"Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ <comment><USER2> I was part of this history, working for a military contractor from 1983 until 1992. From 1985 until 1990, I was project engineer for a complete rebuild of the DSP satellite system (NORAD missile warning) ground communications network.

I consider it the peak of my engineering career. I got to go inside Cheyenne Mountain, got yelled at by a General when the system did something bad and he was called back from his vacation in Hawaii, got yelled at by a base captain for inadvertently giving orders, went to awesome Denver strip clubs with base officers and master sergeants, and found out that my system was sending early warning to Patriot anti-Scud batteries during the the 1st Gulf War.

After George H.W. Bush became president, the military budget was slashed and small contractors like the one I was working at were decimated. I ended up pivoting into digital video compression, which was an excellent move (and provided another 18 years of career).

I think I still have the 80186 assembly language code for the communications processors used on the system. They implemented a protocol called ADCCP, which is the same thing as HDLC. With all the interest in retro computing, I should publish it on Github (assuming the 5.25" diskettes are still readable). It was never classified, so that shouldn't be a problem.

<comment><USER3> I was part of this history, when I graduated in 2003 (marginal timing) I took a gig at Northrop in Sunnyvale. I grew up in Silicon Valley as the grandkid of folks who lived in orchards (long gone by the time I showed up) and between this not- _that_ -secret history of SV and idolizing the Skunk Works as a kid, I was pretty sure that I needed to be in the military industrial complex when I grew up.

I consider it the nadir of my engineering career. I got to stare at an aging brown cubicle wall for 8 hours a day twiddling my thumbs, literally. I had joined a group of old timers (only) who had designed the Trident D5 submarine missile launcher 25 years earlier and had basically just been generating paperwork since. Along the way they had "cleverly" learned how to earn quarterly bonuses by just barely overspending their budgets, ~5% over, which then got renewed at whatever got spent. Over a few decades that's a lot of compound interest you gotta spend to get those bonuses, especially if you're _doing absolutely nothing_ all day. You couldn't even read a book or check the net because it was a classified area and everything was locked down. Just you watching your life ebb away. The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it.

After George W. Bush realized that what he wanted was more tomahawks and fewer nukes, the military budget for strategic weapons was decimated. (If you're gonna blow up Afghans in caves you should mete our force more judiciously, don't just turn the Himalayas into irradiated slag.) I got called into the bosses office and told "davee5, our budget got cut and you're the newest guy here, so unfortunately this is your 30 days notice." I was mad I got laid-off, but later profoundly grateful to be shoved out the door. I ended up pivoting into consumer electronics, which was an excellent move (and has since provided another ~18 years of career).

I still have a pretty cool diagram of the [redacted] that I'm 90% sure was never classified and a Zip drive disk that I definitely should destroy, because it means nothing to me and I'm not sure if it would be a problem.

<comment><USER4> > The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it > represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it.

Government operations always operate by fairly rigid bureaucratic rules, which can always be gamed like this.

Free markets, on the other hand, always have a corrective factor applied - people have to be willing to spend their _own_ money to buy your product.

<comment><USER5>
        people have to be willing to spend their own money to
        buy your product.

I would like to introduce you to the depressing world of Enterprise Software. Do you remember the old saying "nobody got fired for buying IBM"? Think about its origin & implications, all of which outlived the status IBM had at the time of that saying.

<comment><USER4> I remember those days. Those people got punished by accounting reality, and so IBM is just another vendor today.

Which is my point.

<comment><USER6> Except that those people did not got punished. Their careers went up just fine. Those people changed jobs to different companies long before any accounting reality happened.

And accounting reality did not happened to companies that were buying IBM, it happened to IBM. That is difference.

<comment><USER4> If a company promotes/hires people who make decisions deleterious to the company's financials, that company will be less profitable and the stock price will be less.

I.e. the market corrects for things.

<comment><USER6> First, that does not make those people punished. At best it make the company punished.

Second, it does not seem like those companies were punished in any measurable way.

<comment><USER4> > Second, it does not seem like those companies were punished in any > measurable way.

Less profit adds up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a "secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework," and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to share information "at network speed."

The Enduring Security Freedom initiative is just one window into how Big Tech can reap big dollars from their relationship with the NSA. In 2013, it emerged that the participants in the PRISM program—the illegal surveillance program which allowed the NSA backdoor access to all information and user data of all of the Big Tech companies—were reimbursed for the program's expenses by a shadowy arm of the agency known as "Special Source Operations.""

[https://www.corbettreport.com/siliconvalley/](https://www.corbettreport.com/siliconvalley/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqvRzRj9tHE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqvRzRj9tHE)

Silicon Valley is a story of government funded tech development where taxpayers foot the R&D bill while VCs and white Executives reap the profits of taxpayer funded inventions.

<comment><USER8> Corbett Report is an extraordinarily low-quality information source:

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report)

<comment><USER7> One of the great things about the Corbett Report is that you don't have to believe it, you can just look at the sources because every source is referenced.

The case in point over Google's Sergey Brin and the NSA comes from a Freedom of Information Act request fulfilled by the NSA: [https://archive.fo/V0fdG](https://archive.fo/V0fdG). The second point about backdoor data collection through PRISM comes from the Snowden leaks and the reporting from the Guardian: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech- giants...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa- data).

In the video lecture of this post, Steve explains that military funded research from WWI all the way through the Cold War led to the birth of Silicon Valley as we know it today. After making Stanford the "MIT of the West" by bringing hundreds of million dollars of taxpayer money to Stanford for MIL research, in the mid 1950's Fred Terman "encourages his students to leave and start companies" and "professors to leave and consult for companies", and makes his position clear that "I don't want to build production systems for the military, I want to do research. I want other people to start companies and have the military fund them."

[https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo](https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo) [https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of- sili...](https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-silicon- valley-11-the-rise-of-%E2%80%9Crisk-capital%E2%80%9D-part-1/)

Some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies today are the product of tax payer money through the same mechanism which privatizes profits from taxpayer funded MIL research. A prime example is Google.

