skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I would at any time want more turn based strategies in the triangle HoMM-Disciples-MoM, but it seems there aren't any?

You don't even have to go as far as indies to find them -- I can recommend Age of Wonders 3 which just came out. And there are many more good ones in the last few years if you are willing to look a little more indie!

If you only game on iOS... well I stopped gaming there years ago because wading through the free-to-play stuff was so horrible. It's not exactly the same genre but FTL, a game mentioned in that article, is truly great and worth checking out. It's pausible real time at least.
Note: There is no guarantee that a compiler won't optimize this to non-constant time.

And even if it keeps it constant time, a processor may end up running a function like this in non-constant time, due to caching and branch prediction effects.
I didn't get the impression that there was a value judgment attached, as much as an expectation judgment. Seems to me they're just saying that if your title contains flaws, is formulaic, and just kind of decent, that you shouldn't expect to make enough money to turn a profit, if the title's competing with enough other titles that are better in those categories.
I think you're right, but personally I have heard the word "garbanzo beans" before. A boar singularity sounds cool.
awesome, exactly what I need
On the iPad in particular, you might try https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/10000000/id544385071?mt=8. It's a mission-based real-time puzzle game. The gameplay is pretty enjoyable and you can clear stuff while dramatically under-leveled so it doesn't become too easy when you get good at it.

You could also pick up a CAVE game, but it would be by no means indie...

On the PC front I am familiar with more options, but it really depends on what you like. I play mostly shmups, puzzle games, and platformers, which happen to be really easy genres to make indie games in. Over the last few years I've enjoyed Jamestown, Thomas Was Alone, Electronic Super Joy, Antichamber, Super Hexagon, and a lot of games that are distributed for free in places like http://www21.atwiki.jp/iwannabethewiki/pages/283.html
Oh jeez -- Thayer's Quest. That game was a complete money sink. A quarter only bought you time, and there was no such thing as a skip-ahead button, so just getting through the opening cutscene ate up most of your first quarter. I spent so much money getting all the way to the end of that game ... only to discover that it ended at a cliffhanger. A final screen announced that Part II was in the works, but they never actually made it, presumably because the first one did so poorly.

I was all in favor of seeing adventure games break out of their text-only mold (this was years before Myst), which is chiefly why I gave the game a chance in the first place, but Thayer's Quest was a poor exemplar.
(Maintainer of KSS here)

A point of clarification, the inclusion of HTML in KSS blocks is actually a pattern I actively recommend against. It's something I've chosen not to include in KSS core a number of times for exactly this reason (even when my own co-workers submit the PR: https://github.com/kneath/kss/pull/97)

If you're using KSS, I highly recommend tying it as close to your actual markup generation as possible. For me, that means rendering partials directly from rails with dummy objects. That way if the partial changes, the styleguide changes.
Microsoft did: the XBox Live Indie marketplace.

A quick browse through its catalog (http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/XboxIndieGames) will reveal the problem with this approach, namely that it quickly turns into a giant swamp of Minecraft ripoffs and other such disposable crap.
This is very much possible.
http://www.gog.com/games/strategy
This list consists by 2/3 of timeless objective jewels. The rest are nice games too. They were all released in 90s or early 00s.
Can we have a comparable list of games released in last ten years?

"I don't find the vast majority of mobile games to be interesting"

That's what I'm talking about! But, when you run heroes of mignt and magic or civilization on tablet in emulator, it is suddently interesting again!

It's not that tablets suck as a media, it's just almost every game for them is crap (or puzzle, I must add)
I understand the benefits of such an integrated environment, however I'm just not ready to accept the deal of "leave all your earthly possessions behind to join us in paradise" that these environments demand.

As I understand it, these environments are self-contained, in a "separate universe" kind of way. No thanks, I want my apps and services to be deployable to the rest of the world, and I want (some of) the rest of the world's apps to be usable in my environment, which isn't the case here.

