Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37435425 <comment><USER2> I'm glad they're putting money into medical research, but I kinda roll my eyes when people make big claims about curing X, especially when X is something incredibly broad like "cancer" or in this case, "all diseases." AI/ML has barely scratched the surface of its potential in medicine, however, I find it naive to think that you can throw AI/ML at any random disease and always get a cure. Even after a century. Will we have a cure for trisomy 21? For antisocial personality disorder? For obesity and addiction? These things are far more complicated than just creating the right drug.

But as much as I'm rolling my eyes at their blanket statement, the spirit of "yes we can!" does way more for science and progress than naysay of critics.

<comment><USER3> "yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.

<comment><USER4> Only by turning almost 10% _OF AN ENTIRE COUNTRY_ into doing nothing but producing an atomic bomb.

That's not 2 billion dollars, that's 2 _TRILLION_ dollars.

So, basically, redirecting the US military budget. I approve.

<comment><USER5> Source? Estimates I see for the Manhattan Project from a quick google range from .25% to .41% of GDP.

[0] [https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf](https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf)

[1] [http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan- proj...](http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-project-take- number.html)

[2] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf)

<comment><USER6> He's likely thinking of the urban myth that over 10% of the US's power generation was used for the Manhattan Project [1] and confusing it with the cost of the project, for which estimates vary but is around $2 billion total (1945 GDP was $2 trillion).

[1] [http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR11/Session/H13.4](http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR11/Session/H13.4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Probably not feasible without some genetic re-engineering to design out vulnerabilities to common diseases. That's how aging will probably be solved. There's a big debug time problem, though. It takes about two generations to be sure you got it right. We'll probably have very long lived mice decades before it works for humans. (Many cancers in mice can be cured now. This doesn't translate to humans.)

Then there will be species conflicts. Merck people won't be able to mate with Novartis people because they'll be too different genetically.

<comment><USER8> > Then there will be species conflicts. Merck people won't be able to mate > with Novartis people because they'll be too different genetically.

I don't think this will be a problem if you get to the point of genetically engineering people. You just can't mate the old fashioned way, but if anything that's a benefit- free birth control. IVF + genetic modification of the egg cell, assuming your technology is that advanced, should be the easy solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is difficult to say without sounding snarky, but will 'all disease' include the mental disorders (both discovered and undiscovered) that Facebook inflicts upon its users? Depression from seeing other people's perfect lives, obsessive compulsive dopamine-fueled update checking to maximize Zuck's ad revenue etc.

I'm glad he's spending his money this way but how about the way he makes it. Facebook is not a particularly benign product and when you throw in the rising privacy, censorship, and "Free Basics" concerns, I would argue it's creeping towards having a net negative impact on the world.

I would have much more respect for Zuckerberg if he took a profit hit to fix his product and how his company interacts with the world. It's worth noting that Bill stepped away from Microsoft before he got deeply into philanthropy, in part to avoid conflict of interest. He knew he had a checkered past and he made a break with it. Zuck has a checkered present. Curing diseases in the developing world while pushing your product on it at the same time is somewhat morally ambiguous in my view.

<comment><USER10> You're seriously equating looking at someone's photos with catching HIV, Ebola or developing cancer? Pathetic.

<comment><USER9> No, I'm not.

Do you always assume that people who have differing opinions from yours must be heartless monsters and insult them? That must be a serious impediment to constructive discussion.

To put my point succinctly Zuckerberg hasn't demonstrated a great deal of social responsibility in running his business. There are problems much closer to his influence (literally caused by his product) which he doesn't even discuss in public, let alone try to solve. So when he announces he and his wife are going to effectively end the greatest cause of human suffering, some skepticism about his motives is totally legitimate. For instance, what strings will be attached to the receipt of this money?

<comment><USER10> The guy's running a business. He has a responsibility to his shareholders to make it as valuable as he can. Sticky apps/web sites lead to more ad impressions and higher prices. His business does __not __give people cancer or HIV.

You may find life more rewarding to assume people are good and try to see the best in people. As Dale Carnegie says in How to Win Friends and Influence People, if you assume the best in people and encourage them, they're more likely to want to live up to that image.

<comment><USER11> and yet you do the exact opposite - you label the guy pathetic simply because he has a viewpoint that is different to yours.

<comment><USER10> The opinion, not the OP. I'm sure he/she is a fine individual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pharmacology is an interesting example where better technology and scientific understanding have made things worse than earlier, low-tech methods ("inject plant extracts into animals and see what happens").

The number of new drugs discovered per dollar of research has been dropping since 1960, and obvious explanations (like "the easy ones have already been found") turn out not to explain the phenomenon. [[http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1....](http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1.html)]

This is something we should try to understand better, since it goes against the intuition that technology is an unalloyed good in scientific research.

I applaud the money they're spending, but the level of technophilia in the announcement gives me pause.

<comment><USER13> I can't speak for the past, but I think the big deal for the testing of the future will be shifting from "forty percent of the test subjects responded positively to the drug; none of the side effects were that bad" to "80% of test subjects carrying thought-to-be-marginally-relevant gene Y showed positive responses to the drug but none carrying gene Yvariant; those also carrying not-suspected-of-be-relevant gene X exhibited much stronger side effects"

That should make initial testing a _lot_ more expensive, but in the long run launches of new drugs less risky.

<comment><USER14> I've been thinking along these lines recently; we currently design treatment plans using statistical methods, i.e. averaging effects across 'representative populations'. But imagine if you took your car to the garage and they said "90% of cars showing this symptom respond well to this treatment".

When we truly understand how these biological systems work (which could be more than 100 years from now) we'll be able to measure what is different from the individual's baseline, rather than extrapolating based population averages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> All disease with $3bn? [https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we- do/budget](https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget)

<comment><USER16> 3bn is, one assumed, being used as leverage rather than a primary mover.

If you have matching donations or can kickstart an otherwise self-sustaining process, the end-to-end cost doesn't have to add up to 3bn to be feasible with a 3bn pool of initial capital.

Think of it as venture research.

<comment><USER17> _> If you have matching donations or can kickstart an otherwise self- sustaining process_

They won't have been the first people funding research to have thought of this... it's a criteria sometimes used in evaluating in NIH grants, for instance.

 _> Think of it as venture research_

As opposed to?

<comment><USER16> As opposed to more standard research funding which isn't as goal oriented.

I assume they're looking for a "billion dollar exit" from their research funding.

<comment><USER18> Overemphasis on commercialization is a common complaint of the current funding situation in medical research, so I don't think we're failing for lack of interest in commercial exits. In fact, many scientist are serial entrepreneurs.

Moreover, many discoveries that went on to make a lot of people a lot of money had no obvious commercial application when they were first being researched... Predicting future markets is hard.

<comment><USER16> No I don't mean "made money", that would just be standard venture capital.

I mean "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity", which is a _different_ radical exit.

<comment><USER17> I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity". Or maybe I just don't understand the difference between this as merely "achieves their targets by selling useful treatments to people"?

Could to elaborate?

<comment><USER16> A malaria vaccine would make no commercial sense but would be a huge reduction in the total burden of disease. That's what I mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not to take the wind out of anyone's sails, but there is a concern to be raised about relying more and more on charities to fund the public good. When a democratically elected government funds the public good, at least in theory, the public at large has a small say in choosing what counts as "public good". When you leave it to charity, you're relying on the morals of individual wealthy donors to decide what counts as a "public good". I don't claim to know which method is more risky in terms of mis-allocation of resources, but it's something to think about.

<comment><USER20> Why do you assume that government politicians and bureaucrats have a higher moral position to decide what counts as public good?

<comment><USER19> I never assumed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Saw this on Reddit, maybe someone can comment:

\---

From Wikipedia:

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charitable trust or a private foundation but a limited liability company which can be for-profit, spend money on lobbying, make political donations, will not have to disclose its pay to its top five executives and have fewer other transparency requirements, compared to a charitable trust. Under this legal structure, as Forbes wrote it, "Zuckerberg will still control the Facebook shares owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative".

<comment><USER22> First, so we are on the same page: An LLC and "a non profit" are two orthogonal things. "Non-profit" is a tax status granted to any entity recognized by the IRS, an LLC is a state construct, not recognized by the IRS.

LLCs exist in the court system - they can be liable for things done under the legal umbrella of the LLC, meaning they be sued, and so on. This is the "Limited Liability" part; the members of an LLC are, for some things, not personally liable for any legal trouble. LLCs do not exist, as far as the IRS is concerned.

Because of this, an organization can be an LLC in it's local state, registered as a corporation of some kind with the federal gov't - and that corporation can be Non-Profit; eg; an LLC can be Non-Profit, and nothing can be "a" Non- Profit, because Non-Profit is not an entity, it's a tax status.

So.

You are Mark Zuckerberg. You hold a lot of Facebook stock, and you want to commit that stock to Philantropy. Cool. You could start a federal corporation (which would be recognized by the IRS) and file for Non Profit status.