Sergey Brinn and Larry Page had been doing research and building Google at Stanford with taxpayer MIL research money since at least 1995:

"In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer- science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was "query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the 'query flocks' approach." A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google's origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?"

[https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in- ci...](https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa- research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/)

As the Corbett Report explains, that relationship ensured Google's growth long after the company was founded:

"In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community's shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool "capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages." So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government."

[https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09...](https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf)

And as Corbett explains with cited sources available for reference, taxpayer money funded early R&D or provided direct investment in Facebook and Palantir as well. These are but a few examples.

Silicon Valley is product of taxpayer money, where the gov. has been picking white men, usually of privileged birth and position, to be winners by funding their research and their companies with taxpayer money.

So instead of attacking the messenger and committing a fallacy, are you willing to debate the message?

<comment><USER8> In which case, cut out the (biased, unreliable, deceptively narrated, and ultimately detracting-from-the-point) middle-man, and cite sources directly.

The problem with fabulatory conspiratorialists isn't that they are always wrong. It's that they are so indifferent to truth that teasing fact from fiction is far more effort than reward. Citing them directly and credibly only feeds the bullshit cycle. See Harry Frankfurt: [http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_- _on_...](http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_- _on_bullshit.pdf)

I realised this some years back watching a 3h40m epic conspiracy fantasy which does, yes, contain numerous actual, verifiable facts. It also contains numerous uttlerly unsubstantiated claims, and in either case draws supposed conections between individual items --- the narrative --- that are entirely invalid. One key tell was about 20 minutes in, where a fact (Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech, referring not to some hazy/hazing Ivy League drinking club, as claimed, but the Soviet Union: [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#.27Secret_Soci...](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#.27Secret_Societies.27_speech)) was both utterly falsely narrated _and_ very selectively edited. Going a few lines outside the cited bits makes this clear. Lather, rinse, repeat _ad nauseam_ for another 3h20m (and there were likely earlier whoppers I didn't catch).

The reward for my sunk time cost was a realisation of the distinction and relationship between facts and narrative. These can be thought of as a graph or network, whose nodes (facts, real or claimed) and links (narrative relation) can occupy almost wholly separate truth worlds. False facts may fit within a true narrative (an essentially true though fictional novel or film, say, such as _Sophie 's Choice_), true facts, possibly with or without false or invented ones, within a false narrative (a key element of fabulist conspiracies, though often also popular cultural mythologies), both may be entirely invented (usually seen as entertainment fiction, or mad ramblings). The case where both facts and narrative are largely true makes for the most compelling accounts.

There are other dimensions to this: Facts void of narrative or relation are raw data tables. Relationship diagrams tend to narration without facts. There are the various storytelling elements and techniques which strengthen narrative and make it more compelling. All these still seem to work best within the fact-narrative-truth relation I've described above.

The problem with fabulists is that your time is very poorly rewarded, and your own views become slowly warped. Again, going straight to sources, or following more credible narrators (Surveillance-InfoTech ties are not hard to find, recent example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435499) ) is a much better use of your own, and your audience's, time.

Again, it's not that Corbett is uniformly wrong, and the directive would be far simpler were he. It's that he's indifferent to, or incapable of distinguishing, fact from fiction.

Use a source that is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent, and something of an HN perennial favourite:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581255) (2009, w/ "sblank" commenting).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600305) (2018) 43 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8980498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8980498) (2015) 45 comments.

Numerous others: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=Steve%20Blank%27s%20"Secret"%20History%20of%20Silicon%20Valley&sort=byDate&type=story)

<comment><USER9> There definitely is an aspect of "today's lucky 10,000", or I guess it would be "this year's lucky 3,650,000".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Strategic bombing is a good example of network analysis of national economies. I don't know if anyone was doing this in 1914-1918[1], but an under- appreciated aspect of 1939-1945 is how much it was about nodes and links. Ford-Fulkerson wasn't published until 1956, but someone must've been doing similar analyses to pick allied bombing targets[2]. And linear programming, courtesy Kantorovich, helped save Leningrad during the siege.

(Strategic bombing requires strategic bombers which require airframes, which would explain the some-markets-are-freer-than-others deviation of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950#Cold_War) )

[1] apart from the poor fellow who ran railroad operations for the german army, who wrote a whole book afterwards about how it wasn't "too late" to recall the troops and he could've stopped mobilisation before the french border if anyone had actually bothered to give the order. (edit: found a name, Staab [https://www.historynet.com/kaisers- question-1914.htm](https://www.historynet.com/kaisers-question-1914.htm) )

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_I) suggests it wasn't developed to the extent it would be, mid-century.

Incidentally, Kissinger is well worth reading. Many think he's a war criminal. Maybe he himself thinks he's a war criminal. But he does explain his reasonings at length, and his justification for his counsels seems to have been a desire to avoid situations like 1914, where entire empires fell due to a cascade of stupidity. (whether we actually got any tasty omelettes from his broken eggs is, I believe, still an open question)

[2] that some people still carry out these analyses is witnessed by the fact that the US Department of _Homeland_ Security for some reason has been tracking the price (volumes, really) of tea (and other goods) in China.

<comment><USER11> It turns out everything has got something to do with the price of rice in China, to paraphrase a saying my mom used to say. No disrespect meant to China or Chinese people, just an observation about how interconnected our inputs and outputs are, and how little slack there is in the system. Perhaps more slack than we give ourselves credit for, but less slack for some than any of us deserve.

