skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is naive.

First, most of the games they discuss that cost 40-60 bucks, the CoDs of the world, require enough capital outlay to deter any small band of developers. You need money for art assets, voice acting, advertising, sound design etc. etc. You can get by with the just a couple of developers on laptops, but you have to scale back your ambitions (see Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, Spiderweb Software).

The biggest pot of money is on consoles, even with the recent trend towards PC gaming that happens at the nadir of a console generation. You have to be a big boy (at least moderately big) to be on those.

Large publishers can, and do, use Steam just as much as the little guy. And can afford an advertising budget.

Don't get me wrong, I love me some steam. I love 2d shooters, and there never has been a better time for playing them. But pay-per-view didn't lead to the death of big budget movies, and this won't lead to the death of larger games.
That's part of what made Lean Startup frustrating. I know that Ries is the 'real deal', but the book ended up feeling like empty calories to me. Some good ideas, but all kind of vague.
The article seemed fairly naive -- the reason why more developers haven't ditched publishers is the same reason why everyone working at BigCorp doesn't quit their job and do a startup -- I mean, Mark Zuckerberg did a startup, and he's a billionaire!

The reason they don't is a mixture of financial obligations (children, wife, etc), risk management (failure rate is high, career advancement goes out the window at your current job, lots of money invested with no guarantee of return, etc), size of challenge problem (publishers have everything already in place vs you having to do it all yourself), and having the personality for it, among other things.

We can look at examples like Mojang and see huge successes, but it's a self selection process -- we almost always only hear about the successful indie companies, not the ones that tried to get the word out and got nowhere and failed.

Finally, the authors final suggestion of organizing a boycott or a movement seems right in line with "online petitions" and "If this baby gets 1000 likes he will get his cancer treatment". The most effective way to fight Publishers who treat their developers like crap is to vote with your wallet -- a trait that many gamers seem unwilling to do (See: Modern Warfare 2 boycott, Mass Effect 3 boycott, etc).
RIM is now a startup: focused, honest, hungry
How A 7 Day Old Blog Attracted 500 Visitors And Over $1,000,000 In New Customers
Train Your Own AI Army
I agree. I mean this is the reason I don't use Foursquare. Why on earth would I tell the entire Internet where I am and where I've been....
Publishers are "content curators", they assure the gamer/buyer that the games for sale are high-quality.

If you flood the market with lots of indie games (with a high ratio of low quality games), review websites will become stronger and more relevant in the industry and assume the role of content curators.

Today, review websites are already powerful. If publishers 'left' the game industry, their influence would be transferred to review sites and indie developers will be in the same position that they are today.
I would go even further to say that, JSON + AJAX != WEB

Like the name or not, it is why we came up with the Web 2.0 moniker. Sending "raw" data over HTTP to a richer client is quite a bit different paradigm to what was envisioned for the web.
#GlobalRevolution : Chinese Government sites defaced by Anonymous China
Paper makes me smile while I pay them
Flat tax generally means a flat percentage not a flat fee. Regressive tax is where the rate (percentage) goes down as you scale up. A tax that is a fixed total amount (not a fixed total percentage) is regressive because the same amount is a lower percentage of a higher income. You can still charge the rich total more than the poor and have it be regressive; eg a regressive tax where you charge 10k income at 10% and 1k income at 20% you still charging the rich a larger amount.
Note though that the growth of direct requests is much faster than the growth of API requests.
#1 CSRF Is A Vulnerability In All Browsers
First article that makes the point.
Oh if you could find it I would be super grateful. I've done my usual rounds such as searching on Google Books and found nothing. Made me start to wonder if it had been Jung instead.
Timing.

You need to know when you're selling yourself, and you need to know when you're selling your product. You can't sell your product until you sell yourself; if you try to, especially in B2B and smaller markets, you might lose your sale.
If the logo is the same as the splash screen, there are no crosshairs on the woman. That's the radar, which seems to imply targeting or finding, rather than attacking. So I would agree with duxup that it's a bit of a stretch to say it's designed for stalkers, or that it implies assault/rape.

In fact, I think it's a good thing that such an app exists. The bad thing is people not knowing what they share, and that needs to be fixed by Facebook/Google, or through laws. The situation is not that much different from exposing a security hole in order to get it fixed. Besides, some people may actually want their data to be available like this, so once it's strictly opt-in, there's nothing wrong with the app.
What I don't get is if you alienate the insurance companies so that they don't want to do business with you, where is your business model? The only potential client for such a service is an insurance company. Or am I missing something?
A look into a Twitter Spammer's Stats
No, they are dumb, and you can find them in abundance in pretty much any MBA entreprenuership class.
On Building Flipboard for iPhone
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I think this is not an opinion shared by many, although I find it to be spot on.