Sure, Pharo et. al. running in their own kind of VM alongside the rest of the OS is a compromise to address this very problem[1], but like I said in my previous comment, after seeing Scratch, Croquet, and now Pharo rise up and then fizzle in the wider world I ask: what's the point? Where does it fit in today's development world? Is the goal to build a new, clean but segregated OS/environment entirely separate from the existing ecosystem, or is it to provide a development environment that can be used to create applications that are deployable to existing platforms?

If it's the former, I raise my beer, say good luck and on your way. If it's the latter, you've got my interest.

The NextStep platform died because it was the former. Luckily it had two important legacies: it was used to create the first World Wide Web server and client. The server was a network application that could interface with the rest of the world. Then NextStep died. It was then resuscitated when it reverse-acquired MacOS and leveraged that platform to transition to MacOSX, thanks to the vision of one singularly-driven man and tens of millions of dollars. What's Pharo's path?

[1] if the Smalltalk environments run in a VM inside a widespread OS, I wonder if there have been any modern effort in the opposite direction, to have a Smalltalk environment run on bare hardware?
Node will soon join the family of 'devops', 'fullstack', 'cloud' ect ...
Wasn't win32 done like that? I have vague memories of PostMessage/GetMessage/TranslateMessage/DispatchMessage loops. I never did enough Windows development to understand where the actual syscall boundaries were, but since everything was done by message passing to the main loop of your application, the API seems amenable to pumping out multiple messages in one syscall.
So just because you're curious about something at eight you should know all there is to know about it? Like the author says, sex is now more than just about reproduction. I don't think you're suggesting this but sexualizing kids, at least before puberty, would definitely send the wrong message about sex and perhaps would condemn a person to sexual addiction for the rest of their lives.
I don't really see how CocoaPods helps the ecosystem of third-party code or promotes higher quality libraries over time. The cost of using third-party libraries is high, so they need to be worth the cost if I'm going to use them at all, and the vast majority of that cost is not in the stuff that CocoaPods helps with.
I often wonder how amazon has gotten so far with such little focus on usability. I wonder if they don't actually WANT you to get lost in layer upon later of stores. Like how the mall makes it hard to pop in for a quick purchase.
I'm not sure why he's focused on indies. Budgets for AAA titles are growing to the point that they can't survive even on moderate successes (e.g. Irrational Studios and Bioshock Infinite). I expect between the deep discounts offered now on PC sales and the glut of games, consumers are going to push back more on price. The kind of deals that exist on pc via steam sales and the like don't exist in the console market. I'm not sure the AAA will be able to demand the same price.

There have been a number of indie titles that were released while still in development and use continuing sales to fund development (e.g. Minecraft.) But I think the force behind steams early access will shortly come to an end. A couple titles recently cancelled development and I think in coming months more will quit. Consumers will be turned off to early access when some of their titles go dark while still riddled with bugs and half developed.

My two cents for how to be successful, make something fun to watch. With the growth of twitch streaming, more then ever, games are being judged by watching someone play, rather then reviews or trailers.
>Good games should become big hits. If they don't, we won't have good games.

When gaming was smaller this might have been more true but it's certainly not true in the present.

In any other industry would you expect this? That if any book is good, it would be outselling Dan Brown? Is the best music at the top of the billboard chart? Is the best movie the highest grossing of the summer?
Ask HN: East Coast Vs West Coast: Risk Adversion
I've been meaning to ask this on here and wondered what your thoughts were on this.

I live (currently) on the east coast, but visited the west coast (SF to get to the point).

After 25 years of living on the east coast, I've started to see a trend of folks here regarding joining/starting a startup venture.

I talk to countless individuals (tech and non-tech) would refuse to leave a cushy 9-5 job to start something awesome.

I recently spoke to an advisor of my startup who mentioned individuals living on east coast (generally speaking) are very risk adverse as compared to SF Bay area (and surrounding areas).

