How Fragmented Is Android? - <AUTHOR> https://eggonomy.com/blogs/news/how-fragmented-is-android <comment><USER3> I work on an Android app aimed at the North American market.

Android O, P and Q are 88% of our Android devices. By far and large, fragmentation is something I _never_ have to think about.

Jetpack libraries are here to handle it for us, as an abstraction layer between the OS and third party apps.

I would have mentioned that e.g. camera apps are an exception : here hardware fragmentation can be a pain. I was half surprised to see that Google is also working on that one with the camera x library.

There have been cases where the fragmentation bites us; and there might be in the future (although in all fainess my iOS colleagues sometimes have to create specific fixes as well) but the last time I had to scratch my head because of a device specific bug was years ago.

And at the time, I was already finding these articles deeply ridiculous.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you're rolling with whatever Google's latest 'solution' to fragmentation is, so of course it's not going to be an issue: Google is dropping old devices for you so they never even appear in your console stats.[1] This is a perfectly valid business decision to take on your end, but it doesn't mean that the problem doesn't still exist... only that you aren't having to deal with it. I've got several still functional 4.x-5.x devices (thanks to stellar upgrade policies) that can't even use the market anymore (so much for compatibility libraries being the solution)[2] I've also done Android development and years ago stopped believing that the real solution they have to offer is anything other than throw your devices away after a few years. Me bitter? Only when I read posts saying fragmentation is a solved problem on Android ;-)

[1] You say that O/P/Q are 88% of your devices but they only represent 38.7% of devices accessing the market (Q doesn't even show up) per [https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards](https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards). Likely the solution Google has provided ignores a significant chunk of devices out there. When they announce these new initiatives, they tend to support the most widely-used and recent devices while quietly ignoring the rest. A valid strategy, but hardly comprehensive. (yeah, yeah... _this time is different_ )

[2] Technically, they can still _access_ the market, they just can't _download_ anything. Probably either some web API breakage or no longer supported version of something on the device.

<comment><USER3> >It sounds like you're rolling with whatever Google's latest 'solution' to fragmentation

> You say that O/P/Q are 88% of your devices but they only represent 38.7% of > devices accessing the market

NO !!

That's the issue with these articles. They just read the android dashboard and pretend that:

\- it applies everywhere

\- many different devices = difficulty for the devs or users

The dashboard reports the global figures. These figures are heavily skewed by third world countries where old versions of Android are still shipping.

"The market" ... this is absolutely meaningless. If you work for let's say Lyft, the market is wherever lyft can operate, that's not the whole world, so whatever the Android version dashboard tells is meaningless for you or your users.

For our market 88% of the users are O or superior. 6 months ago we stopped supporting devices older than lollipop for this particular app (IIRC it was because they don't support TLS 1.3 and it was giving us some security concerns). For the app I worked on before, we had legacy apks : apks that are still distributed on the play store but that we don't maintain. Basically when we decided to stop "supporting" an old Android version. And by old; I mean Android Eclair; this was a pretty popular app with tons of users on various devices. So we take our current app that still support that old API level. We make sure that it is as stable as we can get it (since we always launch new features, we always have new corner cases, we make sure these are handled). And when it is ok; we set this apk as a legacy one on the play store : if you have one of these old Android versions, you are going to be able to continue using or even installing that older apk. Technically we can update it if we want to, but unless there is suddenly a wave of crashes or complaints we just leave it be.

Even for that app, the figures were roughly the same (and that's while being available in 150 countries, that was for a pretty popular app). For these legacy apks, we often had something like 10k installs, while the main app is in the dozens of millions (but since that app had a paid subscription, make the service work even for old device was a must do).

And yeah, even for that job where we had an app available on API 7+ (Android 2.3 eclair IIRC), the figures were still pretty similar and fragmentation was something I read about in stupid articles, not a part of my daily job. I am not working for Google, if I had to solve fragmentation issues everyday, I would be the first to complain about it. I am here to build an app, not maintain random OEMs hacks.

<comment><USER5> I believe in the comment you're replying to, "the market" is actually referring to the Android Market, the original name of the Google Play Store, rather than the economic market of serviceable users.

<comment><USER3> ah, I see.

It still misses the whole point though.

Again, the global numbers are pretty meaningless for app developers.

Even if your app is called gmail, at some point you will see that you have 0.01% of your users on a very old version of Android. And you are not going to cut them off, just freeze an apk that will be their last version.

And for almost all apps, your useage stats won't look like these global numbers.

We are doing everything we can to increase our user numbers .. if it meant lowering the min supported version, we would do it but it is just not something that would help us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, if you remove all iOS versions with <3.42% penetration, then you should remove the same from the Android table and use 2 decimals for Android like for iOS.

[https://i.imgur.com/0Ar0ta5.png](https://i.imgur.com/0Ar0ta5.png)

My point being: there ARE other iOS versions in use. I have a backup working iPhone 4 turned on right now. It won't upgrade beyond iOS 5 (I think it's iOS 5). But somehow the author ignores all those 0.1% iOS versions, yet shows them for Android (with 4 decimals no less).

<comment><USER7> By the way: iPhone 4 supports iOS 7.1.2, released 4 years after the iPhone 4.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure why the GP said his iPhone 4 won't upgrade past iOS 5, but it's worth noting: while an iPhone 4 _can_ be upgraded to iOS 7, actually doing so is a bad idea unless you want your phone to run slow as molasses. You'll be much better off on iOS 6 or 5.

(I suppose there may be a security argument for upgrading as far as possible, but it's not like iOS 7 is up-to-date either. If you're concerned about security, you shouldn't be using an iPhone 4.)

<comment><USER9> > You'll be much better off on iOS 6 or 5.

Sure. But if you are making an app for say a government service that has as a requirement to reach 98% of mobile users, and you reach the goal if you count _compatible_ devices (not people who choise not to upgrade) then it helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article concludes, as far as I can tell, it isn't fragmented, it just has a bunch of recent enough versions on similar enough devices to run most apps.

Apps don't care what version of Android you run, they care what API support you have, and apps can detect API support at runtime and adapt.

OTOH, the article fails to mention that Apple refuses to let you support devices after EOL, and even some of the oldest Android devices in existence can run even the newest Android, as long as you're willing to upgrade the ROM yourself.

Phone hardware typically is literally falling apart after 3-5 years, any truly old phones are ones that users have chose to keep on life support but not upgrade their ROMs (or made the mistake of buying a phone from a consumer- hostile brand, which is, ultimately, the only valid argument for Android fragmentation).

The _only_ company that is truly consumer hostile is Samsung. And, frankly, I don't know why anyone would buy Samsung _or_ Apple _or_ even Google's own Pixel series... OnePlus charged me $550 for a phone (the 6T) that has the same size screen (and its an AMOLED too), literally same parts, but with more RAM and storage, and a bigger battery, that is otherwise identical to a Pixel 3XL or a Samsung S9+ or whatever top tier extra large phone that costs $800-1300; and that new 7 Pro? Still an amazing deal, and OnePlus supports Android on their phones ridiculously long times.

<comment><USER11> _OTOH, the article fails to mention that Apple refuses to let you support devices after EOL, and even some of the oldest Android devices in existence can run even the newest Android, as long as you 're willing to upgrade the ROM yourself._

The 2012 iPhone 5 is the newest unsupported iPhone. Would you really want to support a phone that old and have to support both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of your app?

<comment><USER12> May 2019 Windows 10 version runs just fine on this 2009 laptop.

<comment><USER11> The smart phone market and the related chipset is seeing the same jump in performance that personal computers saw in their first decade.

Could Windows 95 run on a computer from 1985?

My 2009 era Core 2 Duo Dell E6500 - that I still own ([https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell- Latitude-E6500-Not...](https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell- Latitude-E6500-Notebook.11958.0.html)) had 8 GB of RAM, gigabit Ethernet, a 1920x1200 display, 160GB hard drive, etc. Besides the processor, those are still decent specs for today and even the processor is good enough

The iPhone of 2009 was a 3GS - 320x480 display, 256MB of RAM,802.11G, with a single core 400Mhz processor and slow video graphics by today's standards.

Compare that to the specs of even the low end $475 iPhone 7.

The Core 2 Duo was already a 64 bit processor. The iPhone didn't ship with a 64 bit processor until four years later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Something that doesn't get talked about as much is the differences between how manufacturers customize their OS. It has been talked about a fair bit on HN ([https://dontkillmyapp.com/](https://dontkillmyapp.com/)), but it really is a huge problem.

I can be listening to music on my phone and One+ will just kill Pandora, or Spotify. I have to manually "lock" music apps and workout apps in One+'s task switching UI to keep them from being randomly killed _while in use_.

Hilariously enough I have one game on my phone that will always run in the background and never be killed, sucking down a lot power. Somehow even when not in the foreground it consumes massive CPU. I don't think it is even malicious, just oddly programmed. I wish my music apps could pull off the same trick though!

