Three rules for technological fixes: How to decide which problems will yield to technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7224/full/456871a.html

<comment><USER2> See [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081218094626.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081218094626.htm) for a long summary that's no charge.

1\. The technology must address the cause-effect relationship connecting problem to solution. For example, vaccines work with great reliability because they address almost all of the important variables necessary for preventing the disease.

2\. The effects of the technological fix must be unambiguous using uncontroversial criteria: benefits must be obvious to all.

3\. R&D is more likely to solve a social problem when it improves an existing technical core. It's less effective when exploring theoretical foundations, causes or dynamics of a problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I was behind a firewall and couldn't test whether it was free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _"... Not all problems will yield to technology. Deciding which will and which won't should be central to setting innovation policy .."_

Forget trying to read the article it's subscription.

But the question posed is a good one. My stab is to use trial and error, cheaply. But there has to be more to it than that. Maybe a surfing analogy is order. Riding the wave of problems only leads to technical breakthroughs if you choose the right wave. Go to early and it you miss the break and ride over the bump and miss it. Go to late and you also miss it. You have to exhibit good timing (luck?) to enter the wave just at the right spot and hold on.

Some old salts who have been around for a long time, say that if you squint at the market you can see those waves before everyone else and dabble and catch them before they get big. But this only happens once and a while when you least expect it.</comment>


Chroma.js – A JavaScript library for color conversions and color scales - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gka/chroma.js <comment><USER2> Awesome, I've been looking for something exactly like this

I've just implemented it to set the text colour on [http://www.stevengapo.com](http://www.stevengapo.com) (which gets its colour scheme from random instagram photos) and it's much more readable now

</comment><comment><USER3> The blog posts from Chroma.js [https://vis4.net/blog/posts/avoid-equidistant- hsv-colors/](https://vis4.net/blog/posts/avoid-equidistant-hsv-colors/) [https://vis4.net/blog/posts/mastering-multi-hued-color- scale...](https://vis4.net/blog/posts/mastering-multi-hued-color-scales/) are really nice, and help you figure out _how_ to use Chroma.js (and the LAB color scheme). Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER4> And here's a blog post from a year ago on Chroma.js that goes into a bit of detail about why it matters and some demos: [https://vis4.net/blog/posts/mastering-multi-hued-color- scale...](https://vis4.net/blog/posts/mastering-multi-hued-color-scales/)

<comment><USER5> couple additional links/libs for human-friendly color models:

[http://www.boronine.com/husl/](http://www.boronine.com/husl/)

[http://alienryderflex.com/hsp.html](http://alienryderflex.com/hsp.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's also PleaseJS: [https://github.com/Fooidge/PleaseJS](https://github.com/Fooidge/PleaseJS)

</comment><comment><USER5> shameless plug, if you need to do color reduction for images:

play: [http://o-0.me/RgbQuant/](http://o-0.me/RgbQuant/)

code: [https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js](https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js)</comment>


FBI Releases Documents in Hillary Clinton E-Mail Investigation - <AUTHOR> https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-documents-in-hillary-clinton-e-mail-investigation <comment><USER2> > FBI investigation indicated the Tor user logged into ____'s email account > and browsed email folders and attachments. When asked during her interview, > _____ stated to the FBI she is not familiar with nor has she ever used Tor > software. FBI investigation to date was unable to identify the actor(s) > responsible for this login or how _____'s login credentials were > compromised.

Was this info already public? This seems to me that not only did Secretary Clinton use a private email server to mask her activities from public records law but in taking it under her/her staff's responsibility, she effectively leaked state secrets. How in the world does that not make her criminally culpable?

EDIT: Sorry for the tangent -- I'm really curious: is this part new or had the press already reported it (or discovered it and decided not to report it?)

<comment><USER3> I am not a lawyer, but criminal culpability has everything to do with state of mind / mens rea. This is why "murder" is a crime but accidental homicide is not, even though in both cases the same actions might have led to the same consequences.

"State secrets" is also one thing, "classified material" is another thing.

<comment> nommm-nommm Accidental homicide isn't a crime? I thought that was what involuntary manslaughter was?

<comment><USER4> IANAL. It depends on who is at fault. If you are driving your car down the highway and a pedestrian jumps in front of you so close that there is nothing you can do...

<comment> nommm-nommm That's not really homicide though.

<comment><USER5> Homicide doesn't mean murder. It simply means the killing of a person by another.

People make a big deal about how in capital punishment, the death certificate says 'homicide'. This isn't a political statement that capital punishment is murder; it is just the objective fact of what happened.

<comment><USER6> So if someone jumps out in front of you and they die, you're the victim of a homicide?

<comment><USER7> They would be the victim....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure it's totally a coincidence that these are being released on the Friday before the Labor Day long weekend.

</comment><comment><USER9> "In a follow-up FBI interview on May 3, 2016, ____ indicated he had an "oh shit" moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the .PST files he had created on the server system containing Clinton's e-mails."

</comment><comment><USER10> > "Appropriate redactions have been made for classified information or other > material exempt from disclosure under FOIA"

So, I'm confused. I thought they said she _didn't_ mishandle classified information.

<comment><USER2> I can't tell if you're joking or not, so I'll bite: Comey said that they didn't have the elements that normally support a case such as malicious intent or efforts to obstruct the investigation. [his words not mine]

Of course, classified information existed on the servers and it stands to reason that the investigation report itself could contain classified material.

<comment><USER10> I was joking, and denying the obvious (which you stated).

It's just infuriating that an ordinary citizen like myself can get a ticket for speeding, even though my intention was not to harm anyone and I wasn't aware the signs had changed a few miles back. I'm convinced the Clintons, Bushes, Obamas, Kenndedys, etc literally have a different set of laws that apply to them.

<comment><USER11> Speeding laws are written such that it is a violation regardless of intent or reason.

<comment><USER12> So too are the laws on classified information. I would have been in jail months ago had I done what she did.

exabrial is correct; there is, and has been for decades, a double standard between what the politicos can get away with and what we GS plebs can do.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that's right. Most laws require a trial. Speeding does not require a trial: you are guilty if a cop says you were speeding. You can appeal, of course.

I was strictly addressing the parent's comparison about speeding tickets. They are not like other laws.

<comment><USER13> You're not guilty just because a cop says so. You have a right to a trial for every speeding ticket. Most people just waive that right.

<comment><USER11> I stand corrected. Sounds like you are technically not guilty unless you waive a trial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also, documents are available here with verifiable hash (in case content changes):

Hillary R. Clinton Part 01 of 02 - 1353814-0 - LHM.PDF — PDF document, 2,568 kB (2,629,920 bytes)

[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmePNKoSunyVnbye94tojqt5qhn1WVmmTrEygf9...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmePNKoSunyVnbye94tojqt5qhn1WVmmTrEygf9FDxmPDU)

Hillary R. Clinton Part 02 of 02 - 1353814-0 - HRC 302 -V2.PDF — PDF document, 1,226 kB (1,255,658 bytes)

[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVfowJwBQ5LJGxMatQ8FiS89RWfyqGE6WbfoGs...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVfowJwBQ5LJGxMatQ8FiS89RWfyqGE6WbfoGseSt2d1P)

</comment><comment><USER15> You've just landed the job as the second most powerful person in the USA. You work constantly, and rely on 24/7 access to email and messages through your Blackberry (or iPhone/Android now). Your boss has a functional Blackberry. Your predecessor had one too.

You are told you can not have a mobile device, but only use a secure computer in a secure location.

Your job requires constant travel.

Given the setup I'm unsurprised that someone as resourceful as a Secretary of State solved the problem.

Running around corporate/government IT departments that say no to everything is a long-standing tradition, and long may it continue. It is how Blackberry and Apple devices got into the hands of these organisations.

</comment><comment><USER16> weird this isn't on the front page even though it's only 5 hours old as of now

</comment><comment><USER17> Where are the documents?

On the vault, I just get:

> There are currently no items in this folder.

<comment><USER14> I've linked mirror of the documents here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415174)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> why is this news on site like Hacker News?

<comment><USER19> > why is this news on site like Hacker News?

Why not? I'd much rather read and interact with the opinions of the fine people that make up this community on this topic than anywhere else on the interwebs.

<comment><USER18> my bad. I simply said thinking it as just another politics related news. Sorry about it. It's too late to delete it now.</comment></comment></comment>


Anti-vax movement blamed for 30% jump in measles cases worldwide - <AUTHOR> https://www.sbs.com.au/news/anti-vax-movement-blamed-for-30-per-cent-jump-in-measles-cases-worldwide <comment><USER2> Anti-vax is not a "movement". Vax is a movement, and a recent one, always coming along with the government's bayonets. There are few reasons not to vax yourself in Finland, and incidentally there are no anti-vax problems there.

Where I live, the healthcare minister peddles placebo pills, cause she has a share in the business, and the secret services have their own media to "leak" private data of politically dubious people.

Every consistently christian family have many memories of government repressions. Most MDs talk to you as a cop in a bad Milwaukee neighborhood to a black teenager.