It's very similar to what happened with notebooks or netbooks or whatever they are called - small laptops that are more portable than a 17' laptop. Yes, people wanted portability, but no, the PC is not portable. That is why the iPad is such a success - it's not a PC. It's something else.
Things I Learned the Hard Way at Amazon.com
Late to the party, but I felt I had to share that this post directly inspired my brain (definitely my _brain_, as opposed to _me_) to create and start writing a story. The night after reading and thinking about this, I woke up with characters, a world, a plot, conflict and resolution, a whole novel (actually a whole set of them). It's been quite a week for me, especially because my sudden surge in writing fiction led me to try giving my iPhone app away for free and then suddenly finding some unexpected success there, for the first time since that app launched!
That's only if you want a piece of the affiliate sales / agent money. You can always go for just ad revenue.
Howard Aiken said it best: "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

There are two passive modes of control over your ideas that you can deploy that won't be taken as signs of "paranoid crackpot syndrome": patent rights and copyright.

Patent rights do cost (particularly if you're broke like many startuppers) and they set a process in motion you have to keep up with (commitments to financially support your patent in upcoming years or lose rights to it), but they make for an effective deterrent to some. They also give investors warm fuzzies, particularly if you sound like you know what you're doing when it comes to the filing process.

Copyrights are free and easy. If you have a powerpoint or whitepaper, simply stick your © dingbat, year, and name on every page. Your first level of audience will still be able to take your idea and run with it, but it becomes a violation of copyright law to distribute the copyrighted work (or iterations thereof) further without your consent.

The kids who cheated off you in high school by and large have found other, less productive things to do with their lives than try and steal your thunder.
It is a different problem, but it largely disappears if the system does not do leap seconds.
Looks like you just might have something to hide.
I hear what you're saying, but isnt that "problem" what open source is all about?

I personally prefer Less, but that doesnt mean there shouldnt be multiple options. Everyone has different things that work for them.
Duck-checker in Python: does one exist?
Sequoia certainly hasn't had that effect on YC companies. Nearly every founder I've talked to on the subject has said that when they met with Sequoia, they received good questions and advice about how to build a really big company.

There's a common cause for both the Sequoia LP investment and rising hype about YC: both are because YC companies are doing better and better. It certainly is true that hype, PR, and fundraising can be big distractions for early startups, but all the YC partners go to great lengths to make founders focus on the more important things.
Demo HTML5 video on a 3d CSS CUBE
SMACSS is a set of recommendations for reducing CSS bloat in large web applications. Compass is a library of convenience classes, and the others you mention are preprocessors. Apples and oranges.

SCSS and Less are similar enough that porting code between them is usually just a matter of changing a few symbols and keywords. Compared to the fragmentation of the rails ecosystem I don't consider this too overwhelming.
The majority of folks? I don't think so, an actual majority of people in the US won't be aware of this kind of stuff until some psycho stalks and kills someone and they find something like this on his phone.

I mean, it will happen sooner or later, same number of violent psychopaths out there as always. The media will love the cyber-stalker angle too, just like Columbine was used to push the Violent Video Games Ruin Children meme.

An app like this makes a better target for public outrage than facebook or another big player too, so they'll probably take the brunt of the 24 hour news cycle outrage. Especially since the big players have a prepared coordinated PR response ready to go already.
For those who didn't see the recent kerfuffle: This guy recently found and demonstrated a major Rails exploit on github. He seems to know a thing or two about security exploits.
Depends on the time of year. I seem to be more productive late at night (00:00 - 05:00) during summer and 22:00-02:00 during the winter.
Images capture split personality of dense suspensions
>You can also have x != y where x and y are different objects with the same value.

May be true, but it's not guaranteed one way or the other. In the Oracle JVM the smaller integers are cached such that

new Integer(10) == new Integer(10)

but

new Integer(1000) != new Integer(1000)
It is hot as hell in Austin in the Summer. The humidity sometimes kicks in too.
Yep, Gilad Bracha, Philip Wadler, Martin Odersky... all drunken, retarded monkeys.
A hundred thanks for the Rescuetime mention. I had no idea that I could get something like this for free (lite version, good enough for me, for now) and so easily (I think it took less than a minute to download and set up).
I lived in a studio on Market St in the Tenderloin for $825/mo. With a huge window. There are other units for even cheaper. http://sfofficelofts.com
Considering the similarities between hacking and writing - highly skilled, solitary, large "page size" - and I think the following excerpt could be enlightening.

From chapter 22, "Professional Writing Expertise" (Ronald T. Kellog), in the excellent Cambridge Handbook Of Expertise and Expert Performance:

...the converging point are that ... all of the idiosyncratic habits of professional writers

(1) focus attention inward by eliminating distractions,

(2) may alter consciousness to facilitate entry in a flow state, and

(3) help regulate the writer's emotional state to keep at the task.

