Facebook cuts off friend-finding API access to Vine - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130124/facebook-cuts-off-friend-finding-access-to-vine-twitters-new-video-app/ <comment><USER2> I guess karma is a bitch. I have no sympathy for Twitter as they've pulled similar moves that have screwed over third party developers as well. What goes around, comes around and it's Twitter's turn to get a taste of their own medicine.

This isn't a deal breaker for me using Vine, I've found it to be a really fun application I think is going to take off. and definitely compete with Instagram.

</comment><comment><USER3> Shrug. I don't usually take Facebook's side on things, but Twitter should expect this kind of response after shutting out third party developers themselves.

</comment><comment><USER4> I say "booooooo!" not because I'm some user-first purest, but because I think this is just a bad idea. Facebook and Twitter DON'T need to be at war. They just don't. They're different, and they always will be.

Twitter deserves no sympathy, but I don't think Facebook needs to be doing this, with Instagram OR to Vine.

<comment><USER5> They're not at war from a user-facing product sense, but they are completely at war from an advertising and brand promotion standpoint.

Each wants to make their own social platform more attractive for advertisers. Things like this affect that notion.

But I agree in that they certainly are being more aggressive towards each other.

<comment><USER4> They're more likely to help each other than hurt each other, but I think that's hard to see. They're competition is other advertising media, not each other. Their ads are getting them profitable, but if either ever hits on an ad model for social that works as well as adwords does for search, the other will copy it and they'll both benefit.

<comment><USER5> Hm, interesting perspective.

Out of curiosity what other media do you think is _significantly_ competing with them? I mean besides Google.

<comment><USER4> I don't think Google is really competing with them, Google wins because they make TONS of money on ads when people are clearly actively trying to buy something. Those ads cost tons of money if you ever run such a campaign you'll see it.

They're competing with TV I think more than anything, the sort of "brand recognition" advertising that is more nebulous and hard to measure.

"My friend likes this brand" may annoy you, but it means something to me. When I've seen that in Facebook ads, I remember it. It may be years before that matters to my purchases, but that's how brands invest in TV advertising now, and if they can figure out to objectively show that Facebook advertising does that better, their ad spends will explode.

It's only that, because TV was the ONLY place for this for so long and therefore brands were able to measure the effect of this advertising other time, that TV ads were able to be proven to work, even for ads not directed at people literally looking to buy RIGHT NOW. Internet ads have had a problem proving their ROI in this regard, but if Facebook or Twitter figure this out, it's going to be huge.

<comment><USER6> _I don't think Google is really competing with them, Google wins because they make TONS of money on ads when people are clearly actively trying to buy something. Those ads cost tons of money if you ever run such a campaign you'll see it._

OK, but even if FB takes 10% from Google it's enough to rain on their parade. I can see FB do a decent SE with Bing as backfill for what it cannot provide. If the search engine is decent (bing is OK for most people) and they emphasize the "Search" button, I can see a % of people not going to another site to search.

P.S. Most of the money Google makes is probably by making ads similar to content, hoping enough users can't tell. But we have no consumer protection in USA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've never 100% understood why these social networks were so integrated. It's normal to me now, but years ago the concept of facebook.com/twitter and twitter.com/facebook would scramble the business side of my mind. Especially when I think back to how solid of a line was drawn between Myspace and Facebook

</comment><comment><USER8> I just downloaded Vine 10 minutes ago, and assumed this was a launch bug in their app.

My thoughts after seeing this: wow, what a cheap shot by FB and I feel for the Vine team getting caught in this crossfire (I gather it's still their small startup team inside of Twitter).

<comment><USER7> My guess is Twitter/Vine anticipated Facebook would likely block them, and built the feature in any way. If they didn't get blocked, gravy. If they did they gain some sympathy points (points they have been losing lately).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not the first time, Facebook cuts off almost all APIs to Wechat. At one time Wechat even cannot use the access token to get user's id for login verification. Every API returns "data:[]".

</comment><comment><USER10> Walled garden wars 2.0. Dont let anyone become a threat in any form. Instead they both should evolve to social service providers but they rather cut off each others arms.

</comment><comment><USER11> And, again, the people they're really hurting are the users.</comment>


Chrome 55 removed manual encoding selection - <AUTHOR> https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/chrome/1sC3JN0qDkg <comment><USER2> >1) "Auto Detect" option in the hamburger menu. It's a sticky global boolean that turns on a heavy text analyzer to guess the encoding better. It's off by default because it regresses page load time by 10%-20%. By selecting this, users see less gibberish but they make Chrome slower (and don't realize that).

Perhaps then what you do it make it so specific webpages only have that when toggled, and don't apply it globally. I don't know the merits of doing this in an extension or not, so perhaps its reasonable.

This is another action taken under 'project-eraser'. The task of reducing chromes 'complexity'. [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=512852](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=512852)

This project is specifically to target low-used features, and remove them. Arguably one of the dangers of user data collection.

