iPhones are allergic to helium - <AUTHOR> https://ifixit.org/blog/11986/iphones-are-allergic-to-helium/ <comment><USER2> > So what else could it be? Well, at the heart of every electronic device is a > clock. Traditionally, these are quartz oscillators, crystals that vibrate at > a specific predictable frequency—generally 32 kHz.

Watch crystals run at 32[.768] kHz because you can divide with a binary counter by 2^16 and get 1 pps to drive the Lavet stepper driving the seconds hand.

Watch crystals are also commonly used by MCUs for their RTC (real time, very low power clock), but never used to produce the main clock of a SoC or something like that. Mostly because that'd need an insanely high multiplication through a PLL (higher frequency multiplication ~ higher phase noise). Base clock crystals are typically 20-50 MHz.

Quartz crystals used to be hermetically sealed.

<comment><USER3> > Quartz crystals used to be hermetically sealed.

Are they sealed against helium though? It can get through a lot of materials that more common gases can't.

<comment><USER4> Hermetically sealed by definition is airtight, i.e. "excludes the passage of air, oxygen, or other gases". [1] With that said, the diffusion rate depends on both the properties of both the seal and the gas.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_seal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_seal)

<comment><USER5> Very few air seals protect against helium, the smallest gas. Most materials, even metals, are like sponges to helium. It'll seep through slowly.

<comment><USER6> I was about to correct you and say that hydrogen is the smallest, but apparently, hydrogen's atomic radius is actually a bit bigger. Helium's radius is smaller due to the larger charge of the nucleus making for a tighter electron cloud.

<comment><USER7> I too had the same thought, and then thought maybe hydrogen molecule is being considered. Read up to see that hydrogen atom has bigger radius. TIL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is the Post-mortem from the OP on Reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem_mri_disables_every_ios_device_in/)

<comment><USER9> There are some fascinating weird stories in that thread.

<comment><USER10> It reminds me of the classic "500 mile email" [https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Helium is very good at getting through the tiniest cracks due to its small atomic diameter. One uses it to find leaks in devices with ultra-high vacuum seals (e.g. in low-temperature physics) by attaching a pump with a simple mass spectrometer sensitive to Helium to the device under test and then using a small helium gun to test different parts of the device from the outside. When spraying it at the leak some of it is pushed inside by the pressure difference and can be detected by the pump spectrometer.

Hydrogen would be even better of course but it is rather dangerous when mixed with air.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't hydrogen only work if it was atomic hydrogen? I thought molecular hydrogen gas was larger than helium.

<comment><USER13> Hydrogen exists as H2 in its elemental form you'll you'll need to ionize it to separate it and keep it in an ionized or other way isolated form to prevent it from binding to other hydrogen atoms.

<comment><USER12> If you are talking about ionized hydrogen, you are no longer talking about a gas. If it's ionized, it is a plasma.

<comment><USER14> And if it's a plasma...it's gonna melt whatever you're trying to leak-check :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe I'm just a fanboy, but I found one of the most impressive parts of the story, aside from actually tracking down the root cause, was that the iPhone User's Guide actually specifically addresses this, along with explaining that it's necessary to give it about a week for the helium to diffuse.

<comment><USER16> You just know there was a days-long meeting about "the Helium problem", including graphs of how likely different user-personas are to enter a zeppelin, work in a balloon factory, or attend exceedingly well-funded birthday parties.

After debating late nights about whether to pony up for the new better-sealed clock, someone said "Screw it, throw it in the user agreement."

<comment><USER17> "better sealed clock" would be the universally used quartz resonator, but that would have added 0.002$ to their cost. Unthinkable.

<comment><USER18> Nice try! The SiT512 Apple uses is more expensive than a quartz resonator. I don't have Apple's specific BOM details, but I'd guess it's likely something like 2x the cost.

<comment><USER17> it's only more expensive in small quantities. after you ramp up, it's infinitely cheaper as you can produce them on waffers. also you are thinking BOM alone. the selling point of silicon mechanical instead of crystal is that it can be assembled faster and cheaper, greatly offsetting the item cost.

but don't trust me, see the "advantages" of manufacturers promotion [https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/look-inside- programm...](https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/look-inside-programmable- mems-clock-chips)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel like the buried lede is that the MRI operators vented large quantities of helium into the hospital's HVAC and didn't think to tell anyone.

<comment><USER20> Oxygen monitors are standard practice when you have MRI machines and Helium cooling. I would like to assume that this monitoring was in place and it never raised any flags? [https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/helium-mri-rooms- around-w...](https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/helium-mri-rooms-around- world/)

The air's usual O2 concentration is ~20.5% and it looks like safety monitors trigger at 19.5% and 18%: [https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/all-categories- gas-monito...](https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/all-categories-gas- monitorsair-check-o2-oxygen-deficiency-monitor-for-co2-n2-storage-areas/)

Helium makes up less than 0.0005% of air naturally. I'm guessing that increasing He concentration 1000 times to 0.5%, for example, is enough to cause problems for iPhones, but not enough to trigger the alarm or pose any danger to people.

<comment><USER18> Considering that Trimix and Heliox used in deep commercial dives can have the majority (Aka >50%) of the breathable "air" be helium, your theory that there's really any risk of danger to people seems a bit unwarranted to me.

<comment><USER21> Helium isn't _toxic_ but it displaces oxygen. Heliox still contains enough oxygen to breathe (at sea level it's 21% oxygen just like normal atmosphere, and when diving the partial pressure of oxygen is the same as oxygen in normal atmosphere). But if you release helium into a room full of air, patients with already-compromised respiratory systems from injury or from respiratory diseases or from opioid painkillers could be at risk for brain damage or death if they were borderline already and not being monitored closely enough.

The author's cavalier "I bet the nurse's voices were higher pitched that day!" was incredibly inappropriate given the potential danger.

<comment><USER18> > Helium isn't toxic but it displaces oxygen.

While technically correct in theory, in any real world environment Helium will not displace Oxygen unless you are dumping orders of magnitude more helium than in this scenario.

> Heliox still contains enough oxygen to breathe (at sea level it's 21% oxygen > just like normal atmosphere, and when diving the partial pressure of oxygen > is the same as oxygen in normal atmosphere).

There's so much wrong with this (and the rest of your post) I can't think of a polite way to respond, so I'll just wish you a good day.

<comment><USER22> I'll admit I haven't gotten that far in my diving certs yet, but isn't the point of Heliox so that you can have less than 21% O2 at high depths to avoid narcosis and a fatal ppO2?

<comment><USER23> To simplify it a bit.

The point is to keep partial pressure of oxygen below that of maximum safe limit of 1.2 to 1.6. For example, 100% oxygen at surface is 1.0 and thus safe but will very fast reach maximum when you increase the pressure just by a few meters. Regular air with 21% oxygen will start to be a problem at 50 meters, so divers that need to go deeper need to use mixes that has less than 21% oxygen. When a mix is less than 18% oxygen they become hypoxic and cannot safely be used at shallow depth.

So the point is not to get "the same as oxygen in normal atmosphere". It is to keep the partial pressure of oxygen within safe limits, usually between 0.18 pp02 and 1.4 pp02 depending on a multitude of factors and safety margins.

<comment><USER21> The only point I was trying to convey with that statement was that there might be much less oxygen by volume in deep-diving heliox but the partial pressure of oxygen is still maintained so that cellular respiration can continue normally. Was that the only thing you thought was outrageously wrong with my comment?

<comment><USER23> I am not jsjohnst, but the only additional nitpick is that Heliox is any blend that is exclusively helium and oxygen and the reason why heliox is more commonly used for deep dive is that helium has less resistance compared to nitrogen, meaning that pushing compressed air through ones respiratory system takes a bit less effort. Helium in heliox is thus used to displace the nitrogen, with the oxygen ratio being adjusted based on health, depth, bottom depth, purpose, decompression, surface interval and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is the first time that I remember seeing a story evolve on the internet. What was originally from a post on r/sysadmin 3 weeks ago is now summarized on a Blog article that's at the top of HN. Will it get picked up my mainstream media and be on everyone's news feed by next week? Or tomorrow, now that its picked up momentum? Besides being a really fascinating story, its having an interesting journey as news travels through different outlets and gets condensed and filtered down to more consumable forms.

<comment><USER2> You weren't around when the Meltdown rumors started?

<comment><USER25> I remember hearing plenty of whispering that Intel had a major bug disclosure coming up, but for most of that time I feel like the majority of speculation was centered around the Intel ME.

Sadly my immediate reaction to this post on /r/sysadmin was to discount it, or rather attribute it to some external factor that nobody could possibly figure out and entirely unrelated to the MRI. In this case I was quite happy to be proven wrong by the follow up posts and subsequent article.

I'm really curious why something they can generalize to "helium leaking into the quartz oscillator" only affected Apple products. What feat of manufacturing keeps a broad range of OEMs safe on the Android side but so eludes Apple? Worse yet, was some "cost savings" engineered between iphone 5s and 6 that ultimately introduced this issue?

<comment><USER26> It wasn't a quartz oscillator - it was the MEMS oscillator that Apple was using in place of a quartz oscillator that is speculated to be the root cause.

The other phones involved still used quartz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We had this problem too.

Every time my colleague brought his phone to the control room the Cellular stops working for like a day or two, but my 6s worked just fine anywhere even next to a Dewar that's venting Helium. Now the mystery is solved!

