skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In older versions of Windows 8, swiping up was indeed necessary. And, in fact, there was an affordance (of sorts) to let you know that that was what you were supposed to do: if you did anything that was not a swipe-up, the screen bounced up slightly, revealing a little bit of the login screen underneath. After seeing that, it was a little more obvious what to do.

Now, obviously that was still a pain in the ass and Microsoft wisely axed that requirement for mouse-based computers. Now I think things are much better -- yes, there is no affordance telling you what to do, but if you do literally _anything_, then you get what you wanted. That's not too bad.
YouTube testing Moodwall, wants you to discover videos by 'vibe'
Has Apple Really Ever Invented Anything? [video]
A Day in the Life at MIT's Sloan School of Management
I think it's because in TF2 you get a super fun, deep game that you can play for years and have a ton of fun and not pay a penny. You only pay for "extras".

In FarmVille, when you use up your virtual money you can't play anymore. You can't plant anything, you can't harvest anything, you can't plow anything. You just have to wait a few hours until your plants grow.

So your choice is make an IAP or literally watch grass grow.

And even of you could grind through that and keep playing (say by mining gol laboriously)... TF2 is just a more complex, more interesting game. FarmVille and the like seem to exist only to get you to spend money compulsively.
"Obvious" is a relative term. What is obvious to an adult may not be obvious to a 2-year-old. Likewise, to many engineers the iPhone was obvious. To many of the CEO's heading large cell phone companies? Not so obvious.
Gay in Silicon Valley. A Founder's Perspective.
...not to mention Jobs with his extreme willingness to control everything, was initially against any third party apps. His vision was: you buy this device, here are the set of app, go and have fun. thats it. Its only after Cydia getting traction he changed his mind...

http://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-de...
Did you read what I was replying to?
What they bring to the table: experience in foreign markets (all that legal headache, market research, contacts).

They probably "should" do that by offering this as a service to promising US startups. But who would pay for that an even remotely comparable amount of $$$ than what they get now?
I'm 100% with you: personally, I would happily pay a substantial price for a good quality game, which I could install on whichever computer I want without it messing anything up, and which had a single-player focus. Sadly, hardly anyone makes games like that any more.

It is, unfortunately, the logical conclusion of Internet piracy. The pirates can talk about how a ripped off copy isn't really a lost sale and they wouldn't have paid anyway until they're blue in the face, but the fact is that someone has to pay for the games these people obviously enjoy so much. Given that one-off big purchases of games seem to have at most 5-10% efficiency in terms of people buying legal copies, the people making the games are looking for alternative models where the pirates can't just copy the whole thing, which means something where you take the money interactively or something where you never actually get most of the game data installed locally so you can't copy it. And that means in-app purchases for the little guys and things like DLC and MMOGs for the big players.

And they still throw in increasingly obnoxious DRM for good measure, presumably because the net win from making it more difficult or time-consuming for some people to get a pirate copy outweighs the loss of custom from people like me who would buy a good game without the junk but won't spend that kind of money on software we aren't actually going to own/control.

In short, if you miss paying a fair price for a finished game, blame the pirates, and blame the short-sighted executives at the big game companies who couldn't find a better way to respond to those pirates than screwing their legitimate customers.
And you don't think game developers targeting the 10% of the players who, frankly, have a problem, while the other 90% are left with nothing at all, describes exactly a collapse of the mobile gaming market? It's not as though games need to stop being made or that everyone has to lose money for that to happen. Look at this article and it's plain: it's nothing but talk about how developers are going to monetize next - nothing, not a single sentence, about how to improve the state of the art.

The biggest challenge for mobile game developers is that the platform just really isn't all the great for making good, fun games that people will want to actually pay for. And all the brainpower is going into monetization strategies rather than innovating on that platform. Like games on Facebook, mobile is good for making games that separate from their money people with addictive or compulsive personalities. Little else.

I fucking love video games. Console and PC. My Steam account is worth many thousands of dollars by now. I haven't paid for a game on mobile in over a year (and I haven't been downloading any of this free garbage to make up for it, either), and I don't miss it. I read on the train instead. I don't think I'm atypical.
>Im glad Microsoft is cleaning ship, and i understand that the windows "power users" will need counseling.

I think the subtext of these posts is that time will tell if they're cleaning ship or just filling it with a whole new generation of powerusers around a system designed primarily for casual use. That's nothing to say if casual users find it useful either. Ultimately the whole casual/power user is sort of a false dichotomy. On a long enough curve, all users are powerusers for their case.
How Skillshare Solved the Chicken and Egg Problem
Quite likely most of the new PCs sold after Jan will have Windows 8 on them by default.
Hi - I wrote the book and its focus is on client work as an individual, rather than starting a company. In future releases, my list includes adding a section on sharing work with others, which might be more relevant. If you ping an email to feedback@freelancedeveloperbook.com with stuff you'll like covered, I'll add it to my Trello board
If the US-based hosting provider ignores DMCA requests, can't you sue the provider?