I don't know if this is related to project eraser, but there is the removal of chrome://plugins menu in chrome 57, [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=615738...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=615738#c44) which also does not appear to have a clear reason other than a better settings menu for plugins such as flash, but goes into the territory of removing the ability to even disable any other plugins, such as widevine.

<comment><USER3> reducing complexity, sounds familiar. I think Gnome did that between 2 and 3.</comment></comment>


Chromecast and Chromecast Audio on sale ( 5 $ off ) - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/05/02/deal-alert-chromecast-and-chromecast-audio-on-sale-for-5-off-almost-everywhere/ <comment><USER2> Invalid certificate. Stay away from this site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Android police is pretty well known, and there isn't SSL on this website...</comment></comment>


Python isn't just Java without the compile - <AUTHOR> http://bitworking.org/news/Python_isnt_Java_without_the_compile

<comment><USER2> "In some ways it makes the problem easier when you can assume the user is a good programmer. Language designers often find themselves worrying about the mess users might make if they were allowed to do such-and-such. Once you assume the user is a good programmer, you automatically have the answer to any such question: let the user do whatever he wants."

\- pg

"About 12 years ago, Python aquired lambda, reduce(), filter() and map(), courtesy of (I believe) a Lisp hacker who missed them and submitted working patches. But, despite of the PR value, I think these features should be cut from Python 3000."

\- gvr

Remember: Python's not broken, you are.

</comment><comment><USER3> The example given in the articles entirely fails to describe functions as being first-class citizens. Python also lacks full continuations, unless the article is referring to Stackless Python. What is described in the article as continuations are actually generators. Finally, the meta-programming described in the article, while valid, really only scratches the surface of what's possible with meta classes in Python.

<comment><USER4> This article is a poorly done "look how smart I am". First, the title makes little sense. If you were going to compare and contrast Python to Java, this first thing to come to mind would be static typing, not a compile step. Second, I was going to complain about the first-class functions as well. By his example, PHP has first class functions as well because you can define a function out side of a class. But we all know PHP does not, in fact, have first class functions because you cannot pass a function as an argument or return a function as a value from another function in PHP. I think you can get the point across better with this example...

def fun_factory(scale):

        def inner_func(arg1,arg2):

            return scale * ( arg1 + arg2)

        return inner_func

class myclass(object):

        def __init__(self,scale_func):

            self.better_example = scale_func

if __name__ == "__main__":

        print fun_factory(10)(5,5)

        myinst = myclass(fun_factory(10))

        print myinst.better_example(5,5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Try that in Java:

class NullReceiver(object):

        class SimpleCallable(object):

            def __call__(self, *args):

                pass

        def __getattr__(self, name):

            print 'unhandled method "%s" called' % name

            return nullReceiver.SimpleCallable()

</comment><comment><USER5> Or that (this one is in Ruby):

s = 'a'

class String

      def rghize

        return self + 'rgh'

      end

end

puts s.rghize</comment>


The Army ignored her about a dangerous colleague. Then he set her on fire - <AUTHOR> https://taskandpurpose.com/katie-blanchard-feres-doctrine <comment><USER2> Nothing ever seems to change in the army regarding these incidents.</comment>


Hyperspectral analysis with just an app - <AUTHOR> https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2017/february/app-reveals-constituents.html <comment><USER3> This is very interesting, but the headline is a baldfaced lie.

The headline "hyperspectral analysis with just an app" is unfortunately kind of bullshit. (And Fraunhofer seems to have realized this, as the current headline is just "App reveals constituents".) As highd points out, this will give you nine spectral dimensions instead of the usual three, or eight rather than two after you drop luminance, which will almost certainly be the first principal component. From eight spectral dimensions you can maybe get back to eight wavelength bands.

(And you _do_ get nine spectral dimensions rather than the usual three, because the spectra of the light emitted from the display are not going to exactly match the response spectra of the pixel colors in the camera. But they'll be close, so some of those dimensions will have very little energy, so they'll be very noisy, and JPEG compression is likely to be fatal. And of course they vary from one device to another.)

An eight-band image is not a fucking hyperspectral image. It's multispectral, like Landsat. But that's still enough to do quite a bit of material discrimination. Probably not even close to enough to detect pesticide residue, though.

The only way you could get more information this way would be through nonlinear effects, where illuminating the object with twice the light gives you a scattered result significantly different from twice the original scattered result. Those don't contribute significantly to the spectra of ordinary materials except under extremely intense lighting conditions, although I've seen two-photon effects do interesting things with glow-in-the- dark paint and a red laser pointer, and of course there are devices (like green laser pointers!) that take advantage of the Kerr effect — by using exotic materials.

<comment><USER4> Not to give them too much credit because it doesn't go into this detail, but it would in theory be possible to use the speaker/mic to utilize ultrasound [1] and pick up IR as, on certain devices, there is no IR filter on the front facing camera [2]. So you could combine RGB inputs, with background IR pickup and ultrasound to get actual hyperspectral data.

