1994 Bolivian earthquake reveals mountains 660 kilometers below our feet - <AUTHOR> https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/02/14/massive-1994-bolivian-earthquake-reveals-mountains-660-kilometers-below-our-feet <comment><USER2> I believe this is a great use of public funding for basic research.

Plate tectonic theory is strangely both very recent and very old—it was conceived in the 1950s and has led to major discoveries in the private sector.

While the immediate implications of a breakthrough like this (extreme topography separating mantle transition zones) don't likely have an impact on society at large, a series of them likely will.

It would be great to unlock additional resources, perhaps in less volatile areas, or more cleanly, by using a new model for earth processes.

<comment><USER3> > Plate tectonic theory is strangely both very recent and very old

In general geology is one of the forgotten natural sciences, even though it has had some pretty important fundamental contributions to the way we see the universe (the concept of deep time is fairly recent). Maybe because it is inherently dealing with time-frames and scales beyond human imagining.

<comment><USER4> In my experience teaching geology, many people are fundamentally uninterested in rocks; they're mundane, pretty static, boring, etc. Many people are also not particularly spatially-inclined so maps aren't interesting. I think the spatial and temporal scale issues you bring up are also factors.

People do seem to be interested in landscape development, minerals (pretty crystals are cooler than pieces of shale), earthquakes, etc. Paleontology is typically housed in geoscience departments too.

From a research perspective, geoscience is extremely fun. Even to those infatuated with the Earth such as myself, the individual topics of study can get a little dry. However, geologic problems can be approached from a wide variety of methods, and to solve those problems that are still standing, a research group will come at it from many angles. This includes, but is not limited to, physics-based computational modeling, hiking, isotope geochemistry, fossil collection, statistics, satellite imagery analysis, acoustic physics, technical drawing, computer simulation, spherical geometry, and smashing boulders with sledge hammers.

For example, one chapter[0] of my PhD thesis (studying the development of fault-bounded mountain ranges in Tibet) I spent several months camping in beautiful Tibetan mountains doing geologic mapping and sampling (which is hiking, making qualitative and quantitative field observations and measurements, as well as digging holes and picking up rocks), then I came home and did a lot of radioactive isotope geochemistry of the minerals apatite and zircon within the rock samples: These minerals contain uranium and thorium; as the U and Th decay, they produce 4He (an alpha particle). At high temperatures, those particles diffuse out of the apatite and zircon crystals, but at low temperatures the 4He is retained in the crystals. So you measure the ratio of 4He to U and Th, and get an idea of when the crystals cooled below the diffusion 'closure temperature' (which is dependent on cooling rate). By taking these measurements over almost a vertical kilometer along the mountain range, I could estimate how fast the mountain range was rising, because it cools as it rises out of the surrounding crust. But it's a bit complicated to do the calculations right because there are lots of small issues (how fast the rock in the mountain range cools is dependent on the ambient temperature of the crust, the thermal properties of the rock, how much radiogenic heat production there is from K, Th and U decay, the temperature of the surface of the earth, the irregularities of the topography, ...) so to do it right you have to make a finite element model of the crust and simulate the thermal evolution as the crust deforms due to faulting and mountain range development. This is only a forward model, so to figure out the whole history of deformation including faulting and mountain range uplift rates through time, and deal with uncertainty in the thermal parameters of the crust, I had to run thousands of forward models. Lacking a cluster, I had to teach myself Python and how to use AWS EC2 instances to do embarrassingly parallel finite element modeling (I used the PiCloud library which was incredible but died in an aquihire event).

[0]: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tect.20053/abstra...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tect.20053/abstract)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for sharing your research and experience. Your comment was a really nice read.

What does someone with a PhD like yours does afterwards?

What is currently the holy grail of geology?

<comment><USER2> Fellow (former) geologist here.

The most common options are:

-Resources (oil/mining). It's a surprisingly diverse field within this realm

-Academia/research. Also very diverse

-Disaster modeling/prediction/studies like earthquakes and flooding

-Some engineering (ie geological surveys for real estate/infrastructure development)

-Space-related like satellite imaging/remote sensing. Or becoming an astronaut

<comment><USER4> Good list. A lot of folks go into environmental remediation as well. Unfortunately in practice a lot of this is 'helping companies pollute to the maximum extent allowed by law' but it's better than nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is both really amazing and sad at the same time. Amazing because they are advancing a fascinating field and discovering what Earth's interior is like. Sad because it seems research like this barely gets any funding or attention.

Yesterday I read that NASA estimates that it would take $104B to go back to the Moon. I'd much prefer we would spend that kind of money on trying to get to the center of the Earth :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Some possibly interesting stuff about topography on the 660 km 'boundary':

The 660 km boundary (aka the 660 km discontinuity) is primarily* a mineralogical phase transition in the mid-Mantle. What that means is that the bulk geochemistry above and below this boundary are the same, but the crystalline structures are different (different mineral assemblages are stable at different temperatures and pressures given the same bulk rock chemistry, and the transitions are sharp-ish rather than gradual). The rock below the 660 boundary is maybe 10% more dense than the rock above. Because rock in the mantle is viscous (say, 10^20 Pa s) in the absence of persistent stress or pressure gradients, any topography on this boundary should eventually level out. So seeing kilometers of topography on the boundary means that there are some sort of persistent differences in force in the mantle of magnitude 10-100 MPa that can sustain the gravitational potential energy gradients produced by irregular topography and therefore irregular density distributions. Over broad scales (hundreds to thousands of km laterally) this could be from the big mantle convection cells that drive tectonic plate motion on the Earth's surface. At smaller scales I have no idea what could be driving it.

Another interesting thing about the 660 km (and 410 km and shallower) phase transitions is that I _think_ that the density and viscosity contrasts due to the phase transitions causes a lot of the deep earthquakes such as the Bolivian earthquake from the paper. These earthquakes are in a subducted (sinking, falling if you will) old slab of oceanic crust. As these sink due to density contrasts (they are cold from being at the Earth's surface), they will slow down when they pass through the 410, 660, etc. phase transitions and should deform, kind of like a big icicle that falls of a cliff into water fracturing when it hits the water's surface (except it may continue to sink).

* Some say it's a chemical boundary as well, i.e. that the material above and below doesn't mix. I think most high-resolution seismic imaging of the mantle shows that many convective features such as mantle plumes and subducting oceanic plates penetrate the 660 discontinuity so I don't know if I believe this but it's hard to say and this isn't my area of expertise. It could be either or both although we have solid experimental and theoretical thermodynamic evidence for saying that these are phase transitions.

</comment><comment><USER6> This complicates my planned journey to the center of the Earth.

