skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I get my Android game noticed or should I give up?
I have been working on an Android game for around eight months now and while I personally I think it's a great little game - as a developer - I am struggling to find the motivation to market it and feel like it will be a waste of time trying to get it noticed. I just want to write code and I hate the idea of marketing even though I know it's an essential part of the process.

The obvious thing to do is to submit it to as many review sites as possible, but I've read many articles that say it's a waste of time to even try contacting the popular review sites. Maybe I am hesitant because part of me is a bit reluctant to have it criticized too much? Hmm, not sure about that.

I think the main problem is that the game is a "Snake clone". IMO it has enough original features to stand up as its own game. But I think many people just see Snake, think "toy project" and walk away.

I would really appreciate some feedback on what the HN community thinks. Should I continue trying to push the game? Or should I not waste any more time on it and just accept it's time to move on?

One more point: if I do move on, I won't feel like this has been a failure personally. I am very proud of Foobit - it's my first Android game and I can't stop playing it! Also my Son (aged 10) loves it, so it's definitely been a worthwhile learning project for me. I'm just in two minds as to whether I should commit to marketing it or not, that's all.

Download link for anyone who wants to try it (it's free to play): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=iode.foobit
Hm. I probably shouldn't say this, since I am hoping to take advantage of it, but I am curious how you would stay relevant if a completely open source platform build around drag-and-drop Polymer/web components managed to become popular? Or even any kind of open source composable widget-based platform.

Or maybe that just isn't a concern because so far nothing like that exists?

I like the idea of Weebly, I think building web software should be based on components for the programmers and usability for users. But I don't see how a closed platform stays relevant.

I think its just that most web developers still don't understand widgets.
I think the website is down. Is it available to buy? Can it be shipped to europe?
What exactly makes this a killer? I'm having a hard time seeing it. It just looks liked any one of a dozen similar Android phones, with more power/memory/horsepower?

Calling something a killer by itself does not a killer make.
Well... TIL! (Though, rather obvious thinking about it...) It definitely screws up my generalisation. I thought "North American" would be nice given the U.S. and Canada generally share the same language and culture. Mexico messes with that, slightly. Though, I suppose states like Florida (from my Dexter knowledge) would have similar issues given the high-proportion of Spanish speakers.

Speaking as a Brit, we do (rather ignorantly) generally refer to citizens of the U.S. as "American."
Running Django on Arduino Yún
It's like a decorative tuning of a broken car. But it was already broken to begin with. The problem is that everyone is too familiar with how to drive that specific brand of broken cars.
How Social Media is used to topple governments and manipulate public opinion
I think you're looking for Media Monkey +
http://www.mediamonkey.com/addons/browse/item/linkedtracks/

I don't use this plugin myself but this looks like it's exactly what you want...
If you haven't signed up for their beta program, I'd recommend it. At least on the android side the app is much nicer than the one in the app store.
Forgive me for being slightly snobby (and maybe too tangential), but I always find it completely off-putting when people try to be "hip" and put the $ sign after a number (as in 1$ here; they're also internally inconsistent).

I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on the matter, especially if you think I'm misinterpreting the motivation behind it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_symbol#Usage

edit: Muphry's Law, and trying hard not to ask why people are downvoting my curiosity (but failing)
Can't wait for the QWERTY version :)
It's aiming to compete feature by feature with high-end Android phones and the iPhone, at a substantially lower price point. Not looked closely enough at it to know if it's likely to succeed at that.

Their cheapest model is threading close to the mid-range cheap MTK based Android phones coming out of China.
Sgumul 2.0: An Online Booking System Created by Hoteliers
Boxcryptor 2 doesn't have a Linux client and Boxcryptor Classic was just mostly EncFS so its Linux support was the same as Safe here.
Space bar will flap higher if you hold it longer. Mouse click always flaps the same amount.
Wikipedia says the company was founded just a few months ago, in December. Even with using "commodity" components, I wouldn't have thought that 4-5 months was enough time to go all the way through a design cycle for something like a phone. The founder used to work for Oppo, is Oppo manufacturing these? Edit: according to the Engadget review/article, these are being built by Oppo.
I've been doing this stuff for a while. I can make 3d models from photos using VisualSFM and CMPMVS. It produces good results. I guess it hasn't taken off because for most people this is not cool. What does the average person do with this tech? Making mini statues of yourself is a nice application but most people find it a little creepy - not cool. I suppose it's like when photos started being a thing - it took a while for people to accept it. It took money and power to force it into peoples consciousness so that they could appreciate it.
Just a quick look at the examples, and I can say that it reminds me very much of Clojure Ring. It provides really small and extensible core, and if the community pick it up and start writing useful middlewares, it can become very useful.
JBoss hosting with multiple websites and web applications
I think that one safe exception is upcasting of integer types (e.g. i8 to i32) and I think it's a little awkward to program in Rust without it.

