skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"With his funding, he planned to make the game available for free on the web, and Crawford suspects that's one of the main reasons why his campaign went down in flames."

Perhaps of note is that Kickstarter's model is based off the Street Performer Protocol, originally intended as a solution for getting private funding for free, public goods.

There is a whole Open Software category on Kickstarter, so clearly "free" is not a reason his campaign failed. Quite frankly, it failed because his vision put "simulation" before having an actually engaging game.
How to Organize Your Project's Directory Structure
I found many of the article's points valid for my applications. Not all tips apply to any ones particular situation but I, like many, am at a point were issues start popping up and its nice to see a general tool box of tips to pick from. Like any tips from anywhere "your results may vary. Consult a professional adviser before acting on any advice."
What Makes Clients Truly Unhappy: Unmanaged Expectations
You must be fun at parties (couldn't resist the snark).
I think that's different. In arcade's example, the only reason you needed a coin is when you have used all your lives. Now, if you had better skills, you could get through the entire game without a single additional coin.

In IAP module, the game is designed so there is no chance (at least for 99% players) to go through the game without purchasing the stuff on the go. Take "where is my water" for example. You can continue game as long as you keep scoring all 3 coins on each level. If you miss even one coin, after many levels you will be missing that coin to open another level. There you have an option to open the level for $$$ Now, some of those coins, in my gaming experience, were impossible to score, but that's a different story...
No one else can implement pinch to zoom, so what? Is pinching the only way, or even the best way to zoom? It may seem like it is the best and most obvious way right now but that is only because Apple popularized it and made it ubiquitous. In the future someone may (gasp) innovate and come up with a better solution, that would in hindsight seem even more obvious.
At least for just right now. This is a promotional period that, currently, is to expire at the end of Jan.
I'm skeptical that they're the main driver of revenue.

Your skepticism is founded on a prediction about a measurable feature of material reality, right? Your prediction is catastrophically inaccurate.

http://casualconnect.org/lectures/games-for-gamers/virtual-g... (Particularly slides 16, 17.)

http://gigaom.com/2011/07/25/game-devs-looking-for-revenues-...

http://www.quora.com/Social-Gaming-Startups-and-Companies/Wh...

Feel free to take anyone in the industry out to coffee if you want confirmation.
Completely agreed. My hope is that either the whole thing collapses with a "what the heck were we thinking" like the $3 ringtone idiocy from several years ago, or at least that there's enough customers like us so that lack of IAP becomes a viable selling point.
Jurors don't have to be ignorant of a subject to be objective. Further, it's up to the lawyers on both sides to dismiss a juror during selection if they think they'll be biased. They didn't, probably because both sides -- believing they were in the right -- thought that someone with knowledge of patents would ultimately see things their way.
Same here.

My first programming languages were Spectrum BASIC and Z80 Assembly shortly thereafter.
If you invented something, you spent ten-of-thousands on patents, you spent huge amounts of capital in developing a product - you launch it to much positive press and then someone simply copies everything you have done. You're a small business - what do you do now ?

Been there.

Me and 2 other people invented a product that hadn't existed before and created an entire lexicon for it. Then jokers at a larger company duplicated our product. The manual and website had been at least rewritten but the similarities to our stuff were obvious.

Eventually we found evidence of typos in the internals of our product showing up in their UI. That was when we got a lawyer. We significantly slowed down their product launch and probably got a few managers fired.

It took a few years for our patent to be issued, which finally got them to fuck off. I would have gladly traded a much shorter term on our patent for a faster issuance. Those years felt like decades.

(We didn't appeal to the Internet because the Internet was a much much different creature back then. A corporate blog was unheard of. And it could have backfired: we had one loose cannon employee in our own company who went around a conference telling everyone how that company had ripped us off; the next year at the same conference everyone remembered the story but many people mis-remembered who had stolen from whom. Which is why we tried to handle things with the legal system instead of by trying to tell everyone what assholes they were. Although there is a Texas company that is now complete poison to have on your resume at any company I work for.)
English hexadecimal "magic" words
I'm using springy in a game and it works great.
I use jsPlumb here http://live.daisyworks.com/editor.html

It is a great way to make drag-n-drop widgets that work for pretty much any browser. Simon has done an awesome job with this.
> "But hey, these days most of these sites are websites, and don't really have big engineering problems to solve. Maybe they don't need to think deeply."

This is by far the most presumptuous and arrogant comment I've seen on HN this week.

Disingenuous too. You claim to "respect" people who like working in open office spaces, and then you turn around an insist they are less productive, and indeed, working on easy problems that don't require extensive thought.

