Why every iPhone/iPad owner needs to read this. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zapdrive.com/2012/10/why-every-iphoneipad-owner-needs-to.html

<comment><USER3> 1) Apple has widely publicized their policy on this.

2) Apple's ecosystem is designed to create lock in and generate monopolistic profits. This actually is the goal of all businesses until their market becomes mature.

3) At the mature stage, businesses seek to compete on price and everyone's "economic profits" are lowered to zero.

I don't know if storage is at the point where it can be offered at breakeven at $20/year, but if it is, congratulations, you at least helped ruin Dropbox's "greedy monopoly". That being said, you have little chance at ruining Apple's monopoly. You can decide to hurt it though by offering your product on Andriod for $20/year, and Apple for $28/year.

You also gain the benefit of targeting the "right customers" in the sense that Andriod customers are more focused on price, where Apple's customers are more focused on looking cool. (no offence meant for either group, just simplifying for the sake of it).

I'd love to hear how you are able to gain such a huge cost advantage over the other companies in this space.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually proposed this idea to the person from Apple who was dealing with us, and although he said he can not "pre-approve" anything, but this seems to be ok, and within Apple's guidelines:

1\. Users pay $19.99/year for 100 GB for a plan that does NOT have iOS access. This is a PC/OSX/Android only App, that has nothing to do with iOS.

2\. Users pay $29.99/year for "100 GB + iOS Access" plan. The iOS app will have an IAP for the "100 GB + iOS Access" plan, for $29.99/year.

3\. We wont offer the IAP for 19.99/year for "100 GB Desktop only" plan, because that subscription can not be used from iOS anyways.

How are we offering such low prices? We have worked very hard to create very efficient storage and compression technologies. We are not using a third party cloud (S3), and have built our own cloud, ground up, which drastically reduces the price. We are not offering much free space. According to our estimates, upto 50% total space on Dropbox is used by free users. Basically, Dropbox is "taxing" its paid users, to cover the charges for free users.

<comment><USER4> Why don't you just do this then?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we are working on this. But being a startup, we will be really hurt by this. No iOS customers are going to use our service. However, we would be happy to lead the change. If this becomes a trend, and more and more companies follow our footsteps, we would be living in a better world a few years down the road :)

<comment><USER4> >No iOS customers are going to use our service.

I think you oversell the price sensitivity of iOS customers. Once you're out of 0.99 land, people will pay for things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Its all over the Internet Explorer thing happening again. But with IE at > least you could tell your users to download a better browser if they want to > use your app. You can not tell your users, "Buy another phone to use our > service!"

That's what I take from the article. People got up in arms in a way that was much stronger against Microsoft during IE's early years and whining for Netscape (who lost because they just made a shitty browser, it wasn't 100% because of bundling IE with windows. Netscape Navigator 4 was terrible and slow compared to IE.) much more than people do against Apple, even though we could install an alternative browser, which is something you can't even do on the iPhone and iPad (without a modern JS engine you might as well give up, there isn't a single browser on iOS that is not based on the internal webkit and a JIT-lacking javascript engine. There's the oddball, Opera, that does all the rendering in their server farms, but they don't allow anything that runs locally).

There were even talks of cutting Microsoft into multiple companies, one that makes office, one that makes windows etc. Only people who have been around during those years would know what I'm talking about, but MS was hated to a point you couldn't begin to imagine in 2012, for something that wasn't even a bit as bad as Apple post-iOS.

I can't believe the crap Apple gets away with, they are getting away with so much that even Microsoft is now following their lead, Windows Mobile had far less restrictions compared to Windows Phone and Windows 8 on ARM which are both reactions to iOS rather than something MS thought of doing before the tide that iOS (and Android) did to the smartphone market. Windows Mobile wasn't open source, but the user was as free to install and use apps as they are now with Android. It's not the case anymore, and there won't be anything like Chrome or Firefox or (locally rendering) Opera for Windows 8 tablets on ARM. Only on x86 and only because they know how much of an uproar it'd be with current x86 users, because if they could close everything down and get away with it, they would, which is why we should be as loud as possible to show that we don't want this kind of future for our computing devices.

<comment><USER6> Apple can get away with this because they aren't a monopoly. Their market share isn't anywhere close to the 90% that Microsoft enjoys.

They temporarily enjoyed a 90% share of tablet sales, but that has since dropped substantially. This is probably a good thing from Apple's perspective, since if it would have stayed at 90% then they probably would have the DOJ on their back for their monopolistic practices.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is, the 33% smartphone market is 100% controlled by Apple. Nobody can enter that market, unless they have Apple's blessing.

<comment><USER7> I also cannot set up a lemonade stand inside of a Walmart.

<comment><AUTHOR> But you can setup a lemonade stand elsewhere and sell to people who buy at Walmart.

<comment><USER7> You can sell your service to people that have iPads.

This is the fundamental question of what an iPad is. Apple would like it to be treated as an extension of their store, and you want it to be like a Windows PC. Any consumer that agrees with you is free to jailbreak -- your problem is that consumers seem to have no problem with Apple's model -- they probably don't understand it, but they haven't perceived an indirect drawback either.

Developers should have their eyes wide open about it by now.

So, the right thing, if your intention is to change their behavior is to not support them. Don't buy it, don't develop for it, encourage others to do the same.

The thing is ... everyone wants one and wants to develop for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, we can not sell our service to people who have iPads without paying a 30% cut to Apple.

Again, as mentioned in the article, we think there is nothing wrong with Apple having an App Store and charging a 30% fee. What's wrong is, Apple forcing everyone to use their App Store for distributing Apps.

"Don't buy it, don't develop for it, encourage others to do the same" - <USER2> is the whole point of this article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Only offer sign-in in the app (with no option to purchase / become a paying member). Netflix, Dropbox, Spotify, etc all do this, it's basically industry standard. Boom, done.

I would have expected this blog post 2 years ago; the fact that you were blindsided by this really doesn't give me a lot of confidence in your company. Anyone who's developed for iOS would have been able to tell you on day one that you're in serious gray-bordering-on-black territory with regards to IAP policy. Yeah, it sucks, and you can't really do anything about it. So suck it up and go with what everyone else is doing. Because so far, you've definitely lost me as a customer.

