U.S. launches cruise missile strike on Syria after chemical weapons attack - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/06/us-launches-cruise-missile-strike-syria-after-chemical-weapons-attack/100142330/ <comment><USER2> With the media, "believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see" is prudent. After having been dragged along by the nose in the case of Iraq's (non-existent) WMDs, the world should know better than to eat any old narrative presented, including this one about chemical weapons attacks.

What remains surprising to me is that this is still considered an extreme and/or paranoid attitude by many otherwise educated people. Is it really so difficult to believe that entities like Associated Press or the Washington Post, privately held entities, serve specific interests? Or that the power elite, a small group that holds 95%+ of the world's wealth, would put those resources to use in shaping public opinion to their ends?

Yet even suggesting the possibility, that you can't necessarily believe what you read in the biggest newspaper (or, shocker, the press bureaus), will yield uncomfortable looks shot back and forth, like you might be strapped with a suicide bomb. I suppose it is a modern day taboo that we can't trust the central institutions in our society.

<comment><USER3> Of course we can't trust them. That's why we have a free press and free speech - so that there is no central authority controlling the media. Anyone who wants to set up an independent media, or carry out any form of independent investigation or reporting can do so. It's strength in diversity. Anyone who has reason to doubt these reports can do exactly what these reporters did, and in fact there are plenty of cases of incorrect reports being exposed. That's the system working as it is supposed to.

<comment><USER4> >Anyone who wants to set up an independent media, or carry out any form of independent investigation or reporting can do so.

I can't - I don't have the resources or expertise to set up a global media conglomerate.

Can you ?

I could try a start up, but I would need to take venture money and that comes with giving up some control...

Pretty soon we are going to reach the conclusion that there are maybe a couple of people in the world who could, in theory, create a media outlet able to compete with the established ones.

So not 'anyone'.

<comment><USER5> _I don 't have the resources or expertise to set up a global media conglomerate._

Start small. Grab a camera, buy a plane ticket, set up a twitter account and a web page. Congratulations you are now a journalist. If your work is good you will find an audience a grow from there.

There are also lots of people already doing this, and you can follow their work if you wish

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Independent report by MIT researchers conclusively refuted US claims that the 2013 sarin attacks were conducted by the Syrian Government after analysis of the rocket trajectories: [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose- sarin](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin)

I would caution against believing any media reports until a similar analysis is done for the current incident. Assad has no reason for jeopardizing his current favorable position.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for the link.

> Most significant, he [Obama] failed to acknowledge something known to the US > intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the > country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study > concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket > attack.

> When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the > administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.

I think many of us are asking the same thing: Is the intelligence we're being fed cherry picked.

It's unsettling that the government and the media does not have to be accountable to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which is what the general public expects.

What happens to those people who mislead us, and are we finally going to smarten up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The quickest solution to a crisis at the approval polls is a war in the Middle East.

How many will die this time?

<comment><USER9> Zero, so far. Let's hope it stays at that.

<comment><USER10> AP ~2-3 hrs ago:

"The U.S. strikes —59 missiles launched from the USS Ross and USS Porter — hit the government-controlled Shayrat air base in central Syria, where U.S. officials say the Syrian military planes that dropped the chemicals had taken off. The U.S. missiles hit at 8:45 p.m. in Washington, 3:45 Friday morning in Syria. The missiles targeted the base's airstrips, hangars, control tower and ammunition areas, officials said.

The attack killed some Syrians and wounded others, Talal Barazi, the governor of Syria's Homs province, told The Associated Press. He didn't give precise numbers."

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like 6 dead

[https://www.thequint.com/world/2017/04/07/usa-attack- syria-g...](https://www.thequint.com/world/2017/04/07/usa-attack-syria- government-cruise-missiles-civil-war)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We've seen that before. In order to attack a country you first claim they did something terrible to kids, then you bomb the hell out of them.

<comment><USER12> You are joking right?

Syria used sarin gas on civilians. There are few things as terrifying and atrocious as chemical weapons. It is absolute insanity to use nerve gas, never mind the other war crimes committed by the Assad regime.

<comment><USER13> Guns, burns, bombs, live burrial, drowning at sea.

Dying from gas is no more horrible than those.

<comment><USER14> I reckon it might be much more horrible than a swift gunshot to the back of the head.

<comment><USER15> _For nearly a decade, Ketchum, a psychiatrist, went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel—or, at least, he told himself such things. To achieve his dream, he worked tirelessly at a secluded Army research facility, testing chemical weapons on hundreds of healthy soldiers, and thinking all along that he was doing good._

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/operation- delir...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/operation-delirium)

<comment><USER16> Damn, that looks like a fantastic read. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And so we jump into a 20-sided civil war that Russia also has a strong vested interest in (that airbase was being used by Russia to stage some of its operations -- interestingly enough, no Russian stuff was destroyed)

US military intervention in the Middle East. What could go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER18> Note: This comes at a time when the "moderate opposition" people and Assad's side were/are meeting in Geneve for peace talks.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's really disgusting when domestic politics spills out into the outside, resulting in wars and misery. I wish this vestige of imperialist times, the practice of "short victorious war" would finally die off.

</comment><comment><USER20> U.S. are _still_ an ally of ISIS. That's a shame...

<comment><USER3> That's bullshit. US planes are bombing ISIS as well.

<comment><USER20> ... : [http://heavy.com/news/2017/04/isis-syria-attack-trump-us- mis...](http://heavy.com/news/2017/04/isis-syria-attack-trump-us-missile- assault-response-terrorism-assad-homs/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So there are a lot of sinister theories floating around these comments... might I be so bold as to propose that this is simply what it looks like?

People have attributed Machiavellian goals to Trump's childishness before, and it turned out he was just being childish. I have zero problem believing he saw the pictures of gassed children and directly instructed Mattis to smack Assad.

Honestly I see this as Trump being the broken clock right twice a day. Putin has long used his status as a nuclear power to muscle his way around (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, etc) as he knows that other nations will think twice about shooting at his forces, so long as his actions remain reasonably limited and he expands his influence slowly. It's about time someone called him on that.

As for whether the Syrian government actually launched the strike, keep in mind that the US, for all its flaws, has the best equipped and most expansive intelligence apparatus in the world. Whatever Trump thinks, I assure you THEY do not want another Iraq-like mistake and almost certainly crossed every t and dotted every i on this.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why can't U.S. have a leader like Trudeau?

[https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/850164875368296450](https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/850164875368296450)

<comment><USER23> Because calling for the UN Security Council to do something is easy but often doesn't achieve anything, Russia, with its veto, is hardly going to allow its ally in Assad to be implicated is it?

The question for Trudeau is - when Russia says no, then what?

<comment><USER22> Ok, so let's skip investigation and just attack Syria without evidences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From the transcript of his speech about the attack, it sounds like the intelligence community has pretty solid evidence and proof that the aircraft taking part in the bombing left from the particular airfield that was targeted by the cruise missile strike.

I shall hope that this will signal a renewal in the current administration's efforts to rely on actual government intel services for strategic knowledge, as opposed to listening to talking heads on particular mainstream news and taking them at their word...

<comment><USER25> Remember when we had strong evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?

<comment><USER24> Fair enough - point taken.

Also, just checking the news updates and it appears that the President did not clear this strike with congress, but instead informed the Russian authorities about his intentions before issuing the order. Is there any more clarification on this?

<comment><USER26> Why do you think informing the Russians was inappropriate? The situation is very delicate - two superpowers fight a war, supporting in a limited way two opposing sides of a conflict. US informing the Russians means they give them enough time to evacuate their people. The intention is not to kill Russians or to start a much more terrible war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good luck, America

</comment><comment><USER28> I am generally anti-war, anti-Trump, anti-Republican... so you can imagine my surprise at the sense of relief this act has given me. Assad has been stomping on innocents in his little part of the world without substantive rebuke for far too long. What's the point of the US's ideals if we don't stand up to the bullies of the world? I know intervention leads to horrors, but refusal to act to stop war crimes is almost as morally reprehensible as committing them yourself. Anyone else thinking along the same lines right now?

<comment><USER29> I agree that Assad is "stomping on innocents". But so are the rebels he is fighting, namely ISIS and Al Qaeda and similar groups in a smorgasbord of terror. Shall we bomb them too (and thereby strengthen Assad)? Mideast politics are horrendously complicated and need to be untangled carefully, as one would untangle the wiring in a bomb. Unintended consequences are the norm, unfortunately.

<comment><USER28> Absolutely right. We shouldn't use the same methods to fight terrorism, though. If one of your opponents plays the centralized-government military game, play by those rules, if another plays by the decentralized-guerilla warfare game, play that. At the end of the day I think it's the US's responsibility, as arguably the most powerful military force on earth, to defend humans caught in the crossfire of other military actors. My support of unilateral action against Assad does not preclude my support for fighting the smaller repressive regimes he claims to be chasing.</comment></comment></comment>


Can you suggest some companies I can apply for event management jobs? - <AUTHOR> I am studying in Event Management and I have been graduated. <comment><USER2> You can apply jobs in the global companies such as Pico. It is a well known event marketing company that offers many job opportunities world wide. You can apply for project assistant. For your reference, you can visit [http://www.pico.com/en/people/join_us.php](http://www.pico.com/en/people/join_us.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> Event management as in, Network Security?</comment>


Spotify migrate 5000 servers from Debian to Ubuntu - <AUTHOR> http://raphaelhertzog.com/2014/07/16/spotify-migrates-5000-servers-from-debian-to-ubuntu/ <comment><USER2> Ubuntu LTS is a joke, really. Any major issue found in any core package is usually forwarded "upstream" (which is Debian).