<comment><USER14> I don't think a lot of people understand how apps run in the background on Android. I know having worked on one recently, coming from iOS, I had a lot of assumptions about what it would or wouldn't be doing... and they were all wrong (of course).

Turns out Android, at least however this app is setup, maybe by default, leaves the app fully running. Like zero effort to suspend it automatically. A part of the UI crashed and a hunt to find the bug made me realize this... I fixed the bug, but still haven't really looked into how to really suspend it.

<comment><USER12> It helps that each version does it differently, and the OEMs also make their own set of fine tuning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> These articles rarely go over what, if any, practical concerns there are. The Wintel market is even more fragmented, but that's not really an issue in practice because the abstractions are more or less in the right place.

<comment><USER16> You can install stock Win 10 on any machine you buy, or most Linux distros with the same boot image thanks to UEFI and the PC spec. Android ARMs are NOT an architecture. They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels.

Oreo and the /vendor partition may help with this some. Still, it's a far cry from the Linux/PCs days of the 90s. I've written about this before:

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/android- fragmentation/](https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/)

<comment><USER17> > They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in > their hacked to hell kernels.

Sounds like arcade cabinets. Maybe we need something that does for Android ARM devices what MAME does for those: specifies each device as an abstract wiring diagram of pins to bits of patched kernel acting as ROMs. And then make that whole thing into a kernel virtualization-provider module, which uses the stock kernel for anything not masked over by ROMs.

<comment><USER18> This is what devicetree is supposed to be.

However, as with the arctic machine, the incentives are misaligned - <USER2> actively don't want to be commoditized.

<comment><USER16> Windows phones did at least have UEFI + arm. You can unlock the bootloaders of many of them now. But there's still no driver support for mobile data and several other critical hardware components.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > My POV is ... Apple leads the Mobile OS market share ... by a huge margin.

I'm having a really hard time understanding this statement. Does the author mean with respect to how updates are handled? It clearly cannot mean in terms of sheer number of installs, Android is clearly _leagues_ ahead of iOS in that regard.

<comment><USER20> The conclusion is unexpected and stupid.

Android doesn't brag it has 75% share. Actual data is that 85% of smartphones run Android and that's market share. Fact that they are not updated to the latest version doesn't change the market share.

<comment><USER21> "Addressable" market share maybe? A developer can target iOS current version and current version-1, and cover the large majority of iOS devices. How far back does an Android developer have to target? Maybe it doesn't matter since the Android marketshare is so much larger that targeting current - 1 stills gets more devices than iOS.

<comment><USER22> >Maybe it doesn't matter since the Android marketshare is so much larger that targeting current - 1 stills gets more devices than iOS.

That's an interesting way of thinking about it, getting 20% of 100 is more than getting 80% of 10. I think the problem you'd run into is that some users with androids would be upset they can't install your app when their friend that has an android can install it just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The fault of fragmentation lies at many levels, including distributors. The bookstore at my alma mater in the Midwest is normally great at promoting modern tech products, but they recently started pushing two models of a phone with KitKat at $100+ pricepoints. That's Android 4.4, which was deprecated in 2015. Who are these phones for? They're not even suitable for computer science students, because trying to learn Android development with a KitKat device is incredibly suboptimal.

<comment><USER3> A google search on 100$ android phones returned a "best cheap android phones" list. The first entry is the Nokia 2 (never tried one but I heard good things).

For 85$ it ships with Oreo.

That's kind of amazing : for a relatively modest sum, you get a lot of technology.

It makes me wonder why anybody would recommend a costlier device shipping with 4.4

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I know this post is about Android versions but I recently launched a new service and have been watching user agents and I've been pleasantly surprised to see no matter the Android version, it's almost always running Chrome 73/Firefox 66. I have a user running Android 5.5.1, another on some version of 4! Yet they're on modern browsers. This isn't true for anyone on an old iOS. Those users are stuck with old browsers, which is quite sad for the user and developer.

<comment><USER25> FYI: Android 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 will soon get no more updates to Chrome[1]. Android 4.0 is stuck on an old version of Chrome.

For WebView, Android 4.4 is stuck on Chrome 30/33 and anything older still uses AOSP.

Samsung users often use the Samsung browser, which is often a very obsolete version that came with the phone.

1\. [https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-android- droppin...](https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-android-dropping- support-android-4-1-4-3-jelly-bean/)

<comment><USER26> Android 4.1-3 are from 2012, early 2013. So 6-7 years old. Those old devices are barely functional to view modern webpages, anyway.

<comment><USER24> That's the assumption I made but is that actually true you think? This is true of iOS devices after OS upgrades, I've experienced this myself: Apple ruins old devices with software updates. But I somehow doubt that a phone from 2012 must be ruined with bad software. Any idea?

<comment><USER26> Not bad software, underpowered mobile device CPUs. Mobile CPUs have only started stabilizing around "good enough" around late 2016 and that was for flagships (with Snapdragon 820, basically).

A mid range Android phone CPU will choke quite hard on modern Javascript-heavy web pages. Now think about a low range phone...

<comment><USER24> I don't know, older Androids take 4-5 seconds to parse my webpack bundle. That's not too bad for these devices, given that once it's all parsed and evaluated, the app seems to work fine. I do want to buy some even older devices to see how they run. With webpack and a little effort, ares these older phones really bricks?

<comment><USER25> We still support Android 4.1, iOS7, and IE9 because our users don't choose to use our web app (their company does). There are low income users in our demographic for whom spending money to upgrade their phone is not their priority.

With care it is possible to make mobile web apps run at a reasonable speed even on low end devices. I personally like to aim to make things work OK on shitty old devices, that way I know it works well on newer devices. Also our code (custom) was originally written for IE6 so we started light, which helped.

A framework that appears to be good on low end devices is svelte.dev: "Last month, a developer in Brazil shared that [Svelte is] being used for point of sale systems in Brazil. There are like 200,000 of these devices in the wild. His job is to build this interface for the point of sale system. They're working with a very outdated version of WebKit on extremely memory constrained and performance constrained hardware. They tried a dozen different frameworks and none of them were up to the task. You would press a button on this interface and, half a second later, it would respond, which is kind of an awful user experience because you're more likely to press that button twice and end up overcharging your customers or something like that. They tried it with Svelte and it worked smoothly, so that is an example of what you can do when you have a framework that has a very, very low memory footprint and very good performance. Another example, we have a guy using it in the context of smart televisions, which also tend to be quite constrained devices." From: [https://shoptalkshow.com/episodes/349/](https://shoptalkshow.com/episodes/349/)

<comment><USER24> I'm excited to try Svelte. Looks great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not a professional app developer. A year ago I invested few months to develop an app I wanted to have. Today it has few thousand users.

Fragmentation doesn't bother me. Yes, on some devices the app crashes, on others the sound lag is unbearable. I don't really care, as long as it works fine on most devices. Two things infuriate me, though. Enough to never again spend another minute developing for android.

 _Every_ time I enter android studio, it wants to update. The studio wants to update. Suddenly it's incompatible with build system (yes, the build system has dependencies on IDE version!). Then gradle wants to update. Then SDK. Then IDE again. It's never-ending cycle of updates. Each update has 20% chance to cause build errors on this project (Love2D for Android). Each error has a cryptic message, and it's resolved by something completely unrelated to error message. Usually it's solved by bumping up the minimal SDK version and thus cutting off some percentage of potential users. I dread each and every attempt to re-build my app.

The second thing is recent requirement to provide 64-bit version of each app. My app depends on framework written in C++ with additional libraries in C. I can't and won't spend time to get the build for 64-bit version working. Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons.

Fragmentation I can deal with. All web developers deal with it daily. But Google's treatment of development is horrible and I don't want any part of it. Because of this I've transitioned to web as platform. At least I can be safe that anything I build will be runnable in 10 or 20 years.

<comment><USER22> >Google sent me a mail that "All new apps and app updates are required to provide 64-bit versions of any 32-bit native code they provide". So I won't be able to update existing app to existing users ever again, for non-technical reasons.

Isn't the reason entirely technical? 64-bit apps can use 64-bit only instruction sets, which are newer and usually faster, resulting in a performance improvement. BTW, apple did the same thing years ago on iOS and is planning to kill 32-bit apps on MacOS soon.

<comment><USER28> I think Google wants to allow OEMs to build devices that only support arm64-v8a arch - this will make the OS image significantly smaller because now they need to ship several components in duplicate - 32 and 64-bit versions. This is beneficial to total size of OS on the flash.

Apple did this years ago.

<comment><USER29> RAM usage as well as you no longer need to keep both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of OS libraries in memory at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Old Android devices that cannot be upgraded is a headache for service that can't afford to lose customers who still use old smartphone.