I'm an iPhone owner and I know that 1)you have no qualm about charging me more for the same service (apple's 30% notwithstanding) 2)you don't know much about iOS development and 3)your dissatisfaction with the platform makes me doubt your commitment to it in the future, and with data backup, I NEED to be confident in my service's future as well as its support of my device.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well first of all, you are totally wrong. Read my comment below (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642321>) to know how we are not in the same category as Netflix, Spotify etc.

Second, We are not iOS developers. Our iOS app is just another "portal" for our users to access their files. Hell, we didn't even use Apple's SDK, we used PhoneGap to make the App.

Third, just like you, we were also in the illusion that we were not affected by this policy, and by not linking to an external website we were within the guidelines. Turns out, thats not true. (Read my comment linked above)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So why can't this be worked around the way everyone else does?

Don't link back to your own website from the iOS app, and don't give end-users any way to upgrade their account from the app. Have the app just ask for a username and password to authenticate with your service, and require end-users to go to your website in order to do any account management.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, that's what we did. But it did not work. If you are thinking about Netflix or Kindle App, 1.14 of the "App Store Review Guidelines" says: "Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the App, as long as there is no button or external link in the App to purchase the approved content. Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues for approved content that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the App."

So that applies to only magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video subscription/content services. "Cloud Storage" is not included in the list. This is what was told to us by the Apple guy who we were talking to.

<comment><USER7> I use apps connected to pay SaaS services (Concur, SalesForce) -- the apps are free with no IAP, but my company pays a lot for them. Yammer has pay services and a free iOS app with no IAP. I think if you look for them, you will see tons of apps like this that are the front-end to a SaaS service (not content) -- why is yours any different?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, thats another thing we are exploring. If a third party developer makes an App "ZapDrive Browser" using our API and does not link to the website, that should be ok. Because, technically, they can not offer IAP, since they can't do it in first place. Its like developers using Dropbox API in their Apps, as long as they don't point to Dropbox, they are approved.

<comment><USER7> My apps are from Salesforce, Yammer and Concur -- not third parties. I would bet there are 100's or 1000's of apps like this -- just look at the EMR space: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drchrono-emr/id363897223?mt=8>

Your way is another, but I think unnecessary.

You might have a bad reviewer -- collect 50 examples like the above and ask why you are different.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats a good point you raise. But at the end, there is the ultimate reason that Apple has: "Just because other Apps are doing this, does not mean you can do this too." I think they have put "cloud storage" into a category, that has to offer IAP. Since they made Dropbox and Google Drive offer IAPs already, they expect every new entrant to follow in line. I am sure they will start targeting other SaaS markets as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, after reading the post, why does every iPhone/iPad owner need to read this? That was never actually explained. ;)

-1 for inflammatory unrelated post title

<comment><AUTHOR> It is explained, by buying an iOS based product, they are causing a loss to consumers in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is it guys. We're not getting any crappier titles than this.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is why I love Android. Gives the consumer more freedom.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can you elaborate on your "100% safe and secure" claim? You appear to have a "reset your password" link, which is a big red flag that indicates to me that any data I store on your service is not private. To me "100% safe and secure" means that if you lose your password you lose your data, because it has been encrypted with the lost password.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, this is kind of off-topic for this thread. But anyways, the text you quoted actually says: "No downloads or installation required. 100% safe and secure!" That means, you are not vulnerable to any virus or trojans, as you are not downloading and running some software to use our service.

<comment><USER6> That's too bad. Storing encrypted volumes on Dropbox is a PITA. I'd readily switch from paying $0 to Dropbox to paying $20 to you if I could stop doing that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you can't make your business work on $x * 70%, you can't make your business work.

 _Every_ SaaS faces the same issue you have. And they (mostly) still offer IAP. That's because you might lose the 30% on the first sale, but usually renewals happen out of band.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean that we will lose 30% from only the first sale? If a user subscribes using IAP, their subsequent payments will also be charged a 30% fee by Apple. Won't they?

And its not the question of whether we can do business at $x * 70% or not. We would love to give 30% to someone who actually brings a customer to us (we actually have a 20% recurring commission for our affiliates). The question is how is Apple entitled to that cut?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For IAP can you make it really hard for users to trigger it? For example, "solve this puzzle to access the Pay button or go to mysite.com for fast checkout".

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that is something Apple would "approve".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fyi, google play store does not allow 3rd party collection of in app Billing, if you use google play store. A clear market is mobile app distribution

</comment><comment><USER16> How can anyone be developing an app for iOS and NOT know that their only distribution channel (aside from jailbreaking) is the App Store?

<comment><AUTHOR> a) we were not developing for just for iOS. Our service is not an iOS only App. Our iOS App is just a tiny part of the whole package.

b) We knew App Store was the only channel, we also knew paid apps have to pay 30%. We, like many other people here, just were not aware that cloud storage apps were required to pay a 30% fee too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> victim mentality devalues your product

<comment><USER18> $20/year for 100GB? Victim or not that is pretty amazing value.</comment></comment>


Which Coin will Coinbase add next? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bitcoinbeginner.com/blog/next-coinbase-coin/ <comment><USER2> Adding monero would be a good move for coinbase.</comment>


A simple formula for fractal patterns (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fractalforums.com/new-theories-and-research/very-simple-formula-for-fractal-patterns/

<comment><USER2> play with a shader version here: [http://glsl.herokuapp.com/e#16062.1](http://glsl.herokuapp.com/e#16062.1)

<comment><AUTHOR> A shader actually inspired me to post this here. Here's the one I encountered: [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ssGzn](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ssGzn)

I was trying to figure out how that works.</comment></comment>


The Ruby Standard Library To Be Converted to Gems for Ruby 2.0? - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyinside.com/the-ruby-standard-library-to-be-converted-to-gems-for-ruby-2-0-5586.html <comment><USER2> Specifically: the "library" libraries in the Ruby stdlib (ie, not "String", which is built-in, but things like "net/http") are going to be installed as "default gems". From the wiki, it does _not_ look like you'll be pulling down new gems the first time you run Ruby; rather, the libraries will be structured as gems and registered as gems.

Implication: Ruby will be almost fully dependent on Rubygems; there will be even fewer cases where it's reasonable to run a ruby interp without pulling in Rubygems.

