skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if a solution to that might be to take what I will call the "counterstrike model" where the game developer doesn't necessarily have to run all of the game servers themselves.

In other words , when you run the game you get a selection of servers to play on. If you want to play on the official servers you need an account from the developer (which you get when you buy it) but if you are a pirate user you get to run on any of the unofficial servers only. Of course paying customers will be able to use either official or unofficial servers.
I think there are just two reservoirs, both in North Van. One of them is behind the Capilano dam, so you could actually tell that it was running low on the water volume in hotter summer months.
It's just so much easier to download a game for free when jailbroken. Many probably just downloaded it to try and then forgot about it.

Unfortunately it's very hard to get stats to show the number of server hours used by pirates vs. non-pirates.
For once, Java was the correct answer.
That's not obviously a fallacy. You're assuming that it's impossible that some percentage of the pirates would pay if piracy was eliminated. That seems like too strong an assumption.

If even 10% of the pirates end up paying, that's a 100% increase in sales, so the implications of that assumption are not small.
but they are used for debugging, not bi-directional transformation between two incompatible sources.
Wow. At last, an azure-hosted site featured on HN front page.
It complicates the process,and when you make paying for something more difficult, people are less likely to do it.

I'm surprised that the company can't simply do a 'phone home' procedure when online services are tried though, verifying through App Store API's (if they exist) or by making their own things. Does anyone know how feasible that is ?
Mover.io looks like a great idea. I've been fiddling about with S3 and FTP wrappers, so this looks helpful. I'm looking forward to my API key.
Is there a word for something, like the service being advertised here, that by its operation demonstrates that it's not fit for use?
But how do you give accounts to paying customers?

The only way I know is through in app purchases.
There's other models besides Zynga and facebook spam.

Giving the client software away for free and charging for access to official servers has been done for years successfully by Eve online and other games.
So more like embers then.
Last.fm Founders’ Next Track: Lumi
How does one flag the comment as spam or the user as a spammer?
DhtmlxScheduler 3.6 - Google-like calendar for Windows 8 apps
No, if the authenticity check is client side you can hack the asm to neuter it.

This is security 101 people. Don't trust what the client says.
What are you trying to say here exactly? We shouldn't have privately funded drug research?

Yes, capitalism has some bad side effects. That is not a reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.
The problem is that it is hard (impossible) to tell from within an iOS app if it has been purchased legitimately. If you want to give users the convenience to buy the app for $.99 and then start playing, then I don't think you have a chance to add any meaningful validation. I wonder how it would've worked with subscription IAPs. I would guess that they are a big psychological problem to potential legit players. This would have been a great chance to find out.

In my experience, piracy on iOS varies a lot with the region, too. The majority of my analytics come from China with only one(!) copy ever being sold there.
I don't think it's trivial.

The code given to Apple is not modified at any point before sent to a device. The code is also duplicated onto itunes, which is how you can so easily crack it.

The only way I know of to identify each and every purchaser is to use in-app-purchases.
And growing vegetables on the moon is far too expensive to be practical - moon rocks cost thousands of dollars per gram!

EDIT: OK, for the benefit of whoever didn't have a sense of humor, I was suggesting that the astronauts might be planning on bringing some soil with them.
"It's sometimes astonishing how the pursuit of optimal diffs masks the intent of a change where an added method diff starts with the closing brace of the previous method, for example."

In Python you can get the whole return statement. Especially when adding a similar type of method, e.g.: Django view functions. Makes

git add -p

more fun.
Can't secure boot be disabled in the bios?
Depends what you mean by "concerted sales" versus inbound marketing. Inbound marketing has a sales component.

If you want to know more about inbound marketing, check out Hubspot. They coined the term "inbound marketing". Hubspot is pretty pricey but their software handles all aspects of web marketing from getting visitors, to leads to customers (I.e. they're cheap if they do what's promised). They provide intensive training on all topics too, so there's the maximum chance you'll be following recommended, proven practices rather than wondering how to construct campaigns, landing pages, email marketing campaigns etc.

My email's in my profile if you want to know more.

Btw this probably isn't the best time of day to post this on hn, do a few google searches like "best time to post on hacker news" to figure that one out.
Well it would be a server side check. But even a rudimentary IP address check would be fine to ensure one connection at a time.

It is all a bit odd I have to admit.
Finding the right co-founder can be hard depending on who you are and who you know. If you can't manage to find someone, hiring the right person (or people) might do, and you can always shift an ideal candidate into the co-founder position after working together for a while. It all depends on what resources you have available and how much you can do yourself.

Although my experience is limited I am in precisely the same situation these days. I have spent about six months looking for the right technical co-founder. I can't hire at standard developer wages and would prefer some help with the heavy lifting (my skill set is more design and business-oriented). Searching for the ideal candidate has been a time-consuming process involving countless emails, numerous in-person meetings/interviews, filling out profiles, applying for founder matchmaker services, etc. It has been a time sink much like fundraising... only I haven't found a co-founder.

