment><USER21> Tensorflow lite, interesting. Has anyone tried this with Google Coral USB accelerator? I got one laying around but very little experience with ML. I could get the USB Accelerator working with the pretrained posenet after much messing around, but my chances with DeepSpeech are small to none. This seems like the perfect fit though.

<comment><USER22> To the best of my knowledge, DeepSpeech currently isn't compatible with any inference or training accelerators (other than NVIDIA GPUs).

But the whole point of the TFLite model is that it has low resource requirements so an accelerator for inference shouldn't be necessary.

<comment><USER6> TFLite on Android with the NNAPI delegate is theoretically supposed to leverage hardware accelerators. We haven't tested it extensively though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if it is any good at out-of-vocabulary words? Is it hard to teach it new things like medical terms and such?

<comment><USER6> In the post I mention a Brazilian company who's using DeepSpeech for vocabulary constrained, medical applications. They've trained their own Brazilian Portuguese models.

The English acoustic model that we released does not have a fixed vocabulary. What determines the vocabulary is the language model, which can be created from text. So if you have in-domain text, and would like to try it out, I would say the first step is to create a language model using your text and then experiment with it.

We have some documentation on how to create the LM here: [https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/tree/v0.6.0/data/lm](https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/tree/v0.6.0/data/lm)

It's not super detailed, but I'd be happy to answer questions on our Discourse: [https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/deep- speech](https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/deep-speech)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks great. Is it related to any of Mozilla's product?

<comment><USER6> We'll have more to share about that soon :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So who will be developing an open source assistant like Goggle Home / Alexa? :)

<comment><USER25> If you do a 1 minute google search you will find that there are multple open source voice assistant offerings already, for example mycroft.

<comment><USER5> Most of which are not fully open, e.g. do not have open speech recognition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any recommendations on a good raspberry pi hat or microphone to test this?</comment>


Ask HN: Must have (Linux) sysadmin skills? - <AUTHOR> Hey Everyone !
What would you list as the most essential skills one must be able to demonstrate to be hireable ? (Coming from a developer). What are the most common things a sysadmin does daily ?
Cheers <comment><USER3> * understand the basic directory structure (/, /boot/, /var, /usr, /opt, /etc) * file management (commands: tail, head, cat, awk, sed) * process management (commands: ps, top, kill) * package management (yum, dpkg) * one configuration manager (puppet, chef, ansible) * basics of tcp/ip _network management (ifconfig /ip, netstata/ss, ping, trace) _ addiontal commands if you want to be more than a junior (strace, lsof, iostat, vmstat)

I'd like to point out that some sysadmins are focused on linux internals while others focus on application in production. So, of course, the list may vary according to the position you're looking to be hired.

<comment><USER4> Good list, I'd also say permissions. The number of problems I fix by understanding users/groups and assigning the appropriate permission (not `chmod 777 *`) is huge. It shows up in a variety of "Cannot access file" type messages or "File does not exist" application errors and people sometimes freak out because the file is there.

<comment><USER5> To be fair 'chmod 777 *' fixes those issues as well, just at a big cost to security.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if "fix" is the right word. Chopping your right arm off "fixes" the itch, although you're literally giving your right arm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a very big overlap in what good developer and sysadmin should know about Linux. There are a lot of tasks, which in one teams performed by developer and in other — by sysadmin. Random topics which IMHO more specific for sysadmin work:

1\. Troubleshooting and performance analysis. There is excellent site about performance: [http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html) I don't know a good resource on troubleshooting, but some tools are the same.

2\. Problem can be anywhere including network so the next topic is networks. There is excellent book TCP/IP Illustrated — old, but still relevant.

3\. Sysadmin often spends a lot of time in a shell so it is good to know it very well (and common shell commands too).

