# Key Points from #hplusroadmap IRC Discussion

• A potential breakthrough using CRISPR technology for curing latent viral infections was shared (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/08/21/1410785111.long), sparking discussion about its potential applications if it could be adapted to work in living organisms.

• Cancer research funding was debated, with the suggestion that billions of dollars could be effectively utilized to equip labs with high-throughput robotics, microfluidics, and sequencers while freeing researchers from grant-writing obligations.

• The prohibitively high cost of electronic design tools was highlighted, with only two main providers (Cadence and Synopsys) charging $50K-$75K per seat annually, creating barriers for small startups in hardware development.

• Custom keyboard designs were discussed, including the Atreus keyboard and "dactyl," a Clojure library for designing 2D and 3D keyboard shapes, demonstrating interest in optimizing human-computer interfaces.

• Text-to-speech synthesis options for Linux were evaluated, with Festival and CMU Arctic voices being recommended as the best available options for natural-sounding voice synthesis on Linux platforms.

• Developer tools were shared, including tmux-resurrect for preserving terminal sessions and a discussion of Betamax, a Python library for recording HTTP interactions, with noted limitations regarding proxy configurations.