skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My first impression is that you are similar to 99designs. I believe you will be better off with an inbound marketing effort with proper targeting. Sales is resource and effort intensive. Lack of early results may be more demoralizing than inbound marketing.
I'm not an iOS dev, however I remember that games on the playstation sometimes requires updates to be allowed to play on the servers.

So one way of combating piracy would be to release updates weekly and disable access for the old version after another week. Yes, the pirates would be able to keep up, but updating apps is a much bigger hassle for pirates than for those who purchased the app.
It is, though it's significantly diffused compared to other news outlets where editorial policy is defined by one or a few key people.
You don't need an exclusive pre-launch invite to join MySpace
I'd stick one on my phone!

Wait...
Make a credit card chargeback
I'm a little confused. That's the weight that a single Lego brick can withstand, correct? So assuming you made a "tower" that was essentially a vertical line of 2x2 Lego bricks, it'd collapse after 3,591m.

But that's not how we build towers. If you create a proper foundation with Lego bricks and distribute the weight evenly across them, and taper the tower as it goes up, am I wrong in assuming it could go a lot more than that? The entire weight of a structure never rests on a single brick...
Apple Game Center is heavily integrated into iOS and provides all sorts of validation features. Surely the devs could just re-release and force users to authenticate through Game Center?

Also - any idea if the honest paying game payers are going to be compensated? In future they'll see paying for a game as i) paying for a weeks worth of play ii) pirating it for a weeks worth of play. You mustn't punish genuine users because of others behaviour...
Exactly. This thread is full of people who have clearly never lived anywhere with weather that actually does "suck" (to repeat a common refrain).

Spend a winter in New England and try to tell me it sucks here. Go on, do it. This oughtta be good.
> If you like doing things outside, the weather there is consistently inconvenient for about 10 months out of the year.

Within a few years, you learn to just do any outdoor activity in the rain unless it's June. And you get very friendly with gore-tex.

This was something my family and I never did in Chicago, though that's mainly due to the intensity difference. In a "Seattle drizzle" you'll be fine; in a Chicago thunderstorm, not so much.
I imagine if they've pulled the app they'll probably have to go through a refund procedure, but I'm not 100% on that as it's a pretty rare and odd situation.
Would it be legal for someone to manufacture and sell 3rd party Steamboxes, if Valve has no immediate plans to do so?

It seems like somebody like Alienware, or even just somebody on Kickstarter, could put together something impressive at a XBox720/PS4 pricepoint.
You're right, I don't understand. And to be honest you're not making me want to very much either.
Whether that's true or not, I hate most freemium games. Sell me the game or find a way to have me endure ads, but I won't be buying in-game points soI can make my brown cow purple or whatever. I also don't like spamming friends to earn the points needed to purplefy my cow. In general I've never met a freemium game that compelled me to pay after install.
The great fallacy here is the notion that you would sell more without piracy.

Piracy at least brings you publicity. Even if you would somehow be able to ban all piracy, in the best case you still would only have that one sale out of 10.

Pulling the game from the store was a pretty stupid move. If I really wanted to play that game now I have no other choice but to - you guessed it - pirate it.
As far as I see it, with piracy rates around 90%, going freemium is the only way a dev can make money these days.

It's sad how these kids don't realize they are killing the platform they are trying to play on.
Works great and I've even got a flash blocker. BTW, are you using sound manager 2?

- I strongly advise you to round the corners of buttons with border-radius:3px; so they look more clickable.
Save Your Kisses For Me
Here's another:

If you look at your history and think 'oh, migration 0005 hasn't been run', don't do 'migrate 0005'. That will of course take you back to 0005, deleting any modifications made after 0005.
Why can't they distribute the game app as a free client for an online service with paid accounts? That would seem to be the simplest and most obvious way to curtail the piracy. Especially given that they do have an online component of the game anyway.
It is not the problem of lower sales, but of higher costs caused by those 9 additional pirated copies.
I know that there is serious volume going around in bitcoins but in my head this was limited to transactions of a few hundred to a few thousand USD equivalent tops, with balances on the same level. I'm quite surprised that someone or some organization would have had at some point in time a balance of 600K+ bitcoins, the current value of that amount would be about $8M!
This is just a re-imagining of the Steam interface to be optimised for large screens - I think the post above yours is referring to the rumoured "Steambox" that Valve themselves are supposedly working on.
Since soil samples on mars seem to be strongly oxidizing, even containing perchlorate, the vegetables are likely to catch fire upon touching martian soil.
And there was ways and means around that, the problem being it's a partially solved problem. Every step that's taken to solve it is broken pretty shortly after, short of sending a man with a gun to watch every single person playing and establish ownership it's not going to be a completely solved problem.
I second your motion. Initially I thought that they found a new material that is sensitive to 2.4GHz electromagnetic waves. This train of thought was inspired by the ability of cameras today to capture infrared light. [The old point remote at camera trick].
No, if the authenticity check is client side you can hack the asm to neuter it.

