skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: This week I released my first Android game.
I started programming 20 years ago on an Apple IIC in original BASIC, and all I wanted to do when I was a kid was make video games. I have many fond memories of staying up late at night working on dinky little QBASIC games, with the only light coming from the glow of my computer screen. Back then the internet was nothing like it is today, and I had a really hard time figuring out how to implement graphics in C++ using DirectX, it was very frustrating. In college I switched from computer science to physics, and I took an 8 year break from coding to do research and teach, but a little over a year ago I rediscovered my passion for programming and got a job at a small startup. Being inspired by the HN community, me and a close friend decided to try and achieve our childhood dream of having our own video game company. This week, after 3 months of extreme stress and all night marathon sessions almost every night, we released our first game in the Google play store!

It's been a really valuable experience, and now that the first game is finally released we are entering a whole new world of marketing, which is kind of scary. The website is up, although it could be better, but getting that together is just another form of programming and design, it's not the same as the hard work that it's going to take to market this product and make this company succeed.

I would really appreciate any advice that the community has to offer, and it would mean a lot to me if you guys would check out the game and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Demo Version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bloodhousegames.superfox

Full Version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bloodhousegames.superfoxfull

Company Website: http://bloodhousegames.com/
My personal favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, where the project was abandoned by MS after the first SDK was already sent to developers:
http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...
Arrrh... http://facebook.jpg.to/
Korean Beauty Contestants – Face Morphing
There is already an official Arduino ARM Cortex M3 board, the Due: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDue

Teensy 3.0 afaik has some degree of support for Arduino IDE too. LeafLabs Maple has Arduino-style IDE too. And finally there is Energia IDE for Stellaris Launchpads.

So I'd say that the "Arduino for ARM" field is already quite contested, and I've probably missed some projects.
On one hand, I cannot recall a single village of more than, say, 1000 inhabitants (in Germany) which did not have a decent supermarket (Aldi, Lidl etc.) – at most, it might be at the other end of the village a few kilometers away, but, well.

On the other hand, you ignore that bicycles are perfectly fit for use as transportation, especially in rural areas with little traffic, reducing the need for a car even further. You can get as far as 20 km easily by bike (about an hour, tops), and I will be very surprised to learn of places where the next shop is more than 20 km[0]

Additionally, you ignore that the average population density of a country is no measure whatsoever of how said population is distributed – if the vast majority of the population live in villages and cities, it doesn’t matter whatsoever whether there are fifty trillion square miles of forest around them or not.

Futhermore, I have to admit that I did not necessarily consider Russia and Iceland to be part of Europe in this regard.
Yea, the WaSP was in 1998 petitioning Netscape to cancel Mariner, and unfortunately they caved.
Yes, taking VC money is a double-edged sword; that's basically the long and the short of it. However, it's a great thing that investors will line up to throw millions at a nascent tech start-up, especially if you want to spend your life building big companies.

VCs obviously have a lot of power and influence in the Valley because many businesses need a big chunk of start-up capital and they have it, and they own fractions of many companies and sit on boards. The fact that they are influential isn't a reason not to associate with them.

Bootstrapping your business and paying your engineers' salaries out of your revenue rather than investment is admirable. I'd like to try it sometime.

The main thing to recognize is that when you take money from investors, you are claiming the business is a good business. Successful fund-raising is not derisking, it is you explaining the risk and why you will succeed.
Thanks for the link; I'm actually living #9 (re-read books from your high-school reading list) right now and am loving it!
BTW, there's also an Office web viewer, which doesn't seem to require signing up for SkyDrive.

http://blogs.office.com/b/officewebapps/archive/2013/04/10/o...
There a couple of ways to look at this. Either incompetent people are successful because the barrier to success is quite low; in which case this is encouraging for competent people.

Or incompetent people are successful because the barrier to success is highly arbitrary and only somewhat correlates to competence which is much less encouraging.

Maybe you lose out on funding to a much less competent crew because you were launching a B2B Web-based SaaS product on a month when everyone was crazy about B2C mobile products for example.
Debuggex is a very well done and useful site. It reminds me of http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ in terms of utility and slickness of design. Alex Sirota of that site uses a sponsored area that is not obtrusive.
Googler here. It will be with AOSP soon, but there was some confusion getting that done. We did this as a temporary measure; didn't want to delay getting GPL compliant.
I never do -Wall and -Wextra. Why? Because too many of clang's warning switches have names that have little to do with what they actually warn about. One in particular has to do with it finding duplicate selectors in different classes. I can never remember what it's called, but it's very annoying when you need to find it to disable it. Even worse, when you disable that particular flag, it disables a whole bunch of other actually useful warnings as well!

