skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you view the mobile gaming market?
Over nearly the last decade, as both AAA and indie game developers have focused more and more effort creating mobile games, I've seen a lot of people within my circle of friends show disdain for a variety of reasons, some of which are listed below:

- Manipulative/annoying money-making strategies, i.e. lootboxes, gacha systems, stanima systems, ads, etc.
- Perceived "wasted effort" making mobile games based on IPs that haven't had a non-mobile game in quite some time (Diablo Immortal and Commander Keen, for example)
- The overall low quality of a majority of apps found in the mobile market, with supposedly little action from the platform maintainers to moderate content properly.

Yet the mobile market has been a financial success for a number companies. Mobile games that are free-to-play seem to have the greatest succes, accumulating tens to hundreds of thousands of downloads regardless of genre or whether they fall within any of the previously listed categories.

So I'd like to extend the question outside my own little circle to the various hackers here with their own experiences: how would you describe the current state of the mobile game market? Do you think it's fine the way it is, or can it be improved upon (and how)?
If they are still creating those chips, yes, why not?
Dead-Letter Meetings
I am completely convinced the problem was the invite-only launch, as others have said; let me explain why I think this:

Facebook used its invite-only (campus-only, .edu only) natural to build status.

However, a college campus is a dense subgraph of the overall human social network. People in college are socially interacting with mostly other people in their college.

Google+ was invite only, but the invites were not clustered in the network. The subgraph induced by the invites were a fairly random slice through the overall human social network. Not actually random, there were dense subgraphs of Google employees, and of certain tech communities in there. And indeed, within these subgraphs G+ got some traction.

But most early users joined and found none of the people they wanted to communicate with could get on. I viscerally remember being in this position as a user. You sent invites to your friends, and you waited. In the meantime, you went back to Facebook.

This makes almost everyones' first use experience suck. A B2C product where everyones first use experience sucks is dead on arrival.

I remember discussing this at the time. It seemed like madness to me. (I was doing a PhD studying social graphs.)

My first tweet on twitter, from 2010, is about Google Buzz (a preceding social product):
https://twitter.com/fergal_reid/status/8974231887
"No beta to build up hype for Buzz. They realised that social apps that need a critical mass of users have to happen all at once."

When it turned out they had not in fact realized this for Google+ I was dumbfounded. I still believe this one decision likely cost Google tens of billions of dollars. Many many users would have preferred G+ to work - I'm reminded of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/918/

I would love to hear the inside story here and learn how this was actually weighed up, or that I was wrong.
Samsung sold exploding batteries, no third party repair needed.
TransferWise has a debit card and full banking facilities, I assume they are available in the United States?
I still use xhr instead of fetch
> They still have the Taxify logo on their cabs in Hungary but the app updated to Bolt (taxify).

This might be a solution: wait for a fairly large UI overhaul or reskinning, announce that reskinning with the name that you want the product to have, then slap the new branding on the reskin while maintaining the company with the old application name (this is assuming the the company is named after the product.) That way, whether people use tho old name or the new name, they're talking about the application or the company that has a single application.

You might even be able to gaslight many old customers into thinking that the product never had a name change, and that the split always existed.
There are exceptions, but an awful lot of "I read so fast and just love reading and read like three books a week" stories end up at "oh, you mean YA and fantasy and slim, low-calorie business and self-help books. OK I guess."

I read some of that stuff too, but I wouldn't dream of using my speed at reading them (or anything, in fact, but especially those) as a point of pride. I'm old enough not to be at all ashamed of them and I'd happily talk about reading them, but no way I'd brag about how many books I get through if that's most of what I've been reading. I mean I can go grab some Goosebumps books and read like 10 of those in a day if I want. They have chapters and everything so that counts, right? Then I can get some shirts and tote bags and pins and bumper stickers telling everyone what a reader I am.

There are lots of sorts of books.

And if you're using that as your basis for what fiction is then you've got some learning to do, to put it mildly.

[EDIT] just to highlight a part you quoted again, this is so, so frustrating to read:

> Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. The concept that presented by the book is the knowledge you’re gaining. This knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment.

No. There are certain kinds of fiction that, when done right, have you stopping at most every couple pages to think and absorb and reflect, if you're reading it in such a way that you'll get anything out of it. If you're reading it the way you read Terry Goodkind probably you won't, and you'll have a bad time, and maybe think it's "bad" and "boring" and so on. Just like listening to 80s top-40 pop music doesn't really prepare you to give a deep listen to Miles Davis, or Beethoven, or hell even Public Enemy, despite it all being music.
Probably because there’s low cost alternatives if all you care about is confirming your biases.
Great managers do a lot of things...but I'll talk about a couple of them that matter to me at the moment.