But why would you? You're not accepting other peoples donations, so you don't need to help them make tax-deductible donations. Your money, "moved into" the LLC, still goes on your personal taxes (remember, the IRS does not care that your state has invented some court construct called an LLC - unless you're a federal corporation, your money goes on your regular tax return), meaning any donations made to, say, a Non-profit research fund, will be tax deductible just like it would any other day, so _you_ don't loose out on any taxes.

Creating a Non-Profit of some kind would mean a lot of legal work, a lot of complexity in terms of how this new federal entity uses it's $3B Facebook stock to vote, if you set up as a foundation there are rules around holding too much stock in individual companies, et cetera et cetera. TL;DR: There's a lot of downside and the only upside is that some guy on Reddit would whine about how you're a fraud in some other way.

If I wanted to set aside $3B of my personal stock and tell the world "I'm gonna donate this money, over time", I don't see why I wouldn't just pay the $50 filing fee to get some legal distance from lawsuits in the form of an LLC and call it a day.

Edit: I should say that this is a short-term perspective. I would expect, as Mark grows older, he may want to move this money into an actual non-profit entity of some kind, with a board and so on that could oversee the management and dispersement of the money over the long haul, or whatever. But in the short term, it just seems like a lot of legalese for no benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I know it's more of a western problem, but it would be good if someone could find some real solutions to the obesity crisis.

If you ask many GPs in the west they will tell you that a majority of illnesses they address are related to weight and diet. With an aging, increasingly overweight adult population alongside a sharp rise in child obesity come big consequences for health care over the next half century.

Im not saying its an easy task you can just throw money at, but if trends continue as they are now the health and economic impact on society will be huge.

Bar some sort of national catastrophe (for e.g. war, famine, disease) is it a crazy idea to think we could see a reduction in obesity levels? Are we simply resigned to the fact that we will just get bigger and bigger in the future?

<comment><USER24> For starter, stop drinking liters of cold drink and beer every day. If you really need it, I will create an app for that.

<comment><USER23> I need an app to drink beer?

<comment><USER25> _Untapped_ is a great app if you are a fan of craft beer, makes it easy to keep track of what beers you have tried and still have to try!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announce $3 billion initiative to 'cure all diseases'"

[http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/21/mark-zuckerberg-and- prisci...](http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/21/mark-zuckerberg-and-priscilla- chan-announce-3-billion-initiative-to-cure-all-diseases/)

<comment><USER27> I suspect it would have been _much_ better for them to simply partner with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where they're actually curing diseases. They've literally almost eradicated polio globally[1].

        [1] http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/Polio

<comment><USER28> Largely by funding the effort.

[http://www.polioeradication.org/Portals/0/Document/Financing...](http://www.polioeradication.org/Portals/0/Document/Financing/HistoricalContributions.pdf)

Which I don't mean as a criticism, it's just that they aren't really driving the effort, they are participating by providing a lot of resources.

<comment><USER27> Based on that link, the Gates foundation is providing $2.86 billion. The second biggest donor is the US Government at $2.64 billion.

I'd consider the entity with the most money in the game as the driver of really anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The absolutely crazy thing is that in this day and age the vast majority of diagnosed paediatric cancers are not sequenced (no germline, tumor or RNA seq) It actually makes me feel quite sick that there is so much information out there that is not being mined or analyzed.

I hope this money does not go into some sort of "in 100 years from now moonshot" as opposed to, we have huge urgent needs for money right now.

</comment><comment><USER30> These self-congratulatory billionaire philanthropists and their tax evasion schemes really irk me. Everything won't be peachy in the future. We're well on our way to warm up the planet by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, because of the globalized world in which you could gain your fortune. Stop exerting power of money that doesn't belong to you, pay your taxes like everyone else, and maybe governments would have more means to improve issues that were democratically prioritized, with more oversight. These flashy single issues funds with vague goals are mainly there to serve the ego of whoever funded them.

The school of life has a good video on this topic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTAE5m3ZO2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTAE5m3ZO2E)

</comment><comment><USER31> Most infectious diseases in humans are known to have originated from wildlife, so eradicating all current diseases will still leave us with new diseases entering the human population. Current rate at which new diseases establish themselves in the human population is about ~1 per year, moreso under unstable climate [Greger, Woolhouse].

[http://czbiohub.org/projects/infectious- disease/](http://czbiohub.org/projects/infectious-disease/)

Looks like Chan and Zuckerberg's initiative on infectious diseases is focused on a rapid response once a disease establishes itself in humans. There is certainly a lot to win there, but it is still acting after the fact, rather than prevention. Would have liked part of the effort to be focused on monitoring wildlife to understand which diseases are at risk of jumping over.

Greger, M.Crit. Rev. Microbiol. 33, 243–299 (2007). [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18033595](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18033595)

Woolhouse, M .E.J. Trends Microbiol. 10, s3–s7 (2002). [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12377561](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12377561)

</comment><comment><USER32> Not sure why there is a lot of negativity here. It doesn't seem that ridiculous of a goal. I think by 2100 we will have extremely powerful AI that will make fighting diseases extremely easy compared to methods available today. To be honest, it seems like an achievable goal.

I wish Zuckerberg and Chan the best in this.

<comment><USER33> _I think by 2100 we will have extremely powerful AI that will make fighting diseases extremely easy compared to methods available today._

Right. Just like the jetpacks and lunar colonies we have easy access to now, as promised in the 1960s.

<comment><USER34> Would you trade the development of the internet for jetpacks? I wouldn't.

<comment><USER33> The point is that most predictions of what the future holds for us (based on spike developments in the past 5-10 years)† usually prove to be quite silly.

† And in ML's case, ridiculously successful branding (per the sibling comment of yours).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is great. Great achievements as a startup founder and now philanthropy.

For those comparing this to pharma companies. Pharma companies invest in drugs that they can make money with. It sounds as though this $3 billion is aiming at more general research and making it publicly available.

<comment><USER36> maybe you should hold off on the praise until there's some results to show for it. making a press statement is not the same thing as curing a disease.

<comment><USER37> I'm comfortable praising someone for giving away 3 billion dollars to fight disease, even before the results are in.

<comment><USER38> Indeed. In fact most of the wealthy people I know are quite charitable, in contrast to the way "the rich" are portrayed in the media and politics. And a high profile commitment like this from a high profile person could encourage that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is lovely and all.

But he is in a much better position to work on the curious problems of ever increasing political polarization in our new Post-Factual world.

If I were to guess, over the next century that problem is going to result is a vastly more misery than a slight speed up to medical technology could compensate for.

<comment><USER40> I am much more concerned about social/ethical/cultural problems in general. I think if those problems were solved, all other issues with effectively evaporate in a very short time, because we waste a tremendous amount of energy on, well, random crap.

Sometimes technological/medical/governmental/etc. changes do move the social forward so there's hope there.

<comment><USER39> I agree entirely. And, looking at a small but easier part, I believe that there is a particular piece that Zuckerberg can work on very effectively.

His company is now a key part of the way people form their view of the world. The algorithm/process that selects what ideas they are exposed to chooses only the most outlandish and memorable ideas that also serve to reinforce the viewers already existing preconceptions. This, after all, makes facebook quite attractive: an echo chamber of stimulating impressions that always reconfirm your world view. Obviously accuracy is irrelevant in this model and evidence is unheard of.

This is a specific problem that is contributing to a completely credulous world view, worsening political gaps based on untruths and, worst of all, creating the belief that fact is just another word for opinion. And this problem is exactly in his area of expertise on a platform he has control of.

At any rate, if not worked on pretty quick, a re-established House Un-American Activities Committee will make it awfully hard later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I would never discourage them, audacious goals are how real change is achieved.

But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse and scarier one seems to fill the void. And if you wanted to get pedantic, it could be said that Humanity is a disease of the Earth. Eliminating that infestation might qualify under the goal. Perhaps AI is not going to solve the problem by eliminating disease, but eliminating that which can be diseased. Kill the prey, and the predator dies.

<comment><USER40> Pedantic or simply oddly foolish? That's not a precise statement at all. The concept of humanity-as-a-disease makes no sense outside of a highly misanthropic and Stockholm-syndrome-ish view of the world. "Earth" is not a sensing entity, for one, so you cannot commit moral crimes against it (i.e, bring forth to it the very real suffering that a human experiences from a disease), and it's also the source of both humanity and disease in the first place. We have diseases because "Earth" runs a process by which various creatures are continually created and torment each other to figure out who survives better.

Removing humans would do nothing more but restart the misery process again, until another intelligent vehicle appears to try to resist it, assuming that intelligent vehicles are a low energy state that evolution-style processes like to reach. Such a vehicle is our best bet for the disease truly going away. The intelligent vehicle, of course, will be highly influenced by the natural world it came from.

You could go for a Sargeras-style crusade and decide to extinguish all life in the universe and make all planets uninhabitable so that nothing can ever evolve again to cause diseases anywhere, but you would still need such an immensely powerful vehicle to enable that that you could as well stop wasting your time and make utopias instead because if you can handle FTL travel you can handle some microbes.

> But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse > and scarier one seems to fill the void.

There are plenty of awful diseases people used to get from unsanitary conditions, malnourishment, and direct contact with nature that we don't talk about anymore because nobody gets them in first world countries or because they have been eliminated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I just feel this is too broad and unbounded. They should have focused on a specific diseases and a shorter timeframe. By 2100 most of us will be long dead by current standards.