I feel for those who are struggling right now, everywhere. Help those you can, near and far. That's the best diplomacy, living your ideals in a predictable, consistent way. I think that was the genius and perhaps criminal aspect of Kissinger. He was duplicitous, in my opinion, but he told the truth using a lie, as an artist does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The talks, the slides, the write ups are great. I hadn't known about this till someone here on HN made mention of it. Definitely recommend at least watching / listening to a video of him doing the presentation on YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER13> After watching the first 5 minutes I decided to crack a beer and watch the rest (late 30s interests have changed). Definitely interesting - for me the part that were most intriguing was the knowledge around how the air battle in Europe was fought. I didn't realize how much a cat and mouse battle it was around radar technology. The rest of the talk I enjoyed the details of the storyline that I had an awareness of but didn't have the specifics.

Also, not sure the last slide was really worth adding - didn't add anything to the talk. Rest was great - thanks for posting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought the radar line-of-battle stuff was the wrong presentation for the first part, but kept reading because it was so interesting.

At about slide 70, I realized - "Oh: SV came from _EWAR /ELINT technology_."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the presentation:

1\. There was a 4-20 percent chance a bomber would be destroyed in an allied bombing run over Germany in WWII.

2\. An American airman would have to fly 25 bombing runs before they could go home.

</comment><comment><USER15> PBS did a great American Experience[0] on this topic as well. Doesn't hit all the points but does spend a lot of time on the relationship between the government and SV firms.

[0] [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/)

</comment><comment><USER16> From what I've read, US war department and other associated military/intelligence factions pumped billions into SV. Good times.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great post.

Promotes narrative that military/gov influence transitioned to risk/venture.

Is that really the case?

<comment><USER18> It has been most of the US history

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a very interesting presentation.

On the topic of innovation policy, Mariana Mazzucato argues that governments should take a more active role in driving innovation towards particular goals. Be it electronic warfare / military electronics that begat Silicon Valley as detailed in this presentation by Steve Blank, or getting to the moon before the commies (Apollo program).

See her Ted presentation at [https://www.ted.com/talks/mariana_mazzucato_government_inves...](https://www.ted.com/talks/mariana_mazzucato_government_investor_risk_taker_innovator) or her book "The Entrepreneurial State"

<comment><USER20> "Entrepreneurial State" is an oxymoron...source: Entrepreneur who worked w/ state for many years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Didn't know that radar was so advanced already in WW2. He's definitely right in that it's not being told.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't that incredible?! I think of Ghz radar being a recent innovation, but that presentation mentions _several_ examples.

Granted, some of the equipment from WWII was so big it took _a whole B-17 bomber_ to carry one unit. So modern tech gets some credit for miniaturization, at the very least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find this stuff super fascinating. Is there any good books that cover similar/related topics?

<comment><USER19> If you're interested in the innovation policy aspects, see writings by Mariana Mazzucato, particularly her book "The Entrepreneurial State".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've always associate computer history with Bell Labs and other systems belonging to that era.

</comment><comment><USER24> Which one book should I read to have fun while learning about SV history?</comment>


The making of Warcraft part 3 (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-3 <comment><AUTHOR> HN's discussion about part two of this series - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4387650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4387650)</comment>


Unleashing an Epidemic to Kill Tumbleweeds - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/article/science/unleashing-epidemic-kill-tumbleweeds

<comment><USER2> here we go:

[http://www.discoverseaz.com/Wildlife/Tumbleweed.html](http://www.discoverseaz.com/Wildlife/Tumbleweed.html)

"However, anyone who is fond of birds, small mammals, and deer owes a debt of gratitude to the tumbleweed, which provides sustenance for many such animals. Among the desert dwellers who eat tumbleweed seeds, foliage, and stems are Gambel's quail, ground squirrels, pocket and white-footed mice, prairie dogs, kangaroo rats, and mule deer. "

and

[http://cals.arizona.edu/mohave/master_gardeners/kingman/arti...](http://cals.arizona.edu/mohave/master_gardeners/kingman/articles/tumbleweed.pdf)

"The main reason the tumbleweed survived is agriculture. In the American mid- west, the tall prairie grasses would have made it impossible for the tumbleweed to roll any distance. As time passed, the grasses were replaced by ploughed fields. "

Well, now we sure the killer fungi will be the right solution we've been waiting for.

</comment><comment><USER3> This method of fighting one invasive species by introducing a new species always makes me worry a bit. I can't comment on this particular case but I would like to point out that there are sometimes ways of eliminating a species without risk of spreading another species. One that I can think of is the sterile insect technique. [0] Overwhelming number of insects that have been rendered sterile by irradiation are released into the wild. They compete with fertile wild insects during the mating season. Release enough sterile insects and the population will be decimated.

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique)

<comment><USER4> I can see how it could be worrysome. Playing around with a food network could result in unintended consequences. A couple of searches:

"Glomerella cingulata (sexual version of the fungi they want to spread) (...) causes disease on many different hosts including quince and apple..." [2]

"The United States is the second-leading producer (of apples), with more than 6% of world production. " [3]

Link to article [1]

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomerella_cingulata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomerella_cingulata)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple)

[1] [http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10526-011-9399-x#p...](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10526-011-9399-x#page-1)

<comment><USER5> They want to release Colletotrichum salsolae. Glomerella cingulata's teleomorph is Colletotrichum gloeosporioides - different species. Since it's the Ag. Research Service that's interested, the first thing they'd test on are Ag. species.

Also, hopefully the dual-naming of fungi by anamorph/teleomorph will go away some day. It's really weird to refer to a species by two separate taxonomical names.</comment></comment></comment>


The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2016/03/15/the-end-of-civilization-and-the-real-donald-trump/ <comment><USER2> It appears [1] to be actually from 2016 ...!

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20160318113746/https://thehealth...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160318113746/https://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2016/03/15/the- end-of-civilization-and-the-real-donald-trump/)</comment>


A (not so) brief history of America's Internet problems - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@michaelrbock/a-not-so-brief-history-of-americas-internet-problems-427522599eb9

<comment><USER2> Wow this is a really insightful article. Great read! I highly recommend.</comment>


This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/meet-17-year-old-saving-you-game-thrones-twitter-spoilers

<comment><AUTHOR> That she's young and female is interesting...but I really love how her idea was thought up the night before and swiftly implemented...what a prime example of how fixing an itch that everyone else is too lazy to scratch can be more compelling than trying to come up with an elaborate, but contrived project</comment>


Printed Solar Panels for Less Than $10 a Square Metre - <AUTHOR> https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured-news/the-clever-electronic-inks-rewriting-our-energy-future <comment><USER2> Hey, I know the phd student who printed out these cells and set up the demonstration! It's part of the university's push for large scale organic solar demonstrations along with the smaller test cells.

