Which Airline Kicks Off the Most Passengers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/04/which-airline-kicks-most-passengers <comment><USER2> This misconception that the flight was "overbooked" has to die. The flight was NOT OVERBOOKED. It was sold out, but definitely not overbooked.

The reason that United needed 4 seats is because they had a last-minute crew to fly to Louisville. And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers.

EDIT: Since some asked for a citation for the latter: 14 CFR 250.2a: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a)

<comment><USER3> > _And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over > paying passengers._

Do you have a citation for this?

<comment><USER4> I also would like to see a citation for this. It's my understanding that deadheading crew members are considered must-rides and that this is an industry norm.

<comment><USER3> Likewise.

A cursory search turns up a couple links.[0][1] It seems to involve the fact they had to deplane passengers who had already boarded, rather than merely deny them boarding.

[0] [http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/04/11/united- den...](http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/04/11/united-denied- boarding-illegal/)

[1] [https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_...](https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_rvideos_just_filled_with_united_related/dg3xvja/?context=3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's more interesting than the numbers is the linked article[1] about how Delta avoids problems by asking passengers on overbooked flights how much they'd want in order to give up their seat at check in time. By doing it early and without the other passengers around it eliminates possible bidding-up at the gate and lets them have a list of low cost bumps ready as soon as it's needed.

[1] [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/how-delta- masters-t...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/how-delta-masters-the- game-of-overbooking-flights/)

<comment><USER6> Yeah I saw that. That's brilliant. First thing is getting people thinking about getting money, so they are already primed, fantasizing about it. Then the hint about "Delta will pick the lowest bid first". Those interested already are willing to play but now have to think of others outbidding them so they lower the bid. And lastly and most importantly, it lets people who never want to participate (such as well, doctors who have to be there for their patients) not participate.

<comment><USER7> I fly Delta. They've paid me over $1,000 in cash [1] to bump me off a $500 flight. I don't think United pays that much. Instead, they get aggressive.

[1] _American Express gift card_

<comment><USER8> Actually, airlines in the US are mandated by USDOT to pay you 4x the ticket price or $1350 (whichever is lower) for a domestic delay >2hrs or an international delay >4hrs.

If the bump delays you by <2hrs (generally unlikely), it's 2x ticket price or $650 (again, whichever is lower).

You were probably entitled to $1350, so you really didn't do that great.

That is also how much the United passenger is/was entitled to.

<comment><USER2> > are mandated by USDOT to pay you 4x the ticket price

In the case of United, if by "pay" you mean give you a voucher (or N vouchers of value 1/N of the total, only 1 of which can be used at a time) for travel on their airline, to be used in 1 year, not to be combined with other offers, yada yada... No wonder no one wanted to take them up!

<comment><USER9> Incorrect. By law, at least, cash is mandated. Not a voucher.

Relevant text:

>Except as provided below, the airline must give each passenger who qualified for involuntary denied boarding compensation a payment by cash or check for the amount specified above... The air carrier may offer free or discounted transportation in place of the cash payment.... The passenger may insist on the cash/check payment...

Full text:

>Except as provided below, the airline must give each passenger who qualified for involuntary denied boarding compensation a payment by cash or check for the amount specified above, on the day and at the place the involuntary denied boarding occurs. If the airline arranges alternate transportation for the passenger's convenience that departs before the payment can be made, the payment shall be sent to the passenger within 24 hours. The air carrier may offer free or discounted transportation in place of the cash payment. In that event, the carrier must disclose all material restrictions on the use of the free or discounted transportation before the passenger decides whether to accept the transportation in lieu of a cash or check payment. The passenger may insist on the cash/check payment or refuse all compensation and bring private legal action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At the end of the day, this is less about stats and more to do with process. Overbooking happens. So do delays and shitty experiences with airlines. We get it.

The difference was that United had many options at their disposal and chose one of the least humane methods in a civilized society.

Furthermore, the leaked internal memo by the CEO shows a clear lack of empathy and I see a lot of similarities between what happened on the plane and the PR aftermath. In both cases, instead of choosing alternative choices that would come with some cost to the company(increasing the bounty to give up the seat, apologizing profusely for the incident) in exchange for rectifying a situation, they doubled down on bad choices (violent removal, written accusations against the passengers behaviour).

Honestly, this would be non-story had they just upped the compensation to anyone interested in the plane.

And on a side note, it's kind of sad how one of humans greatest technological achievements, the airplane, is associated with one of the least liked experiences in North America, namely going through airports, security, and dealing with airlines.

<comment><USER11> Airplanes are great. Airlines used to be great when there was competition. But we've ignored the merit of competition law, and allowed too much conglomeration in the name of profits. And the airlines are very profitable, but they are not competitive in particular on service and customer satisfaction.

The last few mergers shouldn't have been permitted.

<comment><USER12> I'd argue that it was competition that made the circumstances you see today - first class of today resembles standard class in the 70s for about the same relative price.

Airlines increasingly wanted to grow the flying population, by lowering prices. More people have access to airplanes now, and so they have turned into what was traditionally the service and experience of a bus.

<comment><USER13> Nah. The experience in a bus: Nobody asks for your ID. You can pay cash. Nobody frisks you when boarding. Nobody irradiates you to watch nude images of you. You don't need to unpack your luggage half the time. You can stow your suitcase in half a minute, and can get it back equally fast.

We would be so lucky if flying had the service and experience of a bus!

<comment><USER12> Ha, fair point.

If you upgrade enough to private then you can get the flying experience of the 50s: Small Planes, no security, walk on the tarmac.

It's like paying more puts you further back in time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > By contrast, Southwest—which has been taunting United over the Dr. Dao > incident—has a slightly lower rate of overbooking than the other airlines

I get the feeling that this is missing the point

> Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against > their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen. > Some weren't. Given those numbers, the interesting thing isn't that United > had to remove one of these folks by force. The interesting thing is that > apparently it's never happened before.

> It hasn't happened while cell phones were recording the whole thing, anyway

Did this person even watch the video? I seriously doubt regular instances of violent deplanings wouldn't be a point of pop culture by now if "against their will" always ended with a man being dragged bleeding off a plane

<comment><USER15> Seriously. Is the author trying to claim that getting knocked out and a bloody lip is par for the course or even, i don't know, has EVER happened in any of these 40,000 yearly instances?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't wrap my head around how everyone is like "Yeah, overbooking happens, that's just the way it is". Why the hell is it legal? If I booked two clients on the same timeslot, collected cash from them in advance and then stood one up and offered him a fucking coupon, I'd have a court case opened against me the next day and I'd never find a client in the same city again. Why the hell do airlines still get away with it in the age of online payments?

<comment><USER17> This wasn't overbooking, as was already said.

And overbooking is legal because it is not illegal.

And when you have 2% of your passengers not turning up on every flight, and flight margins of <$100 profit per plane (during the worst times), not per passenger, you need to overbook.

<comment><USER18> > And when you have 2% of your passengers not turning up on every flight

Why is that a problem? They've paid for a service and not used it.

<comment><USER19> It is nevertheless a wasted resource that could be used better. Indirectly it will cause all tickets fares to fall down which will benefit the people that actually flies. I'm not against overbooking but forcefully expelling a passenger is just another step in the direction of making taking an airplane just such a shitty experience. The correct, common sense, ethical and business savvy way to proceed would have been to start bidding until some passengers sold back their tickets. That would have been fair instead of some fixed compensation that doesn't take into account all kinds of inconveniences you will suffer because of losing your flight. I try to avoid taking airplanes nowadays which is quite sad considering I'm an aerospace engineer. My only positive thought is that airports are a nice contained experiment everybody is forced to watch of what happens to people when there is a power imbalance, even if you live in a democracy.

<comment><USER18> The following may not apply in other places as it does in Australia, so correct me if I'm wrong.

Airlines don't care about unused seats, if they did we'd have last minute rates like we do for hotels. Hotels know it's better to have someone pay $20 a night than to have their capacity go unused at $50 so they'll drop the price for booking a day or two in advance.

Airlines do the opposite, they charge more for booking late.

<comment><USER20> It's just a form of price discrimination. Early bookers are usually price- sensitive individuals. They're prepared to shop around, or even forgo the trip if it's too expensive. Late bookers are mostly corporate customers or price- insensitive individuals.

So airlines make the most revenue by setting prices low early on, and higher toward the flight date. They certainly care about unused seats, but the revenue from expensive last-minute bookings normally outweighs the revenue they would get from filling all remaining seats at a discounted price.

They do their best to minimize unused seats by getting the prices right early on, and adjusting based on observed demand. But at a certain point, it makes sense to raise prices even if it's highly likely that there will be unused seats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I got $500 from United for being bumped on a SFO -> BOS flight. My resulting flight was only 1.5 hours later and I got moved to #1 on the upgrade standby list. From what it sounded like, it was a computer system that decided the amount, not a human.