There are many good reasons to avoid any contact with the officials.

I'm not an anti-vaxer, but in a country where any slightly marginal social group is still alive in spite of the government, you can't blame them. It's a sound Bayesian strategy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. The first two comments on HN are anti-vax propaganda, obfuscation, and racism. It's not a logical stretch to say that lower vaccination rates leads to higher infection rates. And it's pretty well documented that herd immunity drops off pretty quickly with vaccination rate.

And the HN ideal should be to rigorously investigate even a logical inference like that. Yet when a post does just that, it's met with a _racist_ suggestion that middle eastern migrants are causing the uptick. No citations.

Very disappointing reaction.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe journalism should come with a liability - as in spreading missinformation and blowing hot air into the flames of civil war like debate is something that you could be held liable for. If enough people cite you as the source of the information for their bad decisions, you should be held financially acountable.

<comment><USER5> I think the solution is even, uh, simpler than that. Refusing to vaccinate your children should be viewed internationally as child abuse, and parents who commit child abuse, especially in 1st world countries (where child abuse is already illegal), should be prosecuted.

<comment><USER6> There are other ways to not get sick.

Ways that don't involve a government registry, ways that don't involve police demanding papers, ways that don't involve mandatory behavior modification with negative reinforcement.

My instinct is to not resort to a knee-jerk presumptive desire to punish, because I feel I don't have enough dominion over my peers. I'm not interested in throwing more people in jail. I'm not interested in more traffic tickets. I'm not interested in putting my kids in another database.

Sorry, track your mandatory compulsory military draft in some other place. Raise your own kids far away from mine, thanks.

<comment><USER5> > There are other ways to not get sick.

[citation needed]

> I'm not interested in putting my kids in another database.

Shot records have been a thing, in the US at least, for decades. This is not a new thing.

>Sorry, track your mandatory compulsory military draft in some other place.

What the fuck does this have to do with anything I said?

> Raise your own kids far away from mine, thanks.

Yea, since it seems like your kids will be getting the measles (or worse), gladly.

<comment><USER6> Your fundamental error is philosophical.

I'm not against medical intervention. I think vaccinations are a good thing.

I'm against government mandated familial interventions.

I think there are 1,000 other more important things the government could be doing to improve people's lives. Alarmist, breathless hand-wringing about personal medical choices or parental responsibilities isn't the only way to approach pandemics or public health issues.

The last thing we should be doing is using government resources to apply retaliation or punishment. There are plenty of reasons to inflict harm, take money away from people, and generally stifle the hell out of people with laws, and all of them get over used, and just simply spread misery. This gives people more reasons to rationalize and passive-aggressively resist anything with a government's fingerprints on it.

Meanwhile, you said it yourself: those who do get vaccinated have nothing to fear. They'll live lives untouched by disease, so it's none of their business what happens to the rest. For the vaccinated, this is _already_ a non-problem by default.

<comment><USER5> > I think vaccinations are a good thing.

I also think vaccinations are a good thing, but your original comment didn't come across that way.. In fact, it came across as being completely off topic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Connecting an iPad retina LCD to a PC - <AUTHOR> http://emerythacks.blogspot.com/2013/04/connecting-ipad-retina-lcd-to-pc.html <comment><USER3> That's pretty awesome, and a pretty grim testament to the lameness of Laptop makers if they aren't willing to put that panel in a laptop! (I mean seriously, you can't pull the display port connection out of an ivy bridge chipset?

Something I have always felt there would be a good market for would be a compact an inexpensive LVDS (TFT-LCD connector) to some sort of driver (small FPGA or maybe SOC). You could then salvage displays from "dead" laptops (where the display works) and build up some pretty awesome sorts of deca-panel UIs :-) I'm thinking 'home star trek bridge' to a whole new level.

<comment><USER4> Of course you can pull the DP connections out, that's not the problem. The problem is that when you put that display on a windows machine, you end up with a bunch of legacy windows software and web graphics content that looks unreadably small, followed unhappy users who return those fancy DP panels to your retailers.

Of course, the same thing is true of iOS and OS X software, which is precisely the reason "Retina" (as distinguished from arbitrary 200+ DPI hardware) displays are always shipped in resolutions that exactly double those of pre- existing devices. So even though the legacy software doesn't handle it Apple, by controlling the framework, is able to make it work more or less seamlessly.

Dell and HP don't have that freedom, they need help from Microsoft, and Microsoft, well... At least Windows 8 does high DPI natively, though the MS decision was basically to jettison legacy visuals and hope no one runs the old software anymore.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi I had a Thinkpad with a 15.4-inch 1920x1200 screen, back when such wonders existed, and I had no big problems with its 150 DPI running Windows XP, even less with Windows 7. Yes, there were some really old applications that wouldn't react to system-wide DPI settings, but that was a small minority.

I think there is simply no excuse for the regression in laptop resolutions - <USER2> can't even find a laptop that will give me 1200 lines anymore, they give me "full HD" at best, which is less. And we can see proof in all the comments saying that they would buy this guy's hack to plug a hi-res screen into a laptop.

<comment><USER4> I had a Compaq in 2004 with the same display. And indeed, windows works pretty well up to about 150-170 DPI. But I have a 10" Acer tablet with a 1920x1080 screen sitting next to me, and the legacy windows desktop is basically unusable. Yes, it can be made to work if you are tolerant of VERY SMALL BUTTONS, largely unreadable text in graphics assets, and know where to find all the font settings. But it pretty much sucks, and no one sane would try to use it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know if there is some company I could send off a schematic of the adapter he uses and have one sent to me? (This would be UK, but I have no idea what term I'm searching for to get a single circuit board made)

<comment><USER6> I haven't done profession PCB printing yet, but the one that catches my eye for cost and finishing is <http://oshpark.com/>

<comment><USER7> OSH Park does an outstanding job. I've used them for work and hobby prototyping, and while the turnaround time isn't great (week or two) the quality is first rate.

From what I gather the boards are actually made by Amitron outside Chicago.

Unlike most quickturn PCB fabs they don't bury you with options. The standard options give you everything you need (ENIG, double mask+silk screen, either 2/4 layer, etc.). The OSH Park ordering wizard is a case study in how PCB orders should be done, and for the quality the price can't be beat. Best of all, it's just a "Fred in a shed" operation in Oregon that came out of a hackerspace there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Props for using OpenTTD to test the screen :)

<http://www.openttd.org/>

</comment><comment><USER9> My immediate thought was - Raspberry Pi! - an LCD screen like the iPad one would be very nice for it...

<comment><USER10> The Pi doesn't have a DisplayPort output, I imagine it would be significantly more complicated to convert from hdmi!

<comment><USER11> <http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=AC1621>

<comment><USER12> Well, that like doubles the price, for one. Also, it maxes out at 1080p resolution, good luck getting it to work with the ipad screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought seriously about building and selling something similar to this about 4 years ago - really cool to see someone hack it together. Awesome work Andrzej!

Compact, portable screens seem like a no-brainer to me. My MBA display is less than half an inch thick. Why does my desktop screen need to be significantly thicker? Why not use the same panels from laptops to build a display that can be used both on the desktop and for portable use? I love to use one large/two smaller screens when coding - and I want a display that I can pack into my bag along with my main display and use at a coffee shop. The panels themselves are generally cheap (it's something of a commodity market, but depending on the display size/specs they run $35 to $90)

When I originally started researching this, there were two problems, both of which have been (pretty much) solved:

1 - Connectivity. Laptop panels generally use LVDS, which from my understanding are bit-reversed versions of DVI, possibly with some extra baggage. So you needed to have some intermediary processing, which was then (and is still) possible using a DisplayLink chip. The DisplayLink chip basically uses CPU power to create a virtual DVI/LVDS port over USB. The advantage of DisplayLink is that it negates the necessity for even using the Thunderbolt/DVI/Displayport output of your laptop, and allows you to simply plug in via USB and go. But the chips cost ~$15 each, require non-trivial integration, and use up CPU. As Andrzej mentions, displays are moving towards eDisplayPort, which means you can pretty much plug them in directly.

2 - Power draw. For the display to work well as a portable device, it should be possible to power it via USB alone. USB 2.0 standard is 5V and 0.5A, so 2.5W, which isn't sufficient. But USB 3.0 is 0.9A, bring the total up to 4.5W. As Andrzej mentions, the iPad display can be powered off the Displayport power (3.3W, 0.5A, ~1.9W), and with a step-up convertor you should just about be able to power the backlight up to max brightness from the USB port.

Both those problems are now fixed. You can now build an external display, either using an iPad panel, or that from a 13" MBA or (possibly that of a MBP Retina, not sure about the power requirements there). Then you have an extremely slim, awesome external display that's completely portable and powered by USB.

Some companies have been building crappy versions of this using DisplayLink chips, but I really want to see something with a clean, minimal design and way higher resolution. I'd try at it myself, but I'm busy trying to build software to enable better online political activism. If anyone out there is interested, I'd love to help, either with funding or advice.