One of the colleague once estimated that just giving a new Android phone to all customers who is still using annoyingly old phone is better solution than supporting old Androids. He calculated the cost of supporting old Android(amount of time wasted multiplies by engineer's wage). He concluded that it's actually cheaper for a company to give every old android users of our service a new phone than diligently supporting old Android versions. Also, it greatly improve the QoL of engineer.

Sadly, our company never executed this plan.

<comment><USER31> Well, salaries of employees are a fixed cost, so there wouldn't really be any money saved by giving away devices. At least, there'd be no money saved unless the company also then fired all of the engineers that were no longer needed because time didn't have to be spent diligently supporting old android versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> We support API versions 19-26 on our Android side, and it's a pretty major pain. The permissions model is different, background services work completely different, and then there is the tendency for things to just stop being supported (looking at you, GCM). Compared with the Apple ecosystem it's incredibly jolting. I mean, I get it. Android started from the opposite end of the spectrum from Apple, and now they're sort of meeting in the middle. But it's been a much smoother ride working with iOS over the last couple of years than it has been working with Android.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have an ipad 3 (yah the original ipad on its 3rd iteration). Apple was supporting os updates until fairly recently. The thing is that none of the modern apps tested or cared about something that old. So even if was technically supported the experience was borderline unusable. Even the core ipad usage was klunky. Stuff gets old and we move on.

<comment><USER34> Well, that's kind of the point: Despite the age, OS-updates to it shall make it work just like any new device, except for being slower. If features (that are also present in the older device) don't work at all instead of just slow, that's fragmentation.

You should upgrade an old device because you need a new feature or you want more speed a modern device can offer you, but having to abandon the device because it doesn't work properly anymore should not be an option you're forced to consider, and that's the point, the vendors _do_ force this upon you to drive their sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've been tracking the data from Google's Android dashboards over time : [https://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts](https://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts)

From these observations, it seems that Android's fragmentation is getting worse, and that newer versions of Android have more and more trouble establishing themselves as the dominant version. In fact, JellyBean was the last version to reach more than 50%.

<comment><USER28> It is hard to understate how MISLEADING these dashboards are. They are so, so, so wrong. I've professionally worked on several apps/libraries which reached millions of Android users and not one of them (not one!) had a distribution that's even close to what those dashboards show.

Any kind of app that's not exclusively targeting emerging markets on 512MB phones will have significantly higher percentage of newer Androids. If you're targeting US, EU, China, Japan, Korea and S. America you'll probably have Androids before 6.x in marginal <10% total figures.

Any kind of app that's being released together with its iOS version will probably have double to triple percentage of new Android versions and pretty much non-existant usage stats on Androids before 5.0.

Those dashboards reflect pretty much no app published on Play store - not even apps like Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> From the article: "So the Android ecosystem is split between at least 1,728 combinations of OS - Brand - Device Model"

It's actually _much worse_ than this. Here's a review of the "Samsung Galaxy S10+": [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14072/the-samsung- galaxy-s10p...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14072/the-samsung- galaxy-s10plus-review)

This "device model" is actually two devices with completely different SoCs. There is no meaningful sense in which these two phones are one device. Sometimes the manufacturers document this, sometimes they just start selling a phone that identifies itself by the same name as an existing phone but with a GPU that has completely different performance characteristics.

<comment><USER37> It's probably _not_ worse than that because he makes the totally incorrect assumption that Android version and device are independent, which is obviously not the case.

Most people update their phones to the latest available version for their phone, so it would be 144 OS-device-manufacturer combos (more or less).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _12.X has about 80.5% market share..._ [of the iOS market] _My POV is ... > Apple leads the Mobile OS market share ... by a huge margin_

That's a rather dubious view of market share, parsing the definition to include only the most recent version of an OS. Under that mode of accounting, I'm sure MacOS enjoys market share "dominance" briefly after each October update of Windows. But if we extend Android version back just to 8.x then ~46% of all android devices are accounted for, and 46% of Android's total 75% of mobile install base is still quit a bit more than 80% of iOS's 23% mobile install base.

And even that I don't really care about. iOS is a great OS. What I don't like are sloppy definitions and methodology in something that presents as data analysis.

It's a stretch to say each manufacturer that puts what amounts to little more than a custom skin and vendor-specific apps constitutes its own distinct fragment. So too is it disingenuous to represent each point-release of Android as a separate fragment, especially when the author goes on to lump all iOS 12.x point versions together.

I'd also say that fragmentation, in some small way at least, works in favor of android users that have older versions installed because apps can't just target the latest version given that vendors don't push the latest updates to all users. It means older devices can still get many/most new apps on their devices. Contrast this to Apple, where not updating to the latest version can have an impact on app availability much sooner, while updating the OS tends to degrade (in my subjective experience) user experience significantly when you hit the second or third such update. Last time I had to update my kid's ipad to a newer iOS version it basically killed it. It was necessary so she could play minecraft again, but the device became unbearably slow, and minecraft crashed anyway. (My solution was to "upgrade" to an $80 kindle fire kids version, which plays minecraft quite nicely. _That_ I'll admit is absolutely its own fragment of Android though)

</comment><comment><USER38> Most people never have to deal with this though - I wonder what the % of these figures are things like Smart TV's and various other Android devices.

For the most part it isn't a problem for us - we require Android 6+ and for the phone to have various sensors.

Some of our customers can't afford the latest or greatest Android devices - that's fine - we will do our best to support them.

Could Android do what iOS does? To a degree yes, they would just have to cripple phones forcing people to make the choice between newer software and a slower phone or leaving something that works just fine as it is....

</comment><comment><USER12> Khronos likes to talk about Vulkan support on Android.

The reality is that thanks for it being an optional API, introduced in version 7, only flagships have proper support.

And even then, each OEM provides a different version, with their own set of instructions.

Hardly any better than GL ES.

Now they are doing it compulsory on Android 9, upgradable via the store, with GL support being supported via ANGLE.

Guess what, first you need to get a device with Android 9 on it.

This just an example among many others across other API surface areas.

So much for Java on mobiles being too much of fragmented system that Google was going to sort out with their solution, hence the need to undercut Sun.

<comment><USER39> I don't get the negative sentiment here. When Vulkan was brand new Google didn't want to force it in 7.0 or they might have had even more devices still stuck on 6.0 today.

The fact they made it mandatory and independent of vendor in 9 is laudable. Doing so absolutely costs them adoption of the latest releases but they did it anyway.

When you say "first you need a device with Android 9" that is on the vendors to provide. And the scarcity of 9 can in part be contributed to compulsory Vulkan support. Most of Googles first party phones now run it, even though their general attitude of abandoning 4+ year old products is still egregious.

<comment><USER12> If Google was anything like Microsoft, they would produce stuff like Android 2019 OEM requirements, and provide the OS directly from them.

Like for example, the "PC 98 System Design Guide":

[https://www.amazon.com/PC-98-System-Design- Guide/dp/15723171...](https://www.amazon.com/PC-98-System-Design- Guide/dp/1572317167)

Fact is, just get a new phone is not an answer that consumers likes to hear.

Not every country is like US with everyone on contracts getting free replacements every two years.

Many of us enjoy the freedom of pre-paid replacable SIM cards, and use our phones until they either die or get stolen.

In any case, I only used Vulkan as the most recent example, I can give plenty of other ones, and I develop native Android as hobby.

Other Android developers with more in depth knowledge have plenty of war stories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> But does this fragmentation actually matter? For most apps which are at most accessing some sort of online data, like a web shop, chat apps, etc. you just target the lowest API that has the features you want and it's compatible with all newer Android OS releases.

I would think the real fragmentation that developers have to consider is in things like screen size, or custom APIs by hardware vendors. In my experience, it's the difference between Samsung's bluetooth stack and Android's own

</comment><comment><USER41> I work at a company that distributes an Android SDK specifically for East/West/Southern Africa and South Asia. So far (and we are extremely early stage) we've seen 2,992 unique make/model combinations, and from there the OS ranges from v4.3 - 9.0 and everywhere in between. There's a huge backward compatibility problem in these markets -- we had to build our own dual sim API because of it. Device specific issues are extremely real, and as far as I can tell, Google does not have a great strategy for these markets that make up a not insignificant (and growing) portion of their market share. Android users who are sensitive to data usage/costs don't upgrade their OS often, and have secondhand or imported devices with some kind of customized OS.

[https://medium.com/use-hover/hover-launches-v1-0-stable- and-...](https://medium.com/use-hover/hover-launches-v1-0-stable-and- scalable-f65e33731090)

</comment><comment><USER42> 1) Do this analysis for your own user base, universal stats may not be relevant.

2) It's more helpful to look at aggregations on cuts that will impact your product and codebase. e.g. % of devices above API level 19, % of users with each screen size grouping, what % of our users are on tablets, etc. These answer questions when you should drop support for an API, when you should start using new features, how many different UI mocks you need. Those are the relevant questions.