You could also see if their payment provider is willing to help.
Pen vs. Pen: Dealing With A Copycat By Naming & Shaming
That poor guy will never be able to go out for Korean food again...
I hope this makes some kind of a difference on my 2010 Air. 10.8 really destroyed the battery on this thing.
Can't see from the UK

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee."

I am also concerned that the BBC is blocking British users!
An interesting variation on F2P is the one used by World Golf Tour [1], which I've been playing a bit recently.

Instead of forcing users to pay real money to get better equipment, it has another means of earning credits: viewing advertisements. That means that a) I don't feel like I'm actually spending money (except opportunity cost), and b) they can show pretty well-targeted ads to users who are requesting to see them. I don't know the financial details, but I'd guess they can sell for a pretty decent rate. And you have to view quite a lot of them to get as many credits as you could have bought outright for $10.

As an added bonus to them, relying on ads means I have to disable AdBlock for their entire website.

[1]: http://wgt.com
Well... The main patent in this case is the "bounce-back patent".

Where would you draw the line of what´s patentable? To me this seems actually to trivial as with most software patents.

In terms of software it´s not really the implementation that´s protected, more the concept... (Nobody is comparing source code and is looking if it´s coded in the same way)
How will this effect Google's Mobile Advertising Strategy? As the numbers show for almost all free Apps, the In-App-Ad's are being replaced by In-App-Purchasing...
Apache and Linux and Wikipedia are completely valueless according to your only metric.
Thank you for the links, but in the future don't put words in my mouth and then use them as a basis to insult me.
Why not just download the 90 day developer trial of the OS?
In Smalltalk, fork is an instance method on a block.
The Essence of XML
Uh yes, Smalltalk.
I don't know who won but I know who lost. It's you. You who own a mobile phone. You lost.
> "As article notes, 43% in the US admit to cheating."

Actually, the article references another article on their site which references a survey:

http://chronicle.com/article/High-Tech-Cheating-on-Homework/...

The second article states the survey, done by "Center for Academic Integrity", found 22% admitted to cheating on tests, which is the traditional idea of cheating, and 43% admit to "unauthorized collaboration on homework".

Unfortunately, the article does not properly cite its sources. In particular, it does not name the survey, who did the survey, how many participants were involved, what the range of errors is, what the definition of "unauthorized collaboration" is, how the question was phrased, or which of numerous "Center for Academic Integrity" was involved. The most prominent according to Google seems to be the "International Center for Academic Integrity" at a Clemson University, but I was not able to find a reference on their site to such a study.

This is a good example of the problem with not properly attributing one's sources such as "The Chronicle of Higher Education" is doing. Readers can not evaluate the quality of claims in the article if they can not reliably locate the sources and read the parameters and constraints of referenced surveys and studies. It's very unprofessional not to properly cite sources in formal publications and articles.

> "this idea that cheaters are the "other" from countries where they don't know any better is ridiculous"

In my experience (personally as an adjunct professor, and in frequent discourse with other college professors making the same observations) most students in US engineering courses for the last 25 years are nationals from various asian nations. In many other countries collaboration on homework is expected and normal and students are not taught that failure to show sources is plagiarism. Only copying answers on a test is considered cheating in much of the world. Because of this, the majority of cheating in engineering classes is done by foreign students. Much of this is unintentional because they are simply unaware and were raised in a different system. In some cases, students receive sophisticated assistance from their home country, for example Chinese students in some courses have bound Chinese language translations of class-and-professor-specific course materials, including appendices full of past course exams for a given class, with answers and explanations. Making use of any and all resources one has access to, without feeling the need to attribute or explain its provenance is considered common sense, not cheating. Explaining US standards of academic behavior at least provides those who are unaware of these standards an opportunity to adjust their behavior to conform to US (or possibly western) standards of what is considered cheating.

Cautious readers will at this point be observing with delighted skepticism and awareness of irony that - as I post anonymously using an alias - my personal history claims above are not a reliable source and barely qualify as anecdotal.
Since this is essentially Apple vs. the rest of the industry, how can you claim those supporting the industry are the ones that are ideologically driven?
I just observed , whenever there is a discussion about Common Lisp , some how somebody would inject something about Clojure. Did anybody noticed that ?
I don't have a categorical opposition to patents, so the monopoly aspect of them does not particularly concern me.