[1][https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/blogs/ultrasonic- cross...](https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/blogs/ultrasonic-crossdevice- tracking/)

[2] [http://kenstechtips.com/index.php/how-to-see-the- invisible-i...](http://kenstechtips.com/index.php/how-to-see-the-invisible- infrared-world-using-your-mobile-phone-camera)

<comment><USER5> What is ultrasound used for here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The idea itself is great, but the quality of the result obviously depends highly on the type of hardware - namely the spectra of the display and camera.

An LCD has a totally different spectrum (broad) than an LED display (single wavelength). Cameras on the other hand always have a broad spectrum, but it varies depending on the color filters, the response curve of the pixels as well as the post processing (e.g. the demosaicing algorithm). Regarding response curve of the display: that's also something they have to calibrate for and it's not only a hardware parameter because it can be modified in software, for example by the iOS Night Shift feature.

Making this work with a single piece of hardware is hard enough and I wonder if they'll target the android market at all. My guess is they're going to release it only for iPhones because it's so homogeneous.

Also, the press release photo made me giggle, the front camera isn't even facing the object they are scanning :D

Edit: Saying LEDs have a single wavelength is probably not correct, but they have a very narrow band depending on the technology used.

<comment><USER7> Couldn't you in theory calibrate this for any feasible device using a known light source and a large enough set of color swatches with known response curves? Inferring device parameters should just be solving some system of equations given enough constraints, and if you overconstrain the system you also get an estimate of how much noise is in your parameters.

In this case, you need to simultaneously estimate the LED wavelengths as well as the response curve of the camera.

Not saying it'd necessarily be worthwhile to do, but if that actually worked, all you'd need to do is send a light source + a color swatch booklet through the mail to a potential user if the device isn't in the database yet.

<comment><USER8> > using a known light source and a large enough set of color swatches with > known response curves? Inferring device parameters should just be solving > some system of equations given enough constraints, and if you overconstrain > the system you also get an estimate of how much noise is in your parameters.

If that's true, and those constraints aren't terribly well understood, it would make for a good machine learning problem. Fwiw.

<comment><USER7> Sorry I wasn't being clear -- the RGB camera response to each patch of a swatch should give (up to) 3 different constraints under normal lighting, plus another 3 by cycling through LED colors, so in theory you only need ceil((k+3) / 6) colors to estimate a k-variable camera response curve (the other 3 estimate your LED wavelengths).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So they're using the screen consisting of three monochromatic LED types as a full-spectrum light source? I don't think that works... You still just get three points on the spectrum, same as the Bayer filter on the camera.

I suppose if the three screen LED wavelengths were significantly different from the three camera filter wavelengths then you could:

Illuminate with screen Red to get Rscreen.

Illuminate with screen Green to get Gscreen.

Illuminate with screen Blue to get Bscreen.

Use ambient full-spectrum light to get Rfilter, Gfilter, and Bfilter.

Then you'd have 6 points on the spectrum.

<comment><USER10> I think you're correct, barring significant nonlinearity in the bayer mask or object. Technically you can get 9 linearly independent points - <USER2> combination of light channels on with each combination of bayer mask channels. Ideally only 3 of those will be nonzero, but if the bayer mask is imperfect you'll see some illumination on adjacent channels. Environmental background is subtracted out from all since it's unknown, so that doesn't give another point.

There's also no way you're measuring pesticide residue with that - I doubt that would even be possible with a high-end visible hyperspectral camera. Maybe with a raman spectrometer.

I've designed a couple versions of cell phone camera-based spectrometers and spectral imagers, so I'm relatively familiar with the design principles.

<comment><USER6> Can you give us some insight on the whole pesticide thing? How is it possible to detect it with a spectrometer in general?

Are you sure that it is impossible to detect it, even if the app is 'calibrated' to a certain object, e.g. an apple? I think if you limit the search space it could be possible!?

<comment><USER11> It's impossible. Most chemicals of interest are pretty boring in the visible spectrum. I'd say >95% of pure substances I've worked with - everything from pesticides to pharmaceuticals - are some variant on "white to off-white solid" or "clear to amber liquid." White/clear indicates that all photons visible to us interact with the materially equally. You get tans, yellows, and browns largely from high-frequency (deep blue/purple part of the spectrum) being absorbed by assorted chemical bonds.

Spectroscopy is predominantly done with UV (200-280 nm most common) and IR, which are regions where photonic interaction is dominated by electronic and vibration/rotational transitions, respectively.

