skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask 3 points by nemant
Relationships? What are you talking about? I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform. The only way I can meaningfully interpret your claim is by replacing "build relationships with them" to "and market directly to them", i.e. being able to email your customers with marketing messages. And I'm glad Apple doesn't give my email address to everyone I buy an app from.

The only other interpretation I can think of is "Apple doesn't let you respond to reviews on the app store", but the ability to respond to reviews is not an industry-wide expectation. I can't think of anywhere before the rise of mobile gaming that anyone considered the idea that a game developer should be able to respond to reviews.
I would be very, very surprised if they were using UE3, considering their games haven't seen much of a graphical update since... 1994? Really old school in literally every single way. Think Ultima Online, then take a step back from that.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if they suffered from a similar regression.
For some games, yes. But not for most of them.
Just wanted to add that many FPGAs physically support updating parts of their configuration without turning off or stopping the rest of the chip. This is just very hard to do without the docs we need of the chips, and almost no one does it.
Huge props to the Team at Slack. They've made a great product.
My personal opinion is, tools like slack and others can get quite distracting with the constant notifications.
I foresee in the future where startups are doing products that reduce/manage the "noise".
> the better your paid, the better your organic - by a right mile

I interpreted it as meaning the higher your app is ranked in the 'paid' category (preferrably in the top 20 or higher), the better your organic acquisition rate is going to be (logically because you'll get all the "free" advertising for being featured on the front page of the "Top Paid".

It's a self-reinforcing cycle...more customers, higher ranking, more customers...if you can swing it.
This start-up is a great example as to why it's important to understand who the players are that deliver healthcare in the US.

You have the insurance companies that pay the costs (drug and non-drug). However, many insurance companies partner with PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers) and let them handle all of the processing (for a fee).

Guess who one of the biggest PBMs are? CVS Caremark. Yes, the same CVS as the retail pharmacies.

If this product is going to work, it needs to figure out how to create an incentive for the existing players to get involved.

If you look at your drug benefit card, it likely has a list of "preferred pharmacies". Go there and you pay less, go somewhere else and pay more. The PBMs control where you get the best deal. And yes, it's typically at their own pharmacies (e.g. CVS).

If this company were to approach a retail pharmacy with their idea, I'll bet the pharmacy says "no". Retail pharmacies already have contracts with PBMs/insurance companies that pays them a certain fee for dispensing. A retail pharmacy would likely lose money if they had this company repackage a prescription. The only way to make this attractive to the retail pharmacy is to make sure they either make the same or more money. That's up to the PBMs/insurers.

So if you take a step back and think about what drivers insurance companies, it's all about cost. Not just dollars, but improved outcomes for patients since that lowers costs as well.

Compliance (taking the right drug at the right time) is a huge issue in terms of drug costs. An insurance company might plop down $5K for a prescription. The patient may only take 3/4 of the doses and end up no better. That $5K was a waste. Asthma is a great example. Insurers are more than happy to pay $300/month for a drug that reduces ER visits. One ER visit can cost $1000K.

Now prove to an insurer/PBM that this type of packaging saves more than it costs (e.g. improved compliance) and they will come knocking on your door.

This of course entirely ignores the issue of drug distribution. There are some huge players out there and this company needs to figure out how to insert itself between the company that sends the drugs to the pharmacy and the pharmacy itself. I'll leave that for another time.
If you're just mapping an array to double each element, there is no benefit.

Which is another way of saying that the examples in this doc are not very good, unfortunately.
paid advertising turns into far better organic growth by a very large margin.
He's saying that the more money you put into paid ads and the more conversions you pay for, the more organic (non-paid: referral, from press, or search, etc.) conversions you'll get.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/bruceeckel/rethinking-scala-presen...
Back in the time-frame of the Leopard to Snow Leopard transition, I visited an Apple Store (for the last time), where upon I informed a 'genius' that on Windows, I had code that I needed to (or was required to) run everyday that was older than him, and that Apple's complete disregard for backward compatibility lost me (and everyone I know) as a customer for ever.
Yeah, that was tricky. I think he means "the better your paid [search results], the better your organic [search results]." Meaning you can buy improved organic search results.
Given that we're discussing the supply side of things, I think your example is backwards. But even if you changed it to competition for supplying the desire of yellow marbles, I still don't think it's relevant. It's certainly true that there's an incredible supply of cheap/free games on iOS (typically of very low quality, or chock-full of F2P mechanics or ads). But there's a very low supply of high-quality serious games being sold for more-than-a-cup-of-coffee prices. I think there's certainly a market for those games, the problem is just that you can't rely on the App Store for discovery (but you never really could do that anyway). So it seems the real problem is just that Jeff Vogel doesn't know how to market his stuff, and rather than actually figuring it out, or, heck, hiring someone else to do it for him, he's just giving up on the market entirely. Which is a real shame.
Watch Jason Scott's BBS documentary to see the people who built many of the icons of the bbs world. It is 8 episodes long and is available on youtube right now. I have watched it multiple times and the depth it provides into what was going on is why I like it. I dialed into bbses for years to post messages, play games, and get patches. At the time I didn't fully grasp how wide spread the phenomenon was so when your favorite board went away it was brutal.