Very few people in Ubuntu have, apparently, the knowledge to debug issues which go beyond simple repackaging of an updated copy. Even issues related strictly to Ubuntu (such as mount dependencies with upstart with complicated setups with multipath) do not get fixed if the issue is not resolved in newer releases and/or got already debugged in Debian.

This is not what "support" in "long term support" is. Predictable release cycle in these terms is not worth much.

For desktop systems it might be different, but then again in our lab (~50 users) most of our Ubuntu's users shifted away to Mint over the course of 3 years. Only one is still using Ubuntu.

But of course I'm biased, I'm a Debian developer myself.

<comment><USER3> At my company, we don't even consider Ubuntu as a viable server platform. It's RHEL/CentOS for just about everything.

As you mentioned, the LTS Ubuntu versions are really not on the same level as the stable RHEL releases and support that is provided.

Yes, Ubuntu is very popular... in both the Desktop and Server arena (mostly catalyzed by EC2 making Ubuntu the default Linux image, even though EC2 is built out of RHEL/CentOS boxes). However, most "big metal" servers are RHEL/CentOS or something else.

In any event (and distro-fany-boyism aside ;-) ... one has to question the change from Debian Stable to Ubuntu LTS. The only thing I can think of, is they wanted a more "proper" company to call up for support... even though Debian are the guys Ubuntu calls up when _they_ need support.

At the end of the day, my 2 cents would be to get a distro that focuses on being a server distro first and forthright, not a distro that is a jack-of- all-trades.

<comment><USER4> One reason they switched is because of Docker issues on Debian. Source is here (@4:46) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pts6F00GFuU#t=284](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pts6F00GFuU#t=284). Whole video is worth a watch though.

<comment><USER3> RHEL 7 (and now CentOS 7) has native Docker support built in... seems that would have been a good choice of distro if they were looking for good, long term Docker support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're still running Debian Squeeze in production at one of the places I work. It had one advantage recently: The SSL package was so old that the heartbleed vulnerability hadn't yet been introduced, lol!

<comment><USER6> I have a client who was in the same position. They actually still have a few boxes on Etch... and amazingly, one Sarge box:

$ cat /etc/issue

Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 \n \

They're all running a very old hacked-up version of torque that no one remaining at the company can do anything with. At least they're walled off from everything else, I suppose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I don't understand is why companies don't pay Canonical for support? Is it such a bad thing to pay for Linux support?

I wonder if companies that have chosen Ubuntu LTS think they are supporting Canonical and its developers just because they are running Ubuntu. This article doesn't mention Canonical at all.

Support Debian developers is a great thing but Canonical probably spends tons of money and I rarely see companies saying "I chose Canonical and Ubuntu because...".

DISCLAIMER: I work for a company that provides Linux support services

EDIT: Typos

<comment><USER8> > One thing I don't understand is why companies don't pay Canonical for > support? Is it such a bad thing to pay for Linux support?

I've never needed paid professional linux support. Or windows support. Or mac support. Or android support or any of that.

I think the issue is...once you develop enough in-house Linux knowledge you don't really derive a benefit from paying for support.

Tbh, the only kind of "linux support" I'd really want is overnight sysadmin support so I don't get calls at 3am. I suspect that isn't the kind of support you have in mind.

<comment><USER9> All software has bugs, and professional end users often hit edge case bugs that affect few others.

Do you push fixes for these back into your distribution (or upstream and cherry-pick into the distribution, etc), or do you maintain your own private repositories containing your modifications?

If you do the latter, then you have extra maintenance costs. If you pay for support from a distribution vendor, then you save that cost. Even if you have the expertise to do everything yourself, it still costs you time (and therefore money). Working with a distribution vendor amortizes that time between all of their customers, saving everyone money.

<comment><USER8> > All software has bugs, and professional end users often hit edge case bugs > that affect few others.

I'm kind of amused by the implication that I'm not a professional end user.

> Do you push fixes for these back into your distribution (or upstream and > cherry-pick into the distribution, etc), or do you maintain your own private > repositories containing your modifications?

Or maybe, y'know, a third option where one picks software that is highly reliable for your use case.

You are suggesting a very false choice. If you have unique needs that frequently cause you to encounter edge case issues, you need someone in house who can fix those on your timetable and not a vendor's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who admins a bunch of Debian powered servers, it would've easier for me if the Debian LTS project had been announced last year instead of earlier this year.

The 1 year gap between the release of the new version and the end of support for the old version just wasn't long enough. Sadly I'm also switching servers to Ubuntu because of it - along with a push towards using Docker containers powered by distros with long term support.

</comment><comment><USER11> My team switched from Debian to Ubuntu a few years back for precisely for this reason: a predictable update schedule. Dealing with support isn't really my concern. I'm able and willing to workaround whatever edge-case issues arise, but when I deploy an OS on a box I need to know how long I can plan on the core OS elements being updatable. I need to be able to schedule mass OS upgrades months in advance. Ubuntu provides that capability, Debian has not. Though it sounds like Debian has woken up to this issue and is finally addressing it.

</comment><comment><USER12> TIL Spotify has 5000 servers ... somehow I expected they'd have more.

<comment><USER13> They have more. A guess would be about the double.

<comment><USER12> I see. Did you used to work there?

Why were the other servers not upgraded?

<comment><USER13> I'd love too, but no. But I have a close friend that works in their SRE team. I also meet lots of Spotify people at meetups and such as I live in Stockholm.

My guess would be that they will not migrate their data-related machines (Postgres, Cassandra etc) as the reason for going to Ubuntu is partially for Docker and using Docker in their testing and staging environments (to begin with).

The other one being that they don't have anyone maintaining an patched inhouse kernel for debian anymore (or they don't want to do that).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Flip gender in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Garrett-R/gender_bender <comment><AUTHOR> The biggest problem I have right now with this is "her". The 3rd person possessive and objective cases are identical for female ("her"), but different for male ("him" / "his").

So these 2 sentences flip "her" differently:

        It was created by her very quickly
        It was created by her very own child

I'm no NLP expert so if anyone has some ideas, please see this issue: [https://github.com/Garrett-R/gender_bender/issues/2](https://github.com/Garrett-R/gender_bender/issues/2)

<comment><USER2> Have you tried nltk's part of speech tagging?

<comment><AUTHOR> Experimented with SpaCy, didn't work too well, but will try nltk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't "examine gender norms" it just creates a lot of non-sense per book like "She had to go to war like most women and like many ended up amputated and homeless"

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to hear more about why you call that nonsense.

I think that's a great example though. I'm male, and I think a common misconception is that gender equality is only for the benefit of females. But feminist issues effect everyone. Like women being allowed to join the workforce increased productivity which also benefited men from having cheaper products.

Or this example you point out, men are typically the ones being drafted into war or at least the ones serving on the front lines. I think that raises a lot of interesting questions too. Is that fair? Should women more often be included in drafts or mandatory service? Should women be included in the decisions to go to war? Would we have less wars if that were the case?

<comment> core-questions > Like women being allowed to join the workforce increased productivity which > also benefited men from having cheaper products

It also nearly doubled the labour force without actually doubling the number of jobs available, which arguably resulted in the stagnation of wages to the point where dual incomes became necessary for families to maintain the same standard of living as they did decades ago.

There are advantages, but let's not pretend it has been some panacea. Dropping birth rates in the first world may largely be to do with women deferring pregnancy for career advancement.

> Should women more often be included in drafts or mandatory service?

War is war. The military needs to be distinct from other fields as it is not an experimental playground for egalitarianism, it is the profession of targeted death and destruction. Changes to the military have to be evaluated in the context of "what makes the most efficient military unit", not "what military unit represent everyone back home best". It's not a representational game, it's a crudely real necessity for the security of a country.

On that front, real study can show what makes a more cohesive unit. If adding women helps, do it. If it hurts, don't do it. Doing it to make a point may endanger real lives.

> Should women be included in the decisions to go to war?

Aren't they already? Plenty of female politicians, advisors, representatives. Of course they should be involved, but on their own merits and through their own career advancement, please. Trudeau-style arbitrary enforcement of representational quotas promises no guarantee of better decisionmaking.

> Would we have less wars if that were the case?

Do women have fewer interpersonal conflicts with their peers than men?

<comment><USER4> > War is war. The military needs to be distinct from other fields as it is not > an experimental playground for egalitarianism, it is the profession of > targeted death and destruction. Changes to the military have to be evaluated > in the context of "what makes the most efficient military unit", not "what > military unit represent everyone back home best". It's not a > representational game, it's a crudely real necessity for the security of a > country.

NASA used to have a requirement that astronauts had to have experience as military test pilots. The military said that test pilots could only be men. This meant that women could never become test pilots nor astronauts.

Then someone put a few women through the NASA tests and found they performed at the same level as men, and sometimes better than men.

Too often "let's be careful, we need to test this" is used as an excuse to continue discrimination even though that's objectively worse.