This is probably a win. For instance, it may mitigate the annoying situation where you install Ruby from source but forget to pass the right OpenSSL arguments to "configure" and only find that out a week later, when it's a huge pain to fix the installation.

<comment><USER3> It's absolutely a win. now the development of the non-core parts of "core" can occur much faster with less dependency upon a much larger project's release schedule and other constraints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a hardcore rubyist, but from my experience, this seems like an obvious no-brainer. Gems play an enviable position in the Ruby ecosystem and if often emulated in other programming languages. I can't imagine Ruby (or Rails) being as popular as it is without the help of Gems. Making stdlib a gem means that stdlib can be updated independent of the Ruby language. That means bug fixes, security updates and improvements can be made more often.

There is a similar push in the .NET community to extract certain parts of .NET into NuGet. As it works now, you have to wait for an update for all of .NET (or worse, Visual Studio), which may take years. So called "out of band" releases always seems to have poor support because so many .NET frameworks rely on an upgrade of VS to really use! (E.g., ASP.NET MVC 3) For something fast-moving like the web, this is an eternity.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of Armin Ronacher's famous post, "STD stands for Sleazy, Tattered, and Dead" [1]. Basically, the point is that trying to collect too much stuff in the stdlib in the name of "batteries included" results in the packages atrophying and not being updated fast enough (or ever, due to backwards compatibility concerns).

Though I know that the distro maintainers are just going to _love_ this.

[1]: [http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2009/3/2/std-stands-for-sleazy- tatte...](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2009/3/2/std-stands-for-sleazy-tattered-and- dead/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Gem compatibility already causes a lot of headaches. Am I wrong to think that this would add to that?

<comment><USER7> There's little reason for this to be the case anymore, given such things as Bundler [0] and RVM [1]. The former lets you define, per project, the exact version of the gem to use. As Rubygems.org hosts all old version in perpetuity, you should never be forced to use a newer version than you have tested.

RVM, meanwhile, has the concept of gemsets, which are completely independent sets of gems which can also be used per-project, which solves the problem of two programs needing different gem versions.

[0] <http://gembundler.com/> [1] <http://beginrescueend.com/gemsets/basics/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If they're doing this then they should merge bundler into rubygems.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is interesting since it's the same reasoning behind the addition of an elisp package manager in Emacs 24; they are talking about improving the release cycle by spinning off formerly built-in things like org and gnus into packages that can have their own scheduling.

<comment><USER3> The changes happening with emacs24 are fantastic... I predict an emacs renaissance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please provide a gem list that isn't in the ruby marshal format and in something that is actually usable outside of ruby. JSON, YAML I don't care just not a language specific unused (outside of ruby) serialization format.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anything that helps release cycles for open source to be faster I am all for. Faster release cycles means faster patches to bugs. woot!

</comment><comment><USER12> Gem to debian package compability is already terrible. This will make it worse.

<comment><USER13> Does anyone actually _use_ the Debian-packaged gem's for anything at all?

About the first thing I do on any new Debian box is to make sure I run a non- Debian rubygems as the Debian one is hopelessly broken, and install any gems I need via bundler.

That takes care of that problem.

<comment><USER9> The $PATH problem has actually been fixed in Debian unstable; they caved on FHS-compliance and let Rubygems place things in the right bin/ dir. Not sure if other issues persist, but finally some progress has been made.</comment></comment></comment>


It's poll feedback time: Almost EVERYBODY self-censors already - <AUTHOR>

And you know what they say, self-censorship is the worst form of censorship.
See the results here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6017918
From now on, read HN comments with this in mind and draw your own conclusions. <comment><USER2> I self-censor because I want people to like me. If I accidentally blurt out that I think Pearl Jam sucks or the Metallica black album "has some good songs," they may decide I'm a moron and never talk to me again.

</comment><comment><USER3> It only takes one joke about killing Bambi hunting last weekend to cause some people to think you're a terrible human being who shouldn't be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER4> Or people simply didn't care enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> In that case, only severe pain can help us.

The thing is, it will be way more difficult to correct the problems, once we really feel the pain.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good place to buy DRM free ebooks? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed that battery life on my reader is substantially longer when I'm reading in the default reader, which doesn't work with drm'd books from Amazon or kobo. Does anyone know of a good place to buy ebooks without drm? <comment><USER2> If you choose the book first maybe its better look writer website first where it is available. I have a pocketbook reader, it doesnt work very well with kindle books, when I was searching Wheel of time and Brandon Sanderson it was available on google books as DRM free but it was the choice of writer. So when you are looking for books there, you need to check first if there is a 'DRM free' flag.</comment>


How is Google meet so fast? - <AUTHOR> I've been having internet problems the whole day, where loading simple webpages takes a long time occasionally resulting in timouts.
However, I've had a call and it barely mattered. The call was ok, and I could hear everything clearly. I tested my internet speeds during the call and I got 47kbps.
I think this might be due to UDP or TCP but does this only explain this start contrast? <comment><USER2> "While Chromebox for meetings will operate with bandwidth speeds as low as 300 kbps, video and audio quality might be poor." (1)

This is directly from Google, so it's likely your internet speed test is incorrect. If I had to guess, it's a DNS issue but could be anything.

1\. [https://support.google.com/meethardware/answer/4541234?hl=en](https://support.google.com/meethardware/answer/4541234?hl=en)</comment>


Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/13/dollar-general-walmart-buhler-haven-kansas <comment><USER2> Do dollar stores has aggressive pricing? I've found they are a bad deal for many common day goods. Usually the $/qty is pretty bad. One example that sticks to my mind is aluminum foil. Those rolls are pretty small for the price.

The main thing I find them good for is things like cleaning supplies, brooms, greeting cards, gift wraps which tend to be marked up elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> Dollar General and Family Dollar are general stores, like used to be common in days of old. They are not "dollar stores," which refers specifically to stores where all or almost all merchandise costs about one dollar. This is a point of confusion on every article about Family Dollar and Dollar General, because most people commenting apparently never go there.