From talking with him, the technology isn't really ready for prime time yet but it's getting pretty close. I think the key point is that efficiencies in small scale cells and larger scale manufacturing are still climbing (the same group has achieved greater than 5% in a cm^2 test cell iirc) and the printing is incredibly cheap and very amenable to fast scaling up.

It seems pretty obvious that you needed more efficiency for it to be a viable rooftop solution but the guy who set this up claimed that the fact he could just stick down some velcro and stick on the cells opened up some different use cases with cheap and lean installations supporting cheap cells.

All in all, if you look at how far the technology has come in the last 5 years alone, then it's a pretty exciting field to follow.

<comment><USER3> > It seems pretty obvious that you needed more efficiency for it to be a > viable rooftop solution but the guy who set this up claimed that the fact he > could just stick down some velcro and stick on the cells opened up some > different use cases with cheap and lean installations supporting cheap > cells.

I imagine one end-case could be using this as a cladding material, you could cover buildings, and the low efficiency would be balanced by the low cost.

The major problem is that these materials are unstable and degrade quickly, if you can get the lifetime up from 5-10 years now, to 20-30 years, then it really starts to look attractive.

<comment><USER4> I don't think commercial structures typically keep their cladding beyond 10 years, unless it's a warehouse, so I'd imagine if it's anything other than. A warehouse they'd be happy to just have it reliably last 10 years then whatever from that point forward.

Also depending on who's involved and the business vertical, plus tax and policy structure, there could be a cottage industry around skinning warehouses I'd imagine, even if it needed to be re-skinned ever 10 years, but I agree that anything less than 10 years isn't sturdy enough for many applications beyond super niche.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like the conversion efficiency is between 2% and 3% _, so, pretty low compared to silicon based PV

reference

[https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/17/researchers- australias-...](https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/17/researchers-australias- university-newcastle-testing-printed-solar-panels/)

[http://reneweconomy.com.au/uni-newcastle-team-tests- printed-...](http://reneweconomy.com.au/uni-newcastle-team-tests-printed- solar-panels-in-australian-first-50301/)

_ edited to clarify 2/3%

<comment><USER6> That would put them at 20-30 watts-peak per square meter, or $0.50 to $0.33 per Wp if the cost is $10/m^2. At the lower efficiency, crystalline silicon modules are already cheaper. At the higher efficiency, it may be cheaper than crystalline silicon modules but just slightly. It would need to reach commercial-scale production very soon to avoid being overtaken by the relentless manufacturing optimization of standard c-Si technology.

Another problem is that "less than $10 a square meter" is almost certainly an estimate referring to scaled-up commercial production. Printing 100 m^2 of devices for that test site did _not_ cost under $1000.

Finally, I'd wonder about lifetime and endurance. Crystalline silicon itself is extremely durable. With good supporting materials and thermomechanical design, c-Si modules can go 30 years before they degrade below 75% of original rated output. (There are at least a few solar modules installed in the early 1980s that are still working fine.)

<comment><USER7> Half the cost of solar panels is installation, because the price of panels has dropped so much. Low-efficiency panels are thus a lose; if they're less than half the efficiency of existing panels, they could cost zero to make and not be useful.

This isn't the first roll to roll process producing solar cells. Ovshinsky's Energy Conversion Devices made such things for years; in 2008, they were the largest producer of flexible solar cells. Their Uni-Solar unit is still active, but not a big player.[1]

(That was one of Stanford R. Ovshinsky's many inventions. He invented flexible solar cells, nickel-metal-hydride batteries, and much of thin-film electronic technology. But each time, some other technology pulled ahead.)

[1] [http://www.uni-solar.com](http://www.uni-solar.com)

<comment><USER8> I don't disagree, but that's really absurd. Installation is not particularly difficult. There are dangers, but It's not significantly challenging. The market requires it - because all those solar companies wouldn't exist if it wasn't profitable. Still... every time I see an installation quote I'm blown away by how much people pay. People don't seem to care about numbers once they have to get financed for a few years.

<comment><USER9> You should check out the planet money podcast on this topic. Turns out a big part of (consumer?) solar getting cheaper was the invention of a new tool, some kind of wrench I believe.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/04/10/398811199/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/04/10/398811199/episode-616-how- solar-got-cheap)

<comment><USER10> > GOLDSTEIN: But again, just in the past few years, installation has actually > gotten a lot cheaper. As a way it's gotten cheaper is it's gotten faster. > You don't have to pay those guys to be out at your house for as long. And > when I was out at John's, I actually saw some of the reasons it has gotten > faster.

> RYAN BARNETT: This is the Zep Tool. This is the end-all be-all of tools.

> GOLDSTEIN: The Zep Tool? Led Zep Tool?

> BARNETT: Yeah, exactly. (Laughter). One tool to rule them all. Yep.

> GOLDSTEIN: That's a guy named Ryan Barnett (ph).

> What's a Zep Tool? I mean, it's a wrench. It's basically a wrench. It's got > these little marks on it or whatever, but the key thing is it's part of this > whole installation system they use.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtiKyp12ej0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtiKyp12ej0)

I think it's much more accurate to call it an installation platform/system, as the wrench is fairly incidental. The hardware is the innovation. Pretty cool overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For a _very_ rough comparison, according to this, conventional solar panels cost about $10-$12 per square foot, or very roughly $100 per square meter.

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-cost-per-Sq-ft-for- solar-p...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-cost-per-Sq-ft-for-solar-panels)

Of course, what we really want is a comparison in terms of cost per watt.