Is this a location thing? e.g. East coast being disproportionally risk adverse as compared to its west coast counterparts? Or have I just met overly risk adverse east coasters?
Don't underestimate the value of having no debt when you graduate. Debt makes it harder to take risks and thus can lesson your possible rewards.
Once again, over again, one more time, beat up on the US over its "rotten" 'education'. Graduate/professional school? Nope. They're talking K-12. Then they are talking 'averages'. Yup.

This beating up on the US is mostly just fun from public flogging, a scam, a way to get headlines.

The US tried hard, poured in lots of money, bricks, mortar, etc., and it didn't work. Details:

Frontline video on efforts of Michelle Rhee in
the DC public schools:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education-of-michelle-rhee/

Transcript

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education/education-of-michelle-rhee/transcript-35/

If the Asians are so good at teaching math, then
let them fix the DC public schools. Wait: Rhee is Asian. Oh, well, try the backup plan.

Okay: 'Control'. Control on country of origin.

I'll put it to you in blunt terms: Essentially the worst schools in the US do better than the schools in west Africa and Mexico. Some people won't like that point.

So, I'll give another point: How do the students in Minnesota of Norwegian descent do compared with the students in Norway?

That is, are we talking "US schools" or country of origin?

Next, for "US math", I have a right to be torqued and offended and I am: I'm a native born US citizen educated only in the US and hold a Ph.D. in engineering from one of the best research universities in the world for my research accomplishments in applied math, complete with theorems and proofs. I've done just fine in "math", thank you.

For math in Asia? From nearly all I've seen, math in Asia is not so good. I can think of some good work from Japan, but otherwise, no. For South Korea, one of their better college math majors came to the US for math grad school and right away had to conclude that they had learned no 'math' at all in college in South Korea and, instead, had just done some rote memorization with zero understanding. Then as a grad student they had to start over essentially as a freshman college math major.

But articles like the OP keep talking about K-12 'math' where likely they mean mostly just simple arithmetic; not a biggie.
Well, I wanted to recommend GOG as a source of good games as well, but you mentioned it yourself :) GOG have new games too, and many of them are good. At least all the good ones which I expect appear there sooner or later.

Above I meant that it's not possible to make a list which everyone will view as perfect. Tastes vary after all. But GOG is a good approximation indeed.

> That's what I'm talking about! But, when you run heroes of mignt and magic or civilization on tablet in emulator, it is suddently interesting again!

Sure, I like playing Loom or Goblins 3 on a tablet in ScummVM for the fun of it :) But that's a rather non typical tablet gaming I suppose.
Because the ISPs oversell their actual bandwidth on the hope that no one actually uses all of it at the same time. It's like how an airline might overbook a flight expecting a few people to not show up. Then Netflix comes along and everyone can very easily max out their bandwidth simultaneously all streaming movies in the evening.
It may be possible to enable Quick Sync on systems with >=Sandybridge chips plus a dedicated graphics card, but I can't find a definitive answer.
Someone elsewhere posted an image of the actual Google email: https://imgur.com/Km8tYbH

Is the letter legit? It claims the Google Nest parody went so far as to create fake Google employee profiles on social networking sites, used false Whois info (listing Google as the registrant and contact), and featured a (working) Google "Sign In" button.

The last one is the most concerning (and confirmed by mirror sites, e.g. http://google-nest.codewing.de/ ). That's more like what I'd expect from a phishing site; a parody page should have no need for it.
This would require spending money on not mining companies. And if there's one thing Australia is overwhelmingly against, it's doing anything which might cause us to behave more like a first-world economy then a third world one.
Whoa, I will have to try this with Raspberry Pi - "How to make 35$ SteamBox".

