skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
20% sound ridiculous high, and I would ask where in the world of sanity that people got that number.

If we look at freemium to paid conversion rates, 20% seems out-of-this world large. Almost no one has that high. Looking around, 1% or 2.5% is said to be the average for games[1][2][3].

Why would a pirate be 10 times more likely to be incited to buy a game, rather than those who play a game designed from the ground up to encourage high conversion rates? It sound to me that logic demand that games with features designed for high conversion rates will do better than games that don't.

Ie, to sum up, the conversation rate for pirate->paying should be far less than 2.5% in average, and nowhere near 20%.

[1]: http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2009/11/04/running-a-freem...

[2]: http://www.gamesbrief.com/2011/11/conversion-rate/

[3]: http://www.gamesbrief.com/2013/03/arpdaus-conversion-rates-a...
Spain was exactly like that until a few years ago, especially that "go somewhere else" bit. Going out is sooo much better now.

I used to have a shower after I got home, besides the one I took before going out, because if I didn't, my sheets would stink throughout all the week; and I wasn't even going to heavily crowded bars, just restaurants.
Link to official documentation: http://help.ovh.co.uk/InstallOvhKey
I much prefer to be the JavaScript guy than the PHP guy. JavaScript does have some pitfalls, but they're easy to avoid. JavaScript is way cleaner and better thought out than PHP. Python is still very small. The two big "enterprisey" languages C# and Java are ubiquitous and are hard to excel in.
It's always bothered me that Google doesn't have pretty URL formating. Well done here.
Even if they do delete it and never back it up, it seems very unlikely they'd go through what must be a huge library of backups and wipe you from all of them. Such an expectation would be ridiculous, and I'm sure pretty much no company will do that, but the point is your data won't be deleted from all sources regardless.
I have the same problem - I think it's down to impulse buys.. I have a lot of games on Steam I've never got down to playing as I've no time!
yah I am aware. Orphan works.
Your last point is a great litmus test. Startups are stressful and emotional by nature, not to mention the ridiculous time commitment required.

Any company that fails to empathise with that is a company worth avoiding.
Cute. You may make sales due to the novelty of the idea getting blogged about, but you'll lose sales and PR due to the majority of your player base having played/used a faulty product.

There are still gamers who think that 'Batman: Arkham Asylum' had legitimately broken mechanics, due to a similar action the developers of that game did ( http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/94524-Arkham-Asylu... ).

I'm all for punishing pirates , but the unfortunate aspect of this is that you're punishing pirates & all of the possible legitimate customers that the pirate exposes to the game.

These people are potential customers , independent siblings, children who can beg their parents to buy the game, whatever, that are witnessing and at worst case experiencing a broken product, and having whatever faith they had in whatever company reduced.

I do like what it does to make you think twice about data legitimacy on the ether though. It's nice to be reminded that most of us don't know where that data is coming from.
See, Facebook again ;-)

I don't think it's possible to get "a few groups" of sceners together in the Netherlands. It's even hard to find people enthusiastic about FOSS, though there are some more of those.
Here's what the position should be. You're free to use other people's stuff that appears online, but not for commercial purposes.

Putting someone's picture (that happens to be on the web, publicly available) in a post on a site, where you happen to have ads does not count as "using your image" for commercial purposes. Putting your image in an ad would.

My point is that you shouldn't be able to just claim having copyright over someone's work, and then profiting from it as your own. I shouldn't be able to take the HD version of Iron Man 3, and then sell it to my local cinema. That's as far as copyright should go.
Try the Total War series.
using always-online DRM to stop piracy: losing the whole of SimCity's customer base
using irony to teach pirates not to pirate: priceless
The important figure (for developers) is not what proportion of pirates would buy the game, but what proportion of possible buyers will pirate instead.