A few examples of products that do this (not very well) using DisplayLink chips:

\- <http://www.mimomonitors.com>

\- [http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkVision- LT1421-Widescreen-M...](http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkVision- LT1421-Widescreen- Monitor/dp/B005L2NA54/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366665383&sr=8-1&keywords=portable+display)

\- [http://www.amazon.com/AOC-E1649FWU-USB-Powered-Portable- Moni...](http://www.amazon.com/AOC-E1649FWU-USB-Powered-Portable- Monitor/dp/B005SEZR0G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1366665383&sr=8-2&keywords=portable+display)

\- [http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-14-inch-Ultra-portable- Mobile-...](http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-14-inch-Ultra-portable-Mobile- Monitor/dp/B005F0IKHA/ref=pd_cp_pc_1)

<comment><USER14> Out of curiosity, is the software to enable better online political activism public yet?

<comment><USER13> Not yet I'm afraid. My pet project is <http://fixthedmca.org>. I'm working on first implementing <http://trydiscourse.org> to help get the community engaged and communicating and building tools like click-to-call legislators to help drive action. I'll be abstracting out and offering the tools to other campaigns (anti-CISPA, patent reform, etc) as quickly as possible.

At the moment it's just me, so a little developer strapped as I try and both code and navigate getting an unlocking (+ DMCA hearings) bill through Congress. If anyone's interested in helping out, please please get in touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Next step: make four of them and get nice 20" 4096x3072 desktop. Of course you'd need to plan your DE to suit the tiled nature, but I imagine that it wouldn't be that bad.

</comment><comment><USER16> I want one.

Seriously though, I really want one. At 70 USD it's incredible.

 _Dreaming of all the places I want a screen in my future house_

<comment><AUTHOR> The really sad part? The entire build cost less than the replacement LCD element to revive my old thinkpad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Woah, $55 for that panel? Seems like it costs less than $100 including the PCB stuff, I'm really tempted to do this but I don't have the time :(. Heck, I'd buy a reasonably finished version of this for $150, maybe $200, without thinking too much. That's pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER18> What's the cheapest most compact PC you could drive this level of display with? One could imagine packing them together to put together a open source, absurdly cheap (albeit bulky) iPad wannabe.

<comment><USER19> People have already beaten you to it, with accurate ID and everything: [http://www.onda-tablet.com/onda-v818-mini-quad- core-7-9-inch...](http://www.onda-tablet.com/onda-v818-mini-quad- core-7-9-inch-android-tablet-ram-2gb-wifi-dual-camera-16gb.html) (they probably have one that copies the big iPad, too, with the same panel mentioned in the article...).

<comment><USER20> I don't understand, can the iPad3 panel be put into that or what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If I'm reading [http://www.ifixit.com/iPad-Parts/iPad-Retina- Display/IF116-0...](http://www.ifixit.com/iPad-Parts/iPad-Retina- Display/IF116-022) correctly then all Retina iPads use the same screen i.e. 3rd gen (dock connector) and 4th gen (lightning connector) should both be compatible with this.

Assuming you're brave/handy enough to cut the necessary holes to expose the connector

</comment><comment><USER22> Add a Leap Motion device to the mix...

</comment><comment><USER23> Give me a Thinkpad with a screen (4:3 screen mind you) like this.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would love to be able to hook one of these panels up to a Mac and use it as a retina display (1024x768) for testing desktop retina usage.

</comment><comment><USER25> Props for OpenTTD in the last screenshot :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Any clues if the iPad Mini Display using the MiniDP interface?

<comment><USER26> Minis can be easily disassembled so if I were you I'd try those ifixit reviews where they do it and compare the connectors. Chances are still unknown though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do it with the Nexus 10 panel! 2560×1600!

<comment><USER28> I would just like a nice way of using my nexus 10 as an external monitor -- I have tried a few things in Linux but nothing which really worked well.

<comment><USER29> have you tried this?

<http://dmx.sourceforge.net/>

I've used it to combine macs and pc's as one big display and it worked pretty good.

<comment><USER30> I tried Xdmx a few months ago. It failed pretty badly for me, so I blogged about it ( <http://idupree.dreamwidth.org/2151.html> ; choice quote: "Xdmx is broken in various different ways for various different people on the Web. Xdmx isn't very well maintained. It doesn't support XInput2 [1], it relies on Xinerama which is somewhat maintained but whose architecture needs improvement [2], it may be incompatible with Composite [3], it just plain segfaults for a lot of people [4], and is generally unloved [5]." — citations in blog post.)

<comment><USER31> There's also Synergy (<http://synergy-foss.org>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Imagine a beowulf cluster to... power them.

</comment><comment><USER33> Or you could avoid all the trouble and bad a Surface RT or Pro, isn't it? Compatible out of the box with thousands of printers, scanner and every kind of peripheral you can possibly imagine.

<comment><USER34> Perhaps you didn't read the article, but it's about using an iPad display panel as an external monitor for a computer (via displayport).

There are no other parts of the tablet, only a screen.</comment></comment>


Show HN: TrendsFormer – Make Trends Your Friend - <AUTHOR> http://www.trendsformer.co

<comment><AUTHOR> I created this site as a hobby project to show the trend of something over time, starting with restaurants/locations from Google Places and Yelp. It started as an idea after I had a really bad quality food and service from a restaurant rated 4 out of 5. So with TrendsFormer, I'll be able to see whether the restaurant's quality has gone down over time through a "trend line".

Was wondering what you guys and girls think about it. I also previously posted about showing trending and peaked posts on HackerNews as a time-saver for the passive readers who love to read all the comments too. The concept of peaked means the momentum of HN comments for a particular post has slowed down.</comment>


Assembly is shutting down December 6, 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://assembly.com/?shutdown <comment><USER2> An idea that was too idealistic to survive real life. Or was it too complicated? I was reluctant to contribute to products because of a perceived mob rule - and backend engineers were outnumbered by frontend and UX folks.

</comment><comment><USER3> I liked the project. I still use [http://formspree.io/](http://formspree.io/) on one of my servers and I don't plan to remove it.

Thank you for your good work.</comment>


Amazon's Home Security Company Is Turning Everyone into Cops - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvyvzd/amazons-home-security-company-is-turning-everyone-into-cops <comment><USER2> The inventor of Ring was on Shark Tank not long ago as a "shark" himself. (He pitched Ring to them before selling to Amazon and they turned him down.) Originally, he was all about answering the door from his garage. After the acquisition, he started talking about saving the world by spying on everyone through his doorbell.

Funny how $1B can change you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Those who fail to understand history, repeat it.

West Germany. The Stasi. Everyone watching everyone. Surveillance. And these people enjoy this...</comment>


The Trouble with Fusion (1983) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm still only a few pages in. I don't have the chance to read it all right now, but I will revisit this tomorrow morning. Here are my early thoughts. Disclaimer: I am an advocate of fusion and am moving into the field (professional electrical engineering support of an academic project).

We need to walk before we can run. D+T fusion is viable. Hull maintenance is a solvable problem. Economic studies come after we can walk. Similarly, actually realizable designs that can reach Lawson performance necessary for p+B11 won't come before designs that can reach D+T are made.

There are compelling narratives around funding, but ultimately it seems they are simultaneously overly optimistic about our technical advancement and overly jaded about future prospects.

It's important to note that there is no difference in a reactor design capable of different fusion fuels, other than its Lawson performance. You can fuse D+T just the same as p+B11 if your device is capable of p+B11. There is not magical jump in performance we can make. So why skip over D+T if we need to go through it anyway? If D+T is found to truly not be economically viable (which sounds inherently flawed, since prices go down as technology becomes more advanced) then we could still pursue confinement devices in the hopes of reaching more advanced fuels.

<comment><USER2> So I'm a few pages further and I fear I will not be finishing this paper. I am surprised it was published and is still referenced. Where are the citations? Where is the analysis? You can't just say "fusion reactors need to be ten times bigger than fission reactors". It's frankly embarrassing to MIT that they would allow egregious, unfounded claims to be published. Peer review exists to shred such unsupported statements.

<comment><USER3> This was a semi-popular article. You can find more technical analyses in the literature.

The specific points made in the article have stood the test of time. Lidsky said the power density of a DT fusion reactor would be at least an order of magnitude worse than that of a fission reactor. And if you look at existing reactors and concepts, this is true. Compare to a commercial PWR, in which (thermal power)/(volume of reactor vessel) is about 20 MW/m^3. An order of magnitude worse than that would be 2 MW/m^3. The (thermal power)/(reactor volume) for ITER is about 0.05 MW/m^3. For ARC and Lockheed's concepts, about 0.5 MW/m^3.

Your outrage should not be directed at this article (although such outrage is sadly understandable, if this article is telling you things you don't want to hear.) Instead, it should be directed at the fusion community as a whole, which has downplayed these critiques and glad-handed the issues raised while marching confidently into a dead end.