[https://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html](https://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html)

<comment> core-questions > Too often "let's be careful, we need to test this" is used as an excuse to > continue discrimination even though that's objectively worse

You just said they tested it and they did fine. That's all I am asking for. I don't think your quoted statement logically follows from that at all.

I think it's pretty fair to say that the battlefield is a different situation even than being an astronaut and what works in one place may not work in all places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Dawn Quixote

Not sure if this is intentional or not, but "Don" in this case isn't a name, but a title. Does the library attempt to determine whether a name that can also be a word is in fact used as a name in a given instance? (Not blaming it for getting this one wrong if it does, since it's a Spanish rather than English word)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, that was intentional just to be funny. There are indeed many words which can sometimes be names (some months, some town names, I even know a woman who's birth name was America).

I let the user control which names are translated (and they select a name for each unique identified name) and allows the user to mark a suspected name as not a name. This is the `--interactive-naming` flag.

I added that after the first iteration and reading through an ePub on my Kobo and found tons of random proper nouns "flipped".

<comment><USER6> > I even know a woman who's birth name was America

I know an "Africa" and know of a "Madeinusa" ("made in U.S.A", which she was not).

<comment><USER7> Sounds like the Miranda musical where one of the main characters is named "Usnavy" after the inscription on a ship..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The whole gender issue has been very well covered and is now overrated.

Much more important is to get people (especially typical parochial Americans) to realize that there exist other human beings in other countries. Even the most sexist American male is aware of gender issues (even if he doesn't agree with them). But even "liberal", "soft-hearted" Americans don't much care or know about the life of someone in say Bangladesh or Indonesia.

So maybe you could also think of changing nationalities. E.g. change Anglo- American names to Bangladeshi or Indonesian ones.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps on a macro level gender issues have been covered at a surface level. However most people don't grasp how ingrained gender biases exist in everyday situations or in this case, literature. This is an interesting project to bring those more nuanced or subtle biases to light.

<comment><USER10> Everybody already knows about the missing tampons in the men's restroom. Tell me about the little kid's life I could have saved with five dollars.

<comment><USER11> What does any of this mean?

<comment><USER12> I read it as a disdainful version of "instead of focusing on small-scale complaints about gender issues, why don't we focus on more important and large-scale issues like saving children's lives?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is interesting and close to some things I have been thinking about (vide [http://p.migdal.pl/2017/09/30/dating-for-nerds-gender- differ...](http://p.migdal.pl/2017/09/30/dating-for-nerds-gender- differences.html)).

Did you try making some interactive version? I think this could be inspiring for a large audience.

Did you try using things like word2vec, to find word "analogies"? (They are often biased, like doctor - man + woman is nurse.) Comparing two "translations" could be interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be interesting to try to add word2vec. I wonder if I was successful, and the analogies are biased like you mention, then the book would be flipped but still feel "normal".

So, "the nurse walked in and she said hi" would presumably get translated with word2vec to "the doctor walked in and he said hi".

That's not the effect I was going for, but it would be really interesting to compare the differences like you mention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could you perhaps make a simple but user-friendly website that lets people convert their epubs?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have thought about that. I will do if there's demand since I would really love for people to be actually using this and right now only developers can use it.

Will require a bit of simple front end work. For example, translating an epub really needs to involve the user (which is currently available in the terminal) since it's very difficult to automatically translate names.

For example, "April" can be a month, a town name or a person's name. It needs flipping if it's a name, but not otherwise. Even context sometimes doesn't help: "We were worried about April."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice one! Original, sharp and funny.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, you should try reading one of the epub's, it's quite entertaining, and you some interesting assumptions that you may otherwise would have overlooked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "If Ivan weren't my son perhaps I'd be dating him"

Loved the examples, can't wait to try it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, and feel free to leave a comment if you do use it in some interesting way!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Excuse me, but this "flipping" business only further reinforces the idea of gender as a binary construct, which is problematic.

<comment><USER16> Not sure if you're trolling but a tool which flips between two popular genders doesn't deny existence of other genders. Not everything related to gender has to be about the gender spectrum.

<comment><USER17> A k2+ gender version would be an interesting expansion on the idea though. Since the notion of a complementary or inverse gender isn't universal to all genders, maybe cases where there's no clear inverse the gender could be swapped with a randomly chosen gender. Or just swap any explicit gender reference with a different randomly chosen gender. This becomes a bit more challenging if you want to keep the output cohesive though, since you'd probably have to introduce some sort of entity linking scheme.

Another issue is finding an appropriate k for genders, assuming this package is implemented with some sort of hard coded gender mapping. This becomes more complex when accounting for different cultures, which probably just ends up multiplying k by m cultures.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Education level of successful tech founders? - <AUTHOR>

What is the average highest level of education attained by those who have sold their technology-based companies for a personal gain of $10+ million?
Inspired by the Reddit AMA posted yesterday (man sold startup for $20 million, has Bachelor's degree), I began wondering how I could realistically do the same.  As a college student, a very immediate issue is graduate school - to go or not to go?  Naturally there are other factors, but I'm really wondering about statistics: how often do founders at each level of education succeed impressively but repeatably?
This seems like the kind of statistic that would interest the HN community, but I could not find a similar submission. <comment><USER2> Education can help you, yes.... but I've never heard anyone who succeeded say that their degree was pivotal in their success. They've all pretty well said it takes some smarts, some guts, and more hard work than ordinary humans should be able to accomplish.

(Of course, in some fields you must have a degree just to play, so YMMV)

</comment><comment><USER3> Grad school isn't just about in-class education, it's about making connections, opening doors, and demonstrating a certain level of seriousness about the endeavor.

If you have an MBA from HBS and an MS from MIT, there will be a lot of doors open to you that simply won't be available without those sorts of connections. This is not to say that they are requirements for achievement. They simply improve your odds of getting "lucky" at some future point in time.

That said, I shouldn't downplay the importance of the education aspect. The number of case studies I read and thought about during grad school did wonders for sharpening the way I think about my own business.</comment>


It looks like Microsoft is already breaking a big promise with Xbox Series X - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/23/21335984/microsoft-xbox-series-x-exclusive-next-gen-promise <comment><AUTHOR> Just reading through the story, it struck me how bad the Xbox naming scheme is. I am a PlayStation owner and casual gamer, I generally follow consoles. But looking through that list it's difficult for me to put the consoles in order, and difficult to tell what games will work on which system at a glance.

I can't help but think that confusion would be far worse, for example, for parents buying a console for their kids for Christmas.

I wonder if it's possible to quantify how much that mental friction adds up to reduced sales.

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems a bizarre decision when if the hype is to be believed the real jump this generation is the increased drive speed meaning you not longer have to design levels around loading corridors. Once you release cross generation you can't build a game around that anymore.</comment>


A 32 year old BASIC programming challenge, solved - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiFEicJ6grM

<comment><AUTHOR> The original Sinclair ZX Spectrum manual featured a listing to play a few bars of Mahler's First, with the reader asked to play the whole piece as an exercise. Here's Matt Westcott completing that exercise with the help of a few friends and a table covered in Spectrums. In the process of making this possible it is also believed that the record was broken for the number of networked Spectrums in one place.

<comment><USER2> I can't get youtube (at work)

Is this the event in Oxford, with a bunch of speccy 48s hooked up with one of these? [http://spectrum.alioth.net/doc/index.php/Spectranet](http://spectrum.alioth.net/doc/index.php/Spectranet)

(I think there would have been a Raspberry PI in the mix somewhere as a network metronome)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed it is, and using the Spectranet board. The Pi simply provided synchronisation, each Spectrum had the whole piece in memory as BASIC code.

We had a bit of a discussion about how it might have been done back in the day using 1 bit input ports and a Spectrum doling out sync pulses.

Edit: Though the Spectranet's auto-loading of the code made things far easier than it would have been with loading 12 Spectrums from tape!

<comment><USER2> Fabulous, I've been waiting for the video since I saw the photos on facebook :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Actual title:

        Mahler's first symphony, as played
        by 12 networked Sinclair ZX Spectrums

The first 7 minutes are explanations of the challenge and how it came to be. Actual "performance" starts at the 7 minute mark.</comment>


Implementing breakpoints on x86 Linux - <AUTHOR> http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2011/01/implementing-breakpoints-on-x86-linux.html

<comment><USER2> That's a good informative article. I'd never stopped to think about how breakpoints work. Basically, you overwrite part the code to call an interrupt which sends SIGTRAP. Your SIGTRAP handler then has to both do what you want and execute the code that you patched over. Thanks for posting this, and please keeping posting more like it! It deserves more attention than it got.</comment>


Ask HN: Is this a good idea - Startup Deals? - <AUTHOR>

Many technology startups often find it hard to get early adopters/beta users. It becomes even more difficult if their target audience is non-tech and not in their social circle.
How about creating a platform, StartupDeals, that connect startups with early adopters by offering various deals in a way similar to daily deals sites? For e.g., discount coupons, free 3 month membership, etc.
StartupDeals can then market these deals to its registered users based on their interest. It can also try to promote these deals on social media such as Facebook, twitter, G+ etc.
Do you think this idea has legs? Is there any similar service available? <comment><USER2> You'll only find half of your answer here - those trying to market their apps. The real trick is finding out if the people that represent the other half of your business model think it's a good idea.