To what extent do these patents actually benefit the technical community though? As you seem to know, a technically inclined person that actually reads other peoples patents seems to be a rare animal.
Yea, I´m coming from the creative side... And great companies always had attention for detail (or for more more "superficial" stuff if you want to put it that way). The success of that companies (Apple being one of them) clearly inspired other companies to try harder.

What do you do? I guess more research? If there is something like that in software...

And how would you approach the patent system?
Journal of Irresponsible Research?
And so much of twitter's functionality was "contributed" by those same passionate early users - hashtags, @replies etc.

And don't forget if it wasn't for third party developers building their own clients, we wouldn't have the official Twitter clients on iOS or Mac.
It's interesting that the App Store used to explicitly ban upsells ("This feature requires MyApp Pro") in apps, since it is a customer-hostile feature, until they realized they could make a fortune with it.
They are less productive than they could be with better office space, not necessarily less productive than everyone who works in private offices.

Peopleware covers this in great detail. There is a section which suggests that quiet office space is required to find the best non obvious solutions.

http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_12
"...via brute force methods."

Seriously, this registers barely above a lie detector for me. They have to just guess my password and then, when they get it right, they'll record a different brainwave pattern? Sounds simple enough. Okay, my passwords typically consist of several words with some numbers thrown in. I wager we can go through 40 trials each minute for 16 hours each day. How many millions of years do you have?
The purpose of the patent system is not to "teach Samsung a lesson". The purpose of the patent system is to encourage innovation.

Apple made hundreds of billions of dollars even with Samsung copying them. If the patent system disappeared Apple would still make hundreds of billions of dollars, thus they would still have spent billions on R&D without the current patent system.

If you'll notice the jury also found that Samsung violated Apple's trade dress--that was the proper way to go after someone who copies the "look and feel" of your product.

Furthermore I don't care whom Apple sues, I care about the broken system that allows them to do so.

I'm not blaming apple for anything. I've used a macbook pro for the last 5 years by the way, and I only recently switched to a thinkpad running linux b/c I don't like the iOSification of OS X, not because I care whom they sue.
Jury in Apple v. Samsung Goofed, Damages Reduced; What's Wrong With this Picture
It is common for android fans on hacker news to assert that the patents are invalid because the same features exist in android phones, but this is not only a temporal error, but implied a lack of understanding of what patents even are.

I've not seen any arguments on hacker news that the patents are invalid. Period. Full Stop. I've seen this assertion many times and the claim that it is "obvious" but it is clear to me that the people making the assertion have never read the patent and don't know the first thing about patents.
Because of the chilling effect on design or because there are less and less handset manufacturers? Or another reason? Please don't vaguebook me.
Professor William Morgan's distraction hypothesis sounds plausible -- that the distraction takes people's minds off of worrying. Along those lines, productive activities in general may have positive effects not just for their distraction properties but for their intrinsic ability to contribute to a sense of accomplishment.

The distraction hypothesis probably doesn't sit well with those who argue that depression has a physiological basis and must be addressed medically. It's not clear to me whether one side is right and the other wrong or if it's a difference of degree. It seems to parallel ADHD treatment issues, at least on the surface.
Yes! Mobile game companies are essentially casinos (and receive most of their revenue from whales).
F2P is probably a bubble waiting to burst, a short term trend, but I don't think high-quality mobile games have too much to worry about.

There'll always be a market for great games at a fair price.
Anybody have any information on Elon Musk's leadership style? What makes him so successful at inspiring people and making efficient organizations?
Richard Gabriel: Models of Software Acceptance (How Winners Win) [pdf]
The jury had 14 days of hearing evidence. It is quite possible that the case was so compelling that it didn't take them very long to decide the points.

I've yet to see any argument that the verdict is wrong, based on an understanding of the patents in question.
Hacker News is allegedly home to a surprising amount of smart people. Nobody is able to deduce that is all has to do with a reducing amount of daily oil consumption, though. America is losing its grip on the world thanks to it. And immigration. Seriously, when are you going to stop letting worthless people into your country?
When you save a track, there is a little "lock" icon below where you type in the track name. You can use this to mark a track as private. Sorry, that should be more clear.
> There is no attempt being made to come to any wholesome understanding

Do you actually follow Roberts, or is your understand based on this one short summary? Because, e.g. "What Makes Food Fattening" (77-page pdf here http://media.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pd... ) is very much an attempt to come to wholesome understanding, develop a model, test it against nature. (The test is "putting it out in the wild", and the result is "works beautifully for 80% of people who try, not at all for the remaining 20%". He's not funded to test this, nor is he making any money of it - I don't think there's a better route for him to take).

> To do a proper test, you need variable isolation, and the stability of test results is no guarantee that it is an isolated variable

Yep. Except, in the real world, NO published result related to nutrition, and almost no published result regarding medicine, is a proper test with isolated variables. Including almost every guideline your doctor works by.

