skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given that Draw Something fits within the same asynchronous turn-based model of the With Friends games (owned, of course, by Zynga), I'm curious to see where Zynga moves with branding. There's something to be said for unifying all future OMGPOP/With Friends games under the With Friends blanket for cross-promotional purposes, but the "X Something" brand does have some measure of brand appeal.
I like it.

Wasn't this essentially happening less officially through Deviant Art?
The unfamous beer factor from Steve Ballmer back in the days promised us to be the most productive after six beers.

After all, this seems like people are getting wasted after writing their code.

With this, Flowdock improves your code quality for the next month or so...
How to Read a Book by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, Part 1
There's more to the word "lead" than market-share. Apple makes a much larger profit for each phone sold compared to other companies.
Dunno about "without", but certainly not well used. Once explained recursion to someone using a simple programming example; we stepped thru it for two hours before he got it.
couldn't charge for their creations but of course people do charge for open-source code to be made. IBM, RedHat, the US National Security Agency, Canonical, DARPA, Google, etc. all pay for open source code to be written. If the programmers weren't allowed to charge for their code, a lot less code would be written.
Can you prove that those projects wouldn't be healthier if people were happy to pay money for them?
But we shouldn't want the Treasury to have a say in this!?
Allowing the Treasury to have a political say in what the Bank can put on their banknotes opens up a whole can of worms that it would be infinitely preferable to be left unopened.
SpaceBase: 2D and 3D Spatial Data-Store
Yeah, you said their work was "light enough" that distractions don't matter. That was condescension.

If you want to backpedal, you actually have to take the pedals and run them backwards. Otherwise it's not effective.
I would guess they will probably go with 'Draw Something With Friends'.
Founders often don't have a choice as to whether to accept buyout offers. In the case of OMGPOP, which had received a ton of VC funding and struggled for years until finally finding some success, I can definitely see why VCs would want to force a sale. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if VCs generally think that "make games for iOS" is not a business model that is capable of the kind of returns they need anymore, and they want to avoid taking further risk on that model—hence they forced the sale.)
Show HN: GitHub Watches for User
Piracy is abuse of open networks and speech right. I don't want a government sufficiently powerful (per the RIAA) to stop it, such powers would would themselves be a serious danger to society.

I suppose that amounts to a freedom to piracy. But that doesn't mean piracy is somehow right, or even intended. It's an injustice, of individuals, persisting in the space needed to maintain a free society.

Nor am I much impressed by the argument that with so many people pirating, it must actually be moral. Probably most of them think it's moral, given that they take their norms from the people around them. And the offenses are largely minor. But I think the steps from principle to copyright are pretty clear, and I don't see how anyone concludes that it's actually right.

It's like littering: no one actually thinks it's okay, but they do it because it's convenient, they won't get caught and it isn't a big deal. The consequences of those calculations are obvious.
Knock knock
knock knock!
Who's There?
SQUARE payment processing!
SQUARE Who?
Sqaure who could not come up Triangle!

knock knock!
Who's There?
Paypal, Eventbrite
Paypal, Eventbrite Who?
Who could not come up Triangle Card Reader!

WHO WINS?

http://www.boxdino.com/v/12001
الحوالات الصفراء
A common sentiment regarding spacecraft of the era: "Because of their small size, it was said that the Mercury spacecraft were worn, not ridden"

(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury )
There are crimes of state and of the heart and mind. Some require paperwork and lawyers. Others result in groups of people expressing their disapproval in various ways. Both can be very serious and poor times for levity.
Exactly. That's more or less the sentiment in the conclusion to the article:

"If you are using Emacs, keep using it.

Hell, if you are using Java you should probably keep using Eclipse. Similarly you probably shouldn’t ditch Visual Studio and hack your C# code in vim. Emacs and IDE’s are useful – they have tools that will make your life easier. The IDE’s don’t have vim’s raw text manipulation power, but they make up for it by having great integrated debuggers, GUI building tools and etc. But if you are hacking in Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby or something like that, vim is usually a good choice.

Is it the best editor in the world? I don’t know. I guess it depends what you are doing. The bottom line is that you should choose a tool that fits the particular problem you are trying to solve. Not all problems are nails. If you try to apply a hammer to a philipsh-head you are probably gonna screw things up somewhere down the line. But vim is a great editor and you should definitely give it a chance."
Really sad actually.

The only reason why Zynga bought them is because Draw Something is so high profile, that there was no way Zynga could steal it.

As I said over on Quora, this really sucks as Zynga is a despicable company.

Surely, the folks at OMGPOP had been worried that Zynga would try to steal this game, as they have done every one else -- and I would be interested to know what they thought of Pincus' character prior to the purchase.