Btw, just tested it on my MacBook Pro, its awesome to start some CPU/GPU intensive game and play it without fan noise and heat :) Also interesting thing - you can add nonsteam games (battlefield, guild wars, heck even applications - WinSCP etc) and stream them ! This is awesome !
Show HN is generally used to show off things you've made or had a part in. If it's just a new product then use the title on the site you're linking to.
I don't refuse to use third-party libraries out of hand. If something is good, I'll use it. However, my assessment of the cost/benefit tradeoff differs from others. Take, for example, AFNetworking. It seems to be the gold standard for any iOS app that makes web calls, to the point where it's practically a default first step when making a new project for many programmers. Me, I don't understand the appeal. The cost is enormous due to adding a huge quantity of code (and therefore bugs) to your app, and the benefit over using what Apple provides is tiny.

If the cost/benefit tradeoff appears worthwhile, taking into account the large cost from adding any third-party code, I'm happy to make it. It just doesn't happen very often.

To me, CocoaPods doesn't move the needle on the cost/benefit tradeoff, because the cost of what CocoaPods handles is extremely small compared to the total. Thus why I don't really understand the point of it. It takes something that's infrequent and already easy, and makes it a little easier.
So if you're going to the store to buy toothpaste, and there's too many brands on offer, you're going to stop buying toothpaste and let your teeth rot? I'd file that under "unlikely". The paradox of choice means that you may be less happy about your eventual choice, but you're still going to make it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice
>my ideal language would probably be half way between Python and Lisp

You might like F# then. It's concise like Python and has all the power of functional programming.
And I would like to see that kind of list for tablet games in real genres (not action-puzzle) - WRT quality.
Currently PostMessage/GetMessage I think are syscalls, TranslateMessage/DispatchMessage are not most of the time.
"As soon as the person has downloaded the file, you can just cancel the web server and the file is no longer accessible to anyone," Lee says.

So your recipient would be the only person to download a file of some specific size at some specific time, from a service that only ever served it once. Traffic analysis is how the Tor network is attacked in practice. Unfortunately, Onionshare is more vulnerable to traffic analysis than even the old GnuPG and Dropbox method.
Yeah, the article isn't wrong on many points, but the characterization as a 'bubble' isn't right.

The race to the button pricing is a concern. I worry about the day where every title has to be free-to-play to get made... Ugh.
Well, I think you're hitting on something.

1. I think you're wrong about the lack of correlation and, as nickff points out, better math ability is correlated with higher income, but

2. Math ability does not affect income.

Correlation is not causation. The better math ability is a side effect of higher income in my opinion, not vise-versa.
> Why haven't any of the big names released a true "app store" where anyone can get a game into the store for maybe $100...?

This seems like an interesting model. Charge developers a flat fee (FEE) up front. Take a cut of each sale (PER) as well, but only after (FEE/(COST*PER)) sales have been made. For example, using a fee of $100 and a percentage of 20%, the first 500 sales of a $1 game would see all of the money going to the developer. Thereafter, the store would take 20 cents for each sale.

This model seems like it would encourage developers to only submit games that they deem to be high quality. Players would have less shit to wade through, giving them more incentive to try out new games.

Perhaps $100 is not high enough to achieve this goal, but I bet there's an ideal number that discourages low quality submissions while leaving the door open for small-time developers.
The idea behind exokernels isn't that you give "most programmers" direct access to hardware, it's that you give a library writer direct access to hardware, and then programs link in the libraries that are most appropriate for their application. Basically, separate protection from policy & abstraction: the kernel still provides protection, but the library handles all policy & abstraction details. So instead of having your database mimic disk blocks on top of a filesystem, just expose the raw disk blocks to the DB. Instead of having your garbage collector fight the virtual memory system, expose the TLB and physical pages to the language runtime. Instead of requiring that every read() go through the kernel, have the NIC write directly into application buffers.