The bargains vary. Some of the standards at both mentioned general stores and Dollar Tree (a widely-known dollar store chain) meet Walmart's prices, e.g. for ammonia, which beats any other grocery store by nearly a third.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _For all that, while Alfers feels sympathy for Nech, he said the Dollar > General is the future. "The Model-T put horses out of business. It's hard to > protect existing businesses," he said. "I would still vote for Dollar > General. If one state didn't accept the Model-T it wouldn't have changed the > outcome. I think Buhler voted their sentiment. The question is, in five > years will they have a Dollar General or something similar?"_

How sad. One of these is a technology change. The other is local policy. We make choices about the communities we want to live in. This one was under his control, and his justification for a choice I think he regrets sounds like cognitive dissonance to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> These places are just awful. I went in one last summer and the girls working there were drenched in sweat. The management refused to set the thermostat below 80 degrees! And the cashiers had to stock shelves when there are no customers _at the cash register_ so of course they were sweating. Usually when you go in one, the only employees will be somewhere deep in the store and you have to wait a long time until they check the register for a line.

The idea is to have no stock room so they don't have to hire stocking staff, and make the cashiers do it when they aren't actively checking people out. The trucks unload everything right in the store so aisles are always blocked with giant piles of boxes. It's gotta be a nightmare for someone in a wheelchair.

But the worst part is of course the way they treat employees.

<comment><USER6> Meh. Those conditions are par for the course in jobs like that. IMO it beats working fast food any day of the week.

Working at a franchised establishment (like Dollar General or Walmart or Wendy's) is usually pretty middle of the road because they use their scale figure out how to optimize for every last but of productivity and that usually means working employees as hard as they can reasonably work. However, at the same time the franchise usually decrees something like "thou shalt not drag the brand name through the mud by running your location like a sweatshop." Small businesses have much more deviation in quality. If you think getting minimum wage for doing retail work in an 80deg store is a particularly bad deal then you're probably living in a little bit of a bubble.

<comment><USER7> >If you think getting minimum wage for doing retail work in an 80deg store is a particularly bad deal then you're probably living in a little bit of a bubble.

Is this a joke?

<comment><USER6> No. It's not a joke. There's tons of jobs out there that pay the same and involve more labor and/or a work environment with a less pleasant temperature. Pretty much any outdoor manual labor job and many food service jobs will meet those criteria.

<comment><USER5> This was not an act of nature. It was the manager cutting the costs. 80 degrees is _not_ a normal accepted indoor temperature. This is unusual punishment given the context and norms.

Expecting something different from a job outdoors or in a kitchen would, I agree, be a little ridiculous. The wage should of course be adjusted accordingly, but this is just disrespectful.

Middle of the road? Try $8.00/hr.

[https://www.job-applications.com/dollar-general-cashier/](https://www.job- applications.com/dollar-general-cashier/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if this is somehow a very USA-specific issue, and I wonder why that would be. I recently moved to the countryside in Finland, to a place that isn't even a town, just a road with houses and farms. There are a couple of rather crummy grocery stores within a few minutes driving distance, but mostly people shop at the stores in the nearest city, maybe half an hour away.

Where I live is kind of an extreme. There are a lot of places that do qualify as towns, and urbanization is definitely taking its toll on them. Local stores close down, and people have to shop further away. Still, this idea of a store that doesn't sell fresh produce seems completely alien - I haven't seen that pop up anywhere. Why does that work in the USA?

<comment><USER9> >Still, this idea of a store that doesn't sell fresh produce seems completely alien - I haven't seen that pop up anywhere

Yes you have. The Finnish equivalent is called Tokmanni. It's pretty much the exact same low quality crap. The only difference is that Tokmanni sells some stuff over €10.

<comment><USER8> I hadn't thought about Tokmanni as a grocery store replacement, more a general goods store. Now that you mention it, they do have a crappy food section that consists of edibles in cardboard boxes. I always pass by that part since I don't go there for food, but maybe that explains my blind spot.

<comment><USER10> That is exactly like a Dollar General. Small food section in cans and boxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion 10 months ago, 227 points, 317 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15500510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15500510)

Popular topic recently: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dollar%20general&sort=byPopula...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dollar%20general&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why do they frame it as only "poor middle America". I use to live in apartments that were going for $1700/month for a three bedroom (now $2100 a month less than 3 years later) and there is a Dollar Store in the same complex as a Publix across the street. The city had a median household income of $100,000.

Suburbia welcomes dollar stores just as much as rural America.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just drove thru upstate NY for 3 hours. Can confirm. Dollar General in every small town.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is why you need to get the government out of business. They shouldn't be choosing what stores are built where nor should they be giving certain businesses tax breaks over others.

<comment><USER14> Get government out of business?? I think it should be the other way round. Get business out of government.

Government has a place in prescribing how business is conducted. Without local government zoning for businesses your cities would be pretty shitty places to live. Light or heavy touch is the contentious point.

The bigger problem is that businesses by and large control America. Sort that problem out, complaining about government pushing business around is laughable.

<comment><USER11> Living in GA, big business serves as somewhat of a beachhead against it from becoming another Mississippi.</comment></comment></comment>


Writing interactive stories with Ink in Unity - <AUTHOR> https://www.primegames.bg/en/blog/writing-interactive-stories-with-ink-in-unity <comment><USER2> Very cool. Every time one of these interactive fiction stories comes up, it reminds me I really ought to get back into Inform 6.

I've really been tempted lately to try embedding a z-machine interpreter in the Microsoft Bot framework. It'd be neat to play Zork in Teams or Slack

<comment><USER3> I did a similar thing for Facebook Messenger, though I adapted PyZork and expanded it with my own story (using a custom js object based language, slightly more verbose than Ink): [https://adventure.kilianvalkhof.com/](https://adventure.kilianvalkhof.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I dislike Twine, and I unfortunately do not have enough to fill my days to be able to avoid reading a fair amount of Twine code. It's mostly terrible, even by hobbyist standards. It does however present an incredibly low barrier to entry, and that most of all is what I think this project misses. Telling stories in text should not require an IDE, and whatever form of programming is exemplified by that XML is one that I'll avoid at all costs. The other language choices are also dubious. I do not like feeling compelled to say nice things about Twine, but it's hard to find any comparative advantages in Ink.

<comment><USER5> > I unfortunately do not have enough to fill my days to be able to avoid > reading a fair amount of Twine code

I'm not sure what you mean.

<comment><USER4> I read a lot of bad game code written in Twine, for no particularly good reason, and I suspect there is some more productive way to pass time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know of any possible alternatives? I'm just curious what the options are, because this seems like a lot of fun.