...

Many choose to write at the same time each working day, but individuals differ from morning, afternoon, evening, late night, to early morning preferences. Work sessions of one to two hours correlate with productivity in scientific writing, but the relationship is weak (r=.22) and the variability is large, with some individuals writing four or more hours at a time. Successful poets also typically write for one or two hours, whereas most novelists typically report longer sessions of two to three or even four to six hours. Running or walking help some writers think through problems while away from the writing table. Others use meditation, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, or other drugs to alter consciousness in the service of writing.

Now, writing isn't the same as hacking, but as a process it seems to have many things in common with hacking. I seem to remember reading somewhere (couldn't find the page) that most experts in general practise in the morning when energy is at its highest, but this doesn't seem to be the case with hacking. I found this rather curious. My guess is that the page size is typically bigger, which requires longer periods of time to enter flow, compared with say, chess, where 30 minutes is often effective. That still doesn't explain why there aren't as many novelists writing at night as there are hackers. So another, less scientifically backed up, idea is that hacking is less of an expertise and more of a "production task", meaning we often do things we already know perfectly well how to do, something that would require less energy. Computer science is an extremely new field, so it wouldn't be too surprising if we would see hackers that are experts at a whole other level 50 years hence. It could also be a cultural thing, since a lot of hackers start as teenagers when they are still in school. What are your thoughts, HN?
Why is this on HN? The author of this article does not know anything about the game industry.

The reason most developers of $60 games sign with publishers is because they do not have the money to develop games of that size themselves.

Whether it is a good idea for them to be doing this is really a different question (and it is complex to answer).
there are hundreds of these...this is just a YC backed one
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Thanks for the downvotes because you kids can't read. I'm talking about the "Nail It Then Scale It" book being a copy, not "4 steps.."
Or even -
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&#....
While what you say is true, I disagree with you in tone.

Adobe makes money from Flash by selling licenses to the tools. During the long period of platform growth, developer community growth and turnover helped maintain profits through new license sales. Now that the Flash community is shrinking, that revenue is not sufficient to maintain the profits that will motivate Adobe to fund continuing development of the platform. This is a business, after all, not a nonprofit like the Apache Foundation.

Meanwhile, you have companies like Zynga making profits from software built on the Flash platform disproportionate to the number of Flash licenses they purchase. Zynga owes much of its success to the high market penetration of the Flash player, which makes its social games extremely accessible to its non-technical core users.

It's reasonable to place much of the blame for Flash's decline on Adobe for failing to maintain the quality of the Flash Player and for underestimating the shift to mobile/tablets. In light of those failures and what must be rapidly falling Flash tool sales, Adobe has made a decision to change the revenue model for Flash so that they can continue to profit from the platform.
Some of the cache plugins may just utilize page output caching, but IMO if you're spinning up your language runtime (Ruby, PHP, Python, Java, .NET) just to do page caching, you've already lost. Varnish and even built in Web Server caching can be far more efficient.

It's better to use the language runtime for more specific caching inside your application logic and for smarter cache expiration.
I agree, since I want to be able to offer plans without long contracts, to deal with that I ether need to;

1. Raise the onboarding cost high enough so leaving at the drop of the hat is not expensive for us.; or
2. Lower the cost of acquisition of customers.; or
3. Pass the onboarding costs on to customers as a setup fee.

If it costs me 250 dollars to bring on a customer, and they leave after two months, I'm never going to make money.
Obviously a contract is always an option, I get stability, customer gets lower pricing, at a cost of flexibility on both sides.
The big advantage of startups is customer acquisition is easier for us, they are less barriers for contracting, and getting them to try our service, furthermore; these are companies that have no real viable way of providing support as-is – it’s a win-win.
Seriously? This makes it to hacker news front page?
I mostly agree with you, but I need to be a bit pedantic and point out that a boycott is voting with your wallet. It's better, actually, because you vote with your wallet and tell the publisher that you did and you encourage others to follow suit. This way publishers can't just blame something else for the lack of sales for Generic 3d Shooter: Curbstomp Edition.
"April fools day" will not be a good day for him to publish "secret stuff".
Show HN: password protected messages
Just in case it might be a problem for anyone: The article uses the CSRF vulnerability to log you out of all Google services (and says so in a PS at the bottom).

Don't open the article if you don't want to have to log in to Google again afterwards (might be a problem if you're using two-factor auth and you don't have your phone handy for instance).
Clarification: he didn't recently find the exploit. He's been making noises about it for a very long time and being ignored, so he took the (dubious, to some) step of using the exploit publicly and loudly, to draw attention to the problem.
I'd not say so. All new - well forgotten old.
why? seems perfect.
It's still not clear how he did it. According to the full article at theatlantic.com, his odds were close to 50/50, but still against him. It's pretty lucky that he won so much in 3 separate cases.
When I stop to think about it, it seems strange to me that ownership of copyright is transferable at all. I suspect it comes from years of thinking of intellectual property as if it were physical property.