<comment><USER4> The paper made many good points but I found the power density argument by far the weakest. Yes a fusion reactor will necessarily weight more than a fission reactor of the same output and if we assume a constant price per pound across fission and fusion reactors this means it will be more expensive. But the reactor itself is only a small fraction of the weight of a fission plant. And of course we have every reason to think that the cost per pound of reactors across different reactor types will be entirely different.

I see this argument a lot in discussions around rockets where some people assume that if one rocket weighs less than another per pound delivered to space it must necessarily be cheaper when in fact the effort required to make it lighter almost always means it's more expensive. I think the rise of SpaceX has finally put an end to that argument, at least.

<comment><USER3> Fission reactor cores and reactor vessels are made of fuel and steel. They are very simple compared to fusion reactors. Fission reactors can therefore be expected to be much cheaper than fusion reactors, even on a per-pound or per- volume basis. They can also be expected to be much more reliable.

(A fission reactor vessel will also last the lifetime of the power plant. A DT fusion reactor, not so much.)

(The average density of ITER is about the same as the average density of an unfueled PWR reactor vessel, btw.)

The analogy with rockets would be for those advocating air-breathing launchers. Make the launcher much more complex, just so one can save on LOX. Make the reactor much more complex, just so one can not pay for uranium. But LOX is cheap, and fuel is not a major cost driver for fission power.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the arguments about the relative complexity of fusion reactor were well taken and they present serious challenges, unlike the power density issue.

But at the same time fission reactors are very expensive. The reactors themselves cost something on the order of $10 billion and the cost of the fuel and steel that go into the reactor is a very small fraction of that. And as far as I can tell the reason for that price is that the building is built to very exacting standards. It has to be built to those because even a reactor that's been shut down is putting out roughly 10% of the thermal power it was generating when it was active due to secondary decay, which fades away over time. But that means that the cooling system cannot ever fail, which means things get very expensive. And that's the same reason why instead of using the $.10 off the shelf screws you get off the shelf NASA uses special $100 aerospace grade screws.

The paper talks about safety as if it can be separated from price but in a world where we care about making unsafe things safe the two are inextricably linked. If a cooling failure results in a meltdown that will make the systems very expensive. If a fusion containment failure just stops output and causes excess wear on the inner lining, which has be replaced periodically anyways, then that's a different issue.

Which factor, over-engineering for safety or design complexity, will dominate, I don't know.

<comment><USER3> > unlike the power density issue.

I reject that assertion. The argument you tried to give against that power density argument (using magnet advances) just showed you didn't understand the point Lidsky was making.

> And as far as I can tell the reason for that price is that the building is > built to very exacting standards.

Fusion reactors will also have to be built to very exacting standards -- not because of safety concerns, but because any malfunction in the radioactive, hands-off part of the plant will be economically disastrous. Lidsky goes into this point as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This old critique has aged fairly well. It was too optimistic about advanced fission, and the suggestion to move to advanced fuels for fusion was mostly shot down by Lidsky's student, Todd Rider.

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fce7/a35629488ec030d983025a...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fce7/a35629488ec030d983025a44dc00d38d0f68.pdf)

[https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412)

A similar critique was being made around the same time by Pfirsch and Schmitter in Europe.

[https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2131865/component/file_2...](https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2131865/component/file_2131864/content)

<comment><USER4> There are a few parts that have been overtaken by advances. Improvements in superconductors have driven the minimum size for a fusion reactor far down, for instance.

<comment><USER3> Lidsky's argument is entirely unaffected by that advance. The power of his argument is that one can just ignore the plasma physics.

<comment><USER4> Plasma physics tells us the relationship between the minimum workable size and the containment field strength. Change the field strength and the size changes.

<comment><USER3> Yes, and Lidsky's argument works even if one assumes arbitrarily good plasma performance. He was not basing his argument on magnetic field strength or beta limits, or even any particular device geometry. Assume 100T magnetic fields and beta=1; his argument still applies.

What may be confusing you is that very low power density designs, like ITER, may be even worse than Lidsky's bound. So they could be improved somewhat by better magnets or plasma physics tricks. But once Lidsky's bound is reached, further improvements of that sort are no help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Commonwealth Fusion Systems was formed out of the work presented here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4)

A lot has changed since 1983. The superconducting materials that CFS depends on weren't even discovered until the late 80s, and it took a very long time for that to become practical. Fast-forward to today and you can buy this stuff on Alibaba!

<comment><USER3> Lidsky's arguments against fusion apply to the ARC design. Its overall volumetric power density is 0.5 MW/m^3, 40 times less than a PWR reactor vessel.

<comment><USER6> What defines the volume to get to that number? From what I can tell from the ARC specs the plasma volume is 141 m3, and the expected power output is 200-300 MWe, which makes it 1.5-2 MWe/m3.

Do you have some numbers on a PWR reactor vessel? I was trying to look up some details on the APR-1400, but could not find any.

<comment><USER3> The volume is the volume of the reactor, including blanket, magnets, and the structure needed to support the JxB forces on the magnets, not the volume of the plasma. See table 11, page 30, in the ARC paper:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf)

For PWRs:

[https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/nuclear- engineering/22-06-engine...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/nuclear- engineering/22-06-engineering-of-nuclear-systems-fall-2010/lectures-and- readings/MIT22_06F10_lec06a.pdf)

(take the dimensions given for the primary reactor vessel, compute the volume as a cylinder with spherical end caps, and divide that into 3400 MW(th). The result is slightly below 20MW/m^3. Note also the power density of the core itself is given as greater than 100 MW/m^3.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We know what the issue is--fusion never got a useful amount of funding.

Now, it is entirely possible that even given an enormous amount of funding-- fusion might still not work. However, engineers with lots of money are remarkably clever and effective beasts (see: radio, semiconductors, plastics, steel).

Fusion has been funded at "Fusion Never" levels for almost 40 years while we subsidize every other significant energy source to the tune of billions or trillions of dollars every single year. (For example, how much money got poured into the technology that became "fracking"?)

<comment><USER3> No, that's not what the issue is. That's an effect, not a cause. The cause is that fusion turned out to be less promising than had been thought, and that led to budgets being tight. Lidsky's devastating critique was part of that (tokamaks not being as good as early hopes implied was another.)

<comment><USER7> > The cause is that fusion turned out to be less promising than had been > thought

So did a whole lot of chemical rocketry. Instead of whining about it--we spent a lot of money on engineering, we made the Saturn V, and we went to the moon anyway.

The issue is that fusion only has one end point--providing energy. Researching chemical rocketry made better weapons--so we funded the snot out of it. The DOE spent billions on the Unconventional Gas Research Programs and lined a lot of pockets.

Funding isn't guaranteed to make progress, but lack of funding practically guarantees lack of progress.

<comment><USER3> Not a good analogy. Chemical rockets are the only real way to get to space. So if you make them better, even incrementally, you have a win. It also helped that launchers were very far away from fundamental economic limits on their performance. Expendable launchers, unlike power plants, are expended.

But fusion is competing against a plethora of other approaches to production of energy that actually work, and are being used, and are arguably superior.

Fusion also uses components that are mature due to their use in these other approaches. DT fusion, which Lidsky is addressing, will produce its energy as heat. This heat has to be turned into power using turbines and generators, a mature technology. And it's a mature technology that's a major part of the cost of coal and nuclear power plants, and is a big reason why those power plants are no longer competitive.

(This echoes an argument from the mid 20th century, when it was pointed out that fission power would, at best, be only slightly less expensive than power from coal, due to all the common elements the power plants shared. And it turned out nuclear fission was more expensive than that, as one could not do the nuclear parts too cheaply. DT fusion reactors promise to be much larger and more complex than fission reactors, for the fundamental reasons Lidsky and others gave, so one can reasonably expect their economics to fail even more.)

(This is also why the focus on thorium and SMRs to try to keep fission alive is probably hopeless.)

("Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it")

The complaint about funding is a red herring. It has the presumption that if funding had been available, fusion had a real chance of succeeding. But as Lidsky points out, it didn't have a real chance of succeeding. Even if the program had produced a reactor, no one would have wanted it.

<comment><USER7> > This heat has to be turned into power using turbines and generators, a > mature technology. And it's a mature technology that's a major part of the > cost of coal and nuclear power plants, and is a big reason why those power > plants are no longer competitive.

Erm, natural gas uses turbines and generators and nobody seems to be whining about that. It isn't the turbine driving the cost in coal (nuclear is a different story).

First, we _still_ can't engineer a superconductor. We have barely doubled magnetic field strength since 1970ish. And the big advance of superconductivity in graphite with slight offsets demonstrates just how little we know. Superconductors would have had a massive improvement in basic science with funding (this was one of the huge losses in not funding the Superconducting Supercollider).

The FFT (fast fourier transform) was effectively useless in the 1970s and 1980s--until Moore's Law made it not so useless. Similarly, computational dynamics made huge advances since the 1980s--to the point where non-simple toroids are now the standard.