My experience with my social group is that this second group is quite high. I know (for example) people who have bought many xbox 360 games (as these are hard to pirate) and have never bought a PC game, despite playing similar number of games on each.
download: https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137...
What's wrong with Myers-Briggs? One shouldn't spend too many thoughts about it, but I find the test results to be quite stable and fitting for me and many peers. Combine that with the idea that diversity is good, and that there is no right and wrong in personality.

I'm from Europe, had some courses on MBTI and I liked it. Not sure if the American love affair goes way beyond that.
You take them off every night, I mean seriously!
"I'm assuming some bad faith here, because the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they pirate and use will be the first."

In your own words, you say copying is human nature. It sounds like the "pay-before-evaluate" model is hoping to change that. I'd say expecting human nature to change is unrealistic. Isn't it easier to just exploit human nature? I mean, isn't that good capitalism?

(Everyone's rationalizations are self-serving, including your own, otherwise thinking would be a liability...)
Hah, this is genius. Love the irony.
one explanation might be that the posts were deleted because piracy isn't tolerated on those forums
That would be quite an about-face; Global Foundries was spun off from AMD in 2009.
I'm sorry if I'm incredulous.

I DO believe that the screenshots show the formating of the forum. It's just that those particular posts were completely fabricated. (e.g. rewriting the source code of a comment in the html source and then taking a screenshot of it.)

Just to confirm that Google does index those posts, I picked a random one that wasn't too recent, and could find it without any problem:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22While+we+were+inspired+by...

If you find (and don't fabricate) these posts, could you reply with a screenshot and link? Neither link actually brings up anything.

You also offer no explanation why "literally ONE MINUTE" after putting his torrents up, his uTorrent screenshot shows a torrent added the day before.
Guardare film porno tutto il giorno essendo pagati profumatamente
I wish I had Glass yesterday when I was stuck in traffic.

OK Glass, show me traffic to Home.

I wanted a sixth sense, to be able to see a map of London with all traffic marked out so that I could pick my rat race run through the back streets and at least be moving.

And whilst I got out of the traffic fine, I wish I had Glass and it knew to tell me before I got into it.
This line of thinking is what happens when you take barely overlapping populations and attempt to extrapolate between them. For a more related data-point that you can get from public data (because the 20-25% comment was inside baseball from folks I know personally), the average conversion rate across all titles on XBLA hovers around 18%. When you take into account the general demographics on XBLA versus something like Steam (where the folks I was referring to previously generally roll), a small bump from there doesn't strike me as overly conservative.

You can't really compare what amounts to a SaaS conversion rate to a purchase of a completely realized product with significant media presence (like, even indie games get a ton of eyeballs and an implicit seal-of-quality when they hit Steam or XBLA). It just doesn't shake out that way.
As I wrote in the post, I use Goose (https://github.com/xgdlm/python-goose) in my product. Goose also returns the URL of the main image! (sometimes it even includes its dimensions)
I did link you to the posts on facepunch.com, here's a screenshot instead: http://i.imgur.com/Ankgk7S.png
Well, I can remember many times where I didn't have my phone handy and missed some great pictures.

But that's not enough to convince me of the usefulness of smart glasses.

Nonetheless, I'd love to try one out for a couple weeks and I can see me buying one for USD$ 200 if it gets to that price.
Page was unavailable for me. Cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I agree.

I don't pay for anything unless I can try it or read a ton of reviews about it first. I've still gotten burned a few times but never felt any moral outrage over it. It's not some inalienable right to download stuff for free.
ugh you beat me to it!

Truth is MBAs are inflated hullaballoo whose exorbitant price for offering semi useful drivel may have worked in the time of all-is-fine-and-dandy but in today's unstable economic world where lean is mean (in good sense) it's just anachronistic.
The posts did not discuss piracy, only in-game dynamics. That's the point.

The author also literally made up the lie that ONE minute after adding his torrent, look at all these pirates, this is a screenshot ONE minute after adding the torrent!

Screenshots show torrent added a day ago.