Maybe equally important to the cost of these panels is the ease and cost of _installing_ them. These new printed panels are very flexible/lightweight and can be deployed easily and even temporarily.

<comment><USER12> Yep, but the article states "production costs":

>The technology delivers unprecedented affordability at a _production cost_ of less than $10 a square metre.

the cost you are citing are "sale prices", they are not the same thing.

Given that the Quora post cited is accurate (and "current" as the price of conventional panels is dropping constantly, and a two years old post sounds like outdated) the ratio is much smaller than 1/10, more probably around 4/10 or 5/10.

Still a "big thing", however, provided that it works, that the cost estimation is accurate, that the efficiency is comparable, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have any information on how efficient these are how long they last and that kind of thing? All I got for the article was a lot of hype and $10 a meter.

<comment><USER14> Woild like to know normal panel's efficiancy and costs for comparison

<comment><USER15> You can buy solar cells off aliexpress at ~$0.33 / watt (this is the lowest price atm). The most efficient cells are at 23-25% efficiency, but these are a bit more expensive (closer to $0.5).

Here's the first example I could find ([https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-Pcs-17-6-125-x-125MM- Mono...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-Pcs-17-6-125-x-125MM-Mono-Solar- Cells-5x5-Grade-A-monocrystalline-Silicon-PV/32679479078.html)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm a researcher in this field. Printable, flexible solar cells have been researched for over a decade and improvements on their efficiency plateaued at about 10% almost five years ago. That's at lab scale being tested in a nitrogen glove box, using the most exotic designer molecules and printing techniques that don't scale. Many companies have tried and failed to commercialize this technology in the recent past, Konarka being one example. I believe Heliatek in Germany is the latest iteration, no doubt propped up by their massive solar subsidies.

The main problem is that the raw organic semiconducting materials are currently not produced at scale, and no chemical company will risk ramping production when the end product is only a 5% efficient cell that will be outcompeted by c-Si in almost every application except niche cases like the chicken coops described by others here.

That being said, my best guess is that printable, flexible electronics will be seen in flexible displays/wearables within 5 years, RFID tags on product packaging in the same time frame, biomedical and soft robotics applications within 10, and flexible large-area lighting (think wallpaper with programmable lighting zones) within 10 as well.

But in the energy game, efficiency and raw material costs determine winners, and printed OPV is losing on both.

</comment><comment><USER17> > On our lab-scale printer we can easily produce hundreds of metres of > material per day, on a commercial-scale printer this would increase to > kilometres. If you had just ten of these printers operating around the clock > we could print enough material to deliver power to 1000 homes per day," said > Professor Dastoor.

That being said, may-be 10Km worth of these can power 1000 homes.

It costs $10 per sq.meter.

<comment><USER18> The costs of the inverters, installation, and connection already dominate the cost of solar.

Before incentives in California, you are looking at $5k/kw and the solar cells are less than 20% of that.

<comment><USER19> Is that true? I was looking at $4/kw (all in) 5 years ago. Not in CA, but that should come close to a 25% difference. It was mid-tier panels, but a high quality inverter.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but did that include federal and state subsidies? With Fed tax incentives (as most people quote) on a 5kw installation in CA it's $15-20k depending on who and where. So that would be in the $3-4 range... a lot of that is labor (almost half) so other parts of the country are lower. Rural places tend to be higher though.

My real point was that labor price variations can easily be larger than the total actual panel cost.

<comment><USER20> Curious, what is the need for a 5kW array? Do they typically only produce at 5-10% of peak? Or do the relatively low panel prices mean that if you are going to build 1kW, you might as well build 5?

I just went outside and checked my utility company smart meter... the whole house isnt even using 100W right now (though thats on the low side, I'd think).

<comment><USER21> Lighting/laptops/phones take a tiny amount of energy. For example, a phone battery nowadays (e.g. iPhone 6) is about 10 watthours with say 5 hours of screen-on-time. Disregarding it's on doing background stuff all the other hours, it approximately uses just 2 watt on average.

But the very first microwave (oven) I looked up on Bestbuy used 1500 watt, and if you've got something cooking for 40 minutes in there you're easily using 1 kWh, or about three months of iPhone use.

> Curious, what is the need for a 5kW array? Do they typically only produce at > 5-10% of peak?

As for peak production, well yes-ish. The average peak solar hours in the US is about 4 per day, Europe is probably at 3, in Texas it's probably 5. That means a 5kW array will produce about 25 kWh a day, or 750 a month in Texas, saving about $85 a month / 1k a year in electricity purchase at 11.5c a kWh. So yeah, on average a panel in the US produces at roughly 15% or so of peak. (±4 peak hours per day).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 2% efficiency would give you ballpark 5W per square meter (peak) or about .25W for a sheet of paper (less indoors or at night)

So, if this can be combined with a paper-thin e-ink display (and, if needed, a flat sheet capacitor for power storage), would that be enough to make true paper-thin displays at reasonable price?

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if these could be used to produce panels on a remote planet/planetoid. I.e. could you use this to create a bunch of panels to place on the moon, even with the low efficiency you'd still save a lot by not having to ship them.

<comment><USER24> You would still have to ship the raw material, as well as the machines to assemble/print them.

<comment><USER25> and figure out a way of transferring power through space..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> An interesting addition to the mix. The design space around solar power systems focuses on either cost (like in this example where efficiency is low) or efficiency gains regardless of cost[1].

Presumably if we get to a point where you can cheaply print 25+% efficient cells then we're "done" as it were on improving solar cells :-)

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/japanese-company- dev...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/japanese-company-develops-a- solar-cell-with-record-breaking-26-efficiency/)

</comment><comment><USER27> > "By reinventing the delivery model we remove the need for initial lump sum > outlays, overcoming the key barrier to community uptake and ensuring that > the science actually ends up on our rooftops," said Professor Dastoor.