Visible light absorption is typically caused by highly conjugated bonds and metal-coordination complexes. In terms of day-to-day, this is almost exclusively dyes (synthetic and natural). Dyes also tend to be really potent absorbers - you only need minuscule amounts of them to create very vivid colors. So a purely visible-light-based app would at best be able to give you a handle of what sort of dyes are in something. It won't tell you if it has pesticides (let alone traces!) or HFCS or nutrients or what-have-you.

tl;dr - no, it's not remotely possible to even detect pesticides with visible light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i actually built a little chameleon throwie concept years ago based on this principal. it used two RGB led as the output light and stepped through the colors, then used the unused LED to measure the light(LEDs have photosensitive resistance). Then once it figure out it's color(dumb mixing of resistances) it would output the guessed color using PWM on both RGB LEDs of the thing it was on. In short though, it didn't work very well. Also like others have said, LED's have very narrow bandwidths (by design, as it uses less power). if this weren't the case people probably wouldnt be paying around $2000 grand for a light bulb ([http://www.shop.spectrecology.com/USB-ISS-UV-VIS- illuminate-...](http://www.shop.spectrecology.com/USB-ISS-UV-VIS-illuminate- cuvette-holder-USB-ISS-UV- VIS-2.htm?_vsrefdom=adwords&gclid=CjwKEAiAxKrFBRDm25f60OegtwwSJABgEC- ZQK35fiSEKRNFRRhfDNrp_8BnWeioZd-NNAzJ6Q0DHxoCs8Lw_wcB))

<comment><USER13> I tried to do this exact thing years ago too! Except I only used one RGB led, and thus could never sense the red channel, because the bandgap of green and blue LED dies is too big to really get any signal from red light. Isn't it annoying when your project is up against quantum mechanics?

I also build a swarm of throwies that used a single LED to synchronize their blinking. That project was much cooler, and I wish I had better documentation...

<comment><USER14> I am interested in this project.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately, the lack of documentation thing strikes again... It was pretty simple electronically - an ATTiny25, a coin cell, and an LED wired across two IO pins, for light sensing using LED's junction capacitance as a photocurrent integrator ([http://www.merl.com/publications/docs/TR2003-35.pdf](http://www.merl.com/publications/docs/TR2003-35.pdf)). The trick was in the control algorithm - I got things synchronizing reasonably well, but LED ensemble was prone to all sorts of weird chaotic behavior.

I suppose I should recreate it, on an even larger scale. I just need to figure out some better way to power it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Were it not for the source, I would have called this a hoax.

</comment><comment><USER16> but but but... how many dimensions do they expect to extrapolate from three available by illuminating from the screen?

I'm anticipating someone snapping an image and an app saying, "That's either a fresh organic grape, a tractor tire or a leg of lamb."

Will you have to tell it: "This is a Kale leaf" and let it evaluate the signal levels relative to other Kale leaves?

<comment><USER17> As far as I can tell, their research has nothing to do with directly _identifying_ objects, only identifying _properties_ of objects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hmm, how accurate is it, though? How do you calibrate such a system when the ambient illumination could be anything?

<comment><USER15> If I understand the article, that problem is alleviated by illuminating the object with only a single color of light at a time in rapid succession, using the screen of the phone. Presumably, the camera would filter out ambient light from the result by sampling that first.

It is certainly not going to be precise, but it's quite an achievement if they can may it work within the limits of the device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just to confirm, is this a smart-phone based spectrometer? (Why don't they use that term?)

<comment><USER20> > _Just to confirm, is this a smart-phone based spectrometer? (Why don 't they > use that term?)_

Spectrometers generally produce a single spectrum from a light source.

A hyperspectral imager produces a spectrum for each pixel in the image. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging)

<comment><USER21> What I was really confused though, as this doesn't use a grating etc. is how it obtains a spectra.

Like with a grating I can see how you can obtain a spectral pattern for many wavelengths, but with a bayer array, surely you can only distinguish R, G, B.

Would I be right though in thinking, if there's no stray light and only the light from the phone screen shining on the apple, you can cycle through many wavelengths of light, enabling you to measure the reflected light to determine the spectra.

One thing I was wondering so pesticides can presumably also be detected using visible light spectroscopy then?

<comment><USER6> _> Like with a grating I can see how you can obtain a spectral pattern for many wavelengths, but with a bayer array, surely you can only distinguish R, G, B._

They inversed the principle: Rather than controlling the bandpass of the sensor (which a grating does passively, over the spatial domain) they are controlling the spectrum of the light source. You can produce a varying light spectrum by setting R/G/B on the display, and record the light reflected by the object with your R/G/B camera pixels, which also have a certain frequency response.

I have a feeling you can use this to recreate a coarse approximation of the full spectrum and then use it to infer some of the object parameters, like pesticides on fruit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> High tech spectral analysis, with an apparent goal of enabling death dealing anti-GMO pseudo science. Great work Fraunhofer, I'm expecting an impressive Scientology e-meter app next.</comment>


YouPronounceIt: Search for a word, get videos of YouTube speakers pronouncing it - <AUTHOR> http://youpronounce.it/ <comment><USER2> Nobody mentioned Forvo yet?

[http://forvo.com/about/](http://forvo.com/about/)

>Today, Forvo is the largest online reference for pronunciations with a database of over 3 million words pronounced in 325 languages – all created and maintained by native speakers.