<comment><USER7> make sure to take your hiking boots. crossing mountains is tough business.</comment></comment>


Should Microsoft's Office Group Market Visual Studio LightSwitch?  - <AUTHOR> http://accessindepth.blogspot.com/2010/11/should-microsofts-office-group-market.html

<comment><USER2> I had no idea outsourcing clients were expected to commit to not do _any_ development work inhouse using sane tools. That makes doing it anyway, but in Excel, look far less painfully ignorant.</comment>


Denver Metro Rents Decrease Following Completion of Nearly 10,000 New Apartments - <AUTHOR> https://www.aamdhq.org/index.php?src=news&srctype=detail&category=Industry%20News&refno=87 <comment><AUTHOR> A couple of articles chewing through these numbers:

[http://www.denverpost.com/2017/01/18/metro-denver- apartment-...](http://www.denverpost.com/2017/01/18/metro-denver-apartment- rents-drop/)

[http://www.curbed.com/2017/1/25/14342828/denver-rents- afford...](http://www.curbed.com/2017/1/25/14342828/denver-rents-affordable- housing-apartments)</comment>


I know who 'Satoshi Nakamoto' is, says Ted Nelson - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/19/ted_nelson_thinks_hes_outed_bitcoins_nakamoto/ <comment><USER2> This is almost certainly wrong.

If you spend any time at all reading about history of Bitcoin and other related currencies, it's clear that Satoshi was a cypherpunk. And at least an active lurker, if not a well-known participant, in the cypherpunks mailing list during the 1990s and early 2000s. Just look at the sources in the bitcoin paper. Satoshi cites lots of cypherpunks, and not many mainstream academics. The code borrows time-stamping ideas from Usenet and takes inspiration from command-and-control architectures of IRC botnets.

The pieces of the puzzle are:

\- (1997) Adam Back's hashcash proof of work system

\- (1998) Wei Dai's b-money

\- (1998-2005) Nick Szabo's writings about git gold

\- (2004) Hal Finney's reusable proof of work (RPOW)

Satoshi brought these ideas -- _cypherpunk ideas_ \-- together to make Bitcoin, not the ideas about improving Chaumian blind signatures and anonymous e-cash that were being discussed in the academic crypto literature of the time. Remember, cypherpunks (and others inspired by Tim May's crypto-anarchy) have a long history of communicating anonymously. Anonymous remailers and pseudonyms were expected on the list, so it's not unusual to see Satoshi Nakamoto come out of this tradition.

There are probably people that know who the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but they're not going to tell. They're cypherpunks, after all. And if Satoshi stays anonymous, it just means that everything is going _exactly as planned_.

<comment><USER3> Here are some emails and headers that you might be interested in:

<http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/>

phrases: <http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/phrases.txt>

He might be one of these people: [http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin- satoshi/p2p-research-mem...](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin- satoshi/p2p-research-members.txt)

Here are some forum posts timestamps: <http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin- satoshi/datetimes.yaml>

I also feel it is necessary to point out that it is completely possible to spoof forum posts to match his writing style and C++ idioms. So there might be someone posing as a "second satoshi" waiting to be discovered by phrase analysis. This is one of the vulnerabilities of his pseudonym.

Happy hacking.

<comment><USER4> Wait, what, why are you guys ascribing so much importance to the dating format? yyyy-mm-dd _is_ the format I've been using for a long, long time, and I have no affiliation with cypherpunks nor have I ever had any. I know a lot of non-programmers who use it too. It's just a good, solid, sensical time format (largest to smallest, just like we already tell time: hh:mm:ss). I think I first came across the idea of using it in everyday situations like 5 years ago on some gaming forums.

You should all use it too, because it just makes too much sense. :)

No, seriously, _please_ start using yyyy-mm-dd whenever wherever you can. It is most especially useful when you're doing text analysis, makes life very easy there.

<comment><USER3> Well, no.

The file "datetimes.yaml" contains a list of serialized ISO 8601 timestamps because that's how you represent timestamps in yaml. These timestamps represent the different timestamps that bitcointalk.org gives to the posts made by the Satoshi pseudonym.

I am not implying that anyone who uses ISO 8601 might be Satoshi. Rather, I am providing you with a list of timestamps in ISO 8601 format. I am making no claims about how Satoshi tends to write timestamps (and I don't remember if I even looked at that, I think I got bored).

These timestamps can be used to determine which timezone he is a member of, or which timezone he wanted you to think he was a member of, or to compare against other email headers. For example, I would love to compare this data against a historically-accurate cypherpunk email archive. (I do not have one at the moment.)

However, he could have written some small amount of software to delay the posts he wrote to the forum, but some of them look very timely. He could also have written software to delay the times that his posts were posted, to make it sync up with the timestamps of another cypherpunk member (which would be hilarious and evil).

I think a more thorough analysis would have to look at each individual Satoshi forum post and determine whether or not it was written "probably delayed", because sometimes the delta between the post he wrote and the post he was replying to was very tiny, which would improve the chances that he was not on a delay timer (unless he spoofed all questions he replied to, which I also doubt).

<comment><USER4> Oh, so bringing up his timestamps was for that... you guys weren't talking about the format per se. Sorry about that, completely my fault for misunderstanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Utter nonsense; no mathematician would have created Bitcoin. Mathematicians _criticize_ cryptographers for _not being rigorous enough_ in their proofs. Bitcoin _does not even have a formal security definition_ , let alone any kind of proof.

Anyone who is looking at professional cryptographers or accomplished researchers is looking in the wrong place. Bitcoin is the work of amateurs and enthusiasts, the sort of people who flood sci.crypt with claims about new cryptosystems and ignore the experts who still take the time to post there. It only caught on because it appeals to libertarians and anarchists, and eventually was promoted enough that mainstream media outlets were afraid that they would be left behind on reporting "the next big thing."

<comment><USER6> A pretty harsh appraisal of a system that is already trusted with accounting for over a billion dollars worth of digital assets. Can you give some examples of other cryptographic systems of comparable complexity being used at scale for years without major incident? Message encryption, TLS, and Secure Shell are generally trusted as being secure, but all pale in comparison to the complexity of bitcoin in terms of what they attempt to achieve. Yes, bitcoin is vulnerable to a 51% network attack, but I believe there is a social engineering-type security built into the protocol. That is, early adopters are incentivized by easy block rewards and currency appreciation potential. But they also take the greater risk of 51% network attack. As bitcoin takes off, mining becomes more decentralized and less vulnerable to 51% attack. Just last week we saw this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5696596> (Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined)

<comment><USER5> "A pretty harsh appraisal of a system that is already trusted with accounting for over a billion dollars worth of digital assets."

That it is popular does _not_ demonstrate that it was not designed by amateurs and enthusiasts. Many popular systems were hacked together by amateurs. Fidonet was the work of amateurs -- a global computer network that _remains_ in use to this very day.

It is also _not_ the case that systems trusted with large amounts of money must necessarily be secure. If the past 20 years have taught us anything, it is that security is not even within the consciousness of most users of payment systems, at least when it comes to online payments. That credit cards were _ever_ used for Internet payments, rather than Chaum's systems, should be proof enough of that. All that standards between most people's bank accounts and a potential thief is a password, yet there is little demand for smartcards or other more secure systems.