It seems also that using the "as" syntax for both upward and downward casts makes code a little harder to read. Either allowing implicit upcasting or having separate syntaxes for safe vs. unsafe numeric casts would make more sense to me.
"In Steppenwolf's case, the fact is that, like all hybrid creatures, he lived with the feeling of being sometimes a wolf, sometimes a human being. However, as a wolf he was forever conscious of his human side lying in wait, observing, judging and condemning him; just as the wolf did when he was a human being. For example, whenever Harry in his capacity as a human being had some lovely idea, experience some fine and noble sentiment, or did a so-called good deed, the wolf in him would bare its teeth and laugh him utterly to scorn, indicating how ludicrously out of character all this fine play-acting was in a wild animal of the steppes, a wolf who at heart knew perfectly well that his real pleasure lay in stalking alone across the plains, occasionally blood or pursuing a she-wolf. Seen thus from the wolf's point of view, every human action became frighteningly comic and self-conscious, vain and inane. But it was exactly the same when Harry felt and behaved like a wolf, when he showed other people his teeth or became murderously hostile to humankind as a whole, hating all its hypocritical and degenerate manners and customs. For then it was the human side of him that lay in wait, observing the wolf, calling him a brute and a beast, spoiling and souring all the pleasure he was taking in the straightforward life of a healthy untamed wolf...

His position was a lonely one; it was uncanny the way the world left him to his own devices. Other people were longer of concern to him; he wasn't even concerned about himself. The air around him was getting thinner and thinner the more solitary he became, severing all contact with others, and he was slowly suffocating as a result. For the situation now was different. No longer his desire and goal, solitude and independence were a fate he was condemned to. He had made his magic wish and there was no going back on it. However strongly he yearned to re-establish contact with others, however willing he was to hold out his arms to embrace them, it was of no avail: they now left him alone. Yet there was no indication that people hated him or found him repugnant. On the contrary; he had lots of friends. Lots of people liked him. But friendliness and sympathy were the only reactions he ever encountered. People would invite him to their homes, give him presents, write him nice letters, but nobody was able or willing to share his life. He was no breathing the air that the lonely breathe, living in an atmosphere that was still, adrift from the world around him. No amount of yearning or goodwill had any effect on his inability to form relationships."

Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
> I'd like to hear other peoples' thoughts on the matter, especially if you think I'm misinterpreting the motivation behind it.

Author is from a culture where the currency symbol goes after the sum, does not realise it's before in the US. Internal inconsistency likely linked to multiple authors and lack of review.

Since when is putting the currency sign in the "wrong" place "hip"? Why would you assume such a thing instead of a honest mistake? You even linked to a page stating:

> many [non-anglo non-latin-american cultures] place [the currency sign] after the amount

(note that contrary to this article's exact wording, this is cultural rather than currency-based, within the EU some countries put the € symbol before the amount, others after: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_th... — and this is not solely linked to english-speaking, Austria uses prefix where Germany uses postfix; Denmark and Latvia use prefix, ...)
It's very polished ... but. The start animation? Needs to die. Showing me a game which then turns out to be finished when I try and swipe? Bad UX. Score totalling animation? Cute the first couple of times, very annoying thereafter. Swiping and signing? Again, cute for a couple of times rapidly turning into a rancid waste of time when you want to play again (yes, I know you can set this to autosign now but ...)

It's just not smooth enough from start -> play -> restart -> restart to be a good casual gaming experience. It's start -> thud -> thud -> play -> thud -> thud -> restart -> right, back to 2048 then.
If you actually read TFA it's more like using an airplane as tractor.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7632338
I was thinking what GNU could be if they launched GitLab or some alternative to replace the archaic Savannah. It could take the project to a whole new level.
Addendum:

The TED talk was on Youtube (and ted.com is up now). It was for a non-technical audience, the message is that the GF target is to make economical power plants. A commercial venture, as I wrote.

The only real news is that the plasma injectors are probably done now, over the last month.
Detailed post W3C's plagiarism
Now you know why it's called Facebook.
And lack of oligarchs, who signed-off on torture, on the company board.

Now that can't be a bad thing! SpaceMonkey needs to use it as a selling point.
I think it's far more likely that the author is from a place which puts the currency symbol after the number and simply made a mistake. I've never seen or heard of anybody intentionally doing it incorrectly for effect.
Skilled immigrants to be offered 'express entry' to Canada in 2015
Usually done by people who are not from a country where the currency symbol is after the sum.
The Target Breach – NNT’s Perspective
Oh and "< back" from Options leading to the game scrolling down from the top? Very annoying. It has a left arrow. The iOS convention is that going back up the stack means moving left. But no, they've gone for a left arrow with scrolling up and down. Buffoonery.
"I don't think being excited/passionate about something means "messy and can't complete projects" - that means they are perhaps excited about the wrong thing."