<comment><USER8> USDOT mandates that they pay you 2x the ticket price (capped at $650) for a delay of less than two hours. So not sure what you paid for your ticket, but you may've been entitled to an extra $150.

<comment><USER13> If somebody gets bumped involuntarily _after nobody accepted a lower compensation_ , they can get $650.

If they offer $500 and one of the passengers takes it, he can't just rock up after the flight to ask for more money.

<comment><USER8> Right. I meant, from the OP's perspective, he did more for the airline than he really did for himself. Sure, he got some money. But he really helped the airline save money and continue to justify a (in my opinion) dishonest practice.

Maybe we need to start a Airline Passenger's Union, so that we have some collective bargaining power when an airline wants to bump passengers, and instead of them convincing individuals to accept _less_ than they deserve, we convince the airlines to pay _more_ than mandated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Overbooking and so on: some people might not know or remember, but on ancient times it was kind of 2 separated processes: buying the ticket was one thing, booking a specific flight was another. You could change your initial choice of flight (perhaps paying some fee, not the whole ticket again). Doing a no-show wouldn't make you loose your ticket (perhaps you would, again, pay some fee). Even the need to check-in is a consequence of that time.

Without that, things would be straightforward: buy the ticket, board the plane, loose the ticket if you don't.

With the ticket being a different thing from a "reserved seat in a specific flight", you end up with overbooking (selling more tickets than the flight can handle because usually someone will loose the flight, or will change it to another day). You end up with companies that don't want to lose the last seat in exchange of a small fee (it's better to sell another full ticket, no?).

Perhaps prices would go up a bit. Perhaps people would be more pissed off when they loose the flight. I don't know.

I just know that it began as a model that made sense at the time, and small changes added-up so that we are in this situation, now.

</comment><comment><USER11> United has made threats of police force a thing before now, and it'd would seem that's effective due to the low instance of it going any farther than that

[http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus- united...](http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united-low- priority-passenger-20170412-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's worth pointing out that this article is just completely flat-out wrong. Kevin Drum is just completely screwing up here.

The stats he references do _not_ point to de-planing - a term he invents only for this article.

All those involuntary denial of boardings he references are _before_ passengers board the plane. Which makes a huge difference.

The paper he links to (indirectly) makes zero mention of passengers being kicked off planes. They only make reference to involuntary denial of boarding, which happens before passengers get on the plane.

I think there's only one other comment in this entire thread that makes this point.

Just thinking it through a bit, you can see it makes no sense. If a plane is oversold, how the hell do they let the passengers board? You'd have two people trying to sit in the same seat.

</comment><comment><USER24> After this incident what will likely happen is more legalese in the contract allowing for airline discretion when it comes to bumping people involuntarily. You'll have higher fares for guaranteed seats and lower fares (general cabin) will enjoy the prospect of being bumped with some pre-arranged compensation system.

It'd be nice if all airlines, other than not overbooking, chose Delta's approach. Deplane option right as you check in.

<comment><USER25> It's not "deplane" if you're not on the plane yet.

Also, it's come out that United's so-called "random" method was a sort based on frequent flier status and then (potentially) price paid for ticket. If that's really the case, they targeted their least valuable one-time customers first.. aka people who "next time" was months or years down the road.

As someone with status, I get their reasoning but let's be honest and not call it "random."

<comment><USER26> Boarding priority rules that discriminate on status are explicitly permitted by US regulations. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.3](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.3)

<comment><USER25> I have no problem with that but then let's stop calling this random.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Title should read "Which US Airline Kicks Off The Most Passengers?"

</comment><comment><USER28> > Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against > their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen.

Well at least we have numbers and pretty graphs.

<comment><USER14> Where's the pretty graph for "against their will" versus "violently against their will"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> These were not people that were deplaned, they were people that were denied boarding. Two totally different things.</comment>


Are we alone? Setting some limits to our uniqueness - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-04-limits-uniqueness.html <comment><USER2> "Frank said that the third big question—how long civilizations might survive—is still completely unknown."

Interestingly, that might not matter so much - Michio Kaku argues that any truly advanced civilization would be essentially immortal, as their technology would have evolved fast enough to deal with global catastrophes: [http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of- extraterrestri...](http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of- extraterrestrial-civilizations/)</comment>


UC students suit claims Google scanned accounts without permission - <AUTHOR> http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20160513/uc-students-suit-claims-google-scanned-accounts-without-permission/1 <comment><USER2> From the article:

 _> However, the suits by the students, including 68 from Berkeley and 243 from UC Santa Cruz, have been thrown into uncertainty by a federal judge's suggestion that each student in the largest claim should file separately so the court can collect 710 individual $400 filing fees._

 _> "Our clerk's office is really unhappy you are circumventing our filing fees by adding 710 cases under one case number," U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh told the students' lawyer, Ray Gallo, according to a court transcript._

 _> Gallo, who is representing the students in both cases, said he expected Google to file a request to separate the 710 claims individually._

 _> "This is a mass case and the question is, 'Can these people who all have essentially the same claim bring it together so that a lawyer like me will agree to do it?" he said. "If these cases have to be filed individually, no lawyer would take it."_

In one hand the lawyer is right, filling what amounts to the same complaint under 710 different cases is burdensome and adds unnecessary complexity in the process.

On the other hand it signals a very bad start by the part of the complainants legal team. Not following judicial (and clerical) procedure to the letter is a very easy way to have the case lost on a technicality.

Being a layman in this area my question is: what prevents them from filling a proper class action?

Either that or what prevents them from filling the case with a single complainant and, in case of success, using the precedent to get an easier time for the rest 709?

<comment><USER3> > Being a layman in this area my question is: what prevents them from filling > a proper class action?

Litigating a class action involves not just litigating the merits, but litigating the propriety of filing as a class action. E.g. is the class composed of a definite and ascertainable group of people? Are the facts common to all class members? Settling a class action also requires court approval, whereas setting a lawsuit in which all plaintiffs are joined does not. This adds a whole bunch of motions practice.

In a case like this the plaintiffs would likely win on class certification, since the same alleged harm happened to an easy-to-define group of people. But it's a bunch of extra work for the lawyer, who is probably proceeding on contingency.

<comment><USER4> > But it's a bunch of extra work for the lawyer, who is probably proceeding on > contingency.

Aren't most class actions done on contingency? Also, if they are suing Google, it's hard to believe the extra work of filing a class action would be a significant expense for the plaintiff; there is discovery (and all the skilled labor involved), experts, travel, etc. And it's billable time, which should increase the fees the court approves.

Finally, isn't it usually a race by attorneys to get their class certified first, so they are the lead attorney (and get more of the fees)?

<comment><USER3> Both things you say are true, but here you've got 700 plaintiffs. How much damages did they have? $500 each? Then you're talking about a fee award of $100k, which isn't a lot to battle class-certification issues with Google.

I'm not sure if this happened at any other universities. If so, a class action would make more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Each Plaintiff received disclosures from his or her Educational Institution that indicated his or her (Apps for Education) emails were private,"

I'm missing the part where Google told the students they weren't scanning the emails; wouldn't this just be a failure on the school's part? If they removed all advertising from the service in 2014, I can only imagine that the licensing agreement before that point included some clause about advertising and email content.

<comment><USER6> You are best off reading the actual Complaint to determine who the parties are and the specific allegations against Google...that said the article included this single allegation against Google from the Complaint:

>"Google's lies," according to the lawsuit, included a statement on a privacy page for Apps for Education, which was on the web from at least June 2011 to September 2012, and said the apps were "completely ad-free -- which means your school's content is not processed by Google's advertising systems."

<comment><USER7> That statement from Google would only be a lie if the students were getting ads. The article says the complaint is that "the firm harvested their data for commercial gain without their consent". I could not determine from the article exactly what harvesting was done or what commercial gain derived from that.

Google has maintained that the email scanning for targeted advertising is not a privacy issue in that it is automated and there are no details leaked outside the system. If it turned out that the scanning was done and no actions resulted from that then the whole thing would become philosophical.

<comment><USER8> They lied because they claimed the emails weren't being scanned:

"which means your school's content is not processed by Google's advertising systems"

<comment><USER7> What does "processed" mean in this context? Can an advertising system which produces no advertising be considered to have processed anything?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So what did google actually do? What's the actual harm? Article is poorly written.

<comment><USER10> I thought it was pretty clear--despite saying they wouldn't, they sold the students' data.

<comment><USER9> I guess I missed the part where data was "stolen" and used in some bad way?

<comment><USER11> The data belongs to the students and there was an agreement not to mine it; the complaint is that this agreement was ignored and the data was mined.