"Message encryption, TLS, and Secure Shell are generally trusted as being secure, but all pale in comparison to the complexity of bitcoin in terms of what they attempt to achieve"

Why separate encryption from TLS and SSH? TLS and SSH _are_ encryption (and authentication) systems. Here, on the other hand, is a secure multiparty computation system that has served a large user base for over a decade without major incident:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixmaster_anonymous_remailer>

The most major attack on remailers so far was the recent attempt to de- anonymize the Pittsburgh bomb threats. It is unclear if the FBI was able to break the security of Mixmaster even after compromising numerous remailers; a man has been indicted, but the evidence (last I checked) remains secret. It seems unlikely, unless the FBI had compromised all the remailers except for the ones they raided prior to their investigation; that would mean that the FBI had effectively compromised _the whole network_ , which is beyond what any secure computation system can protect against.

Similarly, there is the Danish Sugar Beet Auction system. This system has fewer workers than Mixmaster, and certainly less than Bitcoin, but it was designed and engineered by prominent researchers and serves thousands of users (only a slightly smaller scale than Bitcoin). The system has been used for a few years now:

<http://fc09.ifca.ai/papers/15_Secure_MPC_goes_live.pdf>

"Yes, bitcoin is vulnerable to a 51% network attack"

Let's be _very_ clear here: Bitcoin is not merely vulnerable to a majority of _parties_ behaving maliciously; that would be acceptable in a multiparty computation system. What Bitcoin is vulnerable to is _one_ party working just slightly harder than all the other parties. In other words, a single malicious party, working in polynomial time, can successfully attack Bitcoin (whatever the definition of a successful attack actually is). The attack allows one party to deny confirmations on transactions involving another party. It allows one party to double-spend the currency. It allows one party to prevent other parties from being paid for mining.

This is why I said Bitcoin is the work of amateurs and enthusiasts. This is the sort of attack that nobody in the cryptography research community would consider acceptable. This is not merely a disconnected between theory and practice (as is the case with PGP, TLS, and Mixmaster, all of which diverge somewhat from their theoretical foundations); the vulnerability exists in the very design of the Bitcoin protocol.

There are other signs that Bitcoin is the work of amateurs. The protocol specification is hard to pin down; much of the design is documented only with code, rather than in the original paper. There is no threat model and no formal security definition. The security analysis in the original paper focuses on a _specific_ method of attacking Bitcoin, without ruling out any other methods. None of this is something you would expect to see out of expert cryptographers, and to suggest that it is the work of an accomplished mathematician is beyond wishful thinking.

If you want to compare Bitcoin to the work of experts, why don't you take a look at the work of experts? Here, for example, is some important work in the field of secure multiparty computation:

<http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~rafail/PUBLIC/57.pdf>

Does the original Bitcoin paper even _remotely_ resemble this? Here is an earlier, shorter work; can you honestly say that the original Bitcoin paper even resembles this:

[http://www.math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS/MYPAPERS/GMW87/GMW...](http://www.math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS/MYPAPERS/GMW87/GMW87.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Regarding credit card security (or lack thereof)--protection lies mainly in the massive fraud prevention efforts of the credit card companies (hence the large fees). It gives more protection to consumers than merchants (it's easy to request chargebacks). Bitcoin offers an alternative security model, known as caveat emptor. There's no way to reverse a transaction. All consumer protection devices, such as escrow, are outside the scope of the protocol. So bitcoin by itself may or not be an acceptable means of payment, depending on the use case.

I understand the risk of a single party attacker who controls more than half the network. But at this point, what kind of attacker can muster up that much computing power? Only a nation-state, billionaire, or large corporation could conceivably do so. And it's daily growing beyond their reach. Not only that, but their motive must be not just to make gains. They would have to want to destroy the bitcoin economy. Interestingly, the bitcoin economy has already survived a 24-block split without major calamity[1].

I had a look at the papers you linked to. The Canetti paper certainly seems more rigorous and formal. But the Danish Beet Auction paper actually doesn't seem too far from the Bitcoin whitepaper. The bitcoin paper is certainly the most concise.

Amateur or not, bitcoin may be the "worse is better"[2] solution to low transaction fee, decentralized, online payments. If a better solution comes out, I'd love to hear about it.

1\. <http://bitcoin.org/chainfork.html> 2\. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better>

<comment><USER5> "at this point, what kind of attacker can muster up that much computing power?"

There is already a single mining pool that nearly controls that much computing power. In general, though, it is a bad idea to ask these sorts of questions; what is really important is not "who might amass this much power" but rather, "what will the honest users do about it?" In the case of Bitcoin, once an attacker amasses enough computing power for the attack, the honest users would have to increase their own computing power to prevent the attack -- but the attacker would only have to add as much to their own computing power as the honest users add to theirs.

By comparison, Mixmaster uses 1024 bit public keys. Suppose someone amassed enough computing power to compute the corresponding secret keys, thus breaking the security of Mixmaster. Without adding any additional worker nodes, Mixmaster could be updated to use 2048 bit keys, or 4096 bit keys, or even larger keys. This would result in an exponential increase in the work needed to attack the system, at the cost of only a small increase in the work needed to run Mixmaster (small to the point of probably not requiring any new hardware).

"Not only that, but their motive must be not just to make gains. They would have to want to destroy the bitcoin economy."

I would also be wary of trying to guess an attacker's motives. The attacker may only be interesting in blocking confirmations on transactions involving a specific party (e.g. maybe the US government wants to prevent Wikileaks from receiving donations). The attacker may have some goal that we cannot even imagine without knowing the attacker's particular circumstances.

"Interestingly, the bitcoin economy has already survived a 24-block split without major calamity[1]."

Yes, but that incident was (apparently) accidental. The fact that such a thing can _accidentally_ happen is pretty bad news. To borrow Bruce Schneier's analogy, a house can _accidentally_ burn down; an arsonist will _maliciously_ cause that to happen, and will do so in the worst way possible. An attacker will try to _trigger_ such a fork, whether by spending a large amount of computing time or by exploiting some implementation bug (e.g. maybe the attacker will do only slightly more work than other miners, searching for that one block that triggers a subtle bug in some version of Bitcoin).

Compare this to a secure multiparty computation system in the malicious model. In such a system, a node cannot _accidentally_ break a security property -- because _no_ node can deviate from the protocol in a way that breaks the security property.

"the Danish Beet Auction paper actually doesn't seem too far from the Bitcoin whitepaper"

There are a few key differences:

1\. The security model is precisely defined: the adversary corrupts a minority of the worker nodes, any number of clients, and no node will deviate from the protocol.

2\. While the security model is weak, the authors (a) acknowledge that it is weak, (b) give a justification for choosing a weak security model, and (c) explain how to strengthen the security model and what the trade-offs would be.

3\. There is a formal proof of security, which rules out all polynomial time attacks within the security model.

The Bitcoin paper has none of the above. There is no clear security model, no justification for accepting the attack described in the paper itself, and no evidence that other attacks do not exist. The paper does not spend any time considering an attack conducted by some colluding subset of nodes, not even to explain why such an attack is unlikely or will not be considered.

