skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wouldn't cutting off support and updates for the game be a better alternative than shutting it down though? If someone is hooked on the game, they won't care much for new updates.

If they get bored, they find a new game to play. As long as the game is at least profitable, run it until it isn't.

The only other reason for closing a game prematurely like this would be to minimize people complaining about the lack of support for a game, which could translate to "Zynga sucks, they haven't added anything in months, clearly they've stopped caring about their customers!" by players who either forgot about or didn't get the memo.
No, it doesn't. C++ sucks.
Yeah, most people simply reach me via @TweetSmarter. Have emailed you now :-)
This is great for the hardcore user, but for everyone else I'd prefer to solve it for them in the css.
So, these are virtual pets and what-not, that people have kept "alive" and happy for years, right?

So, is it really that hard to port the player's data in to a stand alone desk top application that at least the character can sort of be preserved in, or more? Perhaps let the open source minded folk perhaps keep "feeding" the application? Or something like that. I would imagine that players would be happy enough to pay a reasonable amount for that. Or perhaps do a data dump for players so that some representation of the character exists.

I kinda think developers should have something like this in mind before they start, especially where kids and money are concerned.
Bad advertising can harm sales, yeah. But sociopathic? I think you're reeeeeeeaching too far, bro.
> Blizzard is an excellent example.

Blizzard is a complete mystery. I paid for a copy of Starcraft: Brood War when it first came out (1998), and I've played on Battle.net using my original serial on and off ever since. Their servers are still up and running silky smooth, 15 years later.
It's not laziness, it's an economic decision. Learning a development environment like iOS or Android takes quite a bit of time and effort (especially if it's not your day job). If you believe that by the time you become proficient, HTML-5 will have improved enough to significantly decrease the demand for native apps, then you should spend your time learning something more valuable.

Also, lots of people have already learned native app development, and it's increasingly becoming a commodity skill that, at least for simple apps, can be outsourced to the lowest bidder. Developers might believe that learning skills that are not as easily outsourced, such as data analysis, might be a better investment.

Finally, learning a fast-changing environment like mobile apps is a much bigger investment than just learning a mobile language. It's a large, ongoing effort to stay current with the new features in every new release of the platform. So please let's not call people lazy just because they're not jumping on our favorite bandwagon.
So, if I have this right decode() says "take this string which I believe is encoded in <encoding> and convert it into whatever the internal string representation is"?
Surely Gmail requires "non-trivial interactions".

Yes and no. GMail is arguably one of the most successful and mature web apps out there, but at the end of the day you're still just reading mail, clicking a few places to change how information is presented, and typing a bunch of text. None of this requires a lot of real-time assistance as you navigate the information, context-sensitive UI, or task-specific controls beyond regular menu/toolbar/icon kinds of things, for example.

And why not mathematical modelling/simulation? — you can access a lot more computational power on servers.

Well, I think that point is debatable if you're doing serious modelling more than occasionally. The kind of processing power required makes it cheaper to buy your own high-end systems than to use commodity cloud-provided facilities very quickly, and for the same reason I suspect it would be difficult to offer such services economically in SaaS form.

Also, real time graphic visualisations in web apps are still far slower and less sophisticated than what you can achieve natively with modern graphics cards, at least for now. If you're watching a couple of pretty graphics in an analytics tool, that doesn't matter. Even some basic 3D work is starting to get interesting with technologies like WebGL arriving. But for real-time rendering and navigation of global weather patterns or the design of a cruise ship? I don't see that being done remotely any time soon.

And how often does one hear of a startup making new desktop software?

I'm not sure how often one hears about start-ups doing something is a very useful metric, really. The culture on HN is particularly biased towards that field, but in reality there are millions of programmers out there working on desktop software. New bespoke desktop applications are being written for businesses all the time, and likewise tools, toys, games and more are written by small software shops for individuals all the time.

But nearly all the innovation has been pointing in the other direction.

