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Comment by draugadrotten | Hacker News Reader

Back in 2007, mobile phones used a system called T9 from Nuance corp which was trained on a word corpus taken from IRC and similar chats. This caused all kinds of issues - the mobile phones would accept offensive words like "naziparking" but reject normal language like "world peace". Using reddit may lead to ... surprises.

Source: http://spraktidningen.se/artiklar/2007/11/darfor-ar-din-mobi...

Translated by Google: https://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=...

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T9 would autocomplete my name to "Asian Lung," which was hilarious to my high school friends. And to be fair, I am Asian and I do have lungs.

To be fair, most people are Asian and have lungs.

At first, I read your comment and wondered if "most" applies to situations in which a plurality but not a majority was being talked about.

Then I remembered this [0].

Still wonder about the plurality/majority thing, though.

[0] http://imgur.com/CK6aONG

As with most things in language, it appears the interpretation of "most" is dependent on the context.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55920/is-most-eq...

Well look at the big lungs on Brad

I had gotten the impression that happened because they were using an algorithmic compression engine that favored false positives over false negatives, i.e. they had essentially trained an algorithm to generate "strings of characters looking like words" as a means of compression and some weird strings of characters were determined by the algorithm to be words even though they shouldn't have been.

I'm having a hard time imagining being sensitive enough that "naziparking" is offensive. Is any mention of the concept of nazis verboten?

No, "grammar nazi" is considered inoffensive. Many people pernickety about grammar use that term to refer to themselves.

Might have been an exclusively German language problem, or maybe they cleaned it up since that article was published. I have a phone with T9 and it works remarkably well. Heck, I would prefer it to Swype. (Of course, it's not useful on smartphones, because they no longer have real keys.)

t9 was AMAZING and i miss it every day. faster and more accurate than swype for sure, especially since inputs for t9 are deterministic.

very easy to text even from your pocket etc - something you cant do on a smartphone - notice texting accidents became more common with the widespread adaptation of smartphones ;)

Note that you're comparing a touchscreen to tactile keys in that statement too, though. I could text from my pocket without T9, but try doing that with a touchscreen WITH T9...

And while we're doing that touch vs. tactile comparison, what I also loved about the old "dumb phones" was deterministic timing. I could do stuff on those phones from start to end without looking at the screen - I quickly learned and remembered that e.g. this operation completed instantly, and that menu has ~1/4 of loading time, etc.

I think this feature was actually key to being able to memorize how to perform operations quickly. There's no way you can do that with modern smartphone, where every other interaction lags for anything between 10 and 1000 ms, and inputs are sometimes dropped at random. It's this non-determinism of smartphone UI that makes me look at the screen all the time when using it.

I think this is actually because of the changing interface. It doesn't matter how long the interface takes to be ready if the keystrokes are buffered (which they were), so you could press "menu down down down ok" and the thing would work, even if the menu took two seconds to show up.

You can't do that when you have to actually wait for the thing you want to select to show, otherwise you'll be selecting something completely different.

I am really hoping that we reach peak touchscreen soon, and companies can start exploring other form factors again. I want a fast CPU and wifi in something that isn't just a giant flat slab of glass.

Haven't we already?

Texting also became more common with the widespread adoption of smartphones - we'd of course see more accidents as a result, but the medium became massively more useful to a lot more people.

Yes, give me some bloody buttons on my phone.

I guess I'll need to wait until shape changing tactile surfaces come to phone screens, which might be a while / never.

Side note, "naziparking" is a word people say....?!?

Welcome to IRC.

Anyways, i could see someone use that term in frustration about a car having been parked across two spaces.

So maybe the "naziparkers" are those who go around keying the cars that are parked wrong.

I assumed it was a reference to domain parking/squatting.

I guess i got the alternate impression because i read the original Swedish article text...

That's weird. A grammar nazi is a stickler for grammar. You'd think naziparking would be a stickler for proper parking.

We used T9's since at least the beginning of the Millennium. It was one of the major selling points of Nokia phones back when snake was the other one.

like Tay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

T9 on phones goes all the way back to ~2000

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