That kind of thing carries regulatory fines in EU. There may be a bit of culture clash happening in this thread between Europeans ("this is my data and you need my permission to use it") and SV ("this data is gathered by the company and it's theirs to do with what they wish")

<comment><USER9> An important concept in American law is harm, and what's unclear to me is what exact harm was caused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am a fan of Google (and I worked there as a contractor), so I don't intend to be negative, but:

I am happy to be a paying customer of Google; for example: Play Music, Youtube Red, Google Drive, etc.

I less happy with their making money from me indirectly via selling and using data associated with me. I would like to pay a yearly fee for search and gmail, in a privacy mode. I am surprised that this is not something that they do as an option.

I think that Microsoft has hit a sweet spot with a yearly fee for Office 365 (I don't think that Microsoft scans OneDrive files, etc. and makes money from that) and I would like Google to copy that business model.

<comment><USER13> > yearly fee for Office 365.

You can. You can subscribe to Google Apps. They don't advertise at you and scan your stuff only for the purpose of providing you search and related services. [https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en](https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en)

Apps for Work is $60/user; Apps Unlimited is $120/user. That compares quite favorably with Office 365, especially considering the Unlimited includes unlimited Drive.

<comment><USER12> Thank you for that! Apps terms of service do seem to satisfy my concerns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In the previous Gmail litigation a couple of years ago Google Apps for Education users were one of the classes.

In that case Koh dismissed the 1967 California Invasion of Privacy Act eavesdropping claims because users' lawyers could not show the emails were _confidential_ (see Section 632). However she didn't dismiss the wiretapping/interception claims (see Section 631).

Another element required for an eavesdropping claim is lack of _consent_.

How are you going to show that the granting of consent was in question for each and every user and was thus a "common question"? Maybe some users read the terms and other did not. Maybe some users paid attention to news reports about email scanning and others did not. See Koh's Opinion.

For those interested search "paulhastings.com" "in re google". There is a copy of the unreported Opinion, with some interesting redactions on the devices Google uses to scan email. Content Onebox, Medley Server, Changeling, CAT2 Mixer, ICEbox Server, etc.

What if users started putting "CONFIDENTIAL", as between sender and recipient, at the the top of all their emails? From there one could argue confidentiality implies lack of consent to eavesdropping.

Apparently Google argued users understand that interceptions are part of how all email, not just Gmail, is transmitted. Intermediary SMTP servers might be "interception" but it seems like a reasonable judge could conclude if a message intercepted says "CONFIDENTIAL" then there's no permission to read it, whether the reading is done by a human or a machine programmed by a human.

</comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps Judge Koh is too familiar with the rarefied world of 1% techies to understand how burdensome filing fees are for college students.

</comment><comment><USER16> In the age of 100% computer assisted lawyers and courts, why can't 710 lawsuits be filed?

Class actions just make lawyers wealthy.

710 lawsuits makes much more of a statement, no?

<comment><USER17> Apparently it costs $28400 in filling fees, who is going to upfront that?

<comment><USER18> That's $284000 in filing fees.

<comment><USER17> Ouch, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Knowing Google, they probably did. Don't be evil my ass.</comment>


"Unquestionable greed": The startup CEO who stole $765k from his friends - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/unquestionable-greed-the-startup-ceo-who-stole-765k-from-his-friends/2/

<comment><USER2> "A sausage lunch spot in downtown San Francisco called Showdogs apparently determined its busiest hour (between 12pm and 1pm) by using Motionloft sensors."

They really needed Motionloft sensors to tell them that the busiest time for a downtown lunch spot would be Noon???

<comment><USER3> American Science</comment></comment>


Australian census website cracks after 'malicious' attack by hackers - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/census-website-cracks-after-malicious-attack-by-hackers-63734 <comment><USER3> The stated capacity of 10^6 submissions per hour seems utterly ludicrous - <USER2> sums shown in this article imply that the suppliers are incompetent. It will be interesting to see how the fallout from this is played.

<comment><USER4> Considering it was designed and hosted by IBM who are trying to recreate themselves as a primarily cloud PaaS company (see IBM BlueMix), I'd say it was a matter of IBM's engineers poorly configuring the scalability of the deployment, which I think also reflects poorly on their ability to service the cloud hosting market.

ABS shouldn't have outsourced the entire project to IBM, they could have just developed the application in-house and deployed it to an autoscaling CE instance group on Google Cloud, they probably would have saved $7-8 million paid to IBM while also avoiding this catastrophic failure.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the cloud and/or auto-scaling would help here. Most likely this is due to poor architecture choices.

Also, from what I can see, gov't departments normally outsource for projects and only ever retain staff for maintenance activities (i.e. keep the lights running). It's probably due to the way budgeting is done.</comment></comment></comment>


13-Year-Old Password Security Bug Fixed [crypt_blowfish, ergo PHP et al.] - <AUTHOR> http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/06/20/2257229/13-Year-Old-Password-Security-Bug-Fixed

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not claiming expertise -- just a heads up. I gather this resource may already be avoided by some/many.</comment>


HN referenced in official Google Tablet UI mocks - <AUTHOR> http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/user-experience/form-factors/tablet

<comment><AUTHOR> In the last static UI mock image, the designer (Glen Murphy) leaves a little tip of hat to Hacker News.</comment>


Apple dominating Android with 84 percent of mobile gaming revenue - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/06/mobile-gaming-revenue-apple/

<comment><USER3> _According to Newzoo, in-app purchases are where developers are really seeing the money. Ninety-one percent of mobile gaming revenue comes from money spent inside the game on both Android and iOS._

Freemium is king. Unfortunately this model usually incentivizes the wrong kind of game design. The top ten tends to be dominated by Skinner boxes selling virtual tchotchkes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Other headline: Playing games on Android is cheaper.

<comment><USER5> This is an excellent point. I hate this Forbsian POV here of how making the most money is the most important thing ever. I had an iphone for a while and felt forced into buying 99 cent apps for basic usage. On android, a lot of this stuff is free. Maybe android appeals to people who don't feel blowing $100 on apps or in game items is acceptable. Regardless, I don't see android or its app selection hurting because of it.

Not to mention, android appeals to power users who probably have a xbox or gaming PC anyway. If I'm going to be stuck in a skinner box for hours, I'd prefer the one with the big screen and the slick graphics.

<comment><USER6> It depends on which side you are on :) You might love to buy android phone but will you develop for it knowing it wont bring as much money...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What about in-app ads? Lots of Android games have built-in ads that bring revenue for the developer without the need for the user to purchase anything. I remember that the original Angry Birds used to be free on the Android Market but displayed ads, while the iOS App Store version cost a dollar.

<comment><USER8> > _What about in-app ads? Lots of Android games have built-in ads that bring > revenue for the developer without the need for the user to purchase > anything. I remember that the original Angry Birds used to be free on the > Android Market but displayed ads, while the iOS App Store version cost a > dollar._

Apps don't make anything near what an actual purchase does. Plus, nobody looks at ads when he plays a game...

<comment><USER9> At our local Android developer's meet-up, we had a local game developer who has released several paid and ad-supported games. There are two relevant observations he made:

1\. He often made more money from the ad-supported free versions of his games rather than the paid versions.

2\. The Play Store is not the only place to download/pay for Android games. According to him, there are hundreds of alternative markets (such as Amazon's), some of which are much more prevalent outside the U.S.

<comment><USER8> _> 1\. He often made more money from the ad-supported free versions of his games rather than the paid versions._

Besides being just one account, that might as well be because, well, his paid versions didn't sell that well at all?

<comment><USER10> My experience is roughly the same. We aren't making hugely popular apps, but in all cases, the ad-supported version generates more revenue than the pay versions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think at this point Apple is holding carriers hostage in most parts of the world, and they are demanding they buy a certain amount of iPhones from them (at the full retail price) before the launch, otherwise they don't give them the iPhone.

So at least for a few years, Apple could just keep increasing profits, by demanding the carriers buy 30% (or whatever) more units each time, and ride that business model for a long time, until the iPhone is not a popular item anymore.

If the other manufacturers want to make some decent profit, besides making great products, obviously, they also need to be more forceful towards carriers, and also demand full retail price for their phones, rather than a heavily discounted price for "volume" or whatever reasoning carriers have when dealing with the other manufacturers. Those $600-$700 Android smartphones you see in store at carriers, they pay only $400-$450 for them. Manufacturers need to stop this practice if they want higher profits.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is some truth in this, as based on my own experience, there are more quality games in iTunes then there are in Google Play ... or maybe the Play store simply sucks for discoverability of interesting games. And when I did find some quality games, some of them performed poorly on my Galaxy S1, probably because of the slightly outdated hardware.

On the other hand counting the total revenue of Android games is very difficult, because some games make money from ads and some publishers are going selling through alternative app stores or are self-publishing.

For instance I'm willing to bet that The Humble Bundle packs that were self- published were not added to this count ... <http://www.humblebundle.com/> ... although the developers did make quite the revenue.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a simple reason why: Google Play's app selection sucks.