It doesn't correlate 100%, but the majority of stuff I've seen by the visibly 'passionate/excited' people does indeed end up far more of a mess than other code I've had the pleasure of working on.

It can indeed just mean someone is excited about the craft, but usually, from what I've seen, people are getting excited about learning new things, and almost by definition, they don't know how to use those things efficiently. Things = libs, coding techniques, etc. Those 'things' don't have to be 'new', just 'new' to the passionate individual. In those cases, the 'excitement' is coupled with "my first time doing X".
How Hotels Should Apply Big Data To Provide a Unique Guest Experiences
Ah got it - that makes a lot more sense. I didn't get that impression from their site, so I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I'm an iPhone user, so I'm probably not exactly their target market, but I sort of still am I suppose, and not being able to understand where a particular Android phone lies on The Grand Scale of Android Phones (without doing a ton of research) has always been one of my frustrations with the Android world.
I wish it was available in non-huge form factor, like this one, at most http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_one_mini-5505.php
I have a friend who thinks it's "younger" to put it afterwards, and I figured the designers of this site might be from the same generation, as are a few (younger) HNers. I did read the page I linked, that's why I linked it.
I've made this mistake quite a few times coming from Hebrew, where the currency symbol (₪) is written after the number (it is to the left, but the direction of writing is right-to-left). It is possible that the people who wrote this are used to putting the currency symbol after the number, and especially since it's inconsistent it is probably a mistake.
I keep reaching the conclusion that frameworks are evil and libraries are awesome. Frameworks promise to organize your code and keep things structured, but the inherent verbose nature of JS frameworks ends up harming more than the structure helps.

Ultimately, if naked JS is too difficult to manage due to the lack of types and interfaces, I much prefer to use another language that translates to JS, rather than attempting to force it onto the JS language, because it always becomes messy and half-baked.
TDD is dead. Long live testing.
If you partner with an ODM you can come out with these in a short timeframe.
Sounds like something specific to your enviro. Haven't experienced that
Does it have an appstore ?
Automated discovery and sharing of content for engagement.
> rescheduling does not necessarily indicate greater likelihood of default

That is simply untrue. Look, I work for a credit card company, and we have a great deal of experience with evaluating customers and predicting risk of default. A customer choosing to reschedule a loan does not necessarily mean that they WILL go in default, but it is almost certainly an indicator that increases the probability that they will. I am not suggesting you should consider them in arrears (they aren't!) but that you should take payment rescheduling into account as a leading predictor of future default rates on cohorts of loans that have not yet reached default.

> we aim to improve our Statistics page to use a single metric to encompass both ended and current loans...

Depending on how well that metric is designed, that might actually LOSE information.

> ...and allow users to filter the data by date disbursed.

That will definitely be useful. In my experience, graphing key indicators (like default rate, repayment rate, loan profit, number of loans made, and leading indicators of default) by cohort (grouping by start date) is a really good way to view your data to determine whether changes in lending policy are having the intended effects. Since your policies have changed recently, this sort of view may prove very useful.
> (..) but the inherent verbose nature of JS frameworks ends up harming more than the structure helps

Does that statement actually mean anything? I don't see how it's anything but nonsense.

Also note that AngularJS (which is what's being discussed) is a library.
I quite like the bigger screen, if they were going for multiple devices it'd be great if they'd make a smaller one too but, since they need to focus, I'm glad they went for a larger one. In addition since they're trying to feature compete at a lower price point it makes sense for them to go for the bigger one first.

P.S. does anyone know how they can afford to sell it for so cheap? just looking at the specs I find it hard to understand.
You might like the "Why I Hate Frameworks" discussion (rant) from a while back:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12

Although it's ranting about Java frameworks rather than JavaScript a lot of the complaints look rather familiar. Having said that, I don't think anything in the JS world has reached the baroque complexity once regarded as normal in the enterprise Java world.

[NB Note my comments on that discussion - I had not long finished rescuing a monster of a Java enterprise application where the simplest thing needed to go through about 30 layers of abstraction (I did actually count them) from a page being submitted to the underlying message being sent over MQ - it seemed to be a point of honor to combine every feature of J2EE with every design pattern to do the simplest things. Having multiple huge jar files in the classpath each 97% identical to the other just added to the sense of adventure when you clicked on something.]
One THREEx a Day Gets Your Game on Its Way A Challenge
Right, if this gets in then I officially demand that the much more innocent ternary operator and prefix/postfix increment/decrement operators get in as well.
I've come to the conclusion that this non-programming programmer "design pattern" fad is a way of obfuscating mathematical and computational concepts while making them no less hard (as we see by them often being poorly used) but seem less hard (and, paradoxically, more intelligent due to buzzword compliance) to the businessmen who, because of programmers' weak professional identity, call the shots.