>Forvo continues to work toward its mission as a go-to reference for authentic and veritable word pronunciations through over 116 million site visits annually and over 400,000 registered users.

<comment><USER3> I've not come across Forvo before, but it's UI comes across poorly in comparison to youpronounceit - a small search box and many steps between type a word and playing it - whereas the latter has a clear interface, plays the result quickly and provides context.

Forvo may actually be more useful, but youpronounceit is the one I'll return to.

<comment><USER4> I guess the link provided doesn't represent the page in the best possible way, [http://forvo.com/](http://forvo.com/) meets you with big input in the middle of the page, although they don't focus it automatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like what you did there .. [http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=%27%29%3C%2Fscript%3E%3C...](http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=%27%29%3C%2Fscript%3E%3Cimg%20src=%27X%27%20%20onerror=%22alert\(document\)%22%3E)

</comment><comment><USER6> Humourously related is the Pronunciation Manual: [https://www.youtube.com/user/PronunciationManual](https://www.youtube.com/user/PronunciationManual)

<comment><USER7> My first thought was whether they explicitly blacklisted Pronunciation Manual!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a brilliant research tool, because it can give you fast, unbiased answers about how English is spoken by real people instead of what's prescriptively correct. Any English dictionary will tell you that _coup de grâce_ is pronounced with an /s/ sound at the end, but searching on YouPronounceIt it's actually very hard to find an English speaker who says it this way.

<comment><USER9> I agree that it's a useful tool, but I disagree that it's unbiased.

It is biased by the people or algorithms behind the speech-to-text conversion.

For example, if you search for "Yawk" you'll see one match, to a park ranger kidding someone from "New Yawk". This transcription was done by a human, which you can tell from how the text does "yeahhh", and how later text is elided or reworded for clarity. That is, around 0:40 the speaker says ".. unusual rock outcroppings. I mean they still attract people.." but the text says ".. unusual rock outcroppings that still attract people". Therefore, I think the transcriptionist used "Yawk" to highlight that the ranger was making a joke about differences in dialect.

That said, this bias may be low.

I did not know that about coup de grâce. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure what this really does. I mean it's interesting but as far I can tell it's just searching transcripts or caption data for the word and then queueing that part of the video. There's no checking if the word is actually pronounced correctly so you're not actually improving your pronunciation.

Several videos were not just the wrong pronunciation, the captions were wrong so the person never said the word the system thought was the requested word.

A good example is "candidate" which many people pronounce wrongly as "cannidate" Checking the results, first one said "cannidate", second one said something that sounded like "kennedy", 3rd one captions were wrong, 4th one was "cannidate" as well.

<comment><USER11> > pronounced correctly

If a word is so frequently "mispronounced" that you're likely to stumble frequently stumble upon a "mispronunciation" using this service, then it's not a mispronunciation at all.

Language is defined by how it is actually used.

Arguably, the fact that this service might give you "mispronunciations" is actually a point in its favour. This shows you real world examples of how a word is pronounced.

> A good example is "candidate" which many people pronounce wrongly as > "cannidate"

Dropping the first /d/ in "candidate" is a common feature of colloquial American English. It might be proscribed by some, but it's not incorrect.

<comment><USER12> >If a word is so frequently "mispronounced" that you're likely to stumble frequently stumble upon a "mispronunciation" using this service, then it's not a mispronunciation at all.

Start thinking of "proper" pronunciation being a dialect (specifically, "Proper English"), and the objection comes back in force.

<comment><USER11> There's no such dialect as "proper English". There are some standardised prestige dialects.

<comment><USER12> I think we're in agreement here. If you take a descriptivist version of the original feature request, it's along the lines of "please do not show me pronunciations that are from a non-prestigious dialect."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A quite humorous google-talk I stumbled upon: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU&t=1233](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU&t=1233)

<comment><USER14> It's humorous, but actually quite interesting as well. As a non-native english speaker I've learnt a lot watching it. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is fun way to discover random videos. I searched "invincible", and you get array of videos on topics from technology, cancer, health care to solar panels.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is really nice. Although it got the first example I tried wrong in the first video (I tried "awry", and it came up with one that he actually said "a riot").

Much more useful than dictionaries that have pronunciation, since you can hear it in context spoken by real people. If some people pronounce it wrong, that's ok, because it gives you a feel for how it is actually used.

</comment><comment><USER17> This could be incredibly useful for video editing - creating one of those "word collage" clips sometimes used in documentaries.

If you could filter the results by another keyword (within just the video title for example), you could easily use it to search within the words of a specific person and create mashup videos a la "Brian Williams rap"[1].

Of course it'd require a little bit of manual trimming of clips, but it'd get you 99% of the way there - provided the content is on YouTube and captioned. Maybe there are other cheap/free solutions out there for this kind of thing, but last I checked, there were a few transcript-searchable video services targeted at media production companies, and the subscription pricing was incredibly high if I remember correctly.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CYJ73pVpVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CYJ73pVpVc)

</comment><comment><USER18> heyoh [http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=i0php8i94%22%3C/script%3...](http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=i0php8i94%22%3C/script%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert\(1\)%3C/script%3E)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a fun idea and it's pretty clever. It would be handy if you could specify (or be informed about) which accent was used.

