skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've worked for one of Zynga's competitors, and you are omitting one significant cost. It is vital for these games to add content monthly if not weekly, and these games are released with a large number of known bugs that are slowly fixed through the games lifetime. I'd say that any of these games, once released has at least two programmers and three artists working almost exclusively on bug fixing and adding features. Last game I worked on we had three programmers working on the client full time on it, two programmers doing occasional work on the backend and three artists creating assets for at least five months after release. I quit about this time, but my guess is this expenses went on for at least a year.
It's possible that some of these games had paying user retention numbers such that maintaining customer loyalty among the holdouts was not a hard requirement. I don't have a convenient way to look up MAUs at the moment, but many apps languish at say 10k. That would imply a few hundred paying customers. The majority of them would be worth whole tens of dollars in LTV.

One of my rare compliments to Zynga: they aren't stupid and it is highly, highly unlikely that the live teams' business analysts made a worse decision based on the data than an outsider would make based on a press release.
It's basically a skunked term at this point. No matter which sense you use it in, some subset of your readers is going to take umbrage.

There are other, better, words available that can take its place.
Good point, these games are competing with each other. I think Starbucks ran into this problem in the late 90's.
Yep, running a web site in an hybrid iOS app will slow down your app, as the Nitro Javascript engine is not available. That has been the case for a while, because of security reasons, and won't go away any time soon
Actually it is $3133.7 (eleet). I got it, of course. The security team at Google is, simply put, awesome.
Some lox recipes include sugar:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Homemade-Lox-at-14-the-Cost/
Google has an awful history with regards to communication with developers and communication with customers (read: very few public APIs and terrible customer service).
I caught the bug last year (2011) got a new bike in February this year and severely broke my leg in March (non cycling accident). Even with the bad leg I managed to lose a bunch of weight and feel great.

Thank your for sharing your story.
Time's up.

"Meno: And did you still not think [Gorgias] knew [what excellence was]?
"Socrates: I'm rather forgetful, Meno . . . maybe you know what he used to say. If so, remind me . . . . let's leave him out of it; he's not here after all."

From Plato's "Meno".

Here's another fun quote:

GLENDOWER.
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR.
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
Oh, I totally agree that unit cost right now is way way too high. That said it is many orders of magnitude cheaper to do a one off plastic part with a 3d printer than an injection mold. Also, 3d printers are just one small piece of the one off automated factory.
Now that your position has been decimated by history, you could focus your efforts on one of my pet peeves that's been appearing a lot on HN: "binary blob"

Type either "blob" or "binary lob." PLEASE!
15 things I learned from "Shipping Greatness"
Great story. Here's my variant.

I never learned to ride a bike as kid. At age 33, I realized I was about to move to a city where biking is close to mandatory (Melbourne), so I sucked it up and went for a couple of one-on-one adult bike lessons. Despite a first lesson that was so painfully fumbling and awkward I almost gave up, I showed up once more and figured out the key: when you start to fall over to the left, steer to the left, and you will suddenly no longer be falling. Rinse and repeat. We did a little cruise around the neighborhood, and hey, I was biking! Although I did have my ceremonial first fall when I crashed into a bollard at the end of a bridge (at very slow speed, fortunately).

Then I started commuting to my new workplace by bike. 15 minutes, a nice and easy ride, mostly on bike paths separated from road traffic -- but it was still scary as hell initially, and I walked the route a few times, trying to figure out exactly what I'd need to do to cross every road and turn every corner. The first morning was freaky, but I still remember the feeling of adrenaline rush when I arrived at the office the first time: Whoo! I survived! And then on the way back later that day, my shoelace gets caught up in the gears and I do a slow-motion crash onto the bike path. No real damage, but my nerves were sufficiently shot that I had to walk the bike home and skip the next day. Two days later I was at it again.

Next I attempted to learn curb hopping. My spectacularly mistimed 2nd attempt saw the wheel hit the curb full on, so I flew head over heels and shredded one knee to bits on gravel. Turns out you can keep biking just fine with a bloody knee, it only starts to hurt once the blood gets a chance to congeal.

And now I commute by bike every single day, rain or shine, 0 or 40 degrees. I wouldn't give it up for the world and am considering upgrading from my current trusty but heavy mountain bike into a zippier road model.
Objective C is brilliant, it's one of the few things I actually enjoy about Apple's ecosystem.

This is because it stole ideas from Smalltalk, which is also brilliant. I doubt there are many people who hate it rationally, but I'd love to have a discussion with them instead of the people that have some knee-jerk reaction to the message-passing syntax.
It's not just the brackets, though they're ugly and provide stops for the eyes where none should be; you have NSReallyReallyLongNames all over the place (encouraged by XCode, to the point of automatically doing it for your own classes, because namespaces are apparently too modern), required parameter names, and other silliness that makes Java look restrained. And while we're at it, its interop with an actual, fairly standardized modern (note: this means "not C") language that people use (so C++, for those keeping track at home) is not very good, and while you might find Objective-C superior nobody else uses it so C++ is probably going to be involved somewhere, be it Windows or Android.