Some questions you need to ask yourself: 1\. Who are those early adopters? (the end users, not the HN crowd [a]) 2\. Where do they hang out?

[a] The HN crowd could be early adopters for a service like analytics or something techy, but probably not the best crowd for, as a wild example, a premium knitting service.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it could work. I think it might have to be more "social" than current deal sites like GroupOn.

Quick idea: users could have profile pages that list the deals they have gotten and have a one line and 5 star rating for the deal/startup.

</comment><comment><USER4> I understand the concept, however don't see why them startups can't just advertise on the existing deal sites that have a larger user base.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe existing deal sites have different kinds of audience. However, this service will focus on early adopters interested trying out new technologies. Also, it will create a community of such users and will track their interests and activity to recommend relevant startups deals to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Appsumo does something similar but yeah, I think it might have some legs...

<comment><USER2> And they've almost completely pivoted to paid educational content.

On the one hand it means less competition for the OP, but they pivoted for a reason. There's likely more money in their education products because of the price point and the LTV of the customers.

How many times can you sell the same person on an analytics package? The LTV of a customer in a business like that can't be great. You help them find the right tool for the job and you're done. You teach them CSS101 and they come back for CSS201, etc.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Gandalf – $1 private Docker registries - <AUTHOR> http://gandalf.io We just released Gandalf.io, a private docker registry-as-a-service. We've kept it really simple and affordable. The first private docker is free and the rest come in plans all priced at $1 / docker. We built Gandalf.io as an internal tool to manage and access our dockers and liked it so much we're releasing it as a service.<p>Gandalf.io is built by a small team of developers for fellow developers. We're eager to do more like managing trusted builds, continuous integration and continuous deployment, as a single pipeline using only dockers on our platform. For now though we think empowering teams to get started with dockers by sharing them easily and using the standard docker cli will do. <comment><USER2> I'm a Docker newbie but, don't private registries go against the spirit of Docker and basically every infrastructure automation tool created in last 5 years? I can't even see enterprisey companies finding this useful because their IT policies are so strict that having config on someone else's servers, private or not, is against their wonky rules.

<comment><USER3> First, in the real world private registries are used for builds containing source, sensitive keys, and so forth. There is a use case here.

But second, no enterprisey company will use a service that bills like this, because

-$4 and $250 per month all rounds down to zero, so it's not a selling point

-$4 signals no support when the shit inevitably hits the fan

-$4 signals this company will tank along with your data in a month

An enterprise company with actual money will take an hour or two of dev time to boot up one of the open source registries ([https://github.com/dotcloud/docker- registry](https://github.com/dotcloud/docker-registry)) and stay in control.

Source: working at a Docker startup for almost a year

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm uncertain as to why I'd use this over the official project offering [ [https://index.docker.io/plans/](https://index.docker.io/plans/) ] at roughly the same price point? [e.g. $50/month = 50]?

<comment><AUTHOR> for one you can get started with a private repo without paying for it. You can securely share it with your entire team and not pay one cent, and you can do that just by creating an account on gandalf.io.

Secondly, for those who're starting out using dockers, a four docker plan is optimal because most folks use a combination of containers inheriting from public and private repos. So you can pay $4 per month for 4 repos using gandalf.io whereas you have to pay a minimum of $7 per month for docker.io's service.

Thirdly, this is just the beginning and we're working on a roadmap of features, some of which docker.io might not provide.

Fourth - support is important when using a service, and support can have a specific flavour when using a startup offering. try gandalf.io to understand the flavor :) !

<comment><USER5> :-) Not to troll but the third point made me smile: "we don't have yet features that our competitor doesn't have yet"

<comment><USER6> Given humans are irrational, even offering the exact same service at the exact same price point, but with a different name, is a viable business plan in a niche without competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are already private Docker registries out there. My company uses [https://quay.io](https://quay.io) , for example, and Docker has its own private registry. How does Gandalf compare to these existing offerings, besides on price?

Security for Docker images is just as important, and in some cases more important than it is for code assets. What protection does Gandalf offer against unauthorized downloading of images/layers, and tampering with images stored in the repository?

Does Gandalf plan to support features like building images from a Dockerfile, ideally sent via GitHub repo hook? This is a great workflow convenience offered by both Quay and Docker.

<comment><AUTHOR> Quay.io is a great product and if you're happy with it we don't recommend moving to Gandalf.io.

Gandalf.io went live yesterday and still very much in early beta and we're still improving the functionality and experience. The reason we decided to set up Gandalf was because we think this is a huge potential market with space for at least 3-4 players. We also think docker containerisation is more than just enterprise devops preserve and want to lower the threshold for startups and individual developers to get started.

Gandalf.io has an auth layer wrapped around the standard docker registry and you can access it via SSL using the docker api (this includes the docker CLI). We're still examining ways in which we can strengthen the security of the system and are open to suggestions and insights.

Github based builds are in the upcoming release slated for next week. Sign up for the free plan and you'll be notified by email when that happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Constructive criticism =/= trolling.

Please don't equate the two when posting on HN. People here are offering comments, insight, and opinions. It shouldn't be surprising if they are not in agreement with you on certain aspects.

That being said, best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! yes, sometimes we misunderstand the intent of a comment. and sometimes we don't :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I grok access privs incorrectly but..

Personal user data Full access This application will be able to read and write all user data. This includes the following:

Private email addresses Profile information Followers

Why read AND write? Why all data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our goal is to integrate your docker workflow very tightly with github. The user will be able to decide which features to switch on and off and whether to write or only read! Obviously we'd rather announce these features when they're ready and we'd rather collect the data upfront so we don't have to prompt the user once again when they sign in.

<comment><USER10> That seems like an OAuth anti pattern. Why would you ask the user for every permission when they're signing up? That can only hurt conversions. Ask for the bare minimum, and then request more permissions if the user does something within the app that needs them. Especially for something as sensitive as this, you want people to feel safe using the product and you can't do that by scaring them when they hit "Sign Up with GitHub."

<comment><AUTHOR> I do agree that's something we might have to change if the signups slow down. And we need to do a cost-benefit on that perhaps. At the moment, folks are signing up though :)

<comment><USER9> Which perhaps shows how little "folks" care about who they share their data with. Additionally I have private organisation repos that I _really_ don't want you taking a peek at. Sorry, no dice for me unless this is tightened up.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. We received more than a few brickbats for this since yesterday. So we changed the github oauth request scope. As it stands now, the data we request is only the user scope which includes the user's private email address ([https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes](https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes)). We'll add additional scope requests if a user elects to use our upcoming github build feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So what are sizing limits on each "repo" you offer? Unlimited?

I could not find a FAQ-esq section on your page, and was too lazy to "sign up to (possibly) find out".

<comment><AUTHOR> We're currently offering the service without constraints - its still a beta offering and we could add limits later on. We're assuming you'll build a docker within reasonable limits - say 3-4GB max.

FAQ page coming up soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good luck using something called 'Gandalf'..

<comment><AUTHOR> hmmm. I was a lawyer in a previous avatar. I think we're ok.

<comment><USER3> Famous last words when going up against Goliath Hollywood.

<comment><AUTHOR> :D thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Best of luck guys, I love competition :)

<comment><AUTHOR> We love you guys. in fact, we didn't realize you guys were the competition till we were in alpha :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> what exactly is the use case for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sharing private containers among team members, especially when remote working. That's the best use case.

Storing your own private containers for access from multiple locations or machines.

Auto-deploying containers using the standard docker api

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> btw, for support questions - we're #gandalfio on freenode

</comment><comment><USER15> tempting at a gr8 price. all it has to do now is to work correctly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh. yeah. its worked for us so far internally. we're scratching our own itch. and it certainly could use a lot of polish. but we think our core focus on docker collab could help us fine tune it and provide a fantastic service with all the support devs need.</comment></comment>


"Blueprint Cleanse" aims to clean up Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/25/silicon-valley-its-time-to-clean-up/ <comment><USER2> Financially, they'll clean up. What Lacy probably really needs is better food, less booze and more sleep. Same goes for anyone else wanting a "cleanse."

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, you can build a business on homeopathy too.</comment>


iOS7 has broken Audiobooks - <AUTHOR> https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5320585?start=0&tstart=0

<comment><USER2> It seems like the music app received some half-baked changes across the board. For example, you can no longer shuffle all music in a particular genre through the app. They added (or maybe always had) an option to shuffle through Siri ("Play some blues"), but there are some frustrating edge cases:

"Play some video game music." "I'm sorry, I can't help you with videos."

I've had to resort to creating smart playlists for most of my genres, which is highly inefficient.

I find the new interface for shuffling to be confusing as well. It's now the word "Shuffle" with a white background, which changes to "Shuffle All" with a slight pink tinge when you tap it. If tapping "Shuffle" turns shuffle on, then why would tapping "Shuffle All" turn it off? It just seems like a confusing experience.

Overall, I'm fairly happy with iOS 7. But outside of radio, the music app feels like a regression.

<comment><USER3> Also missing from Music.app: The ability to delete music from the device. Fortunately I still have some space left on my phone, but barring plugging the phone into iTunes, I don't know how to decrease the amount of music on my phone.