</comment><comment><USER43> Very nice. Some context:

Mark Zuckerberg is worth 55 billion dollars. This is 5% of his net worth.

Mark Zuckerberg spent 20bn on Whatsapp. At his 28% shareholding in facebook that's a 5.6bn USD personal commitment.

The top 5 global pharma companies spent 42 billion USD on R&D in 2015 alone. Total pharma sector R&D is circa 200 yards. Every singe year. They aren't anywhere near "curing all diseases". This intiative would fund them for 5 days.

Very generous, but let's keep some perspective.

<comment><USER44> >The top 5 global pharma companies spent 42 billion USD on R&D in 2015 alone

But how much of that spend was actually targeted at curing diseases, versus things like hair loss treatments, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, or other first world problems? It's well known that big pharma corps generally ignore the low hanging fruit of curable third world diseases because there is no monetary incentive for it. See why there was no viable Ebola vaccine until the latest outbreak, even though we've been dealing with it for decades.

<comment><USER43> If you look at pharma company R&D, they know where their bread is buttered: people who are at risk of death are much bigger spenders than brunettes wanting to be blondes. 70%+ of pharma R&D goes towards life-prolonging research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> So lets say this were possible. Where would be the best place to throw this money? Just researching X disease one by one isn't going to be successful. There are not enough resources available to make that happen that way. Period.

So what if a big leap in computational biology happened? Making faster machines is relatively easier and largely unregulated.

So you focus on simulating disease and some form of automation that tries to cure it. We have the problem of building these models for the computer to crunch on. So why not build them from people. Continuously monitor everything about someone. DNA, the various omics, self reports. All the while machine learning is trying learn these models. So other automations can change them.

So the first thing we need is a way to collect all this data. Itself a major medical breakthrough. How much data do we need to build the models? This seems to be the first breakthrough we need to even approach this.

</comment><comment><USER46> Feeling so privileged right now; what a great time to be alive and see such visionary leadership. Thank you Mark, Priscilla, Bill, and the thousands of people whose names I don't know who work tirelessly on these problems.

</comment><comment><USER47> any money spent on research is good but,

1\. governments around the world probably spend hundreds of billions yearly on research in medicine alone. and zuckerberg wants to solve everything with his 3bn?

2\. our current technology is not even close to good enough to make the kind of major breakthroughs needed to say we 'cured cancer'. for example, the biggest neural networks we trained have the order of 10bn parameters while the human brain has 100bn neurons, each, I'm guessing, having at least 10 parameters. similarly for very small scale technology. I think we need to tone down a bit the hype in AI and computing.

</comment><comment><USER48> _All_ disease? I hope they mean specifically pathogens, because there are plenty of diseases that are caused by other things or have unknown causes, and you can throw ten times the net worth of Facebook at them and they probably wouldn't be cured noticeably sooner. If it's just pathogens, I could believe that if we programmed nanoprobes that could target them, making antibiotics/antivirals permanently obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER49> To achieve this goal, Mark will need access to the entire world medical records, selling our data to insurance companies. Sorry Mark, but I refuse to trade my privacy, and the safety of millions that cannot afford medical insurance with a promise of living in a world without disease.

</comment><comment><USER50> New diseases will come to be. Possibly, the cures will cause the new diseases, possibly something else, but all disease won't be conquered. Does this ambitious projection include only disease or does it also include disorder? I think it would be cool to cure disorder before disease.

</comment><comment><USER51> Addiction is probably one of the worst diseases, and I am not sure that you can 'cure' it.

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't think it's a good thing to make us disease-free in terms of evolution.

I think it's better to just cure the diseases that kill us ( long/short-term) eg. cancer, aids, ... or make us immoble for longer term ( parkinson, ..)

Why? Because i think the best defense is a good immune system. You don't get a good immune system by staying inside and infection free and using medication all the time. Let people become sick ( not lethal ones) and let nature fight it off.

<comment><USER40> You're essentially advocating that a huge amount of people would die off, FYI.

<comment><USER52> I am not.

I am saying that getting sick is not a bad thing, a sickness that kills is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> In this vein, Some very interesting work is being done by the church group at Harvard to encode cells to withstand all viral infections at the genetic level.

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2101657-synthetic- super...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2101657-synthetic-supermicrobe- will-be-resistant-to-all-known-viruses/)

</comment><comment><USER54> I built a visualizer of the top causes of death. We've got a lot of diseases to cure!

[https://www.infino.me/mortality/usmap](https://www.infino.me/mortality/usmap)

</comment><comment><USER55> Including aging as a disease?

</comment><comment><USER56> I wonder what they plan to do about the anti-vaccination movement.

</comment><comment><USER57> What about new diseases that are discovered between now and then?

</comment><comment><USER58> The commitment is very big, my comment is very small.

Whatever exists needs to be challenged continuously to keep existing. Any naive attempt to suppress all adversity forever will backfire.

<comment><USER32> Ok, so you would rather Zuck not spend his money trying to cure diseases?

<comment><USER58> No, but the sanguinary headline made me imagine a future where all biological stressors have actually been eradicated. Our species would be at its weakest.

I guess I was briefly taking the donator's unicorn propaganda literally. Sorry.

<comment><USER59> We're already partly there. Infant mortality is way down, allowing weak babies to live on to reproduce. Antibiotics and immunization of course. A lot of the good things we do for individuals are probably bad for our species because they remove stressors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'd like to see their efforts in stopping the spread of the most rapidly increasing disease to challenge humanity in any man's lifetime.

It's called Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER61> I don't remember who's quote is but sounds relevant for this article :

We won't have cure for diseases until first we have a cure for greed.

</comment><comment><USER62> How does one even define "disease"?

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm sick of this contrarian disruptive nonsense.

Redd Foxx got to choose his fate, but what am I going to do while forced to sit around the hospital dying of nothing?

Find a socially acceptable alternative to disease before you eliminate it.

(Ok, to put it more clearly: get off my damn lawn and my damn planet you stupid non-exponential function understanding kids.. Please!)

</comment><comment><USER64> Such a joke. If they were anyone else we would be calling them out. Is there any evidence that this wealth won't be concentrated in the same industry, whose stock prices would decrease if their drugs worked to treat any disease causes. A claim like this can be dismissed without evidence.

</comment><comment><USER56> Why does the author keep saying "Ms Chan"? Aren't they married?

<comment><USER65> Should be Dr. Chan. She has an MD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> By 2100 I hope we have a patchable structures that just need an electronic update to generate the new immune cell/protein/expression.

</comment><comment><USER66> These acts of apparent philanthropy from ridiculously wealthy people rub me the wrong way. It feels like those rich patrons from older times who would bestow their "generosity" as they pleased, except that in modern times most countries have frameworks in place to make this sort of work happen, and these rich people choose to ignore them, or worse, disparage them.

Companies like Facebook (and people like Mark Zuckerberg) actively avoid paying taxes whenever they can, in a lot of countries that, for example, have public healthcare and other public institutions that would normally benefit from these taxes.

It's a bit like repeatedly stealing some kid's lunch, and then making fun of the kid for her weakness while appearing strong (and stronger in comparison to the weak kid) and compassionate when the kid passes out and you carry her on your back.

<comment><USER67> Very true. Empires build by companies with low ethics and that are known for bullying competition and poor integrity.

Some skepticism here would be appropriate. I guess it's still better then them buying more, eh, yachts.

Still, I can't shake the feeling that instead of making a horrible closed product, Facebook, that's basically eating the internet like a cancer, itself -- how about fixing that too?

These people are so powerful they have presidents kissing their ass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Who will own the intellectual property rights on the discoveries ? If it's Zuck, then I'm not interested.

</comment><comment><USER69> as long as smoking will be removed the planet I'm fine

</comment><comment><USER70> Not bold enough. Let them tackle nondeterminism first.)

</comment><comment><USER71> Most likely by year 2100 Mark and Priscilla won't be alive, and people that read about this claim won't be alive either. Then, it is not a legally binding claim. I think it's a way to promote their foundation.

</comment><comment><USER72> EDIT: JWZ disagrees that this is all rainbows and puppydogs.

Archive.org link because JWZ dislikes HN- [https://web.archive.org/web/20160818144913/https://www.jwz.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160818144913/https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/12/zuckerberg- has-not-donated-anything-you-gullible-credulous-pinheads/)

<comment><USER73> NSFW due to testicle.

JWZ has some referrer detection so you might want to open it in a private tab to get around.

<comment><USER74> And a perfect illustration of why "I'll just leave this here" is so much worse than a simple description of the link target.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Hubris, much?

Yes, this is a commendable effort, but I don't think they have the smarts/money for this. Even at an investor/patron level.

<comment><USER76> It almost certainly won't happen, but you could have said the same thing about starting a social network that includes over a billion daily users.

<comment><USER77> That's like comparing the discovery of a new fundamental force, with the discovery that mythical dragons have been living in secret among us as our lawyers. It's true that both are unlikely, but one is ridiculous and the other merely very very challenging.