3) Do test your UX across a couple different phones categories. Samsung & vanilla Android have different button placements and icons.

4) There are plenty of libraries and tools available to handle this problem. I won't say it's not something to think about, but it's usually pretty low on my list.

</comment><comment><USER43> Should be more fragmented, until it gets to the point where I don't have to have ads kicking in my teeth daily.

</comment><comment><USER44> In practice this is a non issue, even for larger apps with a big user base. This is just trolling.

<comment><USER45> Why would it be a problem for larger apps that have a bigger budget?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Last I checked, for our popular mobile game, there were over 28,000 different models of Android phones represented in the analytics from a single day. Multiply that by Android versions, manufacturers, hardware specs... it's a mess that is hard to wrangle.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm wondering if letting your app support very old OS versions is a good thing. You get more customers but aren't the ones with the old OS more likely be the ones causing the most problems (= work) because they aren't very tech savvy?

<comment><USER34> It provides economic opportunities for third party services. Supporting your local IT/Phone-store around the corner in assisting me is preferable to me than to buy a new phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > ...owners (hopefully) buy a new Android device which offers latest updates.

A new Android device will get one "latest update". Before the user buys it. After that, it will be just as fragmented as the rest.

</comment><comment><USER48> But what this article doesn't take into account is that Android is obviously split over tons of devices while iOS is, of course, set for Apple devices

</comment><comment><USER49> > The vast majority of iPhone users update to the latest version quite fast > and flawlessly.

Has this person ever been around iPhone owners when a new update comes out? I seem to remember a ton of lamentation at every step of slower speed, worse battery, laggy UI, moved features, removed features, and the like.

Yeah, there's a lot of different Android versions out there. Who cares? Other than security updates, it's pretty much a non-issue. Developers target the version they want to support and publish their app online.

<comment><USER50> Maybe on one particular major version update. The vast majority of updates are completely painless, as evidenced by such a large percentage of people having no reservation about updating to the latest version.

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 I'm surprised to see Marshmallow (6.0) below Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0)

</comment><comment><USER51> This is asinine. Android's support library makes fragmentation a non-issue for the vast majority of applications.

</comment><comment><USER52> Android is, as all US technology, a counterparty risk.

</comment><comment><USER53> every article preaches the same absurd fallacy: " _users_ update the OS more in so or so"

Users have absolutely no say! Planed obsolence does.

every single device could be running the latest version just fine. But the manufacturer intentionally decide to not offer (or allow!) the update on not cases.

This is pure greed over consumer rights (or respect).

want the latest security patch on your 2yr old $600 device? too bad, trhow it in the landfill and buy a new one (often with worse features)</comment>


Cellphone Carriers Envision World Without Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/cellphone-carriers-envision-world-without-wi-fi-11551531600 <comment><USER2> They would love this because it is not easy share my 5g hotspot in my phone if I am at work so everyone would need a separate plan. With wifi I buy one plan and we all connect. So unless 5g comes with unlimited connected devices and bandwidth I will stick with wifi</comment>


World's first virtual reality cinema - <AUTHOR> http://www.hotrecentnews.com/en/news/amsterdam-gets-virtual-reality-movies/6585 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm very excited about this! Can't wait to see the first movie [https://thevrcinema.com/](https://thevrcinema.com/)</comment>


Samsung wins appeal, Australian Galaxy Tab 10.1 injunction overturned - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-30/samsung-wins-apple-appeal/3704158

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems to capture the general flavour of the ruling:

      It is sufficient for us to express the view that, on the
      present state of the evidence, there is a real and
      substantial prospect that the importation into and supply
      in Australia of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 will not infringe
      claim 6 of the Touch Screen Patent. We have referred to
      a number of difficulties that confront Apple in making good
      its case on infringement. It may well be that, on a final
      hearing, Apple will meet these difficulties. But
      difficulties they are. Whilst we would not be prepared to
      say that Apple's case on infringement is not open to be
      argued, the difficulties to which we have referred do
      affect the assessment at the present time of the probability
      that, if on a final hearing the evidence remains the same,
      Apple will be found to be entitled to final injunctive
      relief for infringement of that claim. If Apple has
      established a prima facie case at all (which we doubt), it
      is founded upon a construction argument which, if the
      evidence remains as it is, is unlikely to succeed at trial.

</comment><comment><USER2> If I were in the market for a tablet I would certainly look at the the Galaxy Tab.

If Apple considers them their biggest threat, then that's quite an endorsement.

<comment><USER3> They were the biggest threat at the time the lawsuit was filed. I think the target will be changing to Amazon and ASUS in the near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just started looking at it, but I like this bit from the initial list of court orders:

      7. The respondents pay the appellants' costs of and
      incidental to the application for leave to appeal and the
      appeal.

The appellants are Samsung and the respondents are Apple. I don't know about Australia, but in the US winning court costs tends to be a big deal.

<comment><USER5> In line with what inclinedplane said, I've always found it strange that costs are generally not awarded in US legal culture. Awarding costs takes a lot of the momentum out of strategic and extortive lawsuit practices, and gives people a lot more incentive to settle out of court - a practice that's broadly regarded as a good thing. If anyone knows a reason it's not done, I'd be interested to hear it.</comment></comment>


Pedestrian Bridge Collapse over SW 8th Street in Miami [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2019-HWY18MH009-BMG-abstract.pdf <comment><USER2> What went wrong technically to cause the bridge collapse is only the second half of the story.

The first half of the story is that the stakeholders wanted an over-the-top bridge design, complete with fake cable stays, and out of hubris decided they would use an all-concrete single-truss Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) design because all-concrete would look better and the university's (FIU's) engineering department sort of specialized in promoting ABC.

What could have been a much cheaper nice looking normally-designed bridge (which would be open today) ballooned (or you could say, was hijacked) into a $10mm+ bridge disaster that would be comedy if people hadn't been hurt and killed. A majority of it was even paid for by federal grants.[1]

This is why we can't have nice things. They were so focused on building a nice looking bridge — and meeting deadlines — that they didn't/couldn't allocate sufficient resources to verify the design, verify it was built and moved into place correctly.

[1] see page 9 of [https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/brie...](https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/briefing- room/306576/amendment-2-ga-tiger-v-fiu.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > stakeholders wanted an over-the-top bridge design [...]

Nothing wrong with that!

> They were so focused on building a nice looking bridge — and meeting > deadlines

These are also good things.

To me sounds like the civil engineers started behaving more like software engineers. The independent peer reviewer they hired was not qualified to do the review.

> Louis Berger was not qualified by the Florida Department of Transportation > to conduct an independent peer review and failed to perform an adequate > review of the FIGG Bridge Engineers design plans and to recognize the > significant under-design of the steel reinforcement within the 11/12 node, > which was unable to resist the horizontal shear between diagonal 11 and the > bridge deck.

This whole business of the engineers ignoring the cracks that the contractors kept needing reassurance about is also insane.

<comment><USER4> > To me sounds like the civil engineers started behaving more like software > engineers.

Things like these were common in construction before software engineering was a thing. It always makes me chuckle when someone defers to "if we built buildings like we build software" trope. We do, and worse.

Lots of constructions standing around the world are not up to the codes in zillion different ways. They are still standing because redundant nature of physical construction is more forgiving than execution on a Turing machine.

<comment><USER5> > Things like these were common in construction before software engineering > was a thing

I read in an architect's memoirs that when he was a student back in the 1940s whenever his Architecture faculty teacher and his students visited a construction site to maybe change some small details (or at least they were perceived as "small" by said architects) oftentimes they were met with very angry construction site workers who would make the above architects think again about trying to force the implementation of those small changes. A similar story was told to me by my father (also a civil engineer) as happening in the 1980s, though the level of implied violence coming from the construction workers was a little more subdued. Wish that we in the software industry would be like those construction workers from time to time.

<comment><USER6> You have the metaphor wrong. You're the software engineer. Your toolset is the angry (or not) construction worker. Build a toolset that yells at you when you want to do something stupid/dangerous.

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, the mindset of the people who develop software toolsets (and operating systems like Unix) is exactly the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The construction and inspection firms working on the bridge were aware of > the cracks and reported the cracks to the design firm, asking for guidance. > The engineer of record at the design firm repeatedly indicated that the > cracks were of no safety concern.

Welp, that's a lawsuit laid out cold right there, setting aside even the fact that

> the probable cause of the ... bridge collapse was the load and capacity > calculation errors made by FIGG Bridge Engineers, Inc.

<comment><USER9> _The engineer of record at the design firm repeatedly indicated that the cracks were of no safety concern._

I've heard many other examples of viciously denying that anything is wrong, all the way until something becomes very _very_ wrong, to wonder whether this is an inherent part of human nature or a futile effort to avoid liability for knowingly screwing it up.