BTW, among us there are others who accidentally brought their phones near or even into the MR bore during maintenance, but none of these devices has done any permanent damage to our phones, except one accelerometer on a cheap Chinese phone, even in a 7T magnet. So I never thought that MRI could be causing the problem.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's in the iPhone user guide ... maybe not something everyone reads, but it has been known for some time

That said - a 120l leak of liquid helium is both stupidly expensive, and highly damaging to the MRI unit: there's a bath of ~1000-1500l of liquid helium in an MRI to keep the superconducting coils at superconducting temperatures. Losing ~10% of that volume _probably_ means the unit won't work

<comment><USER28> When you install a new unit you use additional helium that boils off just to bring it to superconducting temperature.

<comment><USER14> >When you install a new unit you use additional helium that boils off just to bring it to superconducting temperature.

Nope - well, not with any of the ones with which I am familiar: they're shipped full _most_ of the time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Few things; Isn't it a bit odd that a hospital MRI machine room isn't being monitored for these kinds of things? I'm curious, not accusatory.

Also, this could be a potentially catastrophic tool for terrorists. As trivial as it sounds, it's even worse than a traditional frequency jammer because it renders the device unusable instead of just not being able to communicate with the outside world.

Edit: On the other hand, interesting counter-terrorism tool as well. Is there any precedent for the CIA using this sort thing intentionally?

<comment><USER30> There are almost certainly oxygen sensors in that room. The helium concentration was probably not high enough to displace enough oxygen to trigger them. Though it wouldn't entirely surprise me if they were ignored or disabled.

Liquid helium is rather expensive and would likely draw attention in areas where it's not usually handled. Really doesn't sound like a useful terrorism tool.

<comment><USER31> Honestly, even Sarin nerve gas isn't a very useful terrorism tool.

I think the infamous Thunderf00t does a decent job of explaning why [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6uLUaqgWY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6uLUaqgWY0)

<comment><USER29> I love him, will watch

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I love HN. I came here to learn more about MEMS RTCs, something I've never heard about previously... But most of the discussion is about the dangers of a helium leak... Which is a good point, especially if that leak is in a hospital.

A bit of googling on MEMS RTC revealed this slightly dated article which I thought was still interesting: [https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app- notes/index.mvp/id/55...](https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app- notes/index.mvp/id/5545)

Turns out one of the main reasons to switch is for the smaller packaging vs quartz oscillators.

</comment><comment><USER33> The picture in the article that is labeled as an MR scanner is a CT scanner, and the people are wearing lead for radiation protection.

<comment><USER14> The photo is labeled "Morris Hospital's GE Medical BrightSpeed CT Machine"

<comment><USER33> It said 'MR' rather than 'CT' when I commented, and now it's a completely different photo with a new caption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's good that he was able to reproduce it (although with a far higher concentration of helium), but the original story showed up a few weeks ago at an EE forum I lurk, and everyone there was skeptical of helium and suspecting EMP instead:

[https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-in-the-air- kills-i...](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-in-the-air-kills-ios- devices/)

 _But an electromagnetic pulse would have taken out medical equipment in the facility as well, and they were working fine!_

I suspect medical equipment is designed to a higher standard of EMP resistance than most other products, especially equipment designed to sustain life. Phones also have antennae specifically designed to pick up EM fields, while medical equipment like an EEG or ECG is specifically designed to _reject_ them.

Likewise, the devices "reviving" after a week is not unusual if they're just resetting due to power loss. Immediately disconnecting and reconnecting the battery would for sure differentiate between helium (device remains dead even after reset) and EMP (device reboots successfully.)

<comment><USER35> Any particular reason you're ignoring the fact this only happened to iOS devices? Do the various Android manufacturers incorporate additional shielding to prevent the occasional EMP?

<comment><USER36> It probably affects a specific chip Apple are using that may not be present in the Androids.

<comment><USER14> Since that's what the article says ... I'm gonna say you're right

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Am I the only one hoping that exposure to helium made Siri sound like a chipmunk?

</comment><comment><USER38> Anybody can provide a reason why SiT1532 wouldn't be hermetically sealed? They are talking about high accuracy, intuitively it would seem that if helium affects it this badly, then it would be susceptible to some atmospheric pressure changes (unless the seal worked against air but not helium).

<comment><USER20> They do have a strong hermetical seal on them, but the older ones used by Apple are still susceptible to "small gas molecules".

They must have some seal in place and fortunately our air is Nitrogen, O2, and a little bit of Argon. These can't get through the seal! Helium is only found in minuscule amounts naturally and apparently this concentration is so low it doesn't matter.

Helium is special because is it has the smallest kinetic diameter of all the noble gases. You can compare its diameter to other gases here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_diameter#List_of_diame...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_diameter#List_of_diameters)

Helium is frequently used in leak tests since it has a way of working through even the tiniest of leaks. Elemental Hydrogen is of course smaller, but I believe you only find Hydrogen as H2 which is a larger molecule than Helium.

<comment><USER39> According to that table, Helium is 260, and water is 265, and there are a few more under 300.

Does that mean that water (in some form) also acts like helium and would be able to get through that seal?

<comment><USER20> I think the answer is that water has polarity! Though we're definitely hitting my chemistry knowledge limit...

While water's overall charge is neutral, its charge isn't distributed symmetrically ans tbis makes it a rather polar molecule. This means part of molecule have different charges which leads to attraction to other water molecules thanks to van der waals forces. Basically water naturally clumps up and won't squeeze through tiny holes even if it's kinetic diameter would technically allow it. (Though I believe very high pressure can force it through)

Water's polarity is what causes surface tension and droplets! For comparison, gasoline is relatively nonpolar, though not as nonpolar as He. If you've ever spilled some you can see it spread out immediately and avoid the droplet formation and cohesion you'd see with water. Similarly, water tight containers might not be gasoline tight. (but don't test this out...)

To correct my comment from earlier: _Helium is special because of its small kinetic diameter AND because it's naturally found in a monoatomic and nonpolar form, as are all noble gases. This lack of polarity leads to minimal intermolecular attraction that would cause clumping and limit flow._

(I found a reference that helium can be measured flowing through a 1.0nm hole, albeit at a very low rate. I wonder how close to the 0.260nm kinetic diameter a hole can get for He to still flow)

<comment><USER40> Presumably it can still pass through if the hole is smaller than 0.26nm!?

<comment><USER20> I really have no idea...but I don't think so! Or at least if the kinetic diameter is the smallest hole something can fit through it can't?

Helium's is 260pm or 0.26nm so that could be the limit. But the actual atomic diameter has a couple different calculated and observed values from 31pm to 140pm so maybe it could fit through holes around that size? My guess is we don't have the technology to make a hole of precisely that size or even measure a single He atom passing through such a hole. Would probably have to find a real expert to know if it's theoretically possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I would be very interested in seeing the the iPhone charges while "anethitized". I severely doubt data would be accessible via standard channels, but as this kills the general clock I am assuming it should prevent any sort of lock protection mechanisms from kicking in indefinitely.

Not sure how you would get it going again and / or how necessary that would be. Perhaps heating it to excite the helium trapped in the oscillator and hoping it bounces out.

Could end up being a pretty easy go to law enforcement trick. Put a phone and a helium balloon in a ziplock bag, pop the balloon, pause the phone, deal with it later

<comment><USER42> We were wondering if this could be used for iPhone scams. It's a dead-simple way to apparently fatally & totally destroy in a deep & non-diagnosable way a pristine iPhone which will however (probably) reverse itself in a few weeks. It seems like this ought to be exploitable _somehow_. Something like get a new iPhone, helium it, return it for a refund, and somehow hold onto the phone... Couldn't figure out how it would actually work, though.

<comment><USER41> how about get a phone, accumulate normal life scratches for 9 months, "helium it" hard, so it lasts a while, then get apple to replace it as defective? iiiiiii dunno... there's a scam in there somewhere, were just not being creative enough!

<comment><USER42> The problem with that is that the helium doesn't do anything special. Just damage/destroy the phone some other way. You're not exploiting its special ability to look _completely_ broken but then magically repair itself in a few weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> A smaller discussion on the Reddit thread that this comes from: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334630).

</comment><comment><USER44> It was really fun to watch this story develop over the last few weeks on /r/SysAdmin. I found myself checking the OP's profile a few times a week waiting for the smallest update. It's truly mind boggling to me (a software developer with very very limited hard science experience) to think about the ramifications of invisible forces causing these kinds of wild goose chase mysteries.

</comment><comment><USER45> >the 120 liters ended up going outdoors and how much ended up inside. Helium expands about 750 times when it expands from a liquid to a gas, so that's a lot of helium (90,000 m3 of gaseous He).

the math seems couple orders off - the 120l would make less than 900m3. The 90000m3 would be on the scale of the total volume of a multi-story hospital building.

<comment><USER46> Three, in fact.

120 × 750 = 90000 liters, or 90 m^3. Very annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This article isn't great.

First, it illustrates an MRI story with a (mislabeled) picture of a CT scanner.

Then, it overestimates the volume of gas expelled by a factor of 1000.

170L X 750 = 90k L = 90m^3.

This would fill a 35m^2 (about 350 sq ft) room, maybe the size of a living room, with pure helium.

<comment><USER48> I came up with 125 m^3 here:

[http://www.airproducts.com/Products/Gases/gas- facts/conversi...](http://www.airproducts.com/Products/Gases/gas- facts/conversion-formulas/weight-and-volume-equivalents/helium.aspx)

But if you're going to criticize their math, you might want to double check your own math.

90 m^3 = 2m (height) x 6.7 m^2

(ok, 2m is a little low, 2.5m would be more comfortable.)