I see a lot of the bbs community feel in many online forums so I know it lives on.
The OP article mentioned the British doped the sailors' booze with lemon juice, at least at first.
> It is fascinating how much the "micro-transaction" model on the iOS platform continues to bury everything else.

It's not only iOS, it's exactly the same thing on Android. Some companies also tried it on Vita and PS3 with games like Rainbow Moon and Destiny of Spirits, but ultimately failed. Interestingly i've also been able to get people to completely drop free-to-pay games by getting them other hardware like PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS.

So basically the only platforms where this happens are the two primary cellphone platforms.
See this issue: https://github.com/numtel/pg-live-select/issues/1

I would love to see a pull request for the "proper way." Thank you for your help.
Any Rotation Gesture – A gesture recognition library
Good job for getting upset a retail clerk making not much more than minimum wage for CEO-level decisions?
WikiLeaks Dumps Data from Sony Hack
#leoncomegambas
Something interesting is the Facebook still stores all (or most of) these assets, served straight from facebook.com instead of a CDN: https://www.facebook.com/images/pageheaderbg.gif
Interesting... I'll take a look at this.

It would be awesome to write a Postgres extension in C to implement Live Selects directly. Due to this project's developmental legacy this was considered from the start but is definitely on my radar.
It's not about giving your email address to everyone (I wouldn't want that either), but it's about having the friction-free option of doing so. There are a number of game-makers for whom I absolutely want to be emailed when they make something new, because I love their stuff. That doesn't happen on iOS very easily.
It depends on the kind of travellers. Business travellers are far more price elastic, preferring schedule. Less frequent but larger planes means giving up the most lucrative passengers to your competition.

The best aircraft to use is one where you fill every seat and no one with money is left waiting. Having empty seats get very expensive very quickly because you are hauling unused weight in the plane, fuel to carry that weight, fuel to carry that fuel, heavier/bigger landing gear, bigger airport fees (typically based on plane maximum weight), more expensive maintenance etc. There is also the opportunity cost where the bigger plane could be used on a more profitable route.

You should see Cathay Pacific flights between London and Hong Kong. For example on Sundays they have the following departures from HKG to LHR: 00:20 00:35 09:10 14:35 23:55 - there is also a 23:55 on the Saturday making that 3 flights in under an hour. All of them are on the 777-300ER. You see something similar for LHR to HKG. Cathay doesn't have any A380s and really seem like they could use a few!
Supercell is based in Finland, which is an EU member state.
I Walked the Brooklyn Bridge Without Facebook
Supercell is in Finland, an EU country. From my understanding Supercell actually pays much higher than prevailing wages.
And were you seriously running binaries from 1987 (+/-) because you might as well stuff that thing in a dosbox.
I enjoyed the heck out of developing drivers for that thing—it was a constant uphill battle to even get correctness, nonetheless, the pretty decent performance we got. In the end, my tablet's battery died, and it now sits in a drawer, forgotten.
Apple doesn't necessarily want to solve that problem.

Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0]; namely the software, games and media that make their hardware useful. Software in the app store is a viciously competitive low-margin market; just like most other commodity markets. Which is why you need to treat it skeptically and work on building a name outside the app store before you are putting money into it.

Look at Twitter as an example. They give away their app to drive usage of the service, and in the early days they were totally OK with other developers making and selling twitter clients. This was because twitter clients are a complement to Twitter the service and their money comes from selling the analytics and advertising that the service enables.

0. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Games which target iPad first inevitably make design and marketing compromises that harm their other platform performance & experience - whereas games which target other platforms then are adapted can typical make far less painful and less compromising changes (which can work against them or for them).

Yes, it is possible but not easy - look at for example Shenandaoh's Desert Fox / Battle of The Bulge).
But I don't know if that is a long term model for success. $19.99 is the highest price point you can set for a game and then you are competing with things like FMC2015 or Xcom (heck, you can get GTA San andreas for $6 or so - is your game better than GTA?!?) which are full PC ports. Clever developers will I think make a game for more established platforms, and if successful port to iPad for additional revenue.
The iPad has millions of active premium gamers, but a tiny number compared to any non-portable system.
Which sucks because some of the games are quite good, or could be without the IAP stuff. I do enjoy Peggle and would be willing to pay a few bucks for it. Instead the only option I have is to get it for free and only play a few rounds per day until it's begging me for money. And not a one-time purchase, literally 99c per day. No thanks. And an Age of Empires style game would be awesome on mobile! But not a "it takes five hours to build this building unless you pay lots of money" style game.