Knowledge advances in a "front". If you throw money at a point (especially a fundamental one), it drags related knowledge forward as well. Look at steel, for example. Steel has been considered "mature and well-understood" (hah!) practically since 1910--but there was so much money being thrown at it that it continuously advanced for almost a century. Once steel moved forward, architecture and construction moved forward. Then we got new applications like cars. Then we got new tooling like heavy presses. Then we could use more exotic materials like titanium. I can go on and on.

<comment><USER3> Natural gas uses combustion turbines, not steam turbines (except as a bottoming cycle in combined cycle plants, but that produces only 1/3 of the output of the plant).

What combustion turbines allow you to do is avoid heat exchangers, and also operate at a temperature much higher than a steam turbine because no solid material needs to be at the temperature of the working fluid. A simple cycle gas turbine (without regeneration) has no heat exchangers. Heat exchangers are expensive; transfer of heat across a solid/fluid interface is not as fast as we'd like it to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Didn't the feasibility of fusion increase with advances in magnets. I thought the much stronger magnets being available today allowed for much smaller (volume per watt generated) systems, smaller even than the Iter design.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm a layperson like everyone else here, so I'm just going to rely on the fact that fusion research is ongoing, well-supported by government and private sector investment, and is an active area of research for hundreds or thousands of intelligent and sane institutionally supported academics, as reasonable and practical justifications for my belief that fusion is not quite as problematic as laid out in Lidsky's dated and superseded work.

However, for a sketch of how to address the talking points of the more strident objectors one encounters in the wild, one can perhaps turn to [https://fire.pppl.gov/fusion_critic_response_stacey.pdf](https://fire.pppl.gov/fusion_critic_response_stacey.pdf) for some ideas. Cheers!

<comment><USER10> In fact, section III of that document specifically rebuts _The Trouble with Fusion_ , based on the state of knowledge 16 years later.

<comment><USER3> This is all you really need to read from Stacey:

"Based on our present understanding, D-T tokamak fusion reactors project a cost-of-electricity that is about 50% larger than the projected cost-of- electricity from advanced light-water reactors in the middle of the next century."

We all know what happened to the projected cost of fission reactors -- the projections turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, because of complexity and loss of experience. Fusion would face these problems in even worse form (indeed, ITER's cost ballooned 4x or more past the initial projections.)

The experience with fission has enabled us to calibrate the optimism bias in these projections, with damning results.

Simply being competitive with fission is no longer good enough for fusion to succeed. It has to be significantly better than fission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There has never been any serious expectation of getting usable power from fusion. All the reactor designs worked on in mainstream research would destroy themselves in a short time by high-energy neutron flux.

Fusion research is, instead, a jobs program for high-neutron flux physicists, to provide a pool to draw on for weapons work.

There are interesting commercial projects for designs that do not suffer from high neutron flux, such as those pursuing pB reactions. I read of another where neutrons are emitted in a place some distance from where the expensive machine parts are.

You can tell if a fusion process is serious by whether they have an answer to the neutron problem. Tokamak doesn't.

<comment><USER12> High neutron flux is useful not only for weapons but for civilian purposes too, for example for "burning" nuclear waste, or for fusion-fission hybrid reactors. I wonder why the Department of Energy does not invest more in this area.

<comment><USER3> Fusion-fission hybrids combine the worst features of both. There is no user "pull" for the concept. If you want power with fission, just build a fission reactor; that's going to be simpler, cheaper, and altogether more sensible. If you want to dispose of waste, just seal it in dry casks and wait a century or three before deciding what to do with it. That will also be much simpler and (due to nonzero interest rates) cheaper.

<comment><USER12> > Fusion-fission hybrids combine the worst features of both.

Maybe, but maybe not.

Worst features for fusion reactors: 1. they don't exit now and they won't exist for the next 50 years; 2. they produce lots of neutrons, which make the surroundings radioactive

Worst features for fission reactors: 3. they can go Chernobyl, 4. they produce long-living radioactive waste, 5. they are horribly expensive 6. proliferation concerns

How do these things look for a fusion-fission hybrid:

1\. fusion reactors don't exist. Well, they do exist but they are well below the breakeven point. For a hybrid, the fusion part has (a very) negative energy balance, but it's more than made up for by the fission part, so being above breakeven is not a concern. The technology to manufacture the fusion part of a hybrid exists today (and has existed for decades)

2\. fusion reactors produce lots of neutrons. For a hybrid, this is actually the point of the fusion half

3\. fission reactors can go Chernobyl. This is so because the current fission reactors are powered by a chain reaction. This chain reaction threads the very fine line between subcritical and supercritical, in other words a classical fission reactor sits in a very narrow region between a bomb and a fizzle. The fission reactor in a hybrid gets its neutrons from its fusion partner, not via a chain reaction. The beauty of not having a chain reaction is that you can't have a supercritical chain reaction, or a Chernobyl event

4\. fission reactors produce long-lived nuclear waste. I agree with you that this is not the big deal that's made up to be by environmental groups, but the fact that you can burn it via a fusion-fission hybrid is a nice bonus point

5\. fission reactors are expensive. this is fundamentally a consequence of 3, that they present the danger of going boom. And as long as the fission reactors get their energy from a chain reaction, this danger exists. If you have a design that cannot go supercritical because it does not rely on a chain reaction, this is going to be inherently passively safe.

6\. proliferation concerns. Here I simply have no idea how fussion-fission hybrids compare with classical fission reactors. That's why I mentioned the Department of Energy. If they develop and run these new reactors, then proliferation concerns become moot.

Besides all these points, the fusion-fission hybrids have another advantage: they can burn U-238 [1], which makes up 99% of the uranium on Earth. This means not only you have more fuel available, but you don't have to go through the stupendously expensive process of enrichment. Or it can burn Thorium-232, which is 3 times more abundant than uranium. In other words, not only the construction costs would be much lower, but the operation costs too.

Oh, and here's another advantage. Because classical fission reactors are based on a chain reaction that has to be very narrowly confined between supercritical and subcritical, at any given point only a very tiny fraction of the fuel is burning. Nuclear advocates don't like to dwell on that, but they like to point to the flip side of this coin, that the fuel lasts for a very long time (years). However, if you could burn the fuel faster, you can get the same power from a smaller reactor. We could be talking a factor of 100. Since construction costs don't scale linearly with size, a reactor that's 100 times smaller could easily be 1000 or 10000 times cheaper. And we could end up being able to send gigawatt-size reactors to Mars, rather than the kilowatt-size currently envisioned by NASA [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion%E2%80%93fission...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion%E2%80%93fission_hybrid)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilopower)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The concerns and criticism make too much sense; as much as I want to believe a comic/movie density power solution (like arc reactors) can work...

I think the criticisms would have gone over better if something more than the implicit: 'look for better ideas' proposal had been included as a path.

It's been over 30 years; is there anything else as an idea in the field of power generation? (Preferably something we could also use in space)

<comment><USER14> "Fusion in a magnetically-shielded-grid inertial electrostatic confinement device"

> Theory for a gridded inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion system > is presented that shows a net energy gain is possible if the grid is > magnetically shielded from ion impact. A simplified grid geometry is > studied, consisting of two negatively-biased coaxial current-carrying rings, > oriented such that their opposing magnetic fields produce a spindle cusp. > Our analysis indicates that better than break-even performance is possible > even in a deuterium-deuterium system at bench-top scales. The proposed > device has the unusual property that it can avoid both the cusp losses of > traditional magnetic fusion systems and the grid losses of traditional IEC > configurations.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01788](https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01788)</comment></comment>


1Password X 1.17: New brain written in Rust, new menu, and even more accessible - <AUTHOR> https://blog.1password.com/1passwordx-december-2019-release/ <comment><USER2> Now that they have abandoned the non-cloud customer that made them what they are, I eagerly await the next player to move in and fill that void.

<comment><USER3> I recommend Bitwarden. I self-host it using the brilliant [rubywarden]([https://github.com/jcs/rubywarden](https://github.com/jcs/rubywarden)) and I've never looked back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now that macOS handles password management in Safari, 1Password is expendable (at least for me). I stopped using it a few weeks ago and canceled my subscription.

<comment><USER5> What about on your phone/laptop/etc? And why did you not use a password manager within your browser before if that's the only place you use it?</comment></comment>


"Super fast" game download launch - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7946697.stm

<comment><USER2> This is how Quake Live works too - after a small download you enter a 10 minute warmup/skill-determining match against a bot, the rest of the maps carry on downloading while you play. In my case everything had finished downloading by the time I got out of the warmup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clever idea - these guys must have great PR behind them to plant a story like this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Part of me really wants digital distribution of games, especially if it means cheaper titles. On the other hand, I'll miss being able to sell games to save money on new ones.

</comment><comment><USER5> Neat idea - Valve have the content market well wrapped up at the moment so something genuinely new like this might have a chance of succeeding.

<comment><USER6> > Valve have the content market well wrapped up at the moment

Not really - according to Valve's own numbers, most Steam accounts are used solely for CounterStrike (and the required HL2 installation).