Look at "top free apps". It's not filled with useful, smart and new applications by a wide variety of developers. Instead you see Facebook, Google's services, and Flash Player. Then look at "top new free apps". You see very poor quality games from organisations like "Free games Play - <USER2> Team".

Now look at iTunes's iOS App Store. There is far more quality and variety in the "Top Free Apps" section. And games you've actually heard of.

Edit: I'm not saying this to bash Android, I love the platform. But I am irritated by its app selection. It's probably why I have very few apps on my Android phone, but had far more on my iPod touch when I had it.

<comment><USER14> Dunno why you are looking for free apps when discussing profits. In Top Paid for Android, I see Angry Birds Space, Draw Something, Cut the Rope, Where's My Water, and Osmos HD in the top ten alone. All high quality. Of course, the real intriguing list is top grossing, which is dominated by Zygna style apps which are making out like casinos by running a kind of legalized gambling on both platforms. Basically using the nucleus accumbens like an ATM.

<comment><USER13> Ah, good point. I'm not sure why I'm looking at free apps.

But you're right, it's very interesting to look at top grossing. There are some non-Zynga-style apps there which just have huge sales volume. At least, I assume that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At my old job, I worked with 12 people; 10 had Androids and 2 had iPhones. Both of us iPhone users had purchased at least 2 apps and only 1 of the Android users purchased 1 app.

If you're trying to generate revenue, going Android usually isn't the way to to do it. This is just my non-scientific random sampling though.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, that's a pretty small sample size :) I'll gladly pay up for a good game on my Android, and do so every month when I get bored of whatever I have been playing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I get the feeling that lots of people with android phones buy them because they need them to do serious work and don't buy a lot of games. 99% of people I know with iPhones don't do anything serious with them and purchased them purely for the entertainment value.

<comment><USER18> The wonderfully ironic thing about this is that 10 years ago we would have said exactly the same thing about Mac v PC.

<comment><USER17> We still do.

The PC users are the silent majority now as they were 10 years ago.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_OS_share_pie_cha...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_OS_share_pie_chart.png)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I build this without knowledge of code - <AUTHOR> https://luego.app <comment><AUTHOR> I've built an app that helps collect testimonials. It's completely built on Bubble.io without knowledge of code.</comment>


Google Set to Unveil Wireless Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-set-to-unveil-wireless-service-1429660082 <comment><AUTHOR> If the content is behind a paywall:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/33f1js/google_set_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/33f1js/google_set_to_unveil_wireless_service_as_early_as/cqk96if)</comment>


Show HN: Hello – Houseparty for web - <AUTHOR> https://sayhello.li <comment><USER2> What does it do? I block the camera and mic.

<comment><AUTHOR> then it wont work at all.. its a simple video conference app</comment></comment>


The Seven Signs You're in a Cult  - <AUTHOR> http://theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/06/the-seven-signs-youre-in-a-cult/361400/

<comment><USER2> >1\. Opposing critical thinking

>6\. Crossing Biblical boundaries of behavior (versus sexual purity and personal ownership)

>7\. Separation from the Church

These have nothing to do with cults what so ever.

<comment><USER3> True. But this article is apparently written from a Christian point of view, referring to other Christian groups. So it takes for granted that the brand of Christianity one practices is the norm from which evil, by definition, deviates.</comment></comment>


Revolutionary Scuba Mask Creates Breathable Oxygen Underwater On Its Own - <AUTHOR> http://www.minds.com/blog/view/269672871016534016/revolutionary-scuba-mask-creates-breathable-oxygen-underwater-on-its-own

<comment><USER2> There is a detailed analysis of the feasibility of such systems in general on the following web page:

[http://www.nigelhewitt.co.uk/diving/rant/#gills](http://www.nigelhewitt.co.uk/diving/rant/#gills)

Quote (following an explanation of the quantity of oxygen in solution in sea water at depth, vs. quantities required to breath, yielding a requirement of 2000L/minute of water to be processed):

"This raises three problems in my mind.

"Firstly is size. If the magic box is a reasonable size, say a volume of working water is the size of my scuba tank it will have 12L of water to work on at any one moment. So 2000L/minute means that the water must be in, processed and out in 12*60/2000 seconds. That's just over one third of a second to complete the whole process.

"Secondly there is the fact that 2000L/minute worries me when I consider that my old 20HP outboard had an 20cm diameter prop on it. To move 2000L/minute it would have to knock the water through at 2000/31.4=63m/s, otherwise 142mph in old numbers. So my second problem is that this is a huge amount of thrust for a diver who does not wish to zoom about like a torpedo and the third problem is that that sort of power isn't going to come from ordinary batteries."

Personally, I read the article as a typical design student 'concept' piece; certainly, if I were a battery manufacturer that had a product 30x more energy dense than the competition, which charged 1000x faster, I would not be looking at the scuba market to make my billions.

<comment><USER3> > So my second problem is that this is a huge amount of thrust for a diver who > does not wish to zoom about like a torpedo...

Wait, who said I don't want to zoom about like a torpedo?

I'm kidding, of course. Great link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yet another Yanko Design "concept" mistaken for a real project in the media. I wouldn't mind it once in a while, except that this studio seems to make a habit out of being subtly misleading in order to garner free press, and it has been going on for years.

I hate to be so negative, but this actually works...if you ever see a project that makes you say "Gee, it looks like an industrial designer's concept might have gotten mistaken for a real product here", you should then ask yourself, "Is Yanko Design somehow associated with this piece?" 9 out of 10 times the answer will be yes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks to be a art/design project?

[http://www.behance.net/gallery/TRTON/13434535](http://www.behance.net/gallery/TRTON/13434535)

"The micro battery is a next-generation technology with a size 30 times smaller than current battery that can quickly charge 1,000 times faster." \- seems BS

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone else remember this device from Star Wars - The Phantom Menace when Obi Wan Kenobi and Qui Gon Jinn swim down to Jar Jar's people? lol.

If this were real and it isn't - it sounds like a rebreather ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather)) only several orders of magnitude smaller and without the extra tank full of pure O2.

Fun to think about though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it a real thing or just an idea? What's all this about a microcompressor and microbattery? Even the source links are very short on details of something so 'revoultionary'.

<comment><USER8> It's just a concept, made by a designer called Jeabyun Yeon.

It's easy to dream up wonderful applications of various (non-existing?) technologies. The hard part is actually making them work in the real world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Revolutionary Scuba Mask Creates Breathable Oxygen Underwater On Its own

( [http://ow.ly/syOmy](http://ow.ly/syOmy) )

</comment><comment><USER10> Wasn't this an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man? As I recall, it was a fake product even there.</comment>


Success factors in Kaggle competitions: a visual analysis - <AUTHOR> https://www.kaggle.com/timakova/kaggle-competitions-dashboard <comment><USER2> So bigger teams have a higher chance of success? Who would have thought of that!?</comment>


Dutch schoolteacher who saved hundreds of children during Holocaust, dies at 107 - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/johan-van-hulst-dutch-schoolteacher-who-saved-hundreds-of-jewish-children-during-holocaust-dies-at-107/2018/03/28/cdbd44c2-31ca-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html <comment><USER2> Back then, they used Hollerith machines and the like to track their victims. You have to wonder what such an operation would be like these days.

[http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/infotech.html](http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/infotech.html)

<comment><USER3> Just ask ICE</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which platform to create multimedia quiz - <AUTHOR>

Hi, i'm new to elearning. I want to create a platform for quiz with audio (like an English listenning exam TOEFL, TOEIC,...) on the web. I've heard about HTML 5 audio, could i use it to implement for all browsers ?
Thank you very much. <comment><USER2> Not all browsers support html5 audio, but there should be a shim or wrapper with a fallback to flash out there on the internet,</comment>


Gene-Editing May Revolutionize Treatments for Cancer and Infectious Diseases - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/health/gene-editing-cancer.html <comment><USER2> Yes, and we need more hackers in bioinformatics and RSEs or Research Software Engineers.

If you are a data scientist or software engineer and are looking for a new field that really needs your help check out computational biology and/or bioinformatics.</comment>


Your Password - Their Business? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thewhatnoise.com/2012/04/your-password-their-business.html <comment><USER2> I mentioned on twitter, that the reason for the big outcry over this, is in part because the employers did it so badly..

ie.. if they built a facebook app that accepted uploaded CV's, they could have sneakily taken this data (like so many other facebook apps) :></comment>


Eye Sim – The eyesight simulator - <AUTHOR> http://www.eye-sim.com/

<comment><USER2> I had laser surgery nearly a decade ago. I spent top dollar and it's been by- far the best investment I've ever made. There is one specific thing I do miss, though, which was the ability to take my glasses off and disconnect into an abstract blur. It's not something I could have done while driving or while wandering along NYC sidewalks, but while at rest, it was an occasional relief.