"Amateur or not, bitcoin may be the "worse is better"[2] solution to low transaction fee, decentralized, online payments."

Perhaps, but so what? The point was that Bitcoin was almost certainly not designed by a mathematics or cryptography researcher. Amateurs can certainly create systems that become popular. The Linux kernel was originally written by an amateur; if this were 1993 and someone tried to tell you that Ken Thompson was behind the Linux kernel, would you have believed it?

<comment><USER6> I appreciate your thorough responses and patient explanations about the weaknesses of bitcoin. I agree with you that bitcoin is not perfect, nor is Linux, but I enjoy using both. By your standard, we may have to wait a very long time to enjoy decentralized digital currencies. Bitcoin could go the way of Linux and over many years see gradual improvement in security and usability. Or it could suffer a debilitating attack and cause a massive loss of confidence. Either way, it's here today and that's better than potential currencies with formal security proofs that are years off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Utterly flawed reasoning. See: "Prosecutor's fallacy"

<http://www.conceptstew.co.uk/PAGES/prosecutors_fallacy.html>

<comment><USER8> So is yours. See "Defendant's fallacy" at the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER9> That does not make elux's reasoning flawed, because they did not say that Mochizuki definitely was not Nakamoto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't seem to find any indication that Shinichi Mochizuki has done any published programming, and then to suddenly write very good crypto software in C (by himself, who does that) seem implausible. Mathematics Genius != Crypto Programming Genius.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ok his 3 identification features are, he is a very smart professor, he doesn't rely on peer review and he works very hard.

There are probably 10000 people who fit this profile and the profile of the bitcoin creator even better. This is dumb

<comment><USER12> Also, he's Japanese and Nelson thinks Nakamoto is actually Japanese because everyone who says he isn't Japanese is falling for committing "ethnocentric cluckery". Dumb indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't it a little dangerous throwing around claims like this? If everyone believed that I had a secret stash of a hundred million dollars, I would be slightly worried for my safety.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nope. It's still definitely me.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692317>

<comment><USER15> Bad Luck Brian:

Finally reveals the true identify of Satoshi Nakamoto, Nobody believes him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Bitcoin is engineering, not math. Isn't the crypto all based on 70s and 80s math? Why would a pure mathematician get involved? And Bitcoin took evangelizing, not just the work of a hermit.

Methinks Ted Nelson is pulling someone's chain. Maybe he can tell us the identity of The Joker, or Fuzzy Dunlop from The Wire.

<comment><USER4> > _And Bitcoin took evangelizing, not just the work of a hermit._

I don't think it took evangelizing. Did Linux take evangelizing for it to get big? Bitcoin was something that, once properly implemented, was bound to get a lot of attention from cypherpunks. The big feat. here is actually coding it up and having it work without too many issues. As for it getting big this year (with the value of BC going really high a month back), it was just one more way to get 'rich', so people jumped on it. It has an intrinsically viral nature.

<comment><USER16> depends on your definition of evangelizing... search for Satoshi Nakamoto's voluminous posting history ... just putting software in a forum where people can see it, discussing it at length and getting people to participate and contribute is different from dumping a proof and declining to explain it.

for some definition, Linus Torvalds has awesome collaboration/evangelizing skills. a lot of otherwise great engineers can't be bothered to communicate and get people to adopt/contribute, sometimes they think evangelizing is a dirty word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The video: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDJTGTrEm0>

If he had wanted to speak to the man directly, he could have cryptographically done so. Tell the world that you know who he is, but not reveal the name, then publish a cryptographic hash of his name. That probably catches the real guy's attention (regardless of whether Ted got it right or not).

</comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of this blog post by a rather 'unknown' blog poster called Ashwin Dixit, which was posted to HN weeks ago claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto actually is Shinichi Mochizuki [http://ownlifeful.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-creator- satos...](http://ownlifeful.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-creator-satoshi- nakamoto.html) (and after lurking in the shadows of HN for, uhm, eons, this , hopefully informative, comment on HN is my first step out of the shadows. Hi guys :) )

</comment><comment><USER19> > Mochizuki doesn't use the conventional scientific peer review process. > Rather, his habit is to publish, and leave it to other mathematicians to > sort their way through his reasoning

Wrong: [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=Shinichi+Mo...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=Shinichi+Mochizuki&hl=en&as_sdt=1,48)

I see a lot of papers there in ordinary peer-reviewed journals.

</comment><comment><USER20> The following seems a lot more likely. From Wikipedia:

Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841) contained networking and encryption technologies similar to Bitcoin's. After textual analysis, the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" was found in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Identity>

</comment><comment><USER21> Nelson apparently has said that if Mochizuki denies being Satoshi he will donate to charity of his choice [0].

        Nelson tells Quartz that he is offering to donate to charity if Mochizuki denies
        being Satoshi Nakamoto. "If that person denies being Satoshi, I will humbly give
        one bitcoin (at this instant worth about $123) to any charity he selects.  If he is
        Satoshi and denies it, at least he will feel guilty. (One month time limit on
        denial-- bitcoins are going UP.)

[0] [http://qz.com/86255/the-mysterious-creator-of-bitcoin- could-...](http://qz.com/86255/the-mysterious-creator-of-bitcoin-could-be- japanese-mathematician-shinichi-mochizuki-says-the-inventor-of-hypertext/)

<comment><USER22> $123 seems way too small a sum for this to be of any consequence for either party

<comment><USER21> There's a reason he chose to dedicate a bitcoin and not 123 USD despite being its current price value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ted's impression of a Sherlock, Watson conversation alone is worth the price of admission.

</comment><comment><USER24> I find it extremely hard to believe that bitcoin is attributable to a single person.

<comment><USER25> I find a single person standing on the shoulders of giants quite plausible. A single talented person can achieve much more than most committees.

<comment><USER26> "committees" is a pretty loaded term, right? I mean replace "committees" with a 2-4-member team and you have Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. Personally I always thought it was a rogue Post-doc until reading PG's post about it. PG convinced me a government was, indeed, involved. For me now it is a question of "which gov?" and "why that gov?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ted Nelson: _"EVERYBODY thinks they can design great interfaces and almost no one can (...)"_

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk&t=7m34s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk&t=7m34s)

</comment><comment><USER28> More on Shinichi Mochizuki and the ABC conjecture

<http://projectwordsworth.com/the-paradox-of-the-proof>

<comment><USER29> Funny how after the hype around the ABC proof that now somebody thinks he's Satoshi. I'd be a bit more convinced of this 'unmasking' if Shinichi hadn't been all over the news last week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's HN's opinions on Nelson himself? Barring this article, I've mostly read about his ideas about Xanadu, etc, and while they're not _bad_ per se, they seem rather unfocused and on the whole rather vague -- almost like, engineering/technology in a purely essay tradition. Can anyone point me to his best work? I hear a lot about him but never found much to justify his repute.

<comment><USER30> I'm hardly representative of "HN's opinions", but describing Nelson's ideas as "unfocused" and "vague" is kind of like the student who complained about Shakespeare's works being "derivative and full of cliches".