Really? I'd say the mobile "app store" model and the Linux "distribution" model have both been very successful at getting native software deployed onto users' systems, too.

It's just a shame that we still have horrible deployment practices and dependency management on most desktop platforms, much of it due to the stagnation of desktop OS architectures and the continued use of strategies that were originally designed to cope with limited resources but that have been obsolete for years now.
what was it that had you pay $20 to purchase in the first case?

I havent paid to play a social game so I'm really curious as I havent played any Facebook games before.
Reverse-engineering chirp.io using the Web Audio API
You don't have to do infoproducts. Who's telling you that you do? Not sure where you're getting this idea from. Because Brennan's current income is mostly from his book & courses? Because he used that money to free himself that much faster? But he never said it was the only way.

Here's the way I look at infoproducts (other than from a love of teaching, which I obviously have): http://unicornfree.com/2012/be-your-own-angel-how-to-make-mo...

I got to leave consulting twice as fast because I decided that teaching was a much better way to spend my time. And it was. Teaching pays dividends that you can't imagine, beyond the simple revenue.

As for Freckle, $400k/yr is amazing? Not hardly. If we hadn't made the mistakes we have made, I bet it'd be a $1 m/yr biz already. All my semi-major competitors must be making at least 5x-10x that per year (at least!). I've met some of them at confs; the Harvest guys I met a couple years before I ever did anything with Freckle, and I suspect they were making more then than we did now.

There are tons of popular, quiet SaaS successes, all around you. (Also people selling UI kits, themes, plugins, resource kits, and dev libraries. I have a friend making $10-15k/mo on an iOS component, last I heard. Not to mention live workshops, which are both impactful and very profitable.)

I have a lot of friends who don't write, who don't usually speak, etc., who write about business in general but don't share numbers… who run successful SaaS businesses in the $300k-3 million/year range.

Here's the thing: those friends don't share like I do -- because they don't have "preach the good news" as a personal mission (as I do, as Brennan, Patrick, etc. do) -- and so you assume they're not there. Your whole argument is predicated on the 10% of the "big picture" that somebody has come to you and handed to you, pre-chewed and spelled out.

I mean this kindly so please take it in the manner it's intended: I see this kind of attitude a lot. "But I don't WANT to do xyz [which nobody ever said I had to do, but about which they merely said 'here's what I do']. SOMETHING IS FISHY/unfair/sketchy/dishonest/a rip-off." Assuming nobody is saying "You have to do it this way," this is a kind of ego-freak-out that your subconscious designed to give you an excuse to maintain your status quo. The ego is a slippery, slippery creature.
This is why sometimes the best way to solve a problem is not to directly solve the problem, but just make an attempt to discover more about the problem.

The best example to study to in this case is the P Vs NP problem. I never understood how people can spend years trying to prove P=NP or P=!NP. Unless you already know the answer to question, to begin with a goal to prove it either way is not a wise way to achieve a solution to such a problem. If you try to discover more about this problem you likely to get to a result faster than than the actual proof simply because you can't prove/disprove what is not already proved/disproved. You can only hope to 'discover' a result.

So many times playing around, having fun and trying to discover things for sheer curiosity is likely to lead to more fascinating results.
Best performing IPO of the year: Guidewire Software.

But why would anyone at Forbes have heard of them?
> I successfully communicated and pissed off people I don’t like. Yay!

You'll make a lot of friends with that attitude.
They may be doing this to switch customers to their other titles before a new competitors game comes out
Imageoptimiser: Post Mortem of a GitHub Bob
I don't know when you last used Facebook, or maybe it is your lack of use that is the problem, but it filters the feed to only show you stories from people you interact with. It basically implements Google+ circles completely automatically for you. You may have accidentally turned this off, I suppose. There's an option for the feed to give everything sorted by date instead, although it isn't the default.
FUJITSU CP335276-01 5200mAh Li-ion laptop battery pack 
5200mAh FUJITSU CP335276-01 Laptop Batteries Description:

Battery Type: Li-ion

Battery Capacity: 10.8V

Battery Voltage: 5200mAh

Battery Size:

Battery Color: Black

Battery Brand: fujitsu Laptop Battery
Virtual Environment Reveals Sex-Dependent Nature of Skin Disclosure
Surprisingly a lot of specific and useful information. Thanks for the share.
I don't think Airbnb qualifies, because people are offering something beyond their labor.