But can't banks just solve this, by financing panels upfront? There's quite some money to be made there, I'd guess. And the risk is limited.

</comment><comment><USER28> A lot of cost in installations is now other factors such as casing, peripheral electronicls like invertors, labor, financing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> A French company has been doing solar panel printing for while now. What's so new with this one ?

</comment><comment><USER30> Shingles are about $8 per sq meter, uninstalled. Plywood is somewhat more. How durable is this stuff?

</comment><comment><USER31> If the efficiency could just increase (to ~8% maybe) and inverters got a bit cheaper still, I think you'll start to really open the "just for fun" part of the market. I wouldn't hesitate to put them on my shed.

<comment><USER32> Plenty of cheap inverters - design your system to run at higher voltages. Run your panels in series to get to ~120V first, then get a simple switch inverter since you're already matching (in North America where I am) your mains voltage, those inverters are cheaper and usually more efficient. Then you feed that into your MPPT, which should have the step-down for 12V battery charging and cleaning the input 120VAC power..

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Efficiency is the bottleneck of that's project, perhaps if it became an open source project creative people can create fantastic uses for it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Efficiency is the bottleneck of that's project, perhaps if it became an open source project creative people can create fantastic uses for it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Could I wear it and generate power while I walk around? Could I sell the power I generate when I reached my destination?

</comment><comment><USER35> How those films hold under direct sun?

</comment><comment><USER36> What's the cost per Watt?

</comment><comment><USER37> What is the price per watt?

</comment><comment><USER38> Yeah but do they mine bitcoin

</comment><comment><USER39> > If you had just ten of these printers operating around the clock we could > print enough material to deliver power to 1000 homes per day," said > Professor Dastoor.

The US has 100M homes. That would require 100,000 days, or 300 years...

<comment><USER40> That also means if these things decay at the same rate as normal solar panels (producing an equivalent of 30 years of like-new power through about 35 years of lifetime), only 100 presses will be enough to power the entire U.S., or about 300-400 presses if you include all power needs, not just home. Which doesn't sound like a lot, one press per million people.

<comment><USER41> But where are you going to put these things? They are quite inefficient compared to conventional solar, so it's not like you can just cover roofs in them and be done.

<comment><USER40> Yes i already realized that... Essentially that is half-scam, with that low efficiency they are pretty much useless.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do World Lenses work without depth sensor? - <AUTHOR> Snap just released World Lenses and I'm wondering if CV experts can explain how they work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6x44v8prFA.
I was under the impression that phones needed depth and advanced motion tracking (eg see Tango https://developers.google.com/tango/overview/motion-tracking) to enable stuff like placing digital objects down and having them stick without moving around. Surprised Snapchat can now do that without needing additional sensors on the device.
How might that work? <comment><USER3> You can use the accelerometer to figure out which way is "down". Then, using CV techniques to identify the ground plane. Even if you get this a bit wrong, as long as you visually track some registration points, you get consistent positioning of your virtual object, which is probably the most important bit.

I noticed in the videos that nothing ever goes in front of the animated objects, so they're probably not identifying objects, and trying to figure out object boundaries or anything like that. It's a simple, well-polished trick.

<comment><USER4> That would be my guess as well. If you actually try the feature, it doesn't actually map the planes in the image, it just assumes you're pointing it at flat ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clickable: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6x44v8prFA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6x44v8prFA)

</comment><comment><USER6> Tango is the "correct" way to do this and will give essentially the most robust set of data back to whoever is looking. A SLAM image + depth based hybrid approach will always give you more robust data.

But just plain old analysis of "parallax" (things closer move faster etc) can quickly give you a workable understanding of the general geometry of a space.

The new MR headsets like Magic Leap and HoloLens likely use both types of sensors (like the kinect camera) to determine this stuff. But Snap just wants the widest push possible, and since it is not mounted on your eyes, the 'pixel stick' being off is not as much of an issue.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot you can do with just a single camera and imu. PTAM is just one example there are other formulations but it tends to work well without using a ton of CPU/GPU resources

[http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/](http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/)

<comment><USER8> There are a few things stacked on top of each other to make it happen, but this is a good start.

Combine this with GPS information and you can roughly "place it in the world" and make sure it doesn't clip the ground plane. After that, it is just pulling it up from your sparse 2D DB and dumping into the scene for other cameras. If they really care, there'll be some data included from the placement camera to help localize it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Imperial (A UK University) are currently making large leaps forward in terms of modelling a room or environment with just a single camera and little computing power. Their basic methodology was:

\- Pick "unique" points currently in view

\- Track how they move as the camera moves

\- Combine this data with the accelerometer to get an accurate movement reading of the phone.

\- You can get the depth of any point by comparing two images and knowing the change in user position.

Simple algorithm, but their results were astonishingly good. Snap don't need to model the entire room, they just need to work out where these points are to keep the image appearing still.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are several ways to do depth mapping with just a single camera. Structure from Motion, and Multiple View Geometry are a couple. Of course, more sensors will usually provide better data. I imagine there are plenty of situation where this app with behave poorly (e.g. low light, scenes with little texture), they just don't show it in the demo.

</comment><comment><USER11> Besides, analysing the pixels directly, maybe their algorithm take into account the vibration/movement of the live video to detect depth.

</comment><comment><USER12> Close one eye. You can still estimate depth, can't you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely.

But I guess I find it extremely surprising that Google would go through years of working on Tango - software, hardware, developer community, etc, etc - <USER2> the tech was available on existing phones.

[https://developers.google.com/tango/](https://developers.google.com/tango/)

<comment><USER13> If you've got typical levels of binocular depth perception:

Close one eye. Slowly poke something 2-3 feet away. You can do it, but you might be off an inch or two with your distance estimation and be surprised when you actually make contact. Open both eyes and do something similar with another object. The added depth information should mean that you can tell where something is to a greater precision.