<comment><USER10> It's called 'the Normalisation of Deviancy' e.g. [0]; there's quite a lot of recent literature about it. Basically a risk is taken and nothing goes wrong; as a result the risk gets repeated more and more often with less and less concern until things do actually go wrong.

[0] [https://www.flightsafetyaustralia.com/2017/05/safety-in- mind...](https://www.flightsafetyaustralia.com/2017/05/safety-in-mind- normalisation-of-deviance/)

<comment><USER10> Also here's a great article with a couple of examples (think this was discussed here a while back):-

[https://fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/how-i-almost- destroy...](https://fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/how-i-almost- destroyed-a-50-million-war-plane-when-display-flying-goes-wrong-and-the- normalisation-of-deviance/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> NTSB Youtube report:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBjntrebxj8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBjntrebxj8)

The ntsb and us chemical safety board channels are amazing.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB](https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB)

<comment><USER12> I don't get this. There were large, steadily growing cracks in supporting elements, observed and documented over multiple days. Why on earth wasn't the street closed down?

The bridge slowly and visibly announced its impending collapse, which - as I understand it - is exactly what engineers want. The thing nobody wants is a bridge like the Morandi bridge in Genua, where the signs of impending collapse were hidden under thick layers of concrete, until the structure suddenly and unexpectedly gave way.

<comment><USER13> > ... hidden under thick layers of concrete ...

... and (only for the record) behind false or falsified inspection reports.

[https://www.corriere.it/english/19_gennaio_31/reports-on- mot...](https://www.corriere.it/english/19_gennaio_31/reports-on-motorway- bridges-at-risk-suspected-of-being-toned- down-c35d1c84-2574-11e9-9fef-1e7c69c121a7.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Third party analysis from AvE last year. Usually NSFW language.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtiTm2dKLgU&app=desktop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtiTm2dKLgU&app=desktop)

<comment><USER15> Usually? ::slaps kneee:: this our beloved redneck from canuckistan. :) Demonetized seems to be the norm

<comment><USER16> Top comment on the linked video: Although the content is very interesting i'm actually here for the foul language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A fake cable-stayed 175-foot span pedestrian bridge for $9 million.

For less money, they could have had a real cable-stayed bridge, like the one over I-280 near Apple HQ.[1] That cost $14 million, but it's a 375-foot clear span over the freeway.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Burnett_Bicycle- Pedestrian...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Burnett_Bicycle- Pedestrian_Bridge)

<comment><USER18> iirc all the bids for a concrete version (ala Florida) were twice as much for the steel design that was used, otoh California version also has to be earthquake resistant. I gotta give credit to all the engineering firms and Caltrans oversight. Very little downtime on 280, that would have been a traffic nightmare for entire peninsula.

<comment><USER19> $14 million for 375 feet in CA is ~$37k/ft

A 620 ft concrete suspension bridge [1] in Chicago was $23 million, or ~$37k/ft

A 1470 ft concrete and steel bridge [2] in Chicago was $33 million, or ~$22k/ft

This ugly monstrosity in Florida was $9 million for 174 feet, or ~$51k/ft

It's awfully pathetic.

[1] [https://www.exp.com/project/35th-street-pedestrian- bridge/](https://www.exp.com/project/35th-street-pedestrian-bridge/)

[2] [https://chicagocrusader.com/new-41st-street-pedestrian- bridg...](https://chicagocrusader.com/new-41st-street-pedestrian-bridge-in- bronzeville-opens/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> And then there's this accidental destruction of the phone of the engineer who stamped the plans for the bridge.

"Denney Pate, who stamped the plans for the bridge, told a judge June 12 that his wife accidentally put his pants with the phone in the pocket into a washing machine, inflicting damage that destroyed any call records or images."

[https://www.enr.com/articles/47108-bridge-designer- testifies...](https://www.enr.com/articles/47108-bridge-designer-testifies-on- evidence-one-day-after-osha-slams-figg)

<comment><USER21> I am surprised they can't subpeona the phone company for these records.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> To FIGG Bridge Engineers, Inc.:

10\. Train your staff on the proper use of Pc (the permanent net compressive force normal to the shear plane) when calculating nominal interface shear resistance.

Pretty humiliating. I wonder how bad the damage is to FIGG.

<comment><USER23> I bet they change their name after the story, like the new Magnum did (from NYT article)

<comment><USER24> They can always rebrand as FIGG Demolition.

I get that mistakes do happen but this was a bloody footbridge...

<comment><USER25> I know this is a joke, but Engineering skill is just as important in safely deconstructing something, as it is in constructing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I lived on the corner of 7th Terrace and 109th AVE during my senior year. I could see the bridge being built from my bedroom window; I would cross 8th Street to go to school everyday.

The bridge collapsing was one of the most surreal experiences of my life.

</comment><comment><USER27> It sometimes fascinates me (and scares the shit out of me) to wonder at all of the little errors/assumptions like this that are baked into the millions of spreadsheets that form the foundation of so much of what we build and do in the world.

<comment><USER28> Dead comment reply by 'FakeComments' that I am not sure deserves to be dead (what happened there?): "I'd say the better part of engineering is knowing how to design in the face of small errors creeping into the project."

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> NYT coverage:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/us/bridge-collapse- florid...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/us/bridge-collapse-florida- international-university-NTSB.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> The Miami Herald has done some great reporting on this: [https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami- dade/...](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami- dade/article236250848.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Is anyone going to review their other bridge designs? Wonder what else they missed.

<comment><USER32> FIGG is one of the premier bridge designers in the country. You can probably get on one of their bridges within a couple hours no matter where you live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I'm reading the report correctly, the bridge was barely sufficient to support its own weight, which is extremely surprising since I remember reading a _very_ long time ago that bridges and other structures are designed to be 10x stronger than they normally need to be; a vague reference in the article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety) supports that. It seems like this bridge was designed for minimal cost...

<comment><USER33> This is totally hearsay, but I've heard from multiple older engineers that as computer models have been improved over time the safety factor has been reduced as we have more accurate simulations. If the safety factors from the '50s had been used it's possible this bridge would never have been designed the way it was.

<comment><USER34> I've noticed from videos of recent bridge failures (FIU and the Taiwain Arch Bridge collapse a few weeks ago) how _fast_ the failures occur. Contrast with, say, the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure in the 1940s.

I suspect current designs are far nearer critical tolerances. Even under the ridiculous dynamics of the Tacoma Narrows incident, ultimate failure took hours.

<comment><USER9> _Even under the ridiculous dynamics of the Tacoma Narrows incident, ultimate failure took hours._

It took 4 months from construction to failure, during which time it was already flexing far more than normal.

<comment><USER34> The FIU and Taiwan's Nanfang'ao Bridge collapse ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanfang%27ao_Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanfang%27ao_Bridge)) each precipitated in seconds.

Contrast Tacoma Narrows, whose final throes were long enough for crowds to form and traffic to be cleared.

Tacoma:

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

FIU:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=BSq8295GFk4](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BSq8295GFk4)

Nanfang'ao:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=mjsZbbG5fag](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mjsZbbG5fag)

Morandi, Genoa, Italy:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=_gEMep8xLHk](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_gEMep8xLHk)

I-35W, Minneapolis, MN:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=74JNl5n-YdI](https://youtube.com/watch?v=74JNl5n-YdI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "This is a synopsis from the NTSB's report" about the FIU collapse from March 15, 2018, and not a new collapse, which is what I feared.

<comment><USER36> Based on file type alone I assumed it was some sort of formal report rather than a press release and therefore not breaking news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I study at FIU... I just don't see the point this bridge. Why would you spend 10+ million dollars on a bridge to cross a street, when the same problem can be solved by a simple crosswalk? We already have one of these bridges... and the majority of people don't bother to use it and simple take the cross walk. It just such a waste of money.

<comment><USER38> The federal government was picking up most of the cost. It's much easier to be wasteful when it comes out of someone else's budget.

<comment><USER39> And when it also supports your claim of being at the bleeding edge of bridge construction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Recent NTSB video:

[https://youtu.be/hBjntrebxj8](https://youtu.be/hBjntrebxj8)

</comment><comment><USER41> So much for the much vaunted "Professional Engineers".

<comment><USER32> As I've posted before, there's nothing special about a guy with a PE other than him hanging out there with liability for the lawsuit.

Someone with a PE license has met the minimum requirements from the state. Nothing else can be garnered from someone possessing a license. The minimum requirements have, historically, resulted in engineers who put out public facing designs that, more often than not, do not bring harm to the public. I can tell you first hand that sometimes the guy with a license who is actually at "the minimum" does not always put out something that is safe.

<comment><USER42> Indeed. You can browse through the disciplinary actions taken against engineers by professional associations and you will find all sorts of incompetence and malfeasance. I find the discipline tends to be on the lenient side—lots of fines, suspensions and reexaminations with only the occasional permanent loss of license.