Sadly, Xanadu never became the success that Nelson forsaw, but "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" was full of all sorts of incredible new ideas, some Nelson's, some from others that he just collected in one accessible place. Keep in mind that the book was first published in 1974, two years before Jobs & Wozniak formed Apple Computer to sell the Apple I, and seven years before the first IBM PC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Has anyone just asked Shinichi Mochizuki if he had anything to do with bitcoin?

I assume he would be honest and deny it if he had no involvement. (but still would be cool to get this amazing guy's opinion about bitcoin tech)

If he was involved with bitcoin, I doubt he would lie about it. Instead he would simply not respond, and thus confirming he really might be "Satoshi".

</comment><comment><USER32> If I had to bet on this, I'd say Satoshi isn't Japanese.

<comment><USER33> Well, the English is certainly native level and they appear to make none of the common mistakes second language learners do, like forgetting or misusing 'the', but that doesn't mean Satoshi isn't ethnically Japanese. Frankly, for all we know, Satoshi could be a woman.

People raised in the Japanese culture express themselves very differently, though, and I'm not seeing that in this writing. This tends to survive, even when they're highly skilled in English, because they're not saying anything incorrectly, just differently. For example, one of my friends always refers to Earth as "our Earth" instead of "the Earth" (I rather like that one, personally).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would like to remind people: If you know who Satoshi is, for crying out loud _keep it to yourself!_ If this man's identity is revealed, it will be a likely death sentence.

<comment><USER35> Why?

<comment><USER36> Because he likely has 9 figures in Bitcoin that - by design - could not be recovered were they ever stolen from him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone done (publicly) any statistical textual comparison between Satoshi's writings and those of any of the plausible candidates?

<comment><USER38> So far someone already conducted some language analysis to determine his nationality and it's either British or Japanese. Possibly a brit in Japan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The creator of Bitcoin is Neal J. King

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto- currency-m...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-currency- mystery-reopened)

<https://www.facebook.com/neal.j.king>

<comment><USER2> This is also almost certainly wrong.

Those patent applications don't really have anything to do with Bitcoin. But I guess if you're a journalist, anything crypto related looks like it has to do with Bitcoin.

And if I remember correctly, the bitcoin.org domain was registered by Satoshi using anonymousspeech.com, so that's also a clue.

<comment><USER40> Looking at Neal J. King's Facebook posts, his politics seem mainstream liberal, not libertarian. I'm not sure Satoshi would be such a big fan of Paul Krugman and vocally advocate increasing the debt ceiling. He also has a post back in 2011 specifically responding to the suggestion that he created Bitcoin.

<comment><USER39> It is like saying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is too handsome to be a bomber. [http://now.msn.com/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-is-too-handsome-to- be-g...](http://now.msn.com/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-is-too-handsome-to-be-guilty-of- the-boston-bombings-teen-girls-say)

Okay this example is too harsh but his few posts doesn't meant that he didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This dead post on HN made the same claim: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692179>

Was there a date on Nelson's? I don't really buy it as being correct, but hey.

<comment><USER17> There is a date. See his youtube video: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDJTGTrEm0>

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The last time I read a story about reclusive Japanese mathematicians putting out government-confounding cryptosystems -- it was the terrible Dan Brown novel _Digital Fortress_.

Reality is getting Hollyweirder by the minute...

<comment><USER43> Well see, that's just it. This harebrained theory is way too hollywood, and light on evidence.

In reality, a mathematician doesn't make significant contributions to two different completely separate fields that both get widespread media attention within the span of a few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is painfully embarrassing. I love Ted Nelson but it's much, much easier to find out who 'Satoshi' is than those tortured comparisons.

</comment><comment><USER45> This reminds me of some of the theories about who wrote Shakespeare, particularly the "Oxfordian" theory.

</comment><comment><USER46> How would you correctly pronounce 'Satoshi Nakamoto'?

<comment><USER33> Sah-toh-she Nah-kah-moh-toh.

Japanese is rather easy to pronounce once you learn which vowels to use and a few small tricks. The 'long' vowels are really just two separate syllables that get blurred together a little when adjacent. For example, 'ai' == ahh + eee blurred together and sounds like the word eye.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Snitches get stitches Ted.</comment>


In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/world/26cyber.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

<comment><AUTHOR> cyber warfare is the new 5th column.</comment>


PyPy 4.0.0 Released – A Jit with SIMD Vectorization and More - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2015/10/pypy-400-released-jit-with-simd.html <comment><USER2> The good news never stops with these guys. PyPy is so good that I've stopped considering myself a "Python programmer" to a "PyPy programmer" over the last few years. Best of every world. I get my preferred language and eliminate CPU performance worries.

For me, targeting development on PyPy has taken the place of migrating to Python3. Which just moves too fast in effort to pull people over, Python is too big for that strategy. At this point, people want speed with a great language, they want PyPy! The PyPy team has pretty much enabled the perfect development stack. I use PyPy+Django+gunicorn+Nginx and no problems.

Keep up the great work.

<comment><USER3> I'll go one step further and advocate for the PyPy developers please _not_ to port to Python 3. Here we have a project which has clearly become the go to for 2.x people who would like Python to move forward in a way which makes a real difference to them, and there is an ideal opportunity here for this to become the de-facto continuation of the 2.x line, with a real future, as an alternative to the 3.x forcefeed.

<comment><USER2> Not a bad idea. It would certainly elevate the project to unforeseen heights and probably turn them ([http://www.baroquesoftware.com/](http://www.baroquesoftware.com/)) into very wealthy men while offering a very desired and needed service for many businesses. While harming no one who didn't already harm themselves. More relevant than CPython3 overnight, which is of significant stature.

If prestige and money are desirable things, absolute no brainer if they have a business bone in their bodies. It would also secure the future of the stack for everyone concerned with Python3 threatening to cut off Python2. It could also enable a bigger return on those of us who have invested financially into PyPy development. It would certainly snowball even more financial investment.

It would then be the CPython3 project's move. Abandon and integrate all the non-breaking Python3 features into 2.7? Or just move forward with a significantly weaker and less relevant project, working against their past selves? I don't think most would really care and it's best they just move away with their own project.

Could be on the way judging from the favorable naming convention, PyPy4? Has a nice ring to it.

"the Python2.7 compatible release — _PyPy 4.0.0_ — (`what's new in PyPy4.0.0?`_)"

"the Python3.2.5 compatible release — PyPy3 2.4.0 — (what's new in PyPy3 2.4.0?)."

The PyPy gods are in an enviable position for sure. If they seize the opportunity it's the chance of a lifetime.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the best thing they could possibly do right now is to fork Python and make yet another flavour. We already have this 2/3 mess so let's throw another version into the mix just as Py2 seems to be dying.