At least they get to stay in NYC and be no place close to Pincus.
Absolutely. We were our own first customers and sometimes have to restrain ourselves from blowing all our YC money on commissioning our own artists. Most of the work so far has been for the wall, but some people have commissioned pieces that they've used in a site design. No games. . . yet.
OpenWorm Browser: cell-by-cell C.elegans in WebGL
And some more:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3730638

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3735900 <- "It's a fake"
You can sign up with the link I don't have either facebook or twitter. Just full in name, email & password. all done :p you don't have to use any 3rd party services. Just signed up ... pretty good stuff. If you want some very focussed news about just about anything it's a great place to go.
The Science behind GTD
Hah! I can imagine epoxy covered magnets sticking to my little finger.
That's my question -- would YC make the offer now, and would the company accept it? Basically, could there possibly be a re-do? The answer might be "no" for both, but it might be "yes". Is applying to YC and accepting a one-shot deal for all parties, or can there ever be a chance to get back together? From the responses and posts, it looks like it's a one-shot deal - either they accept you and you accept the offer, or there's no chance to get together again in the future.
pls. answer the question. it will give us perspective of where you're coming from (why you hate apps).
And you're misunderstanding economics too. Just because you can get it for free that does not mean there is no market for people paying for it.

> Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value.

What shows market value is the desire for that product. The only reason that music is pirated now (when it used to be purchased) is because it's easy and without consequence. Let's say hypothetically in the future stealing a car becomes easy and without consequence (even though it's still illegal) does that mean there is no market value for cars? Of course it doesn't. It shows that people care more about saving money

If pirating music was impossible many people would return to paying for music, the only reason they don't now is because stealing it is consequence free.

The convenience argument is also (for want of a better phrase) complete and utter bullshit. I can switch to itunes right now, type in a search term, hit purchase and have the song on my hard drive (and iphone and any other device I have connected to my itunes account) within 10 seconds. Hell, I'll open my screen recording program now and record me proving this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA2wzb0-4Pg

People pirate music because it's free, consequence free (the reason they don't steal cars is consequence) and everyone spends all day every day justifying it. It's not a matter of convenience, people go to more effort pirating than they would purchasing (except for cases where the music is not available commercially, but those instances are "rare" and not a worthy consideration for the sake of this argument).
I'll just recycle my comment I made on the PG's article:

PG seems to be advocating a pragmatic approach, based on the difficulty of enforcement. Goods can be excludable or non-excludable. Excludable goods are anything that can be effectively locked down (like most physical goods, or movie tickets). Non-excludable goods can't (like air, fish in the sea, and IP). You can make a non-excludable good excludable by creating laws (like Carbon Taxes or IP laws), but it's not always practical.

But he kind of misses the other half - rivalry.

Goods can also be rivalrous or non-rivalrous. Ideas are non-rivalrous as you don't lose anything (except a competitive advantage) if other people also have it. In fact, IP may be the opposite to rivalrous (which is a rare enough thing to not have a name, though I like the name "network goods"), because it's worth more if everyone has it. If more people can speak a language, it's more useful to everyone. The Lord of the Rings is more interesting if you can talk to your friends about it.

While there's a good reason to try to make common goods (rivalrous but non-excludable) goods more excludable (by introducing laws which prevent over-exploitation), it's perverse to make non-rivalrous excludable. You don't tax breathing if there's plenty of air.

The main reason you want to make a public (non-rivalrous non-excludable) good more excludable is to incentize its creation (another reason might be because it's judged to be a "de-merit" (bad) good - such as a porn or a method of manufacturing weapons). But since IP is an input to creating IP, there's very good reasons why you want to make copyright and patents expire in a short time - bringing down the cost of creating new IP may outweigh the lost incentive. Also, the anti-rivalrous nature of IP may even encourage people to make more, simply because it's so useful have more people using it - Linus got his own private kernel debugged and extended at a lower cost by sharing it.

If a good cannot be easily made excludable, then it's all very sad (assuming that the lost incentive to create more of it outweights the loss from more people having access to the existing stuff, and the stuff that's made voluntarily) but there's not much you can do without heavy regulation.

Music will still be made. Musicians will make money on gigs. Advertisers will pay musicians for annoying jingles. It's not the 1700s, there's literally millions of talented musicians who will eke out a living actually connecting with the community (concerts, teaching, playing in pubs) who should be able to produce far more (in aggregate) than Mozart, Beethoven and the like. Without copyright, many of those musicians may make a better living, as they can draw on other people's material more easily.