Same thing with Tango. In both cases, you can extract some information about the environment from a 2D image stream. Add in accelerometer, gyroscope, and depth-sensing hardware, and you can correct some of the edge cases while increasing precision even for the things that you could do with standard hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Semi-dense visual odometry, thats what you need to search.</comment>


Dealing with Non-responding Applications - <AUTHOR> http://ctp200.com/comic/13

<comment> java-man Thank you for your cooperative multitas...

:-)</comment>


IBM picks Slack over Microsoft Teams for its 350k employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/10/21132060/ibm-slack-chat-employee-rollout-microsoft-teams-competition <comment><USER2> This article implies IBM's use of Slack has been some kind of secret? IBM was the catalyst for Slack Enterprise Grid existing.

IBM have been using Slack internally since about mid 2016 as a bunch of separate teams, set up by the individual departments who wanted to use it. At the same time, an internal CIO initiative called Whitewater started formalising tools to move the company away from internally-managed products such as Notes, Sametime and notes-database based reporting systems to "best- in-class" stuff like Verse/Outlook, Slack, Mural and Pagerduty.

I worked for the company until 2019, and was heavily involved in my department's initial use of Slack as a private instance, along with it's subsequent transition to the Enterprise Grid. There was never any talk of MS Teams while I was working there, and though I suppose it's possible they evaluated Teams over the last 12 months, there would have been far too much traction with Slack at that point to justify moving. IBM never does anything quickly. (It took literally 2 years to move every BU over to Slack and off Sametime, a tool that everyone hated, in the first place.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've wondered -- does slack harvest/share/sell employee data?

Is slack a tool that an employee can turn down?</comment>


Open Data Could Be Worth $5.4 Trillion Annually - <AUTHOR> http://datascience101.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/open-data-could-be-worth-5-4-trillion-annually/

<comment><USER2> has anyone tried accessing this data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you talking about open data in general or are you talking about the data used in the calculation of $5.4 billion?</comment></comment>


This Is Your Brain on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/this-is-your-brain-on-twitter/ <comment><USER2> Sort of takes the long way around of basically saying that too much of anything is bad for you.</comment>


Recki-CT: PHP compiler in PHP - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/08/introducing-recki-ct.html <comment><USER3> I feel like when you remove a large portion of the dynamic features of PHP (references + global variables) you're now comparing different implementations of different languages, not different implementations of the same language.

HHVM is impressive largely because of the strides in performance despite PHP being an obnoxiously dynamic language, in the same way that V8 is impressive in the optimisations they're able to do on Javascript.

It's certainly a cool side project, but I don't think anyone is under the illusion that HHVM (or the official PHP interpreter) wouldn't be orders of magnitude faster if they didn't have to support the idiosyncrasies of PHP.

<comment><USER4> To get the best performance out of HHVM, you have to let it "warm up" (JIT the functions you're using), and compile the bytecode ahead of time. Otherwise it assumes you could include new files it hasn't seen before, and has to skip out on some optimizations to accommodate that. So he can't claim he's faster when he's running it like this: @exec('hhvm ' . __FILE__ . " $test");

It's also worth noting that Facebook is actually pursuing this same approach with Hack (making the language more optimizable). And they've tried the AOT approach, and it turned out to be a huge pain for several reasons.

<comment><USER5> Please look at the test script again. It does indeed warm up the JIT.

The timing results come from _within_ HHVM. Basically, the test is dispatched within HHVM, isolating just the function call itself. It's then executed 5 times (timed independently) and then the bottom 2 executions are thrown away. See: [https://gist.github.com/ircmaxell/8859d7f1bbee7b2f6e16#file-...](https://gist.github.com/ircmaxell/8859d7f1bbee7b2f6e16#file- bench-php-L952)

So the warm-up period happens. It's not just "benchmark `hhvm file.php`". The benchmark happens _inside_ of HHVM.

So yes, JIT warmup is accounted for 100%. In fact, PHP, HHVM and Recki-CT all execute with the exact same pre-compile steps (parsing and any pre-compiling are ignored in the benchmark).

And their AOT approach that they tried was all-or-nothing. Meaning the _entire_ code base had to be converted. This is a "compile what you want, and run the rest normally". In fact, this is 100% compatible with Hack and HHVM...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To be 100% fair, this is a non-official 20% project. So "Google backed" is a bit of a misnomer.

<comment><USER6> Also, "outperforms" is a bit misleading, seeing that Recki-CT doesn't even pass all bench tests.

The available numbers do look impressive, though !

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I happy for all the php coders out there, I am so sad this kind of things could help make php more important in the market place.

<comment><AUTHOR> With WordPress still powering a _very large portion_ of the internet - <USER2> potential gain in this is huge.

According to surveys ([http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm- wordpress/all/all](http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm- wordpress/all/all)) wordpress powers over 20% of the whole internet. PHP is still going strong and is huge and a lot of websites simply need something simple that works.

If this thing can introduce even a 10% performance gain in a CMS like WordPress - that can save millions of dollars in hosting bills worldwide.

As a programmer - I'm not very excited about WordPress to say the least but as an entrepreneur who has to pay hosting bills I can see the value in this. (Plus, compilers are insanely cool to begin with!)</comment></comment>


Mail art - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_art <comment><USER2> A few years back, I'd missed my sister's 30th birthday and wanted to do something a bit dramatic to make up for it.

I got the idea of sending her the message "Happy Belated Thirtieth Birthday!" with each character on a separate postcard, all sent via separate post offices.

So I researched 30 separate interesting towns in the US. Then I ordered 30 postcards, each with a picture of the place on the front, and a single character of the message on the back in a large block letter. Finally, I wrote a note on each that said something about the place but started with the big block letter.

Then, I mailed them all to the postmaster at each location, stamped and inside an envelope along with this letter to the postmaster: _Dear Postmaster: I am mailing my sister 30 postcards from 30 towns for her 30th birthday. I have enclosed a postcard, which I ask be hand-cancelled with a postmark from your town. To protect the postcard from machine cancels in its journey through the mail system, I have enclosed a stamped envelope addressed to my sister in which to seal and mail the postcard. Thank you very much for your time!_

About a week later my sister starts getting the cards, but it doesn't make sense to her so she calls me after a few. I tell her just wait, there's more, she'll understand soon enough.