Seriously man?
Ask HN: Mobile shopping cart recs?
Looking for mobile shopping cart software I can integrate into an existing web site. Seems like there are lots of options for uploading product to a hosted store, but we're struggling to find a good mobile shopping cart solution with strong APIs. The important part here is mobile.

We have customer specific pricing and real-time availability is also important so it needs to be heavily API based rather than turn-key "populate the product DB and off you go".

Any recommendations?
I can think of a couple arcade examples analogous to the "in-game currency" variety of IAP. In Gauntlet, inserting coins adds to the player's health, which constantly ticks down. In Lunar Lander, inserting coins buys fuel, which is needed to maneuver.

By the time arcade games were sophisticated enough to have things like multiple weapons and super moves, developers had settled on the model where extra coins are used to buy the ability to continue a game after failing. The arcade industry is quite conservative overall.
I imagine that all it takes is for a few media outlets to pick up on the advent of IAP for Apple to address it. It's becoming somewhat of an ethical problem for them.

Maybe we'll see an equivalent of The Great Google Purge.
Samsung doesn't have 70% profit margins on their mobile devices: that's highway robbery.
This is the reason some studios are now betting on the Vita has they hope that there they are safe from this trend.
This is not exactly true. It's true that you wouldn't break your OS install by switching power off at random times, but if you had something in the middle of writing a file to disk, then it was sure as hell going to leave that file half written.

For sure, there was no "software shut down", but the issue with that was it put the burden on the user to be careful about when they shut it down if they were saving stuff to disk. The floppy and hard drive lights (if you had one!) were there, and as long as you trained yourself to not turn it off while those lights were on, you would probably be fine, but it was far from a sure thing.

I adored the Amiga, and it was way ahead of its time in a whole lot of ways, both software and hardware, but this wasn't really one of them.
The standard free market theory is that profit attracts competitors that enter the market and drive down those profits. They would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those pesky patents.
Scientist Says: Brain Can Be hacked
David Sacks (Yammer) Says Silicon Valley at `End of the Beginning'
Mergulhar no Mar Vermelho em Dahab - Egipto
The UIWebView is slower than Mobile Safari because it's missing the Nitro Javascript engine. (Apparently, for security reasons.) I suspect the Facebook HTML app would have run decently had Nitro been in UIWebViews.

You're right, it doesn't have to be that way forever.
Hopefully, Nitro has been brought to UIWebViews in iOS6.
If not, well darn.
Investing In Our Neighbours Is Good
A brief discussion on the trend to invest internationally.
Exactly, and we pretty much have ourselves to blame. We prefer to get ripped off via "free" or low upfront costs, or "sales" taken off ridiculously inflated prices. Honest pricing is generally not rewarded; look at the Nexus One, or JC Penny's attempts at transparency.
Sucks that this post is so far down. It's the only piece of content on the page so far that doesn't seem like a biased, drunken tirade, including the OP.
I have thought about doing something like this - providing a sysadmin service to companies who don't necessarily need a full-time sysadmin, but do need e.g. emergency response to system failures. I see two main challenges to making this profitable:

) Knowledge of client applications. To fix something in a timely manner, you need to know the application/architecture. If the client does not have documentation (or, as is more likely, they have outdated documentation), learning the architecture could mean a large upfront time investment.

) Bursty nature of support requests. This could be mitigated by doing consultancy/project work in the same market.

Particularly in early startups, the infrastructure tends to grow organically. Having an outsider help document the infrastructure and processes could be quite useful.

If anyone wants to discuss this idea more, my email is in my profile. I think there is a market out there for such a service - I'd love to hear from anyone who thinks it might be useful to them.
Awesome have wanted something like this for a long time, just don't have the mastery of JS to create it myself!
This looks good. But it wasn't clear to me that the author is talking about the UK (primarily? exclusively) without reading a fair amount of the page.
While I agree with you on the point on oil there, could you provide a few links to back this up? Although in most cases they won't make a difference, they will to someone with an open mind.
That's because those empty books aren't truly empty. They're filled with imagined potential. Most purchasers estimate the value of that potential as high and are therefore willing to invest in something expensive to protect it and signal its worth.
I'm somewhat glad to see a mainstream news piece covering HN material like this getting slammed by the community - I know people who still subscribe to real newspapers (of the local variety) and am amazed at how terrible and slow their coverage of most things is. This is especially apparent in instances like this one, where we've been having a much more coherent discussion about this for days now.

edit: Just to add another anecdote about the failings of mainstream news, last July there was an article in the business section of the paper about that blog post about the fake Apple stores in China, which appeared at least a week after the link appeared on HN and with unintelligent, spun commentary attached.
With Windows 8, they will basically have the same UI for desktops, tablets and phones.