Curried function? Too mathematical. Let's call it a Factory.

Tree-walking algorithm? Let's call it a Visitor.

Sinusoidal curve? Again, too mathy. Let's call it the Vibrator pattern.

Lots of words get spilled, mediocre employees remain employed, good people leave or get fired while trying to fight the current of stupidity, and nothing gets done. Brilliant! Now, you can go a step further by creating a system to monitor those mediocre employees, making them basically employable while bringing down the top, and call it "Agile" when it's the exact opposite of agility.
Here's some more detail [1] on the buffer overflow AOL was allegedly exploiting to validate their AIM client. Probably wouldn't fly these days.

[1] http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/security/aim/index.htm
I've been using Light Table with the LightTable-Go plugin (I'm one of the contributors). Support is still fairly basic, but for my needs it works pretty well. If you want to try it, grab the plugin from github and not the ide's plugin manager - that one hasn't been updated in some time.
I loved Angular when i first stumbled on it. Binding was cool... the rest of it, i'd throw away and be really happy.
Question about context: who is "defunkt"?
The TESTivity Virtual Learning Experience
The TESTivity Virtual Learning Experience is an on line insurance course that replicates the live classroom experience with the addition of on-line learning aids not available in a traditional classroom environment. The flexibility of the Virtual Learning Experience allows you to learn on your schedule. The ability to stop, pause, rewind and repeat modules (or the entire Pre-license course) will enhance your understanding of key concepts and improve your retention.
Show HN: HMTL5 distraction-free writing app
I can sympathize with the article, but on the other hand, when you reach a certain level of complexity, OO kind of forces you to use dependency injection. Which means providers and factories of some sort for short-lived objects, at least if you want to have testable code. I don't know if it's "enterprise hand-holding bullshit", but having seen code with and without DI, the DI one is definitely easier to work with and refactor. This doesn't mean Angular is not over-engineered, since I don't use it I have no opinion on the matter.
Does it have unlocked bootloader and root?
This type of writing is getting really tiresome.

"Enterprise sucks, frameworks suck, X language sucks..." You don't like, but other people like it, get over it. Just don't use them and stop complaining all the time.
I still write inline javascript blocks in my internal /admin service. Who wants to touch me?
Brazil Passes 'Internet Constitution'
Checking the "Disable Lookup" item on the settings menu prevents it making ajax calls to any server and does all processing locally. Of course there's a resulting drop in speed and OCR accuracy. The lookup requests are all HTTPS, are never logged, and contain no user identifying information.
I recently moved to Melbourne from Christchurch, NZ. I've been living pretty close to the freeway to the CBD, and it surprises me how early in the morning traffic starts building. Two days a weeks I have to be up by 6:30, and by that time there are already traffic jams.

I wonder whether because of the warmer climate, people don't have such a problem with getting up early. In a Christchurch winter (I'm sure it's the same in most of Canada) it will certainly be below 0°C at 6:30. The record low for Melbourne city is only -2.8°C, versus -7.1°C for Christchurch.
Basically, you get 90% of the features of the best Android smartphones at half the price.
With all due respect -- that is just how some of us work internally. We learn by experimentation, intuition and repetition.

I often find it extremely difficult to write a design document for a system, particularly a system owned by somebody else. I have written design documents in the past, and they rarely end up describing the eventual system, no matter how hard I work to maintain and update them.

In my experience, software design and engineering is an iterative process, like gradually groping in the dark to determine the shape of a room. I cannot simply turn on the lights and take a photograph of the room at the start of the project.

Having said that, I completely agree that in principle it is great to start new projects with a complete design document, at least a functional specification. Accurate technical specifications are a rare, elusive beast, though.
Carrier-grade NAT.
CEB is hiring for Java Developer.
https://github.com/antimatter15/ocrad.js
Hope so. My first attempt was a complete waste of time.
Frédéric Gros: why going for a walk is the best way to free your mind
In addition, the frameworks actually help you write less code, and certainly more organized and modular code.

The article comes off as whiny without really giving any argument for the viewpoint other than essentially "this pattern sucks because I say so"
NYPD's Twitter photo contest backfires with images of aggressive police force
Indirect Tracking of Drop Bears Using GNSS Technology
Sometimes it's amazing if I'm out of bed by 7:30.
The article seems to extol what most would call "girly" friendship--continuous contact, social gossip, etc. Lots of attention to little things.

This happens within the article - the writer's wife essentially shames him for his "surfing friendship" not being like her friendships.

I've encountered this too, as I'm sure many men have - being criticized or blamed by family or spouses for not talking enough or not talking about "the right things" when spending time with friends. And you're left asking yourself "was I doing it wrong?" when I come home from hanging out with friends and playing video games or hacking or whatever.