skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Patents cover inventions of methods and processes to accomplish something-- implementations, not the idea or the feature.

Thus pinch-to-zoom as Jeff Han demonstrated it, using cameras to take pictures of your hands is not the same thing as apple doing it using software to turn noisy amorphous blobs into finger points on a capacitive touch screen.

Other people can implement pinch-to-zoom because pinch-to-zoom cannot be patented.

Both Apple and Jeff Han could have patents on their very different implementations of this same feature.

Unfortunately people really seem to believe that patents cover features, and I think this is due to the deliberate spin put on the discussions by anti-patent people.

If you disagree, try reading the pinch-to-zoom patent itself.
I'm guessing it's also an emotional issue: someone loves Twitter, they use it to communicate in ways they couldn't before. But they are frustrated by Twitter's own apps, and wanted to find a better way to use this service they love.
Is it just me or did the game market become much more sinister than it used to be? It's all about getting people effectively addicted to make more money out of them. Give them a taste for free, once they're hooked, start cashing in on those poor addicts.
Right. Just because you can doesn't mean you have to, but it does mean you can.

This is little more than a new round of the CSR debate.

I find it hard to fault Apple for cashing in on the ridiculous legal system.
You think Barnes and Noble copied the novel implementation of one-click, as disclosed by the patent, and didn't use bog standard database and cookie techniques?
If you have code duplication/DRY problems, then Backbone is not your problem. You need to abstract common functionality and add mixins to Backbone.View.prototype.

In every backbone project that I have developed, the set of View mixins that I create are very specific to each project and the custom UI/UX I build. It would be a useless exercise to abstract all of my View mixins into some kind of opinionated framework, because I know my next project is going to look and behave differently.

That said, if you are working on a large project with some simple UIs/UXs and need some simple data binding, then you may want to check out an "ambitious" framework like ember.js. Backbone is a library that helps you organize large projects with a lot of complex and custom UI/UX.
OT, but in CSR Racing and many "pay to avoid waiting" games, there's actually a bug where if you move forward the time on your device, the game thinks the time has passed and gives you the free gas.
A subscription game only works if you're WoW. Virtually every other big name MMO since that has ended up free to play.
Free to play is the modern coin-op. Sure, it can ruin a game - anything can. Executed properly you'll find a mechanic of variable pricing based on a customer's interest in your product. If someone cares more, they (can) pay more. Who could ask for a better pricing model?
> Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone.

The TARDIS.

Your move.
There are some interesting insights in here, but I think it's a bit like talking about the "fall" of Harry Potter or the "fall" of Star Wars. People get bored of particular entertainment franchises and icons and move on to the next thing. While there's undoubtedly more to milk from Angry Birds (especially if iOS devices get new innovations they can lean on), they'd better be working on new franchises that could be even bigger.
>> A very small percentage of people buy stuff in games. Of this small percentage you have people who will spend a LOT. These are your die hard fans. I know, because I am one of them and won’t bat an eye spending $50 in a game I like.

I would love to analyze the in-game purchase data across multiple free-to-play games on multiple platforms (e.g. facebook, app store, etc) in order to see the distribution of user spending habits. While I'm sure there are power users who spend magnitudes more than the average, I'm skeptical that they're the main driver of revenue. What I'd like to see is the average % of users who make in-game purchases, the average in-game purchase over time, frequency of purchases and what % of total revenue the average represents.

Unfortunately, I don't think Zynga et al will be releasing this data publicly anytime soon.
Oh wow, I wrote this post a while ago! :-)

It was a neat little idea to play around with when I first wrote the post, since setting X-Requested-With on an arbitrary domain requires a violation of the same-origin policy. But as I point out at the top of the post, there was at least one recent case of a same-origin violation (via the Flash 307 bug) that allowed for arbitrary headers to be written.

CSRF tokens, whether they're in headers or in a form, are the more secure way to prevent an attack. They require a violation of the same-origin policy where an attacker can read (at least part of) the HTTP response sent by your server. If an attacker can do that, you already have larger issues.
Its nice, but I didn't like how "save" means "share". When I logged in with facebook, it told me it wouldn't post to my wall or access my data, so I wasn't expecting it to share my tune under my real name (I wouldn't have clicked save if I'd have known).
Robot learns self-awareness
Saw a friend of mine the other say, he had a angry birds teeshirt on. He has never played it ever in his life nor even knew it was a game, just liked the teeshirt. I showed him the game, involving the killing of birds and pigs and he was not phased in any way but still likes his teeshirt.

Apart from that any old death of Tetris type article were you change the title to angry birds will be relevant in such matters of simple fun games and there lifespan.
>The idea that you need Apple's permission to install software on your mobile computer is false.