Great managers give clear expectations. Even if you operate autonomously, they still provide you guidance on "this is what I expect, and this is how and when you should communicate <X> to me". Great managers also make time to clear up any doubt or uncertainty about a task. You should never feel embarrassed or afraid to ask a great manager for clarification or direction, their job is to give you those "good vibes" that make those conversations easy for you to start.

Great managers never onboard you by saying "you'll figure it out", or "welcome aboard, you'll find everything in the wiki". Great managers show you the docs, answer any questions you have about using them, and initially shepherd you towards where they need you to end up. This plays into the "clear expectations" quality I mentioned above.

Great managers (sometimes subtly) pair you with great teammates. They initiate cross-training themselves, and not by telling you to shoulder your way into someone else's domain. Sometimes they do this by making the other member(say, a DBA) responsible for a task they cannot do without your(the programmer) help. They might make the DBA responsible for documenting your help, or vise versa. This is subtle cross-training, where neither role feels like they are being pushed out or prepared-for-replacement by the other. Instead, you should end the assignment feeling like teammates that both managed to learn something new, from an experienced professional(the other person).

That's my two cents. For what it's worth, I didn't realize I had been a bad manager, until I went to work for one. As I found myself thinking of "geez life would be better if he/she did <XYZ>", I realized those were things I didn't do myself in the past. That made me really appreciate what life in the shoes of my reports must have been like. I didn't set clear expectations, it probably felt like a bit of a mystery gamble to the people who worked for me. I hate that for them, and no one could have convinced me I was doing it wrong - until I had gone through this experience myself.
as the owner of a 4.3ghz 6900k which I already find way too slow... cries
The opposition of "spin" isn't to counter-spin, but rather to not spin. While the racism-denial narrative is hard to justify (as you state), that does not mean that the racism-encouraging narrative is worthwhile (as you imply).
Why is that scenario Apple’s problem?
The thing with Harvard Facebook is that it's a predefined social circle that came online as a unit. If you go to Harvard, most of your friends and people you regularly interact with are also going to Harvard, so you have a cohesive group altogether.

With Google+, invites were more or less random, so in a group of 5 friends maybe 3 got one and 2 didn't. Were the 3 people who got invites supposed to just drop their other 2 friends? Obviously people aren't going to do that.

People do like things that are exclusive, but they want to exclude outsiders, not their friends.
The new thing is that it can be just be switched on/off on an existing install.

Sure people have been running distros from ram for a while but getting the tooling situated to make it like any other feature it super cool.
It's always good to know about the basics. How memory work, memory allocators, cpu registers, compilers, &c.

You don't start racing cars by going to a F1 grand prix, you start with small slow karts and walk your way up. It's very visible when you work with people who started coding in C vs people who started with java/javascript.
Here's another way Apple may be killing "right to repair":

I own a chain of independent cell phone and computer repair shops. Last year, Google unilaterally took away AdWords in our industry. The day after Thanksgiving, we woke up to find none of our ads were running.

Google claimed this was because "third-party tech support providers" were scamming customers--i.e. people were buying AdWords for virus removal and tech support queries and then trying to scam people for money.

Google also claimed an independent verification service was coming for those of us who had actual physical repair shops and weren't scamming people.

Despite Google's promises, none of this has been delivered. Our business has dropped significantly since AdWords disappeared 8 months ago. This Google action has really hurt legitimate small businesses.

I write all of this because the prevailing theory in our industry is that this is Apple's way of fighting against right to repair.

If only Apple authorized service providers are allowed to advertise on Google for repair-related keywords, Apple will have taken more teeth out of "right to repair."

It reminds me of the quote from The Matrix: "Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?" If independent repair shops can't be found on Google, is that Google and Apple's way of muting third-party repair?

Right when Google ads disappeared, Amazon and Apple made a deal that meant third parties could no longer sell Apple products on Amazon: https://9to5toys.com/2018/11/09/apple-and-amazon-deal-iphone...

This is just a reminder that Apple is fighting in every way possible against right to repair.
> It's just fun to program in.

This is the correct answer.
I think there's a line between being authoritarian and supporting a system where democratically elected officials can enact laws. This isn't about crypto, this is about respecting rule of law in society.

> I call authoritarian someone who thinks that they can circumvent an individual's freedoms arbitrarily by finding enough people to agree with him/her.

I suspect there are a lot of people who agree that counterfeiting money isn't something that should be allowed. Are they all authoritarian as well?
The default answer is the new Threadripper - which doesn't have a confirmed release date yet, but should be out within the next 3-6 months. However, if you really care about optimizing for that workload, the exact answer depends on the codebase(s) you're dealing with because the time spent linking varies significantly.