Also, the page does a nasty flash when it renders in Chrome.

<comment><USER20> [http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

<comment><USER19> Hahah, good point and great link! However, it might be possible also to include links to pronunciations in US and UK English.

Here is a decent example: [http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/ore...](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/oregano)

Having said that, this is not quite what I was expecting: [http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/alu...](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/aluminium)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be nice if you could specify the part of speech also. For example the verb and noun pronunciations of associate and attribute are different.

</comment><comment><USER22> [http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=quay](http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=quay)

First video: American mispronouncing as "kay".

Second video: American mispronouncing as "kway".

Third video: Brit correctly pronouncing as "key".

Otherwise, amazing!

<comment><USER23> Merriam-Webster lists all three of those as accepted pronunciations [0]; like many things in English, there is significant regional variation.

[0] [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quay](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/quay)

<comment><USER24> Is the word "Quay" even used in US English?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quay_(disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quay_\(disambiguation\)) gives quays all over the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore, but none in the US -- with the exception of a couple of tiny _landlocked_ towns in Oklahoma and New Mexico called "Quay".

Are we allowed to call a mispronunciation a mispronunciation when it's only pronounced that way by people who have probably never encountered that word before?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is great! I'm just trying to improve my pronunciation for recording a podcast and I'm spending a lot of time on dictionary.com. Hearing many people pronounce a word is great.

@cairo1982 some videos are listed as private, and some start playback at the very end.

</comment><comment><USER26> [http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=Llanfair%C2%ADpwllgwyngy...](http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=Llanfair%C2%ADpwllgwyngyll%C2%ADgogery%C2%ADchwyrn%C2%ADdrobwll%C2%ADllan%C2%ADtysilio%C2%ADgogo%C2%ADgoch)

Bummer!

<comment><USER27> Oh, but it's there!

[https://youtu.be/fHxO0UdpoxM](https://youtu.be/fHxO0UdpoxM)

It is however touted as 'an easy and fun way to improve your English'..

Village name marketing gimmicks aside, good tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> You could also grab videos from Pronounciation Book Youtube channel: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT9uWfM5hvVlAPzl7KMlSvA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT9uWfM5hvVlAPzl7KMlSvA)

</comment><comment><USER29> This could also help deaf people wanting to learn how to lip-read certain words -- because you are searching transcripts, you don't have to guess what the person is saying.

</comment><comment><USER30> Works for a phrase too, cool.

[http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=%22what+the+heck%22](http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=%22what+the+heck%22)

</comment><comment><USER31> [http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=gif](http://youpronounce.it/search.jsp?q=gif)

1) hard g

2) hard g

3) hard g

4) hard g

5) I closed the tab

The concept and implementation are pretty neat, at least.

</comment><comment><USER32> Genial! I've used AT&T text synthetizer before to learn to pronounce certain phrases and that works well too.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a great idea, with a great implementation and use of accessible resources. congratulations to the creators!

</comment><comment><USER34> Apparently there were a few minor changes in the search engine and the results given</comment>


The internet as an engine of liberation is an innocent fraud - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/the-internet-as-an-engine-of-liberation-is-an-innocent-fraud <comment><USER2> I'm disappointed this article didn't get much attention here. I've loved Carr's 'The Shallows' [1]. Definitely a recommended read for IT people.

[https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing- Brains/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing- Brains/dp/0393339750)</comment>


Security considerations for password generators - <AUTHOR> https://palant.de/2016/04/20/security-considerations-for-password-generators <comment><USER2> I never use password generators unless I know how all the smaller parts work together to produce the output. I always compile password generators from source, and I always check their code. This doesn't guarantee the generator doesn't have a backdoor/weakness but it's preferable over blindly executing such a program and assuming the password is truly random and doesn't contain 'reversible strings', or strings that can be traced back to the program.</comment>


Oops: Azerbaijan released election results before voting had even started - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/oops-azerbaijan-released-election-results-before-voting-had-even-started/ <comment><USER2> > The data were quickly recalled. The official story is that the app's > developer had mistakenly sent out the 2008 election results as part of a > test. But that's a bit flimsy, given that the released totals show the > candidates from this week, not from 2008.

This is horseshit.

I spent years building US and international election results maps for a large company, and I had _exactly_ the same thing happen to me on at least one occasion.

When you build an election map or any kind of election reporting site or app, you have to have test data ahead of time. You _can 't_ use test data from a previous year, for the simple reason that it has the wrong candidates and parties.

How do you know your code even works with the current candidates? Maybe there's an encoding problem with one of the candidate names this year. Happened to me.

You have to use test data from the _current_ election, yes, the election that has not yet happened. Because you have to test your app with the current candidates, photos, parties, news feeds, electoral boundaries including all the latest redistricting, and all of that.