It would be nice to have a platform that outlawed that kind of stuff, so real games for real prices could go back to being competitive. It's to the point where I won't even download a game that they won't let me pay for upfront (and even then, I find some $1.99 games that have stupid IAP requirements, and that pisses me off even more).
Progress is hard.
RxJS author here. Right, an advantage is if you know the Java, .NET, Python, C++ version, etc, then you know the JavaScript version. That and we try to adhere to an Array#extras style following all of ES2015/ES7 Array methods.

Another advantage is that many frameworks such as Angular 2.0 are shipping with support for Observables, so that's a huge win for users of RxJS that it automatically just works.
Regardless of the work environment, professional wear should be worn to an interview.
Odd because we didn't experience an increase in violent crime during the recession, in fact it continued to decrease. How many of those studies look at data after the great mid century crime wave had settled?

As for evidence that jobs and prison prevent recidivism (or crime in general), assuming they do to some degree, how much more or less effective are they than therapy?
Honest question: how/why is it legal for Apple to ban any other "app store" from existing? I understand the motivation to require the presence of an intermediary to combat malicious software, but it seems blatantly anti-competitive to forbid competition within the domain of providing this intermediation service.

Similarly, why haven't any major app companies challenged Apple on the 30% app store charge, and how it is inconsistently enforced? For example, rdio charges a premium if you purchase a subscription through the app store, but MLB radio does not.

I don't know much about these things, but as a user I think it's fair to conclude that Apple has not done a very good job of app store stewardship, and I personally would welcome potential new overlords.
US Moves Ahead with Hefty Duties on Chinese Melamine
Ah, now that's a different discussion :) Yes, I was wondering about that. Mendel I think would belong on that list; I think membership in it depends upon fundamentally changing a field, rather than 'just' significantly improving it.
No, I'm saying look beyond the "indicators" and "peer groups", and look at the individual person.

I personally would have far more respect for someone who bucked the odds and fought for everything she had than for someone who is "high achieving" but got there relatively easily on a path well paved (if not paved with gold).

I also find that people who made it through a hard early life tend to be less spoiled and selfish, to be more sympathetic to the plights of others, and to have a greater capacity for love and trust, and to know what's really important in life.
To back this up, Spiderweb's original Exile series still works perfectly well on modern Windows machines. I dug up my disk for Blades of Exile a while back and spent some time playing it on my Linux machine without anything other than some very minor graphical glitches. The Mac versions haven't been playable without an emulator for a very long time. And in this case, we're talking about the most recent iteration of SW's engine (they seem to remake Exile with a more modern engine and refreshed graphics every so often; the current Avernum 2 is the second remake of Exile II). Software platform vendors should really make an effort to maintain backwards compatibility for at least a few years -- especially when the platform is so centrally controlled.
Is Slack Really Worth $2.8B? A Conversation with Stewart Butterfield
Isn't Supercell Finnish? That counts as EU.
So simple, but such an improvement over the current system. Excellent idea.

I just looked up how many people are taking prescription drugs and was shocked; almost 50% during the last 30 days (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm). A big chunk of that is probably birth control and blood measure meds, but still that seems like a really high fraction of people (and an excellent market size for this business).
World-record electric motor for aircraft
Judging by the few comments here, people seem to be more accepting of moving tls into the kernel than they are of windows moving http into the kernel. Is this a double standard? They are both protocols implemented on tcp, most often by userspace programs.
I think you're thinking of the old nickel batteries, lithiums liked to be fully charged at all times.
I can't cite the exact case, but I think there's been at least one case where someone did that and were still arrested, because they didn't comply with the implicit request - "stop filming me, citizen" - quickly enough.

I could be wrong, and this might be a memory I made up. :/
I would think jblow knows what he's talking about here, he's delivered at least one great game to the world (to me, Braid had the perfect difficulty ramp and an awesome level of inventiveness).

As a buyer on Steam actually I didn't feel I had a direct relationship with jblow as the developer, but I would have been very happy to receive his marketing material, especially if it was programming tips!

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-5-tips-of-a-productive-dev...

(...looking forward to The Witness)
Scientists find key to 'turbo-charging' immune system to kill all cancers
They don't have to ban other app stores. All they have to do is require that apps that run on your device be signed by Apple's certificates... which requires the App Store ecosystem.