Still, I'm glad professional licensure is required. That's what will prevent these folks from quietly rebranding and designing another disasterous bridge tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The engineering firm mentioned as responsible in the report hosts their web site without using https:

[http://www.figgbridge.com](http://www.figgbridge.com)

Why am I not surprised?

<comment><USER44> Why exactly should they care? Is there something secret on their site? A login form perhaps?

<comment><USER43> They should care because https is not just about protecting secrets. Thinking that is the case is a common misconception about https. Among other things having https also makes it harder for a bad actor to deliver false content while intercepting requests to the site.

<comment><USER45> And pointlessly makes it harder to deliver true content in the first place.

Not everything needs to be HTTPS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you keep your dev environment(s) portable? - <AUTHOR> Recently, I had to move machines...and it was a nightmare. Moving my applications, dependencies, config files, plugins, etc.; it is insane. I'm still finding libraries that I need to replace to get things to move.<p>How do you all keep everything organized and portable? What are some easy ways to stay organized when moving from machine to machine? <comment><USER2> This is a big part of why I insist on packing library dependencies in version control with my projects that use them. I've found that it's better to have a known good state than it is to be kept up to date with the latest versions of libraries automatically. It's not that hard to upgrade an existing library. I personally find it harder to find a library at all.

I keep a separate hard drive for project stuffs. It's not just for source code or image files, I also install the software I use to work there. Tools, IDEs, libraries, content packs, documentation, anything necessary for work, goes on that hard drive.

That way, in the case of a full OS reinstall, I at least have the program installation directories as a TODO list.

Also, all of my code is in Github somewhere. I don't have "my HDD only" code anymore. I have one project called "snippets" where every tinkering starts life, eventually to be carved off into its own repository if I like it and I spend significant time on it.

I wish I had something like this for my photos. I was using Dropbox for several years, then Google Drive because they offered a lot more space for a lot less money. But I've found that they are only good at restoring small changes. Completely restoring a system burns a lot of bandwidth, takes forever, and I ran into some nasty merge conflicts that destroyed some of my data. I've had both destroy so much data on so many occasions that I just don't consider them to be backup services anymore, they are simple file publishing services.

How do you backup 200GB of images without having to become a sysadmin in your own home? I just want to shoot photos and write code.

</comment><comment><USER3> I typically use Vagrant to create virtual machines dedicated to a specific dev environment. The Vagrant VM is usually provisioned by using Ansible.

When moving machines I just re-run 'vagrant up' which will create a new Ubuntu VM and install all the software I need.

Here's an example of one of my VMs using Ansible: [https://github.com/RealImpactAnalytics/vagrant- dev](https://github.com/RealImpactAnalytics/vagrant-dev)</comment>


Americans Unfit to Fight a Pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85553 <comment><USER2> Not just the US. General health and conditions such as obesity are worsening in many countries around the world.</comment>


Snakes on a train - <AUTHOR> http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss_news/Snake_on_train:_450_passengers_evacuated.html?cid=38303172

<comment><USER2> Genuine question for the submitter: Why do you think this is appropriate for HN?

I'm trying to understand the HN community better and there are quite a number of submissions like this. Are people just sharing things that caught their attention in the news, or do you genuinely think this is relevant to the community here?

You can probably tell that I don't think it's appropriate, but maybe I'm wrong. That's why I'm asking for your thoughts.

Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a fair question, and frankly it may well be it has nothing to do here. I just see it as relevant to nerd-culture because of the obvious (I think) reference to the "Snakes on a plane" movie. You could argue nerd-culture is not enough for hacker news, but then if you look at the homepage for example the GOOG split into GOOG/GOOGL article really has nothing to do with hacking. It's news for google shareholders, but somehow it seems many people on HN care about the stock market and Tesla cars and many other things which don't directly relate. Some things capture the HN mind-share and they become acceptable. Sometimes I too am baffled by what ends up on the front page.

So many people, many interests and opinions. That's why there is a 'new' page and a front one I suppose.</comment></comment>


Finger pointing won't solve the Covid-10 crisis, only collaboration will - <AUTHOR> https://iai.tv/articles/blame-wars-auid-1393 <comment><USER2> Finger-pointing might not stop the spread to continue further, but the world simply cannot turn a blind eye to the responsibility that the Chinese regime and WHO figureheads have on how a bad epidemic turned into a worse pandemic.

</comment><comment><USER3> COVID-19 probably.</comment>


These researchers have discovered the perfect password that's easy to remember - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/22/these-researchers-have-discovered-the-perfect-password-thats-also-easy-to-remember/ <comment><USER2> The title of the article a bit overzealous but the system the researchers designed is actually really cool. Direct link to their paper: [http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/memorize- random-60.pd...](http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/memorize- random-60.pdf)</comment>


C++11 std::unordered_set and map are slower than a naive implementation - <AUTHOR> http://www.clifford.at/blog/index.php?/archives/132-C++11-stdunordered_set-and-stdunordered_map-are-slower-than-a-naive-implementation.html

<comment><USER2> Just posted this on the OP:

There's a big issue with the unordered_map.erase(const_iterator) method -- STL mandates that .erase() returns an iterator to the next item in the container. There's no simple implementation of that for hashtables other than to walk the hashtable, which is quite slow.

This was once a serious performance issue with unordered_map (discussion here: [https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=41975](https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=41975)). I haven't followed up in years, but is the issue?

</comment><comment><USER3> These containers are problematically slow for most use cases but it is not really their fault. An internal design that will give good performance is _hugely_ dependent on the use case and the C++ STL offers little ability to specify the nature of the use case so that appropriate internals can be constructed. Consequently, the default implementation will always be pathologically poor for some significant subset of use cases.

A similar problem exists for other types of STL containers but it is particularly acute for the map and set containers. Some programmers end up building their own library of map implementations, each implementation optimized for a different use case, to get around this problem. The number of template parameters you would need to generalize std::map would be ridiculous, so it is easier to just have a lot of specialized implementations.

For high-performance code, std::map and friends are usually the wrong choice. Personally, I always write usage optimized maps as needed these days; the first couple times seem tedious but it quickly turns into a simple idiom you can implement in your sleep.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also interesting is the apparent fact that map and set (the tree-based ones) grow at faster than logarithmic time---if they were true O(lg n) then (given the log scale on the x axis) they should appear linear on these graphs.

It would be nice to see the specific code used to run the benchmarks, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> The benchmark code is linked to from the article: [http://svn.clifford.at/handicraft/2014/hashlib/](http://svn.clifford.at/handicraft/2014/hashlib/)</comment></comment>


Maybe the Web's Not a Place to Stick Your Ads - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=125741

<comment><USER2> There goes my web 2.0 idea...

Seriously though, if Google is willing to pay me for traffic on my website, who am I to complain? Besides, good advertising is more about exposure and image, than direct sales. How many people knowingly buy something because they saw it on television? Not many. How many people choose a familiar product over a less familiar one? Quite a few I bet. For how many did that familiarity come from seeing the same product on television? A lot more than we realize.</comment>


Postmaster General: Mail days may need to be cut - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Postmaster-General-Mail-days-apf-14188649.html <comment><USER2> There's a really good Jonathan Franzen essay about the Chicago post office in the early '90s (it was notoriously mismanaged). I was surprised by how important the post actually is; most families receive and pay all their bills through it.

On the other hand, cutting from 6 to 5 days seems like a reasonable concession to priorities in the 21st century.

</comment><comment><USER3> A few other options:

1\. Privatize. What does the government have to lose by doing this? (other than less money). I've dealt with both UPS and USPS when mail I sent through each had deliverability issues, UPS was far more pleasant and easy to deal with. I would far rather deal with a few private mail companies, imagine the type of innovation we might see in a market that has been stagnant for as long as I can remember.

2\. Charge to cover costs. Is there a Laffer Curve type effect with postal rates (spam snail mail companies switching to email maybe)? I imagine that in most cases charging more would simply equal more revenue, why not just charge $0.50 a stamp instead of $0.43. Its seems much fairer to do this, instead of having taxpayers subsidize the cost that the actual users of the system generate.

</comment><comment><USER4> The two options presented have some difficulties:

1\. Private companies have no mandate for universal service. They are free to refuse to deliver to any area, or to subcontract delivery out. In fact, SmartMail is a service that relies on private shippers delivering parcels to a destinating Post Office with the Letter Carrier making final last-mile delivery. The private companies wouldn't do that if it wasn't cheaper to use the USPS for final delivery.

2\. As far as taxpayers subsidizing the USPS, this has not been the case since 1970 when the agency stopped being the Post Office and became the Postal Service. It's just incorrect.</comment>


Russian Censorship of Telegram - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/06/russian_censors.html <comment><USER2> By the way - RKN already unblocked a lot of IP ranges, so currently there's ~3.8 million IPs in the block list.

