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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

1997: Nobody believes the NSA is listening to phone calls. Netscape is rich. China barely has the internet.

2017: Kids can run real time E1+ voice transcription systems made exclusively of free software on commodity gaming hardware. Bizarrely, the dominant implementation is based upon the "free" browser community Mozilla, based upon work released by a "don't be evil" global megacorporation, but they are reduced to imitating China to get there.

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I’m tempted to just ignore this troll but this is highly uninformed. There’s nothing “dominant” about this implementation or the DeepSpeech architecture in general. And just to address the Sinophobia at the end of your post: the Deep Speech papers were published by Baidu’s Silicon Valley lab, not “China.”

Haha, what the hell? How did you interpret the comment like that? It was a jovial reference to how times change. For the record, I like China, I live here, I've spent most of my adult life here! Chill out :)

PS. With respect to "There’s nothing “dominant” about this implementation or the DeepSpeech architecture in general." the use of dominant was really poetic license in support of the line of amusement, but in fact I'm not aware of a more popular open source transcription system by Github stars ... are you? As for China != Baidu SV, I actually find it even more bizarre that they would develop such algorithms in such a foreign environment.

I don't understand this "China == Evil" attitude on this website.

It might have to do with their one party political system, heavy censorship, thousands of executions each year, and persecution of reporters and political opposition.

This happens on a smaller scale in the US as well, not to mention the flagrant wars waged on other countries as well as brutalizing their own black and Hispanic population through the justice system and underpaid labor, yet people here dont generally paint a broad brush to claim the US is evil. They understand its a complex place with nuance. The same naunce should be afforded to China.

I don't live in the US and I don't pretend that it's a perfect place either, but there's still a big difference between the two countries.

> there's still a big difference between the two countries

yes indeed, like a few thousand kilometers.

on the weekend, HN is overrun with nationalist/conservative trolls.

This doesn't help. Please follow the guidelines and flag comments you think break them, and don't comment that you did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Was I supposed to flag the parent comment? Perhaps instead of attacking well-meaning people for observing problems, you should focus on solving the problem.

If you go to a comment's page by clicking on the timestamp (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15837946) you should see a “flag” link.

They are more and more all over. Look at Reddit.

1997: Apple was nearly bankrupt:

https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech_0806/

Not everything changes. 1997 - 2017: Microsoft has 90% desktop market share, but the Year of Linux on the desktop was fast approaching.

Linux not gaining a least some traction was a huge disappointment.

I do not really see how a system kernel has any bearing on consumer desktop environments. Meanwhile, open-source web-browsers surpassed IE, Android is nominally open-source and so far runs on a heavily modified linux ...

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