I don't get this hate for Python 3. Yeah some things changed, yeah having a big codebase in Py2 sucks if you don't have the time/resources to switch, but starting new projects in Py3 by default is awesome. Asyncio and async/await are fantastic and worth the switch alone.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I agree that Python 3 is not that bad to start a new project in. But that's not the problem. The problem is that many of us have a _huge_ investment in Python, and the project is meandering around, borderline- insulting its historic users who still like 2.7, while simultaneously failing to deliver on REAL needs such as performance and GPU support. Instead we get these little tweaks here and there, downright embarrassing PEPs like type annotations, and all this frankly distasteful pressure to move to 3.x using threats of the end-of-the-line for 2....

Basically 3 gives us lots of headaches, very marginal improvements, an ivory- tower sense of "we know best" (message to Guido - no you don't), and a real concern that the powers that be have no clue what's going on at Golang Towers, Fort Javascript, not to mention Clojure, Julia, or even Elixir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kudos to the pypy team! I suspect pypy would benefit from some kind of marketing campaign. It rarely lets me down and yet lots of python devs don't know about it.

The most popular package(s) that don't work with it have been numpy, scipy, etc. When I first encountered pypy, there was a numpypy and I wouldn't be surprised if that's different now. But bottom line, tons of python code out there needs more performance and has no dependency on numpy or any C extensions.

<comment><USER6> > But bottom line, tons of python code out there needs more performance and > has no dependency on numpy or any C extensions.

What they need is nice JIT engines like PyPy and not to switch languages.

If no one invested in improving implementations for modern languages and switched to something lower level all the time, we would still be using Fortran for business applications.

<comment><USER7> We still are using FORTRAN for Business Applications and I fail to see the need to switch them to a slower language to modernize them. Unless the switch is solving a program leave them alone. This is why in R there is still plenty of FORTRAN code.

Personally I LOVE Python but I always feel it is the 2nd best choice. I do use Python but it rarely is the best tool to use for the problem you are solving. Maybe Pypy will turn this around, and I hope so.

<comment><USER8> How can SciPy be fast if it is written in an interpreted language like Python?

Actually, the time-critical loops are usually implemented in C or Fortran. Much of SciPy is a thin layer of code on top of the scientific routines that are freely available at [http://www.netlib.org/](http://www.netlib.org/). Netlib is a huge repository of incredibly valuable and robust scientific algorithms written in C and Fortran. It would be silly to rewrite these algorithms and would take years to debug them. SciPy uses a variety of methods to generate "wrappers" around these algorithms so that they can be used in Python. Some wrappers were generated by hand coding them in C. The rest were generated using either SWIG or f2py. Some of the newer contributions to SciPy are either written entirely or wrapped with Cython.

A second answer is that for difficult problems, a better algorithm can make a tremendous difference in the time it takes to solve a problem. So using scipy's built-in algorithms may be much faster than a simple algorithm coded in C.

[http://www.scipy.org/scipylib/faq.html#how-can-scipy-be- fast...](http://www.scipy.org/scipylib/faq.html#how-can-scipy-be-fast-if-it- is-written-in-an-interpreted-language-like-python)

<comment> semi-extrinsic This is also why the scipy/numpy crowd doesn't care much about PyPy. In this world Python is the equivalent of ducttape. You don't performance optimize ducttape, you want it to be easy to use and to fix any problem you have.

<comment><USER9> PyPy is taking a similar approach. The difference is Numpy is using CPython's CAPI as the duct tape where as PyPy is using cffi as the duct tape. Both approaches end up using the same underlying libraries.

Too many people just have the wrong impression, thinking that PyPy plans on re-implementing all the libraries that Numpy and scipy use but that's just completely false.

They have re-implemented the Numpy array so that it can take advantage of the JIT and so that parts of an algorithm implemented In Python that uses Numpy can also be optimized. Unlike what occurs when using Numpy under CPython where the Python code does not get optimized unless it is converted to Cython, C Code, or some alternative to Python to have it be optimized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > We would also like to thank our contributors (7 new ones since PyPy 2.6.0) > and encourage new people to join the project. PyPy has many layers and we > need help with all of them

This doesn't match my experience of the PyPy project. I found a tiny bug in the stdlib matching against CPython, went into IRC to ask a question about test running to be sure I got it right and was quickly engaged in conversation about why I was running core tests. Next thing I know my small bug has been fixed by a core developer and my chance to contribute is gone.

I'll stick to being a user.

<comment><USER11> This is very very disingenuous.

Here are the public IRC logs for what I assume you're referring to (which is from July 2014 by the way):

[https://botbot.me/freenode/pypy/2014-07-02/?msg=17362202&pag...](https://botbot.me/freenode/pypy/2014-07-02/?msg=17362202&page=5)

You found a bug in an old version of PyPy. A core developer told you you might want to try a new one. No one stole your shot out from under you.

You would undoubtedly be _welcomed_ to contribute. Don't post FUD.

 _Disclaimer: I am not a PyPy core dev but I do work closely with them._

<comment><USER12> > Alex_Gaynor - simpson: import operator; operator.isNumberType is the check > you want

> I'll push this change quickly

> Alex_Gaynor - uhh, wait the check seems to exist?

I dunno, I kinda see both sides here. First, I don't think the devs were off- base at all here. They were friendly and looking to solve problems. However, they did seem to want to simply solve the problem, while Matthew did state that he was looking at this as a way to contribute.

The whole interaction could have been improved with a little encouragement at the end, and possibly a recommendation of an 'easy' bug that was currently in need of a fix. It was fairly clear that there was an enthusiastic new contributor, so a little effort in this direction may have been warranted.

I certainly would consider this an example of being unfriendly or unwelcoming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My experience with PyPy was that it was faster for mapreduce jobs without JSON parsing and slower for JSON-heavy jobs. Because, I assume, CPython benefits from a C implementation of simplejson and PyPy doesn't. Does anyone know if this has changed? (I'll probably install 4.0 and see for myself, but curious if anyone knows what I should expect.)

<comment><USER14> We did put some effort into making built-in json faster. If you're using an optimized version like uJson, it'll be faster under cpython so far, but it all depends whether there is more processing or more parsing involved. We're happy to help you with benchmarks though

<comment><USER13> I've only used simplejson. A mapreduce job could be reading billions of lines and possibly doing very simple logic on each line, so the parsing/encoding is a big percentage of the processing, sometimes nearly all of it. I'll try 4.0 and see how it does now.

<comment><USER14> Try builtin json instead of simplejson for pypy (it's API-equivalent)

<comment><USER15> On big jobs (millions of json input/output) I have found ujson significantly faster than json + pypy.

<comment><USER14> yop, as I said, ujson is probably your best bet if all you do is parse json.

<comment><USER16> If you are on python3 python-rapidjson is faster and safer than uJSON:

[https://github.com/kenrobbins/python- rapidjson](https://github.com/kenrobbins/python-rapidjson)

        >>> data2 = 1.23456789e-13
        >>> rapidjson.loads(rapidjson.dumps(data2))
        1.23456789e-13
        >>> ujson.loads(ujson.dumps(data2))
        0.0

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am curious. Usually in numpy basic linear algebra are delegated to BLAS and potentially really fast if configured to use a fast BLAS implementation (OpenBLAS, MKL, etc). Does the numpy fork of PyPy use the same approach ?