> that is, many people, especially if they're not sleep-deprived, can wake up earlier simply by telling themselves "I'm going to wake up early tomorrow." (I myself usually wake up before my alarm clock goes off.)

That is true. And yet, a lot of people want diets to work, and they don't. A lot of insomniacs want a placebo to work, and it doesn't. Placebo is powerful, but is not all-powerful. It is stronger with some people, weaker with others.

Discarding results just because they were not the result of a double-blind placebo-controlled test is not rational. Neither is accepting results just because the author thinks that they are double-blind placebo-controlled:

e.g., almost all placebos today are sugar pills; If the tested-against-material has a side effect, such as causing flushing or a dry tongue (though does not produce the wanted outcome -- which is very often the case), this is not in face a double-blind; the patient knows that they did not get a placebo, and the whole test is useless. Yet, this is the gold standard.

Furthermore, if you read the NEJM / BMJ / Nature / Science medical papers, you'd notice that their result are tested on (and are therefore only valid for) a small ethnic group, a small age group, etc. But then, very unscientifically, it is assumed (by others -- usually not by the authors of said paper) to apply much more widely.

> That is, any "follow up" tests after the first guess are already tainted by the fact that Seth knows what's being tested.

Yes, that does not make the results any less true or useful: Butter makes seth faster at arithmetics, in a consistent and statistically significant way. That may not be true for others. And may be entirely a placebo. Nevertheless, if Seth wants to be faster at arithmetics, he can do that by eating butter, regardless of the cause. Is that not science?
In all of the industries I'm familiar with, I just don't see it happening that someone says "Hey, I wonder how they did that. I'll go check out their patent filing!" Certainly not in software. And the concept of willful infringement gives even less incentive to do so.
The first one. Patent law has run amok to the point there really isn't any distinguishable difference between the trolls and the legitimate businesses any more. If you can patent pinch-and-zoom you can patent anything.
I'm not sure about you, but I've seen a fascinating display of apologizing for the patent system. People have been staunchly repeating what it should do as opposed to what is actually happening in practice.

I've also watched a series of curious arguments revolving around the assertion that patent somehow protect small business which are innovation; as if big companies won't dredge up incredibly expensive patents from purchased portfolios to force licence agreements.

I short, I've learned that the average software & design patent proponent really is as disingenuous and intellectually bankrupt as I have suspected... at least this venue.
Interestingly enough, depression is a comorbidity of ADHD.
What's the science behind this? Obviously, like (nearly?) everyone else here, I make my living staring at a screen and if it's damaging my eyes, I'd like to know about that.

Similarly, does anyone have a pair of these lenses? Any good? Do your eyes feel any difference?
The Acqui-hire Scourge
If an idea can be described in one sentence, it shouldn't be patentable.
Sure it's equivalent to brute force now, but it's not like the brain is doing a cryptographic hash. I would not be suprised if a bit more development made it possible to break passwords one character at a time or something on that order of complexity.
I'm not really talking about IAP for upgrades but when they're used to buy expendables (be it coins, stars, bonus items, etc.). I'm fine with the "free with in-app paid upgrade" or the 'lite' version and 'full' version (though I find the former cleaner).

However, more often than not with games, IAP is used for expendables and more often than not, the gameplay now revolves around making you buy things, rather than the game itself. You have artificial scarcity on some things, not to make the game more interesting/difficult/rewarding but to make more money for the game author.

Don't get me wrong: I'm totally for developers and studios making money, but not when it skews the gameplay.
I usually set up the free tier of Uservoice. It's not bad - my biggest complaint is the batch handling. When I send out an email campaign, I get a lot of 'out of office' notices, and deleting those one at a time is a pain.
I'm sure they are rare among startup founders, but not rare in the wider realm. But it is not the fault of the patent system that people don't read them.

I already mentioned one benefit that doesn't require reading the patents, and that is there is less incentive to obfuscate designs or lock down products.

Secondly, for situations where there is a major break thru, patents give companies caught flat footed a chance to come up to speed by reading the details of the invention so that they can then extend it.

I don't, for a second, doubt that many engineers in Google and Samsung have read these Apple patents, for instance. Of course the official policy is that they don't, and they will never admit it in court (they'll never let the people who did read them testify) but the level of industrial espionage that these companies engage in is such that it seems exceedingly unlikely they wouldn't read freely available publications designed to reveal these inventions.

But that is also the purpose of the patent system.

Where things are broken here is that Google feels they can get away with infringing because in the past court cases have been long time coming and relatively weak in their impact. So, google made the calculated decisions to simply violate the patents.