<comment><USER76> I don't think it's all that ridiculous, it's over 80 years in the future. 80 years ago we were dying of all sorts of [now] easily preventable and curable diseases. Penicillin was not used until 1942!

<comment><USER77> And now it's practically useless. It's not a one-sided battle we're in, and we're heavily outnumbered.

<comment><USER76> The point was that so much has changed in the previous ~80 years that I don't think it's ridiculous to think things will be radically different ~80 years into the future.

<comment><USER77> Barring universally available, and highly advanced nanotech, it's ridiculous to think that all diseases will be "tackled" in ~80 years. In that same time frame it's much more likely that we'll be tackling issues of how to maintain a semblance of civilization, not achieving utopia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> this is marginally better than the Bluth family's fundraising efforts to cure TBA ...

</comment><comment><USER79> Step 1: shut down Facebook.

<comment><USER80> Sorry to see you got downvoted for voicing your opinion. Remember, Stockholm Syndrome is a disease.

<comment><USER81> That opinion adds nothing to the current discussion. This isn't just an open "tell us any random opinion you might have!" forum; the idea is to contribute thoughts relevant to the topic.

<comment><USER80> I think the OP here was hinting along these lines perhaps:

[http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/245251.php](http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/245251.php)

Facebook is by some considered an addiction, so in some regards a disease that should be tackled along with others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> I wonder why, all these billionaires first want to make billions, and then do philanthropy. How about making their services/business/products more affordable with which they are making all this money with in the first place?

For example: MS Office used to cost 4-500 euro for the average home user a few years ago. That was ridiculous.

If you have a small shop and 2000 Facebook page likes, Facebook rips you off each time you want to reach them.

Maybe market dictates these prices but then again, they would be in the position to dictate the prices in the first place.

<comment><USER83> I rather wonder why those philanthropists think they are the best to decide what to do with the money? If I understand it correnctly, neither Zuckerberg nor Gates have given up much control over their money, they just cannot use it anymore for themself.

<comment><USER84> Looking at the lasting impact of Carnagie's estate or any of the other billionaires who decided to spend their later life focusing on philanthropy, rather than just throwing cash at other peoples causes, I'd say they can and do provide a real to society by continuing to control their capital.

Just like the other commentors have pointed out, who is better qualified to launch and run a major project than those who already spent their lives building and scaling great businesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Charity with evaded money is very evil.

<comment><USER84> Public tax policy that either provides plentiful loopholes or high enough tax rates where billionaires/millionaires can (and are highly incentivized to) shift their money and use tax saving schemes are what's really evil.

If people spent time focusing on increasing government tax _revenue_ from the rich rather than increasing tax _rates_ on the rich - which just pushes more and more wealthy people to stash their money in tax shelters (see Ireland) rather than investing it at home - they'd actually succeed in improving the inequality situation. And most importantly boost the economy and create more middle income jobs (by keeping money as job-generating capital instead of sitting dormant in off-shore shelters).

Instead of expecting humans to stop acting out of self-interest, how about:

a) Creating incentives for businesses and the wealthy to not move money elsewhere by having competitive tax rates. The simple fact is having them pay something rather than further incentiving them to pay nothing would massively increase revenues without increasing rates.

b) Massively simplify the tax system to close the myriad of loopholes that allow these wealthy people to continue operating locally while shifting all tax liability elsewhere. Make it obvious exactly how much each person owes their governments at the end of each year.

Creating a tax policy that's grounded in the reality of human behaviour (you can call it evil if you wish) rather than idealistic fallacies of how people _should_ act is the real solution here.... Assuming this whole thing Zuckerberg is creating is partially a form of tax sheltering in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I plan to conquer the world and all of its inhabitants... long after all of us here are dead or senescent.

I guess it _is_ easy to make empty statements if you make them apply to a far enough future. Mars colonies from Musk (still working on getting the colonists there in one piece of course), and all disease tackled!*

*With $3Bn

<comment><USER86> The difference being that you don't have an army or the power necessary such that I'm going to consider your plans to be serious in the least.

With $56 billion, I'm inclined to take Zuckerberg a lot more seriously. He currently has eight times the annual R&D budget of Pfizer in paper wealth that has been increasing in value at a rapid clip (emphasis on paper, in that of course it may go up a lot more or down a lot, who knows). Tackling all disease is beyond grandiose; wiping out numerous diseases however is not - that would be an extraordinary accomplishment.

<comment><USER77> Well, to be fair I _am_ responding to the grandiose statement that he made, not the more reasonable one that he could have made.

<comment><USER80> And again, trolley problems...

There is $3B on on one track, with a note pinned to the top.. "To cure all diseases - <3 MarkZ".

A train is barreling down.

On the other track lies you, with a hoodie and a ham sandwich.

Watching to the side is HN...

HN can pull the switch and change the points, thereby saving the $3B, but killing you... in the hope the $3B will cure all disease.

On the other hand HN can say screw the cash and let's save a ham sandwich, because (ummm, let's face it, sorry kid, you aren't going to amount to much)

Little did HN know, you ARE MarkZ!

<comment><USER77> Are you actually replying to me, or are you... what the hell are you talking about?

<comment><USER80> I was making an abstract defense in your favor based on the parent comment where someone appeared to be claiming you had neither the power nor the cash to have any say in the matter.

For all we know you might have billions or a machine for curing all diseases already working. (Or be MarkZ).

Yes, probably time for my bed, it's rather late. And far too late for moral philosophy.

<comment><USER77> No no, I think I just missed it, my bad. Either way though, sleep well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I really wonder why those techy multibillionaires invest in medicine rather than techy stuff. I'd rather like to see fusion and hardware research done. Speaking globally, that might just bump global economy so significantly, the illnesses would go down just because more people would be able to afford education and medical care easily.

</comment><comment><USER88> Oh that's just great, another billionaire philanthropist curing all diseases. Like Gates did.

I don't know whether their passion loses momentum inside 'initiative/fund' or it was doomed to be opposite of it's cause from the start?

<comment><USER89> That's a strange reaction. Hasn't the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation been one of the most successful philanthropic organizations of all time? I thought they've saved millions of lives fighting malaria alone?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation)

<comment><USER88> There is literally nothing on that article about how many lives their initiative saved. Just standard corporate propaganda about how much they spent on this and that.

If I've spent 80 millions on Vaccines does that mean that I've saved hundreds of lives? No.

I don't want to be a truther here, nor I'll paste links that would confirm partial statement wrapped inside my question, but it would be great if one could be open to critically observe actions of our beloved philanthropists, there is complete universe beyond local news feeds.

<comment><USER90> I think your opinion is probably interesting and potentially valid, but your tone in the original comment is limiting your ability to communicate effectively.

Less sarcasm would serve you well.

<comment><USER88> sarcasm is better part of life, it's not limiting it's enriching :) I fail to understand why people hate it?

<comment><USER91> After a while, overtly sarcastic tone gets a bit boring when you get to read it every day in the every corner of internet over any possible issue.

And in my experience, it's rarely very effective in changing people's opinions, if they are not tending to agree with you already in the first place.

<comment><USER88> Okay people, you win. I wasn't trying to change opinions, I just kept my own. I'm still new here so let's consider this an experiment in public discourse.

Peace ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Toronto man found not guilty in Twitter harassment trial - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com//news/canada/toronto-man-found-not-guilty-in-twitter-harassment-trial-widely-viewed-as-a-canadian-first <comment><USER2> Reasons for Judgment released by the Ontario Court of Justice:

[https://www.canlii.org/en/on/oncj/doc/2016/2016oncj35/2016on...](https://www.canlii.org/en/on/oncj/doc/2016/2016oncj35/2016oncj35.html)</comment>


Fully-qualified Nonsense in the SSL Observatory - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/fully-qualified-nonsense-ssl-observatory

<comment><USER2> The SSL PKI appears to be well and truly riddled with holes.

By the way, do browsers check for certificate revokation and refuse to connect to revoked sites?

I'm constantly amazed that ecommerce even functions. I'm glad it does, but there just seem to be fairly fundamental _holes_ in the PKI to secure ecommerce.</comment>


IPhone 4's 'Retina' Display Claims Are False Marketing  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/iphone-4-retina/

<comment><USER2> I can see his point in a broader context but marketing departments aren't typically staffed by folks with a PHD in theoretical physics and I'd be surprised if consumers expect to be educated by advertisements. Often it seems they buy into the marketing hype as feature of the product they are buying.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is probably close enough they can get away with it.</comment>


Ask HN: what tools do you use to find available/cheap domains? - <AUTHOR>

Ask HN: what tools do you use to find available/cheap domains? <comment><USER2> <http://domai.nr>

<http://www.bustaname.com/>

<http://www.nxdom.com/></comment>


Lave: eval in reverse - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jed/lave <comment><USER2> Sounds a lot like python's "pickle" module (which is super-useful for prototyping), but with the same achilles' heel: all of your serialized objects can now run arbitrary code when you deserialize them!

<comment><USER3> Not _quite_ arbitrary; the only code run is that generated by lave. Arbitrary code present in functions is parsed, but not run.

<comment><USER4> But if there is a persistence or network layer involved, when compromised, it could function as an injection vector into the application, right?