</comment><comment><USER7> Okay, first of all, ink looks very, very cool. I hadn't heard of it and will definitely be checking it out. It'd be nice if there was a javascript compiler. Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to port.

I'm on an adventure game team. We started the game during a game jam. I'm the only developer. My team sort of wants me to use Unity but I absolutely refuse. I've put enough effort into proprietary platforms to know that it's pretty much a trap in the long run.

Anyway, during the game jam I stubbornly used Twine2, and was very let down. It didn't help that our writers were terrified of anything that looked or smelled like code. They wanted to use google docs!

Okay, so that meant that I had to copy and paste every revision into Twine manually all at the same time as I was trying to figure out the CSS and the branching/organization. That was too much. Twine was not made for collaboration.

And I thought because it was built with some variation of HTML5, that I'd easily be able to extend it with css and javascript. Nope, that wasn't the case! Twine is not made for extensibility. It even escapes HTML entities that I carefully wove into our text, transforming them into `>` and `<`. And doing modular dialog was just not possible. We wanted to create something dynamic, but with Twine it was very difficult. Twine was not made for incorporating dynamic dialog.

Twine was great as a proof of concept, but I've moved on to TiddlyWiki5. So far I'm feeling much better about that decision! There is a plugin called TiddlyMap that lets you treat TW5 content as a directed graph with multiple layers of edge and node types. It's very powerful: [http://tiddlymap.org/](http://tiddlymap.org/)

Maybe I can incorporate ink as a way of generating TiddlyWiki content?

I'm in the process of creating an feature for TiddlyMap that lets you visualize local linearizations of time-flows on these directed graphs. The goal is to be able to connect content together on a non-linear causal level (in the graph view), yet also to be able to edit it in a local timeline view. The proposed feature actually goes beyond just time editing. Check it out: [https://github.com/felixhayashi/TW5-TiddlyMap/issues/270](https://github.com/felixhayashi/TW5-TiddlyMap/issues/270)

Once our content is organized as a TiddlyMap graph, I can bring it to life using various existing javascript libraries for sound, graphics, etc.

Lastly, since TW5 integrates with dat & Beaker Browser, I'd like to create a p2p collaborative editor for tiddlywiki. I'm not imagining something with user authentication and a central server (like google docs). I'm imagining something where multiple users login to the same editing context via websockets and can pull/push to the collaborative version to each of their dat forks, similar to git. TW5 stores data as HTML, so it'd just be a matter of doing some smart diffing. TW5 already has an import feature, so even just using this could work!

Honestly, a collaborative dat editor would be useful outside of tiddlywiki! Could be a cool project for someone who is ready to tackle it.

<comment> T-A > It'd be nice if there was a javascript compiler. Maybe it wouldn't be too > hard to port.

The Inky editor is written in JavaScript, and apparently can "play" stories too:

[https://github.com/inkle/inky](https://github.com/inkle/inky)

<comment><USER7> I saw that, but noticed that it still seems to use the "inklecate" compiler, which is written in C#. I wonder to what degree it's actually dependent on that?</comment></comment></comment>


About Windy (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://community.windy.com/topic/4/about-windy/6 <comment><USER2> I've been using Windyty since it's launch. As a sailor, the visuals were extremely critical in planning passages. Where we could plan down to the minute of when to make course and sailplan changes.

Now we're on land and I've introduced to it to my colleagues. While I can read weatherfaxes, gribs, and navtexes it would take a full for your average layperson to read and interpret that data. Windy makes it very easy for anyone to conceptualize weather models and create their own predictions.

<comment><USER3> "Where we could plan down to the minute of when to make course and sailplan changes."

As a racing sailor I get that you can PLAN when to do these things, but Windy isn't giving you info from models accurate enough for this to be optimal. It just make you feel good and the picture are pretty.

<comment><USER2> If you have wind, polars, currents, and sea states you should have a good grasp at where you're boat will be and at what time.

Also, the closer you are to your start time the better the model. If I go sailing in the next 30 minutes, the model is really damn accurate.

<comment><USER4> at ~9km resolution they may be accurate but I doubt you can plan things down to the minute or even have any certainty of what weather conditions to expect near shore where terrain will greatly affect the flow of 10m winds. also Windy only works over a strong network connection so during actual passages it isn't really that helpful (compared wx gribs which can typically be downloaded over ham radio)

All that being said, Windy is an amazing product, and definitely a boon for visualizing model data and making that accessible to anyone with a decent internet connection!

source: thousands of miles of single-handed ocean sailing and I also handle wx model data daily at my job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a paragliding pilot, this is one of the best weather resources for me (along with [https://meteo-parapente.com/](https://meteo-parapente.com/)). Fantastic visualizations, fantastic data sources.

Note: Depending on your region, it might be a good idea to compare forecasts of different weather model. GFS with its 22km resolution is not well-suited for forecasts in the mountains, where the model may completely "overlook" an entire (large) valley. Weather phenomena like the Föhn are also not modelled well. ECMWF with 9km resolution is often better. In the alps, I've had good experience with NEMS (by Meteoblue) as well as COSMO by Meteoswiss (which is not (yet?) available on Windy).

Overview over the prediction models: [https://community.windy.com/topic/12/what-source-of- weather-...](https://community.windy.com/topic/12/what-source-of-weather-data- windy-use)

</comment><comment><USER6> My go to weather app, along with Dark Sky. Can't say enough good things about it. Constantly updated with new, useful features.

There's something to be said for a software company not taking a ton of VC money, hiring hundreds of people, and shutting down in 3-4 years. From the last photo they have a ~10 person team.

<comment><USER7> It is indeed a cool project. However I am interested how they make money? Their apps seem to have IAPs, or how does their business-model work?

<comment><USER8> The project was started (and still being partly coded by) one of the most successful Czech internet entrepreneurs, currently ~16th wealthiest Czech out there, his fortune estimated at ~$.7bn, so this venture seems to be self funded.

I can dig up an interview I read with him (in Czech), but I can't recall him talking about the financial side of things. He rarely talks to the press, so it's hard to come by this sort of information.

<comment><USER9> That's kind of amazing. Is it common for wealthy entrepreneurs to create self- funded projects like this?