Just as a thought experiment: could a system where copyright isn't transferable but lasts until the death of the author work? Assuming a suitable definition of "death" which covers both individuals and companies, that is.
Life-extending drug without the negative side effects
And this does have real value. Myself and 2 other friends were this close to doing exactly what Leaky is doing, but I (the programmer) did not want to spend a lot of time implementing that price prediction model off of hard-to-read (and constantly changing!) legal documents.

From the previous HN post a few days ago, multiple people raised the concern that Leaky quotes them at twice what they are actually paying. Someone else said that without looking up a credit score the rates are basically worthless. So I still have my doubts as to the accuracy of Leaky's data, even though they say it's within 1%. Maybe that's 1% given some default middle-ground credit score?

I was told that the rates insurers file change frequently. So I'm also interested to see how quickly Leaky can stay on top of up-to-date results. That's my second accuracy-related concern.

If these concerns did not exist, I'd already be in this business. I'm sure the same can be said of other people. In fact, I assumed that with such an obvious need for a business like Leaky the absence of such suggested a higher barrier to entry than is visible at first blush. I think what happened in Leaky's case is that they were too naive to know they were being naive, and then kept pushing on it anyway. Isn't that a Steve Jobs quote or something?
There's no excuse for not being able to make a game of at least Counterstrike quality anymore.

Our tools have come so far, and our computers have become so cheap, that the barrier to entry to making a solid, fun, good-looking game is removed. Gone. Poof!

All you need to do is be willing to learn and stubborn enough to execute, and you'll make it.

And you know what else?

We need this. We need hordes of little velociraptor indies to outbreed and outsell publishers. We need the bloated megacorp AbstractGameFactorys to die. We need to free up the IP, we need to encourage genuine risk-taking and technological progress, and we need to do our damnedest to kill off these fuckers before they irrecoverably damage the market and the gamers.
hm yep. should I hide that thing? hm.. Sorry guys in advance.
drchrono (YC W11) and Comprehend (YC W11) - Game-Changing Health Start-ups
I saw Sebastion Seung speak at my college. I highly recommend his book the "Connectome", or just watch his TED talk.
Looks that Google detects the type of logout and doesn't ask for two-factor authentication in this case.
I'm having a little trouble parsing this post. Is he saying he's discovered a variant of CSRF that cannot be stopped by using the Synchronizer Token Pattern? Or has he found something that a lot of site's protection patterns don't follow?
Isn't it also sexist? And by default cutting out a large sector of the market...
This is the schedule I naturally tend to as well.

I usually wake up at around 4 pm, then spend the remainder of the day just hanging out, doing some chores and wasting time on the internet. In the evening I go out to dinner or a bar, and then hang out and play games with friends. I head home once the night is over - usually it is around midnight to 2 am. At this point I am usually bored of distraction, and entering the peak of my waking period. In the quiet solitude of the night, I find myself naturally gravitating into the Zone. On a good night, I can continue invincibly into the afternoon. At this point, I get any necessary email and administrative work out of the way, make sure my work is committed, and fall asleep.

If during a night session, I find myself falling out of the Zone, I simply just go to sleep early. However, this has the unfortunate side effect of shifting my schedule unpredictably for while.
Nice angle. Any way to hold them responsible when Leaky's quote does not match the insurer's quote? Force them to make the price 100% reproducible from public documents given the same information on the consumer.
On that topic, I wasn't able to find any information on the security of Fabric or the sandboxing it uses. Short of going through the source code is there documentation on this topic?

NACL, which is only somewhat similar in that it runs native code via the browser, went to great lengths to demonstrate how their sandboxing worked to address the FUD of running native code in the browser. I have a very similar FUD about executing Fabric LLVM code from arbitrary websites.

To clarify where I'm coming from, I am a javascript / ruby dev and although I have worked in C I do not claim to understand the inner workings of LLVM or have ever worked with it. If there is an implicit reason why building on LLVM would sandbox code written in fabric it is not implicit to me. I doubt I am alone in this and would greatly appreciate an explanation of Fabric's sandboxing.
Another Stuy Town dweller here. It's also a pretty good options for those of us with families. We have a nice park with play area outside our door. It's fairly quiet. And don't forget free heat, water, and electricity!
I am saddened by the fact that I cannot disagree with your assessment.
How did you detect that it was a money laundering scheme in the first place !?
It'd be nicer if you had a link to a separate page that does it so that people can read the post first.
nope. Token Pattern is ugly workaround browsers' vulnerability - that's the point.
3 Positive Feedback Traps Startups Should Be Wary Of