Objective-C is tolerable, sure, but I'd rather write C++ - and that is no compliment to C++. (But, as a side note, I give Apple all the credit in the world for having a fantastic C++ environment on its own. XCode has its stupid spots, but it doesn't get in clang's way.)
The fact that people still argue argue about the only-several-centuries-old newfangled meaning of this word signifies to me that I probably shouldn't use it in my writing. If I use it to mean "reduce by one tenth" most of my readers will be confused; if I use it to mean "destroy," a vocal minority will be annoyed.
It's actually a Javascript strength; one that makes it more dynamic.

NodeList.prototype.map = Array.prototype.map

Just one line and now you can do stuff like:

document.querySelectorAll("div").map(function(ele){
return ele.id
});
Sounds like you have some better first hand knowledge here, tell me is there no situation in which you just 'run' the game and artists and game developers are no longer involved?

This is a critical point for me. I was a huge World of Warcraft fan, played a lot, and would still play a lot if it wasn't a complete waste of time :-) I also play 'Settlers of Catan.' (SoC) I've played SoC since it came out, and while it has had a couple of expansions, I don't play them, I still play the original. Once I got the box and tiles and cards there was no additional participation of any game designers or artists. The game continues to grab followers, the marginal cost of shipping a new one is some injection molded plastic and printed cardboard.

Why aren't there computer games like SoC ?
Uhm, democracy is hard? The article doesn't seem to substantiate this.
CSS? I thought that only applied to extremely old versions of IE.
WOW 5.1: Epicus Maximus in the Brawler's Club
There are better words, sure, but if you're going to be That Guy Who Literally-Literally Everyone Hates And Nobody Wants To Ever Talk To...be right.

Because, I mean, if you're going to be That Guy etc. etc., being right is close to the only thing you've got left.
"Next time" is a bit optimistic; I'd suspect this was the only time in your life you'll have ever found a bug that extreme.
In this case it's a Java wart, yes, but the same thing happens with other parts of the language. Another example:

"Conjoining an element to a list can be done in the reverse order"
(= __ (conj '(:a :b :c :d :e) 0))

Well OK, so is `conj` just `cons` with reversed argument order, or does it append to the other end of the list? My Lisp intuition tells me that the first is more likely, but the test failure doesn't show you anything, you have to use trial and error or fire up a REPL.
You are the one that stated absolutely you shouldn't listen to random opinions, with rhetoric such as "If he _wants_ other people's opinions, he'll ask for them" and "developers can also intend for their software to be "widely-used" but only if it's _in their own terms_."
And, by the way, the two commands are something that could be done in O(n), rather than O(n*log(n)) - but this little procedure is so damn easy to write, that on relatively thin inputs that are less than 20m lines long, I usually just do this.
Yea, it's easy to see he's into Marx (there are quotes from him and other Marxists throughout), but I think it made the technology choice seem based purely on management's anti-labor strategy. Unless greater productively, less errors, etc. can be called anti-labor, it's pretty clear that the playback method lost the technical battle - which was the dominant, not a class struggle.

I think all things equal, you do want to be able to be worker independent: you'd like to have everything written in, say, Python not a mix of languages each developer happens to like. This doesn't mean that devs are actually plug-n-play, but on a spectrum is does make them more so.

From a pragmatic point of view, I'm sure subjected to blatant commodification, a lot of people will react by quitting or creating systems that are hard for new people to pick-up: i.e. obscure / spaghetti code.

In reality, most engineering jobs are pretty far from commodity - especially if you'd like to keep your team cohesion, tacit knowledge, experience, etc. It generally doesn't pay to do this in creative jobs.
When I meet successful people in business from time to time, I more often than not find that having conquered the business world - physical challenge brings them more happiness than another business success could. Especially if it just a 5k that some average athlete shrugs off; all challenges are personal. Sometimes, if running a profitable business, building and managing people effectively is not a challenge, a 40 min 5-k can very well be.

Book recommendation, not just about cycling: The Rider, by Tim Krabbé

"The greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses; people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you’. Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few friends these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms, she rewards passionately.”

http://www.belgiumkneewarmers.com/2008/01/tim-krabbes-the-ri...

http://www.amazon.com/Rider-Tim-Krabbe/dp/1582342903
Yeah, I hear you. There's definitely room for improvement here. I'm not sure what you mean by not greppable - the file is listed, as is the name of the particular koan. If there's a way to get line numbers displayed here that would be great.