I'm with you: iTunes Radio is nice, but the rest of the music app feels a bit worse off.

<comment><USER4> I can delete songs from my iOS 7 phone by swiping. I'm not sure which settings factor into this - it's being synced with iTunes via USB, and it's logged into iCloud but I doubt that makes a difference.

<comment><USER3> Strange, I can't get the swipe behavior in the Music app. I've yet to plug the phone into iTunes since the iOS 7 update, but whenever I swipe across an album or song, it acts as if I tapped it.

<comment><USER5> Swipe right to left, not left to right.

<comment><USER3> Huh. Works for tracks and playlists, not anything else, looks like. Still, much better than nothing. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm listening to an audio book right now - I can select any chapter I want and it shows the chapter length fine. This has been working the second I upgraded to iOS7 the day it was released.

<comment><USER7> Is that an m4b file (the "official" way), or just a collection of mp3's shoved together to form a book ("Part of a compilation")? The former has been broken (especially on iPad) since iOS 5, and the latter has many issues but at least you "can" see how many chapters there are, and select them.

See, for example, these support thread with hundreds of comments: [https://discussions.apple.com/message/16397272#16397272](https://discussions.apple.com/message/16397272#16397272)

The sad thing is that they don't give 3rd parties access to m4b metadata (chapter name, length and cover), and they themselves have broken their Music.app's ability to parse them. So nobody else can fix this mess.

<comment><USER6> mp3's shoved together to form a book - that's probably why it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The default Music app is a sub-par audiobook player, as was in iOS 6. I don't consider that a cardinal sin for an app called "Music", or good cause to say that the operating system upgrade itself 'broke' a medium. Audible works as well as it ever did.

I have to say that audiobook players are an area where Android has an app that doesn't have an iOS equal - Maple Audio Player handles audiobook files about as well as you could ask, with excellent bookmarking and playback speed options.

</comment><comment><USER9> Bit of an oversight from the Music.app team, unless they decided that it was time to trim functionality and leave it to third party apps to handle.

<comment><USER10> That would be an incredibly dumb decision, considering they sell audiobooks in the iTunes store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I get the same feeling from iOS 7 that I did from using the first versions of OS X after using NeXTSTEP / OpenStep, so much of the cool stuff and details were missing. I still miss the menus and the Digital Librarian among other things.

Its like in the big rush, they just left things undone or looking like crud (the new icons for example).

<comment><USER12> Getting iOS 7 ready for the announced date was obviously death march. I am therefore optimistic that many of the small bugs and annoyances will get smoothed out over time … :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They also broke podcasting in the newest version of iTunes for Windows.

The interface is worse than something even Microsoft would ever make.

<comment><USER11> They broke it on OS X too. Now you can delete the media you downloaded, but cannot delete the entry. Makes for a very cluttered "Did I watch that" interface.

<comment><USER14> Not only that, but I have several episodes from several different podcasts that continually try to download each time I refresh. I have listened to them before, and deleted them, but itunes insists I really really want to listen to them again.

I do not.</comment></comment></comment>


Check out my flicker app written in bash - <AUTHOR> http://penguincares.no-ip.org/cgi-bin/flicker2.cgi?p=yogi+bear

<comment><USER2> This is a really cool time waster. I typed a few keywords and it creates works of art based on the keyword i type.

My favorites so far.

<http://penguincares.no-ip.org/cgi-bin/flicker2.cgi?p=sadness>

<http://penguincares.no-ip.org/cgi-bin/flicker2.cgi?p=blood>

<http://penguincares.no-ip.org/cgi-bin/flicker2.cgi?p=kiwi>

<http://penguincares.no-ip.org/cgi-bin/flicker2.cgi?p=tacos>

anyways, back to work

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to get every picture 6 times.

Would you be interested in publishing the source, as an example to other people who might be tempted to do similar things in bash ?

</comment><comment><USER4> The "bug" of finding each picture six times turns into a wonderful Andy Warhol-like feature. Each picture claims more of one's attention this way. I say leave it!</comment>


Harvard psychologist reveals the biggest reason people don't achieve their goals - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/A-Harvard-psychologist-reveals-the-biggest-reason-people-dont-achieve-their-goals/articleshow/53850022.cms <comment><USER2> void article(void)</comment>


Ask HN: GAuthify looking for experience testers, free membership in return - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
We're looking for a couple projects to help us out by providing some feedback on implementing GAuthify: https://www.gauthify.com. GAuthify is a RESTful hosted API service for google authenticator, sms & email multi-factor authentication.
If you're looking to add two-factor authentication to your project please shoot us an email at support@<website>.com with some project information and expected number of users. In return for your help we'll cover your cost of membership.
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <https://www.gauthify.com/></comment>


Yubico will release a security key with both lightning and usb-c - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/8/18172193/yubico-security-key-lightning-connection-iphone-2fa-ces-2019 <comment><AUTHOR> I am really excited by this.

Now google just need to add support for this in their smart lock app...</comment>


San Jose: Three TSA agents test positive for Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/10/san-jose-three-tsa-agents-test-positive-for-covid-19/ <comment><USER2> The US seems like it's pretty screwed at this point. All the recent cases here in Australia have been people returning from the US.

Just look at the exponential growth on this plot: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_the_United_States#Timeline)

That's not a trend that's going to reverse quickly.

<comment><USER3> It looks that way because it's almost certainly been circulating in the US since January [1], and testing was hardly available until recently (and is still ramping).

Despite the long, largely unchecked circulation period, there's no hospitalization crisis here.

And another record-hot Spring/Summer are on the way... take heart!

[1] [https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-10/us- coronavi...](https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-10/us-coronavirus- cases-far-above-official-tally-scientists)

<comment><USER4> "there's no hospitalization crisis here."

Yeah, there wasn't a crisis in Italy 3 weeks ago either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am slowly coming to the realization that a quarter to a half of a percent of people who are alive on Earth today may not be in one year.

Please send the following links to your employers, especially if you work with the public:

[https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or- peop...](https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will- die-f4d3d9cd99ca)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronaviru...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronavirus- cancel-everything/607675/)

The _only_ way we will avoid swamping the healthcare system in the US is by enacting widespread measures _before_ it seems necessary/imminent. NOW is the time to act, not later.

<comment><USER6> Given life expectancies, this is true every year. For people under age 50 the stats look much better; for people over 80 yearly death rates are already in the double digits. Whether coronavirus deaths are additive for the 80+ crowd is yet to be seen.

<comment><USER7> Ultimately no death rates are additive. There's a death for every birth, sooner or later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This piece of news is scarier:

Sacramento County Gives Up On Automatic 14-Day Quarantines

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2020/03/10/8139909...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2020/03/10/813990993/coronavirus-sacramento-county-gives-up-on- automatic-14-day-quarantines)

<comment><USER9> > Effective immediately, people in Sacramento County should not quarantine > themselves if they've been exposed to the COVID-19. Instead, they should go > into isolation only if they begin to show symptoms of the respiratory virus, > the county's health department says.

> Sacramento County has at least 10 coronavirus cases, including one person > who recovered.

10 cases and they already gave up on quarantines? The decision maker either knows more about unpublished cases or don't understand infectious diseases at all... What a great way to make sure more people "show symptoms" two weeks down the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A useful number is that the deaths today represent the disease burden 3 weeks ago. Propagating that multiplier forward, the deaths today represent 500-1000 infected individuals today. So the US has 16 deaths. You're looking at 8000-16000 infected individuals in the US today.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hate to stoke FUD, but that's pretty much it for any semblance of containment. If those TSA agents tested positive, 1) you can be sure other TSA agents at other airports are also infected, and 2) I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't pass Covid-19 to a significant number of travelers, 3) whatever individual(s) gave it to the agents undoubtedly also gave it to other travelers.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, it's pretty clear by this point that the virus has been spreading widely in the States for some time. Such is life.

Just wait until they actually start testing people in earnest; the infected numbers will skyrocket in a very short period of time, causing another stock crash and more mass panic.

It'll probably be at least another few weeks before it's time to buy with both fists, imo.

<comment><USER13> Are people not aware at this point that the US will look like Italy/South Korea in a few weeks time? Hence, the hoarding of goods that has already begun..

<comment><USER14> It's safe to say that the US will likely look worse than Italy or South Korea since additionally the US also has:

\- Inconvenient labour laws regarding sickness, people are and will be afraid to take sick leave

\- A lack of public healthcare, the US system does not seem designed for a collective approach.

\- A higher rate of diabetes compared to the rest of the developed world which seems to be affecting quite a lot the impact of the virus.

<comment><USER15> On the other hand, the US has a lower population density and less use of mass transit.

It's also not clear what advantage "public healthcare" is supposed to have in this context. The CDC has the authority to test and quarantine people. For the majority of people infected the "treatment" is to stay at home and recover. A minority of people will require hospitalization, but most of those people will have health insurance. The vast majority of those requiring hospitalization will be elderly and eligible for Medicare. The large majority of the remaining minority of a minority will have private insurance. And the remaining minority of a minority of a minority who require hospitalization, aren't eligible for Medicare and don't have private insurance will presumably still get treatment and then have a bad day when the bill comes, which is a financial problem rather than a medical one.