<comment><USER47> My math was fine, but I did get the base numbers wrong. Should have been 120L as mentioned in the article, which equates to 88.577 m^3 at 15C, which is pretty chilly. 20C is more like room temp.

But, I'm not sure your math is quite on the money either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Wow. This is good to know. As a TriMix SCUBA diver, we should keep our iPhones away from the fill station and away from us when we are venting / testing our mixes :-)

<comment><USER18> Aman! Had the exact same thought and glad this story brought it to my attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is strange and I happen to work at a facility that does a lot of open air helium mass spectrometer leak testing.

I'm and Android user so I have no skin the the game. I'll have to talk to some people at work tomorrow. A few guys are iPhone users and work in direct proximity to the helium leak testing stations or use them as well. I know a woman in the office didn't like her iPhone because of numerous problems but I never thought to press her for details.

<comment><USER51> Would the helium concentration in air actually get high enough to cause problems? As far as I understand leak testing, you don't need a lot of helium for that to work.

<comment><USER50> Not much at all but some of the knuckleheads try to speed up the process and crank the pressure until the helium probe is more of a blow gun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> That'd be an interesting way to defuse a bomb hooked up to an iPhone with a power-off failsafe

</comment><comment><USER53> Anthropomorphizes the iPhone when you think about how humans react to gaseous general anesthesia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflurane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflurane)

</comment><comment><USER54> > "My immediate thought was that the MRI must have emitted some sort of EMP, > in which case we could be in a lot of trouble."

I... don't think that's a thing that MRI machines can do. They're even shielded!

</comment><comment><USER55> > Perhaps there's a bug in iOS that causes crashes when it gets faulty data > from the gyro? But the bug impacted Apple Watches, too—and they run WatchOS.

Technically, watchOS _is_ iOS

</comment><comment><USER56> TL;DR: Apple uses MEMS clocks (while most Androids contain quarzes), which can be affected by Helium molecules even though they are sealed in the attempt to prevent that.

</comment><comment><USER57> How will I ever execute my plan to explore the eroding atmospheres of exoplanets when apple can't even be bothered to handle a little helium. Jeez...

</comment><comment><USER58> Nice discovery! Now scifi/horror movies can stop using the "I have no reception for no reason" and use helium somewhere in the plot.

</comment><comment><USER59> It was very entertaining to follow r/sysadmin's threads about this weird issue, until the guy found out the source of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER60> I think we just invented a way to get people to put away their phones during concerts, plays, and comedy shows.

</comment><comment><USER61> So what's the most effective means we've found to seal against helium penetration?

</comment><comment><USER62> So I guess IPhone owners need to stay away from children's birthday parties?

</comment><comment><USER63> I wonder how aware Apple is of this story. I'm sure engineers browsing here will have seen it, but it'll be interesting to see future iFixit teardowns of devices to see if the MEMS sensor has any different shielding or if they use a different chip entirely.

<comment><USER64> The article says that Apple's user guide mentions phones not working around helium:

Exposing iPhone to environments having high concentrations of industrial chemicals, including near evaporating liquified gasses such as helium, may damage or impair iPhone functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Reddit > ifixit > Hackernews > Buzzfeed/Engadget tomorrow?

<comment><USER40> Couple of days after Engadget it'll be on mainstream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> It's a little hard to take this article seriously when the caption grossly misidentifies a GE BrightSpeed CT scan (x-ray) with a MRI machine. My guess is the magnet was still on (perhaps incorrectly).

</comment><comment><USER67> Those MEMS device photos (micrographs) are beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER68> I think the correct spin would be to say:

Apple Devices are Helium Detection Canaries.

</comment><comment><USER69> It would be an interesting attack if you needed to disable an iPhone.

<comment><USER70> Any security hardware using this oscillator would be at risk too. I can see the Mission Impossible plot to use it to attack a security systems and IP cameras if they used those chips.

<comment><USER71> I'm not sure how far this vulnerability will ever get an attacker because most devices will probably continue to use regular quarts oscillators that aren't sensitive to this like MEMS devices. Apple probably only uses them because they're squeezing every ounce of space and their markups can stand the increased cost of the MEMS vs the quartz/ceramic oscillators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Maybe not a good idea to use MEMS avionics on a blimp or dirigible, then.

Here's the Zeppelin NT cockpit, but I can't tell what kind of gyros they may be using: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/2003-07-...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/2003-07-26_18-06-46_Germany_Baden- Württemberg_Hagnau.JPG)

</comment><comment><USER73> This is hilarious, additionally the software quality of iDevices have gone down the tube.

</comment><comment><USER74> From where do they know the guy's name and where does he work?

<comment><USER75> They probably contacted him through Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> "Hospital cooling gas caused cardiac arrest in fresh Apples."

<comment><USER77> Hospital cooling gas caused _clock arrest_ in fresh iPhones.

<comment><USER76> well, ticker is ticker ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Did iFixit just take a post from reddit and put it on their website?

Did they add anything to it, the write up was quite comprehensive. I've got a bad feeling about this.

</comment><comment><USER79> What is it about Helium that breaks the device? Is the device intended to contain a vacuum?

<comment><USER80> TL;DR: it breaks the oscillator that keeps time on the device. This breaks the clock and eventually has a cascading effect on the system.

The article is pretty straightforward and engaging; it's worth a read!

<comment><USER81> Oh wow, so the clock is unnecessarily coupled to the other systems?

<comment><USER82> Tons of events are tied to the real-time clock. For example if the interface code wants to know how fast you're dragging your finger across the screen, it divides the distance between digitizer samples by the elapsed time. Or to know if a "tap" is a "long press", it has to know how long it was. All kinds of stuff depends on that clock.

<comment><USER81> I remember the double-click (which is time-dependent) still working on my Mac Plus when the clock was stuck at midnight. It also didn't crash the OS and make the computer turn off.

<comment><USER83> Are you joking?

This is a completely different thing than the UI widget that tells you the time and may freeze for any reason UI can freeze.

<comment><USER81> I was never criticizing the fact that time-reporting apps would fail at reporting the time if the hardware clock broke; I was criticizing the fact that the whole OS goes down, while the Mac Plus's didn't in the same circumstance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> > Hydrogen and helium are notoriously hard to contain because their molecules > are so small.

You probably didn't mean "helium molecule"–or if it was, that would very odd, as helium as a molecule is very rare…

<comment><USER84> Helium is a 'noble element', check the Periodic Table and tell me how Helium gets to be part of a molecule. Unless a lot has changed since I was at school then you aren't going to get a lot of helium 'molecules'. It just doesn't work like that.

What I don't get is how these helium molecules diffuse into the iPhones so easily, an awful lot of helium must have to leak for that. Normally helium - balloon sized quantities - tends to prefer going skyward rather than hide in an iPhone.

But since that seems to not be the case it would be good to turn up at a concert where everyone is playing with their hand rectangles rather than enjoying the moment, then to release some helium to fix that for them...

<comment><USER85> > Helium is a 'noble element', check the Periodic Table and tell me how Helium > gets to be part of a molecule. Unless a lot has changed since I was at > school then you aren't going to get a lot of helium 'molecules'. It just > doesn't work like that

Yeah, well maybe they don't tell you all the details and special cases in school...

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas_compound](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas_compound)

<comment><USER84> I checked the link and now I see why you didn't post the relevant quote:

"There is some empirical and theoretical evidence for a few metastable helium compounds which may exist at very low temperatures or extreme pressures. The stable cation HeH+ was reported in 1925."

Maybe you do get these things happening inside a particularly pedantic iphone but regular chemistry suffices here, the general idea of the Periodic Table stands true, noble gasses on the right hand side don't react to instantly form co-valent bonds with the other elements. Sure, anything can happen in the side of a giant thermo-nuclear reactor but, in every day situations classical understanding works great.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When algorithms grow accustomed to your face - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/technology/when-algorithms-grow-accustomed-to-your-face.html?hpw&rref=technology&_r=0

<comment><USER2> The few years before machines reach some kind of malevolent sentience will be the best years because they'll understand us more than we'll ever understand ourselves.</comment>


Sipeed MAIX: inexpensive,  crowd-funded RISC-V module - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sipeed-maix-the-world-first-risc-v-64-ai-module#/ <comment><USER2> Two days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18448003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18448003)

</comment><comment><USER3> The CPU / SoC appears to be a 'Kendryte K210' which looks like you can simply download the SDK from github - which seems pretty impressive to me :) [https://github.com/kendryte/kendryte-freertos- sdk](https://github.com/kendryte/kendryte-freertos-sdk)</comment>


Dkron – Distributed, fault tolerant job scheduling system - <AUTHOR> http://dkron.io/

<comment><USER2> I like how you changed the name. Nice one.</comment>


Mercurial 1.1 DVCS Released - <AUTHOR> http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2008-December/022670.html You can see a full list of the new features at http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/WhatsNew. My favorites:
1. A real rebase command, rather than having to use quilt voodoo
 2. bookmarks, git-style lightweight local branches (though git users beware, though bookmarks and local branches have the same functionality, their semantics are radically different (and speaking as a Mercurial user, I prefer git's, but whatever))
 3. Much more Windows-friendly repository format (and improvements to case-folding systems in general)
 4. Vastly improved web interface
There's lots more, but having used the development version for the last several weeks, the above features are my favorites. <comment><USER2> Cool. The changelog lists lots of updates; I'd be interested to hear from those who have had more experience with Git as to whether this improves Mercurial's stance versus Git.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, disclaimer: I'm a Mercurial fan.