You also DON'T want to do -Wall and -Wextra along with -Werror. Why? Because when a later version of the compiler gets smarter and puts in more warnings, suddenly your (working) code won't compile anymore! That would go over very poorly in a CI system or an open source library! Your "future proofing" has just ensured that sometime down the road (and likely at an inconvenient time), your project is guaranteed to break!
Most of these sites will show the amount of interest due so I don't think it's so much that issue as it is the issue that taking out one of these loans increases the chance that you will need to take out another one of these loans the following month which is a much harder calculation to make.
seems like a great idea! wondering if you could plug this into comments on facebook where you could have your own such images embedded into text, like custom emoticons (or make the like like an @mention where its a word and a link to an image at the same time). Great stuff!
Trade Glitches Test Investors’ Fragile Faith in Market
heh, never heard of that til now. Sweet!
It gets made fun of a lot, but personally I believe Hackers had the most realistic depiction of what hacking is like to hackers of any movie. Definitely one of my favorites.
The next Xbox rethinks DRM, Achievements and Xbox Live friends
Yes! I love the idea of being able to find images that actually include the text you want. Even better if the image itself is relavent.
Hey Look A Dishonest Whitepaper (iPad vs Dell Tablet)
Actually Litecoin MIGHT jsut solve "the deflation problem":

More specifically, having a number of BTC clones of "varying degrees of 'dilution'" in constant competition might, via emerging floating "exchange rates" (from arbitration traders), "balance" what the missing "monetary overlord" cannot technically pull off. Could that be? Ever-evolving store-of-value versus medium-of-exchange demand in the network may be ever-shifting to the various currencies based on their intrinsic un-changable core "policies" (inflationary Freicoins vs. deflationary Bitcoins) and other market dynamics, no?

I'm no game theorist right now so I can diagram it out but hey, something to think about, no? It just "might" contribute to "easing" the "problem".

Also, I do love me some "quotation marks".
I also thought it would be handy to get the most relavent image given a URL, much like what happens when you paste a link into a facebook post; attempting to find the "logo" on the page or the high-res apple icons.
We like to travel (most widely in Central America)and always have, over the last three decades. And we do not generally go out of our way to stay in resorts or spend money wastefully. One way too common problem with coming across "shoe-string" and "Lonely Planet" travelers is how insanely boring they are, where every experience boils down to how cheaply they pulled it off.
True story: One of the entrepreneurs from Startup.com was my summer camp counselor.
Did you have a similar mix and quality of clothes at the end of tht period as at the start? Similarly, was you washing machine (if you had one) of similar quality? T.v, computer?

It is relatively easy to live on a budget starting from a position where you have all relatively new stuff, and where you have a full closet of relatively new clothes.

Also: €25 for eating out once or twice plus clothes?
"It's surprising to me that anyone would think otherwise."

Not really if you think about it. Many experiences from the outside seem like one thing until you go through them yourselves.

You might think Starbucks is all about coffee "why would anyone pay $4.00 for a ..." but if you are a frequent Starbucks customer you then realize it's about a sugar fix, community (if you spend time there and get to know the regulars), habit and a host of other things you might not realize at the outset.

New people are introduced to new things all the time with a fresh slate.

I would find it quite surprising for any 17 year old or even a 50 year old who hasn't paid attention closely to know what the real game is (in anything).

I remember as a young child the shock I had finding out that there were dishonest policemen or other authority figures who committed crimes.

People get a good chuckle at newbies for sure (laughing nervously because they were all newbies at one point).
Five kilometers sounds like a very sane maximum distance for shopping, which is manageable in one hour (two hours round trip). You don’t have to visit every shop each day, as the prices will be roughly the same and you can note new ones as you get to the shop the next time. Walking requires nearly no energy, compared to the standard energy requirements of the human body.

Also note that a bicycle for as little as £20 can speed up transportation immensely at nearly no cost (of course, you might want to invest a further £3 in chain lube, but, well).
Ask HN: How can I find remote jobs?
I'm learning how to code and I've thought it would be great to find part time/full time remote job that can enable me to to build my coding skills and portfolio.
Where can I find startups that are looking for remote workers? I don't mind working support or any over tedious job as long as it pays good and for reasonable hours.
I guess the point is that there isn't much of a shortage if they're being paid the same as they were more than 10 years ago.

The author also pointed out that wages rose when there was a true shortage. It's the very next sentence.