Instead, I'll be bootstrapping as a single founder for as long as I need to (or can). I figure that since I have the capacity to start building the product envision I may as well get moving. I can always take on a co-founder later, after I have more to show.
I agree that article is poor. Jolla's official presentations, interviews with them or their twitter feed is much better source of information.

2b. I guess that's poor interpretation what Jolla says about China. In general Jolla puts a lot of hope/weight in China.

3. Let's wait and see. While betting on China from their side might mean that users will have less freedom not more.

5. My impression is that Hurmola simply not enjoyed being CEO (he found himself more valuable in other position). http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/15/jolla-ceo-switch/

I personally believe that at least one company should manage to take special place in current market (BB10, Jolla, Mozilla, someone else) - I don't want to name it 3rd ecosystem because it is not. My bet is on BB10 and Jolla (BB10 has bigger chances than Jolla, but Jolla might succeed in Europe as well if marketed properly). I personally find Android quite boring/unattractive/wrong and iOS too closed - both as developer and as user.
I've seen games do that, mostly Gameloft's, but it's not perfect (the message was shown to me when I restored my backup with a legitimate copy to another, new device, and wouldn't let me play it. Needless to say, I was annoyed).
I mean really, what sort of activities would an average person find it useful to use a secure network for? Illicit, illegal, or insurgent. Not a real high demand for this.

I think that that's our fundamental point of disagreement. Demand doesn't follow needs at once because people still doesn't know what they need. But they will. Cases like Petraeus' will contribute to raise awareness.

Also sometimes people tend to use at home what they've learned to be useful at work. Increased security in companies could contribute to the success of an easy-to-use product.

More: piracy, people living under tyrannic regimes, cheaters, etc.
I remember a photocopied version of Another World anti-piracy booklet from when I was 6. I bought the iOS version, just to "give back".
It's totally feasible, the problem is whether the people who are distributing the pirated version are also capable of cracking the client the same way e.g. Photoshop cracks work to nullify phone home checks.

Fighting piracy always comes with an effort/reward calculation like that.
You might want to talk to valve before using the word "Steam" in the name of your product...

Otherwise I can't see an impediment. Maybe Valve could even have a 'designed for Steam' certification program or something.
Plenty Of Zip Codes For Form Auto-Completion
Simplest way would be to automatically email the customer a link with a long randomly generated number (only valid once) when they purchase, when you hit that URL it prompts you to set a username and password.
... Right because Adobe ONLY produce InDesign.

For digital publishing, Adobe have Dreamweaver, Muse, Edge, (part of InDesign), Flash... all linked with Creative Cloud, which allows you to publish 'to-the-web' (Great for non-technical designers).

I would hazard a guess that you work for Quark, or are an Apple-like fanboy of them, to present such a one sided argument with a fraction of the complete information.
Thanks, care to share a lil bit more with us .Was that a dead-tree printed publication ? Were you generalists or catering to a niche ?
That said I don't remember HL1/CS ever being cracked.
Did that this year. Bought an iPad instead of a new PC. I might not even do that again - thinking of buying a device like the Nexus 10 next.

I have a family with lots of eyeballs. Yes, there is still work requiring a PC and so every family should have one. But not every person in the family needs one.
Does the email address come on the purchase report to the seller from Apple?
Advice to Microsoft on supporting CS education
(Author of South here) Nice article - good set of common pitfalls, too. The multiple people one is especially tricky for people when they first encounter it, it seems.

I'm hoping I can resolve some of these issues (like the permissions thing) when we start moving parts of the code into Django proper.
The issue with games however is that often all the actual content and game that you want to get access to actually lives on the client. For example Call of Duty singleplayer campaign. If you have most of your interesting stuff on the server (e.g WoW) then of course it makes sense to do checks server side.

This is why DRM is fundamentally broken for singleplayer games (or music , or movies) in that you have to trust the client.
Get in on Gamification: Tips for Building Easy Site Badges
Building sites with embedded games is hot right now. Primer on gamification, uses and tools to get your site built using these techniques. Talk about icon packs and using simple icons to create badges.
Because then they stop giving money to the university.
change the Font Style... :/
Show HN: Quabel, a distraction-free online writer with writing goals, fireworks
The Daily didn't fail - Rupert gave up
Quabel is a pet project of two friends of mine and myself, and we are proud to finally present it to HN after a long time of working on it.

Basically, we want to make focussed writing more easy. Quabel is an online editor which uses writing goals very prominently. This allows the writer to stay on track and measure performance with all the benefits of using a web service.