</comment><comment><USER7> > What are the most common things a sysadmin does daily

\- reacting to monitoring alerts and critical messages in logs. First you need to understand what given alert/message mean, and then goes troubleshooting if root cause is not obvious \- improving monitoring system settings/thresholds/metrics (if there no separate teem for this) \- deployment (but it often performed by developers) \- upgrading OS and 3rd party software (if 3rd party software not deployed alongside own code) \- performance tuning \- learning software used in production (both: 3rd and written in the company) \- writing numerous config files and ensuring that all settings adequate to given environment/system \- if system is not entirely in cloud - <USER2> broken hardware and parts (HDD), usually using "remote hands" in datacenter. \- managing ACLs / credentials for different systems, e.t.c.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well this one is not really a skill, but quite a useful guideline or precaution to follow - and consistently:

Make your actions reversible (as far as possible). Had learned it in the field, later also saw it mentioned in a sysadmin book.

I can't count the number of times I've seen colleagues just blindly charge ahead and do, for example, non-trivial surgery (a.k.a. edits) on important system config files (in a haphazard, lets-see-if-this-works manner, without so much as making a backup copy of the file), which sometimes resulted in screwing up the system further, sometimes irrevocably (because, you guessed it, no backups - or no current ones, anyway). And yes, on production systems. Got a few stories about that, may mention them some other time.

</comment><comment><USER9> The skills listed on Red Hat's RHCSA [0] page might be a good start.

[0]: [https://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification/rhcsa](https://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification/rhcsa)

</comment><comment><USER10> I love linux even though I am not an expert devops or sysadmin. I get around working with servers for my product and thats about it. I stackoverflow shell scripts whenever needed. Here is my 'must know' list for linux:

\- ssh: you need to know what that means and how to use it

\- Difference between ftp and sftp

\- cd, ls, pwd (directory stuff)

\- scp and rsync (move files from server to server)

\- find, cat, grep, sed, awk, head, tail (manipulations and discovery)

\- chown, chmod (permissions)

\- cp, mv, rm, rmdir, mkdir, touch

\- Don't do rm -rf unless you know what you are doing

\- Setup aliases on your shell. e.g. .profile file for bash etc.

\- top, ps (check processes)

\- sudo and su (switching users or running commands as root)

\- Know various OS differences like CentOS vs Ubunut.

\- Know where to find logs for web servers like Apache or nginx (e.g. /var/log/nginx in Ubuntu).

\- Star/Stop services as needed

</comment><comment><USER11> I want to do a blog post series on this topic.

Systems administration is a huge topic with so many interconnected parts and such vast variety of tools. Even breaking it down to segments can fall apart easily as nearly all topics overlap from user management, to filesystems, etc.

My only advice is this: Get a copy of "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook" and read the topics that you work on. It's a reference not something that you can read from cover to cover, but it's I own the 4th edition and it's depth is amazing. On 18 Aug there is the 5th edition coming out. Grab a copy.

My only issue is that I'd love to have *BSD included along Linux, Solaris and AIX (which is hard to find these days...).

<comment><USER12> Is that the Evi Nemeth et al. book? I didn't think they were doing another edition after she was lost at sea? I'll happily buy an updated version.

<comment><USER11> Yes! It's an amazing book for sysadmins. I bought my copy (4th edition) a few months ago. I'm still reading various bits and pieces.

The new book I'm sure will have a new section on virtualisation, automation (ansible, etc.), docker, docker orchestration tools, service discovery, etc.

I'll buy a copy on Christmas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While not a fan of most certs, I would highly recommend the RHCSA to get an understanding of common sysadmin tasks as it is a hands-on exam and fairly relevant to the real world, and RHCE as well. In addition you should find some random service in your language of choice on GitHub that requires a database and try to implement in a cloud provider taking into account high availability, deployment types (Blue/Green vs Rolling, for example), durability, backups, security, logging, and monitoring by rolling out the services yourself or through managed services at a given cloud provider using a CM like Ansible and/or Terraform.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not sure why nobody mentioned it yet but iptables.</comment>


Blix - <AUTHOR> Blix allows you to discover what's going on nearby, like parties, protests, and food trucks. Share moments with everyone within a few miles - not just your friends. Download blix on iOS at http://goblix.it - an Android version is coming soon <comment><USER2> You might want to prepend a "SHOW HN: " and delete the duplicate

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright, How could I delete the duplicate?

<comment><USER3> The delete button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha yea, but where exactly would I find that? It isn't on any of the pages. I do see a delete button on this comment, but not on any of my other posts (maybe because there's comments on them?)</comment></comment></comment></comment>