<comment><USER16> > still get treatment

Everyone always seems to forget about this. According to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act[0], any hospital that accepts Medicare _must_ "provide an appropriate medical screening examination (MSE) to anyone seeking treatment for a medical condition, regardless of citizenship, legal status, or ability to pay." And if it's determined that treatment is required, or the patient's health may be in serious jeopardy, the hospital is required to treat them until they're stable.

In other words, if you show up at the ER, they're required to run tests to see if you have a life-threatening condition. If you do, they're required to treat you until you're stable.

Everyone makes it out like US hospitals will simply turn people away at the door; in fact, they can't (assuming they accept Medicare, which most do). They'll at least find out your status, and treat if necessary.

If you've ever been in an ER waiting room, you've seen this posted.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act)

<comment><USER17> I hate to break it to you, but when society starts to unravel because there are 1,000 dying people lined up outside the hospital and no free space on the floor for them to be treated, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act won't be worth the paper it is printed on. Words and laws can't make 0 hospital beds fit 1,000 untreated patients...

<comment><USER15> Not getting treated because there are no resources available is a completely separate problem from not getting treated because you don't have insurance. At that point you're down to solutions like converting the nearest hotel into a temporary hospital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems extremely irresponsible to not give more details on where the TSA agents were working. Did they handle or inspect baggage? Were they working a checkpoint? Which terminal?

They just threw a fear grenade out into the general public and now anyone who went through that airport in the last week going to wonder if they need to get tested or self-quarantine.

</comment><comment><USER19> I flew out and back to SJC this weekend on a trip to Disneyland, so this doesn't bode well.

Upside, my company has mandatory work from home this month so I'm self quarantined already.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was going to attend Tensorflow Dev Summit. We dropped $350 on flights + airbnb for this week. But even after Google canceled the summit, it was _still_ tempting to fly out anyway and go enjoy a week in Sunnyvale.

Our plane took off at 3:30pm today without us. This article is pretty vindicating.

Thank you to Google for making tough decisions early, like canceling the summit.

</comment><comment><USER21> Serious question, even if dc drops the ball why can't states do something about it? USA is a federation after all and states are responsible for the welfare of individual citizens too?

<comment><USER22> You see a lot of individual states acting - Washington State has banned gatherings of more than 250 people, NY has placed a town under lockdown and the National Guard is distributing food, California has given up on quarantine and headed to mitigation... As you can see, without direction it's a bit of a mess.

<comment><USER23> California is bigger and richer than most countries - why would they need direction?

Of course it'd be good if the CDC released some general guidance, and was doing better on providing stats, etc. But the States really need to handle things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are they wearing masks at the airports yet? I am still surprised at the lack of deployment of temperature sensors and masks in the US.

<comment><USER25> Masks do not help prevent spread when worn by someone who is not infected (except by reducing hand to face contact to some degree). They help prevent infected from spreading to others. [1]

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/how-to/which-face-masks-protect- against...](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/which-face-masks-protect-against- coronavirus/)

<comment><USER26> I hear this a lot but the whole message isn't consistent to me. Masks (mostly n95 respirators) aren't effective for the general population but they are needed by healthcare workers? How is it they are at the same time effective and ineffective?

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it's disingenuous the way the media saying handwashing is the only important thing. Studies have shown surgical masks are actually pretty much just as good at mitigating virus spread (reduced virus exposure helps, even if you don't avoid it 100%) - [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/18481...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/184819)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is the end.

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

<comment><USER28> Please don't post duplicate comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> That doesn't sound good...</comment>


Coronavirus: Has America ever been this humbled? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51981627 <comment><USER2> >famous entrepreneurial spirit is kicking in.

I'm sure it will but there will be huge coordination mismatch and resource waste because WH is not up to the task of coordinating. Some places have millions of face masks, some have none. Hospitals with wealthy donors and patients will be stacked to the roof when there is opportunity to by stuff.

\- There will be too much some things, too little some others. When there is enough some resource, it will not be efficiently distributed according to need.

\- Mitigation efforts will be optimal because states respond differently different times. If state borders can't be closed like country borders people just come in and spread the disease again.

States should consider creating a 'shadow government' to coordinate the efforts and hire those people that Trump let go to run it.</comment>


Going Out for Lunch Is a Dying Tradition - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/going-out-for-lunch-is-a-dying-tradition-1496155377 <comment><USER2> That's a shame. I really enjoy getting out of the office, walking someplace good to eat and getting some fresh air. I find I'm reinvigorated for the afternoon. Even when I don't go out I go to the company cafeteria - at least I'm getting a change of scenery and oftentimes have engaging conversations with folks outside of my immediate team. Having lunch at my desk is the worst - I feel as I've been cheated: no change of scenery, no social engagement, no unplugging from the machine, no re-invigoration. No thanks.</comment>


Ancient Rome's swiss army knife - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8485654.stm <comment><AUTHOR> The knife is at 1:50</comment>


Consider using domain extension .rest for API based services - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Since your API is not consumer facing, it doesn't have to shine with a .com and because there's no .api, .rest would work. Originally for restaurants, but I'd imagine they'd prefer .com for that perceived trust. Thoughts?

<comment><USER2> on www.name.com a .rest domain costs 43$ a year which is four times the cost of a .com domain. Also you might not be able to transfer the .rest domain to AWS to manage it with AWS Route 53.

A simpler and cheaper approach would be to create a subdomain and/or a subpath

1) api.example.com (SUBDOMAIN)

2) www.example.com/api (SUBPATH)

3) api.example.com/api (SUBDOMAIN AND SUBPATH)

<comment><USER3> The subdomain approach is the more appropriate because:

* DNS routing

* Can control/fine tune CORS

* Avoid mixing up path routing with other interfaces/services

* It's more coherent (i.e., page served with www.example.com and REST API at api.example.com)

<comment><USER2> yes I agress subdomain is definitely better than subpath overall. I personally use the subdomain AND subpath approach for a api and an api service (api.example.com/api) This way I have the separate DNS but if I want I can add the API service as a subpath to www.example.com/api using AWS API Gateway and avoid an extra round trip call to the DNS and CORS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Stopping Autoplay Videos in Web Browsers - <AUTHOR> I used to be able to avoid video by just not installing Flash, but thanks to widespread HTML5 video support, I can't seem to escape autoplay video.<p>I have tried Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and there really doesn't seem to be a way to stop them. I was wondering if anyone here has a full-proof suggestion on preventing autoplay video. <comment><USER2> There's a Chrome extension called "Disable HTML5 Autoplay": [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable- html5-auto...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable- html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai?utm_source=chrome-app- launcher-info-dialog)

<comment><USER3> That's what I've been using but doesn't work 100% of the time. Not that it's the extensions fault, it does help. cnn.com has been the worst offender for me, I ended up just disabling javascript on their site just to stop the damn autoplay videos. The other trick I've been using is uBlock Origin (or your fav ad blocker) to block the video player completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> firefox has media.autoplay.enabled and media.block-autoplay-until-in- foreground flags in about:config

<comment><AUTHOR> I will give this a try. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> FireFox on Android lets you disable autoplay on videos. This is why I switched from Chrome on mobile. Videos always seem to want to autoplay when I'm in a public place. Plus FireFox mobile has extensions so I can run adblock.

I still use Chrome everywhere else, though.</comment>


12 Coding Languages That Never Took Off - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwaredeveloper.com/features/ghosts-in-machine-071207/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if lisp should be included. If delphi and haskell are on the list, then it seems fair game to rank by relative rather than absolute comparisons (instead of absolute small numbers, rank by the gap between what is and what could/should have been). I might also include smalltalk on this list as well.

Oh well - with the web, nothing has to be past tense. Just don't call it a comeback!

</comment><comment><USER3> LOL @ Willarson's comment

Reading about ColdFusion stirs up feelings of nostalgia for me. I remember being a young teen interested in web application development and somehow I got my hands on the Allaire ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit published by Forta and Que. None the less, that was a short lived experience (fortunately) and I had quickly moved on to perl.

</comment><comment><USER4> The idea behind this post could be done in an interesting way. It could have looked at real languages and examined why they--despite some promise--didn't succeed. Unfortunately thats not what the article did.

Instead it asks us to feign confusion why bitfuck didn't become a mainstream language. Maybe because it was a bitfucking joke from the start?

</comment><comment><USER5> Heresy! I loved PowerBuilder and I won't have some dude saying it's dead, even if I haven't seen it in 8+ years.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most successful programming language ever? Whitespace:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_>(programming_language)

In fact, we're all programming in it right now, though we'd be getting some compilation errors.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe brainfuck could be useful for code obfuscation? Just write a small brainfuck interpreter (should be easy, as it only has 8 commands), then compile your code to brainfuck.

The 2d language looks like a nice playground for artificial intelligence experiments (genetic algorithms).

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it too late for you to change the news.yc title to "12 Coding Languages That Waned"? It's ridiculous to say that PowerBuilder and ColdFusion never took off.

<comment><USER9> Even that would be too generous. Brainfuck, Befunge, INTERCAL, and Java2k were _jokes_ , duh, never intended by their authors to "take off" in the first place. And I think "never took off" and "waned" are both inaccurate when applied to Haskell.

I don't know much about VRML, SMIL, and Haskell, but I'm not inclined to trust this author's judgement of them.