Also, it's neither here nor there but I personally would have linked to the posts in question in the write-up. However this is a matter of style and I don't hold it against the author.
Those searches don't necessarily mean this is a hoax, simply that Google hasn't yet indexed them (possible if the posts are only a few days old), and that is assuming they are in places Google is able to index at all.
MBTI has been roundly rejected by scientists and psychologists - its "results" are no more stable than astrology. Just the same as Graphology.
My thoughts on it are at http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/12/astrology-for-businesses/
Exactly, maybe they should've taught him to give good arguments for his opinions or something such.
His article can be broke down to: "MBAs need to change bc they are already worthless! How? Don't ask me, I just feel stupid for paying 100k bucks for nothing"
Some anti-piracy zealots would dare to say they pirated their game idea from someone else.
As someone who owns a motorbike and uses it for my daily commute, I'm really excited about Google Glass because it means I will be able to get rid of my GoPro helmet cam and I will also have a GPS & traffic monitor. But mine is a niche case.
"Taking shit for free because I can" is the nature of a certain audience, yes. Relying on attacks of moral conscience from people already willing to do this is not a workable business model, and because of this, we as a society have evolved a system of copyrights to incentivize content creation[1]. (Tchotchkes with a free game attached is, likewise, not particularly viable.)

[1] - No, this is not a defense of Disney at al and ever-growing copyright lengths, but neither is it an allowance that running roughshod over the little guy is acceptable either.
List of game engines for indie developers, each with a list of example games
I personally find that MapBox's TileMill (http://mapbox.com/tilemill/) is much better. The massive dataset of OpenStreetMap with complete flexibility.
Problem is , for everyone who will happily compensate the artist if they feel they got value there are probably ~100 people who will just keep it for free even if they feel they had value.
> India is one country I'm not setting foot in for the foreseeable future.

Yes its a shame. You don't have to live there. But 1 of every 6 fellow humans do. And not all of them openly defecate. Some are even pleasant enough to shake hands with. Many take a lot more antibiotics to ward off the germs but still die early. Lucky for you you don't have to die early :) but armed with antibiotics and Fiona's travel guides (http://bit.ly/ZR6wtm), you can experience a sliver of the place which is "also a cradle of humanity with much history".
This is actually true. I used to pirate games during my school and college days, since I couldn't afford to shell out 3000 INR on a single game. I still did buy a few original games (whenever my parents allowed me to), but 95% of the games I played was pirated. But, after getting a job and becoming financially independent, I switched to purchasing copies on Steam. Now, I have around 50 titles in my library.
I don't know if this is exaggerated, but the requirement of handwritten letters or the presumption on the part of the job prospect that there is such a requirement is certainly still true.

I remember a friend, that was trying to find a part time student job as a clerk, writing literally a hundred different motivation letters all by hand.

At the time I found it odd and I questioned the sanity of requiring a motivation letter for a retail job, now that I read this I understand what the motive behind it could be, and I find it even odder.
that screenshot is good, unfortunately I can't get to the source to verify directly. It is down at the moment and not taking registrations.

if I verify I will retract my hoax allegations.

May I ask how you yourself found that post, given that google didn't have it indexed?
It does use email for the introduction purposes. We do need Facebook to know who your friends are, though.
5 years ago (I had been a fb'er since 06) I deleted every message is ever received - took me an age but finally did it.

Kept an empty inbox for the next 3 years.

2 years ago (or thereabouts) Facebook introduces a new messaging setup (about or a bit before their new interface, I've forgotten what they call it)
- all the messages were back, all the way back to my first messages sent jn 2005.

Scary.
Quick question: Would you have bought games on steam over $1000 if the steam services would had been a bad one?