Full list of features:

- Automatically save your texts so you don't lose anything

- Create goals and measure your writing performance

- Nightmode for when it gets dark outside

- Markdown formatting

- Drag and Drop your .docx files onto Quabel to import and edit them in Markdown instantly

- Export to PDF/ODT/Latex/Markdown

- Easily publish your writings and share them with others

- (optional) typewriter sound when you hit a key

- (optional) fireworks when you reach your goal

Please tell us your feedback, we value your opinion very much! Thanks!

Our future roadmap includes offline editing, revisioning (hard topic!) and collaboration between multiple writers.
I must sympathize with both sides:

I get what some users mean when they criticize projects in this manner. They're saying, "You're so smart and this is all you came up with?" It's not so much an insult as it is disappointment of a talented person. Their mentality is "If I had your talent, I wouldn't have wasted my time on this."

But it's important to understand that the whole purpose of side projects is to take a journey, learn, experience, and try out random things. It's impossible to tell accurately weather a project succeeds or not so you have to try.

I'm sure if Sergey Brin and Larry Page submitted their Google prototype on HN it would have been met with "Why? There's already Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Lycos, Alta Vista... they do search and they're established, Page Rank is just a feature. What's stopping Lycos or Alta Vista from implimenting their own Page Rank algorithm?". Twitter would have been met with "Only 140 characters? That's not going to get anywhere". (all things that a VC would say)

I blame this on Hacker News (emphasis on HACKER) having more startup news than projects, inventions, designs, code samples, and hacking articles. The emphasis on success starts to drown out the emphasis on coding for fun even if you fail. Oddly enough in the Mixergy.com interview with Paul Graham. At exactly 49:40 Paul says, "[hacker news] was originally called startup news but after 6 months we changed it to hacker news cause we got sick of reading about nothing but startup stuff."
This isn't bad and collects a lot of random useful advice in one place but I have a few beefs with it:

repeat akavi's standard comment about HATEOAS here it really does solve some of the problems they're trying to workaround with carefully crafted URLs and versioning. Links are discoverable even if you can't manage to make your URLs clean or even stable.

I think their bit on error codes is all wrong: Using an unfamiliar code number won't throw a human at all, as they come with a self-descriptive label like "Gone" or "Conflict", and should have a body with an explanation of what happened. (Which they recommend) Error messages are for tools, libraries, and proxies; you should use whatever code gets you correct behavior from them (even if it makes no sense), but there's no value in carefully reducing the set of codes you use.

They have some slightly confused ideas about hierarchies, like suggesting version numbers always go at the root. Surely version numbers should be at whatever level the API gets versioned? If you religiously put your versioning at the root, you're going to wind up with the standard API compatibility problem where someone wants to use a v3 feature so they (have to) upgrade all their calls to v3 and then get angry when there's some unrelated compatibility break. Good advice on making it mandatory though.

For God's sake don't allow GET with &method=delete or the like. You can narrow your verbs down to POST and GET but no further.

Insert mention of CSRF here.

The whole architecture section "The API Façade Pattern" is just a bunch of waterfall, API-first design nonsense. Don't invent an API in outer space then try to integrate it with a real system designed separately.

The whole point of decomposing your API into actions on resources is that you don't have to have one unified, consistent, holy API, each resource is an API unto itself that can live on its own and follow its own rules to get something done. If you really love consistency, go whole hog and be consistent with the whole world by using standards, being consistent with just yourself is a form of masturbation.
I've seen the other side of too many of these stories not to be skeptical, if not outright cynical. Let me explain.

1. There are no absolute sales figures here. It may be that the game sold dismally and a story about piracy might have gotten them developer a ton more PR than the game ever would've;

2. The issue in this particular case is not number of copies (pirated vs non-pirated) but the amount of hours spent from pirated vs non-pirated. Even that doesn't tell the whole story. Perhaps this game required a critical mass of users (some do)? If so, pirated users might ultimately be beneficial.

Also, when it comes to piracy there are a lot of people who download a lot of pirated content and then never look at it or they might try it once. Just getting the pirated content itself becomes a game;

3. How expensive is it to maintain a server on a per user or per user hour basis anyway? It seems quite likely a single machine can serve thousands if not tens of thousands of users as a conservative estimate; and

4. Are they shuttering the game or just overhauling the authentication model? If they plan on rereleasing it then the publicity of (1) becomes even more likely.

Like I said, I've seen a number of one-sided stories now where I've known something about the other side and as sympathetic as someone can make their case, believe me--generally speaking--there is a lot they don't tell you.

Also, don't discount the possibility of internal politics. It's a lot easier for a product lead to say "we had to pull this because of piracy" to his or her boss or board than it is to say "we made a game that no one bought".

I'm just saying.
I agree, but you cannot just take a product and apply a business model to it. If you want to milk IAPs, you need to design your whole game around it. Cramming ads onto a 3.5" phone screen isn't always easy either. Subscriptions (the fair model to pay for a server) might scare people away.