The fat distribution pipe (distributors, promoters, producers, broadcasters) will mostly die, but no-one really cares - they don't create much value. OK, the definition of value is rubbery, but if you make money by convincing people that they need something (i.e. tell them that folk music is daggy, and you have to buy the latest pop hit to be cool) then you're really destroying value, then offering a band-aid.
Yep. We considered that a proxy for demand.
I've seen some hilarious Lil' Wayne & Tebow drawings though! Much more fun to me, but you're right, this is a world wide game.
I'd offer the idea that a significant amount of what YC offers is a brand, the essays are marketing, and anti-entertainment industry sentiment is very high in their target market of young technologists.
Apache, Wordpress, nginx, node.js, coffeescript, ruby, rails, python, django, chromium, firefox, webkit, drupal, varnish, memcached, 7zip, postgresql, mongodb, php, clang, wine, dosbox, vlc, virtualbox, truecrypt, calibre, audacity, openoffice, cygwin, flac, ogg, perl, synergy ...
Good point, and one I didn't realize.
I didn't say anything about where the money should go.
Anyone remember when OMGPOP was iminlikewithyou.com before they made the pivot to social games? 2007ish, if I recall correctly...
I have a very small sampling of midwest developers who I've worked with to be a representative sample. But for those I do know, the great developers from back home already moved out to the bay.
There are always two sides for each story. You hear about a lot of successful companies that rejected a buyout, only to die in obscurity. I guess it all depends on the shareholders and what they want to do. Sometimes it's good to take home a good chunk of profit and look elsewhere.
IPhone + TSA security-fail combo
That's a list of names suggested by the public, not candidates that the Bank of England is considering. Surely it's unsurprising that he is among the 154 suggested names.

"Inclusion on the list does not imply any endorsement by the Bank."

The petition still has value.
Let me offer an argument which I haven't seen, but is probably not novel: people will continue to make music, tell stories and make short films even if there's no likelihood of making much money from it. It's a creative impulse that, happily, has allowed some people in the last few decades to make a living at it -- but that's not the long term history, and it may not continue.

We might not get epic movies... or we might, if CGI continues to dwindle in cost. We probably won't get as much pop/dance music... but we might.

There won't be as many huge star winners, that's all that can really be said to be likely.
I just turned on my laptop and hit the record button.

And the other day, I turned on a $20 tape recorder.

Perhaps you should expand your ideas of what constitutes publishable music.
Except it's not.

I used to log on Windows servers on a daily basis that had only Notepad.
There are proper places for sexuality, objectification, etc. A professional / workplace environment isn't one of them. It makes people uncomfortable and can contribute to a hostile work environment.

Well, that might be a cultural thing though. We don't particularly care about such things in other parts of the world (that doesn't mean we run around naked in the workplace).

And actually neither did the US until like the nineties or so.
"Nobody is ever going to compete with Zynga if people cash out to them the first chance they get every time."

NimbleBit (TinyTower guys) rejected a Zynga acquisition offer. I hope that most game companies hate Zynga too much to allow themselves to be acquired by them.

I guessing that OMGPOP's investors pushed heavily toward this solution after years of little traction.
"They deserve recognition for sticking to their vision and eventually finding one that is a hit"

They absolutely do. But they are now the latest example of what not to do the second you finally gain traction. As I said in another comment, Facebook got this right. So many others do not, and it is really a pity in the social gaming space as there is a huge need for somebody to compete with Zynga.
Subsidizing a hobby is not an accurate analogy. Is a doctor practicing medicine for pay subsidizing their hobby or are they trying to derive value from their efforts? Just because somebody may enjoy what they do to produce that value doesn't mean it de facto becomes "free".
Credit to VCs. I've been guilty in past of noting how raising VC money may take away reasonable exits possible with no funding or just angel. In this case, it is very clear without VC money this company would have been dead pooled many many years ago.
Ask HN: Are there any companies that provide users for experiments?
I need 100-200 people to participate in a behavioral experiment (they will be incentivized with money). Beta-testing companies such as UTest are too biased (all testers are software engineers with 5+ years under their belt). Are there any companies that provide access to such a user base? Cheers!
> professional event

I didn't think hackathons were particularly professional. But I agree, the whole idea is pretty ridiculous.
Samsung Galaxy S III: What We're Expecting
Well, shit, I guess they weren't kidding.

Huh.

(For folks States-side, for an idea on how to implement one of these this design report has some good info: http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/landing/universityprogram/11_win... )
Twitter Says It Has 140 Million Users
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. Just saying we see it less. We're open to remote workers (We have one person working from Greece ATM), but so far haven't been impressed with any applicants we've received from the 'midwest'.

I'm always looking for more remote development tools, I'll check out Sococo, but any other suggestions.
I've never played this (first time I've heard of it), but it sounds like a game I used to play about 5 years ago online with people on IRC/Kongregate chat. I used to love it and spend hours playing it. Boy do I feel dumb now not remembering it when the mobile app craze started!
You implied the 99 cents was a convenience charge, therefore the money goes to the provider of the convenience.
Won't they get some metal detector over your first? Who knows you might just, let's say, have a magnet in your little finger! But seriously, there are more metal things under your skin possible, so if you can't make them 100% sure nothing is going to happen when they turn it on, I guess they will find out by themselves beforehand.
They still wouldn't "have a say"; it's simply a request. I admit ignorance of English political delicacies, however.
As a consumer, I don't actually have much power over who does and doesn't get paid for various things.
My take on Responsive Images
That's right. Charging for software was microsoft's big invention. It took, what, 30 years to realize that the software had enough value beyond the hardware.