For it to work, you need to find a way to allow the humans to differentiate themselves on quality. Otherwise it is just a race to the lowest price possible taking any shortcuts necessary. If price is the only way to tell people apart, then the people providing the service won't care about quality.

AMT tries to solve this problem by having people complete only small very well defined tasks. The task is so well defined that the is no variance in quality.

Other sites attempt to solve this by using feedback rating, but I don't think this really works at all. Shell accounts make this easy to game, and people get upset when they think they have fulfilled the requirements (no matter how minimally) and still get poor feedback.
What about Ruby Motion for iOS? Its commercial ($200 a license) but offers native objective-c compiled from ruby and is based on the open source mac ruby project.

This seems smart as you only have to learn the cocoa framework and you learn a little bit of objective-c. Whats nice if you want to go native and or optimize by writing straight objective-c you are halfway there.

Everything else I have looked at is basically a web browser attempting to be a full app.

I would love to hear if anyone has written an iOS app that is on the app store with it and what there experience has been.
She was involved in a scandal involving a drug called Cronassial, a pharmaceutical industry called Fidia and the Nobel committee.
Through various donations, Fidia (at the time a small pharmaceutical company) used the scientist from 1975 onwards to market a new panacea drug called Cronassial (which was banned in the Nineties across Europe as it was linked to Guillain-Barré syndrome and possibly because of the human spongiform encephalopathy scare).
The drug was approved thanks to the corrupt hand of Duilio Poggiolini (with the ministry of health) who was finally arrested in 1993.
Fidia's "collaboration" with the scientist culminated in 1986 with the Nobel prize, for which Fidia seems to have corrupted at least one of the committee members with 8 million dollars [1], fact that came out during the Italian corruption trials in the first part of the Nineties.

It seems that Fidia's revenue jumped a 1000 folds thanks to Cronassial, apparently from 600 million Lire to 420 billion, with the drug representing 82% of the revenue, but I wasn't able to find a source for that.

It's quite unfortunate Levi-Montalcini never came clean of this scandal, refusing to comment on anything related to Cronassial and claiming ignorance of the facts.

Disappointing as all this might be, NGF is a great discovery which is well worth a Nobel prize and she seems to have been a very good scientist too.

1) Nilsson M.
Nobel committee refutes allegations of corruption.
Lancet 1995; 346: 763-4.
I did 'lein koan run' in my terminal and opened the first file up in LightTable, then made my first edit and hit save - the terminal updated automatically as I saved my changes.
For those who have purchased a house before (I may be about to start the process) do the same techniques apply, or is it a different ballgame?
She's building a web site to showcase both her web development skills and her photography. I'm not sure whether she is going to look for a job or go for freelancing, but I think her inclination is to go for the latter. Her photography is much more art than commercial. She will probably pursue that as well.
With a preposterous amount of Facebook users all across the world, I think we are all projecting our personal experience on millions of others to make a value judgement. I personally get nothing out of it. How is it positively changing your life?
decimated...
yeah... good ol' times where I associated casual games with companies such as Playfish instead of Zynga... You know, Zuma, Diner Dash, Sally's Salon.. Where the companies doesn't actually try to get you addicted to their games..
I can't figure out how you think that's "kinder" instead of "a compliment." What's so noble about gold mining, exactly? Or with a long-term impact?

If I help 10 students build $100k/yr+ businesses, that's a $1 m/year impact I've made… which will continue to improve their lives, have an impact on their families and their communities and naturally themselves, and anyone they tutor, too. And the first of my students are reaching that goalpost, 2-3 years later.

