I agree with you, but at the same time I think it's great that somebody is at least trying to innovate the tools we have for interfacing with technology. I know handwriting recognition isn't anything new, but the idea that the keyboard is all we will ever need can only contribute to the stagnation of advancement.
I'm still waiting for the day I can telepathically control all my devices.
There could be a lot done with eyeball tracking. We already have setups that can accurately determine where you will be looking a fraction of a second in the future.
Eyeball tracking combined with speech or handwriting translation could be quite powerful. The eyeball tracking could provide a lot of contextual information to make speech/handwriting recognition more accurate.
One's saccade eye movements are very regular in acceleration profile, so it's possible to determine where you're going to look from the start of the saccade movement.
I could not find the original reference, but there is some highly technical information here:
This is totally incorrect, eye tracking is not sufficiently advanced to be in any way useful in terms of entering input. There exist 'visual keyboards' for people that are paralyzed which allow them to select a key based on where they are looking. These, while a fantastic tool to help disabled people, are not even close to approaching the speed we achieve using a manual keyboard. There's an example here - your eye has to linger for at least a second for the computer to be confident in your choice.
And it only takes common sense to realize that we don't look at every key we type, and it makes it faster. The quickest typists don't have to look at the keyboard at all, and this increases efficiency. Both handwriting and eye tracking are much much slower than typing, no matter what. You can be the fastest handwriter on the planet, and still a moderately talented typist will burn the shit out of you. It just takes less time to hit a key than it does to write an entire letter form.
I realize my first comment was kind of mean and sarcastic, but that was because this idea is so completely stupid and not progressive at all that I thought the relatively intelligent community on hacker news would realize this immediately. All my friends and co-workers who saw it were like "this is completely dumb"... immediately.
I understand that people like things that are 'different' and 'progressive', but this particular tool is neither of the above. It's a fun little trick that is totally not practically useful in any way.
> This is totally incorrect, eye tracking is not sufficiently advanced to be in any way useful in terms of entering input.
Actually, you are totally incorrect. If you look back at the thread, I am not proposing eye tracking as a sole means of input, but as a means of providing contextual information to other means of input.
> I realize my first comment was kind of mean and sarcastic, but that was because this idea is so completely stupid and not progressive at all that I thought the relatively intelligent community on hacker news would realize this immediately. All my friends and co-workers who saw it were like "this is completely dumb"... immediately.
Then at least you or you and your friends are guilty of sloppy reading, of a level I do not expect for HN. Again, this is not proposed as a primary means of input, but as an enhancement to contextual information for speech and handwriting input.
Hey sorry this is so late. Didn't realize what you meant by contextual input or how that could be useful, but you're right - I can't deny such a fuzzy statement. It's somewhat possible that this could help something sometime in the future, definitely. Apologies for calling you incorrect. Eye tracking is however not efficient or useful as a main input for typing and will very likely not take a leading role in helping to recognize word/sentence input to computers.
On the second statement, I meant my original comment about google handwriting, the one at the top of this tree - not your comment about eye tracking. So I apologize again - I must have not been clear in the way I stated that and I'm sorry you took offense.
I walked out of my math class to go upstairs to the computer lab and buy a postage label to email them. I'm really hoping to get one. It will be fun to play around with.
Since you're already using the last.fm api, might I suggest you add a simple scrobbling feature. If I were to use Tubalr often I would really want to be able to scrobble all the songs I've listened to through it.
I'm thinking about adding a set of features that allow you to register, login, and favorite songs. Maybe when you favorite songs they can also be "scrobbled" if your account is connected with last.fm.
This is what really matters to me. If they don't delete messages or posts while I still have an account, than who cares. But if I decide to close my account permently, which I did yesterday, then why should they keep all the data they have for me. It's no help for me, it's not convientent in any way. It seems like the only reason they would keep it would be for their own use.
Awesome idea. Every time my girlfriend goes on Reddit I get five or six emails from her with random links she wanted to show me.
When do you think you'll start letting people into the private beta?
Oh and the "Return to website" link after you submit your email takes you to http://freshlog.com/ by the way. I don't know if that's on purpose or not, just letting you know.
I've been using this everyday to keep in touch with folks I care about for close to a year now, so the app works, but I'd like to clean up a little first :)
Very cool. Is it just the bookmarklet or are there extensions for other browsers? A Chrome extension would be so much nicer than a bookmarklet in my honest opinion.
However, my wife wanted a Chrome extension so much that I wrote a custom one for her.
I haven't gotten round to learn how to automatically generate custom Chrome extensions yet, but I'll be happy to manually create them for early beta testers like you =)
I really like this idea. What do you use to do this? Or what do you think would work best? I can't tell if Tiddlywiki would be good for this sort of thing.
My encryption is to keep everything on a hard drive that isn't connected to the internet. The insurance companies would no doubt like to see my timeline on my health category with a timeline on dates of every issue I have ever had with the hundreds of sub components of my body with everything from acne to heart trouble to ringing in ears to joint pain.
I have a category with everything I intend to do to the child if I have kids. I have a category with pictures of me every year from 3 days old to today. I do the same with my parents and grandparents (which is more spotty).
I have a category on all the friends I've ever had, what they liked, why they liked me, what I did to become aquainted, birthdays, their parents, all the information about them you would expect a close friend to have.