How do I put executable code onto my iPhone and run it without their permission? Unless you can answer without the words "iTunes app store" or "jailbreak", you have proven yourself wrong.
This is a classic example of solving the vendor's problem rather than the user's problem. A unified UI is scratching MS's itch. They have a problem with tablets eating away at their pie so they sacrifice usability because they don't want to have to write two different OSes, or rather two experiences. They already tried this when they brought the mouse to a phone, now they do the reverse.
What's even worse are the paid games that also have "Buy 10000 coins" in IAP.

At this point I have enough games to play and any games that have IAP consisting of energy/coins/diamonds/whatever I immediately avoid, even if it's a well-liked game. I don't have time for that sort of thing.
> But I wish the Window key was more like the Cmd key in OS X. That is, I wish it was a modifier key that can be used in key combinations, and ideally have it be the primary modifier.

I disagree; the entire point of the Windows key is that it isn't interpreted by applications. It provides instant keyboard-driven access to OS/shell functions (i.e. cross-application functions), and I love it.

Linux (really X Window and window managers, I suppose) could benefit from using that key in the same way; Ubuntu's Unity does so to a limited extent. Imagine having useful keyboard-driven system/window management that's guaranteed not to conflict with any of your applications. (If that already exists, someone please clue me in, I'm less familiar with Linux than I am with Windows.)
You can't buy or build enough servers to handle a short term rush. It is not cost effective. There is much more to it and I don't really feel like writing an essay, but the above point is probably one of the biggest.

I have been wondering if you could build an mmo where the servers run on things like aws so you could add and drop servers as needed.
Career.fork() - How To Thrive As A Freelance Developer
If you account for merchandising, I wonder if Angry Birds is beating the top free to play app?
Sensible people considered these minor features too obvious.

Apples invention was the combination of many simple things into one good product, but they are protecting it by patenting all of the simple things.
Samsung Details Ice Cream Sandwich Upgrades For US Carriers
I see minecraft pocket edition on that list as well and it is neither a $0.99 game or a free to play. I think this is evidence that people are willing to pay for a well-made product. For me this article is simply a rehash of Zynga's whale strategy and we know how manipulative and frankly evil that is.
True... YOU expect the game to push ads at you or try to sell you things, because this is your domain. You look at it from a totally technical point of view, you have plenty of experience dealing with this sort of thing. Mr Smith the average app user on the other hand doesn't have this expectation, and if a little box pops up telling him he can upgrade his sword twice as quickly for just 99 cents, he just might do it..
>> Compared to a normal desktop, where most of your functional navigation is crammed into a small bar

This is a taste thing. Myself, I'll take the crammed bar over the grid any day.

Even though I'm primarily a Mac user these days, I'm a Luddite when it comes to Windows - I still prefer the look and feel of Windows 2000 over its successors.
Gehry is a genius of marketing, not design. Andy Warhol knew the key to fame was to make your work distinctive and memorable. He did it by incorporating familiar elements. People feel good when they can recognize something, "Oh, that must be a Warhol". And that's why Warhol became cool.

Gehry takes this idea to a whole new level - distinctive at all costs. His work is unpleasant, but people remember it. Thus Gehry becomes "cool". Hey, its a business strategy.
It does seem sad. So many problems to be solved in the world, but the things getting financial reinforcement and attracting technical talent are compulsive gaming and nanosecond-level stock trades that are unrelated to productive work. Good thing Farmville wasn't around in the 1960s, we'd have never gotten to the moon.
Some things are just static by nature. There's no point instantiating to use their html helpers for example.
Our government already spends more money on Medicare/Medicaid than most other governments spend on healthcare. I don't see how we could possibly lower our government spending by covering more people.
That scares the pants off me. I really fear games moving in this direction.
You can't patent the feature "pinch-to-zoom" you can only patent an invention of a method to implement that feature. Thus, samsung could have implemented the feature if they had done it their own way.

For example, Jeff Han demonstrated a similar feature, but his system uses cameras to take pictures of your hands.

Thus both he and Apple could have patented their inventions for implementing this feature.

The idea that these patents cover the rights to use features is misinformation designed to make them look trivial.

Of course they seem absurd- they are made to look absurd to you to get you to oppose patents.

And they are doing this by lying to you about what the patents cover.
>> They're realistic about their products.

I've worked with two ex-Microsoft developers, and they've led me to believe otherwise.

Neither of them worked on the Windows team, but they were around when Vista was released. From their descriptions, management seemed very confident that Vista was going to be a resounding success. Apparently a lot of the rank-and-file developers had serious doubts about the product, and management didn't want to hear it.

Granted, that's anecdotal and things could have changed since then. Somehow I doubt it though.
It's truly unfortunate. If the money is really in F2P (and I think it is), I would hate to see "core" developers like Epic/Valve/ID integrate those features into their games because it makes business sense.