<http://frogboy.impulsedriven.net/article/342982></comment></comment>


Airpods are losing capacity over time - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neaz3d/airpods-are-a-tragedy <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how this is surprising anyone given that we've all known that battery capacity decreases with each recharge.</comment>


Swedish calendar - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar <comment><USER2>
      In accordance with the plan, February 29 was omitted in 1700

But 1700 wouldn't be a leap year in regular Western reckoning, either.

<comment><USER3> But in the Julian calender, it was. So this omitted leap day shifted the Swedish calender out of sync with the Julian calender.</comment></comment>


Tired of ad-ridden and bloated PageRank extensions for Chrome? Check this one. - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imboecihmboiphcjjnnbganojpoeeemh

<comment><AUTHOR> Source code on Github here: <https://github.com/julien-c/PageRank-Fast></comment>


What an attacker gets from Apple devices if they sniff Bluetooth traffic - <AUTHOR> https://hexway.io/blog/apple-bleee/ <comment><USER2> Clickbait title: 'If Bluetooth is ON on your Apple device everyone nearby can understand current status of your device, get info about battery, device name, Wi-Fi status, buffer availability, OS version and even get your mobile phone number'

<comment><USER3> A part of the problem is that bluetooth is almost always ON on iPhones. The way one typically toggles it from the control center only disables bluetooth for a short period of time (24 hours), after that, it turns on again. One has to go into settings to actually disable bluetooth.

<comment><USER4> Gotta love the dark pattern. I remember when they made the change, I was pretty frustrated with that.

<comment><USER5> "Dark pattern" seems too strong. Apple doesn't benefit from your turning Bluetooth on and isn't trying to manipulate you into doing so.

It's fixing the annoying issue of today's AirPods failing because of something I did yesterday afternoon which I forgot.

<comment><USER6> Apple does benefit from turning bluetooth on.

Your phone will locate and report bluetooth ibeacons, and allow apple to update their crowdsourced location databases.

The same thing with wifi (which has the same behavior in control panel)

It would have been SO SIMPLE to have a nicer pattern. short press to disconnect, long press to turn off.

<comment><USER3> >It would have been SO SIMPLE to have a nicer pattern. short press to disconnect, long press to turn off.

Indeed, this is exactly what I expected would happen when I long pressed and I was disappointed when it didn't. There are definitely times like this when Apple's UX gets more credit than it deserves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article fails to mention that AirDrop is only enabled for Contacts by default.

Furthermore, each AirDrop session is a TLS session, where the users exchange iCloud certificates to authenticate each other.

See: [https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....](https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf) (p. 45)

The phone is only as secure as the user makes it.

<comment><USER8> I believe that this information leak occurs BECAUSE AirDrop is only enabled for Contacts by default - you disclose your own hashed phone number when you open the Share dialog in order to allow nearby phones to decide whether you're on their Contacts list.

<comment><USER7> The claimed threat vector is loss of anonyminity. There is no anonyminity designed into AirDrop, and nowhere in Apple's documentation do I see the claim for it.

You iCloud account is your identity. When you choose to share things directly from your phone, you are choosing to share that identity. How else can another iPhone verify you?

There is no information leak. This is a clickbait title combined with a 'Well, duh' moment.

<comment><USER8> There's a difference between disclosing "I am phone XYZ and I want to AirDrop" and "here is my phone number." I would call that an information disclosure.

With that said I agree with you that it's an intuitive and non-serious disclosure, but it appears some disagree.

<comment><USER9> Except it's not "here is my phone number", it's "if you know my phone number you can tell it's me".

<comment><USER10> It's functionally the same, because attackers can brute force all phone numbers to reverse the hash.

<comment><USER9> I just looked up Apple's Security White Paper and it explains that the Bluetooth LE signal only includes a "short identity hash", and then the receiving device responds with its own identity info, and then the sending device establishes a peer-to-peer WiFi connection and sends its "long identity hash", which the receiver then uses to confirm that it knows the recipient before responding with its own "long identity hash".

Which it to say, it sounds like you only get partial information about the sender prior to identifying yourself and establishing a direct connection. So you cannot passively identify the exact phone number of an unknown sender.

The "short identity hash" itself it says is "created based on the email addresses and phone numbers associated with the user's Apple ID", though I have to assume that it's independently hashing each piece of info because if you hash the whole set, then the receiver would have to know the whole set, which would be a problem (my device knows more email addresses for me than any of my friends do).

<comment><USER10> Interesting. Looking at the code, it uses the first 3 bytes of the sha256 hash. That's 24 bits of entropy, or 16777216 possibilities. So if you know the area code, you can find the full phone number with decent probability.

[https://github.com/hexway/apple_bleee/blob/master/hash2phone...](https://github.com/hexway/apple_bleee/blob/master/hash2phone/hashmap_gen.py)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the problem space - I'm interested in how HN would design AirDrop without this information leak:

How do you allow two mutually untrusted client devices to determine that they share a common 9-digit number, without disclosing the secret? And for bonus points, how do you allow this to happen without two-way communication or access to a central authority?

<comment><USER11> From the article:

> _your phone sends out SHA256 your phone number hash to all the devices > around you every time you hit Share._

In theory, this should be enough to protect your number (although it's still a fingerprinting vector). The reason it's a problem isn't because other people can see the hash -- is because it's trivial to iterate over the list of possible phone numbers and figure out which one corresponds to each hash.

So... don't use 9 digit phone numbers. I'm sure I'm missing something, but this does not seem like a hard problem, at all.

Everyone using an Apple device has an Apple account. AirDrop is not compatible with Android; so this isn't a compatibility thing. I can't think of any reason why this needs to be a hash of a phone number instead of a randomized string that's attached to your account. Airdrop is fundamentally a way for you to share files across _Apple_ devices -- so just give them new IDs.

Yes, this means that there's a tiny amount of coordination with Apple servers that would need to happen when you add a new contact or share with a brand new phone number you've never seen before, but is anyone on here seriously going to argue that's worse for privacy than essentially transmitting your phone number in the open every time you use AirDrop?

From later in the article:

> _How does your friend know that the person requesting a password is you? > Broadband BLE requests contain your data, namely, SHA256 hashes of your > phone number, AppleID, and email._

There's a device with a screen, right in front of you, and the screen has to be visible for you to click the share button. Your friend also needs to be right next to you so that your phone's are close enough to connect over Bluetooth.

So pick one to two randomized dictionary words, display them on the screen, and just read that out loud to your friend as confirmation.

Is there something I'm misunderstanding about how these features work? The developers at Apple aren't dumb, so I'm assuming there's some good reason for needing to use a mobile number as a device ID for a proximity-based sharing service on a tightly-controlled device.

<comment><USER12> > Yes, this means that there's a tiny amount of coordination with Apple > servers that would need to happen when you add a new contact or share with a > brand new phone number you've never seen before,

I would just have hashes of all the numbers of all your contacts on both phones and if your hash sent over matches you have a contact. No need to phone home.

<comment><USER8> That's exactly how it works currently, but 9 numbers isn't enough entropy to protect against a brute force enumeration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The constant stream of information broadcast on Bluetooth is a concern. But MAC addresses of Apple devices have been randomized for a long time. The device name is something that could be used as a fingerprint for a longer duration if it turns out to be unique. What are the other risks, from a tracking perspective, from this general information broadcast?

</comment><comment><USER14> technical problems aside it's not great to see how many people around us leave leave AirDrop on for everyone.

Sitting in a train or plane full of people means there's usually 3-4 at least in range to randomly annoy with shared pictures or to force open a link in safari

works as intended I guess

sidenote: anyone know what limits there are on all things short range wireless? How many AirPods can reasonably work in a small area? How many Apple watches can unlock a mac wirelessly? How much AirDrop/short range device discovery can happen simultaneously?

<comment><USER15> On some morning flights I'd bet that close to half of the passengers are using some type of wireless noise cancelling headphones, and I have yet to notice any problems. So the bandwidth or noise doesn't seem to be an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The title is a lie.

Checking the status of your phone or collecting your phone number is much different of collecting information for "what happens on your iPhone". I am downvoting this.

</comment><comment><USER17> I mean, fair enough. But all of these are highly local (and most require user interaction), meaning they're less of a privacy concern and more of a security concern for high-value targets. Localized phishing, mostly. Plus you can guard against them by turning off bluetooth.

Worth knowing about if you're somebody important, or manage security for someone who is, but pretty far from "Everyone Knows What Happens on Your iPhone".

<comment><USER18> The edge case would be a someone using these techniques on, say, an attractive woman three seats down on the train.

In addition, one (hypothetically) could use iOS state awareness in conjunction with other attack vectors to gain access: i.e., we have an attack vector to gain remote access, but it only works if the target device is unlocked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this true on Android too? Can someone just lift your phone number via you merely having your Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/etc. running?

<comment><USER8> First off, "someone can lift your phone number via you merely having Bluetooth running" is entirely not true of this information leak.

The scope of this issue is that an unsalted SHA256 of your phone number is broadcast when you open the Share dialog with AirDrop and Bluetooth active. Your phone number is broadcast to determine whether the sending device is in the receiving device's contacts list.