<comment><USER8> You're right. Haskell, despite having been around a few years, is early in its life. I suppose the right title would be "12 languages that aren't wildly popular in 2007."</comment></comment></comment>


Android takes huge lead in US Smartphone market - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/235105/android_pummels_apple_and_blackberry_in_smartphone_supremacy_race.html

<comment><USER2> I've been keeping track of Comscore's numbers for a while and I've been looking for the Verizon bump that iPhones were supposed to receive. Looking at the derivative of the trends there does appear to be a small change but the effect is small and Android's growth is still about 3x the iPhone's.

Historical market share: <http://i.imgur.com/Aj7og.png> Change per month: <http://i.imgur.com/2qIqH.png>

One thing to consider is that these numbers are market share, they don't show how the overall pie is growing.

(By the way, Comscore wants you to pay for historical data so they wouldn't like this being posted publicly, but I've been collecting this data from their press releases.)

<comment><USER3> First, thanks for the historical data. That's nice to see.

But it doesn't seem to me that we'd expect to see an immediate bump in iPhone's numbers from Verizon for at least three reasons unrelated to the platform's (potential) desirability:

1) The iPhone has a lot more competition among Verizon customers. For a while, if you wanted a good smartphone with AT&T, you were getting an iPhone. We wouldn't expect to see "auto-flocking" to the iPhone on Verizon like there was on AT&T for that reason.

2) Contract rollover inhibits fast reaction to new developments. I know a substantial number of people who went Android with the Motorola Droid release in November, 2009. For a 2 year contract, that means November, 2011 is when those customers will be reevaluating their smartphone brand.

3) For some people who wanted an iPhone, they probably bought an iPhone regardless of the network. iPhone on Verizon was (or will be) a chance for some people to change carriers and keep the phone they love.

I think those three factors inhibit a massive switch to iPhone simply because of its availability on a new carrier. Other factors may play a role, too. For instance, AT&T put a lot of their own advertising weight behind the iPhone. Verizon hasn't platformed the iPhone in the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was an original droid owner. I didn't want to switch to AT&T, as I had dropped them years before for a variety of reasons. Everyone I knew got iPhones, and I stuck with Verizon and was happy with my droid. Two months (or so) before the iPhone was released on Verizon, my droid essentially died (left side of touch screen unusable which rendered the phone useless). I got a Droid2. At the same time, I got my non-techie fiance a DroidX.

Right after acquiring those two phones, Verizon announced iPhone. So...I returned them at the 30 day mark. Went to some old phones we had for a month or so and then got the Verizon version of iPhone a few days before everyone else.

I DO NOT like the iPhone. My fiance also DOES NOT like the iPhone. I will be giving mine to our teenager in a month when I have an upgrade available and she will be giving hers to another kid a few months later with the next upgrade. I will immediately go back to an android phone, and most likely a Droid. Why?

1\. Unexpectedly - the droid battery life sucks. That was the major reason I wanted an iPhone. But, I'm willing to deal with it. In fact, when I actually USE my iPhone, its battery life isn't substantially better (but still better). But it's not enough for ME.

2\. I am just old fashioned I guess - I like the physical keyboard. In its absence, I like swipe. For me, it's just faster to get my emails/sms messages sent. Forget the keyboard - it's a preference thing. I can get a device on android WITH a keyboard or WITHOUT a keyboard. I like the options!

3\. Google Maps/Navigation is SPECTACULAR on Android. It's not even comparable on iPhone. I'm sure I could purchase an iPhone app to make my experience better...but I refuse! The android app is free, it's awesome and with the various layers it's just something that I can't live without. I'm very directionally challenged and that app is a lifesaver that I don't want to live without.

4\. Little indicator light telling me I have something new. Stupid, right? That little light saves me from having to unlock the phone and see if I have something that's new or not. The notification system is just __better __.

5\. Email - I can't (or I don't know how) to reply to an email on the iPhone and add an attachment.

6\. I used my droid WAY more for voice search and voice navigation. I NEVER used voice in other areas of the device, such as txt messaging - but I LOVED it for certain things and I just don't do it on the iPhone. Why? Don't know! I bet it's there - somehow. For me, it's just not part of the experience.

7\. File/Photo transfer - it was so easy with my droid. Plug it in to my PC - copy! DONE. I could even copy from my PC back to the phone and it figured it all out. With iPhone, it seems I have to do everything through iTunes. iTunes is slow as hell on my PC. I hardly EVER sync the phone via my PC for this reason.

8\. I don't recall (and maybe I'm wrong???) ever having to delete voicemail on my droid to free up space.

I have more reasons I'm sure - these are off the top of my head. In the end, it doesn't really matter. If people are still replying to this thread, I'm sure some will give me an equal number of reasons why the iPhone is better - or even challenge some of the reasons why I loved my droid. At the end of the day, I'm going back to the android platform. I LIKED IT BETTER! I don't REALLY regret switching, because it allowed me to form my OWN opinion of the two platforms and come to my own decision.

This is relevant to this conversation because I would PAY the same, or more, for an android phone over an iPhone. That's MY preference, as a techie, and that's my fiances preference - and she is definitely NOT a techie. I have very close friends who just don't get where I'm coming from - that I must be crazy...to them - enjoy your iDevice. I'll soon be back to enjoying my android device!

<comment><USER5> That physical keyboard thing is a huge deal with women with nails (nails don't trigger the iPhone screen).

While iOS catching up on the notification system, you're right about the defaults being somewhat better on some android phones for people (sync/maps especially).

If you don't like apps (sounds like you don't), it's a tossup which phone you'll like better. iOS has a better browser, sync is better on many (but not all) android phones, the lack of a physical keyboard is daunting for many, especially women with nails.

If you just take pictures with the default app, mail, text and use the default maps app, the higher quality camera in many droids can make it a better device for you. It's really only when you get into apps themselves (especially 3rd party apps) does the difference hit you. You and your fiance do not sound like app people.

That said, if you want to make your phones suck less till you get new ones:

Install PhotoSync to copy your pictures over. Don't even need to plug in.

Install navigon to make driving directions better

If you want new notifications now, either install a GM seed (not recommended) or jailbreak (a bit of a pain if you're getting rid of the phone), there are lots of different much better notification schemes on there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> By my calculation, there have been about 130 million Android devices sold to date, and over 200 million iOS devices (including iPads and iPod touches). I haven't found an easy way to get these numbers. Here are my sources:

* Apple announced the 200m number at WWDC this year [http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/06/apple-touts-impressive-ios-nu...](http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/06/apple-touts-impressive-ios-numbers-at-wwdc/)

* There have been about 325m smartphones (including iPhones) sold worldwide so far <http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1421013>

* Android has about 40% market share worldwide [http://gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/09/6820706-andr...](http://gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/09/6820706-android-market-share-to-surpass-40-percent-this-year)

It looks like iOS still has at least 50% more users than Android.

But none of that matters compared to the one number I find hardest to determine:

How much money is sent to third-party developers on each platform?

Meaning, how much do customers spend on apps, less percentages sent to the app store owners? The consistent feedback I've gotten from all Android and iOS developers is that iOS customers are willing to pay more. (Apple announced they've given $2.5 billion to developers at WWDC. I can't find the corresponding Android number.)

<comment><USER7> I imagine the number for Android lying significantly lower, because a) it's a lot harder to pay in the Android market and thus b) more apps are ad- supported. But I don't think you can ignore the market share trends in favor of how much money devs get on each platform today. Google is already working to get carrier billing for apps to more countries, so buying apps on android will get easier. Given the huge android userbase, it might soon be very smart to put in the extra effort of programming for Android (especially as you'd be one of the first to do so).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a developer, what's relevant to me is the addressable platform.

Here the comparison is between a bunch of android phones with a mind boggling matrix of hardware and OS versions... to just one of the iOS devices.

Having ported an app between the iPhone/iPod and the iPad, and having done the transition to "retina" resolution, the fragmentation in the iOS universe is about as much as I'm willing to take.

Is there a single hardware & OS combination for android that is comparable to the size of the iPhone & iPod touch, iOS 4.x installed base?

I really don't know, and have no idea where I'd go to find out.

The thought of trying to support an android port of my apps, with the seemingly lower return on investment that the android application stores seems to give doesn't seem profitable.

<comment><USER9> Ha. You don't know how good you have it. On Android:

* Certain devices decode h.264 wrong and crash, others don't, and it's hard to reproduce and virtually impossible to test

* No, there is no Android device dominating the others. Not even _close_. Program to API 7 or API 8 if you must, but the whole thing's a headache.

* No expectations for resolution

* This freaking bug (ARGH!!!!!!): <http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1353>

* Everything is sized relatively, but the only way to size to a % of the screen (that I've found) is to pad a view with empty views with different weights, and set the middle view to 0dp (density-independent pixels, which, because of some manufacturers' lies and trickery, aren't always density-independent) tall, and have it resize later. But wait! Setting it to 0dp messes up other aspects of resizing!

* The order of operations that Android goes through to resolve layouts, if it's even logical, is incredibly opaque, and at the very least, not at all intuitive. For example, denoting a view "A" to be above another view, let's call it "B", is not the same as denoting view "B" to be below view "A". Now try that with four views, arranged in a T formation. Hellish! And good luck trying to resize an image to clamp its left, top, and right edges to the screen, and crop it at the bottom - it won't work unless you clamp only a corner (i.e. top and left) then have it resize to fill the third clamped dimension, that is unless you're using other special tactics to mess around with other parts of your layout, in which case you'll waste a LOT of time finding the right answer, or one good enough to use.