<comment><USER3> Sure, as it could with any part of your app, including wherever your JSON.parse code lives.

<comment><USER4> But could JSON.parse() fed with malicious data fire off an XMLHttpRequest or delete all of your data?

<comment><USER5> That would concern me too potentially, though if there isn't one already it should be easy to implement a switch that would turn this part of the behaviour off.

It looks very interesting to me from the point of view of dealing with certain data types better (at all, in fact), and handling circular references.

<comment><USER6> > it should be easy to implement a switch that would turn this part of the > behaviour off

I think it's one of those "easy on the surface, but surprisingly complex" problems.

When you start allowing arbitrary code execution, it's a lot of work to prevent certain "functions" (i mean that in the non-programming way).

<comment><USER5> I was thinking more along the lines of turning it off at the generation side: only including anything in the persisted state that is safe.

Trying to detect the unsafe parts so they could be turned off after that point would be impossible as you suspect (the task would be constrained by the halting problem, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A few weeks ago, I created something similar so I could reproduce a failure.

In case it is useful: [https://gist.github.com/bprosnitz/cf1d1a3dd1008eef5a85](https://gist.github.com/bprosnitz/cf1d1a3dd1008eef5a85)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is very interesting. It is a serialization format generalized to handle real references, including circular ones, and more complex data-types than JSON can handle. I think it's a very poor tagline, since "eval in reverse" sounds useless, and this lib is anything but. (no affliation btw)

The down-side is that a consumer has to run a full-blown eval() (as opposed to the more restricted JSON.parse()). This isn't that much of a downside in a typical webapp since you have full control over the browser process anyway, but it's deadly for cross-domain.

The upside is considerable for certain data-structures that are hard to represent in JSON efficiently, e.g. with a lot of denormalization.

A key concern for me is runtime efficiency, particularly compared to JSON.stringify.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. The downside of running a full-blown eval() exists in JSON too, it's just that the eval() there is taking place in the reviver function, which requires a lot more coordination than a self-contained file.

As far as efficiency, I'd think for most uses the issue would be on the JSON.parse end. In this case, lave might be more efficient, since JSON reviving often ends up creating temporary objects that need to GC'ed after reification.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I'd like to whip up some simple benchmarks tomorrow, and I'll share what I find.

Also, it would be interesting to support other data-types, such as the ones that come with Immutable.js. That would be slick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's Perl's Data::Dumper ! Some of the options present in the perl version could be useful in the JavaScript too, e.g. pretty-printing structures for debugging output.

<comment><USER10> Data::Dumper has proven invaluable during those _" what the fsck is this routine doing"_ moments.

<comment><USER9> Yes, it's a fantastic aid, I don't know what I'd do without it when trying to debug code dealing with nasty mixes of arrays and hashes.

What would be fantastic for perl is actually something that javascript already has. In most browsers, if you print a data structure to the console, it is presented as a clickable tree structure, where you can show or hide the bits of the data that you want to check.

I'd love some way to recreate this in perl (and in a terminal if possible). The downside of Data::Dumper is that you can produce hundreds of pages of output, when you really want to just examine a tiny part of it.

<comment><USER11> [https://metacpan.org/pod/Data::Dumper::GUI](https://metacpan.org/pod/Data::Dumper::GUI)

AFAIK, no one has written a terminal version yet. There's a TUI framework called Tickit which would make writing one quite easy, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has everyone creates one of these?

[https://github.com/dclowd9901/betterObjectToString](https://github.com/dclowd9901/betterObjectToString)

Yours is clearly better.

</comment><comment><USER13> More like security hole in disguise!

If code-to-be-evaluated represents data, you have to trust it or else very carefully sandbox it.

The real fix is to have a printed notation that has a richer type system and handles circularity.

(Printed notation _is_ code, effectively; it's just code in a distinct language of hopefully limited power, just for constructing objects from a description.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Like print, if you have a lisp.

<comment><USER15> If you use only structs, lists, numbers and strings, print is perfect. It supports circular structure when PRINT-CIRCLE is true.

For custom classes you have to define custom printing methods, because, well, how you print a particular object readably has no general answer: for example, for some data (streams, threads), it makes no sense to serialize them. Java has the "transient" keyword to avoid serializing some fields in classes. You should also set PRINT-READABLY to T so that you have an error if an object cannot be printed readably.

Also, Common Lisp has to serialize values into FASL files when compiling them, but it can do it only for its own types. You can use LOAD-TIME-VALUE to have a form evaluated at load time, and MAKE-LOAD-FORM is a generic function that you can specialize to print a form which, when read, allocates and initializes objects at load-time. For your own classes, it is sufficient to use the helper function MAKE-LOAD-FORM-SAVING-SLOTS.

All that gives you a lot of control over what, how and when forms are evaluated and stored. The good news is that you have libraries available to do that very easily: [http://www.cliki.net/serialization](http://www.cliki.net/serialization) (see for example [http://www.cliki.net/cl-marshal](http://www.cliki.net/cl- marshal)).

See [http://clhs.lisp.se/](http://clhs.lisp.se/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lave means to make in Danish

<comment><USER17> In Spanish, it's the first person subjunctive form of "to wash". So you'd use it to express something like "It's good that I am washing myself" or "Maybe I am washing it."

<comment><USER18> I don't know what subjunctive means so I don't know if you are right about that, but I am a native Spanish speaker, so I can tell you that those examples you gave using "washing" (a gerund, I think) would use the corresponding tense "lavando" in Spanish:

It's good that I am washing myself = Es bueno que me esté lavando.

(That's a literal translation: I don't think anyone would use "lavar" for washing yourself, more likely "bañando" [bathing] or "aseando" [cleaning] --at least not in Mexico, but what's idiomatic does vary quite a bit from country to country. Although for "wash your face" you would say "lávate la cara", using the verb "lavar".)

I am washing it = Lo estoy lavando.

Here are some sentences where I would use "lave" or "lavé":

Dile que lo lave mañana= Tell him/her to wash it tomorrow

Lavé las cortinas con agua caliente = I washed the curtains in hot water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> lave(';)"dlrow olleh"(trela');</comment>


Holography Without Lasers: Hand-Drawn Holograms (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/amateur/holo1.html <comment><USER2> See also some discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9052375](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9052375)

From this source: [http://www.amasci.com/amateur/holo1.html](http://www.amasci.com/amateur/holo1.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah! I was directed to this by a friend many years back, and added it to the list of projects that "I'll do one day" \-- but then presently forgot about it.

Thank you for reminding me!

<comment><USER4> Too late! HP just announced a 3D semi-holographic display based on just this same optics. With theirs, each tiny reflective groove has several conventional LCD pixels in front, plus bright RGB edge-lighting. [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512716/new-3-d-display-...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512716/new-3-d-display- could-let-phones-and-tablets-produce-holograms/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since the reflected points emanate from the (curved) scratches themselves, I would think that between the left and right eyes, each point would be slightly vertically misaligned (since each eye would see light from a different _vertical_ point in each scratch, beside a different _horizontal_ point).

I suppose you could eliminate this by drawing the scratches as if they were cross-sections of a Fresnel lens: i.e., at several points during the scratch, reposition the compass fulcrum vertically so that the needle remains at approximately the same vertical location.

<comment><USER4> See 3.4 in the paper, [http://amasci.com/amateur/hand1.html#34](http://amasci.com/amateur/hand1.html#34) also figure 11b.

Yes, a proper "abrasion hologram" would have holo-pixels resembling little fresnel-lens cross-sections. The "hand drawn" version is simplified, and produces weird artifacts unless viewed perpendicular, and the reproduced image isn't too wide. Yet even so, we can create a 3D object in less than an hour via simple hand-scribed circles on soft plastic. Use an architect compass and an old CD case.

It's now appearing on vinyl, on Jack White Lazaretto album, also on recent re- release of classic 1976 "Rush 2112"...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9gRPtkSOn0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9gRPtkSOn0)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqNF9IWmFQE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqNF9IWmFQE)

Find lots at [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL60100E8F3572CEB1](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL60100E8F3572CEB1)</comment></comment>


Angular 10 Now Available - <AUTHOR> https://blog.angular.io/version-10-of-angular-now-available-78960babd41 <comment><USER2> I'm a frontend developer working on angular for two years. Initially I thought this could be actually better than other frameworks, since it forces you to use typescript and has a __standard, easy and clear way to do forms __. But seems like that for everything else, angular and it 's community like to hug a more-complex-than-it-should-be approach. No single file components. No straightforward export of a component to be used from a third party app. Http requests are even exposed as observables in the official docs. Don't really know how so many companies use this.

<comment><USER3> Having used Angular for years, I share the same experience. Everything is hulking complex and opaque. Compare it to React, which is simple enough in principle that you can actually understand whats going on to push your code to browser.

Angular is the J2EE/Plan9 web framework. They just keep layering on complexity when they find use cases that don't work. Instead of ratcheting down to give you more control, you get even less. The cycle repeats. Its way more than a web framework now. The templates you write are barely related to HTML and JS, an order of magnitude more divorced from reality than JSX

<comment><USER4> The static HTML templates allow us to compile them to JavaScript instructions, similar to incremental DOM (iDOM).