The feature that causes this information leak (AirDrop) has no equivalent on stock Android, but hundreds of horrifyingly insecure apps exist to replicate it.

Google are introducing a similar feature (Fast Share) soon and we will see how it fares security wise.

This is an interesting cryptography question: how do you allow two mutually untrusted client devices to determine that they share a common secret, without disclosing the secret? And for bonus points, how do you allow this to happen without two-way communication?

<comment><USER20> >This is an interesting cryptography question

Is that a solved problem?

<comment><USER19> It sounds impossible for very-low-entropy secrets. Like just imagine if the secret is 1 bit. Anyone can pretend they have that 1 bit (since they can just try both possibilities), which would let them determine that's the same secret the other person has. The only solution would seem to be to stretch the entropy and make a brute-force enumeration slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any idea why this is flagged? I found the demos and the GitHub repo pretty interesting.

<comment><USER8> I didn't flag but it's obvious why: the title and introduction paragraph is comically misleading. Without the hyperbole it would be an interesting discovery, with the hyperbole it's obnoxious fear mongering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are there any news from Apple's side?

</comment><comment><USER23> md5 of a 10 digit phone number... classic noob mistake.

</comment><comment><USER24> MAybe the IT community should be telling people the truth: smartphones are terminals to the worldwide network of hackers. There should be no expectation of real privacy. Encryption can temporarily obscure data, until it becomes obsolete.

<comment><USER25> The legal frameworks surrounding privacy all revolve heavily around "reasonable expectations of privacy". I can't be upset if someone learns salacious information from the street through an open window; but if I close the blinds and someone intentionally peeks through a crack, they are violating my expectation of privacy and potentially breaking a law, even though I failed to secure that privacy properly by covering every square inch of the window.

In some cases, it can be possible to use E2E encryption to create a secret that is functionally impossible to discover. But even in cases where digital security is flawed, vulnerable, or outsourced to a third party, it's still valuable to us from a legal standpoint to maintain social expectations of privacy.</comment></comment>


Ghost.py – Webkit-based scriptable web browser for Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jeanphix/Ghost.py

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is nice, anyone know how to take screenshot with this? Also how is this compared to Splash[0]?

[0] - [http://splash.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](http://splash.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)

<comment><USER3> Shameless plug, a while ago I wrote a micro rest api (ghost.py + flask) to take screenshots and optionally upload them to S3: [http://gedrap.github.io/lightshot/](http://gedrap.github.io/lightshot/)

It still needs some extra work to be production ready though, please feel free to email me or create a github issue if you think it might useful for you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How is this different from [https://github.com/niklasb/dryscrape](https://github.com/niklasb/dryscrape)?

</comment><comment><USER5> Based on "scriptable" and the short example I'd guess this is a headless browser ala PhantomJS, but then it says it requires PyQt/PySide so maybe not?

<comment><USER6> It probably uses WebKit from PySide / PyQT see:

[https://pyside.github.io/docs/pyside/PySide/QtWebKit/index.h...](https://pyside.github.io/docs/pyside/PySide/QtWebKit/index.html)

I think it's sort of an approach towards something like nw.js but I could be wrong, a bit of more description as to the purpose and use case would help evade the confusion since I'm only speculating..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone please explain what this does? I'm a little unclear.

<comment><USER8> It lets you interact with a version of webkit via python. Useful for writing programs to interact with websites that normally require a user to press buttons.

<comment><USER9> How does this compare to mechanize?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting project, keep it up.</comment>


Weapons For Space Wars - <AUTHOR> http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x2.html

<comment><USER2> The mission of the overall site:

" _Your imagination has been captured by the roaring rockets from Heinlein's SPACE CADET or the Polaris from TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET. But are such rockets possible? How does one go about defining the performance of these atomic- powered cruisers?

"This document gives some hints and equations that will allow back-of-the- envelope calculations on such matters. Though horribly simplistic, they are far better than just making up your figures.

"This site was mainly intended for science fiction authors who wanted a little scientific accuracy...._"

Warning, real math and physics, and e.g. skepticism of various favorites. E.g. an "antimatter bomb" in space has obvious difficulties (it and what it's hitting get pushed apart) and less obvious (proton-antiproton collisions have less damaging results than you might expect).

Pretty cool.</comment>


Consumer products based on space research - <AUTHOR> http://slideshow.techworld.com/3203419/it-came-from-outer-space-nasa-innovations-in-our-lives/

<comment><USER2> So these products were made better by space research but of course that's no justification for the program because we're only seeing what is seen while ignoring what's unseen here-the things that the money would have been used for instead.

Several of those enhancements have rather dubious value to society as well.

<comment><USER3> Why, in your opinion, does the space program require justification? Is it the expense?

I would counter that the expense of a thing should not be the overwhelming factor in its consideration. Just because something is expensive, does not mean it is not worth doing. Otherwise, we would all be huddling in mud huts and carting around cow dung for a living.</comment></comment>


Trunk Road Gritter Tracker - <AUTHOR> http://scotgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=2de764a9303848ffb9a4cac0bd0b1aab <comment><USER3> I'm amazed Scotland have a real time map with also how long ago a road was gritted - much respect to them.

And the Gritter names are hilarious - but sadly don't (in my mind) beat Doncaster's "Gritsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Anti-Slip Machiney"

<comment><USER4> > I'm amazed Scotland have a real time map with also how long ago a road was > gritted - much respect to them.

We've the same over in the Netherlands, even including temperature of the road surface - <USER2> [https://www.rijkswaterstaatstrooit.nl/](https://www.rijkswaterstaatstrooit.nl/).

<comment><USER5> Here in Columbus, Ohio, we have a site called the Warrior Watch - [https://warriorwatch.columbus.gov/ww](https://warriorwatch.columbus.gov/ww) It does a great job of showing when my street was last plowed and what it's priority is. We haven't had a lot of use for them this winter though.

<comment><USER6> One thing worth noting about that map is that it's only for major roads that appear to be the responsibility of Transport Scotland - local areas have their own snow clearing coverage e.g. Here is the map (sadly without automatic updates of gritter locations) for Fife where I live:

[http://arcgisweb.fife.gov.uk/LocalViewEXT/Sites/publicWinter...](http://arcgisweb.fife.gov.uk/LocalViewEXT/Sites/publicWinterGrittting/)

Mind you - the road where I live (which to be fair is rural and up a hill) was blocked for about a week the last time we had any serious snow and it was some local farmers with JCBs who actually cleared it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having never heard the terms "trunk road" or "gritter" it took me a little time to figure out what this was. Correct me if I'm wrong but "trunk road" appears to mean something like main road and "gritter" seems to mean plow and/or sanding truck.

<comment> globular-toast "Main road" is actually considerably more general than trunk road in the Great Britain. The roads in GB are ordered hierarchically starting with motorways (although these have restrictions, ie. motorvehicles only), through trunk roads, primary, secondary, all the way down to byway.

It is important for navigation in GB. When you want to go somewhere you are supposed to use trunk roads to navigate to the first town/city on the trunk network _beyond_ where you are going. The signs are coloured to indicate you are on the trunk network. Then as you approach your actual destination you will begin to see it signposted on the local non-trunk roads, at which point you leave the trunk roads.

This has been mostly forgotten in this age of GPS navigation, though, and many signs are in a poor state of repair or badly occluded by trees or shrubbery.

<comment><USER8> I'm from the UK and was unaware of this method (trunk road to town/city after destination).

Is there somewhere I can read about this in more detail?

Thanks!

<comment><USER9> Here is a list of primary destinations.

They are separated by region. So for example if you are in Cambridge (EAST region) you follow signs for EAST MIDLANDS. Once you are in that region, you will start seeing signs for the primary destinations in the region.

[https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/203664/traffic- signs-manual-chapter-02-primary-route.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like "SNOWBEGONE KENOBI" and "READY SPREADY GO."

Also the word "gritter" is really funny to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> In Michigan we have webcams on the front of our snow plows, in addition to their GPS location. This is useful for seeing road conditions throughout the state in places that don't have traffic cameras.

Just click the little icon that looks like a snowplow on this site. No plows out today, however...

[https://michigan.gov/drive/](https://michigan.gov/drive/)

<comment><USER12> Surely if you're planning to drive on the road, you'd want the webcam to be behind the snow plow?

<comment><USER13> Lighting behind a truck is poor (no white lights on the back), and it gives an idea of how bad the roads are getting between snow plows. This is useful since plows often run notably slower than normal traffic can safely run for the conditions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Toronto has the same thing for its snowplows, without the great names, sadly. They're all parked in their lots right now. We've been having unusually warm weather lately...

[https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking- tra...](https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking- transportation/road-maintenance/winter-maintenance/plowto/)

<comment><USER15> Same just down the road, but they're also service vehicles, so they're out and about regularly. [http://hamilton.plowtracker.com/](http://hamilton.plowtracker.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Am I missing something - how do you see the names? When I click on one of the vehicles I see "Vehicle Location (PN61DYG)" and the name field is blank.