<comment><USER3> > Roskomnadzor scaled back after it became clear that its action had affected > services critical for Russian business. Even so, the censor is still > blocking millions of IP addresses.

That was said explicitly in the source article already and also linked to a site where you can see the count of IPs graphed over time.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to be more confident and people person? - <AUTHOR> In the pressurized situation, I lose my confidence. I am not good people person but I think it is affecting me so much.
I am good in technology but could not explainand present ideas.
How to improve myself? Any books and suggestions are welcome. <comment><USER2> Practice. Practice. Practice. My prof set up a small reading group when I was in college. 5-6 students would get together every week and discuss a preassigned paper. I was like you, lacking in confidence, hesitant to disagree, handling confrontation badly etc. But the group created an environment where I could learn how to deal with these things. I could see others fumbling about and realized it was not just me struggling. When I got things right others encouraged me. All this slowly translated into increased confidence.

So try and set something up like that with friends/people who want to see you improve. Every week meet up and practice.

Also recommend Marshall Rosenburg's Non-violent communication. It really helped me see certain things I was doing wrong and showed me ways to avoid them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this book could be helpful. I've only skimmed it; I gave it as a gift to someone. All the parts I read seemed realistic, affirming, and practical.

[https://www.amazon.com/Social-Skills-Guidebook-Shyness- Conve...](https://www.amazon.com/Social-Skills-Guidebook-Shyness- Conversations/dp/0994980701/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think you can start by avoiding saying things like "I am not a good people person" You can try to understand what your benchmarks are for performance. Maybe you can say "Sometimes i feel shy" instead of "I am shy" . Do you see the difference between the two?</comment>


Rental Subsidies for Employees - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed a few start-ups that offer or did offer rental subsidies for employees who live near the office.<p>How does this work from an accounting / legal standpoint? <comment><USER2> I saw that too and figured it could be expensed by the company (similar to how a contractor can get per diem).</comment>


Chat for Bootstrappers - <AUTHOR> Hi all. This is a shameless promotion post, but not for any product or way to make money.
I love Hackernews, but a bulk of the startup related content is VC backed companies. I'm a big fan of https://barnacl.es/ for bootstrappers but prefer ad-hoc discussions around what I'm currently working on and feel like many others are the same.
To fix this, I've started a discord channel for bootstrappers: https://discord.gg/wB9vFJP
I'd love to get more members, and if anyone wants to become a moderator please message me.
Thanks for checking out this post,
Andrew <comment><USER2> What about the forum on indiehackers.com ?</comment>


Obituary for Tom West (of "Soul of a New Machine") - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2011/05/22/tom_west_engineer_was_the_soul_of_data_generals_new_machine/?page=full

<comment><USER2> Wow. Sad. That book, The Soul of a New Machine, and Tom West's story, was what made me decide to go to college for real to study EE.

I ended up switching to CS but that's incidental; my eyes had been opened to endless possibility.</comment>


World won't cool without geoengineering, warns report - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24261-world-wont-cool-without-geoengineering-warns-report.html <comment><USER2> It's no surprise that the AGW crowd is losing the war of public opinion. Take the last line of the article that details a part of the report:

 _The draft report says the available evidence now suggests that above a certain threshold of warming, the Greenland ice sheet will almost disappear within approximately 1000 years, which will result in 7 metres of global sea- level rise. It estimates that the threshold may lie between 1 °C and 4 °C of warming, but is not confident of this figure._

So what they're saying is they are not confident that some degree of warming may occur within a huge band which may do something that sounds really bad (but they don't actually spell out the bad things) in the next 1,000 years.

I am a scientifically literate person with a strong conservation and environmental bent. But when I read something like this even I roll my eyes. Because I want people to actually conserve, please take the following advice to the AGW crowd:

First, stop using the disaster du jour to say, "See!?! We can expect more of this from now on!" Because when you did this with Katrina and then we had 8 years of relatively quiet hurricane seasons you sound like a "sky is falling" fool. The fact that "An Inconvenient Truth" came out shortly after Katrina with a hurricane on the movie posters and box covers was ridiculous.

Second, stop making inaccurate predictions about what is going to happen. For example - for a while everyone was decrying that snow was a thing of the past because of global warming (example: [http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are- now-j...](http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a- thing-of-the-past-724017.html)) When we then had record snowfalls throughout many areas of the world, the same people changed their tune and said, "Exactly! Global Warming will actually bring more snow!" Enough of this nonsense.

Stop using things like carbon credits to live a ridiculously lavish lifestyle while telling everyone else to live simply.

Finally, stop trying to profit off of AGW. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy- environmen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy- environment/03gore.html?_r=0)

There are many people that you will never convince of the reality of AGW. But there are many more people that you are turning away from believing you because of the things above. Because I think finite resource conservation is the right thing to do, please stop hurting this cause.

<comment><USER3> >there are many more people that you are turning away from believing you because of the things above

The 'things above' being two insignificant newspaper articles over the last 13 years? Get real. People reject AGW[1] because of a very well funded propaganda campaign that spreads disinformation and because the existence of AGW is incompatible with the conservative, capitalist political philosophies held by most people in the anglosphere. There are studies demonstrating the latter effect:

 _Why does public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence? We conducted an experiment to probe two alternative answers: the "Science Comprehension Thesis" (SCT), which identifies defects in the public's knowledge and reasoning capacities as the source of such controversies; and the "Identity- protective Cognition Thesis" (ICT) which treats cultural conflict as disabling the faculties that members of the public use to make sense of decision- relevant science. In our experiment, we presented subjects with a difficult problem that turned on their ability to draw valid causal inferences from empirical data. As expected, subjects highest in Numeracy — a measure of the ability and disposition to make use of quantitative information — did substantially better than less numerate ones when the data were presented as results from a study of a new skin-rash treatment. Also as expected, subjects' responses became politically polarized — and even less accurate — when the same data were presented as results from the study of a gun-control ban. But contrary to the prediction of SCT, such polarization did not abate among subjects highest in Numeracy; instead, it increased. This outcome supported ICT, which predicted that more Numerate subjects would use their quantitative- reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks._

[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992)

A few misguided newpaper articles that over excitedly exaggerated uncertain predictions didn't make any difference to anything. Neither did Al Gore's personal finances. People ranting about Al Gore were never going to be won over by scientific arguments, their position is based on emotion and politics, not logical reasoning.

[1] people in the aglosphere that is, it's a much less prevalent phenomenon elsewhere

<comment><USER4> People in general, perhaps. But for myself, my biggest problem with AGW is indeed the fact that its predictions have an ever-longer history of not coming true.

As a person interested in science, I consider this a fatal objection to any theory. AGW is not excepted. Anyone who has the mental gymnastic strength to talk themselves past this problem is merely demonstrating that they are not actually interested in science at this point, as the disparity between theory and fact is pretty clear at this point.

If "the public" are having problems with AGW for the wrong reasons, well, it's hardly the first time the correct conclusion has been reached for the wrong reasons.

<comment><USER5> > my biggest problem with AGW is indeed the fact that its predictions have an > ever-longer history of not coming true.

Are you saying that global temperatures aren't rising? Is the arctic icecap not rapidly getting smaller? I believe even the rising sea level is already measurable (though still small at this point).

The predictions are coming true in a quite alarming fashion.

<comment><USER6> > Are you saying that global temperatures aren't rising?

Yes, see [http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-climate-change- uncerta...](http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-climate-change- uncertainty-20130923,0,791164.story)

> Is the arctic icecap not rapidly getting smaller?

Well, it's not. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global- cooli...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling- Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html)

> I believe even the rising sea level is already measurable

Sure. Global Sea Level Rise Dampened by Australia Floods - [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130819141610.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130819141610.htm)

<comment><USER7> Giving the links to the articles which present the views of denialists as facts aren't proof of anything but that there are journalist and media that distort what the most scientist believe.

See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6451344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6451344)

<comment><USER8> Three of the Rules of Radicals:

#3: Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.

#5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

#13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

All in one sentence at that. Excellent.

<comment><USER9> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem)

<comment><USER8> But I wasn't attacking, I was congratulating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish geoengineering played a much larger role in the conversations around global warming.

It seems we're never going to wean ourselves off of petroleum, and most efforts to meaningfully curtail its use are politically untenable (outside of Europe that is).

I think if people who believe in global warming are serious about solving the problem and not just hand waving about driving less and turning off our lights, then they'd start devoting some serious attention to geoengineering.

(Note I'm not poking at a straw man in the paragraph above. Check out the NRDC page on global warming solutions [[http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/solutions/](http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/solutions/)]. I see a lot about restricting pollution and remaking our lifestyles, but NOTHING at all about geoengineering.)

</comment><comment><USER11> It is laughable that all this is based on imprecise models and simulations and not actual science. There is nothing provable with any of this or for that matter disprovable.