I don't remember my prescription anymore, because having perfect vision is so natural that I almost immediately forgot what it was like to require corrective lenses. The blurriness of the demo is definitely familiar, but the most interesting bits aren't there; To fully immerse myself into a world made immediately foreign and more interesting due to incredibly poor eyesight, relying heavily on my other senses to figure out the world around me. It was meditative in ways that merely closing my eyes is not. Like stepping into a living abstract painting and feeling my way around.

I wouldn't give up my corrected vision, but there was certainly a personal benefit to it at the very few moments when I wasn't concerning myself with the inherent downsides.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tried it with my own prescription (-3.75 and -3.25 dioptre) and I'd say the result is very exaggerated. Especially considering my actual eyesight is worse than my prescription.

How does it create a single image from two different eyes, anyway?

</comment><comment><USER4> Note that walking around without glasses isn't as bad for most people as these images suggest. Depth perception still works fine at relatively high dioptre numbers, so you can usually avoid walking into stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> Testing against my wife (I don't wear glasses), and according to her the results are extremely exaggerated. If her eyesight were as bad as the simulator suggests, she wouldn't be able to live a normal life without glasses (which she is perfectly capable.)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am nearsighted and it's not quite accurate. The optics is probably correct, however brain attempts to sharpen the image, so the perceived result is not just blurred. Especially the light sources - I see somewhat fuzzy spiky balls instead of evenly shaded blotches.

<comment><USER7> >Especially the light sources - I see somewhat fuzzy spiky balls instead of evenly shaded blotches.

Are you talking about this effect: [http://www.stfmc.de/misc/diffcontrarefl/diffreflf23p0fby8p0t...](http://www.stfmc.de/misc/diffcontrarefl/diffreflf23p0fby8p0t1p6b1i400.jpg) That effect is purely optical and as far as I know everyone experiences that in the right light conditions. Evidently even cameras are not exempt.

But you're right, my eyesight is also much better than that simulator would make people believe, and the brain is certainly a part of that.

<comment><USER6> I am not sure. It may contribute to it, but I still think the effect I see is something different. Most apparent it is when I am looking into a LED light with my bare eyes, compared to the unfocused camera. It really looks like the brain would amplify the small differences between neigbouring "pixels" in attempt to focus the image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> alok-g I built this about a year back (as a desktop app) as a part of a larger project. Never thought about releasing this by itself. Seeking advice from HN: How would this make money?

</comment><comment><USER8> My friends like reading about every meal I eat on twitter! They'll LOVE the opportunity to see blurry things just like the blurry things I can see if I take my glasses off!</comment>


Plans to Retire Meldium - <AUTHOR> http://blog.meldium.com/home/2017/4/12/plans-to-retire-meldium <comment><USER2> Hey, before everyone freaks out, it's Meldium, and not Medium that is being retired.</comment>


Smiles Predict Marriage Success - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090414/sc_livescience/smilespredictmarriagesuccess

<comment><USER2> Hypothesis: people who smile in yearbook photos are not really happy, just concerned with appearances, and thus likely to stay in a joyless marriage for appearance's sake.

I'm only half joking :)

<comment><USER3> My wife didn't smile in hers because she had just recently chipped a tooth and had to have her braces put back in. Not sure what that proves.

<comment><USER4> It proves that they didn't discover a rule, but merely a trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised the general response here is so negative. Besides the fact that it's obvious, research does in fact confirm that happier people smile more. And the average high school student is probably not focused on being cynical and grumpy whilst having his/her picture taken (though perhaps cultural norms around pictures have changed over the past decades).

Anyways, couple the happiness-smiling connection with a few other facts about human psychology, and this makes a lot of sense. (1) Emotional states in humans are contagious. We naturally tend to empathize with one and other, laugh together, and cry together. (2) We also naturally tend to mimic physical gestures made by people we are interacting with, often subconsciously. (3) Facial expressions actually influence our emotional state. Being happy makes us smile, but also _smiling actually makes us happier._

It doesn't seem much of a leap from there that happiness would correlate inversely with divorce. In my take, this article is just reaffirming that naturally happy people are less likely to divorce.

Here's another interesting article about the contagiousness of happiness: [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9784878...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97848789)

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're happy enough to have a genuine smile while attending an American highschool, then putting up with someone's shit for 50 year's is NOTHING :)

<comment><USER7> Here is pg's take on how to deal with high school:

<http://paulgraham.com/hs.html>

<comment><USER8> I just read that--it's one of the best I've read by pg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They define marriage success as not divorcing. That works only if you define marriage as a formal pact devoid of any emotional substance.

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems really susceptible to noise. It makes perfect sense that people who smile a lot tend to have a happier disposition, which makes them easier to get along with, which makes them more likely to stay married. However, plenty of people are unhappy in school for reasons that have nothing to do with having a genetically cheery personality. It could be, oh, the getting beat up, and being forced to do mindless work, and listening to teachers who are dumber than you, and waking up at godawful hours.

People often change _a lot_ when they go off to college and start working. I was just having dinner with a coworker who's one of the most talkative people I know. Apparently, she _never_ talked for the first 18 years of her life, and only rarely for the next 4. Happiness may have a strong genetic component, but that's not saying that the environment doesn't matter _at all_.

</comment><comment><USER11> So... the top 10 percent had 0% divorce rate, the bottom 10 percent had 25% divorce rate.

Isn't overall the divorce rate is 50%? Something fishy is happening here.

<comment><USER7> _Isn't overall the divorce rate is 50%?_

No, that is a statistical fallacy.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html?pagewan...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html?pagewanted=print&position=)

<comment><USER12> _"About half is still a very sensible statement"_ </quote> from the article you cited

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Who paid for this?

"We need some money to fund a research project to look at people's amount of 'smiley-ness' in their old yearbook photos and see if it corresponds to whether they get divorced later in life."

<comment><USER7> You don't think there is huge social significance in preventing divorce? Some very smart young people I know can't attend great colleges that have admitted them, because their parents are divorced and not in agreement about paying their college expenses. Loss of human talent hurts all of us.

<comment><USER2> I think there's incredible value in preventing divorce. I also think this study is bullshit.

I know this is a bit of a strawman, but what have we really learned here? That if you tell your kids to smile in their yearbook photo, they'll have a happy marriage? Sorry, I just don't see any value in this correlation at all...seems like it's almost as likely to be random as meaningful.

Edit: Instead of just downvoting me, could someone explain what I'm missing?

<comment><USER7> I'll upvote you as much as I can, and explain why I think the study is worth doing. Just like Alexander Fleming when he first saw a zone in a culture dish where bacteria wouldn't grow,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming#Accidental_di...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming#Accidental_discovery)

a scientist who notices an interesting correlation has some new issue to investigate. The next issue to investigate is why some young people smile for their yearbook photos and some do not. Yet another issue to investigate is whether that characteristic is malleable in each individual. And of course all the causation issues need to be sorted out--do people stay with spouses who smile a lot, even if the spouses are louts, while good spouses who are glum get dumped? There is a lot to investigate here, but the investigation could reduce an important problem. At the very least, a marriage counselor prioritizing which client to devote the most vigorous interventions to might start asking clients to bring in their high school yearbooks and talk about how they felt about having their pictures taken, to get them talking about other issues.

But, yes, I agree that one of the first things to be done here is to attempt to replicate the finding.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

Maybe it is just coincidence in this one study, and the correlation is spurious. But it would be a reasonable idea to check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Smiles _Correlate With_ Marriage Success

<comment><USER14> Yes, it's entirely possible that the divorce flowed backward through time and wiped the smiles off the future divorcees faces while they were posing for yearbook photos.

Thank you for the knee-jerk causation/correlation comment.

<comment><USER15> I think the person who complained about the correlation/causation comment was right, whether it was knee-jerk or not. You don't need time travel to see what the problem could be.

Say a typical person may or may not be the smiley type, and say that means nothing at all about their chance of marital bliss. But say oh, I don't know, all migraine sufferers frown, because they are in pain. And say that being a migraine sufferer puts a terrible strain on your marriage (look, it's just an example) and so you are more likely to divorce. Now if you look for the divorce rate of people who frown, it will be much higher than that of people who smile. But that has no predictive value for an individual who frowns, because (in this hypothetical example) it's not the frown that is the issue - it is whether they get migrains. If there is no predictive value, there is no real science.

The other fundamental problem with presenting research in this way is that it is very easy to pick two percentile ranges and find a difference even in random data. The question that one should ask is - was there a _dose response_. In other words, if you plotted divorce rate along this so called "smile strength" axis, would there be a linear correlation (the weaker the smile the higher the divorce rate)? Or is your conclusion based on the outliers?

I can't tell from the OP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I absolutely hate smiling for photos. It feels fake. I don't really like having my picture taken, to be completely honest, even though I'm not bad looking.