I agree it does make it easier to solve when you can see what you're trying to evaluate to. It was actually a conscious decision to make that not be the case, because it seemed too easy to just fill in the blanks without thinking about what should go there.
I thought it was pretty jarring. If there is anything the world should be able to agree on, it is that Pincus is an insufferable * and a terrible manager.
Uhm, no you do not get to move the goal posts.

Argue against using the word. Don’t dare argue that it has a different meaning than it actually has.

Also, I think I will increase my use of decimate. If it pisses off those annoying pedants (who are perfectly aware of what is being communicated and won’t be the slightest bit confused) I will be happy. I successfully communicated and pissed off people I don’t like. Yay!
"I'm having a hard time imagining a plane of reality in which either is not "half decent""

Garlic is good. Ice cream is good. That doesn't mean that garlic ice cream is necessarily good. It exists as a promotional gimmick, sure enough, but it won't be in Baskin Robbins any time soon.
tldr; they actually had to work on the content.
In general, I don't think desktop apps have yielded to web apps.

Web apps have worked well for projects that are essentially simple front-ends to a database or simple content distribution systems, which admittedly represents a very significant part of the software industry. These tools inherently require some sort of client-server system, so there's no architectural overhead there that you weren't going to have anyway. Also, with web apps you get cross-platform portability very cheaply, and you get zero-effort deployment instead of trying to deal with installation/upgrades of software on say Windows where the plot was lost long ago and no-one has ever restored sanity.

However, when you come to doing anything that requires non-trivial interactions or non-trivial processing, web apps are often still decades behind the state of the art for mature desktop applications. No-one does serious graphics work, or mathematical modelling/simulation, or FPS gaming in web apps today. I suspect we never will, because we'll develop (rediscover?) how to build such applications with a specialised thin client and/or how to push out and maintain software with a native thick client more effectively long before we bastardise a text mark-up language and its friends well enough to write serious software as web apps in general.
Pacificly, schedule a biannual renumeration review. Uttered near me. My happiness was decimated (modern usage).
The point of whining is that it gets better. Nothing gets better when you making a pragmatic point.

As someone who used app engine a few years ago but also used the much better customer service recently, I still choose to whine. And I will for a long damn time considering the shit I put up with.
Ho, you beat me to it with the Python reference (see my other comment in this thread) :)

I don't know if it's really that bad that JS returns the unbound function when doing `obj.someFunc`, as it is consistent with any other property access: it returns the same thing that was assigned to that key in the object, or at some point in its prototype chain.

The really broken behavior, at least for me, is that when doing `var f = obj.someFunc(); f()`, the "this" gets bound to "window" in the f() call, instead of being null, or better yet raising an error whenever referenced, like an undefined variable.
Hard: inconvenient, expensive, embarrassing at times. It takes a long time and lots of people have to compromise.
on the granularity of an individual game there's a surprising amount of luck even in the top levels of the game. for instance, i'm at best a high B-division player, but i've won tournament games against two world champions (and, on the flip side, lost to players rated far lower than me). it's the overall performance in an (ideally 15-game+) tournament that lets the best players consistently rise to the top.
Actually I'm saying that even the most ardent player of these sorts of games only plays a few of them at any one time. If Farmville is capturing $n net per player, but a new game is capturing $n x 1.25 net per player, your better off killing Farmville, if you think enough Farmville players would then switch. I don't know if this is the case, but that is what I meant by "opportunity cost."
Twitpic isn't a Google competitor and was not being accused of a crime.
Treasures of the Cambridge Digital Library
Samsung and NTT Docomo jointly developing new smartphone OS
sorry... this comes across as pure advertising to me.
One of the obvious reasons some teams may not go for native is that they don't have the resources to commit to maintaining two applications.

Having 2 teams, contracting an external agency or finding a developer versed in both platforms are all pricey options. If your product is not the mobile apps themselves (obviously), HTML5 or Titanium can get you there without stretching your resources.
Firefox and IE, by default, use an odd hybrid approach where large fonts get DirectWrite but smaller fonts fall back to 'GDI' style rendering.

If you're using Firefox try these preferences out for a full DirectWrite experience:

gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled: true;
gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.use_gdi_table_loading: false;
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_max_size: 6;
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families: ''; (delete the string)
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode: 5;
Linguo... IS dead.
Deliver With Me – Helps you send or receive shipments via passengers
I'm not saying I'd bring this up in casual conversation. Just that it's a word I personally choose not to use in my writing.
one of the world's largest tournaments, the annual king's cup tournament in bangkok, actually supplies 2, 3 and selected 4 letter word cheat sheets to all the players, to compensate for the fact that thai players use the north american rather than the world dictionary.
> people I don’t like

But I like you...
> She negotiated the price for the diamond for her engagement ring.