There are two big things git has traditionally done better than Mercurial: lightweight branching, and rebasing. Both were possible in Mercurial using mq (plus qguards, in the case of lightweight branching), but the experience was rather clumsy. I didn't mind putting up with it, since, at the time the two systems came out, Mercurial was markedly easier to use than git. But, over the last year, git closed a lot of the usability gap, while Mercurial has held almost completely still, and that's resulted in a lot of arguments that Mercurial's time had passed, and git was the way to go.

The good news is that this release fully eliminates git's first advantage, and either eliminates, eliminates and beats, or fails to address the second, depending on where you're coming from. The easy news to process: the rebase extension enables full git-style rebasing, end of story. You can do an automatic pull and rebase via `hg pull --rebase`, if that's what you want, or you can do more customized rebasing via `hg rebase`. So that's done, and, based on my use in production environments, works very well.

Now, Mercurial 1.1 introduces real lightweight branching--no mq hackery--via an extension called `bookmarks`, which ships with Mercurial. These provide identical capabilities and benefits as git's local branches. The complicated discussion we can have revolves around bookmark _semantics_. bookmarks, like git branches, are basically "floating tags"--tags that mark a head in the repo's DAG, and that move with that head as you issue additional commits. The difference comes from the fact that bookmarks very directly expose what's going on, whereas git's branch command hides what's going on behind what I personally feel is a more intuitive UI. So, the argument is: is exposing what's actually going on better, because it gives you more power; equivalent, since the functionality provided is identical; or worse, because too much implementation is exposed in interface. I personally need more time to sort out preconceived bias of what micorbranching should look like, from the bookmark extension in particular.

<comment><USER3> Ok, a question from a darcs guy who recently switched to hg:

What are the use cases for rebase and lightweight branching? I really don't understand why I should prefer rebase to simply pull + merge. Also, is lightweight branching just a performance hack, or is there more to it?

<comment><USER4> In git, a use case for rebase that I'm intimately familiar with is interoperability with SVN. You can maintain a branch that's a mirror of an SVN repository, but if you do any merging and then try to check the results into SVN the result is a train wreck. In the somewhat acid words of the git-svn manpage:

 _Running git-merge or git-pull is NOT recommended on a branch you plan to dcommit from. Subversion does not represent merges in any reasonable or useful fashion; so users using Subversion cannot see any merges you've made. Furthermore, if you merge or pull from a git branch that is a mirror of an SVN branch, dcommit may commit to the wrong branch._

The proper technique is to make a branch based on your SVN repo, make a bunch of changes on the branch (using _svn rebase_ to keep your development branch in sync with changes on the SVN master branch, and -- god help us -- diff-and- patch if you have to merge in changes from some other git branch; this is your penance for working on an SVN-hosted project), then commit the whole thing back to SVN once you have it in shape. It sucks compared to true-blue git but is still nicer than SVN, because (e.g.) you get things like...

... the other use case for rebase, _git-rebase --interactive_ , a.k.a. "take the last N commits and let me reorder, combine, and edit them however I want." I love this feature. See:

[http://blog.madism.org/index.php/2007/09/09/138-git- awsome-n...](http://blog.madism.org/index.php/2007/09/09/138-git-awsome-ness- git-rebase-interactive)

For more useful ravings about git's features:

<http://tomayko.com/writings/the-thing-about-git>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not going to try to sell you on Mercurial vs. git, mostly because I think that argument is pointless, but just so you're aware, Mercurial also supports reordering and combining patches via mq. And that's an area where I personally feel that Mercurial's method actually makes more sense than git's, though you're welcome to disagree.

[Edit: Oh, and: yes, that's a perfect example of where rebasing makes sense, and is exactly the kind of rebase operation Mercurial now fully supports, without any complicated patch wrangling.]</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deleting RSS Feed Items - <AUTHOR> http://oleb.net/blog/2015/11/rss-feed-item-deletions/ <comment><USER2> RSS Board says to use Dublin Core's dcterms:valid in their MRSS spec: [http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss](http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss)

To hide an article you expire it right away. Numerous video platforms support this tag (youtube, thePlatform, dailymotion).

[http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi- terms/](http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/)

I'm not sure why it isnt in the RSS spec, but I wonder if any CMS's still support it in the text world.

<comment><USER3> I did not know about this, thanks for telling me. I updated the article with this information.</comment></comment>


Why Apple Shareholders Should Be Cautious - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704830404575200362577226100.html

<comment><USER2> _One thing keeping Apple from lots of extra iPhone sales to business users is that Mr. Jobs, for some reason, has a thing against keyboards. There's no business reason for it. It's a silly, unforced error._

Not building products that fully appeal to "business users" isn't an "unforced error". It's a market segmentation decision.

<comment><USER3> I read it as the author implying that not going after as many markets as possible is an unforced error.

<comment><USER4> ...which would be wrong. If going after another market makes you mediocre in the market you're already winning in, you should say no. A physical keyboard adds bulk and weight to the device that make it a lot less attractive to consumers.

<comment><USER5> Would having an optional version of the iPhone with a keyboard (or an optional addon, even third party) make Apple more money? If the answer isn't no, then the author's point has some merit, even if you prefer a slimmer device without a keyboard.

Quick question: with all the third-party devices and addons that Apple permits via its proprietary iPhone/iPod/iPad connector, is there one that provides a mini physical keyboard? If not, do we know if Apple is intentionally preventing it (via API's or licensing)?

<comment><USER6> There are dozens of physical keyboard addons for the iPhone. Apple doesn't prevent any of these 3rd party addons from working. So if some business really wanted a physical keyboard for the iPhone for their employees, they could make it happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are reasons to be cautious about Apple, but not in this list. Most of the OP's concerns boil down to a perception that Apple has been 'too' successful, and it's due for a failure.

On the one hand, Apple's valuation is extremely high. On the other, their products are selling like gangbusters and the iPhone in particular has nowhere to go but up. The current emphasis on software and interfaces gives Apple a substantial advantage over the legacy players like Nokia and RIM; as the iPod showed, it's not a trivial advantage to overcome.

</comment><comment><USER8> _And [Verizon's] data traffic just jumped 20%, even without the Apple phone._

To put that in perspective, mobile data traffic on AT&T's network has increased 5000 percent over the last three years. In 2009, which presumably this article references for Verizon, AT&T was up 200%.

[http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20091118/time-to-cut- att-...](http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20091118/time-to-cut-att-some- slack-iphone-users/)

</comment><comment><USER9> There are a lot of statements I disagree with in this article. At the same time, it is true that if Apple were bought to the same ROI as Microsoft then the stock price would be less than half of what it is. Buying put options to cap your downside is not a bad idea, especially if the stock has already made you a few dimes.

</comment><comment><USER10> These reasons are pretty weak. For example:

 _#3. The Share Price_

Apple still has a P/E ratio of _only_ 22\. Meanwhile, Amazon's is 70. If Apple traded at that P/E ratio, the share price would be $940, instead of $270.

Whose investors should really be worried?

<comment><USER4> In 2006, Motorola traded at a P/E of _only_ about 12, despite huge and rapidly growing profits from its wildly successful RAZR phones. They were nearly as dominant in the cell phone market as Apple is today. Between 2003-2007, Motorola sold roughly 110 million RAZRs, compared with the 50 million iPhones that Apple has sold to date.

Then Apple came out with the iPhone, which was light years better than the RAZR. And further models of the RAZR continued to disappoint.

The Motorola stock that you bought at a P/E of 12 in 2006 has lost nearly 75% of its value today. Motorola runs at a loss now (well, technically they've turned a thin profit in recent quarters, after losing more money in 2008 than they earned in 2006). Its P/E is negative.

Beware P/E ratios. Earnings can head south _very_ quickly, particularly if they're based on one breakthrough tech product.

<comment><USER10> That's an excellent example that you seem to have been able to access quite readily - impressive, +1. And I do agree that you can't just look at P/E ratio.

But the key difference is _...based on one breakthrough tech product..._

Apple has a much more firm footing in people's digital lives - and more brand loyalty - than Motorola could have ever hoped to have.

<comment><USER4> Are they really all that dominant, though? As I see it, they have 3 major product lines: the Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPhone (perhaps the iPad will join that soon). They have massive brand loyalty _among a certain segment of the population_ , but a good number of people don't give a rats ass about them. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, but I honestly regret that purchase (I wish I'd gotten a System76 Pangolin instead). I've got a iPod Nano sitting unopened in a box, an unused gift from my employer. I couldn't live without my N1, but have never felt the need for an iPhone.

<comment><USER11> Why do you wish you went with the System76 model (I'm considering both right now)?

<comment><USER4> I found that pretty much the only applications I use on the Mac are Terminal, Macvim, Chrome, VLC, and BitTorrent, all of which are just as good or better on Linux. Plus, I like to play around with advanced programming languages and other command-line only programs, and usually the apt-get packages are a bit stabler and more problem-free than the MacPorts ones. I'm perfectly familiar with Ubuntu - I use it at work - so the usability/eye-candy benefits of a Mac don't apply to me. In fact, I found it harder to get used to and learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts, because I'm so used to Linux.

If I'm just going to use it like a Linux machine, I might as well pay half the price and get a real Linux machine.

The Mac does have some nice points. Two-finger scroll is great, as is the magnetic attachment for the power cord (I can't count the number of times I've tripped over that). The battery life is significantly better. I can get more & better games for the Mac than for Linux. But the screen on the Pangolin is better, and for half the price, I think I'd end up liking that more than all the little fit & finish on the Mac.