Looking at the top grossing games on the Oz App Store, I wonder if the trick is not simply "don't be a small player": http://i.imgur.com/9S1yx.png?1

Could a small team handle the traffic and meintenance needed for a freemium game?
Although many times provocative and even manipulative I always find Adam Curtis to be thought provoking.
Mix the soil with fine grained coal and water, and the oxidizing power disappear. The remaining coal can be used as a fertilizer. (I'm not sure if this is the more economical recipe.)
Hi, I'm Aaron and the designer of Quabel. If you have any feedback regarding design I will very appreciate it. Cheers!
Uninterrupted time. Good luck coding if you have a girlfriend.
I'm dubious of just handing these guys my browser history. Facebook et al use your social graph not just for personalisation but for advertising.
They don't necessarily know who has pirated and who hasn't. They might just see that there are e.g. 100K people registered on their servers, and they only had 10K sales.
Also: filter bubbles.
>the maintenance of an iPad is negligible compared to a proper pc

Oh, I agree with that. The iPad was a huge advance for people without the desire and inclination to spend a lot of time learning to maintain a computer.
I have seen a lot of small shops in Thailand that feature iMac's with iTunes accounts that are loaded with apps. People go there, pick out the apps they want, leave their phone there for an hour or so and then pick it up again for a very low fee.

I'm not sure if all of those phones are jailbroken, or if they just use a single iTunes account to synchronise with hundreds of phones.
Brackets - open-source code editor built with the web for the web
As someone not in the know, I would love for someone to explain whether the Startups TV show had something to do with this and how "real" is this?
"stick it"?
would've been interesting to know what kind of vegetables.
No? I played CS quite extensively. I only bought a legit copy (of HL, CS 1 was a free download) about a year into playing because I felt guilty.
The current record is 32.5m and was set in Prague over the days of 5-9 September 2012.

Refer to the following site for a comprehensive list of historical LEGO records:

http://www.recordholders.org/en/list/lego.html
apple have had their day. Their going downhill FAST.

I'm glad I got to experience apple when they were great, it was the tail end of their greatness but they created beautiful products and cared about the consumer.

Now their all about the money.

I recently had to book a genius appt and wait a week to get a new charger. w-t-f apple. In the old days any staff would try out your charger, realise it didn't work and then replace it (assuming it was under warrenty) now I have to spend £65 and then get a refund the week after. and they gave me ANOTHER new charger. Why not let me keep the one I paid for and not create more waste.

already left the iphone fold but unfortunately osx (snow leopard at least) is a great OS :(
No. Absolutely not. Makes for great sales copy though.

Here's some history and analysis on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory
That seems to be one aspect, but I've seen games getting railroaded for having a limited aspect with a pay to access additional functionality, and people saying "I'd prefer to have paid X amount for this app not IAP", even in cases where devs have made it free to get more traction.

I personally think companies releasing apps now should be bold enough to stake it and go "it's $10". Square Enix are, it seems to be working for them, sometimes.
I believe the restriction is that each iTunes account can be synced to 10 devices, and each device can sync with 5 iTunes accounts. So it's very likely that those shops are jailbreaking the phones and installing pirated apps.
If you need to host your own screenshot/html2png app, I've built this on top of PhantomJS: https://github.com/w3p/htmlshots. It uses PhantomJS's builtin webserver module to serve screenshots, so you don't need to spawn a new process for each screenshot request.
AngelHack Sketchnotes
Humorously, when their stats script gets blocked none of the links actually work in my Chrome build.
I'd call it TL;MWTRITAIM "Too Long; Might Want To Read If This Abstract Interests Me".

So I dislike the "Didn't Read" part only. It implies the reader can't be bothered to consume the whole piece.
You got it wrong.

If it's an online game, the license check is performed on the server side and no amount of clever client cracking won't get around that. When you buy a license, the licensing server associates some sort of ID with your installation, the same ID that must be presented to the server for an online play. No valid license -> no valid ID -> no online play. That's how all massive online games with free clients work. Easy-peasy. The question here is what can be used as an ID in case of iOS games, but, again, this is a solvable problem.

Moreover, the same scheme applies to the standalone software, except there's an extra step involved with strengthening the executable against any modifications. What Photoshop did is the lamest thing possible (and I think it's a valid theory that they did it on purpose to facilitate the piracy rather than to curtail it). A simple option is to sprinkle 100s of conditionals around the code (with a simple pre-processing script if need be), do not issue any sort of messages, but instead just make the code corrupt heap, stack and do other things that would cause the program to go down after a while. Then simply sign the executable. This is very effective. For every complain in the support forums that the program crashed (and a crash dump that shows the absence of a valid file signature), there's a automatic reply that it's a cracked copy, you get what you paid for.
http://tinysite.heroku.com/ will do s/th similar. Hosted on free Heroku plans.