If it runs server side you can redirect those packets (often as simple as changing HOSTS file) to a server that you control which can be set to always say "yes, you are legit!"

This is why a lot of games are now removing LAN play, because if you can run the pirated game on a LAN you can use a VPN to turn it into an internet game etc.
I remember when eBay changed their policy so that sellers could no longer leave feedback, absolutely ridiculous. And I wouldn't trust PayPal as far as I could throw them.
Thanks for the perspective, hadnt heard that viewpoint before.

Maybe I should stay in Ireland to do my startup rather than trying to get the visa in the US!
As far as AirBnB goes, it seems that they didn't predict all the outrage. Their just using it for their PR.
I worked at a start-up whose engineering lead brought familiar coding style to a project that was inherited. We were imposed a combination of C89-esque and Microsoft kernel coding style on an Objective-C source code. Things like defining all variables at the beginning of the function definition in alphabetical order in CamelCase, having instance variables prefixed with the class abbreviation, and other inane rules. It went something like this:

- (void)
doSomethingOnObjectAndNumber:
(NSObject *) MyObject :
(NSInteger) MyNumber

/*++
Some unstandard doc format.
--*/

{

...
return;
}

Before I started, I was told that the project migrated from git to svn to "make branching easier". I do not work there any more.
Isn't it usually clazz?

But such things are quite annoying for automatic code generators, though, as they have to make sure that they won't ever emit an identifier that clashes with a keyword. The ability to just prepend @ in C# is quite helpful in that regard.
Lean Startup Conference Notes
Javadoc is tied so closely to HTML that any output format other than HTML is quite difficult to achieve.
I was wondering the same thing. If there's a central server, I presume you need an account to access it. The it seems you'd just check for having purchased the app and limit the number of simultaneous per user 1 (or a small upper limit).

Am I missing something?
Two examples of bad service I've had from Apple recently:

a) ordered an iPod nano. Apple missed the delivery date by nearly a week, because they had outsourced the delivery to some unreliable company in Glasgow. I had left the country by the time it arrived.

b) I want to purchase a new 21.5" iMac. Store here in Zurich doesn't know when they'll have stock and suggest I phone each day. I said if I order online could I deliver it to the store. No was the answer. Then I said I would miss the delivery as I work - so asked which courier would be used and would I be able to visit their base to pick the iMac up. The guy in the store was unable to answer. I can't find anyone to contact via e-mail either.

I don't see Apple as a customer focused company.
Yeah that had me slightly puzzled, you'd never attempt a tower with so few bricks as the stability would see it topple over quite quickly.
Heritage App gaining traction
Even in the cold months, it seems people are still interested in finding local history!
Developing REST API per definition of REST cannot be done pragmatically in the way described, so you are going to screw a lot of people if they think this is the last word on REST.

1. REST is a hypermedia API that (somewhat) describes its own services by returning URLs to resources, etc.

Most people don't understand what REST was meant to be that can drive how REST clients were meant to be developed. Some of the major players with "REST" APIs don't either.

2. REST does not have to be versioned if for internal use.

I actually agree with the versioning part, however I've also been on two teams over the past 10 years that developed versioned APIs and neither time did versioning matter, because those APIs were for internal use.

3. This is not a RESTful requirement, but, practically, you shouldn't design an API that allows any querying of resources beyond what should be needed.

This is because of the memory required for caching responses (in a large application), because it therefore can be an easy target for attacks (lets throw a bunch of query params on here... mwhahahahaha), and just because it opens up security holes. Be explicit in what is allowed in your code and your documentation.

4. The querying and filtering I see in this document is insufficient for some applications and interfaces.

It didn't take us long to run into the limitation of the search functionality described in this document in our current REST API based app.
Wouldn't it be easier to assign signal strength to certain GPS-dots and visualize the gathered data on the computer?
I don't get why he pulled it. Surely N / 10 (where N is some positive integer) will always be better than 0?

What is more interesting here though is that (AFAIK) the only way to run pirated iOS games is to jailbreak your phone/tablet. I'm going to assume that waaay less than 90% of iOS users jailbreak their phone.

So this either means that people who are interested in iOS games are far more likely to jailbreak that people who aren't gamers (not an unreasonable hypothesis but 90% still seems high).

Or there's something about this particular game that makes it especially appealing to jailbreakers?
Well....that sounds simplistic, but suppose he doesn't
want to leave South America. Why should he?