<comment><USER17> Zoom in until the names appear on the map, you don't have to select each vehicle - sadly they don't all have names.

<comment><USER16> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I didn't know what gritters are, but this article makes it more clear and cites some of the funny names they have.

[https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/gritters-in-scotland- have...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/gritters-in-scotland-have-names- like-gritty-gritty-bang-bang-and-you-can-track-them-on-a-map-a3741576.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> G R I T A L L I C A!

<comment><USER20> David Plowie!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I live in a warm place so I am out of touch, but isn't that like a lot of gritters for how small Scotland is?

<comment><USER22> The trunk road network is 2179 miles (3506km) long and there's ~120 gritters deployed.

Doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount to me.

<comment><USER23> 2179/120 means each one has to cover about 18 miles. Assuming they average 36 mph, assuming each trunk road is 2 lanes in both directions (assuming one pass per lane and not including time to clean up the shoulder/median), and assuming they spend 50% of their time gritting/plowing new roads rather than filling up/changing drivers/driving on plowed roads to get to or from their target road, that's one pass every four hours. Seems quite reasonable (if a bit undersized) to me as a Michigander.

We're having unseasonably warm weather here - it's 45 and sunny instead of a typical 25 and overcast - so all the snow has melted in Southwest Michigan and our state plow tracking map is basically blank today:

[https://mdotjboss.state.mi.us/MiDrive/map](https://mdotjboss.state.mi.us/MiDrive/map)

We have about 800 snowplows to cover 12,000 miles of state/trunk roads (15 miles per vehicle). It requires about 2,000 operators to keep those 800 plow trucks running 24x7 when it's really snowing.

<comment><USER24> > assuming each trunk road is 2 lanes in both directions

At a rough guess, about half of the roads have 2 lanes in each direction, and the rest one lane in each direction.

That should improve your estimate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I first misread this as "Truck road glitter tracker". At first I was disappointed, but then noticed the names of the gritting trucks and my faith in humanity was restored :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone know what underlying technologies they are using? Anything opensource server or client side? What types of hardware do they use in the vehicles to send the GPS info?

<comment><USER27> Salt, rocks and lots of diesel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Took reading the comments to figure out what a gritter is. (Here in the States.)

<comment><USER29> Here we'd call them sanders or salters.

It was an even bet for me between that and maintenance of oiled gravel roads. It's basically a lower cost version of asphalt. Every few years, they sprinkle some gravel, and spray with heavy oil. The odor is horrible, and vehicles get dirty.

<comment><USER30> Typically we refer to them as 'plows' or 'snowplows' in the US midwest regardless of what they're actually doing—they often (but not always) have a large plow on the front, and a salt/sand spreader on the back, or in some cases a sprayer that shoots out fine mist that gets your car all grimy and nasty for the next day or two.

<comment><USER31> The mist is called "brine", at least here in DC metro. It's usually applied before a winter weather event. Once the snow is down, we apply a normal salt/sand mix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Neat! I love the names too.

Is it using the cell network out of interest, or..?

<comment><USER33> Yeah, i believe it's done via the Vodafone network.

Cell coverage is something like 95% of land and 99.something% of population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "David Plowie" got me

</comment><comment><USER27> ICE DESTROYER!</comment>


Google releases code for MySQL enhancements - <AUTHOR> http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/04/google-releases-patches-that-enhance.html <comment><USER2> Great release from google. I have just started working with databases but i think these features are great

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope my startup can someday make similar announcements about the open source tools we use.</comment>


Revealed: the top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant

<comment><USER2> > Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if > they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat > of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any > information relevant to cybersecurity

So if they "inadvertently" discover you're breaking a law during their mass surveillance, they can forward it to the relevant authorities.

> Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" > or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for > the purposes of ceasing further surveillance

Brilliant. In order to prevent spying on citizens, they spy on citizens to make sure they're citizens who can't be spied on.</comment>


Internetarchive.bak - <AUTHOR> http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK&hn

<comment><USER2> Current status: [http://iabak.archiveteam.org/](http://iabak.archiveteam.org/)

Helping out is super easy: On Linux or Mac, git clone [https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/IA.BAK/](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/IA.BAK/) and run the iabak script. It will walk you through setup.

[https://archive.org/donate](https://archive.org/donate)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is what 21(decimal)PB looks like in terms of Backblaze storage pods:

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-now-is-the-time-for- backb...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-now-is-the-time-for-backblaze-to- build-a-270-tb-storage-pod/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9147719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9147719)

and (more recently) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9602868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9602868)</comment>


Why working from home or Starbucks is a bad idea - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/02/5-reasons-working-from-home-or-starbucks-is-a-bad-idea/

<comment><USER2> This article seems a bit misleading to me. First, it starts on the premise that working from home or Starbucks is what a lot of bootstrap companies do and _think_ it's good and keeping costs down.

Then it leads into why building a company is this environment is bad. Your employees are going to start looking for other startups, you don't have enough whiteboard to map things out.

It seems to me that the reasons for needing "30,000" square feet of office space are applicable to a financed company, not so much a bootstrap. I don't think the argument that's being made here is supported by the arguments for it.

From my own experience at least in building random projects out, Starbucks works really well for me. I bring headphones, so the distractions of the "annoying person on the phone" don't really apply. It helps me focus because it does get rid of the distractions of home, without adding any distractions.

<comment><USER3> It wasn't implying 30,000 feet of space. He was referring to the '30,000 foot view' - the 'high view' of the project/company. It's easy to have a 'big picture view' of things at a coffee shop - "we'll have a login screen here!" - but you can't map out how you want it to work without delving in to more details than is practical to do in a public space.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A DIY 3D Motion Sensor - <AUTHOR> http://duo3d.com

<comment><USER2> Do your demos mirror those of Leap Motion on purpose? Your device is also very similar to theirs..

One amazing difference is that you have Linux drivers :-)

Any chance of those working with Leap? Or, any chances of getting hands on your kit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well we are in the process of starting our Kickstarter which you can find out more about here: <http://duo3d.com/articles/detail/duo_ks>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks really awesome! Completely certain I'll see you on Outgrow.me (I'm founder) very soon.</comment>


Soon, Majority of Web Users Will No Longer Use IE - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/soon_majority_will_drop_ie.php <comment><USER2> I doubt that there will be a mass defect from the people still using IE6, but I'm always happy to hear that IE's use is on the decline.

That browser has been a thorn in my side for too many years now.

</comment><comment><USER3> At this point, it matters not what happens to IE market share. It will not ever get lower than 20% and it will not ever get higher than 90% again. As long as it stays in that range we can know with surety that a) all web sites will still have to be coded to work with IE b) no web sites will be exclusively IE. Those days are over.

The only remaining question is how fast we can vanquish IE6 and thus rescue a small amount of sanity for web developers everywhere. The rest of the battle, in as much as it can be won, has been won.

<comment><USER4> Allow your site to gracefully degrade to a more simple version (for both mobile users and IE6) or just reject IE6 users altogether.

I plan to drop IE6 support soon. From my experience, if someone loves your site, and you make them choose between upgrading their browser and using your site, about 90% will happily upgrade their browser (most of the remaining 10% can't upgrade, but you can't please/support everyone). I know from experience; I have forced this decision on my users several years ago for mac users (dropped support for IE5/mac and older versions of Safari) and had no complaints.

<comment><USER5> That may be a bit biased since I imagine Mac users would be more willing to stop using IE for another browser.

A Windows user may not be as likely - especially since IE isn't the default browser on a Mac.

<comment><USER6> And on the Mac there was an alternative browser preinstalled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More mobile browsing = automatic market share loss for IE.

<comment><USER8> But, surely mobile IE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know how they estimate the market shares of various browsers?

On an average day, I'll use Firefox 3, Chrome, IE7 and sometimes Konqueror & IE8. How would that get counted?

<comment><USER10> I think you would be an unusual outlier ;) As are we all ! So I guess that would end up as noise in the stats?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The data in this article doesn't really tell me much. The decline is slow and is based solely on current versions. There are way too many things to factor. The increase of Firefox users, the uprise of Opera and Chrome. Then when IE6(or was it 7) came out, the different layout had a learning curve that caused users to switch. Then IE8 is supposedly the windows 7 of IE. There are really too many factors to just look at a chart with no significant data and jump to conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER12> When this can be confirmed with reasonable certainty, web developers the world over need to organize some sort of celebration. Proposals?

</comment><comment><USER13> Until corporations upgrade from IE to something else en masse (unlikely in the near future), IE's share will remain disproportionate. I think the vast majority of people still using IE 6 are doing so because they have no choice in the matter.

</comment><comment><USER14> This can't happen soon enough. I'm working on a web app right now that requires ie6 functionality. This browser needs to die but I think it's still got a ways to go.

<comment><USER15> Usually I'll finish an App, continue testing with FF, then cross my fingers and load in IE. Then I fix the carnage over several hours/days and test then revert back to Firefox to make sure nothing has broken. All the other browsers usually just take a couple hours of tweaks to cater to.

I wish Microsoft would force an IE7 update.</comment></comment>