The big change that makes this desirable now but undesirable before is that machines are becoming increasingly single-tasked. When everybody owned a desktop and had a dozen programs on it, you needed to write an abstraction that could support all of those programs. When everybody just runs a web browser that connects up to a web server in the cloud which connects up to appservers and databases running on separate machines, each machine only needs to support one type of application. So let that app link in the abstractions it needs and only those abstractions, ensure that existing daemons don't trample over each other, and have the kernel get out of the way.
Yes. This isn't even fantasy. Avatar was highest grossing and it was the best. We need more of that and less of me-too.

Sadly, even the newest Hobbit is me-too for itself.
Interesting that this article was written in March, about a week before google announced approximately %30 price-drops across its cloud offerings. I would have been interested to see the statistics for this year too, I don't think the chart tells us much about the sustained success (or otherwise) of your subscription model, due to only showing the 2 months after the introduction of subscriptions. The 2 months show rapid drop in income, has it stabilised this year?

I'm wondering, for the icons or other cacheable content, have you thought of using cloudflare or similar? What are your costs going to be this month, after getting onto the HN front page again?

After giving it a try, I noticed that this text is quite out of date now:

We've just released! Read the blog post about it.
781 million registered games sounds like this is the total number of purchased games.
Gaming should be fun. If people are less happy during the fun, your customer base decreases. For the whole market.
Will do, thanks for the suggestion!
I think you're wrong, and that spending does have a huge impact on test scores; the PDF you link even supports that higher family income correlates with higher test scores. My argument assumes that wealthier families spend more than less wealthier ones.
Netflix launched in Sweden about 1.5 years ago. Last week the results of a poll of the public was presented: About 1 million Swedes have access to Netflix streaming at their home. This is out of a population of about 9 million.
Ask your boss to summarize his choices for you in email. Print that email out and send it to your personal email. That would be important documentation for you to provide to an unemployment reviewer. Based on his three choices, you have a valid unemployment claim. Resigning to save face is still a firing. And quiting because your pay is reduced is still a reason to collect unemployment in many states.

Also consider that many companies provide severance in the event of a firing. Saving face by resigning might cost you thousands of dollars.

I'm not a lawyer.
> Many developers would be happy if their game pulled down $10K.

That seems unlikely.
"Caches are just tracking state for tasks, and unless you have actually done something to create locality between tasks there is nothing to make them stay hotter anyways."

This is only true if your data is small enough that it never gets evicted. Otherwise, there are certainly things that can make them stay hotter without involving multiple cores: You can shrink your data, reorder your data, or reorder your traversal of your data.
John's talk was amazing. Watch it here: https://air.mozilla.org/rust-meetup-may-2014/
Discoverability can't be solved to a certain extent. As a gamer, I have a limited amount of time to devote to reading about games, or discussing them with my friends. As the owner of a gaming website, I can only push so many games to my user base.

For example, let's say I own an indie gaming site, and my average user reads 2 reviews a week. 100 games are released each year. I can easily talk about them all on my site, and my users can consume that information and make informed choices. Now, if 1,000 games are released, we have a problem. My users only have time to read 100 reviews, and I can only display so many reviews on my homepage. Which ones do I choose? I pick the best 100 games to write about.

Everyone does this, Steam features games on their store, PCGamer has a limited amount of screen space above the fold, as does RockPaperShotgun. Only so many games hit the Reddit homepage, or get voted up on HN. Which games? The same 100 out of the 1,000 I mentioned earlier. 10% of the games, getting 100% of the media attention.

This isn't a problem you can solve. If I ask my friends what indie game I should buy this month, They'll recommend 2 or 3. It'll be the best ones. It doesn't matter if there are 10 games released, or 10,000 games released, I get 2 or 3 recommendations.

See the issue here? I have a limited amount of time, it doesn't scale up with the number of games released.
Disposable crap is fine, so long as it's hidden by the good games that rise to the top. See: the iOS App Store. This XBLIG thing seems like a real second-class citizen on the Xbox. I've never even heard of it, after years of owning the system and Xbox Live. If all "good" indie games are released through a completely different platform/marketplace it's no surprise that Microsoft ignored XBLIG.