Yes, TF2 is F2P, but I think they've done it in a fairly tasteful manner. The MvM stuff with tickets is skirting the edges a little bit, but time will tell how it all turns out.
Addition from what I've read further down the thread, it appears that the patent is about the way Apple implemented pinch-to-zoom, not the feature of having pinch-to-zoom as a gesture for zooming in general.

So that would be where maybe my analogy breaks down. However:

Can someone maybe explain me/us what is exactly so unique and non-obvious about the way they implemented it, then? And yes I did read the patent, or at least an excerpt of it that appeared to explain roughly how any decent programmer would implement such a thing, given an hour to think it over and an OS/GUI API that is vaguely object-oriented and event-based.

I did read that part.

Does anyone have the non-obvious part handy? (for the pinch-to-zoom specifically, as I just want to focus on one thing, this conversation is convoluted enough as it is)
A good resource on responding to feedback can be found at http://www.gotjuice.co.uk/blog all their articles are geared around how to improve on bad reviews and how to respond
Show HN: The SWE Axis API
Technically the upvote/downvote aren't for agreeing and disagreeing, they're for curating the content to stay on-topic.

But in practice everyone uses them as agree/disagree.
"it never gets easier, you just go faster" - Greg LeMond

this is the reason elite athletes keep getting better, they keep up intensity, continuing to push the limits. Bike committing gets easier, and, like you said, your body adjusts to the level of output you need to get to work.
I dislike free-to-play games because they tend to distort the gameplay towards paying additional in-game credits. It also feels a bit like printers: you get the printer for cheap but pay a lot on inks. Here they lure people in with a well-designed free game that lives on in-app purchases (IAP).

That being said, the revenues discussed in this post are crazy.

On a side-note, I wish the App Store allowed to filter out by apps that have or not IAP. I really don't mind paying for apps and games but sometimes there will be a cool free game available. Nowadays most games are free but with many IAP. If I see a high-ranked free game I tend to turn around when I see it has IAP because I know the gameplay will be around buying more stuff.

On a second side-note, I wouldn't mind the fall of Angry Birds. IMO, the game has received a disproportionate amount of success and the merchandising all over the place has been ridiculous (e.g. a "Angry Birds" Roku box? That makes no sense). The game is ok but not very original or entertaining (again, IMO) but the milking of the brand has been the worst part of it.
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Math is all prior art!
If you think "pinch-to-zoom on a mobile device with touch screen" is a reasonable thing to patent so that nobody except Apple can use it on a smartphone

I agree that this would be absurd, but I think it kind of misses the point of the case. Samsung pretty clearly copied Apple in a "look and feel" way that goes beyond the particular collection of patents. The patents in the case are just the instruments that Apple used to punish the copying.

There are all sorts of other phones that technically infringe on Apple's patents (and vice-versa), but Apple doesn't seem interested in taking the offensive on these. I think Apple's position is much more about the spirit of Samsung's copying rather than defending any particular technical patent violation. But in order to bring a case, you have to pick out some particular violations rather than argue some abstract notion of "copying the spirit" of the iPhone.
It is true, you're just simply being dishonest. You can download and install full javascript apps that run on the device. To call it "putting a web link on the screen" is a lie. After you installed the app, you can go into airplane mode, tap the icon and be in the app and use it-- with no connection to any network. It is an app, not a link. It requires no provisioning file at all, it could be anything you want to download from the web. It could be porn or a shopping list app, whatever.

These apps have access to the iPhone UI patterns such as navigation controller, tab controller etc, and look and feel and work like native apps-- because they are native apps.

I'm tired of people who are ignorant of the technology and ideologically driven to spread lies calling the truth "bizarro world". You're the one who is telling the lie here, buddy. Your need to characterize me like that stems from it. Further, your ignorance of the existence of a solution is not proof that the solution doesn't exist, and when told about it, you should research it, not characterize me.
Didn't apple recently win a sales injunction against google over the galaxy nexus, because it included a search box on the homescreen that dared to search multiple sources of content at the same time? That seems to disprove Miguel's point that if you don't blatantly rip off apple, you have nothing to fear.
"Apple revolutionised the industry"

You give them far too much credit. Apple happened to be first in implementing an obvious conclusion in the evolution of computing: combining a true operating system with the features of a PDA and adding a radio. Many people saw this coming a decade earlier; I was one of them.

The reason it happened when it did had to do with the hard work of the scientists and engineers who kept shrinking and creating ever more powerful computing technology, not with the guy who happened to allow his engineers to pursue this obvious conclusion. Steve Jobs was a visionary only when compared to other CEO's, not when compared to the scientists and engineers that really make things happen.
There are people who don't know that homeopathy is utter BS?
Apple didn't invent touchscreens but..