What makes you think this is a good idea? They are different devices with different use-cases. Why would you want the same metaphor across all of them? I don't try to drive while I'm sitting on the toilet, and I don't flush the driver's seat after I've parked the car.
The guy's patent is for a device that simply saves streaming media to a hard-drive and plays it back. Basically a PVR/set-top or video iPod. Is this non-obvious? If anything, this indicates to me someone who's mentality is pro aggressive IP ownership and enforcement. Like having someone who works for the RIAA/MPAA as a juror in a BitTorrent downloading case.

I wonder how the case would have went if it the jury had been assembled from 9 people who have been working on touch interfaces for the last 20 years.
I think the outside is really interesting but inside is cold & cavernous. Which actually fits well with the MIT style, but not very warm or inviting.
Gehry, like pretty much all artists, is hit or miss. But his hits are fantastic.

Walt Disney Concert Hall is one of the most stunning buildings on the west coast, inside and out. It's not a gimmick, it's genuine artistic achievement.
The implication of being a small business is that you are resource-constrained and cannot do those things as well as the big players can

I disagree with this implication. Being small just means you have to use the resources that you do have, to greater effect. And a small business has a lot of advantages in it's own way... you can typically learn faster, react faster, give customers more personal attention, and you can pursue niches that would be too small for a larger player to focus on.

which is why you need patent protection for your innovations.

Right, because if Apple decides to use technology created by Enraged Camel Software, Inc. you're going to be able to afford the legal fight with them, even if you do have a patent?

And never mind the money you wasted getting a patent in the first place. Depending on who you believe, it can routinely cost somewhere north of $50,000 just to get a patent. What else could a small company / startup do with $50,000?

And never mind that your startup can easily be attacked by $RANDOM_BIGCORP for "violating" some submarine patent that you never knew about, if you step on their toes. IBM alone has so many freaking patents, I'd bet they could construct a reasonable enough patent lawsuit against nearly any new startup that emerges, if they felt like it. And even if they lost in the end, they'd bankrupt the startup in the process.

I just don't think patents (and software patents in particular) do any good for startups / entrepreneurs. Actually, I think they are actively harmful; especially when the USPTO is granting these ridiculously overbroad patents for trivially obvious ideas.
Does anyone own this book? I am actually thinking of going the Freelance way and am looking for a good overview of the outcomes and challenges. I feel a bit lost with all the various information that I have read on the Internet, so am looking for something I can trust and that reflect the reality of freelancing well.
So they're basically PUAs.
How much would you pay for a Github backup service?

Something similar to this is on my list of potential ideas, but I am not sure enough people would use it.
The other two comments (at this moment) summed it up pretty well. The treatment has a high rate of success (80%) and is in no way "experimental". If something has become a part of the standard medical "toolbox", providing it to everyone is reasonable. There is simply no excuse for our current system, especially when other countries provide care and spend less to do it.
Double really?

All you would have to do is buy an iPhone or see one in action, and copy it. Or just, you know, come up with the idea on your own.
Empire State Building shooting victim says NYPD fired 'randomly' into street
Would also love to see a test of 10.7.0 as a number of us have already been experiencing battery problems since switching from Snow Leopard to Lion that were (partially) sorted out with 10.7.4 (See: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235)
Thank you for this highly relevant contribution to the present discussion.
I don't think I've misunderstood anything. I'm not saying patents do not work like this, I'm saying they should not - its my opinion that the way the system currently works is broken and it should not have been possible to get a patent on trivial features.

Also, I'm curious to know which are the "big gun" patents you're referring to. Does this mean Apple will be able to sue Samsung again for even more?
Keep in mind that an empty notebook is not the same as an empty book, nor is Moleskine famous for being affordable. Moreover, full notebooks are among the most expensive types of books.
Why I choose native code over PhoneGap or Appcelerator Titanium
Will somebody please explain what this means. Does this mean Apple can now sue someone who uses pinch-to-zoom on a touch screen? In other words can Apple now just sue for using pinch-to-zoom without having to build a huge case like it did in this one?
""" Then there are the "social games", which to me is really an abuse of the word "game", since they are nothing more (IMHO) than exercises in feeding addiction and inducing compulsive behaviour. There is no element of skill. It's simply who can purchase the most. """

I think you can see that some game especially on mobile are starting to be more social and more skill based, even if the gameplay is asynchronous. I'm thinking about games like Words with Friends or SongPop. Draw Something is also really social but it's cooperative, not competitive.
I like Groklaw's comment (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012082510525390)

" If it would take a lawyer three days to make sure he understood the terms in the form, how did the jury not need the time to do the same? There were 700 questions, remember, and one thing is plain, that the jury didn't take the time to avoid inconsistencies, one of which resulted in the jury casually throwing numbers around, like $2 million dollars for a nonfringement.