Plus, the Mac had a firmware bug when I bought it (thankfully been fixed since) that randomly would lock up the computer for 30 seconds at a time. Not impressed, Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but I'd say a good reason to be cautious about Apple right now is the growing discontent that they're creating amongst "alpha geeks" (<http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/AlphaGeek.html>).

I get the opinion from the swarm of recent Apple-related articles here on Hacker News that Apple-loyalty is down and that a large number of alpha geeks are, at the very least, prepped for competing devices to sway them away if they haven't left Apple already.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Right now they're paying most of the cost of each new iPhone, and under- charging for the data plans too. That's great for customers and great for Apple, and bad for the networks._

Provider-wise an influx of new iPhone customers sounds like one of those good problems to have. Word is you'll be able to get a Verizon plan on the next iPhone, Verizon doesn't seem to be shying away from it.

</comment><comment><USER13> "4. Steve Jobs's ego"

This is Apple's main asset. It doesn't belong on a list of Apple's weaknesses.

<comment><USER5> Double-edged sword.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apple fatigue? The ipod mania has lasted almost 10 years... my sister wants to upgrade her ipod nano to an ipod touch because her nano "feels" old. I have a feeling the ipod will still have a good share of the mp3 music player market for at least the next 10 years or so.

<comment><USER3> I would like to see more iPod innovation.

<comment><USER5> Phones are the direction for iPod/mp3 player innovation. Once battery life and storage size reach a certain point, there's no reason to carry a dedicated device.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure -- Apple sold as many iPod Touch models as iPhones. Considering that they still sell iPod classic, nano, and shuffle, someone at Apple probably has the data that shows that it's still necessary to sell all these other models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Cautiousness" has been the prevailing investor sentiment over the past 9 months, and it hasn't worked.

</comment><comment><USER15> All these "weaknesses" can be turned around to be strengths. Much of this is why Apple is successful.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it just me or these are all terrible points the guy made? WSJ, fire that guy!</comment>


Amazon Device Messaging Beta Now Available - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazonappstoredev.com/2012/12/amazon-device-messaging-beta-now-available.html <comment><USER2> Aren't all of these devices reachable via Google Cloud Messaging as they run Android? This seems like a narrow channel to have to support.

<comment><USER3> GCM doesn't work on any non-Google Android distro.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I manage a large student dev group? - <AUTHOR> A friend and I just launched a developers club at our university. We have way more turnout than we expected (about 50 people) and have a lot of people who are quite interested in building things. My friend and I have independently built things in small groups, but have never really managed a large club like this.The current plan is to build an app to help solve a problem in our CS department. How do we manage all these people?
There's wildly different skill levels. We have some people who have been programming since before they came out of the womb. Others have just finished their first CS 121 class.
What's the correct strategy to break up tasks and keep people engaged in a group like this? <comment><USER2> Hey Flaque, me and my team are working on something tangentially related. Would love to talk to you about it. Can you send me your email id?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, want to PM me on Twitter? [https://twitter.com/flaqueEau](https://twitter.com/flaqueEau)</comment></comment>


Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://watchesbysjx.com/2017/05/portrait-masahiro-kikuno-japanese-watchmaker.html <comment><USER2> For anyone interested in purchasing a mechanical watch, there are plenty of brands making affordable mechanical timepieces today. Hamilton, Seiko, Tissot, Swatch, Orient, and Timex are a few that come to mind for the sub-$1000 category. It's a fun hobby with a nice community of enthusiasts.

Some advice:

* If possible, wear the watch before buying it. Seeing a watch on your wrist is different from seeing photos of it.

* Avoid the "grey market" and buy from an Authorized Dealer. Grey market watches won't have the manufacturer warranty.

* Avoid replicas and fakes ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHgKMA6Bh6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHgKMA6Bh6U))

Some links:

* The Urban Gentry ([https://www.youtube.com/user/theurbangentry](https://www.youtube.com/user/theurbangentry)) is a YouTube channel run by a horology enthusiast with a positive attitude who does lots of watch reviews.

* The r/Watches subreddit ([https://www.reddit.com/r/watches/](https://www.reddit.com/r/watches/)) has lots of photos of watches contributed by the community.

* A video on how mechanical watches work: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1XBb7kJJWg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1XBb7kJJWg)

* S-Town podcast ([https://stownpodcast.org/](https://stownpodcast.org/)) is an intriguing story about a man who repaired antique clocks.

* Affordable Wrist Time ([https://www.instagram.com/affordablewristtime/?hl=en](https://www.instagram.com/affordablewristtime/?hl=en)) the tagline is "Promoting watches under $1000."

Some terminology:

* A quartz watch is usually powered by a battery. They tend to be cheaper and more accurate than mechanical watches.

* A mechanical watch is powered by a mainspring.

* An automatic watch has a semicircular rotor inside which automatically spins when the watch moves, winding the mainspring.

* Hacking is a feature that stops the second hand from moving when the crown is pulled out.

<comment><USER3> If you really want a mechanical watch, and you want to have it mean / be worth something, I'd suggest saving up for a Rolex.

Mechanical watches have (and this has been said before) the Rolex problem. On the lower end of the scale, a lot of mechanical watches will borrow design cues from Rolex (e.g., most dive watches will share similarities with the Submariner) and will fall far short of the quality of one.

On the higher end, you quickly end up at multiples of the cost of an entry- level Rolex with very questionable additional value, quality or longevity.

Rolex is really in a sweet spot in terms of value. They're virtually indestructible, tend to keep their (or even grow in) value and make a number of elegant, understated watches that are iconic.

For example, if you want a dive watch, buy a Sub (no date). While you might argue that Blancpain beat Rolex by a year for the quintessential dive watch, Rolex is the one that popularized it. You're not buying _a_ dive watch, you're buying _the_ dive watch as it has stood since the early 50s.

They're not _cheap_ , but they will undoubtedly last two generations, possibly more. Compared to the other luxury watch makers, they're downright cheap. JLC is another value-oriented brand and you're lucky to get into a watch for 2X what you'll pay for a Rolex. Patek and AP are _much_ more expensive.

The problem with the affordable brands is they cut a lot of corners with manufacturing (vs Rolex), use outsourced, less reliable movements and -- with the exception of some Seikos, have none of the cachet of Rolex.

You can go a bit higher to say an Omega, but you're already ballpark Rolex, so is it worth it?

The downside to buying a Rolex is it will probably kill your watch hobby. I used to collect watches and when I decided I did in fact like the story of Rolex, I bought one, strapped it on basically forgot about watches.

The only watches I'm interested in now are so expensive I'll probably never bother to buy one. I will get to gift my Sub to my son in another decade or so at which time I'll get to go shopping again. So that's something to look forward to, but I'll mostly likely buy another Rolex.

<comment><USER4> So funny you should recommend Rolex, because I actually know a few people who own them(and they all bought them brand new) and the prevailing opinion is that they are absolute crap at actually being a watch - they just drift a lot in short amount of time - one of my friends says his is can be as much as 10 minutes out every month(!!!!!) and that's a 5k watch!!!

I'm personally saving up for an Omega, you can get a timeless design for 2-3k, and those watches are truly indestructible and actually keep time accurately.

<comment><USER5> Um, what? Rolex is known for having the best accuracy and reliability in the mechanical watch market. 20 seconds per day is way out of spec, your friend needs to get it serviced. Omega is sometimes okay, but you still have to avoid certain movements, even on new models. Edit: But you're right that Omega is often a better deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In traditional Japan the custom was each day had 12 hours of daylight and 12 of night time so to accommodate this the length of hours shifted day by day ... Masahiro was inspired by an ancient clock which implemented this idea such that he decided to craft by hand a watch to perform this as well ... incredible master and some impressive video documentary taboot

<comment><USER7> The time system was one of the real interesting things from the documentary to me. This Seiko page explains the time system well: [https://museum.seiko.co.jp/en/knowledge/wadokei/huteijihou/](https://museum.seiko.co.jp/en/knowledge/wadokei/huteijihou/)

12 hour day (what is 24 hours in modern time). Daytime is always 6 hours and night time is always 6 hours. The absolute length of the hours changes with the seasons.

<comment><USER8> There's an android app for it even: [https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aragaer.jtt/](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aragaer.jtt/)

I just started using it recently and I really like it. My mood is very much affected by exposure to daylight and it really helps to plan my day around the sun, rather than arbitrary numbers on a clock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This guy is obviously an adherent of George Daniels. His story is fascinating. He produced likely one of the only significant inventions in mechanical watches in the last century, the coaxial escapement. The book shown in the OP is wonderful and here's a documentary:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nsh8llV5dE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nsh8llV5dE)

Daniels' apprentice and now watchmaker Roger W. Smith has carried on making watches with his escapement and like Kikuno-San makes all of the components by hand and in-house.

<comment><USER9> It's probably worth clarifying why it's obvious that he was an adherent of George Daniels. In his book, and in every interview I've seen of him, he speaks at length about the value of a watch maker being able to make every component in a watch. Listening to him talk about how he learned every aspect of the trade in his is fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found a documentary[1] on Masahiro a while back and it was mesmerizing to watch him work.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTiPNqeMS8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTiPNqeMS8E)

</comment><comment><USER11> Previously ( June 2017, 106 comments )

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14610110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14610110)

</comment><comment><USER12> The "old school milling machine" they mention is actually a pantograph milling machine.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph#Milling_machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph#Milling_machines)

<comment><USER13> Which is an 'old school milling machine'. Just as a Turret Mill with Rotary Table to cut curves is an 'Old School' milling machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't help but admire people who create incredible intricate pieces of mechanical art hy hand. Not ever in my life could I hope to replicate even a crude, barely functional version of such a device. While I'm not a watch geek, the process and methodology behind creating these time-pieces is endlessly fascinating to me. I'd totally love to watch a documentary of someone doing similar work!