> For example, during the tech boom of the 1990s and bust in the 2000s, salaries and U.S. unemployment in IT exhibited the expected classic supply and demand relationship. Salaries rose when unemployment in the field was low.
Yeah, that's a big part of the motivation. Though facebook doesn't render the images inline, just pulls them out into a preview-type thing
It reminds me of Pulp's Common People, poverty tourism doesn't provide a ton of insight if you don't account/control for your ability to leave it all behind at any point.
Why LivingSocial’s 50 million password breach is graver than you may think
Has Apple released today’s reports?
TCDisrupt SF Hackathon Grand prize winner's TCDisrupt NYC Project Today
It would be interesting to do a SaaS play and charge on a monthly basis, with all updates available to all users. And then allow some (very basic AND time-limited) use by free users, only for trial purposes (not freemium).
It's easi(er) to own a niche market, but it's also more likely that anyone decently positioned to compete with you can wipe out your profits with small changes to their product or pricing strategy

Not all niche markets are small in terms of revenue/cost either: there are product niches worth millions (or even billions) whose actual feasible customer set barely makes it into double digits. But when the niche is that small in terms of customers you find that despite the lack of threat from competitors it's actually the customer that owns the niche....
And the loan companies cry that it makes them impossible to do business if they're capped at still wholly usurious rates.
I hoped Crank 2 would be as good, but the craziness was over the top.
A VC fundable startup is one in which you KNOW you can turn $1 into $20. Once you figure out how to do this, you will want as much money as possible to make that happen as many times as you can. That's when VC's are needed. You take VC money for growth, not for ideation or market validation. Before you find your business model you should stick to bootstrapping, angel investing and just keep iterating until you figure it all out.
Is Google Glass a World-Class Hoax?
Bret Victor: Upcoming Videos
Mark your calendar.
"Our various welfare programs are so generous that our poor can (and often do) eat like gluttons."

Ah, the T-bone steaks and Cadillacs meme.
> Sure we can 'make things' out of gold/silver, but we can't eat it or shoot it at each other: making it more or less as worthless

Or---priceless! Hoarding them historically never (or hardly ever) interfered with anyone's livelihood or industrial endeavours, yet because of their arbitrary ("useless") nature could "absorb" / proxy per-unit any measure of wealth applicable at a given time and place-----which is another valuable property in addition to the usual "scarce, indestructable-but-divisible etc." list of benefits.
I only have one grip with the BB black -- the HDMI out resolution. Maximum of 1280x1024. Which itself isn't so bad, but that (and several other resolutions on it) are geared towards 4/3 monitors instead of 16/10 or 16/9. Which itself I don't mind so much, but there aren't many 4/3 monitors on the market any more.

BTW, anyone have information on the performance of the graphic drivers for this board? Would it be any good for full screen video?
"Our various welfare programs are so generous that our poor can (and often do) eat like gluttons."

This statement surprises me, as it contradicts a lot of what I've heard of poverty in the US.

Do you have a citation or several I could look at?
You should add open source software tools, os's, or like someone said hardware (NAS, routers, servers, chips, etc.) that are mentioned too. On top of all these movies that are mentioned here. Great work.
The problem is monetizing a small-market product, esp. an online product. If you go the advertising route, you have to get your page views _way_ up to earn anything; you can't do that with just one little server. If you go the subscription route, pricing is really tricky. If you charge just a little, in my personal experience a) most programmers won't pay anything, so you lose most of your market right there, and b) you'll go broke collecting a pittance from the few who will pay.
Why? Because you don't need to make 1 cent off each tomato sold in USA to be successful. Even taking a cut of every water pump of a certain car is more then enough--for most of us.
You can get jeans for 10 €, lasting about four months (so a year if you have three), shoes are roughly twice the price, three t-shirts usually come in at 5€ (Aldi is wonderful at that – thinking of which, I mostly bought my clothes there, including them in the general groceries category[0]). I bought a used washing machine when I moved in for 90 €, which had to be replaced after two years, so this would be 3.75 €/month. The oven came with the flat and worked fine, I got an old fridge from my grandparents which was still functional when I moved out, but likely sucked up far more energy than necessary.

Tech was relatively decent (used X300, used X41, a weird desktopy-mediacentery thing) when I moved in, I got a T410s after two years from the money I had saved when the battery in the X300 failed and sold the latter for 500€ (350 after replacement of said battery). Trips to my parents were usually paid directly by them, but they obviously weren’t strictly necessary either.

You can get a döner and a drink or two for ~8 € – surely not eating out, but not eating in either.

[0] I spent about 25 € there per week, which would give 120 €/month for strictly groceries and a further 30€ for extras (cheap pans, clothes, paper etc.).
i can not say the same about my product http://onetimepost.com/ ... but it only took me a Saturday morning so ... it wasn't like something huge was lost xD
> Except that C-style macro functions aren't "simple transformations on some tree data structure". They are textual transformations. Hygienic macros (à la Racket) I agree are useful and easy to reason about.

Elixir uses the latter; am I missing something?
AppFog folds Rackspace support
That's one awesome regex debugger!