So yes, it is _made up_ test data, with "predicted" results based on whatever. Recent polling plus a good dose of randomization, perhaps.

You just hope and pray that your test data never leaks out onto a live feed.

But it's a balancing act. You need to test your code on real devices, real browsers, and the whole works. And you have to be ready to swap in your live feed election night and have it all work seamlessly.

Should be easy, right?

Now consider the dynamics of election reporting. You have a deadline. A deadline that _will not budge_. You do your best, but you're probably not going to get much sleep the week before the election. And sometimes you make a mistake.

That happened with one of the US primary elections. We had a test feed leak out onto a live page for a couple of hours, and man did it make the news. They said we'd released the election "results" early - i.e. we'd made up the results.

Well of course we made up the results. It was _test data_ , and we had to do it that way. So yeah, sorry we goofed, but anybody with an ounce of sense who wasn't looking for a news scoop should have realized that _the election hadn 't happened yet_ and it was just a stupid bug.

People talk about deadline pressure. You should try election work sometime!

<comment><USER3> If the data was generated for testing and escaped accidentally, why not say that? Their claim that it's last year's data runs directly counter to this perfectly reasonable explanation.

<comment><USER2> That's a very good point, and of course you flag your test data with a special "TEST" flag.

Now remember the lack of sleep for a week before the election, and imagine a possible bug where your client code somehow fails to put up that big TEST DATA message that you thought was there.

It happens. Happened to me. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's an Onion for that: [http://www.theonion.com/video/diebold- accidentally-leaks-res...](http://www.theonion.com/video/diebold-accidentally- leaks-results-of-2008-electio,14214/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Shocked, Shocked!? It couldn't matter less to the average Azerbaijani. They already know all about it. The government just makes up some ridiculously implausible "explanation" and life goes on. "Last election's results, but this election's candidate names?". If it seems like they're not even trying, its because they're not. The official explanation doesn't even have to be good because the people don't care one way or another.

<comment><USER6> We have our hoaxes in the US as well

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf84Hwo_Umk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf84Hwo_Umk)

<comment><USER7> Is this a parody youtube account? On top of US election conspiracies Pope Francis is a Jew? Seriously?

<comment><USER8> Parody or not, there are sedevacantists in the world:

> Sedevacantism is the position, held by a minority of Traditionalist > Catholics,^[1]^[2] that the present occupant of the papal see is not truly > pope and that, for lack of a valid pope, the see has been vacant since the > death of Pope Pius XII in 1958. A tiny number of these claim the vacancy > actually goes back to the death of Pope Pius X in 1914.

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

The belief the Pope is a Jew is a new one on me, but the general tenor of "There is no valid Pope; the current one is a pretender." is no new idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Snark aside, I feel very sorry for those involved in pushing out the "results" early. I cannot see anything good happening to them.

<comment><USER10> They are criminals. Why on Earth should anything 'good' happen to them as a result of this?

<comment><USER11> I doubt it was the programmers intention.

Sit back and realise that somebody is probably going to be murdered for pushing to the wrong database.

<comment><USER12> Somebody who was involved with fixation of election results :)

Not that I think he deserves being murdured. Of course not.

But, he was betraying his fellow countrymen by 'pushing to a database'. I dont think he really deserve's that sympathy.

<comment><USER13> If you've got two guys with AK-47s standing behind you, do you get a choice in the matter? Even if they aren't standing behind, the implication is that they are there when a despot comes to you for an app.

Maybe the early release was civil disobedience.

<comment><USER14> > If you've got two guys with AK-47s standing behind you

I know it sounds technical to use such a precise level of designation, but there are very very few AK-47s in circulation. Their production ended in 1959.

As with any domain of knowledge it's best to dither to a lesser degree of precision if you're not an expert. 'Two guys with rifles'.

<comment><USER15> > there are very very few AK-47s in circulation.

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47))

> _Even after six decades the model and its variants remain the most widely > used and popular assault rifles in the world because of their durability, > low production cost, availability, and ease of use._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Today I love computers so much.

Tomek in my office says we'd doc this "sev:hi - production data stored in test instance".

<comment><USER16> Yep.

For my customers, that was the day that the election results came out a day early and conclusively proved that there was no hope of ever having a democratic government.

For me, that was just another Tuesday--"git push production --force"

:)

<comment><USER17> `git push` implies that there were any changes to commit.

`git reset --hard origin/despotism` would be more accurate, since it over- writes any commits not yet pushed.

<comment><USER16> Hah, well put. I clearly am not used to committing great evil with git--on purpose, at any rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I bookmarked this to look at every time I get too depressed about American politics.

<comment><USER19> Sorry, as a country that got recently the Freedom of speech, politics and all that B.S.; I do consider the freedom of moving and travelling (without being harassed) to be orders of magnitudes more important.

Freedom to move and travel is a necessity.

Freedom to speech is good, but not really that necessary.