This way Angular can perform an efficient change detection to reflect changes in the view.

Static versus dynamic has its own trade offs. It's well explored topic in theoretical computer science and popular literature. Static systems definitely can set some constraints, but at the same time open a lot of space for compile-time optimizations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been developing web apps with Angular since AngularJS (v. 1) and I love it.

Thanks to the developers and the community for keeping it up to date and for the continuous improvements!</comment>


Icon Sets for developers who aren't good at design - <AUTHOR> http://pzxc.com/giant-free-web-icon-sets

<comment><USER2> of course, a blog post like that is basically just worth sharing if the icons are free (which seems to be the case as I skimmed it). If I remember correctly these free icon pages were more colorful ones than described on css-tricks.com</comment>


Mobile shift: You've probably underestimated just how big this is - <AUTHOR> https://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/01/24/youve-probably-underestimated-just-how-big-this-is/ <comment><USER3> Two things:

1\. The author of this article clearly has money on one side of the issue since he's trying to sell a cross-device app development platform.

2\. The data he supplies isn't broken down by usage type, so it's a little hard to analyze. What if 50% of the 'app' time is spent playing games? Or 20% of it is spent only in a couple of apps like Facebook? He's suggesting that native apps are supplanting web usage, but the graph actually shows web usage going _up_. So, are apps complementing or cannibalizing web usage? Hard to tell.

<comment><USER4> I understand that some people like TV/Radio metrics; such as time spent; however web sites/mobile apps are programmable with multiple purposes where each have diverse usage scenarios than passively watching TV.

Comparing Minutes spent on apps or web sites may be a bit misleading; in this case why not put time spend on Office suites or Desktops on PCs too or me watching my Lisp code. Apps such as games, contents, utilities or web front ends have all different meanings to the users and with regard to monetization (ad or not). The same is true for web sites.

a. the time I spend with my utility apps are apples and oranges comparison to the time I spend reading HN on my Android.

b. Not all 'times spend` are monetizable, or monetizable in the same rate or way;

c. Mobile apps are used slower mainly due to small screen size, finger input.

d. Games are a peculiar category on their own.

Edit: that said; mobile has expanded our connected time to new places/times; toilet, elevator, waiting (queues), couch, TV-ad pauses...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the first signs I noticed of this was startups we funded not caring much what their domain name was. IIRC that trend began about a year to 18 months ago.

<comment><USER6> I wonder how mobile web fits into this. Sure, native apps are great, but I'd much prefer to not need to switch between a bunch of native apps and just use my phone's web browser.

Mobile web apps like Facebook prove that you can build a non-trivial app that runs in a web browser and have the experience be so good that people don't even care about the native app version (at least everyone I know just uses Facebook right from their mobile web browser).

A good domain name is still valuable. This is more true especially as more access to phone hardware gets opened up to JavaScript APIs right from the browser. You just can't beat making a change to your app on your server and having all your users get new versions the next time they visit. It's way better than waiting weeks for Apple to review and approve your changes.

<comment><USER7> I've seen the opposite. Almost everyone I know uses the native facebook app versus going to m.facebook.com. Most people only use a few websites/apps on their phones, and I think it's just simpler to tap on the app icon rather than start up mobile safari and type m.facebook.com.

<comment><USER8> The "native" facebook app is just an html5 webapp believe it or not.

<comment><USER9> I have no trouble believing it, which is a big part of why it has such terrible ratings and reviews now, as compared to when it was native.

And from what I understand, Facebook has done a lot of significant engineering to try and improve the performance while keeping it mostly HTML5.

Mobile web apps aren't ready.

<comment><USER10> The FB app was heavily using webviews long before the most recent redesign. I could be wrong, but if I remember correctly it was even mostly web-based back when Joe Hewitt was still working on it, and he left Facebook in 2009.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _I met a team at a mobile dev shop a couple of weeks ago and in the > discussion I casually mentioned that mobile app usage exceeds web usage._

I have to question this assertion made in the very first sentence...it does not pass the bullshit test and it's hard for me to trust anything else in this post unless this assertion is proven in detail.

And by "in detail," I mean that this metric is useless unless broken up by category. Is it possible that Facebook mobile app usage is more than Facebook standard-browser usage? Possibly. What about for news sites? I would say, no way. It seems that many of us at HN, even the productive ones, spend a chunk of the work day browsing. Imagine how much the average white-collar worker spends idling away.

Also, how much of the mobile app usage includes freemium/MMORPG/spec-intensive games? This is a category that many web services will never try to compete in?

\--

FWIW, here is the site that the OP links to to justify this assertion: [http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web- in-...](http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-in-Their- Rear-view-Mirror)

And this is what that site says: > __In this report, Flurry compares how daily interactive consumption has changed over the last 12 months between the web (both desktop and mobile web) and mobile native apps. For Internet consumption, we built a model using publicly available data from comScore and Alexa. For mobile application usage, we used Flurry Analytics data, now exceeding 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more than 85,000 applications. We estimate this accounts for approximately one third of all mobile application activity, which we scaled-up accordingly for this analysis. __

Ah, a "model using publicly available data from comScore and Alexa"...right, that sounds like a totally reliable blackbox to base a completely game- changing assertion.

</comment><comment><USER12> I find this trend disturbing. This is essentially the opposite of what happened in the 90s during the mass migration from curated networking experiences like AOL and CompuServe towards the unfettered Internet. Now, people are willingly eschewing the open web in favor of, in the case of iOS, walled gardens. And unless this is reversed, it portends a dismal future for the Internet.

<comment><USER13> We're still trying to find the balance of local and cloud. Desktop apps were great in the 90s because they leverage the local machine's speed and hardware (there weren't any mp3 or jukebox webapps in the 90s, games etc).

But as the browser and web got more powerful and we started moving around more and having more computers (work, laptop, home) the centrality of "the cloud" because a selling point and for many applications the "local power" of the desktop was less important.

Now however we're seeing new constraints play a role.

On mobile, again power in some cases is a bit limited, we have more data/sensors to play with and HTML hasn't caught up to complicated swipe interfaces too well yet. We have location and accelerometer sensors that haven't been too well integrated yet. And your phone is always with you. So we're seeing a swing to cloud data back local apps again. The 3 mobile apps I use the most are google reader (the new site layout is space wasteful in a browser on my netbook, good luck having fun reading on a mobile browser), a movie player and a music player. On my desktop I'm just as likely to use grooveshark or some other streaming service, but with still expensive mobile bandwidth having "locally cached" mp3s wins out over streaming.

If we want to move this back all onto the web, we need an html6 that supports swipe, mobile app like layout, local storage (I know, html5 draft kinda has this... ish)

It's all about device constraints and what is available.

This is just a signal we need to develop the browser some more if we again want it to be the platform of choice in this new space.

<comment><USER14> _We're still trying to find the balance of local and cloud._

History tells us that this "balance" is a mirage. It's a see-saw with a foundation based on thick vs. thin clients, i.e. where the horsepower is located.

<comment><USER15> I always liked the metaphor of the 'wheel of reincarnation' from 1968 (!): <http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html> (Read the linked PDF paper, better than the HTML summary.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> People who are surprised about the time spent on mobile devices have obviously never been in a waiting room nor public transportation.

Since the iPhone, people have had a chance to kill "dead time" which would otherwise have been spent staring into walls and windows. Twitter's microblogging and -communication, of course, has exacerbated this where we see celebrities who tweet when there is downtime on the set where they are shooting.

I think it's completely ridiculous to say that this is something particular to mobile apps rather than mobile proper.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why does it have to be apps?

The web experience on mobile devices is improving all the time. With all major smartphone platforms now sporting WebKit browsers, CSS3 media queries and HTML5 are widely supported in the mobile space. That enables us to create sites with one markup that function well for all screen sizes.

There isn't as much pizazz on the web as can be done with apps, but given the expense of effectively writing the same app three times (one for web, one for Android, one for iOS) responsive techniques in web design can make the web option a lot more cost effective than the alternative.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's one caveat to this report that's important: the data is about two different sets of users. The web data is from comScore, and measures all US web users. It includes everyone from HN readers to the neighbor that checks email just once a month. The mobile data is only looking at US smartphone users (who own a phone that can run apps that Flurry can track), and excludes feature phone users or people with no mobile phone at all. Assuming high smartphone usage correlates to high web usage, web data looks comparatively low.

</comment><comment><USER19> Personally, I find most native apps to be much better designed for mobile devices than mobile websites. I know this is changing with newer web technologies, but the reality is that the mobile device provides a completely different set of options that mobile web will have a hard time catching up on. I'm thinking about things related to the hardware, such as near-field communication - or things related to processes that are not running inside the browser, e.g., push notifications.

To me, the possibilities with a mobile device are far greater than what lives within the browser. As much as I love the open standards of the web, and have become a software develop in their midst, there is something that really inspires the imagination about mobile devices that goes beyond the browser.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is probably true for companies targeting casual users. Facebook and YouTube are great examples.

But I can't see people switching to mobile for the bulk of their serious, work-oriented computing unless the hardware experience drastically changes. I would never program on an iPhone or iPad if a computer were available. Nor would I want to do serious video editing, or CAD. I probably wouldn't even want to type a book on an iPad unless I had an external keyboard and mouse-- and at that point, how different is it from a laptop?