<comment><USER15> I don't know where you're located, but you may enjoy the Horological Society of New York's traveling education program[1] if they are going to be near you.

(I'm not affiliated with them, but I've enjoyed a few of their classes)

[1] [http://hs-ny.org/traveling-education/](http://hs-ny.org/traveling- education/)

<comment><USER5> San Diego next month! Thanks for posting this, I might check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow... some bad ass watches he had made.

</comment><comment><USER17> Let me voice my negative opinion: To me it looks worthy of a hobby, but to praise this as something exceptional it's kind of overstretch.

The time required is very long to make the pieces by hand, but I feel any sharp person could do it. Nothing groundbreaking.

So I don't understand people that find this fascinating, inspirational. Just buy a usual watch, and it will have the same pieces.

It's cool that he makes new designs, however make a good market out of that and the chinese will do it too, at better prices.

<comment><USER18> If you buy such a watch, you also buy a story. A single person producing a decently complicated watch from scratch is a pretty good story to tell. I image there are enough people in the world with the kind of disposable income required to buy such a watch, so he will have a pretty good business regardless of Chinese copycats.

<comment><USER17> Well I am not sure. It's a good story to tell if the person is someone important in the community that has for example written important books or invented something that is useful.

If it's just worker-bee man-hours I guess it would be better value-for-money to buy a seiko and tell the story of the factory and how it's made using such complicated processes and optimizations (not sure assumption about seiko factory using complicated processes is right).

<comment><USER19> _not sure assumption about seiko factory using complicated processes is right_

Depends on the Seiko. Seiko makes and has made a large number of complicated and historically interesting watches and movements with a story, but your average Seiko won't have that.

If you want a cheap mechanical watch that's a historical 'first' and has an interesting watchmaking story to tell in terms of processes and optimization, get a Swatch Sistem51. It's the first automatic movement that is simple enough and has few enough parts to be mass produced entirely by robot. Of course if that's a 'good' story to tell or not is very much up for debate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love this art of Patience of the Japanese. They love to spend a life time i to making a tiny wood doll or some little flower arrange...

I wonder its because is an Island and one gets inside himself or one just gets bored...

I am a fan of making bamboo and paper little planes , just to thorw them and destroy on the beach...

I found that using Smoking Paper is a good material haha

What I like is the making the fine bamboos longarinas and skeleton of the models. I like boats of bamboo too.</comment>


Ask HN: Startup vs. big company (equity at stake) - <AUTHOR> Hi HN
I was the first employee at a tech startup in SV. I developed and lead many critical projects in the company, and my current title is principal architect (I'm 32 years old). The company grew a lot (100 people) and it's in a healthy growing state. The upper management wants to keep growing sales until it makes sense to sell the ship, and this will still take probably 4-5 years (sales right now are ~12M$/y and I think the plan is to iterate towards 50-100M$/y). In terms of financing, we are at series C.
My current compensation numbers are:
- Base salary: 230k$
- Stock: fully vested and exercised my 4 year stock option grant, and after dilutions I have about 0.7% of the company in common stocks
The problem is: I'm bored out of my mind and I want to explore something different. So, I interviewed for a couple Google-like companies and they offered me this:
- Title: Software Engineer
- Base salary: 190k$
- Performance bonus: 15% a year
- Signon bonus: 50k$
- RSU package: 150k$/y (600k$ grant over 4 years)
I then told my boss in all honesty that I wanted to leave, and do so in good terms, and after a few days he came back to me saying the company can put on the table another 4 year grant for the same number of stock options I received initially, so that would mean another 0.7% over the next 4 years.
However, the company valuation is now pretty high, so I wouldn't be able to buy those options when they vest and I'd have to stay here until the very final end (potentially 4+ years).
I am a very financially oriented person, so, does it make sense to diversify at Google at this point, or throwing away this additional 0.7% is irresponsible considering the situation? If the company reaches those target sales an exit might as well be in the 300-600M$ range, so you can do the math for that 0.7%...
However, I am afraid that with those "golden handcuffs" I'd just end up burning out in these next 4 years out of boredom.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> Without considering the time value of money, the $50,000 signing bonus is about the same as 0.7% of a $7,2 million dollar exit for the current company. An exit where 0.7% returns $600k is about $86 million. With 1.4% vested from both grants, the exit would need to be at about $43 million to equal the $600k. Note that those exit numbers do not consider preferred stock which may take some, most or all of the exit payment prior to a payout to holders of common stock. In other words, 0.7% of the common stock does not equate to 0.7% of the value of an exit. Preferred stock gets preference. It is almost certain that is the case for a company at series C. Looking at the cap table is the only way to come up with an idea of what the payout might be at exit.

A second consideration is liquidity. Once vested, how easy is it to sell the stock of the current company versus the big company. It is easy to sell vested Apple stock. It is hard to sell vested Uber stock and things tend to be worse from there.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> You're in a great position either way. Many people could only dream of picking between such options.

Obviously maintaining your interest level though is crucial. Could you catch up with your boss and say something like "You have a persuasive argument, but I'm really worried about getting bored. Is there something we can do that might address that?"

Realistically, with what they're spending, keeping you interested might be small-change for them. It could be something like 10-20% time to tinker on something tangentially useful to the company, or periodic breaks to get away and clear your head , or something novel at your desk.

Their offer suggests they value you and they might rather keep someone they value with 80% regular output than re-hire and get someone unproductive, with no knowledge of their systems, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking about this. However, how unreasonable it really is to stay at a tech company for less than 8+ years? All my acquaintances in Silicon Valley, especially the most talented ones, never had a gig that lasted more than 2-3 years. Things always "happened" to them. Putting all my eggs in this basket for such a long time makes me a bit uncomfortable. By moving to Google-like, I would shake things a little bit more for my career and possibly chase some luck.

<comment><USER3> If there's a reasonable chance that you can cash-out in four years, I'd gamble on that. Then do absolutely anything you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is getting more off topic, but what made you confident in the startup that you were joining? You said you were the first employee, so there's a high amount of unknown variables at that company's stage.

The median "startup scene" outcome for a typical person is to be 30 with 5 short-term jobs, zero net worth, and wondering if it's too late to get into a real stable career. Picking a startup that will "take off" and earns high valuation sounds like a time-costly numbers game at this point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dumb luck and sheer stupidity, I joined because the idea was cool, the founders were friends and I wasn't aware at that time how much big companies pay. It was my first startup experience, was working in a slow enterprise environment before and it seemed like a fresh breath of air.

I would never, ever, do it again unless I was a cofounder, in which case the stake would make it more worthwhile. I would have looked at Google to begin with.

But now that I got "lucky" (and I put it in quote because it's all on paper, all it takes is a little bump in the road and my equity gets washed away by unfavorable dilution terms, especially if I leave), I am in this conundrum of leaving vs staying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you doing it for the money, or happiness. That's what will dictate the right answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am honestly 50/50 on this. I don't want to live a miserable life, but if by "getting bored" for 4 years I can gain financial freedom by a huge margin, it's something worth considering (and that's what I'm struggling with).

<comment><USER6> How in the world could someone who makes $200K+ live a miserable life?

What's the likelihood for the current startup to exit at $86 million valuation in 4 years? (based on brudgers' calculation. I like his logic!)

Also, I would have to agree with you from my own experience as well, I wouldn't do it again unless as a cofounder.</comment></comment></comment>


Ruby on Rails Does Not Equal Its Core Team - <AUTHOR> http://luigimontanez.com/2009/ruby-on-rails-its-core-team

<comment><USER2> When I was younger, around high school, I thought leadership wasn't very important. I thought things like football coaches mostly acted as a drill sergeant, and what really mattered was the individuals on the team and whether they pulled together and made it happen.

I have since learned that this is unmitigated bullshit. The team's performance is bounded at the top by the raw talent of the team, but the coach is the primary factor determining how much that talent actually manifests. A leader sets the tone for the community, no matter what the community is, but most especially in voluntary communities.

Those who like the leaders stay, those who don't leave. Over time, the community becomes a reflection of the leader. Not a direct reflection in all cases, as some leaders can build diverse communities, as the Ruby leaders indeed have, but nevertheless, over time the community is largely determined by its leaders.

Leadership matters, and the damage done by the leadership here is quite significant, and no amount of protest by the ones led can really change this. (And remember the damage here was the reaction, not the initial problem; one guy can make a bad choice and we'd have all pretty much moved on; the choice to double-down was the bit that is the real problem.)

If you are seriously concerned by this, I would suggest the path of least community effort is for some of those names to step up and become the leaders. Open source leadership is quite fungible. The path of least individual effort is to go join the Python or Perl communities. Because yes, leadership _does_ in fact set the tone for the entire community, and if the community doesn't like that, it's time to change leaders, or change communities.

<comment><USER3> Leadership is important, but how a leader derives his power differs greatly by context. In the case of a football coach, it's basically positional power - you "take it or leave it", because as a subordinate, you can't change it. The military, corporations, and other forms of hierarchical organizations operate this way.