Sounds like some kind of internet-philanthropy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> GUI-wise Windy is nice, but for a good forecast I prefer [https://www.meteoblue.com](https://www.meteoblue.com), e.g. [https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/multimodelense...](https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/multimodelensemble/zurich_switzerland_2657896)

Although the wind map of meteoblue looks good, too: [https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/windmap/zurich...](https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/windmap/zurich_switzerland_2657896)

</comment><comment><USER11> The author is also the founder and owner of a local Google-like company (search, email, maps, media, etc.), that's where he gets the funding for Windy.

<comment><USER12> And their maps are far superior to Google if you are looking for a map experience. I.e. you want to see a map, understand it, use it. With Google you get a grey blob of nothing where you can see a plotted route and reviews for your destination. It's useful, but very different.

<comment><USER13> Meanwhile, Windy's maps use OpenStreetMap data, but don't give OSM the required attribution.

That's against OSM's licence and seriously not cool.

<comment><USER11> They will fix it: [https://community.windy.com/topic/3353/map- correction/15](https://community.windy.com/topic/3353/map-correction/15)

<comment><USER14> They have not fixed it for almost 3 years - except for a really really tiny attribution only in web that too almost invisible. I challenge you to find it.

This is seriously not cool.

<comment><USER11> They've fixed it in the web, mobile will be fixed in the new release according to the linked comment. Maybe threaten to sue them if this is a priority for you.

<comment><USER15> They did not fix it by putting only "© OpenStreetMap".

From [https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright/en](https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright/en)

> How to credit OpenStreetMap

> We require that you use the credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Off Topic:

I thought the forum was running on Discourse, but turns out to be something called NodeBB, first time I heard of it, it is similar in design, and I think it felt slightly faster / snapier than Discourse.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thought for a second someone had posted this on HN: [https://fridababy.com/products/windi](https://fridababy.com/products/windi) \- Which is a bit of a hack in itself, and one that I'm sure would have generated some interesting responses.

</comment><comment><USER18> We use this website in oceanography to understand what kind of weather conditions our buoys are in. Off the coast of greenland this is helpful to shunt the wind turbines in extreme wind - not because they can't handle the wind, but because the waves crash on the spinning blades and shatter them.

</comment><comment><USER19> Love Windy. Use it for surf condition predictions. Better than Surfline!

<comment><USER20> same, Surfline doesn't have _all_ the spots ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Man, the performance is pretty incredible considering what all it's doing. I'm going to try it out on some other devices.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is just about the most perfect marriage of domain and website I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER23> Its a tragedy they dropped 3D view. Makes it pretty useless for the area around poles

<comment><USER24> Do you look up predictions a lot of those areas?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very nice. And the name actually fits, which is a rarity in itself.</comment>


Reference Lifetimes in Whiley - <AUTHOR> http://whiley.org/2016/05/28/reference-lifetimes-in-whiley/ <comment><USER2> Whiley downloads: [http://whiley.org/downloads/](http://whiley.org/downloads/)

A past discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649842)</comment>


Wave Goodbye: Following John Muir's Footsteps Through California's High Country - <AUTHOR> http://harpers.org/blog/2015/05/wave-goodbye/

<comment><USER2> John Muir page on Project Gutenberg: [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/180](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/180)</comment>


Docker on Windows – Sorting out the confusion - <AUTHOR> http://vijayshinva.github.io/docker/2018/01/16/docker-on-windows-sorting-out-the-confusion.html <comment><USER2> Needs a section on what versions are supported, you need the pro version of windows for instance.

</comment><comment><USER3> This guy needs a medal.</comment>


SteveB's Retirement Announcement - <AUTHOR> http://hal2020.com/2013/08/25/stevebs-retirement-announcement/ <comment><USER2> Uhh, Poor Steve having to save the company because it was at the brink of extinction due to the evil government action of the US and the EU is about as revisionist as it comes.

Look, that company violated antitrust laws left and right and Steve Balmer was instrumental in this sordid affair.

I'm neither a Microsoft hater (I actually think their OS offerings since XP are pretty solid) but that's just so much revisionist bullshit I couldn't even finish the article.

Microsoft was not punished for being big and successful. They where punished (and rightfully so) for repeatedly and purposefully violating the law in a multitude of jusrisdictions.

<comment><USER3> "funny" fact: they also did not respect the punishment EU gave them, so they were punished again over it.

Microsoft has serious problems with let the competitors a chance to compete.

edit to add data: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4069126/eu-fines- microsoft-...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4069126/eu-fines-microsoft- for-windows-7-sp1-browser-ballot)

<comment><USER4> > _Microsoft has serious problems with let the competitors a chance to > compete._

When you come down to it, there's a lot of circumstance involved.

For instance, take iOS -- it doesn't allow _any other_ browser engine WebKit/UIWebView. And no one is suing Apple over it.

<comment><USER5> > For instance, take iOS -- it doesn't allow any other browser engine > WebKit/UIWebView.

Get back to me when 90+% of smartphones from all major manufacturers are sold with iOS. It's not just being anti-competitive - it's being an anti- competitive monopoly.

<comment><USER4> I don't think anything will change even if/when iOS has 90%+ of the market share. Thing are going to remain the same, and Apple will get what it wants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People put so much weight on leadership.

Microsoft when Balmer took over had one direction to go: down. It's reversion to the mean. Eventually a company is going to roll 7 on the craps table.

Unless Cook is extremely lucky and skilled, in 5 or 10 years people will say the same thing about Apple. Days of stagnation and decline will also visit Google and Facebook eventually.

I understand our fixation on leadership. It _is_ super important. But as a thought experiment, I wonder if Steve Jobs was running Microsoft 2000-2010 instead of Steve Balmer, would Microsoft be in great condition today? Or were there already internal and external forces at play at that point that were trouble for Microsoft?

I guess the ultimate lesson is one you can learn from Bill Gates: quit while you're ahead.

<comment><USER7> _> Microsoft when Balmer took over had one direction to go: down_

Not at all. As mentioned here in the Vanity Fair [1] article, the iPhone could have been a Micosoft product and now brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft. Ballmer said "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." If you cut through everything else said, I think this is pretty damning.