<comment><USER14> yes, but BLAS only helps you with some operations and not others. In fact most of "basic" operations are still done "by hand" in some templated C in numpy. Additionally, doing vectorized operations lazily (which is not present right now in pypy but was at least considered in the past) yields great improvements.

<comment><USER17> sounds great. I have a scientfic library that relies on a mix of loops and matrix multiplication. I need to find some time to test it with PyPy

<comment><USER18> Have you also checked out Numba? JIT and type inference, but native to CPython and designed for numerics:

[http://numba.pydata.org](http://numba.pydata.org)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's hard to tell from these posts under what circumstances will SIMD vectorization kick in outside of numpy. E.g., will it work for plain old list comprehensions, which are everywhere in my code? That would be awesome.

<comment><USER20> I did a small test, here's the gist:[https://gist.github.com/arnists/a9f19af5d9469549020e](https://gist.github.com/arnists/a9f19af5d9469549020e)

Seems like a huge improvement, don't know if it's the recent additions or in general pypy vs cpython but it's enough of a speed bump to sit up and take note.

<comment><USER21> That's why you don't use pure python for this. Here is your test done using numpy

        import numpy as np
        %timeit sum(np.sum(np.random.randint(0, 10000000, 5000)) for i in range(5000))
        1 loops, best of 3: 586 ms per loop

<comment><USER20> I was mostly getting a comparison between cpython and pypy, less concerned with numpy vs cpython.

<comment><USER21> Sure, but my point is that it's not a relevant comparison.

A relevant comparison is counting words or something like that. Things people don't have an easy way to do much faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > We would also like to thank our contributors (7 new ones since PyPy 2.6.0)

That's very good news, since monetary contributions don't seem to be abunding (none of the goals have been met according to pypy.org). Maybe it's a marketing issue, like said before?

Thanks for all the effort made.

</comment><comment><USER23> python 3.4 please ;_;

<comment><USER24> The value of PyPy is that it is a thing you can just drop in to make your code faster. If PyPy wants to gain any traction they pretty much have to concentrate on the version with the most existing code.

<comment><USER23> most of my existing production code is 3.4, hence my question.

<comment><USER25> I'm/we are also moving everything to 3.4, since we want all the nice things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> According to data I'm getting a 20X performance increase from the rendering engine in Django. I know this is the least of the time I spend but it's significant enough to take a deeper look.

<comment><USER26> You may be surprised, I've seen a lot of Django setups where template rendering was the slowest or second-slowest part of their system behind DB queries.

<comment><USER20> Still not spending a lot of time there due to proper fragment caching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wish it had faster startup time, which really matters for Mercurial.

<comment><USER14> Working on it (even wrote 2 blog posts recently about it). Mercurial is an interesting benchmark/use case for us.

<comment><USER27> Yay! Glad to hear it. Using Python makes me so envious of Perl's startup time. Maybe some day we can have that in Python too...

Where are those blog posts?

<comment><USER14> [https://morepypy.blogspot.pt/2015/10/pypy-memory-and- warmup-...](https://morepypy.blogspot.pt/2015/10/pypy-memory-and-warmup- improvements-2.html)

[https://morepypy.blogspot.pt/2015/09/pypy-warmup- improvement...](https://morepypy.blogspot.pt/2015/09/pypy-warmup- improvements.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Guys, what's a "trace optimizer"? Google is failing me by returning results about MySQL.

<comment><USER29> Search [https://www.google.com?q=trace+optimizer+compilers](https://www.google.com?q=trace+optimizer+compilers)

According to wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracing_just-in- time_compilati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracing_just-in- time_compilation)

Tracing just-in-time compilation is a technique used by virtual machines to optimize the execution of a program at runtime. This is done by recording a linear sequence of frequently executed operations, compiling them to native machine code and executing them. This is opposed to traditional just-in-time (JIT) compilers that work on a per-method basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How up-to-date is this? [http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/windows.html#what-is- missing-f...](http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/windows.html#what-is-missing-for- a-full-64-bit-translation)

I've read that a few times and I always come away confused -- it sounds like a huge fundamental type change needs to be made by someone well versed in the PyPy internals. i.e. not something you'd typically defer to an external contributor.

I'd like to experiment with PyPy and PyParallel, but I'm basically exclusively 64-bit Windows, so it sounds like a non-starter.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there any work going towards getting pandas to work with PyPy as well? Its the only thing keeping me from using it.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice! Does this work with scipy now?

</comment><comment><USER32> so the next version of pypy3 should be 5.0.x, lol</comment>


The End Of Stuff - <AUTHOR> http://bitworking.org/news/2010/08/end-of-stuff

<comment><USER2> Good article, and true for me as well.

Let me just say though, as a developer of a compass/GPS app for the iPhone/iPad/Android, and as a serious hiker, I do not take my Garmin GPS with me anymore. I bring paper maps and a compass for back-up, but I never use them. My iPhone is plenty good enough for me.

On the other hand, I'm also a serious enough photographer that I prefer an SLR to my iPhone camera, and even though we built a camera into our app, I never use it personally.

<comment><USER3> On mountain bike trips I use my android phone now, I rarely get to anywhere that lacks phone signal but for a real trip that might require a real gps+compas+paper map.

<comment><USER4> Do you mount your phone on the handlebar? What if it gets wet?

I have bought Garmin device[1] for hiking and mountain biking specifically so that I wont' need to worry about it getting wet. And for long battery life and changeable commodity batteries, too.

[1] Garmin Oregon 450 [https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=63349](https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=63349)

there's also top model '550, which adds camera. [https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=26875](https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=26875)

<comment><USER3> I have a pocket at the top of my camelback that gets good enough gps reception to do things like trace my route and such. I have a regular computer mounted on board. If I had the money I'd get something like this: [https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=160&pID=10885](https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=160&pID=10885)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have this analogy in mind where the modern-day smartphone is the equivalent of a technological swiss-knife. In 80% of all situations it is sufficient for the task at hand.

<comment><USER6> Jesse Schell ([http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the- bo...](http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box- presentation/)) said convergence doesn't generally happen, except for the "pocket exception", which includes swiss army knives and mobiles. He predicted the failure of the iPad because of this.

<comment><USER7> Didn't watch the presentation, so maybe it's addressed, but what is the iPad the convergence of? Unlike a Swiss army knife (knife, saw, scissors, tweezers, toothpick, etc.), or pocket computer/phone/camera. It's a relatively different type of device (not a necessary new one, though), not a mashup of otherwise independent devices.

<comment><USER8> he said that technology diverts, he made the pocket exception.

So according to him the iPad isn't a convergence but a divergence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't use it often, but I keep a real GPS around for two reasons: it runs on AA batteries and doesn't need a cell tower. I actually bought it a couple months after being lost in a hurricane-stricken area. Even maps don't work well when all the street signs are blown down (or away). But I've been on enough back roads in the years since to know that I can't count on a phone GPS for maps.