As you alluded to, open source leadership is derived by a different sort of power - it's earned. Leaders rise to the top by the respect they earn. In this context, who the top leader is varies, and there's not a clear cut designation of "leadership". What usually tends to happen is that leaders in this "open" context will try to switch to a "positional" context (eg, by issuing a decree that designates titles). Fortunately, we don't see much of that in the open source world and the Rails leadership has shown tremendous vision by focusing on what matters to Rails developers: code. If you take a quick glance across the Rails landscape, the "leaders" are there because of technical excellence; nothing else. DHH will always have a special place in the Rails landscape as the originator, but the true technical leadership has been people like Yehuda Katz, Jeremy Kemper, Josh Peek, etc. (others mentioned in the article).

The other wonderful thing about Rails is that it's based on Ruby, and Ruby is anchored by some wise old men whose leadership is second to none.

Despite some ugliness here and there, I still feel the Ruby and Rails communities are wonderful communities to participate in and its leadership is in good hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it is fair to say that Ruby on Rails is _more than_ its core team, but to say they are not equal can be misconstrued to suggest that the Rails culture is independent of the core team. The core team exercises a strong influence over the technical direction and the culture of Rails notwithstanding the fine contributions from such great folks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting that HN doesn't allow for exclamations(!) in the submission titles. Must be to prevent "OMG So Cool!!!1" posts...

<comment><USER5> OMG So Cool11111</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I have this domain codingtips.dev but I don't know what to do with it - <AUTHOR> I have a few ideas but I don't know if any of them is any good, such as a blog to post coding tips, or a coding book store, or a platform to link beginner developers with professionals to help them. <comment><USER2> Also the other meaning for tip... an app to "tip" to developers with money?

</comment><comment><USER3> What about an open board with title and content where devs can share a 260 chars code sample, anonymously with a captcha to prevent bots.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't like the concept of an open board that much, not a lot of good information will be posted, and not a lot of options to monetize it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hugo Blog!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hugo Blog?

<comment><USER5> I guess they meant a blog built with Hugo [https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)</comment></comment></comment>


As Bitcoin Bubble Loses Air, Frauds and Flaws Rise to Surface - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/technology/virtual-currency-regulation.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront <comment><USER2> Surely a lot of frauds but where are the flaws?

Instead we have:

\- Open source flexibility: Hundreds of competing coins seeking to optimize upon an original design

\- A decentralized payment system: Beyond the reach of currency-manipulating state actors

\- Programmable money: The key ingredient for trustless and automated next-gen services and products

\- Working as designed: 9 years strong

\- And soon: Scalability to global volumes

[https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/959973688035631105](https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/959973688035631105)

<comment><USER3> > Working as designed: 9 years strong

and

> And soon: Scalability to global volumes

Wait, what? It's working as designed but can't scale to the "global volumes"? Isn't that a bug?

<comment><USER4> It was never designed to scale that large. The theoretical limits to transactions were known at creation time it wasn't much of a surprise. Nobody expects to solve every problem on a 1.0 release.

<comment><USER3> You are incorrect. The best kind of incorrect: factually.

Satoshi said otherwise.

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149668.msg1596879#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149668.msg1596879#msg1596879)

<comment><USER5> slededit is not wrong: the original code _did_ have a block size limit which limits tx per second. It required an update ("hard fork") to actually change this "feature". However, there was disagreement when the time for the fork came, which is why you now have Bitcoin Cash, which _does_ support far more tx per sec and cheaper tx fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As much as I don't buy into the full craze of crypto myself, you have to read this article with a grain of salt.

8 out of the 10 articles he's published recently are about crypto and most in a very negative way.

And this article is misdirected.

> Hackers draining funds from online exchanges. Ponzi schemes. Government > regulators unable to keep up with the rise of so-called cryptocurrencies. > Signs of trouble have appeared at nearly every level of the industry, from > the biggest exchanges to the news sites and chat rooms where the investment > frenzy has been discussed.

If you've been following the recent developments, most of the downfall can be attributed to Chinese money exiting the market as their government is flat out banning owning cryptocurrencies and trading them, in and out of China (...for now... give it a few years and they might flipflop).

The prices shrugged off the bitconnect joke that it was, the other bad ICOs since they don't apply, and the Japanese NEM wallet hack (which was mostly due to the exchange being reckless).

So yes, cryptocurrencies are a dodgy world, full of scam, odd things and you can paint it red all day every day. But you'd be silly to not look at it, the blockchain approach can have very good applications and there is a lot of interesting work and partnership forming, sometimes in unexpected ways.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good and hopefully they'll be cleaned out so we can have decent investments in quality cryptocurrency startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Smash cut to a barren wasteland with no one and nothing left. Maybe cryptocurrency has a bright future, but I'm skeptical that any of the extent ones fit that bill. PoW is obscene, Lightning impractical, and it may just be that the whole thing is fatally flawed.

<comment><USER2> How is Lightning impractical? I encourage you to try it out on testnet right now, it works great. It also solves your PoW concerns.

<comment><AUTHOR> ...By requiring you to keep your computer up 24/7, no?

<comment><USER8> Not really true. You can offload monitoring blockchain to "watchers" (privately), and if you have a pay-only wallet you don't have to watch for anything anyway.

On top of that LN is very practical for heaviest blockchain users, that do run full node 24/7 anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like a semantic distinction; a computer working for you has to watch the network 24/7\. Besides, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Hiring a watcher sounds tricky if you want it to be really trustless, it sounds cumbersome, and frankly I can't find any good info on how it works.

<comment><USER8> AFAIK it can be done anonymously, for a tiny price and a bit bigger bounty (if found). Since the state of the channel is private, watcher has no information about anything anyway. On top of it - it's only a secondary defense. Your wallet still can do the monitoring by themselves and other party can't know that you dissapeared from the internet and won't appear in next 24 hours in advance. Other party risks reputation and their own funds if they get caught by you or your watcher(s). Because of that attacks like that are very infeasible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "When the tide goes out you see who is swimming naked" \- Warren Buffet

<comment><USER10> So true.

I worked in Asia in the 90s, and it was remarkable the frauds, scams, and unsustainable loans that would surface when the local stock or real estate markets dropped sharply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't worry keep HODLing! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg2oukQZ6dg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg2oukQZ6dg)

</comment><comment><USER12> as if above never happens to traditional markets. FYI --2008 where the financial markets almost collapsed and has destroyed lives of millions of individuals.</comment>


A British couple who took on Google and cost it £2.1B - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/fine-google-competition-eu-shivaun-adam-raff <comment><USER2> Here is the money quote for myself: 'To the Raffs, this is Google's real crime: its inaccessibility and unwillingness to respond, even to legitimate complaints. "We've never said that the fault was being penalised," says Adam. "Collateral damage in complex algorithms is inevitable. The fault was not having a procedure by which we could appeal and get timely relief." '

I've been dealing with exactly this myself recently. I had an old gmail hacked and stolen. Well the idiot didnt remove my main acct as the forwading address, so I began receiving emails for everything from his uber account to his facebook account.

No matter what answers I gave google about account creation, old passwords, no matter that I provided whatever they asked, that they sent a verification code that didn't even work, NOTHING restored my access. I even still have the forwarded emails! The emails themselves show how this kid took MY email.

Yet there is no way to get ahold of google other than their product forums, posting and praying to not get a cheap canned response (which is what happened to me).

It seems these companies, in trying to remove themselves from their users by as many degrees of separation as possible are doing this to themselves. If they simply interacted with their users and gave even the most rudimentary of ways to speak with someone (livechat, helpdesk, whatever) most of their problems would be handled at the first contact, instead of becoming huge issues which can possibly affect many people (try searching for 'gmail verification code wont work' or 'cant recover hacked gmail' it will be days of fun reading).

I was infuriated over simply losing an old worthless email to their shenanigans, I can't imagine seeing the startup I created stomped underfoot by a megacorp like an ant.

I used to LOVE google back in the early gmail/android days. They were the good guys. What happened?

<comment><USER3> I'd ask that we consider a different spectrum than good and bad, but naive and abused.

Look at LL Bean and their cancellation of their lifetime warranty [1]. That linked article talks about abuse of the warranty, but I'm fairly sure people were trolling through ebay + thrift shops and buying items to return and resell as new. That's abuse and they had to make changes to it.

Or consider how widely reviled PayPal is for how they "take" their customer's money and lock it up. I had a friend who worked there that described it as "a fraud detection company that occasionally takes payments". You can't even imagine the ingenious lengths people go to commit fraud and rip PayPal and other people off. So they have by necessity become this draconian organization.

When Google/Gmail was small it was easier, they were more naive. But now? I imagine every scammer in the world is trying to corrupt and steal gmail accounts as a stepping stone to greater fraud - and some significant portion are trying to do so by claiming that someone else's account was hacked and that ney need special access.

I don't think there's any easy answers to these thorny problems but forcing it into a false good/bad dichotomy isn't helping.

1 - [https://slate.com/business/2018/02/l-l-bean-has-ended- unlimi...](https://slate.com/business/2018/02/l-l-bean-has-ended-unlimited- returns-and-i-am-fairly-certain-its-my-fault.html)

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, but I think GP has a good first step:

 _gave even the most rudimentary of ways to speak with someone (livechat, helpdesk, whatever)_

Otherwise, we are just guessing. Some will give them the benefit of the doubt. Some will assume the worst. The truth is simply somewhere in between.

The opposite of the LL Bean anecdote is a company that gave a lifetime warranty and made a name for itself in the nautical outerwear industry. People bought in part because of the warranty. After a few years they started having to make good on the warranty- not because of fraud, but because out wear doesn't last forever.