[1] [http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost- mo...](http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve- ballmer)

<comment><USER8> Well, if apple hadn't been forced to release iOS sdk, it probably wouldn't get any significant market share as he predicted.

<comment><USER7> How was it forced? Steve Jobs: _Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users._ [1] Oct 18, 2007

[1] [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1183763?start=0&tstart=...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1183763?start=0&tstart=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What this article misses is that despite the successes and failures of SteveB, to the outside world Microsoft is largely considered as a company without a vision. I don't know if they ever had one, but all those talks all these years about tablets and handheld devices and those beautifully crafted videos about how computing will be 20 years from now, all that don't materialize into products.

Take for example Surface (the table not the tablet). They go and produce a sci-fi table with a touch surface which looks amazing but costs an outrageous $10.000 and has no freaking applications. And that coming from a software company which has spend the better part of the last 30 years building APIs. Where's the vision in that?

I use .NET daily as a platform for building web apps. I love it. I consider it a pretty solid platform and the IDE is like the golden standard in the industry. But in the long term I don't think that they have a clue as to where they'd like to take things. Right now MS seems like the company that waits others to innovate and then follow on their steps. They spend $7B yearly on R&D and you get to wonder what's the end result.

<comment><USER10> Research can (and arguably should) exist outside of a corporate vision.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought the interesting line from the article was: "For employees and ex- employees, our biggest beef with Steve will probably turn out to be that he made a great, if sometimes brutal, place to work a lot less great. And that, particularly in the second half of his CEO tenure, it became a lot more brutal yet cruelly random in how it measured and rewarded employee contributions."

It is one of those situations that gets repeated at companies of every size. It was a fun place to work then someone did something and the fun stopped. The weird part is when it happens at places that are profitable.

It being "cruelly random" isn't really that uncommon either.

<comment><USER11> As much as I agree with the criticism of Microsoft's implementation of stack ranking, if the stock had kept growing like it did in the '90's I think you would have seen a lot more happy employees.

Nobody cares too much about the review system when the options you got three years ago are making you a millionaire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Often the people who decry the era of desktop PCs over _also_ still believe it righteous for the US and EU governments to levy fines and targeted regulations on Microsoft. Which is it: are desktop PCs relevant and therefore worthy of strong-handed regulation or are they irrelevant?

Surely if they are irrelevant, we can call off the government attack dogs and allow Microsoft to bundle a browser and media player with their desktop operating system already, yes?

So thank you, OP, for bringing attention to the regulatory position Microsoft is in versus its competition. I've ranted elsewhere [1] about the market- holistic detriment I believe the anti-trust judgments caused. At the time, I had been of mixed feelings, being an avid Netscape fan. Since then, I've come to regard the anti-trust cases as a tragedy.

Ultimately, I think it was not just Microsoft who suffered but also the consumer. I presently find the world of mobile computing _far_ from the ideal that I want, and I feel it arrived in this form thanks in large part to an unnaturally narrow competitive landscape (the irony!) When I retrace the steps of the past 15 years, I see there were fits of movement in a direction of unified computing, but those were lost. Only recently with the NSA leaks and a gradual pendulum swing back to self-control are we seeing some blips of unified computing.

Yet now Microsoft concedes that tablets and mobile phones should be first- class computing devices (argh!) and simply follows the proven money-making model of the other titans. I still hold out some hope that they will come around to a unified computing model, among other things [2].

[1] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft- awakens](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft-awakens) and [2] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft)

<comment><USER5> > Which is it: are desktop PCs relevant and therefore worthy of strong-handed > regulation or are they irrelevant?

The question is irrelevant. While PCs are rapidly losing importance in the general computing and communications market, Microsoft's monopoly extends over most of the desktop computer market. It is, therefore, a monopoly. It may not be as important as it once was, but the PC market is still huge by all measurements (and is mostly less relevant these days because the mobile device segment exploded).

<comment><USER12> Do we go after Instagram for being a monopoly on photo sharing? Twitter for a monopoly on arbitrarily-small marketing messages and snark? Facebook for a monopoly on social networking?

Yet, the EU _has_ \--in laughably minor ways--gone after Google for its monopoly on search.

It seems there is some correlation between the size (real or imagined) of the market with whether the government attack dogs are loosed.

The point may not really be relevant to the matter at hand, I'll agree. But it's nevertheless amusing to me how often I see the same people who decry desktop computing to be over still harping on about the need for the government to bust Microsoft for its desktop computing monopoly.

<comment><USER13> There is no law against _being_ a monopoly. Microsoft was not punished for _being_ a monopoly. They were punished (poorly) for abusing their monopoly position.

<comment><USER12> Reducing the situation so ends up sounding disturbingly capricious, where favors are granted to the politically powerful and oppression is handed out to the politically weak by defining their actions as abusive.

I feel Google _abuses_ its search monopoly to shove Chrome down my throat. I feel Youtube _abuses_ its web video monopoly to force me into using Google+. I feel just about every company is shoving their cloud services and making management and control of local resources frustratingly limited by comparison.

But do I want any government to step in and assist me? No, thank you very much.

I feel I'd be happier with technology today--perhaps only slightly, mind you, but happier--had Microsoft been left alone in the late 90s/early 2000s.

<comment><USER14> The US, at least, in theory goes further, consumers must be harmed.

The above examples may be abusive, but are they harming you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In assessments of Steve Ballmer's tenure (including Ballmer's own assessment as reported on ZDNet) Vista is mentioned as a prominent failure. No one seems to want to mention the bigger failure: Windows 8, whose adoption is below Vista.

<comment><USER16> Luckily for Microsoft, Windows 8 failure really comes down to the lack of the Start button on a desktop screen. If it were there, everyone would've just skipped the fancy tiled screen, went straight to the desktop and got an improved W7 experience.

Windows 8.1 puts the button back, so the adoption rates should climb back up and rather quickly.

<comment><USER17> The Start Button isn't back, it's the same lose-context-and-switch-to-Metro B.S. that was in the first version.

So instead of activating the hot corner, there's now a prominent button where the Start button was, but it still takes you to a disjointed (touch-friendly) desktop that many wish could be disabled entirely.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, Windows isn't the only desktop environment to throw away old interface designs and adopt new ones that many wish could be disabled.