I've seen two of the pre-iPhone touchscreen OSes without a sliding keyboard or anything like that and they both sucked hard. I owned a LG Prada and knew someone who owned a Samsung F490. They were both terrible, I would've rather had a classic phone than a Prada and my friend who owned the Samsung F490 handed it down to his daughter and replaced it with a classic phone. Lots of people thought that smartphones with touchscreen would behave like the iPhone in its ads except that it was far from the case.

I don't think anyone but Apple could've kicked off the touch revolution. RIM and Nokia ? they only switched course after the iPhone. Nokia's stayed in the comfort zone with Symbian for far too long and didn't have any innovative OS for smartphones and RIM was making candybar, fat and ugly phones with basically just one target audience : people who constantly use email. As long as most people use cases of mobile internet came from email software, RIM wouldn't have felt the need to innovate at all.

The iPhone was really the first touchscreen phone I ever felt comfortable to use. People who made the comparison to the Prada when they were saying that Apple didn't innovate obviously never touched a Prada. It's one of the shittiest phones I've ever used, and phones with keyboards were much better than this. The tactile feel of the touchscreen wasn't good, it lacked precision and the whole interface was programmed in mobile flash. It lacked any advanced feature and couldn't install apps outside of J2ME crap, unlike Windows Mobile. It didn't even have a real web browser.

It's been proven with the new Windows Phones, and new BB os, that you don't need to copy Apple to make good touchscreen OSes. I can understand the anger Apple felt with some Android vendors, and it is true that Samsung even changed the stock Android icons on some of their phones to match more closely the look of the iPhone (WHAT exactly is wrong with the stock android UI ? for god's sake, don't mess with something that already works great).
Samsung is renowned for being copycats, and not just in the mobile phone market. The trial itself revealed that they were targeting Nokia before they changed course to target Apple. But almost all of their electronic division consists of nothing more than being shitty copycats. Their digital cameras aren't anything to brag and Samsung was so late to the DSLR market (mostly hybrids in their case.. uh) that I can't understand why one would ever consider them seriously. Their whole home appliance division consists of nothing but copying other products, they never made anything worth a look.
I'm surprised how Apple-biased the people here is. They're clearly abusing the patent system by patenting ridiculous things. How come things like slide to unlock are considered innovation? that's been used to open laptops before Apple patented it.
Don't forget the cute minimalistic bitten apple and the fact that they are #1 in product placement.
I get so tired if the black rectangle argument. It's completely disingenuous imo. It's not just about black rectangles as Samsung likes to frame the argument; it's a design for a phone. It's not a black rectangle piece of paper or painting or anything else. It's about a mobile device.

The argument needs to be kept in context and if you were with a company that introduced a new device that looked like nothing else on the market at the time, and then a year or so later a lot of other devices started pooping up that looked like it - what would you do? Just say oh well, it's just a rectangle that's obvious and bound to be copied so we'll just let it go..? I don't think so.

I've worked for a well known design company in the past and I know what goes into coming with something (hopefully) original. I've seen people do it. I've also seen them say, hey that's too much like Product X we need to do something more unique and better. Looking across Samsung's cables, headphones, docks, and even stores, they didn't have to consider that. They just took what someone else did and tweaked it (sometimes) a little and put their name on it. The designers I worked with would never have done this. They would have been fired for it as well.

So all in all, the 'black rectangle' argument in my mind is just complete bs. There's a lot of work that goes into designing 'a thing' and Apple took years to come up with the iPhone. Ultimately people noticed and rewarded them. And so has the jury. While our patent system may suck in a lot of ways, this was a big win for design and physical form.
$12,000,000 a month? Holy shit. I had no idea the ceiling was that high. I made a free to play Android game that took me 6 weeks and made about $10 total... I guess I need to give this another shot.
Object.fork ? is there any environment in which that even attempts to make sense?

Fork is a system call.
Fault Injection in Production: Resilience testing - John Allspaw, Etsy
>This is slightly off topic, but I don't really understand Miguel de Icaza.

It might be that you have a narrow view of free/open source software. The idea behind it is not all about GNU or Linux or anything. iTerm 2 is a mighty fine open source software -- for OS X.

Open source is not incompatible with Apple or Windows. Nor it is a religion/principle thing to everyone, some see it more casually.

>I appreciate that his company xamarin are working solidly on Mono which is open source, but a number of their products are not open source such as Mono Touch and Mono for Android.

Well, he also has to make money. He tried the open source non commercial approach with Evolution et al, and it didn't work very well for them (or for the Nautilus guys). If it wasn't for Novell buying them they would have nothing to show for today.