I guess the flip side is, if there was no free software, there would be no pay software.
Some people have the belief "I'm going to work real hard for X years and try to make enough so that I don't have to work at all if I don't want to for the rest of my life." I don't know if this is what the CEO thinks, but if it is, I don't think it's cowardly.
> "Deal of the century for Zynga and a horrible, cowardly business decision for them to sell."

You realize that OMGPOP is founded and staffed by real human beings, who are probably reading these threads today, right?

I can respect the opinion that selling to Zynga was the wrong call - but your tone and wording is entirely inappropriate.

If the founder and employees of the company were sitting across the table from you, would you still call them cowards?
The cherry on top is just coffescript and the new sourcemaps functionality coming from browsers.

Even if you prefer vanilla javascript, still is an awesome combo.
I think it is prescriptive for the distributor and creators, but descriptive for consumers. He is not admonishing consumers to pirate, as it seems many have misunderstood, he just describes what is happening and what will happen with information. But he asks distributors and creators to change and adapt to a new way of doing things.

The original blog didn't claim pg was encouraging piracy directly, so my post was a bit off topic, but I wrote it because I found when discussing this essay/talk with others, many tend to draw that conclusion.
Not sure why you call it economics of scarcity. The distributors want control over the distribution method to make sure they are paid for whatever they are distributing, not to create scarcity. If something is popular, won't distributors try and sell as much of it as is possible.
Libertarian, except for the “gangsters who control the fruit market... running a price-fixing cartel” mentioned on page 3.
I actually have paid for software to be produced using Kickstarter. And I donate to open source projects, too.

I happen to use the GIMP, Inkscape, and FreeCAD for free, and I don't feel guilty about that.
I hear this argument a lot. I've heard it in comments sections on HN, on Reddit, and elsewhere. I've heard it from colleagues in the Entertainment business. I've heard it from friends who are artists and producers -- some established, and some just getting started.

Here's the thing: production needs to change. If production is too expensive to justify digital revenue streams, then either we need to get creative about revenue streams or we need to rethink the cost side of the business. I'm less concerned with whether we feel this is "right" or "wrong," as such concerns are largely irrelevant. Arguments about right and wrong are distractions, and they offer us little in the way of practicality.

What's relevant is that a shift has occurred in the marketplace, and now the players in the market needs to adapt to it. Adaptation isn't going to be easy, and the status quo will need to undergo a painful transition. But we need to adapt, one way or the other.

Hoping the genie gets sucked back into the bottle is not a business strategy. But rethinking the revenue and/or cost sides of the business is.
I don't understand Zynga's strategy. Are they trying to establish themselves as the De Beers of mobile gaming? This seems like an unsustainable strategy. If they just buy out every gaming company as it begins to exhibit growth at insane valuations, they are going to run out of money.

There are virtually no barriers to entry in the market, and there is no point at which there will be no emerging competitors. This is not a stock I would want to be a part of.
I love this. Finally a place to spend the art gift card my parents gave me.
Great submission on that topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144099
Perhaps someone here can explain something that has annoyed me since I saw Inception. Falling (accelerating under gravity) is meant to "wake you up". Whilst falling you feel weightless - almost by definition (if you and the weighing machine are accelerating in sync, you apply no pressure to it). For some reason falling causes the loss of gravity in the dream world, and there's that whole scene about "recreating gravity". But since falling is indistinguishable from being weightless, what is stopping the dreamers from waking up? And why does weightlessness only go one level down?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlessness
This reminds me of a medieval tale, telling the adventures of the Belgian scoundrel Tijl Uilenspiegel:

"Tijl was visiting the market, and noticed a food stand where a butcher was roasting chickens over a fire, spreading a delicious smell.

Tijl stood a while next to the barbecue, sniffing the exquisite smells. Then the butcher noticed him just standing there, sniffing, and not buying anything.

The butcher said: "Hey, you're enjoying the smell of my grilled chickens, not buying anything, you know what? You should pay me for the cooking smells of these chickens instead!"

Upon which Tijl produced his wallet, made tinkling noises with the coins, and replied: "I pay for the smell of these chickens with the sound of my coins!". Faced with such impertinence, the butcher got angry and chased a laughing Tijl away."
> Maybe relying only on personal reference is doing it wrong then.

We try not to, but other forms of recruitment have thus far, returned less than stellar applicants. The only other luck we've had is actively seeking out people with projects in the same field. But that has mixed results also.