Freckle, too, is designed to help my customers earn more & build a better business. And I have over a thousand paying customers there.

How's that less valuable or less honorable than creating some kind of social startup I hope to sell for a couple million dollars? (Or investing in somebody who does?)

There aren't a lot of gold miners who have created lasting wealth, or lasting impact.
Cycling is great, I highly recommend it. Don't think of it as a cheap hobby though, once you get into it you are almost guaranteed to start breaking things on a cheap bike and want better gear.

As a side note, if you do get a bike on a shoestring budget get an older bike as those things were built to last; modern cheap bikes have gimmicky suspension setups (suspension is great but there are vast differences between cheap elastomers and a plush oil based setup) that don't help and add weight (and parts to go wrong) to the bike.

Also if you are finding it difficult to get into, try different styles of cycling. Fast road riding, cross country mountain biking, long distance cycle touring , downhill mountain biking and BMX riding are all vastly different experiences that use completely different skills and muscles.

On another note, if you get serious I do highly recommend so called "clipless" (a cleat in the shoe locks into the pedal) pedals for most styles of riding.

These things seem so scary and dangerous to start with, but I can virtually guarantee that once you are used to them you will not want to go back even for technical offroad riding. The extra efficiency and control you gain is astonishing, toe clips don't even come close. Of course make sure you practise on a grassy area first and get the feel for them and make sure you are confident with them before heading into traffic.

Falling off your bike when you stop for a red light is at best embarrassing and at worst really dangerous.

Also Sheldon Brown's page (RIP) on cycle maintenance though heavily outdated unless you have an older bike is probably one of my favorite parts of the "old internet".

http://sheldonbrown.com/
No wonder the Bible Belt has such high obesity and diabetes rates.
It does.

But I'm kinda curious what you thought it stood for?
There's more to conj. It does a cons for lists, but works differently for other types of collections. You might find it helpful to lookup things in ClojureDocs. http://clojuredocs.org/clojure_core/clojure.core/conj
Bought from a guy on craigslist '00 Chrysler Concorde 3.2L for $2000 back in 2009 when we just moved into USA and desperately needed any car. Still drives. This car has really nice leather interior, huge trunk and actually is quite reliable. But because it is "domestic junk", price was very low. I am going to drive until it dies. And once it die, I will buy another "domestic junk" car and will be driving it for next few years :))
I don't see how this is relevant. Having a god in your life doesn't exclude you from the benefits of trying and conquering new things in life. Also, a relationship with god probably won't give you sweet quads.
Demo link (in README.md) still fails on an iPad. I think it has tondo with the link being inside an H2 heading. When I attempt to click, I see a link icon appear to the left of the "Demo" text, but no amount of clicking will cause the link to open.
What makes you think our apps are aimed at developers? You don't have any data on our customers to say things that we have problems making sales, or that people "play with us" and switch easily.
Given that the Democrats now control the state with a supermajority, and California's fiscals aren't looking like they will improve; you might see some sort of rebellion in the party. I wouldn't hold my breath though.
Keep in mind that I am talking specifically about the context of web scraping. For any other application, I would choose node in a heartbeat.
Sponsorships are really low impact, because they're a distraction to the thing people showed up for (the podcast, the event) and your CTA is by necessity very weak. I am anti-interruption marketing, and not just because it doesn't work.
Amazingly well designed html5 based iOS app
Zynga's taking advantage of human psychology to abuse their customers who have been playing their games for a long time. I didn't realize this until working this out while responding to your post:

By killing off the oldest games, Zynga causes a significant segment of its customer base to substitute newer games for the older ones. These customers are probably the most profitable (they likely buy stuff in game), and they will likely make purchases in the new games as well.