Alter the inputs and weighting in the models by merest fractions, or try take new factors into account and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, yet on the basis of this Billions, if not Trillions of dollars are being moved around and new laws are being made, among many other side effects.

Who decided exactly what inputs are needed for calculations and which should be left out? Who decided their relative weightings? Who decided the exact nature of the interactions inside the models?

It is just crazy.

<comment><USER12> Scientists? People who study the physics of the system in question by building models, simulating them and comparing to data? I'm not sure what else you expect. I'll take them for big policy decisions any day over some blogger cherry picking data.

<comment><USER8> Seems to me that everyone involved is cherry picking the data to support their own interpretation. There's even been accusations of cherry picking of how the data is collected in the first place.

<comment><USER13> If that's how it seems to you, you are not paying enough attention. Scientists are providing full data sets, and denialists are cherry-picking. I can't convince you just by saying so, but seriously, this is an important issue. Set aside some time (a day or two) and read some if the key papers characterising climate change. You will come away with a very different idea on where the truth lies in this "debate".

<comment><USER8> Scientists are most certainly not providing full data sets across the board. There's been a scandal or two of scientists withholding data, even committing criminal acts in some cases. I know it hasn't happened within the last few months so I'm sure it's easy to forget.

Oh wait, "denialists" made those accusations. We can ignore them right? After all, who cares about an opposing viewpoint when you can give them condescending names? Just mock them until they shut up. I mean, real science doesn't need people with different viewpoints duplicating the results, right? You display your bias like a badge of honor.

What good is a full data set if it was collected in a way to push an agenda in the first place? Which I notice you don't address at all in responding to my post. I can go out and get you data that says whatever you want it to say, provided I'm allowed to question the motives of anyone that says my data collection protocols might be faulty.

I'm sure you would like me to read just the "key" papers that support your contentions. Let's ignore "key" papers that might disagree or even agree with a slightly different viewpoint that doesn't present such a drastic outlook. Heck, we should even go out of our way to prevent opposing papers from being even considered in peer-reviewed journals, right? Sorry, that's old news not worth considering anymore I guess.

You seem to be an example (granted, I admit I could be wrong as I don't know you, just going off your condescending words) of what's wrong with this "debate" that has people already deciding what is truth or not. You have no freaking clue what my opinions on this matter are nor what I've read. You see that I might possibly disagree with you and therefore I must be spoken down to as someone who isn't paying enough attention nor is reading the correct materials.

But you are correct in one thing, this is an important issue that could heavily influence the future of people around the world. I, for one, want to at least attempt to get it right because if we're wrong then at best we waste resources and at worst we multiply the problems. To get it right definitely includes listening to people who may have different ideas or even opposing viewpoints.

<comment><USER13> But put that aside, let me give you a primer on climate change.

Here are some indisputable facts (well, to dispute them, you would need to overturn quantum physics, not impossible, but quite a hard task):

1) CO2 absorbs more infrared light than visible light. This can be demonstrated in a laboratory, and we even know why this is the case, thanks to quantum physics.

2) When sunlight hits the Earth, some is absorbed, and then re-emitted red- shifted. Again, we have direct satellite measurements of this, and we also have the theoretical explanation as to why, thanks you again quantum physics.

3) We know that we are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Again, direct measurements show this, plus we know that we are producing CO2 with our industrial processes.

Put those 3 facts together, and the baseline conclusion is that unless there is some unknown fourth factor, our planet is going to get hotter. Scientists noticed this back in the sixties, and started conducting experiments to see if this was indeed the case. All of our measurements since then show that global temperature is increasing, on average, which ties in nicely with what we expect from theory (points 1-3 above).

Anybody that wants to make a serious claim that climate change isn't happening needs to either demonstrate that one of points 1-3 is wrong, or that there is a fourth factor. A fourth factor would be something like "as the world's oceans become more acidic due to absorption of CO2, past a certain threshold value the surface becomes more mirror-like, increasing the albedo, and hence reducing the amount of red-shifting of light". A paper that demonstrated this, and demonstrated that the effect would be big enough to overcome the increased absorption caused by increased CO2 would indeed have demonstrated that climate change would indeed be limited by the threshold value. If such a paper were to come out, I personally would probably breath a deep sigh of relief and then throw a party.

If someone tries to claim that climate change isn't happening without demonstrating that points 1,2 or 3 are wrong, and without demonstrating an unknown factor that hadn't yet been taken into account can be safely dismissed. You _can_ question the specifics of the models, like "is the Greenland ice sheet going to melt in 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years?" That's fair game, and if you go and read the papers, you will see scientists doing just that. But the overarching question of climate change? That's settled business already, and anyone claiming otherwise deserves the title of "denialist".

<comment><USER8> Oh yes, classic. Ignore what I said and continue with the condescending lessons you insist that I need to put me on your alleged superior level. I now have to question your ability to discuss these facts because your reading comprehension is really lackluster.

In no way have I stated that I disagree with the three facts that you stated. As I said before, which you chose to ignore; you have no clue as to what my opinion on this matter is. You are simply assuming things because I'm in a different section of the same ship. It's not my fault you decided to not get out of your cabin and meet other people.

Do I deny that changes in the climate exists, possibly producing negative results for the environment and/or human race? No.

Do I have a problem with the science that's been used to predict doomsday and to force the drastic measures that some say is necessary for the human race to survive? Yes.

Why do I have a problem with the science? Because it's been shoddy work, it's been corrupted, and people who support the science go out of their way to shut down those that may question the methods used. I have a third-grader that is currently learning that is not the way to do proper science, why can't the so- called adults understand this? You claim in your last paragraph that questioning the models involved is fair game. That's what I've been doing and yet you still have the condescending tone and name-calling. You are too quick to label people "denialist" without thinking and it makes you look petty.

I highly disagree that we know for a fact that the climate changes we've seen in the past few decades is solely the cause of human activity. There are numerous possibilities that must be explored before we can say we know for a fact of anything pertaining to this. Too many people do not want to do this and just move forward trying to fix something that we don't understand nor know how to fix. It's an effort "to do something" ignoring the fact that method of governing often doesn't turn out so well.

I grew up with this nonsense way of thinking. I remember as a kid the global cooling catastrophe we were heading for. I remember the urgency to do something about CFCs. I remember global warming being a problem until people realized the globe isn't really warming that much so it changed to climate change. This is not science, this is politics.

So, forgive me if I don't jump on the bandwagon of people doing half the work, declaring themselves the only source of the truth, demanding that people spend countless amounts of resources doing things their way, and subjecting anyone who dare question their data and methods to needless ridicule without actually bothering to answer the questions that they raise.

You are not helping your cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looking forward to my house turning into beachfront property here in Orlando, FL!

<comment><USER15> Sounds nice except for you wont have any water to drink because all of the freshwater aquifers in Florida will have been infiltrated by sea-water. And this estimate of 1 meter of rise is on the low end of the estimates I've seen. Hope you get exactly the amount of seawater rise you need and also can fund your own desalination plant.

<comment><USER16> Eh, Florida has enough green lawns to water that they're making good progress salinizing their aquifers without any rising tide necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> But in the longer term, isn't it the global cooling rather than the global warming that is more disastrous to human beings and the eco-system?

<comment><USER18> I think this is an excellent question.

There's been a lot of panic over the rise of sea levels and a warmer climate, but why _exactly_ is this a world-ending disaster? Yes, the coastlines may change and yes, people will be displaced.

Such has been the case for all of recorded history, and far before. Humans can adapt: they have, and they will again.

I find the idea of geoengineering far more terrifying than global warming. The community that can't get their models to explain the last few years of observations now wants to throw a massive new wrench into the works? Madness.

<comment><USER19> Exactly. If the sea levels rise ten meters overnight, that would be an enormous catastrophe with unfathomable loss of life.

If the sea levels rise ten meters over a couple decades, people will get the heck out when the water's at their ankles, instead of patiently waiting a few years until it's over their heads.

Or figure out a local civil engineering solution like diverting the water with levees and dams, that's at worst a local disaster if it doesn't work out.

<comment><USER8> You are quite wrong good sir, or madam, as someone else in this thread explained that millions will drown with a drastic change in sea levels over 1000 years.

Actually, I'm assuming they were greatly exaggerating which seems to be commonplace in these types of discussions so I decided to poke a little fun at that one. Something about learning to swim and inventing something called a boat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> in 3001: a space oddessy the book talks about how humanity had to build huge mirrors to reflect heat back into space. my body is ready

</comment><comment><USER21> _the Greenland ice sheet will almost disappear within approximately 1000 years_

Gee, we're making 1000 predictions right now? How are those predictions made 10-30 years ago faring?

<comment><USER8> And who's to say that ice would not have disappeared naturally over the next 1000 years if humans didn't exist at all?</comment></comment>