I also carry a decent flashlight (Fenix LD01). I used to carry a weaker light (Arc AAA-P) but once I had to go from full daylight to a dark interior room with it in a hurry during a power outage and the little light was useless. A phone's screen or photo "flash" LED would have been even worse.

I still carry paper notebooks (Moleskine and others). I use Evernote and stuff for notes on my phone, but I still keep some more personal things on paper, in one place. I also can't sketch worth a darn on any of the phone sketchbook apps.

Dropbox is what eliminated USB thumb drives for me, not my phone. I still keep a couple in my bag, but mostly to boot from.

<comment><USER2> Phones don't need cell towers for GPS, if they have a GPS chip like iPhones and Droids! Not even ones with A-GPS... this is a common misconception.

<comment><USER10> While a phone doesn't need a cell tower for GPS, they for the most part need one for viewing their location on a map, and I think that's why people say they need a cell tower for their phone's GPS.

Long story short, my wife and I were trying to find the house we were crashing at in upstate New York one evening after a piece of hers was performed at Bard. I'd punched the address into my iPhone and off we went. Only in the last few turns did we realize that Google couldn't find the address and auto- corrected us to the wrong county (UGH). We tried entering the address again, but had no signal. We were only using the iPhone because we couldn't find my Garmin. Later when we returned home, we still couldn't find our Garmin, so I bought a newer one, refurb, off Amazon for ~$150. It tells me the speed limit of the road I'm on, shows me which lane I'll need to be in when a turn's coming up, acts as a bluetooth speakerphone and interface for my iPhone, gets traffic updates and gas prices from some kind of FM broadcast service.

Yes, convergent mobile devices will get there eventually, but there are still benefits to specialized devices.

<comment><USER2> This just is not true. The cell tower isn't needed for GPS. When you say you need a tower to see yourself on the map, that's the same thing as saying you need a tower for GPS.

If you mean you need the network connection for the maps, this is only true for the Native Maps app (which even does some caching). There are many, many apps that let you store maps offline (including my own).

<comment><USER11> A-GPS near a cell tower is great, but a WAAS antenna beats it in the backcountry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> True enough. But for this to truly happen you need to have a device with a battery that you can feel confident will last all day with regular use.

<comment><USER11> About 10 years ago, I arranged to have everything powered by AA batteries - even my PDA and my phone (it was a Motorola brick). Everything but my laptop, but the PDA (a Psion 5) would do in a pinch. GPS and CD player as well. Torch. Alarm clock. Nowadays I don't think you can even buy stuff to do that with, everything has a proprietary battery and charger.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that tendency bothers me as well. If you want to buy that kind of stuff that is powered by commodity batteries, you are really limited.

Some recent stuff you should be able to buy easily (though they are powered by AAA betteries, actually):

iriver T60SE mp3 player [http://www.iriver.com/product/view.asp?pCode=001&pNo=73](http://www.iriver.com/product/view.asp?pCode=001&pNo=73)

WikiReader <http://thewikireader.com/store/>

but, alas, those are few and I feel like these things go against the general direction of technological progress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The end of stuff" seems rather hyperbolic. More like "the consolidation of gadgets I don't actually use that often".

The Swiss Army Knife analogy is telling: how much have sales of Swiss Army Knives affected sales of woodworking tools, kitchen cutlery, garden shears, fancy bottle-openers, etc?

I can certainly see smartphones supplanting special-purpose devices that have similar form-factors and UIs, such as hand-held GPSs. But devices that have different physical forms or interfaces will still retain their popularity for serious uses. For example, how many smartphones can be tripod-mounted? Anyone who spends hours typing large amounts of text on a laptop every day is unlikely to want to replace it with a smartphone (unless the benefits of increased portability so outweigh the inconvenient interface).

Don't get me wrong, smartphones are great, and increased versatility is cool, and having lots of gadgets in my pocket all at once is wonderful (I've carried the same Swiss Army Knife in my pocket since 1979), but there are times when I want buttons I can press without looking (like a stopwatch), or a device I can glance at unobtrusively without having to pick anything up or pull anything out of a pocket (like a wristwatch), or a compass I feel comfortable carrying in my hand while running through the woods.

</comment><comment><USER14> One thing that bugged me tho. Why android? Symbian did that years before android. IPhone too. Even simple Nokia/SonyEricsson not-so-smart phones were able to do most of those listed tasks years before android. We realized that statement that 1-task gadgets/tools will sooner or latter die long time ago.

Edit: Spelling

<comment><USER15> I don't think the author was saying Android specifically or uniquely enables this (that's just his experience with this process), but rather that the smartphone product does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Surprisingly, I meet a lot of people who still use wrist watches. It almost feels like a renaissance of the wrist watch to me.

Can't wait to get rid of stuff. Unfortunately, computers and phones also aren't immune to cluttering, though. In fact, it is even easier to amass virtual stuff.

I have fund it is almost impossible to clean out a computer manually.

The next step will be uncluttering computers by moving stuff to the cloud. The last clutter will consist of bookmarks.

<comment><USER17> The cloud can (and will) get cluttered too...

<comment><USER16> That's why I mentioned the bookmarks, which point to stuff in the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some things are cooler / more fun than others. Like, wearing a watch or using a real compass.

I have a notebook in which I write directions to a place before going there for the first time. Lame, I know... but every time I have a get a copilot, they end up looking through the book. I doubt they would have done the same if the directions were stored in a smartphone.

Cash is still king.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like the idea of having less stuff in general, I think there was a pg essay on it a while back.

Temporarily moved back to my Dads place recently so I had to cut back down to only really having a room for my stuff, was a great opportunity to clear out a lot of stuff that I wasn't really using.

</comment><comment><USER20> Strangely enough, I completely don't agree. Most of these items are available on my phone, but if I wanted to really use them I'd buy the real thing. For example, if I needed a GPS unit it'd be strapped to the bars of my bike, so it'd need to be durable, waterproof, operable with gloves- things my phone is not. The same applies in one fashion or another to almost every device on that list, particularly calculators and alarm clocks.

<comment><USER21> Iphone bike kit:

[http://gizmodo.com/5605254/liverider-kit-makes-your- iphone-a...](http://gizmodo.com/5605254/liverider-kit-makes-your-iphone-a- computer-for-your-bicycle)

I haven't used an alarm clock in years, I prefer the iPhone in airplane mode. The iPhones calculator seems a perfect replacement for a physical calculator too.

<comment><USER20> To clarify, 'bike' refers to a motorcycle, and the iPhone would probably be useless in the backcountry where I'd be using it. Plus if I bin the bike in a river, the iPhone sure as heck won't survive.

Phone alarm clocks are not nearly as effective as my real alarm clock at waking me up; my alarm clock is LOUD and PIERCING and ANNOYING- but I do sleep like a log.

As for calculator, I see that the iPhone can be a scientific calculator, but from the looks of things, I'd still prefer to have my $10 calc in my hands when I'm designing something. That, and/or matlab.</comment></comment></comment>