<comment><USER5> That's reasonable, but also consider that the Apple iCloud "hacking" from a few years back was largely social engineering Apple's tech support into providing them with enough information to get access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think I'm personally glad about this verdict, but it worries me nonetheless, because it justifies thinking like this:

        "For the Raffs, this remains the burning issue, which
        the technicalities of auctions and algorithms all too
        often obscure. They see it simply: Google, or any other
        search engine, should present only impartial results
        that do not benefit it financially. It sounds
        idealistic, but why should it? "After all," says
        Shivaun, "this is what people want, and what they
        believe Google still delivers."

Maybe Google _should_ act that way, and certainly the Raffs are right that people _want_ that --- but is it something that should be enforced legally? I could see saying that Google has too many opportunities to benefit anti- competitively from its search dominance, and that it should be split up to prevent that, but not that it should be forced to supply results in the way "people want", counter to its financial interests.

<comment><USER7> > forced to supply results in the way "people want", counter to its financial > interests.

I get my water from a private company. Should they be forced to supply me with clean drinking water, counter to it's financial interests? Presumably it would be cheaper to just pump it out of the river into our homes?

And that is the problem, Google has risen to utility level dominance, and utility level importance. Millions of peoples jobs rely on search and search results, time for regulation.

<comment><USER8> Water companies are usually granted a legal monopoly to serve an area because it would be a logistical nightmare to have a bunch of companies all trying to install and service their own pipes. In exchange, they're required to serve everyone in the area and to charge regulated rates.

If another water company wanted to come in and install pipes to your house, they would be prohibited from doing so.

Other search engines aren't prohibited from competing with Google -- in fact many countries actively encourage and fund local competitors -- so I don't see how this analogy makes sense.

<comment><USER9> Some monopolies are granted, some occur naturally. Example of the likes of Microsoft Bing shows that Google monopoly is even stronger than if it was written into law.

Maybe monopolies should have their products strictly regulated regardless of how they came to be monopolies?

Other way to deal with monopolies is just force them to split up into few companies, but I don't think that users would benefit much from having 10 different search engines to choose from same way they don't need their browser to have 10 different homepages. They need just one, but the one that provides results that they need. Same way like they need one water provider that provides the water of quality that they need.

If you allow Google just to show results from whoever pays the most, that only shows that they are sitting on the bridge and let pass through only the ones that pay the most, no matter how much value their passing brings to everybody else. At some point nobody cares if they built this bridge or not. Their bridge stands on and occupies optimal spot for a bridge so people on both sides of the bridge should and have every right to fight for such agreement that benefits them most, not just the bridge owner/constructor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even though the case raises a good point about googles power the problem is foundem was a very low quality ecommerce intermediary that objectively added no value to the searcher.

Foundem also was set up by people with very rich friends in British society :-)

<comment><USER11> After looking at Foundem I can see why this should not be displayed to searchers. I feel like I'm back in the early days of the web!

And only the rich get richer in these cases. ;)

<comment><USER12> it may be a bit unfair to judge them by looking at today's website, which is not in service anymore, even if they have a home page.

"Today, Foundem's website is the digital equivalent of a boarded-up house"

Their business is dead, because they were artificially demoted to 4th page in search when Google Product Search was created.

<comment><USER10> Yes but its a poor quality comparison site that added no value I know sites also hit by penguin that where far more worthy.

Kellys Directory for example which had its roots in a company founded in the 1700's

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Google's ranking algorithms are notoriously secretive due to attempts to resist SEO spamming, but the flipside is that pages can just disappear from its (publicly available) index despite still containing content relevant to your search:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840)

<comment><USER14> Google should be split up. It's wrong to have a company that controls search, one of the major browsers, and one of the two major operating systems for phones.

And then of course it should be made to pay tax where the search results are shown. An ad shown in the EU should be taxed with an indirect EU tax on the ad (30 percent of what is paid for the ad plus an EU VAT). That would once for all make the large advertising companies such as Facebook and Google pay tax in Europe. Every ad should include an ID number with information on the money paid on the ad, who paid it and to whom. Then, consumers and EU tax authorities could easily check if tax had been paid on the ad and who paid what for the ad.

<comment><USER15> Taxation philosophy aside, I really like the idea of traceable ads in general. There are so many intentionally tangled and obscured intermediate steps between the ad buyer and the ad viewer, a transparent record would benefit the honest parties and the consumer. Prosecuting, or at least deterring, malware served over sketchy ad networks comes immediately to mind.

Is there ever a case where untraceability is a good thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sentence jumped out at me: "The idea came to Adam one day as he smoked a Silk Cut outside his office"

Is this how advertisers are getting around ad blockers these days? Or just writing style...

<comment><USER17> Or the journalist is like Bukowski and feels the need to describe all the cigarette brands used by the characters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> God I love the EU

<comment><USER19> it's easy to punish a foreign company, the litmus test should be how it deals with a domestic company behaving badly, e.g. VW

it's not looking good thus far

<comment><USER20> The VW case is complicated further because the German government has a pretty big stake in them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > When Adam and Shivaun Raff's company was destroyed by Google, they didn't > get mad, they got even.

They destroyed Google?

<comment><USER22> Well, I read "get even" in this case meaning that they recouped the financial losses that Google's actions cost their business (plus legal costs on top of that). In effect, they evened out their losses. Perhaps.

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately not; not yet at least. In the article it mentions that their civil case against Google is dependent on this verdict, and due to Google's pending appeal may not be resolved for several years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hmm interesting, I know that am going to get downvoted but what I want to find out is how much it cost them and if going against someone on a European court level can be achieved by someone without money.

What I mean is that those 2 people going against Google and winning, must have cost so much money to achieve, that I don't believe its possible for someone with a tiny business or someone with no money to do so.

I am intrigued to learn if justice is a privilege of the few, or everyone can have justice.

In my specific case, I had my government which is within the European Union, straight out stealing land from my family. We went to the country's court, we went to a 2nd court and then a final 3rd. The justice system within my country failed us so we looked at how we could engage in a higher level e.g EU court. The fees for that were so great and the process seemed so unwelcome that we can just not afford to receive justice. So thats why am asking, I'd prefer to see an article that speak actual numbers and how much money foundem needed to provide to lawyers etc and how didn't they go bankrupt at the same time.

<comment><USER25> Is "I know that I'm going to get downvoted" the new opening argument? Forestalling criticism does usually work in discussions, but it should not be necessary here. If you get downvoted, so be it. You are not your HN karma. (I know I'm gonna be downvoted for this ;) )

<comment><USER26> Is fear of being downvoted a new kind of self-censorship?

<comment><USER27> It's not new. The whole point of a downvoting facility is to encourage site users to conform their posts to what other users want to read. It isn't 100% effective, since users may decide that they'd rather post what they want, downvotes be damned. It probably isn't meant to be 100% effective. Users who do this all the time will get banned, but more occasional anti-censorship posters will broaden the scope of acceptable discourse, often in beneficial directions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google also lost a similar action in Italy. Interesting how the punishment is always a fine paid to the government.

But the real problem is -- Google has to be broken up. Criminals that get slaps just figure it in to the cost of business. It's meaningless. Ad prices just went up a little, that's all.

</comment><comment><USER29> Planet Money episode on this: [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/04/541643346/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/04/541643346/episode-787-google- is-big-is-that-bad)

</comment><comment><USER30> > From their tidy, white-brick home in the suburban village of Crowthorne, > Berkshire, the Raffs pursued the most valuable company in the world all the > way to Brussels and the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, DC – and > won.

Since when was Google the most valuable company in the world?

</comment><comment><USER31> Honest question: so if I want to start a niche/vertical search engine, is it safe to say that I'm "safe" now? As in: I don't need to worry I'd be demoted by Google due to unoriginal content (=extracted from original ecommerce)?

</comment><comment><USER32> 3 items worth mentioning that are relevant to this case:

1) Google is in the process of appealing this decision and could very well end up winning (or having the fine significantly reduced) in the end.

2) At least to some degree, decisions like this are likely protectionism aimed at US companies.

        "[Americans] have owned the Internet. Our companies have created it,
        expanded it, perfected it in ways that [European companies] can't
        compete," Obama said in an interview with Recode in 2015. "And
        oftentimes what is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues
        sometimes is just designed to carve out some of their commercial
        interests."

3) When people talk about how free speech has greater protections in the US than in the EU, this is one of the things they are talking about.

<comment><USER9> Do Americans have 3rd party product comparison websites, or do they just order everything from amazon and are happy about it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder why regulators doesn't pay Google when companies make a profit from being indexed by Google, and only fines Google when companies lose profit from being deindex.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thank you 'British couple'! If I had it my way, Google would be split up (or banned as in China).

</comment><comment><USER35> At this point in time, I am honestly surprised at the lack of balance in this conversation. While I'm writing this, the entire discussion is a bunch of pile-on for Google without any consideration of the actual facts in this case.

Today is a sad day for the internet.

In phone book terms, the business model of this couple was roughly equivalent to plastering stickers with their phone number over all the other entries in the phone book. Any end user wishing to get the information they wanted had to go through an unnecessary step. Any destination, had to fight to prevent their content from being overrun.

I am both a European and an American, and the fact of the matter is that the European Commission is attempting to stifle American business. This ruling does not protect users, and does not protect valid businesses, it protects spammers.

Instead of trying to legislate our way into competitiveness, I would like to see our countries focus on actually attempting to stimulate tech businesses, because attempts like these just hurt technology companies overall. Sure, it hurts American companies more than Europeans, but they're also in a better position to shoulder the burden. This makes it tougher for smaller European tech shops.</comment>