To avoid bad and corrupt justice systems he seems to think will torture/wrongly convict/murder him?
It's a multiplayer game and they could not afford paying the servers they needed
Nothing of this has or had anything to do with functionality on either side of the screen. The motion blur is not even tied to motion on the site (which may or may not be a good thing).

Most "3D hacker interfaces" in Hollywood movies aren't skeuomorphic, yet they blink and rotate and blur and zoom all the time. Same for many Asian TV channels. In what way is worrydream.com bad that doesn't apply to these elements, and why is it caused by textures from real life? Aren't they just all confusing because they are doing too much at once?
The only thing worse than LEDs on monitors is the cheap power supply attached to it. I had to sit in a room with ~30 monitors all blinking at their own intervals and every time one LED get's turned on, the power supply does a high pitch whistle. A cacophony of high pitch whistles. I was so close to burning the whole thing down.
Google API and Python: text to speech with correct intonation
Programme Management Office Functions
> There's starting to be a pushback against developers releasing games for free and monetising through IAP

If a free app is a demo and IAP is a one-time upgrade to the full version, then it's reasonable and perfectly acceptable. This is, arguably, what the IAP were actually designed for - a nextgen support for try-then-buy software.

The pushback is typically aimed at tacky milking practices - "a satchel of coins for $5.99, a pot of gold for $15.99, etc". You either release a limited, but self-contained playable demo, or a fully functional game. Anything that falls into a stretch between these two feels like a sleazy bait-n-switch kind of deal, hence the pushback.
"government shouldn't even have the right to regulate markets in such a way that innovation (and competition) can be stifled by the established players."

This statement is completely impractical. I can't think of a single law that does not affect the markets in some way. By its nature, any regulation requires proof of compliance on the part of the regulated party. This will always create some costs, at least in time spent, to the regulated party. Since "established players", by virtue of being established, have more resources at their disposal, they can comply more easily than upstarts with much more limited time and money on their hands. Hence, any regulation will stifle innovation to some extent while benefiting the established players.

Creating and updating regulations for the benefit of the majority is exactly what democracy is supposed to do most efficiently. Taking that right away from the government would be tantamount to taking the government away entirely.

10 years ago taxi regulations were not stifling innovation enough to be detrimental to the majority. Over the past few months they have. Then they were updated democratically. The system worked.
Sure. Like I said, there are some cases where the textual documentation adds nothing to the stuff it's derived from. And there are lots of cases where documentation is useful (I'm assuming you're not saying there should be no documentation). I think that it's worth having consistency of rules (with some redundancy) over patchy documentation. I'm not trying to convince anyone, just a datapoint that I don't think it's "insane".
> and if this story serves to scare off would-be iOS devs, then we’re all poorer for the actions of a few.

According to these numbers, the few seem to outnumber the many 9-to-1. As a software developer and someone who doesn't mind paying for good games, the state of affairs saddens me a great deal, but it would be hypocritical to blame this on the fringe "one-per-centers".
>(Whoever decided that buyers should be exempt from negative feedback needs their fucking head examined)

It's the best decision ebay ever made. The seller is in a much better position to rip you off than the buyer is (as others pointed out, this scam is only possible for goods that you can convert back to cash). It used to be impossible to leave negative feedback for bad sellers, because the hit to your own reputation cost more than just eating the loss.
I'm complaining his example doesn't work in the more general case and that he should warn of this or give a better more general solution. I'm aware of why it doesn't work.
> I thought that party was eBay.

Initially you would think so, yes; but they never receive and check the package neither do they actually receive the money, per se, since paypal is a "different" company and seller or buyer might choose a different form of payment.
As a programmer, I embrace the fact that people buy iPads or other tablets - by writing software for them and making money in the process. Why would I care what people use their devices for? For me(us) this is a fantastic oportunity - thanks to iPads and the like,more and more people have computers in their houses, which means that we can make new software to sell them. Wins all around :P
That depends.

If the game is fundamentally built in such a way that the gameplay requires everyone to be on one set of servers (e.g WoW) then you can prevent piracy by strictly controlling access to those servers.

For example if you wanted to pirate WoW you would have to reverse engineer the game to the extent where you could implement your own WoW server from scratch which would be a huge amount of work and you would have a situation where pirates would only be able to play with other pirates.

If on the other hand the server is used only to verify authenticity then you simply have to re-implement the authenticity part (easy because you only need to genereate a 'yes' response). You also have to make the client redirect some of the traffic to the fake server (easy to do).

Many games with centralised authenticity servers still run on a fairly P2P system for running the multiplayer itself (i.e the game is actually hosted by one the players). This means that you already have the server software built into the client so that part doesn't need reimplementation.
You are right but I'd prefer to have this answer as you can predict the maximum height of the tower that you designed using this. Also, a question that accounts for complex towers, would not be a question about legos much, I think.
I read Norman's book for an HCI grad class. I would definitely second the recommendation.
Any reference to that?
Money != Object
Great write up :)
Show HN: Investafy, A Better Way To Find Stocks Worth Investing In
This sounds fantastic, both the option and allegro.