Going after such a small niche is a great idea as long as you know that the market is big enough to provide good ROI in both percentage and nominal terms.

I don't think the worry from a competitor "adding a feature and crushing you" is a very likely threat. As long as you can stick it out for a few years to build a brand name and continue to keep in front of the indefinite stream of people learning regex you should be fine.
That is true, but something else to focus on: with smaller niches, the learning that takes place is often much higher and faster, and that is invaluable too.

My app is the absolute niche of niche ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauldavids... ), but I learned A LOT, especially about the official Android publishing process. I don't care if it doesn't get used by many people, because my target market was literally 1 person: my girlfriend.

In addition, the process of making this app was fun. Learning AND fun; a goal that ALL of us here are striving for, right?
Obviously is not a simple life. Dangers are everywhere from drug dealers to policeman.
But to keep this short the fact is the same: For a mentally sane man (or woman) in USA is very difficult die of starvation.
I was around and active at that time, reading T-Filez, phrack and using those giant phreaker and hacker chatrooms. I did go to a club in NYC that was very similar to the one in the movie which were freq by Patrick K Kroupa and Corrupt, plus other hackers before they threw me out for being underage.

I seem to remember in the film the two guys Razor and Blade who had that pirate broadcast 'Hack the planet' actually existed as well.
Maybe I'm just in an overly defensive mood for no apparent reason, but the hubris in this post is somewhat off putting. Not up to your task does not mean "incompetent." Hell, poorly written doesn't even necessarily mean that.
Compartmentalization. Smart people can hold incredibly stupid beliefs. I believe Michael Shermer's book on "Why People Believe Weird Things" argues that smart persons are actually better at self-rationalization of untrue/cognitively dissonant "facts".
Bruce Eckel on why he's moving back to Windows from Mac
The Dark Side of Energy Independence
Nice to see that others appreciate Crank as well! I always wondered why it was so underrated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43EtAgFSso0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr5o58yt4VU
You’re moving the goalposts. I indicated I moved to a small city specifically not to have to own a car to shop for groceries. You seem to think that one can live anywhere in Europe and be within 2 miles (a 30 minute walk) of whatever amenities you need. That is simply not true.

My sister’s husband owns a home on an island in Norway which has been in his family for several generations. They spend several months a year there. There are no shops on the island at all, it takes more than an hour by boat to get to a supermarket. I’ve never visited Norway, but I’ve been told this is quite common.

“if the vast majority of the population live in villages and cities, it doesn’t matter whatsoever whether there are fifty trillion square miles of forest around them or not.”

It does matter to you, if you happen to live in or near a forest. In Iceland, two-thirds of the population lives in the Reykjavik area. If you live outside of that area, you absolutely need a car.
You can set the warnings to only appear on debug builds. Would that fix the CI issue?
Erm, he isn't expressing a right to vote here, he is telling others what they should do (without any supporting facts, reason or evidence).

In your analogy, he isn't the voter, but the legislator, and it's perfectly valid to ask the question "and how many laws have you passed?"
A child's age starts counting when it's a song in his mother's mind
Personally I have no use for Twitter, but find Facebook quite valuable.
Problem is he used bitcoins for pure speculation and "investment". I've used it since 2011 to take online payments for software, then turn around and either cash immediately to avoid price fluctuations or I spend it on hosting, hardware, and lately even stuff off Amazon with btc->amazon credits.

I've never kept and held bitcoins nor do I support any investment scheming like this guy. To me bitcoin is an excellent decentralized money transfer system which is what the media should be talking about instead of whatever profiteering speculators are doing.

I can sell fully customized ROMs now, with the phone handsets and full service and not worry about credit card fraud. I pay almost no fees cashing it to fiat either by using localbitcoins.
I wrote a regex tool a while back: http://regexp.quaxio.com/

It's open source so feel free to "steal" from it :)
I hope the idea takes off, too.

Providing codes is imperative; they are part of the methods and should be available for examination to ensure the integrity of the science. Those conducting research funded with public monies should be required by the funding agencies to release the products of that research, not just the results, but the data and codes, too (absent truly compelling reasons, such as national security). Eventually, I expect funding agencies will indeed require this for astronomy, just as they do for some other sciences; journals could help the field along, could improve the transparency and reproducibility of research, by requiring code release upon publication.

Absent funding agencies and journals insisting on code release and the moral argument of reproducibility, what incentives would help convince code authors to release their software?
These Huge Brands' Early Websites From The 1990s Looked Terrible
You would be surprised - there are actually a lot of people who, for whatever reason, are unable to focus even on something they care greatly about.
Wrap up of a mind blowing week in the world of APIs
It's for the orphans