Or to put it in a other way, how much of that $1000 is thanks to steams services, convenience and marketing? Many people claim, including the CEO of steam, that steam is not competing with pirates. People pay for the services, which in turn get partially sent to developers to create more content to be used in the service.
I recognised the forum layout as being Facepunch.com, then I went to the forum and searched for "Game Dev Tycoon" and looked through the results until I found the post.
The user of an orphaned work can't become the owner - the legislation specifically prohibits granting users of orphaned works exclusive rights. Because of this, sublicencing seems like a non-issue, because anyone who could sublicense an orphaned work from a user of that work, could just directly license it from whatever body licenses orphaned works.
link baiting is the thing to do these days! sad truth.
That's not uncommon. London postcodes were invented because there were numerous streets with the same name in London.
Layered 2-D nanocrystals promising new semiconductor
Instagram effectively already has that feature - if you post a picture on Instagram, any cursory web search is going to find it, linked to your Instagram account, so it won't count as orphaned. The article's claim that "most digital images on the internet today are orphans" is just nonsense.
Truer word were never spoken. I will adjust the site. Thanks.
Some people would say freedom of speech, including digital communication, is a right. Copyright infringement does not constitute slander, lying, fraud, or anything of that sort. It's exactly and only copyright infringment. Also: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/internet-a-human-ri...

Your willingness to pay before you play says more about your income than anything; if nothing else, you probably have reliable income and can afford to make riskier bets.
I don't understand how it is so difficult to get copyright to work on the internet, it seems like this problem should have been solved by a licensing structure like we see with GPL etc.

Make everything on the web available by default for personal use, but not commercial use. Then have 2 licenses: No, this can't be used for personal use (eg Netflix) and Yes, this can be used for commercial use too. Both should have a modifier for Source must be attributed. Put the creator in control and get out the way. Of course we should allow more fine-grained licenses like we see for source code etc, but the two simple licenses should cover most use cases I think.
επιπλα κηπου και ειδη καμπινγκ
η μεγαλυτερη ποικιλια σε επιπλα κηπου, ειδη καμπινγκ και επιπλα εξωτερικου χωρου απο το happyseasons.gr ! δωρεαν αποστολη σε ολη την ελλαδα με δυνατοτητα αντικαταβολησ
Others of us have decided not to live in San Francisco (or India).

I'm not being entirely flippant; I'm originally from the Bay Area, and the filth is a significant part of the reason I live in Tokyo now. Regularly encountering human feces is one of several things I don't miss.
No, you stop it.

Why on earth are you concerned about a point in the ocean? Do you need driving directions there? Or perhaps street view? I didn't realize most ships these days navigate with google maps

I'm sure if google implemented something like this they would still support search and linking by lat/lon.
The relevance is that there is a request for bloggers to reveal every little detail of the process of how they decided on what to write when, and I'm saying that's a very unusual practice.
Indeed, this is his profile page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jcr/

(people please use the photo from this link instead of the one currently in Wikipedia where he looks somewhat angry)
In some cases (at least for Google) a postcode seems to be enough if there is only one property in that postcode.

e.g.

KW11 6UF
> "OK Glass, Take a Picture" works. "OK Glass, Take a Photo" doesn't. The Glass is forcing your voice commands to be a certain set of commands and no others will be considered.

This is quite a forgiving attitude; I'd expect both to work.
If I can't keep my email address secure, I'm dead meat anyway.

And the fact that I have a number of websites is not exactly a secret.
Agreed and well said. Nice URLs do not have to be RESTful, but RESTful URLs have to be nice. Personally, its just OK for me if the entire URL looks like:

maps.google.com/whatever-nice-text-describing-location?ll=lat,long

If the lat/long is missing, then ask Maps to do a search. If its present, then its just a "nice" URL. Not necessarily RESTful.

Edit: Formatting
Code4milano: the smart city hackathon
Most of what you propose is covered by creative commons. Sadly, in practice, CC is a shitty deal for photography in general.
What is gameplay?
Oil reserves are like a piggy bank of 100k year.

These bacterias still need to be fed with sugar. Like corn oil it means you're diverting arable land to produce that. I'm not sure if it's really cheaper to produce in the end.
Online registries, even! Though unless you're semi-professional you're probably not willing to pay the prices to do so:

http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/services/price_list
That's only a problem if you consider a copy as damage. (I haven't seen a convincing argument.)