Granted, most of these use cases can't be done on the web today. But that may (or may not) change. And even now, there are professional tasks that I'd much prefer to do on a laptop or desktop than on a mobile device--for example, updating Basecamp to-dos.

I also wonder whether this mobile vs web distinction will persist in the long run. Imagine a future where the most popular way to access Facebook is by clicking an icon on your iPad, which launches a Facebook mobile version in Safari or a very thin native app built around UIWebView. Is this mobile, or is this the web? At that point, I think the distinction becomes meaningless.

<comment><USER21> Few people who use computers for work require the same degree of capability as programmers do. For most office work there are huge reasons why the mobile paradigm makes a ton of sense. I firmly believe that in 10-20 years it will be the dominant form of business computer.

That doesn't mean you can't use a mouse and keyboard as well. And that does make it similar to the form-factor of a laptop or a desktop but that misses the core advantages of tablet computers. The OS experience, the app. install and management experience, the portability advantages (tablets are vastly more portable than even a laptop), and the potential cost savings. Not to mention that it could easily be a different set of companies providing such systems in the future than the PC stalwarts of today (perhaps google, apple, samsung, and HTC instead of Microsoft, dell, and hp).

<comment><USER20> So in other words, mouse + keyboard + iOS/Android will become the dominant system for everyday office use, such as word processing and writings emails? I can believe that.

As you said, the fundamental difference at that point between mobile and traditional computers is the OS. But if that's the case, then I have to question how relevant the distinction is from a developer's point of view.

To cater to mouse + keyboard + iOS/Android users, we don't need to build native iOS apps. We can just as well build regular old web apps and ensure they work well for mouse + keyboard + iOS/Android. That's not very different from what we do today, except for the fact that we'd have to account for yet another set of screen sizes.

Therefore, as far as serious/business/professional apps are concerned, I don't foresee a major paradigm shift. More like a pressure to learn some new web dev techniques, such as responsive design.

Again, though, I don't claim this would hold true for consumer apps. Many of those will likely be used from an iPhone or an iPad without any external devices.

<comment><USER22> What I think will be even cooler is tablet + keyboard + motion sensing field. If the gestures were designed right, you probably wouldn't even have to move far off the keyboard to get that nice, free-form, analog input. Now that I think about it, that would be pretty cool on my desktop, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While I think the idea of this article is true, I think it's a bit unfair to compare the number of mobile apps to the number of web sites. Yes, there may be 350 million websites, but how many of those actually offer a valuable service? I think that the number of worthwhile websites is easily less than 400k. Same with the phone app market: there may be 400k apps, but most are crap. Honestly, I think that the web and mobile probably hover pretty close to each other in terms of the number of useful applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this isn't exactly a comprehensive study, I just looked up some ballpark figures to get an idea and was really surprised by just how big the diff was between where consumer attention vs developer attention seemed to be.

I'm not sure it makes sense to think of it in terms of number of 'useful' website vs mobile apps today by some definition of 'useful' though. Even if you expect the ratio of useful / not-useful to decline at 40M Android apps vs 400K you'd still expect that most of the top useful 100 apps in 3 years' time haven't been conceived yet and will be very different from today's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just had another thought on this: mobile usage does not necessarily imply that the back-end is entirely on the device as well.

For example, the app I'm building right now has an entirely iOS-based UI, but the brains are hosted on the public Web via API. The app talks to the back-end via Websockets for anything that requires brains.

This type of architecture allows your application to participate in the UI-du- jour (native apps) while at the same time participating in the open Web. And you can simply write another client when another type of device (I dunno, Kinect?) becomes the consumer's preferred method of consuming. I think it will become much more popular in the coming years.

</comment><comment><USER25> As a web developer is pains me to say this, but I think that this is a good thing. The web moves so slowly; it will never keep up with native apps.

Some people are definitely concerned this leaves us in a less open world, but IMO, we'll be just fine. The most important part to have open is the data/logic layer, and that has happened through the explosion of APIs.

</comment><comment><USER26> I freely admit I'm on the web side of this issue.

No question that apps are big. But there's a lot of data out there that people regularly used less than 10 apps in the last 30 days. Almost all of those are social or built-in apps. They used a lot more than 10 websites in the past 30 days.

The raw number of apps and websites available is a complete red herring. Mobile apps have existed (in a numerically significant form) for < 4 years. The web is closer to 20. Expect the amount of noise in the app space to follow a similar growth curve except to date app discovery is worse. With the control vendors have over app store environments, this may get even worse and not better. Or it might get a lot better. Who knows. One thing is for sure -- if you want to be found right now, you're better off with a good web site.

We discussed this a while back in a blog post based on other data from Flurry. Also discussed by Skyfire.

Mobify post: [http://blog.mobify.com/2011/06/23/have-apps-really-passed- mo...](http://blog.mobify.com/2011/06/23/have-apps-really-passed-mobile-web- not-really/)

Skyfire post: [http://www.businessinsider.com/why-flurry-got-it-wrong-on- ap...](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-flurry-got-it-wrong-on-apps-v- browsers-2011-6)

Ed: fixed link.

</comment><comment><USER27> It is true that mobile usage is going through the roof and there is no doubt there is a legitimate gold rush happening right now.

Nevertheless, I would like to raise a few points/questions with the reasoning in this analysis, somewhat in defense of the web:

1\. Mobile apps provide a different mix of functionality when compared to the web (particularly on our PCs). Quite a few mobile apps are simply games, various time no-value-add time sinks and other similar non-connected activities. Hence, I am unsure about the merit of comparing 60 minutes inside of a web browser to 60 minutes on a mobile app. (On the other hand, perhaps facebook usage more than compensates for all this)

2\. One reason mobile usage is so high is that our smartphones are always with us and many of us chronically play with them when we have more than a 15 second pause. Again, I am unsure about the "quality" of the interaction during these times.

3\. It seems that many mobile apps - the huge hits notwithstanding - <USER2> small, yet meaningful problems in a cool way. This is great, but it eventually yields a lackluster impact - both financially and in terms of the effect on society - and it makes for a real tough proposition to develop mobile apps as a team (read multiple people) and expect to sustainably "grow" a business. Yes, the barren solution space is huge, but the bang for the time spent is also smaller on average. In contrast, the web now provides really large flexibility in solving a range of problems at various depths.

4\. It also seems that several impressive startups are leveraging the mobile platform as an add-on to their web-based presence, another channel to solve problems on or a value enhancer to the tech. There is 0 doubt in my mind that mobile is here to grow in this sense.

All in all, applications that leverage mobile have a large empty space to fill. However, people should not just jump into mobile because it seems to be the "rage".

</comment><comment><USER28> Remember a time when someone talking about the Internet wasn't necessarily talking about the World Wide Web?

Fifteen years ago we were bitching about all the startups abandoning 16 bits worth of open and unfettered TCP port address space for the walled gardens of port 80 and this new-fangled HTTP protocol.

Viva la (r)evoluzione!

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a pretty bold premise; I think mobile web consumption probably represents a pretty large fraction of those minutes. Having a web app that works well both for desktop and mobile seems more important than a native mobile app, to me.

<comment><USER30> If they included games in that then I'd say over 90% of that "mobile app use" time block is games or facebook for non-tech users. Games are better made as native apps due to audio issues and facebook is facebook. Hence, the articles dataset needs clarification before a firm conclusion can be made..

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Once mobile web browsers have access to most of the APIs that native apps have access to, and they have good offline functionality, developing a web app over a native app will be a no-brainer

</comment><comment><USER32> Comparing "web sites" at large to "mobile apps" is an unfair comparison. In addition to being able to get online through native mobile apps, smart phones also count for page views on regular sites as much as any desktop does. Also, most serious web app programmers out there also have a mobile version of their web site available, so I don't buy the whole give-up-on-standard-web-apps-and- go-for-native-mobile-apps argument. However, no one can deny the strong trend toward mobile computing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's about giving up on standards in favor of native in an either-or kind of way.

If you're building an app nowadays, ideally you'd have a web, mobile web, iOS and Android version at launch. Because you want distribution and need to go where your users are.

Thing is, the web is very crowded so it's hard to get attention whereas relatively, it's still wide open when it comes to the native app galleries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yeah and you've underestimated how much mobile web apps will dominate. There will always be native apps, but their percentage of total mobile apps will dwindle. Many, many apps require nothing more than what webkit offers today. A couple years or less of hardware performance increases will push us past the inflection point.

But the main driver will be supply. There just are'nt enough Android, iOS developers. Web devs are legion.

And no cross-device solution will be able to keep pace with webkit & HTML/CSS.

</comment><comment><USER34> I bet 80% of web minutes are spent on facebook or google(gmail in particular),that means 20% of minutes left for the remaining 345,999,998 other sites on the web.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think it's important to keep something straight here.

If you are going for the consumer market and some parts of the B2B market then yes mobile will keep advancing.

But you aren't going to do the design, programming, your taxes or any other labor intensive work or creation on your mobile.