If you jailbreak device to be able to run unsigned code, of course this restriction goes away and you can use whatever app store you want... like Cydia, for instance.
What kind of specific problems that would make an employee leave that could be solved with a software.
Free iOS Game – Would like feedback
That's what I don't get.

Yes, Apple hardware is nice (although the XPS13 and X1 push them pretty hard.

But I'd have thought that if there was a group that'd see beyond that and ask fundamental questions about openness, digital rights, etc. it'd be developers.
Same here. If I see an in media res opening on a supposedly informative article, I skip down a few paragraphs. If I still can't see the meat of the matter, I skip it.

Inform me, don't try to "entice" me towards your embellishments. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Many BBS systems provided Internet access to newsgroups and IRC chat. Many BBS systems had become ISPs in order to survive. In the early to mid 1990's many BBS operators had invested in an ISDN Internet modem and then SLIP/PPP access on their BBS to become ISPs via rows of MODEMS.

Once the telecommunication and cable companies got into Internet access providing they bought out the ISPs to get customers.

Once DSL and Cable Modems because less expensive and people left dial-up MODEMS these BBSes hard started to die.

There still exists a part of BBS culture here:
http://www.synchro.net/

An Internet based BBS system that uses Telenet.
Curious why a developer of low-tech-requirements games like these wouldn't use something like Unity and eliminate most of the multi-platform hurdles.
Nobody is forcing you to use Swift.
Looker is a good example http://www.looker.com/product/data
"Clash of Clans is Supercell which is a foreign company that can afford to pay their developers less money in a foreign market. Any US or EU company would have a hard time competing with them."

This really isn't true, as the costs of personnel are usually dwarfed by the costs of marketing.
I would consider production values part of marketing (a vital part) - they are competing only on PC without the marketing/production values being an issue - iPad is not a platform they can do that with. I don'et think they are necessarily wrong to step away from th iPad from a business perspective, just saying very different audience customer retention strategy and maybe not suited to them.
I hope support for this comes together!
True Survivor (Kung Fury Theme)
Sounds like fun. When I was taking lessons, we'd parallel a road and it wasn't hard to go noticeably slower than traffic. Cessna 152 IIRC.
Does anyone know if/when AWS will support docker on Windows?
> I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform.

The original post here was on Spiderweb Software's forums, which have been around in some incarnation or another for over a decade and hosts a community that has built up around their games. This is a company that has always relied on a close relationship with its customers.
> Relationships? What are you talking about? I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform.

iD/John Carmack, David Braben, Sid Meier, Rockstar, Volition, Gearbox Software... I could keep rattling off names and developers, but those are all examples of companies and individuals who have dedicated followings who follow them from game to game or platform to platform.
Why not? Every app page has a link to the developer's site, and the developer's site can offer a way to subscribe to some sort of newsletter. And games often provide links in the game itself to view information about the game developer.

Edit: I recognize that it's not particularly common for developers to try and encourage users to sign up for some sort of marketing. But I think that's just because developers haven't really considered it to be an acceptable thing to ask users of their games for, rather than any actual difficulty in doing so.
Python 3 does not have a good way to do cross-platform filesystem access, because some OSes treat filenames as byte sequences and other OSes treat them as strings.

Arguably this was always a problem, because there were values in your program that you weren't sure whether they were a byte sequence or a string. But in practice, under python 2 you could regard a filename as an opaque "handle" of type "string" (that would in fact be a string on some platforms and a byte sequence on others), and as long as you didn't need to manipulate it directly, everything would work.

Python 3 can't do that, so it desperately needs a better cross-platform way of handling filenames.
Behind ELBs with S3 as the backend store is where its at :)
Scientists discover protein that boosts immunity to viruses and cancer
According to my understanding of transducers (warning: possibly inaccurate), that's one use-case of transducers. Transducers are a way to let you map over anything, including (but not limited to) channels, streams, etc.
Drivers for the Tablet 2? Yeah the drivers are awful. Half the drivers I'm using are downloaded from Dell because the Lenovo drivers are useless. Getting to the point where I could have Bluetooth and Wifi connected at the same time was a nightmare. I still use mine, but only when I don't want to start up my PC or something where touch feels more natural, like Hearthstone or Avernum: Escape from the Pit.
I have requested emojis for `:doc:`, `:test:` and `:admin:` --- those are the main three I tend to use in commits. Some of the lesser ones I've suggested are `:tweak:`, `:major:` and `:minor:`. Thankfully `:bug:` is already supported.
Parsing the History of America
Wired is heavily into advertorials, labeled or not - witness the two recent ridiculously hype-laden advertorials on the Apple Watch.
The Architecture of the UnQLite Database Engine