There are also lots of factors in a financial proposition. Some people give away free samples, others invest in an education.

It's interesting that iTunes is doing so well, without mandatory DRM, while copying has only gotten easier...
Ok I just baught it. Partly for the interesting (and funny) story, but mostly because it's hell of a game.
Do you not have a sat nav ?
In some cases, a subsidised phone does make sense. I've got an S3 for £26/month * 24 months, so £624 lifetime. Even six months later, the phone costs £320 new, and the closest equivalent sim-only contract costs £13/month. That's £632 lifetime, and requires a significant upfront cost.

The phone was more expensive to buy new when I took out the contract, and you can get it with no up-front payment on a £21/month contract now, so in both cases it's actually a better deal than presented above.

Android 4+ allows you to disable the bloatware, so that's not an issue either.
I think trying to make geo URLs nicer is a noble effort, but this approach takes a far too naive world view.

Addresses are messy. In most parts of the world (even the "western world"), addresses are hopelessly ambiguous and much of the world cannot nearly as nicely be divided into a neatly hierarchical addressing system as this example suggests.

Real-world addresses are ambiguous, confusing and messy. Pretty much the opposites of qualities that make for a good URL scheme.

How do you deal with multiple places with the same name, or one place that is known by many names? Disambiguation pages and 304 redirects to a single canonical name (which might piss a lot of people off if it's a disputed area)?

Most civilised parts of the world have developed more precise, less ambiguous addressing systems over time, using post codes and other systematic approaches, but even those are not always watertight, often volatile and only work for places where some body issued them (good luck in the desert or ocean).

Geocoding is hard, and reverse geocoding (from a place to a name) is even harder, but fortunately we already have a clear, concise and unambiguous way to address places on earth: the Geographic Coordinate System. Every place on earth can be addressed using a simple latitude/longitude coordinate pair. It's not pretty or user friendly, but at least it's fool-proof.

Why not take a much simpler approach, similar to how many blogging platforms generate pretty urls from post titles?

The URL in the example could then be:

https://maps.example.com/37.769944,-122.422264/199-Valencia-St-San-Francisco

Or just as conveniently:

https://maps.example.com/37.769944,-122.422264/Zeitgeist-Bar

This way, multiple URLs can exist for different entities in the same geographic space.

Multiple places with the same name are also much less of a problem this way:

https://maps.example.com/51.528642,-0.101599/High-Street

vs

https://maps.example.com/51.528642,-0.101599/High-Street

For a real-word mapping service, there would probably be a need to specify a zoomlevel or bounding box, but those could be provided as URL parameters. Ironically, this is very close to how the URLs in Google Maps currently look. Not as nice, but at least it's actually feasible and future-proof.
How are the colors mapped? For me it would make sense that the areas that appear blue lower frequencies would shift to red as you go to higher frequencies, but that is not what happens.
Although in almost all cases 128kbps is just fine and you couldn't tell the difference.
That would be nice, but I think the issue is less one of documentation (lots of demosceners into reverse engineering) but that there are (a) just too many different graphics cards out there (b) the platform lifetime is very short (c) less motivation for hw specific tricks as "everything is already possible"; GPUs these days are parallel general purpose computing hardware, at most you'll speed up something a bit.

If you make your demo to work on one ATI card you will have a small audience at most, and the card will be out of the market in a year and all the tricks you learnt were for nothing. And if you want it to work on more hardware you get into the device driver business, and that rules out special tricks for specific hardware to do non-standard rendering anyway...

Back in the days of home computers there was one longer-lived hardware platform that many people were using. There is a faint hope that initiatives such as the Raspberry Pi may bring people to "standardize" on one more or less ubiquitous platform for longer time, but I'm afraid this ship has sailed. So it makes sense for demosceners to focus on what is possible on the higher, portable API level.
Could be that having more command versions results in too many false positives.
I think the idea is to match very specific phrases so you are less likely to accidently trigger it in normal speech.