So yes we probably underestimate it, but if we believe in that, then we are most probably also underestimating how much both desktop apps and web apps are going to matter many years ahead of us.

<comment><USER36> You assume of course that there will never be a device powerful enough to match desktop.

Should I remind you that the chip in the that SIm card is in fact the same cpu chip that was used in Apple IIs?

In next ten years you will see design,programming, etc done on tablets

<comment><USER37> I think a large part of it is also form factor. My phone could have the power of 3 super computers, but i'd still choose my laptop over it. I prefer a larger screen, and a real keyboard.

For a mobile device to replace my desktop/laptop user interfaces + form factors are going to need some rapid advances.

<comment><USER38> Foldable keyboards and dirt cheap projection technologies could mitigate the form factor issues. How about holographic displays? Or huds?

<comment><USER35> Sure, but not anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think this is misleading.

It's true that there's a mobile shift in _startup_. Most startups want to hit the mobile goldmine and become the next [enter a company here]. However, we fail to understand that those important minutes spent are spent on either games, which are consumed in matter of days (There's not many games that sustain growth for over a period of a few months), and services that, for the most part, already had a web presence.

Here's my rationale: If your startup/internet service company wants to be successful, it will have to have a mobile presence, if it doesn't, opportunity from competitor will arise and you might get into trouble.

However, considering the cost of a native mobile app (iOS or Android), I wouldn't be surprised if within 2-3 years, startup would go back to focus on web first and if traction occurs, expanding to the mobile area (Except for startup that leverage the mobile hardware, ie camera, geo-location, etc)

<comment><USER39> Also, for all those minutes used, how many of them are used by Facebook, Maps, and other service that started has a web service first

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Completely off-topic: what is this site trigger.io? I cannot access it – apparently it is flagged as suspicious: <http://s16.postimage.org/blt1xsb79/triggerio.png> It certainly doesn't seem to be a site hosting porn or child abuse content, nor does it sound like a terrorist cell propaganda site – so why would it be blocked? Should I put my paranoid hat on?

Also, does it happen to be any cached/alternative sources for that content that's not hosted there so I can read the article? Normally I could use an anonymous proxy but it seems like too much of a hassle (it's not that easy to find an anonymous one that hasn't been already banned internally as well). Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER41> Comparing apples to oranges here. Most apps are tools, something you use... While most sites aren't and only provide information.

Also, I can casually browse dozens of sites and completely forget about them afterwards... I don't casually install dozens of apps.

</comment><comment><USER42> People use their mobile phone for apps more than they do for browsing the web?

Really? No shit.

Show me that people are using their mobile apps more than they're using their desktop/laptop browsers and you'll have something to write about.

<comment><USER43> Well, that is what the article claims, they compare their own stats with comScore and Alexa stats. But I think the conclusion is indeed flawed as the Flurry stats include people with smart phones with apps on it that use Flurry, which is just a subset of all people using the Internet. They should include the absolute numbers to make the story complete. But yeah, there is a strong trend we can't deny :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm sure most of those 94 minutes per day are playing Angry Birds and other mobile games. I don't expect we are going to see any new billion-dollar companies being founded over the next 10 years that primarily sell mobile games. There is plenty of mobile opportunity, but the big players are already fighting over the obvious stuff. I'm not convinced mobile has significantly more profitable hidden gems than consumer web, certainly not based just on this article. I wouldn't recommend web devs change their careers anytime soon.

<comment><USER45> You have data to back up those claims? I see plenty of people doing plenty of other things besides playing silly games on their mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think the article is buying into the notion that the web can never be as rich an experience as the native application. I think that the last few years of explosive growth in terms of cloud services and web applications have made it pretty clear that web applications are a viable alternative. Why won't web applications work for mobile devices as well?

Is the argument simply that the app market is less crowded? Is a comparison of the number of websites on the internet(apples) to the number of android applications(oranges) that compelling?

<comment><USER25> I don't think the web can ever be as fast moving as a native environment. That's one of the major downfalls with being compatible with all platforms.

<comment><USER47> Add to this the fact that it is very much in the interest of one of the larger mobile players, Apple, to keep the native experience superior to the html5 mobile browser experience in order to differentiate their iOS offering from a generic "mobile web browser." For example, WebGL is only available for iAds, not for mobile Safari web apps, while openGL is of course available to native iOS apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is there some place we can all share data (perhaps anonymously) about what % of our users are using mobile browsers? I'll go first: on one of our large-ish travel websites, almost 10% of our users were using a mobile browser (this includes both phones and quasi-mobile devices like tablets). This site isn't very well tuned for mobile so I was pretty surprised by the numbers. We do not have a mobile app.

</comment><comment><USER49> The web has a serious problem today. I never know how a site will work on my browser. I feel like the web has become a guessing game. Whereas with mobile apps, I know that if you're in the app store then you'll work as expected.

<comment><USER50> You can tailor web apps for specific devices/browsers/resolutions to control the user experience, just like with native apps. There are no shortcut for good UX on 3" touch screen and 27" mouse-driven screen without lot of extra work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Correct me if I am wrong but I thought mobile apps aren't an alternative to the web?

Do they mean mobile apps vs. desktop Internet use? That would make more sense.

</comment><comment><USER52> Can anyone tell me if this is a nicely wrapped Phonegap or a completely new commercial framework that does the same thing as Phonegap?

<comment><USER53> Looks like a new framework that does the same thing as phonegap. The 'thin native wrapper over html5 webview' isn't actually that hard to do (even for multiple platforms). I prefer to roll my own because, last time I tried PhoneGap, the extra bloat made my app sluggish. It was much more responsive in a minimal custom wrapper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> As a web developer I have typically argued in favor of write once, execute everywhere robust web apps being the future of mobile interaction. Having built websites and apps designed to work well on mobile however, this typically leads to a stream of constant headaches trying to accommodate for the myriad of different mobile browsers and features each support/allow.

Similar to the way that different desktop browsers each roll out new feature support, and often times support features in completely different ways (CSS transparencies/gradients anyone?) mobile browsers have even slower and more varied support for features and interaction control. This problem with desktop browsers has kept most web developers and firms I work with from integrating the latest and greatest HTML5/CSS3 features in all their sites, because there is a huge handicap in trying to optimize for so many different platforms as each evolves on its own timeline.

Even though writing the same app to work well in both iOS and Android is a HUGE undertaking, the advantage is you are only writing your application to meet two different sets of API specifications. Even better yet since mobile devs are typically either iOS OR Android experts you can potentially have two different teams of devs working on the platform they know best instead of having one html team constantly striving to make your application work well (or at all) in a dozen different commonly used mobile web browsers.

I applaud Facebook for their efforts to build out a really great looking mobile web app that does look an awful like their mobile apps, but has anyone watched someone who doesn't know (or care) about the difference between a native app and mobile web app use it? I got a fairly tech-savvy family member a kindle fire recently and it comes pre-installed with a shortcut to the Facebook mobile web app because the native app is not available in the amazon marketplace. Watching over their shoulder I was amazed to see how frustrating the experience was for them when the querystring gets corrupted at certain points and all they are left with is a PHP whitescreen of death. No loading symbol, no ability to get out of the corrupted state the browser got itself into, and generally the user was left with no idea why this wasn't working as nicely as their Facebook app on iOS/Android that looks exactly the same.

At the end of the day I now lean more toward the side of mobile apps continuing to be more efficient and effective for apps that require lots of interaction with the user even if you could technically implement all those interactions in a browser. The relative simplicity of only having to code for two platforms instead of 12, and simultaneously providing your users with a more responsive experience is definitely worth it.

</comment><comment><USER55> this article seems to be implying that mobile and app are synonymous. as far as i can tell, the fact that desktop apps and mobile websites exist is totally ignored. is this about a shift from web to app, or a shift from desktop to mobile? and what about mobile web use?

</comment><comment><USER56> So this is mobile apps vs. web, not internet access via native apps vs access via browser, right?

</comment><comment><USER57> The analysis and the numbers seem to be very misleading. It counts only mobile usage which is a tiny fraction of desktop browsing. StatCounter pegs it at just ~7%.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww- monthly-2010...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww- monthly-201012-201112)

What about adding a 3rd metric for how much time the consumers browse on their desktops and laptops? That's going to eclipse the time stated in the article.

The reason we're seeing such high app numbers in Flurry is that mobile devices are not as convenient to browse on compared to laptops and desktops, so apps like games take over the time spent on such devices.

<comment><USER58> I'm thinking that maybe this has nothing to do with mobile web vs native app this could be desktop vs mobile. This post makes it out to be like native apps are gimping the user share from mobile web but I just thinks it's people doing what they used to do on the desktop with their phones.

<comment><USER14> That's what I was thinking, that this has more to do with more people having web-capable phones than any lack of future for any kind of developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Over a billion mobile only users will likely come online in emerging markets over the next ten years.

Many of those will be in India, where RIM is actually growing like crazy. I anticipate Windows on Nokia will be a serious player, and Android phones will drop to prices the masses can afford.

The race is not over and the "mobile web" may yet turn out to be the dominant platform.

<comment><USER60> I am in a position to boldly predict a new startup will emerge with what will eventually become the dominant mobile web platform.</comment></comment>