I really hope this study is as meaningless as I suspect it to be.

<comment><USER17> I feel the same way you do about photos, but I fear that the study isn't quite as meaningless as you suspect. It's seems quite plausible that unwillingness to conform to social norms by faking a smile correlates to (lack of) success in marriage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In general I agree with what has been said. But, there are also cultural issues involved here. Some cultures smile more some less. Canadians for example smile a bit less than Americans, but I believe have less divorces. Also some horribly stupid smiles have to be filtered out. Some other thoughts: Recall some crazy sadistic couples, who mutilated people, killed for no reason etc. - it looks like the have pretty strong marriages,but I doubt they smile a lot.

</comment><comment><USER19> sounds like a load of bull.</comment>


Implementation of Linear Regression from Scratch (With Mathematical Explanation) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sarvasvkulpati/LinearRegression <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone!

I created an implementation of Linear Regression without any libraries to understand it better myself and teach some people at my High School.

This is my first proper effort at creating a public repo with a good README so hope you guys like it! (Please do consider contributing if you see something you could improve, I'd really appreciate input from you guys)</comment>


Hadoop for the Lone Analyst, Why and How - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tech.stylefeeder.com/2010/01/14/hadoop-for-the-lone-analyst/

<comment><USER2> If you get the VM, it has all the tools already installed. Best to try it out on your own machine(s) first before paying the big bucks to Amazon. For the record, its not really EC2 that costs a ton, its the storage that nips you in the butt.

<http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop-training-virtual-machine></comment>


Edward Tufte's "Slopegraphs" - <AUTHOR> http://charliepark.org/slopegraphs/ <comment><USER2> Long lost in that they're not quite as useful, not as simple to discern info, and don't function in the same ultra-compact way the sparklines work.

But Charlie, damn fine post on the subject, seriously -I enjoyed the formatting and style as much as the content.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand the comparison. It seems like slope graphs and sparklines serve very different purposes. Both of the Tufte graphs in the piece (the "receipts of government" graph and the cancer survival rates graph) would not have conveyed _nearly_ as much information if they were sparklines. The cancer graph is particular is magnificent.

The first set of bullets following the taxes graph clearly outlines what this type of graph excels at. I don't think those reasons overlap very neatly with sparklines; which are better at showing trends in time series data in a very small space. To me the key point about these slope graphs is that they show the relative rates between subjects very clearly. Sparklines do not do that as well, indeed they are often pretty compressed along the y-axis.

<comment><USER4> I don't think the parent poster was trying to say that someone should use a sparkline instead of a slopechart. I believe they were saying that they weren't impressed with slopcharts to the same degree as they were impressed by sparklines. If that is their sentiment, I agree with it fully. I found most of the examples non-intuitive. I had to really study it to try to understand what the chart was showing. That said, before I would say yea/nay, I'd like to try them with a dataset that I understand really well to see what they look like.

<comment><USER3> I thought the two examples that were actually created by Tufte were great, they made perfect sense and expressed the data well, while the other examples were kind of a mess. Partly this is because they weren't clear analogues to what Tufte made, trying to correlate two different pieces of data instead of showing how one piece of data changed over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you don't like the jaggies in your HTML Canvas pictures, you can make the canvas size be twice as big and use CSS to set its size on the screen back to what you want.

Then you get nicely antialiased graphics.

Don't go crazy on the expansion though or iPhone users will hate you.

You should also be careful to drop your endpoints of horizontal and vertical lines on the xxxx.5 boundaries (in screen space) to keep nice sharp lines, otherwise you get a two pixel wide smear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Thanks for that tip. It hadn't occurred to me that that was possible, but, yeah, that makes sense.

I might pick my Canvas experiments back up, then, as R and the other packages are outside the scope of my day-to-day work, but I could see a JS implementation being useful. Thanks again.

<comment><USER6> I recommend you try playing with Protovis. Pretty nice for use cases like this.

<comment><USER7> Or D3, the child of protovis and SVG.

<comment><USER8> To be pedantic, Protovis did also use SVG; it just had a layer of abstraction that somewhat obscured this, whereas D3's lower-level syntax makes it _feel_ like you're manipulating SVG directly (making it a bit more intuitive to learn if you're already familiar with SVG).

I'll +1 the recommendation though. D3 is (unsurprisingly, coming from Mike Bostock: <http://bost.ocks.org/mike/>) brilliant.

<http://mbostock.github.com/d3/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The cancer survival rates graph is magnificent. Super easy to understand, very information dense, and shows some very interesting trends. I never really thought about how different the slope of some of those diseases could be. That some cancers give you just about the same chance of being dead in five years as 20, and other drastically different odds.

<comment><USER9> I agree, although it would be nice to compare a version where the baseline risk of death is partialled out. It would be really nice to see when the line for a particular cancer flattened out, indicating a person's prospective risk after n years was no greater than baseline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought the most enlightening part of this article wasn't about the slopegraph itself, but on visualization in general. To me, this was a very effective message about the care necessary to avoid imposing an interpretation on the data.

 _By selecting the two scales used, the designer of the graph -- whether intentionally or not -- is introducing meaning where there might not actually be any._

 _For example, should the right-side data points have been spread out so that the highest and lowest points were as high and low as the Switzerland and Mexico labels (the highest and lowest figures, apart from the US) on the left? Should the scale been adjusted so that the Switzerland and/or Mexico lines ran horizontally? Each of those options would have affected the layout of the chart. I'm not saying that Uberti should have done that -- just that a designer needs to tread very carefully when using two different scales on the same axis._

</comment><comment><USER11> Not in a web device/timeframe combination to give this a proper look, but definitely like what I briefly had a chance to read. Already saved to revisit later.

For anyone else that enjoyed this and is not aware of Parallel Sets: <http://eagereyes.org/parallel-sets>

Personally, I've found few good real-world use cases for PSets. But I've found it to be helpful for experimenting, even though I rarely use it for any end- product charts.

[edit: One last thing before I'm out of range. I'm sure most folks interested in this are familiar, but if not... BumpCharts: [http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/2005/07/in_praise_...](http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/2005/07/in_praise_of_th.html) ]

</comment><comment><USER12> One minor point in an otherwise excellent post:

      > Another difference I should note: This type of forced-rank chart
      > doesn't have any obvious allowance for ties. [...] In Fry's case,
      > he uses the team with the lower salary as the "winner" of the tie.
      > But this isn't obvious to the reader.

I wonder if this isn't random. It appears to be the case for the 91-71, 90-72, and the 69-93 ties. In the 80-81 and 80-82 ties the higher salary team is on top.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch. In the Visualizing Data book, Fry notes that he's using the lower- salaried team as the tiebreaker, and I took that as fact and didn't check the data (sigh; rookie mistake). I'll point that out in the article when I update it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great article---I once used the "slopegraph" in a paper to show how the types of gov't contracts (e.g., fixed-price versus cost-plus) is different at each step of the litigation process:

[https://skitch.com/johnjosephhorton/fjmuc/ssrn- id1094622.pdf...](https://skitch.com/johnjosephhorton/fjmuc/ssrn- id1094622.pdf-page-23-of-32)

</comment><comment><USER14> One of the most enjoyable posts I've read in a long time. Great topic, analysis and beautiful site. Thank you Charlie.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'm so glad you enjoyed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A nice interactive feature would be: for the line graph that a slope graph is a "zoom" of (according to charlie's explanation), be able to slide or drag over the line graph and have the slope graph for the current focused period appear, either over or next to the line graph depending on available space.

</comment><comment><USER16> _Back in 2004, Edward Tufte defined and developed the concept of a "sparkline". Odds are good that — if you're reading this — you're familiar with them and how popular they've become._

Really? I've definitely read about sparklines, but I've never seen one used naturally, as it were.

<comment><USER17> Me neither, does anyone have evidence of how popular they've become?

<comment><USER18> They're used extensively in Google Analytics and WebTrends

<http://www.semiologic.com/software/google-analytics/>

(Google analytics product pages seem to be down for me)

<http://www.webtrends.com/Products/Analytics/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting post. I think that two-column comparison tables are similar to the slopegraph and (if designed well) can convey the information almost as well, particularly if they have different coloured rise and fall arrows (with number of places). The bonus is that its a simple formatting since nothing breaks its line it can be done with text and inline symbols, instead of as an image chart. The loss is that the connection between elements is not as strongly emphasized, but its fairly easy to tell anyway.

I don't have examples off-hand, so I hoped I've explained what I mean well enough.

</comment><comment><USER20> The post says "There's absolutely zero non-data ink."

The names of the countries are printed twice. As far as data is concerned, one set contains none. The second printing may help readability, but readability isn't data.

You can tell one set isn't necessary because the cancer graph at the bottom leaves them out of the middle columns.

The bullet point at the bottom "Include both the names of the items and their values on both the left-hand and right-hand axes" could add "If your goal is zero non-data ink or your space is tight, you can leave out one set of names."