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/chap20.htm

on HN before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611
Sidebar loads very slow and the ajax spinner doesnt stop spinning. Mind sharing how it was build and where it is hosted?
Racket does this too.

In Racket,

"this is a string, which is a sequence of characters"
#"this is a bytestring, a sequence of numbers between 0 and 255"

You can convert back and forth with string->bytes/utf-8 or bytes->string/utf-8, substituting utf-8 for whichever character encoding you want.

You can use functions like string-ref, which returns a unicode character and bytes-ref, which returns an integer. Functions like string-normalize-nfc (or -nfd or -nfkc or etc) will normalize combining characters, and you can capitalize uppercase/lowercase strings according to locale, etc. Read from an input port with read-bytes and read-string, and writing to an output port works similarly.

Racket does does a great job keeping these things as explicit as they should be.
EVERY SINGLE TIME I see Google + mentioned, I see some user who says "every time I log in it's a ghost town." Which is funny, because when I log in I see a constant stream of activity. Google+ isn't Facebook, so it won't act like Facebook. When someone you don't really care about sends you a friend request on FB, you accept it so you don't offend them, and then you are stuck looking at their crap in your feed. Google+ has one way relationships enabled by default, so you will only see activity if you explicity follow people. I like that, because I'm sick of seeing instagram pictures of people's food.
I actually vastly prefer a language without namespaces, and the naming conventions are not due to the absence of namespaces. You're talking about the NextStep API (the "NS") and the conventions that were born from that -- there is no mandate nor impetus (and, I don't recall Xcode automatically doing it for me) that you use that convention yourself. They just carried it through for the other APIs, like UIKit being "UI" (UIViewController, etc).

My User object was called, unsurprisingly, "User". [[User alloc] init].

As for interop with C++, Objective-C++ exists and is used for apps in the store. (Hint: 3D games that are ports.)
It's amazing how difficult it seems to be to get happy with these things and it always just lasts for a few moments. Whereas God can make one happy in a much deeper sense without all the effort. Also it can last much longer (until you neglect the relationship with him)
For everyone hoping for a reply or dialog, it appears based on history that martinced is a fly-by commenter who doesn't do follow-ups.
I don't quite understand why there should be a difference between encode and decode? Surely something will always be in some encoding so you are just re-encoding?

Or does decode convert things into some sort of byte value?

I'm not a python programmer, so a little confused.
Ah, yes. I didn't do a full cleanup job before processing and you caught one of those words. If you open that page with Chrome and do a "View Source" you'll see that "books" actually appears 597 times in a whole pile of links on the page. Some of them got through.

If you only search what a human can see, yeah, it's somewhere in the order of 3 to 5 times.

I might have a look at the code and see why the full <a> tag contents are not being removed. Funny enough, that's the only bit of code I did not write. I got lazy and grabbed something right out of the PHP manual pages. Lesson learned.
No this is not how it works. Without the advertising, many products would never be discovered at all by the buyer. The opportunity cost of not doing advertising is much higher for seller than just the dollars spent.

Do you really believe people just make products and they magically get purchased? Products are not utilities and your water utility example is so ridiculous I hope you are joking and trolling us all.
In my experience most of them do bring in someone for the stats aspect of it, but they're often not consulted on study design (when relevant), and their "experts" typically seem to be just "experts relative to the other authors" rather than actual stats experts. But that doesn't change the probable truth in your final statement.
some of my parts :)
Of course you're right that some domains (e.g. graphics) are harder than others, but you might be overstating your case. Surely Gmail requires "non-trivial interactions". And why not mathematical modelling/simulation? — you can access a lot more computational power on servers. And how often does one hear of a startup making new desktop software?

I like your point that we might figure out how to get desktop deployment right sooner than how to adapt the web to do all these things. But nearly all the innovation has been pointing in the other direction. Also, such a deployment technology would face formidable institutional barriers.
Does anyone know if this does full speech-to-text transcription, i.e., I speak, it fills my speech into a text box? Or is it just for controlling the desktop via speech I tried googling, but couldn't come up with much.

Also, there is no Wikipedia page for them!
Very inspirational. I fell in love with with mountain biking when I move to BC. It's the one thing that year after year keeps me balanced and allows me to live a happy life. There's nothing more satisfying then finally conquering a drop or technical feature. Especially when your first impression was "that is not possible".
What? The b in blob does not stand for binary.
You've just moved the line of argumentation: instead of "is the word in the dictionary we're using", it's "is that word a bullshit word" -- but only one of those questions is answerable definitively. The only way to play without argument is to use a dictionary, at which point you might as well use the standard one.

(Like another poster in this thread, I do also play friendly games with an open two-letter-word list, to level the playing field for people who don't care to memorize trivia.)