<comment><USER20> If you have freedom of movement, then you can move to a place that has freedom of speech.

If you have freedom of speech, then you can grumble about being prohibited from traveling. But you are highly unlikely to have the influence to get the law changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Couldn't this be just fake data that the developer used to test the app ?

<comment><USER22> I was thinking the same thing, but then why would the numbers be so skewed as to mirror pretty much what corrupt election results would look like?

<comment><USER23> Because it was probably presented to senior politicians prior to being released, and they'd want to see "optimistic" test data.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it would look subversive on the part the developer. Not a good career move in the best of circumstances, which these are clearly not. I could definitely see this happening with the developer's best intentions, and not as part of a rigging conspiracy.

None of that is to say that Azerbaijan's democracy isn't largely fake or that the elections are not, in fact, rigged; it's just that this particular mistake may not an expression of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Call me old-fashioned, but I believe if you're going to fix an election, it should be done with lots of money and empty campaign promises! The public must be involved. Not in a meaningful sense, just as pawns in a larger corporate agenda.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is why I stopped incorporating Event Horizon's gravity drive into my apps. Kept getting results from the future. And hell, that too.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nate Silver did the same thing prior to the 2012 U.S. elections..

</comment><comment><USER28> If they're not competent enough to blame this mishap on 'test data', I wonder if they'll prove competent enough to change the data for the final reported results.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm old enough to remember when tyrants won with 99% of the vote. Perhaps the real news in this article is that nowadays they only win with 73%.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why isn't this the main election story (or even on the first page) when you search Google News for Azerbaijan?

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a facade of democracy like in a lot of other countries. They just try to make it seem like there is democracy but behind it all it's still controlled by the ruling party.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sounds like the 2000 US elections...

</comment><comment><USER33> Is it just me, or does that photo look as if the president is added in photoshop?

</comment><comment><USER34> The Azerbaijan election results app was built by Jeff Dean.

;)

</comment><comment><USER35> More embarrassing than wardrobe malfunction

</comment><comment><USER36> Proving once again he's prescient, Ali G suggested reporting on election returns the day before, during his excellent interview with Andy Rooney several years ago: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KglSPl7g14Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KglSPl7g14Q)

</comment><comment><USER37> In China your life is even easier: the government helps you keep and fill in the voting paper. And they are so efficient that you get the results 8 years before the "election" happens. Good thing is that Obama administration and US people are working hard to catch up. Don't worry!

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm getting really tired of the politics posts on here. Can we please stop upvoting stuff like this? If I want to be outraged I'll go to /r/politics.

<comment><USER38> _" If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"_ \-- [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER10> _" Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."_ \-- [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER39> As a rule of thumb, when someone who has been a user here for over 6 years cites one of the guidelines, it is a _really bad idea_ to get into a citing match with them. You will just get embarrassed, like you are now.

<comment><USER40> guys

guys my regdate

guys

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In other words, America is so un-corrupt and perfect, let's create a spectacle out of every similar story that takes place around the world so that Americans don't question the legitimacy of American institutions.

The implicit storyline is American exceptionalism, which is most valuable when it can be used to justify wars and military action that would otherwise be considered inappropriate or morally questionable.

When you consider what percentage of so-called "world news" is stuff like this, newspapers start to seem like they are all state run propaganda operations. I realize that part of it is just the entertainment value people derive from feeling superior to others, even when the others are presented as victims, but an objective, critical media would simply ignore most stories like this in favor of less juicy but more impactful stories about local/national issues.

<comment><USER42> So what you're saying is, any political story that isn't explicitly about American corruption... is implicitly about American corruption?

<comment><USER41> It's propaganda designed to create a mental state in the reader, namely that the US is great. We don't print the text of national hymns in our newspapers, we just print nearly every silly or bad thing that happens in any other country, even in the midst of much more significant/abhorrent conduct by our own government.

It's propaganda and nothing more. It's useful both for distraction and dehumanization.

<comment><USER42> And I suppose if we only printed things about our own country you'd probably castigate the US for arrogantly ignoring the rest of the world. Or that if other countries report on American corruption and social problems, it's not equally an attempt at deflecting from their own issues? Maybe we should only print positive news about others and negative news about ourselves?

<comment><USER41> I think your definition of "news" is basically this kind of story...

As a thought experiment, imagine if American readers of the "world news" section routinely were led to think things like "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if our policymakers tried that idea" or "wow, maybe the people in country x are just like me and deserve my profound respect, even though my country is launching missiles into their neighborhoods".

Illegal immigrants are dehumanized in the American press too, as are sex workers. The point of creating psychological/empathic distance between the reader and the subject is to permit the reader to suppress the basic reflex of valuing human life. Imagine the news story about an illegal immigrant sex worker who was found murdered.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Failure IS an option - <AUTHOR> http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/failure-is-an-option/ <comment><USER2> I the Guy Kawasaki says it the best: You won't fail only if you won't try.</comment>