This has another benefit for Zynga in that it lets them play games with the user metrics for their newest titles (thus making the stock holders happy). Having a long-time customer start playing a new/trending game is just as good as (or better than, see above) a brand new customer.
Yes, that is a great counter point.
Yeah, it's definitely disheartening that success takes time and the willingness to do different things to make it work. Really disappointing how life isn't like a movie.

Also, hate to disappoint you again, but when it comes to a paying product, "exponential growth" is a unicorn. Just cuz Github can make it work doesn't mean anyone else can.
Shows like Firefly don't get made in a world where consumers pay directly for the content.
Oh, I don’t want to be friends with people who are pedants about stuff like this.
No, the fact that you're being obtuse is giving you a bad reputation. Vim is a very powerful and flexible editor. The site you linked to os titled Learn Vim script The Hard Way. Vimscript is not Vim, it is the scripting language used to customize Vim.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not necessarily defending Vim here. The learning curve is steep, but the "evidence" you're providing here only illustrates that you can't spot differences in basic nouns (Vim versus Vimscript). This is a challenge that any reasonably skilled problem solver would have resolved with one Google query and 5 minutes of reading.
Any chance of getting this on a poster or something? Would look cool on a wall.
Well you might just use some other name than `self` e.g. I use var _this = this;
What planet do you live on? Even with $100B in the bank, you are going to buy A (1) content creator out right, and not the biggest. Lucas Films which has a few dozen properties, and a few hundred hours of content, went for $4b. It is a VERY small content provider. Disney would cost in the neighborhood of $250B

Viacom just bought Bellator (MMA / UFC content producer) for $225M. So apple could afford a few producers of a single show.
IPTV does not require mangaged QoS -Brandon Wirtz Google me I know more about IPTV than you do. (or just about anyone on the planet)
one cheap price is more interesting for me, and if the content is available on netflix, that would seal the deal for me
that's part of it, but not nearly as large a part as you'd imagine. there are ways to defend against, e.g., someone getting the X both ways on a triple letter score (the most common large "tile lottery" moment). harder to overcome is someone simply drawing one bingo after another (possibly by being lucky with the blanks and Ss), getting an early 100-200 point lead, and then simply closing the board down (both players have low-scoring moves thereafter, but you already have the lead), or having a close-fought game be irretrievably lost because you get a final rack with six vowels, or none, or an unplayable Q that hits you with a 20 point penalty and let's your opponent play his final rack out letter by letter, for a large number of points.
Nope I spent hundreds before that, and was a customer for life. Playing for almost a year.

Any company with shtty tech support and pss poor customer service is going to lose customers by making them unhappy and then spiral their stock out of control into a bankruptcy. That includes Facebook themselves, who even after proof that I didn't get gold in the game for my $20, sided with Playdom in banning my account for a day for "unauthorized credit card use" of my own Paypal account.

Here is another thing, Paydom's TOS says I must file a support ticket with them, I did and nothing happened and they ignored the problem, Paypal's TOS says I have to resolve disputes with them which I did by creating a ticket, and then Facebook got upset because their TOS says I have to resolve disputes with them. Which one gets priority? Playdom and Facebook refused to do anything and then banned my account anyway even if I did nothing wrong and I was the one who was punished for a bug in the game that doesn't give me gold I legally paid for with my own account. That is all kind of messed up there and if this is what happens to a typical user who needs a refund due to a bug in the game not giving gold or whatever they paid for, then this whole industry is going bankrupt into another Dotcom bubble burst. You never do this to your customers, never!
What is even MORE amazing is that I was in Best Buy four days ago, and I saw not one, but TWO copies of the Starcraft Battle Chest (Starcraft, the expansion, and strategy guides for both) still selling at $30.

I first bought my battlechest in 2000 for $30.

So 14 years after the release of the original game, it still moves enough copies for Best Buy to have it on the shelves.
Yes, nothing like a good old-fashioned delusion to brighten up your life.
If we're being nitpicky, then 'hammered' would be more descriptive than 'decimated'. Decimated would imply only a -10% drop if we stick to it's figurative definition