I had a good experience selling someone a quite pricey item with cash-on-delivery and I don't think the buyer would have had much chance to rip me off there; of course as a fraudulent seller you could just send them the above mentioned stones or a cardboard box labeled "macbook pro" (which was prominently done to get back at a scammer).
If you can find me a $99 tablet with an x86 processor then I am more than willing to buy a million of them, with cash. I don't think you really understand the premise of Surface Pro.
It's like this in China also plus alipay holds the money in escrow.
Yes, Linux saves you from javascript malware.
I think I generally agree with this (though I do it myself more than I'd like). I think the sentiment of just declaring something (or, more often, someone) 'sucks' is a bit immature, and it's almost always unconstructive. I was listening to the Kalzumeus podcast the other day, and they were talking about this very thing on the last show they did. I can't remember what they called it, but it was something like 'Be curious' instead of 'be critical'. He had an acronym, but it didn't stick with me. Anyway, the long and short of it was, instead of saying something like "this is just a pile of ass", ask the question of why it might be the way it is - there are probably good reasons.

Actually, the Kalzumeus podcast is a good example. I don't especially like it that much (sorry guys, if you're reading), but as I sat in my car listening to it I tried to think it through constructively, rather than just declaring it sucky. I tried to answer questions like: 1) why don't I like it? (the smug attitude of 'gosh-aren't-we-just-coining-it-in-contractors', the ohmygodyes exclamations about everything, the poor sound quality) and, 2) could I do it better myself? (definitely not) and, 3) if it really is that bad, why am I still listening to it (and, of course, that's when I realized it's not actually that bad).

OK, some stuff genuinely is poor quality, and some people are fools, but maybe rather than berate them we would find it more constructive to ask the question "why has nobody else done better?", or "why didn't they spend extra time polishing it?", or "why is this guy in this position and not somebody else?". There are probably good answers to those questions. This is also moving in to 'constructive criticism' territory, which is actually good.

BTW, I'm not saying coddle me (or anybody else). Be honest, be brutally honest, but be constructive. Before getting all arsey and just slinging insults at someone or something, ask the question Why...?
Fair enough. I found that in a collaborative environment (people making and sharing code) the style guidelines had a net positive effect (and believe me, my first gut reaction was along the 'this is insane' lines). As process go, the degree of automation and strict automatic enforcement (and fixing) of rules felt lightweight after a bit.

We're neither of us going to convince the other, I just thought I'd add a datapoint. FWIW I now write Python and although PEP8 isn't as hard-line, I think it similarly does a lot of good.
Samsung's $129 million sales due entirely to Facebook? Please.
Perhaps you're just impossible to sell too then?

Or rather you're so difficult to sell too that it's not worth the effort. Perhaps there are a load of people out there who will pay for the things you won't, even if they're relatively small in number they're potentially much more lucrative?
I won't fault you for your optimism: technological advancement thrives on it.
The original point was that auto-generated documentation comments contain nothing that isn't already there in the public interface. Since it tends to look like

/**
* Foos the bar.
*
* @param bar The bar.
*/
public void fooBar(Bar bar) { ... }

The problem with this kind is that the compiler can no longer warn about a missing documentation comment because from its side all looks nice and well – except that there is zero information in that documentation.

My boss once did that to our entire codebase, adding auto-generated doc comments where there weren't any. Sure, my warning count reached a new low, but documentation quality suffered for months.
My first point was the philosophical one that the notion was absurd; that it is artificial and ahistoric were pre-emptive counters to claims that it's natural or traditional (it is neither).
"Script-kiddies" don't author exploits, or discover vulnerabilities.
What was wrong with the business model of The Daily? What business model should they have chosen? They were using (then brand new) subscription IAPs in the App Store, which were designed as the square hole for their purpose.

I agree that the business model of the game devs is "wrong" because they were trying to charge one-time fees for lifetime server support. What if there had been no pirates, but paying players had played for 10 months instead? Would that have caused the same server issues?
But that is a calculation that seems to work okay-ish with better DRM (or at least it worked great for Diablo 3 in the first weeks - I stopped tracking it after that).
It's been a while so I'm a bit rusty. But for most comments it would just be a start and end tag. You could also reference other types, XHTML style.
Built on Flash, the abandonware tech everyone is leaving.

Flex was pretty horrible, and only started getting reasonable after Flash 10, but there was a constant conflict between the Flex team, and the Flash team (within Adobe). You could even see passive aggressive comments written in the Flex source:

"Waiting for jso-en-so (Flash Team) to FIX THIS, until then use <some horrible workaround>"