I've got all my tax returns back to 2005 (I started the wiki somewhere in 2007). My current net worth plotted on a chart, documented by what I did which caused certain plunges and rises in that graph.
A big category on girlfriends, kinds of women and what works with some. I can give you a cruise through every significant romantic event in my life from my first kiss back in college to sexual encounters. With photos of each girl. Each girl I dated given a full psycho analysis, funny how I searched out each edge of the (Smart, Sane, Pretty pick any two) triangle. I even dated a few (1 of 3) and (0 of 3). Big mistakes that haunt you.
I have a category of books I've read, and plotted those against my life timeline. What I've thought of them, how they changed me.
Anyone who got ahold of this wikipedia and had 20 hours to read it all would know as much about me as I know about me.
This wikipedia is what I want to see on dating websites, If I could include this on a dating website, and have all the girls do the same, it would make dating a lot easier. I imagine a post with dental records, tax returns, employment, income histories, aspirations, books read, history of diseases/conditions, family genetic lines, computers owned, friend structures, self psychoanalysis, and hundreds of other subjects which makes us unique from other humans.
A big worry is that the hard drive bricks iself or gets stolen, this wikipedia is worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. My backup strategy is to make a hard drive cloned image every 3 months with clonezilla, with the hd stored in a physically different location. so my wiki would even survive an fbi takedown where they steal all your stuff.
I've got all the programs I've ever written saved, so I can go back in time 4 years and see programs I wrote in C++, Visual Basic. It's like reviewing your essays from first grade, I can't bear to see them, my programming skill has gone up slowly but surly over time.
Wow, that's really amazing. I think I'd like to start doing the same kind of thing. What exactly to you use to accomplish all of this? What wiki? Plugins? Anything else? Do you have any other advice for someone wanting to get into this? Or something you would have liked to do differently from the start? Any advice you have would be wonderful.
"bluefish editor" freeware on top of a linux operating system (Fedora core). I suggest a more user friendly version of linux for non programmers. I've made short shell scripts which copy templates to different keyboard combinations. I have scripts which validate the html I've written. One of the things that bogs you down is getting image link text from camera/scanner into the html file, so I automated that as much as possible so It is just a matter of opening the scanner and hitting one hotkey which kicks off a script, and scans the image, puts in in the images folder (prompting me for a filename) saves it and injects the html into my bluefish editor. Same thing for photographs and videos on my camera. It's all gotta be (One click-add) or it will take hours each session just fiddling around with documents.
The real secret is adhering to the rules of a wikipedia. Nothing may be added without establishing its link and relevancy to another page. Also, Here is the secret sauce, a tough rule is that when you introduce a new page that links to an old subject, which introduces new information, or new evidence which contradicts old pages, you have to spend time and re-build the pages being linked to. I have a system where editing one significant page has the possibility of having me go back and change previous observations, the benefit is that it automates your thinking process. If you keep all your thoughts you ever have into a tight tree form, you can find that your human memory is upgraded a hundred times over. I was able to use process of elimination to determine which foods were causing my acne, and through continued graphing and elimination, was able to find what elements in which foods were causing it. Something many doctors would probably like to see. When I go to a new dentist, I sometimes bring along my entire history of each tooth, each operation i've had, i can see where that time I kissed the wrong girl caused a microbe party in my mouth which caused cavities. Though the dentists have no idea what microbes are in my mouth, through my wiki. I have a good idea. In some ways the wiki makes me a better dentist (to myself) than the professionals.
It's a wikipedia that treats myself like scientists would treat a newly discovered intelligent alien craft. Everything about it is described, graphed, analyzed, compared, and charted. Nothing about it is taken as a given. The part that keeps me coming back to it is my thirst for knowledge. When I browse hacker news, stackoverflow, and (years ago, digg), anything that struck me as useful for growing myself or growing knowledge was included. So now I have like 800 items in a list organized by category and awesomeness, that to this day when I look at it, I still see the importance. I have a category of guitar songs I can play, piano tunes, how I learned. etc.
Whenever I hear a song that provides a certain response, sadness, happiness, euphoria, depression. I write it down on a receipt, then when I get home I log it. So I have a series of songs I can play which seriously induce all these emotions. I try to stick to the happiness songs. there is a boat load of ones that cause the other emotions. As a result I have 30 songs that when I play, suddenly make me happier. Sometimes when I'm depressed I play the depression inducing songs and it makes me extremely depressed, and I can look at myself like a computer, an input output device, and I see that depression is only a response to external stimuli, if you can take control of your external environment, you can custom make your emotion for that hour/day.
I saw it mentioned here already, but the idea of a "Name your Price" option would be really cool. Just like how Bandcamp does it. I'm always more motivated to support artists that chose this option.
I have the same question, except the only difference is that I'm in at a community college in Souther California right now and I will be transferring and about a year. Right now I'm on a path to go to some UC and get probably a B.A. in Computer Science. I don't want to go into programming necessarily because my passion is really design, especially web related design, UX, and web development.
I just figured Computer Science would be the best path because I find it interesting and it will open up more opportunities for me in the future. However recently I've been discouraged because of all the math I'm going to have to get through.
I'd love to hear some insight about what would be the best way to get into the field. What school is best? What major? I'd preferably like to stay in California.
I'm still waiting for the day I can telepathically control all my devices.