Come on. This is farce. "
Now they'll be as hip as IAC who has 2 buildings designed by Gehry - one in NYC (http://www.iachq.com/interactive/content.html) and West Hollywood on Sunset.
Do you also object to games with a free 'lite' version and a paid 'full' version, where the two are separate app store entries, or is it only games where you have to pay for the full version via IAP that you dislike?
We have closed donations coming directly through PayPal. Thank you to everyone who has been so generous. The IndieGoGo campaign will remain open for another day or so, but we can't keep taking donations when we've now clearly met our goal.

The $50,000 we collected in 10 days will more than cover all of Ken's medical expenses as he continues through his difficult cancer treatment. Thank you to everyone who helped out, you are all wonderful people. :)

Thomas
It might be a nice app but it requires permission to perform R/W operations when I'm not using the application. Why do you need those permissions?
Curious about the credit management mechanism. For the unused credits (coins), can the users ask for refund? Or they expire after some time, just like the cell phone purchased minutes.
Some modern shoot-em-ups in the arcade have blatantly unfair portions of the game where you WILL get hit and lose a life. See CarnEvil for an example. I would consider these similar to IAP.

Older arcade games like Galaga and Super Mario Brothers, however, give you a fair opportunity to avoid the "Insert Coin to Continue" screen based on your skill. I can last 20-30 minutes on a single quarter easily for both of those games.
The app doesn't do this, but in order to list all files on your drive I had to request full permissions.
Can you explain how patents don't grant a type of legal monopoly? This seems non-obvious to me, and poking around on Wikipedia has only served to reinforce my suspicion that they are.
You seem to imply you've read the patent. Could you find the specific claims and then show us some prior art for them?

Many things become "obvious" after they have entered commercial production, but are not obvious at the time they are invented. The car is obvious now, for instance.

Your comment about the jury assumes there were touch interfaces 20 years ago (of a type relevant to this case.) Apple started in the 1990s, but even Jeff Han is using a completely different method.

This seems to imply that you're confusing patents for a "right to sell a feature". On this site I've seen many claims that Apple's patents are covered by "prior art" but the "art" cited is generally nonsensical (eg: 2001: a space odessy having square tablets) and indicate that people think patents cover ideas or features, rather than inventions used to bring them to life.

Just because the TiVo exists, does not mean that I can't, today, invent a novel method of solving similar problems to the TiVo that is legitimately patentable.

TiVo's existence doesn't make patentable inventions in the same space impossible.

The rotary engine was patentable even though other internal combustion engines were already on the market.
Take a look at this. http://www.wallpaper.com/images/98_02032007_prada_f.jpg
The LG Prada phone - released before the original iphone anouchement (though it looks quite a lot like the current 4/4s).
Rectangular, touch screen phones weren't an apple invention. And shouldn't be protected.
Facebook Should Fire Sheryl Sandberg
Authors on Why They Write
PetroChina: The Truly Most Valuable Company in the World
Yes, the reason why Angry Bird is not in the top grossing app is because they already dominate the market. This metric is based on the number of new install on the last week or so. The fact that they are still #2 of paid app (also a metric on the last month or so) means that they monetize pretty well with in app purchase already.
Actually some NumPy calls can be made inside the numba-compiled function as there is nascent support for the NumPy C-API --- it translates the call to a C-call.

In the future, we want to support all Python, but not necessarily optimized --- just using the Python Object C-API.
As someone who is spent the last 20 years of my life on a computer for a minimum of 10 hours a day, I can confirm that Windows 8 stumped me for 5 to 10 minutes while I tried to figure out how to invoke the login screen.

While I am so thrilled that this power user enjoyed his experience, mine was infuriating for the first two hours and made me feel stupid. Those with dramatically less patience and investment in personal computing will probably feel the same way.
They do grant a type of legal monopoly... but on an invention, not on a feature. So, in my example, Jeff Han demonstrated pinch to zoom using cameras photographing your hans, while Apple has a patent on an invention that lets a screen figure out where your fingers are. They both could be patented and have a legal monopoly on their inventions even though they are the "same thing".

If your objection is to there being a monopoly at all, I can understand that. But please then consider several things- for instance, if this system were abolished then companies like Apple would be obscuring their methods to prevent copying, and their platforms would be more locked down. I think if we lived in a world without patents, many of the anti-IP people would be advocating for a requirement that companies like Apple publish the nature of their inventions.
This seems like a very interesting book. How relevant is it for people starting consulting businesses, i.e. not solo freelancers but rather freelance companies?

I'm talking about questions like: how to allocate the different people to different tasks, how/when to hire employees, hiring on-site employees vs. hiring freelancers who work from home (potentially form elance or similar), etc. Does this book get into any of these topics at all?