<comment><USER21> Alternatively, you could keep the double printing of the names and leave out the lines connecting them, they too are just for readability. Of course, you can't remove both the lines and the second printing of names.

<comment><USER22> Well, if you remove the lines, you give up any information besides start-end rankings, in which case you might as well just have 2 columns of names next to each other. eg. look at Tufte's cancer survival rate graph, where it's not just a straight line from start-end but multiple segments, each end-point being a fresh dataset, datasets staggered over time.

<comment><USER21> I meant erase the lines but keep the placement of the text in the columns, not just the order of the labels, but the actual positions of them, so that you could connect them with lines again if you were so inclined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What is that bold font called? I keep seeing it everywhere lately.

<comment><USER24> League Gothic: <http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/fonts/7-league-gothic></comment></comment>


My Favourite Programming Quotes - <AUTHOR> http://www.ginktage.com/2011/02/my-10-favourite-programming-quotes/ Nice set, number 1 is really really true ! <comment><USER2> Since we're sharing quotes, here are ten programming quotes that I like:

* If C++ has taught me one thing, it's this: Just because the system is consistent doesn't mean it's not the work of Satan.

\-- Andrew Plotkin

* We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

\-- Ellen Ullman

* I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

\-- Bjarne Stroustrup

* F U cn rd dis U mst uz Unix.

\-- Tim Roberts

* In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.

\-- Brian Reid

* Ah programming, never before has a profession held itself in such low esteem.

\-- Stevenvotich ([http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8y348/my_progra...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8y348/my_programming_quotes_file_was_well_received_when/c0asp6j))

* Now, I have to point out that making fun of Emacs Lisp is kind of like kicking a puppy... a puppy who's been dead since 1981.

\-- Jamie Zawinski

* An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.

\-- Dan Ingalls, Design Principles Behind Smalltalk

* C will not only let you shoot yourself in the foot, it will hand you a new magazine when you run out of bullets.

\-- Charlie Stross

* Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

\-- Donald Knuth

* The Advanced Automation System suffered from that peculiar form of dissociation from reality which seems to happen only when lawyers try to tell engineers what to do.

\-- John J. Reilly (<http://www.johnreilly.info/ggov.htm>)

Yeah, I know; this list goes to eleven.

<comment><USER3> Related to your list that goes to eleven:

There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code.

\--Christopher Thompson_

A friend of mine running an XP project got empirical numbers indicating that some large fraction of the project's bugs were associated with check-ins after 4pm. So he made a rule: no check-ins after 4pm. Result: a whopping decrease in the rate of new bugs.

YMMV.

<comment><USER5> I know you said YMMV, but wouldn't it be expected that the rate of new bugs would remain close to constant while their peak occurrences shift to earlier in the afternoon? It's just moving a "deadline" back.

<comment><USER6> This may be the case, but it might also turn out that the team is no longer checking in rushed and untested code as they hurry to get out of the office and go home for the evening. Instead, the may just hold off on checking in the code until the next morning, at which point they've slept on it and possibly thought about some edge cases they should test further, etc.

<comment><USER4> This was exactly my friend's theory of what happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did someone say programming quotes? Here's my collection, many dating back to the 80's and 90's:

<http://www.jeff-barr.com/~jeff/quotes.txt>

A few of those are from my kids and from colleagues; most are from Usenet and random mailing lists.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that is a huge collection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Java: write once, debug everywhere._

 _If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution._

<comment><USER9> Write once, run away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My favorite quote from _why:

"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

</comment><comment><USER11> Lots of good quotes here: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58640/great- programming-q...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58640/great-programming- quotes)

My favorites:

      Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your
      code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

\-- Rick Osborne

      I Hate Programming.
      I Hate Programming.
      I Hate Programming.
      It works!
      I Love Programming.

\-- Anonymous poem

</comment><comment><USER12> "Make it correct, make it clear, make it concise, make it fast. In that order." Wes Dyer

"And companies should put more effort into strategies _how_ to handle occuring bugs, instead of a "it-mustn't-be-so-it-can't-be" mentality."

"Though displays have grown in size and resolution in the last few years, eyes haven't." Will Harris

Picked a few from my quote-collection stream. <http://twitter.com/pestaa>

</comment><comment><USER13> #8 is my favorite software quote of all time, but it's incomplete:

The first method is far more difficult.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are also some excellent ones here: [http://www.junauza.com/2010/12/top-50-programming-quotes- of-...](http://www.junauza.com/2010/12/top-50-programming-quotes-of-all- time.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. "

Measuring aircraft progress by weight is actually viable because it is already known what the final weight will be.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here are my favorite programming quotes that I have been collecting for some years now:

<http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/>

</comment><comment><USER17> "There are all these great programmers out there who think starting a startup requires esoteric business knowledge." - Paul Graham

</comment><comment><USER18> pitching in some longer quotes by prof. dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra:

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html)

My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

...

needless to say, refusal to exploit this power of down-to-earth mathematics amounts to intellectual and technological suicide.

...

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1051.html)

In other words, when building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but watch the tide.

...

The other day I found in the University bookstore in Eindhoven a book on how to use "Wordperfect 5.0" of more than 850 pages, in fact a dozen pages more than my 1951 edition of Georg Joos, "Theoretical Physics". It is time to unmask the computing community as a Secret Society for the Creation and Preservation of Artificial Complexity.

...

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175.html)

against "teamwork"

In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and now of the recession I observe a mounting pressure to co-operate and to promote "teamwork". For its anti- individualistic streak, such a drive is of course highly suspect; some people may not be so sensitive to it, but having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of "team spirit". Very. I have even read one text that argued that university scientists should co- operate more in order to become more competitive..... Bureaucracies are in favour of teamwork because a few groups are easier to control than a large number of rugged individuals. Granting agencies are in favour of supporting large established organizations rather than individual researchers, because the support of the latter, though much cheaper, is felt to be more risky; it also requires more thinking per dollar funding. Teamwork is also promoted because it is supposed to be more efficient, though in general this hope is not justified.

...

It is the weak departments that are more tempted to seek each other's support and to believe that there is might in numbers. But such co-operation is of course based on the theory that, when you tie two stones together, the combination will float.

...

To quote Harvey Earl of GM: "General Motors is in business for only one reason. To make money. In order to do that we make cars. But if we could make money by making garbage cans, we would make garbage cans.". Some people might argue that they even tried to make money by making garbage. But the product is secondary; to quote Harvey Earl again: "Listen, I'd put smokestacks right in the middle of the sons of bitches if I thought I could sell more cars.". These quotations are from the fifties, but things have not changed that much.

...

Academic computing science is doing fine, thank you, and unless I am totally mistaken, it will have a profound influence. I am not referring to the changes that result from computers in their capacity of tools. Okay, the equipment opens new opportunities for the entertainment industry, but who cares about that anyhow. The equipment has enabled the airline industry to make its rates so complicated and volatile that you need an expert to buy a ticket, and for this discouragement of air travel we can be grateful, but the true impact comes from the equipment in its capacity of intellectual challenge.

...

</comment><comment><USER19> more here : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512928>

</comment><comment><USER20> One of Jon Bentley's _Programming Pearls_ books has a column, "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" that is worth a glance.

</comment><comment><USER21> <http://twitter.com/perlisisms>

</comment><comment><USER22> The Monday one is especially true... I knew I should have stayed home today.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would have expected only 2 quotes, given the title.

<comment><USER24> I think it would have been better to have asked us for two quotes.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like the last one, about frozen water.</comment>


Hive: Open-source Crowdsourcing Framework - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/12/09/hive-open-source-crowdsourcing-framework/

<comment><USER2> "Hive is free and open source"

Indeed: [https://hive.apache.org/](https://hive.apache.org/)

<comment><USER3> The link is in the article - [https://github.com/nytlabs/hive](https://github.com/nytlabs/hive)

<comment><USER4> I think the OPs point was that there is already a popular open source project named Hive.

<comment><USER5> Which is quickly becoming a tedious exercise in cheap point scoring. People go for names that reflect the intent or otherwise associate with the system they are building. They also prefer existing words. Sometimes that will mean reuse of the same words. Lets accept that and move on with our lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The are so many names available, why choose this one?

</comment><comment><USER7> "hive" really? google the name first??

<comment><USER8> Sooner rather than later it will become impossible to avoid naming conflicts for open source projects (or any projects) if you want a meaningful name.</comment></comment>


Fragments of a Continent Where They Should Not Be - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/science/lost-continent-indian-ocean-mauritius.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 <comment><USER2> I wonder if there is zircon in asteroids. Specifically the large volcano being coincidental on the same spot. That makes me wonder if the presence of basaltic zircon could also be explained by the impact of a large body that punched its way down through the crust to the mantle. Essentially creating a tube which allowed magma to flow to the surface creating the volcano. The resulting dislocation of material causing it to subside below sea level.