Finally after maybe 2 weeks she had all the cards and was able to decode the message.

Oh, I also found a 50-state stamp set on eBay so they all had unique stamps.

It was cool. Here's what they all looked like along after she received them with an closeup of one:

[https://imgur.com/a/wYIKx](https://imgur.com/a/wYIKx)

Barrow, AK and Kealakekua, HI travelled the farthest, from my home in NC to those cities to my sister in Miami, FL. There didn't seem to be much correlation between the distance the cards traveled and how soon she got them.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds of a differnt type of mail art, in the signature of posts one usenet, here is an example of one: [http://archive.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt](http://archive.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt)

<comment><USER4> I enjoyed the 'Twin Peeks' chart

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was so disappointed when the USPS rejected my postal-stamp-sized envelope.

It would be cool to have a service (maybe one already exists?) that specializes in the processing/fulfillment of machine-unfriendly mail pieces.

Reminds me of this guide: [https://thepostmansknock.com/how-to-make- deliverable-mail-ar...](https://thepostmansknock.com/how-to-make-deliverable- mail-art/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Back in the 90s, when we got all of our gaming news primarily through print magazines, the big ones like GamePro and EGM would publish the best envelope art sent in by readers with their letters. There were often elaborate scenes, from Mega Man, Chrono Trigger or even DBZ, drawn onto the envelopes surrounding the address.

<comment><USER7> Yeah I feel like magazines sort of popularized this in that era. As a kid, I would send mail art in to some skate and gaming magazines that I read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ken Miller's Mail Art Archive

[http://www.kenbmiller.com/satpostman/index.php](http://www.kenbmiller.com/satpostman/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER9> How valued is micro art today?

Stamps are such that one must have one to mail something, so why not pick one with a pleasing aesthetic?

I'm working on a side project centered around graphic art containing varying subject matter aimed to be used in a similarly nuanced way as mail art.

I believe this idea is even more applicable in the digital world as graphics are more readily available than artistic stamps.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Washington Calligraphers Guild regularly conducts an event whereby calligraphers from around the world mail in a decorated envelope. A panel selects the best and they post it on their site over here [https://www.calligraphersguild.org/envelope.html](https://www.calligraphersguild.org/envelope.html)

If you're into this, it's fascinating to check out the earlier editions of the contest and the winners. One of my long term hopes is to actually send in something which they atleast consider.

</comment><comment><USER11> Excellent doc on Ray Johnson- "How To Draw A Bunny"

</comment><comment><USER12> Reminded me about keyset art: [https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=94482.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=94482.0)

</comment><comment><USER13> Back in my day user generated content was sent by mail. You would have to mail in your upvotes and comment sections were published in news papers. The whole process was very slow and cost money. Glad the internet was invented.</comment>


JQuery Mobile 1.0.1 Released - <AUTHOR> http://jquerymobile.com/blog/2012/01/26/jquery-mobile-1-0-1-released/

<comment><USER2> I'm using jQuery Mobile in an app I'm making and I _mostly_ like it. But there's a delay in switching between pages that I just can't track down- all of my pages are local so it's not an AJAX issue. I'm poking through the source code to try and track down the source of the problem, but unless I can find a fix it's going to be the dealbreaker that makes me switch to something else.

A shame, because other than this slowness it's a great platform.

<comment><USER3> What you are experiencing might be down to the browser waiting for a double tap when you tap on links and buttons. Google produced an article on implementing fast buttons which describes this phenomenon: <http://code.google.com/mobile/articles/fast_buttons.html>

From the article:

' ... mobile browsers will wait approximately 300ms from the time that you tap the button to fire the click event. The reason for this is that the browser is waiting to see if you are actually performing a double tap. For most buttons we are developing we know that there is no double click behavior that we want to handle, so waiting this long to start acting on the click is time wasted for users. '

The article goes on to discuss how to mitigate against this problem. jQuery Mobile's solution is to use virtual events to listen for touch events rather than mouse clicks. Try listening for vmouseup instead of vclick, this could solve the issue. See [http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0.1/docs/pages/page- scriptin...](http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0.1/docs/pages/page- scripting.html) for more details.

<comment><USER2> It isn't that- I've looked into it myself.

The delay seems to occur somewhere between the pagebeforeshow and pageshow events- so by that point the click action is definitely already registered. But there must be some function call that slows the whole thing down, interestingly, it _doesn't_ on the iPhone simulator, so presumably it's relatively CPU intensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cograts Todd and team! Looks like some solid improvements in this release.

I am the co-founder of Codiqa (<http://codiqa.com>), and we are building tools and services to make jQuery Mobile development easier and faster. We are really excited about the project and hope we can help contribute to its success.

<comment><USER5> your landing page looks very promissing, just what I wish I could use right now. signed up for beta, good luck with launching soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used JQuery Mobile for the mobile version of our site. Performance is definitely an issue. I believe that it will eventually improve with future versions so I stuck with it and used just a subset of the features that had acceptable performance. The compromise in performance was worth not having to worry about cross-device compatibility.

Specific performance issues I ran into: 1) The page transitions were too slow so I didn't use them at all and instead just do page reloads for everything. <https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/3217>

2) The list structure causes scrolling to be too slow so I had to switch to generating the CSS classes and html structures on the server: <https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/2855>

</comment><comment><USER7> Is just me or they take too much time to release new versions? For me it compromise my development.

<comment><USER8> i have done some testing for jQuery Mobile and the problem is that the amount of devices is huge compared to desktop browsers. E.g. someone makes a change to a CSS file to change something simple, but it still has to be tested on all different platforms and devices. Still v1.1 looks promising.</comment></comment>