For instance, if you're working on a large C++ codebase with incremental compilation, rarely do full recompiles and heavily rely on link time and profile guided optimizations, I can see a case where a heavily tuned Cascade Lake X makes a lot of sense (overclock the mesh, tune the memory latencies and get enough cooling to sustain the single core boost as high as you can). It's actually one of the few usecases (AVX-512 being another) where I still see a niche for Intel CPUs purely based on technical merit... saying that still feels weird, but that's where we are now.
>no one should be allowed to charge more for a part than it charges for the whole

I love right to repair policy as much as the next man, but I don't entirely agree with this statement. Certainly from my experience in the aerospace industry where some of the hardware is 20+ years old, the company might not have produced the product for the past decade and have none of the machines/molds/designs to make the part any longer, and it's a niche item so there are no spares. In that instance, we could well be looking at paying them upwards of £20k for something like a lighting bracket which we initially bought for £500, because we're effectively paying them to buy/build the machinery, redesigned the product, and replicate said part without any of the economies of scale they had initially - and it needs to be done because otherwise instead of a £20k bracket you're looking at a full multi-million pound redesign for something as minor as an obsolete part.

You can't expect people to pay stupid money to pay for spares, but likewise you can't expect businesses to keep equipment to manufacture products from decades ago for when the spares run dry, or expect them to have the gift of foresight to predict how many spares they'll need years down the line.
Yawn. Always the same. The world hasn't been as peaceful as it is now in a long time.
> arguing that there was no real protrusion."

I guess we found a technological solution to this problem.
camels are amazing creatures that are more useful than horses in a wide range of situations.
The main thing any of these companies is trying to avoid is loss of control. Control over the ecosystem, control over profit.
They're both. They're selling a service to consumers, which they buy with their personal data. They then use that data to sell to advertisers in the form of better targeted ads.

They didn't even run ads for the first three years of their existence.
Not entirely. But 1Password does clearly flag weak passwords and reused passwords (i.e. used for two or more items in 1Password) with a message that's not dismissible.
The "Kennedy" comment really made me giggle. I have some dislike for some trends of applications addining great amounts of white space.

I have to agree that the interface, and the "Real Names" requirements were the two biggest hurdles for me to even to start to like Google+.

I really liked the concept of circles, but whenever I did get around to using the social network, it never felt as social and engaging as Twitter. Even when I did find an intersting discussion, it was hard to keep track of replies. Reddit/HNews/Twitter have a tree-like structure for the comments, but Google+ was mostly flat, and hard to keep track of any debate.

I would lose interest on Google+ as soon as I tried to read a comment thread, and close the application altogether.
https://monzo.com/blog/2019/06/13/monzo-usa/
I think the barrier should be drawn at not trying to prevent the boards being re-sold; fabricating an entirely new one from scratch may be infeasible, but they will turn up on the secondary market.
I recently tried to buy Office 365 from MS India. It just kept on failing with my India debit card even though it accepts both debit/credit cards. The error message was not helpful and finally came to know from customer care that it was due to the debit card. So, it can go both ways.
Generally I would agree, but in this case its Jim Keller we are talking about.
Rich people upset upset at supply and demand: more at 11.
Yeah, it's absolutely infuriating, especially when you know how most businesses tend to ignore any and all security measures not forced by law, or widespread customer revolt.

One of the worst arguments imo is that argument about emission control circumvention. It's so disingenuous it makes me almost sick.
Sure, protecting the environment is critically important - at least in my opinion - but it's certainly not this supposed mass of people circumventing emission controls that are the real criminals when it comes to environmental damage.
Businesses seems to proudly, and continually, carry that torch by themselves. As long as not laws or widespread public outcry makes it impossible for them to make business, environmental damage is a absolutely ignored by all but a very few.
By never announcing things before they’re ready?
Sort of off-topic, but I just wanted to point out the environmental impact that these ships have one the planet.

According to Wikipedia, "maritime transport accounts for 3.5 to 4 percent of all climate change emissions, primarily carbon dioxide." [1] Oil spills, ballast water, sewage and other issues that they cause are NOT counted in that 3.5-4% figure.

There are plenty of other jaw-dropping statistics about maritime trade, but I can't find bulletproof sources for them. For example, it is estimated that a big cargo ship can produce as much pollution as 50 millions cars and it is said that the biggest 15 ships in the world produce more pollution than all the cars in the world combined.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...
its Interesting how cryptocurrencies have provided an economic incentive for exploiting zero days. It’s hard to keep an exploit a secret when there’s such huge potential payoffs.

The level of sophistication in crypto hacking would terrify me if were a crypto startup employee.
Interesting, he even popped by Tesla on his journey: https://web.archive.org/web/20180426124248/https://www.kitgu...
It doesn't wipe phising. Phising is getting more and more complex, now phising sites ask you for your ToTP to gain control to your account in real-time. And that's one of the origins of FIDO2. - https://fidoalliance.org/fido2/
> Are you sure?