That could account for the additional gravitational mass (especially if it was a very dense meteorite) but that then starts me thinking about ways to falsify that hypothesis. What would have to be true if the origin was an impactor vs what could rule out an impactor. The dating sort of lines up with the Permian- Triassic extinction (231MMyr)

<comment><USER3> Isotopic analysis and dating from samples taken from cores from within and without the area in question could establish extra-terrestrial origin, especially in conjunction with correlation of possible ejecta worldwide. Geological evidence of stressed material with consistent dates? Maybe ocean floor topography? I think those are what they used to pinpoint the more recent K-T event impactor. I don't know if you could use that to confirm or deny your specific scenario though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I appreciate the author who took the time and energy to write this, but I do find the conversational personification style annoying.

<comment><USER5> Three alternative articles covering the new research:

[1] [http://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-just-found- evidence-...](http://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-just-found-evidence-of- a-lost-continent-under-mauritius)

[2] [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2119963-long-lost- conti...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2119963-long-lost-continent- found-submerged-deep-under-indian-ocean/)

[3] [https://phys.org/news/2017-01-lost-continent- mauritius.html](https://phys.org/news/2017-01-lost-continent-mauritius.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Zealandia [1] is the largest continental fragment [2]. It broke off from Australia and then largely (or wholly) sank. Later uplifts from the subcontinent include the north and south islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia. 93% of the microcontinent remains submerged.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealandia_%28continent%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealandia_%28continent%29)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_fragment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_fragment)</comment>


The second quantum revolution - <AUTHOR> http://second-tech.com/wordpress/index.php/2018/04/14/the-second-quantum-revolution/ <comment> core-questions I'm continually surprised that these articles on quantum computing never mention D-Wave, who have a working 2000 qubit machine. Sure, it's not a gate model, but it's working and available today, exhibits macroscale quantum effects, and is well on its way to demonstrating quantum advantage on optimization problems.

It's always the same old, 5-qubit useless IBM machine, when production, commercially available quantum machines are actually being built right now. They have a real PR problem when articles like this never mention D-Wave.

<comment><AUTHOR> D-wave is certainly interesting, but one of the main problems is that no one really knows what's going on. It's not really clear how or if the machine actually performs any calculations beyond what is classically possible. The recent progress is much more robust in this sense, with multiple actors currently moving forward to scale up the number of qubits.

That said, quantum technology is not only about quantum computation. What is happening now is that industry is gaining very detailed control of the production process all the way down to the atomic scale. See for example this ([https://phys.org/news/2018-05-dutch-firm-asml-microchip- tech...](https://phys.org/news/2018-05-dutch-firm-asml-microchip-tech.html)) article, which mentions how chip manufacturer are about to gain precision that is finer than the atomic scale.</comment></comment>


Swedish developer discovers security hole in iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=sv&tl=en&prev=_dd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.idg.se%2F2.1085%2F1.546628%2Fsa-enkelt-hackar-han-iphone

<comment><AUTHOR> Google Translate didn't do a good job, so I cleaned up the translation a bit:

A Swedish programmers has discovered a serious security hole in the iPhone. TechWorld's news editor gets his phone hacked - and can not do anything about it.

A few days ago, TechWorld was contacted by the developer Roman Digerberg, who said he'd found serious security holes in iOS. Among other things, he asserted that it was possible to send an anonymous text message that appears on the lock screen, even when this is set to not display messages.

He also said that it was possible to manipulate the number that denotes the number of voice mail messages, or to just put a red dot in place of the indicator, which the user can not remove. When TechWorld talks to him, he tells us more:

How did you discover this? \- It was by pure chance. I wrote a program in C# for my GPS tracker, which would facilitate the programming of it. By mistake I sent the text message to my iPhone which then began to beep and display strange messages on screen. Soon, I realized that I had created a monster.

What did you do? \- I have been in contact with Apple, both via email and phone, but they seem totally uninterested in this. I've been thinking about making the source available online. People will start doing harakiri with each other's phones, but why should you care about it when not even Apple does?

He also reports that he has received offers from several companies that want to buy the software to use it for advertising, since it is next to impossible to ignore the messages that pop up on the screen.

He offers to demonstrate how it works and TechWorld's news editor gives him his phone number. Soon, things start to happen in his phone:

[image]

Apparently there were lots of people who tried to call in the last minute. However, the voicemail does not have any new messages.

[image]

But it still says that there were 250 missed calls. And it will not disappear, no matter what we do.

Roman Digerberg calls us to check that it worked. During our conversation, he sends another message:

[image]

Indeed a very good call. But maybe not so fun when ad companies get the technology, starting with mass mailings that can not be ignored or turned off.

After taking screenshots, he removes everything in seconds.

\- You can not remove it, only I can remove it, he explains.

He is also sending over examples of much nastier things he can do:

[image]

So what should we make of this? An extra important call that was missed?

Or this, which has great potential to cause heart attacks:

[image]

He explains, without going further into technical details, that it's about manipulating classes in the message structure. Other than sending messages that can not be avoided and manipulating figures for the number of messages, he says that he also managed to lock a phone altogether and that a restart was required to get it working again.

\- Some think that I should start a paid service where you can anonymously send different types of messages. You can imagine what chaos there would be if people sit and sends unwanted and unavoidable messages to each other and make changes in each other's phones. That said, I realize that this is a monster, says Roman Digerberg.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the proper translation.

Any chance you translate the message in the last picture ?

<comment><USER3>
      Voice mail

      250 new messages in voice mail

Maybe you meant this one:

      > SIM-ERROR
      > PUSH DISMISS TO ERASE TELEPHONE
      > Sincerely, Your mom.

<comment><USER2> Hey thanks a lot mate.

Sorry for the late reply though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me he is just manipulating the DCS of the SMS being sent. This is standard behavior according to the GSM SMS specs.

[http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gts/03/0338/05.00.00_60/gsm...](http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gts/03/0338/05.00.00_60/gsmts_0338v050000p.pdf)

From section 4, "SMS Data Coding Scheme" can be used to control "Voicemail Message Waiting" among other indicators and to send messages of "Class 0" which instruct the phone to shall "display the message immediately and send an acknowledgement to the SC when the message has successfully reached the MS irrespective of whether there is memory available in the SIM or ME."

Admittedly it has been over a decade since I last played with sending such messages to phones, but it did seem to me like a bug in the spec, giving too much control to anyone with access to an sms-c (or any other mean to change the DCS field). Back then all phones I tested had implemented the spec as described.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Then that would mean that not only iPhone will be affected by this. Would be nice to see the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this just SMS "Flash" messages? That's how I was told the voicemail count worked when the iPhone came out on O2 in the UK all those years ago.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Message_Service#Flash_SMS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Message_Service#Flash_SMS)

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's just Flash-messages, or it could be based on Flash-messages containing faulty data. He gets the phone tricked to show that there is 250 missing calls on both lock screen and in the home screen (does the voice mail sms use flash?). Certain types of messages also locks the whole phone so that it has to be rebooted.

<comment><USER7> As far as I know voicemail uses flash messages to indicate the number of messages.

<comment><USER8> Not in Sweden on Swedish carriers though. At least not at Telia, 3, Tele2 or telenor. (That's pretty much all of the large ones that owns parts of the cellular network)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If Apple does not care about this vulnerability, sell it to the black hat community, let them spam with it. 500 visits a day to the Genius Bar per store will get this issue fixed in a hurry.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It appears he is sending a specially formatted SMS message that the iPhone doesn't handle correctly.

<comment><USER10> I blame the baseband processor.

That thing is evil!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why risk legal trouble? Just sell it to black hat organizations and make tons of money with zero repercussions from outdated laws.

In this case I'm not sure those hacking laws apply, but who knows with these legislators. Anyone familiar with Swedish law in this area?

<comment><USER12> 1) I don't think you're right about that and 2) some people would find selling exploits to criminals to be amoral even if it were legal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> OT but I love how his name is translated. Novel The Black Mountains.

<comment><USER5> Google Translate seems to think Roman Digerberg translates to: "Digestion novel Berg"

<comment><USER14> GT actually generates both these translations in different places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The important thing that is missing is if this is an iPhone only issue.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sure I agree on the severity, but of course Apple is being dumb by simply not communicating with the guy about it. Jeez.

<comment><USER15> He says he has talked with Apple via both email and phone.

<comment><USER17> It isn't really an issue they can fix. Voicemail and missed call notifications come in from carriers over specially formatted messages. You'd need to develop a new out of band messaging protocol that is as reliable as SMS delivery and get all the 30+ carriers Apple works with globally to roll it out before they could turn off the old stuff.

<comment><USER18> Why does it have to be out of band? Couldn't they just append a signature or something?</comment></comment></comment></comment>