* The concept of resource overlays in Android is a huge, huge, huge pain in the ass. Possibly necessary given the complete fragmentation of the devices.

* Devices will actually lie to you about their screen dpi/resolution because they think it'll be better

* Some devices might have bad defaults, or not allow you to select a button without tapping it (i.e. with a directional pad) while others will.

* Weak-linking and adding in checks for future functionality is not possible, to my knowledge, on Android. Adding in support for Honeycomb features entails actually not supporting them directly, but proxying them through a compatibility library.

* The error-checking for XML layouts and themes is weak.

* XML layouts and creating views in the equivalent of a view controller is entirely different and the mapping is not 1:1. Combining the approaches piecemeal complicates the whole process enormously.

* Asynchronous data can only really be loaded one way without causing lower-end devices to crash on large datasets, and that is with the whole cursor/content provider ecosystem, which is a poor excuse of an abstraction given Java's power.

* Parsing stuff tends to be dog-slow unless you spend an inordinate amount of time paying attention to it.

* Certain upcoming platforms running Android - and developed by Google itself - don't even support the NDK, which means you can't even dip into C/C++ for performance anymore for said platform.

God, I miss developing on iOS. It's too bad our app got rejected for using In- App Subscriptions, then rejected for _not_ using In-App Subscriptions.

<comment><USER8> I understand the frustration of getting a rejection from Apple, it probably wouldn't sting as much if they had better bedside manner. When it happened to me, I was livid for about 5 minutes, thinking it was actually due to a bug on their end. Then I investigated it and discovered that it was actually my mistake, and didn't feel so bad. But a little less terseness and I wouldn't have had that initial anger because I would have correctly understood the reason for the rejection.

I appreciate greatly the long list of issues you just presented. Despite the tone of my previous post, I was on the fence about android.

I'm dismayed to hear that google doesnt' seem to be supporting the NDK as much going forward, as one of the alternative solutions I'd considered was using the Unity engine. Unity is a game engine, but it can be used to make just about anything you want, and you could concievably do a regular, say, business app in it, with the advantage that the same app can be produced for multiple platforms, including iOS and android.

It seems to me, the way to support android would be to do a web app. Presumably the browser, being based on webkit, works and is reasonably targetable. But that limits android as a platform to situations where a web app works as a business model.

Thanks again!

<comment><USER9> To be clear, the NDK will probably remain supported and first-class on mobile devices. Given that I have an NDA for the current Android device I'm targeting, I can't say anything really specific about it, only that the NDK is not designed to work with it (though it would appear that it does support JNI). So I wouldn't discount Unity necessarily.

I have half a mind to just write up a new UI framework in OpenGL or something, and use it as a vehicle to learn OpenGL better, but I don't have the time or the money to do so, and ultimately I can worth with the stuff that's already there, albeit with constant frustration and platform angst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I lost my iPhone 3GS last Thursday, used a Blackberry Curve as a loaner until today, when my Samsung Galaxy S arrived.

I was really surprised how far behind RIM is. I knew it was bad; didn't know it was that bad.

<comment><USER11> It's because you were using a Curve...

<comment><USER12> Nah, I used a bold for a week (while I was developing an app for it), and it was unbelievably bad. I couldn't find a single thing to like about it, however the most unbelievable thing is you have to reboot the device every time you install an app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So this _is_ going to play out just like Windows vs Mac.

<comment><USER14> Yep--low margin but ubiquitous commodity provider vs. high margin but low market share premium offering.

<comment><USER15> One thing I don't get though is that Android phones aren't very low margin. Their retail price is just as high as an iPhone (or at least close). Even feature phones aren't cheap.

So do non-iPhone phones not get subsidized at full retail pricing (or generally much more substantially than the iPhone)?

<comment><USER16> With the exception of my gadget geek friends ponying big money for the latest 4G-whatever, everyone I know who has an Android phone got it on a two-for-one special or nearly free discount. These huge Android growth numbers aren't being driven by the $300 mega phones.

<comment><USER17> Cost of the handset is fraction of the overall 2 yr contract price with data plans that are must for these devices. I know people are eager to label Android as "cheap" and "commodity" but the reality is that there are hugely popular Android handsets in both premium and low cost segments and it isn't clear at all that all of the sales are from low end handsets.

Similarly Apple sells $49 3GS - so does Apple now become a commodity/cheap brand?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the more interesting number will hit when the next generation iPhone shows up and, if history is a guide, Verizon gets an "entry level" iPhone. If Apple is able to produce a phone that Verizon can do the same deal AT&T is doing (free + 2 year contract), then we will get a real feel for what the trend will be.

Nokia might also finally get a boost in the US market thanks to Microsoft's help.

<comment><USER19> Look I know there is this perennial argument that somehow it just can't be true that people actually want Android phones and there must be some external reason why not everybody is buying an iPhone. At some point you've just got to give it up : people buy Androids because they want them. They want them more than iPhones.

<comment><USER18> No, I know people who wanted the Android phones, and I expect a market for Android phones. I know quite a few people who still like Blackberry and have taken the "free" phone when AT&T was offering some BB models that way. I want to know the % of the audience that is in the "I don't care" category and would take an iPhone if it were the free phone. I expect that some people might have and older iPod and think of this as a cheap replacement.

(no clue on the down voting - seems like you cannot even imply free is a factor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't it odd how the media always compares an entire operating system platform to one phone? When iPads and iPod touches are counted, iOS far surpasses Android. It's weird for them not to count mobile operating systems as a whole and instead focus on a single type of device they run on.

<comment><USER21> You keep stating this (in this thread), but it's not that simple.

Apple has sold 200m+ iOS devices in total (June 2011[1]). This includes around 60M iPod Touch's and 20M iPads[2]. There have been over 100m Android devices sold (May 2011[3]).

In the phone market, the typical contract is around 2 years, and the iPhone has been around a lot longer than Android. A larger number of the iOS devices sold are no longer in user than is the case for Android (simply because it has been in the market longer).

This can be seen by things like iOS vs Android usage statistics, where Android is about to pass iOS (note that this _includes all iOS devices_ ): [http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww- monthly-201006-20110...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww- monthly-201006-201106). I'd be surprised if iOS stayed ahead of Android this year in usage, even including the iPhone 5 bump.

[1] [http://www.appleguider.com/article/wwdc-2011-200m-ios- device...](http://www.appleguider.com/article/wwdc-2011-200m-ios- devices-14b-app-downloads-and-other-milestones.html)

[2] [http://www.razorianfly.com/2011/04/19/apple-outs-q2-sales- fi...](http://www.razorianfly.com/2011/04/19/apple-outs-q2-sales-figures-in- samsung-complaint-108m-iphone-60m-ipod-touch-19m-ipads-sold/)

[3] [http://yourmobilesite.net/100-million-active-android- devices...](http://yourmobilesite.net/100-million-active-android-devices-is- android-taking-over-the-world/)

<comment><USER22> The gs.statcounter.com stats for iOS only count "mobile" devices, i.e. it excludes iPads.

<comment><USER21> I've seen this mentioned elsewhere, but I can't see anything on the Statcounter site that confirms it.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww- monthly-201006-...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww- monthly-201006-201106) breaks browser usage for iPod and iPhones out explicitly, and the sum of those both is less than the total iOS usage in [http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww- monthly-201006-20110...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww- monthly-201006-201106)

I could be wrong, but if I am then it would be a weird thing to do - it would mean that Statcounter doesn't list iPad usage anywhere (eg, the other browser- by-version graphs exclude mobile Safari)

<comment><USER22> For the last three days: iOS = 19.98%, iPhone = 15.14% , iPod Touch = 4.76% , iPhone + iPod Touch = 19.90%.

The difference is only 0.08% of mobile usage, so either they don't count iPad usage as part of Mobile at all and that's just a rounding error, or they count it as drastically lower than the 1% (of all browsing, not just mobile) that other sources are quoting for iPad browser share.

Actually, you can tell they do count iPad as part of the normal, non-mobile, browser graph. It's small enough that it gets bundled into "Other" on the browser versions graph, but if you download the CSV data it's called out separately, currently at 0.73% of all browsing and the total they give for all versions of Safari combined wouldn't add up unless they counted the iPad versions in with the desktop versions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is phone only share. Accounting for non-phone use, it's not even close, android is still behind.

iPodTouches are very popular replacements for gaming platforms for children/young adults (crowding out the nintendo DS), and there is the iPad, while blackberry/android tablets aren't doing well (Galaxy tab had a 16% return rate).

<comment><USER23> _Accounting for non-phone use, it's not even close, android is still behind._

That sounds reasonable, but do you have any sources?

<comment><USER24> The only market share numbers I've seen recently that included non-phone devices were straight from Apple (so feel free to take it with a grain of salt if you'd like). They have iOS at 44%, with Android at 28%.

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/06/ios-number-one- mo...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/06/ios-number-one-mobile- operating-system-says-apple.php)

<comment><USER25> Wow, that is a lot closer than I thought, considering how many cheap iPod touches Apple sells.</comment></comment></comment></comment>