No, because I haven't tried every service. What I do know is that key services I have notify me of every single login that is made, so I'd know anyway.

Plus, one has to examine at which point back up the chain the problem might occur or be spotted.

In this instance you've managed to access my TOTP keys, which means you've hacked and broken the encryption on the password manager or you've got malicious code running on my device. Or you have physical access to a running and unlocked machine.

In either of those cases I'm already truly fucked.

I would imagine that any scenario where I managed to get hold of your recovery keys would involve the same things, so you'd be truly fucked.

So in that sense there's no functional difference in the way I have things setup for me.
my friend just a year out of undergrad started a short term rental management company here in toronto and its crazy how much money comes thru, and ive lived my entire life around one of the wealthiest areas of the country
The 80/20 rule is basically the power law which is one of my favorite laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
Investors Are Buying More of the U.S. Housing Market Than Ever Before
I use markdown to pdf flow with pandoc+xelatex. Found a few tex code on stackexchange sites and current setting is good enough for me, made a blog post too [1]

There's also a latex template I've bookmarked [2] - I haven't tried yet, but sample on the repo looks nice

[1] https://learnbyexample.github.io/tutorial/ebook-generation/c...

[2] https://github.com/Wandmalfarbe/pandoc-latex-template
Article poses a good question. How did a privately reported zero-day leak from Bugzilla into an attacker's arsenal?

Also, why did it take 2 months to fix an RCE? It's an RCE, not some XSS. I'd imagine this would be a high-priority. No?
Please provide your definition of what a city is.
I haven't used Telegram much, but as far as I can tell, Telegram has almost none of the features I pointed out as the core strengths of Slack.
You're right, MHTML is supposed to solve this problem. I wrote SingleFile because Chrome did not support MHTML 9 years ago. Now, it's not dead and Chrome supports it but no other modern browsers (not based on Chromium) supports it. That's why I continue to maintain SingleFile.

The JavaScript injected by the extension will be included if and only if there are web components in the saved page. By default, all other scripts are removed.
The rising cost of education and health care is less troubling than believed
Thanks! That makes a lot more sense.
I think the essay would have been better served getting to what appears to be the point much more directly:

- The VW scandal was so shocking because executives and engineers exploited a societal taboo against lying

- Was sustained for so long by exploiting another taboo against placing personal advantage over honesty

- Signs of fraud were dismissed because people assumed successful executives would never violate these taboos, leading them to accept misleading explanations and discounting the possibility of a cover-up.
I've been waiting for agile to die/reform for several years now. I can't stand what it has become.

My current company is "Zombie Agile" and I have to meet all kinds make work requirements that add zero value to what I do but there are people in my company whose entire job revolves around project management and they are making an absolute mess out of what used to be a process owned by the developers for the developers. Frankly, it is incredibly frustrating to work at a place like this.
I think Google+ failed first and foremost because there wasn't any reason to switch.

First, it didn't make sense that people would quickly leave an established network (FB) to join a new empty network. At this time, most folks who wanted to join a network had finally joined FB. It took a lot of time and momentum for FB to reach that point. Google+ didn't offer anything fundamentally different from Facebook: it was very similar, just with far fewer people to talk to.

Second, Google+ wasn't cool. Most successful non-niche social networks seem to grow from young people first: young people enjoy having an online space that's separate from older friends/family. Then, as the network becomes more popular, older folks join. This is loosely the trend we've seen with Facebook and Instagram, and to a lesser extent with Snapchat and MySpace. But, to get young people to join, you have to offer something cool and/or unique. Google+ wasn't very cool or unique: it seemed to target everyone at all once.

G+ failed for other reasons too of course, which others have listed in the comments here. But I think the biggest reason it failed was because there wasn't any compelling reason to use the network.

(I'm a Googler, but my opinions are my own)
I went from a 2500K with HD6950 to a 2700X and a RTX2080.

That was a slight jump.

Yep the 2600 is Zen+, 3600 is Zen 2, decent uplift in IPC (about 10%) on its own not worth upgrading.

That 3900X looks tempting though to replace my 2700X.

50% more faster cores than an already very fast processor, AMD are on fire at the moment.
> let you imagine what one could do with arbitrary firmware images on a fully unlocked device.

You could .. avoid paying the manufacturer's fees for re-enabling features that the firmware has disabled? You could refill your ink cartridges?

Bad actors at this layer seem to be quite rare. And the whole reason everyone uses the unlicensed bands is the freedom to transmit (and expectation of recieving) arbitrary signals.
Listening at the Great Awokening
Does TAILS not do this? Forgive my ignorance, I only know the basic idea of it.