Not saying it's a good (or bad) think in either case (as I don't know) but it's certainly not a unique-to-microsoft thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >> Had it succeeded he probably would have gotten the kind of credit regularly attributed to that other company head named Steve.

Some times some statements within an article show such negative attitude that it becomes difficult to take the rest of the article seriously. I don't know why the author has such resentment towards 'that other company head named Steve' and why he feels to need to mention it at all.

Also in one paragraph it is mentioned that Steve is a hero. The paragraph immediately following that states that he couldn't get things put together at the same time or execute his plans. How does a CEO become a hero when he is not able to deliver the most important things expected of him?

A very confusing article this one.</comment>


MakeGamesWithUs (YC W12) Wants To Turn High School Kids Into iOS Game Developers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/06/y-combinator-makegameswithus/ <comment><USER2> American culture is quick to dismiss the abilities of teenagers. But often, the biggest barrier to, say, teens making video games, is the doubt we've taught them to harbor.

"the developers get 70% and MakeGamesWithUs will take 30%."

That's incredibly generous. When I was making games in high school I'd just be thrilled that anyone was actually playing my games. Good on them for not being greedy.

<comment><USER3> Don't forget the qualifier - "the company will take all profits from the game until the cost of hiring artists for the graphics is payed off".

So, what do they offer?

\- Tutorials/community? Ubiquitous and free anyway, no value added.

\- Analytics? Useless to everyone not doing highly targeted design (read: social games)

\- Art? Well, as per the above, the devs pay for it anyway.

\- Fit and finish? Now this is actually worth something. But all game devs should develop this skill anyway, and if you're a teenager learning game development, that's a good time to learn.

\- Networking libraries? Could be useful.

The overall package might be worth something, but probably not worth having another finger in the revenue/IP pie. I say IP because, what happens if you publish game XYZ with them, independently iterate on the concept, and self- publish XYZ 2? Better to just own your work outright.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I think you're underestimating the value of some of the things we add to the process such as the work involved to get good art, as well as being the place where they can learn about fit and finish. We want to let developers focus on the coding / game-design while we handle the not so fun parts. Instead of having to worry about the not so fun parts you can spend that time building a second game and make even more money!!

For those who don't have money, we take all the risk out of making a successful game. While the developer in some ways ends up paying for some of the art costs (ignoring the fact that the process of getting the art done itself has cost to it), it is guaranteed he will not lose money on art and promotion, which we see as a big win.

We hope the overall package will be worth it, and we plan to add more and more tools / support to make it worthwhile, potentially features like allowing others to beta test your game and A/B testing logos etc. If you can think of more features that would make a revenue share worthwhile please let us know! We want to build things our developers / potential developers need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the kind of thing I would have loved to do in high school. Alas, it was the early 90's, so I tried to write BBS door games instead.

<comment><USER5> Write another BBS Door game for the iPhone -- instant nostalgia.

<comment><USER6> We'd gladly skin and publish it! MakeGamesWithUs is also for kids at heart :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Exactly what we need - more bad iOS games :)

I'm kidding, in all seriousness it would be a great experience for the kids.

<comment><USER6> Hey! We're pretty proud of Elemental Fury ;) [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/elemental- fury/id532040551?mt...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/elemental- fury/id532040551?mt=8)

It turns out that high school and college students make games they want to play, so the quality of games in our pipeline has been quite good so far :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is excellent. I'm not convinced that playing games has many benefits for the average teenager, but there's no question in my mind that learning how to build games will have tremendous benefits. A successful iOS game requires expertise in such a tremendous number of areas (typically some combination of programming, AI, music, art, geometry, trigonometry, physics, even calculus) that getting youth involved in building one will be a definite learning experience.

A recent topic of conversation here on HN lately has been the difficulty many young people are having learning math. I think one of math's major obstacles as a teaching subject - and perhaps it's the biggest one - is that much of it can seem totally irrelevant.

But get someone totally committed to building a game and then watch what happens when they realize they need to understand Newtonian mechanics in order to make it work properly: I'm willing to bet that a lot of young people will take up that challenge and master it.

Good luck with your startup and be sure to update HN on your progress!

<comment><USER6> That's a great point. We've worked hands on with quite a few high school students developing games. You should see the notes they scribble while coding. Even if their game isn't physics based there's usually a good amount of trig and I guarantee it feels like much less of a chore than math homework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is not a great business model. You are planning to take the distributor portion of revenue but also take the additional risk of making the art. This could maybe be okay by itself but probably not. However, additionally it sounds like you want to bring xblig quality games made by young people to ios. Something like 90% of xblig games make less than $200, on the more competitive ios app store they will probably make less.

You need to change your business model drastically for this to succeed. I don't think you will break even with the current business model, much less make a profit.

Most people's first 4 video games fail spectacularly, the younger they are the more likely this is.

There are some exceptions but I doubt they will cover your mounting losses. I am the only person I have ever heard of whose first video game made it on to Steam, but while my game made it on I think many many games did not. Also I was a grad student in engineering at the time, not a high school student. You are essentially trying to VC video game development but only take 30%. This will not work with a 30% cut, and it won't work anyway unless you become a lot more selective on which games you choose to invest in.

<comment><USER6> We have a game that's currently in review by Apple that hopefully will give a sense of just how good these games can be:) The median for games on the App Store is also a lot higher than $200 - in the thousands of dollars. I think we'll break even fine on plenty of games and by virtue of opening up iOS game development to so many potential talented developers we'll have the opportunity to publish real gems.

Only time will tell whether the model works. I'm curious - what cut would you say we should take?

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how much you provide beyond art, also an sdk? It sounds like you are essentially a publisher. Since you are giving a royalty advance in the form of art, software support, handling distribution and possibly marketing. You are then giving devs a royalty rate of 70%.

My understanding is that publishers usually take more than 50% of revenue. I don't know if you should take that much or restructure your payment system, and honestly I don't think being a publisher for tiny xblig like games makes sense.

<comment><USER6> Noted. Check out [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/elemental- fury/id532042459?mt...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/elemental- fury/id532042459?mt=8), we just released it, is this the type of game you mean when you say xblig like games? It's an honest question I'm not particularly familiar with xblig.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> HS students are extremely capable of building amazing stuff.

We run hackathons for HS students every few months and are amazed by the things they do. <http://codeday.org/pastevents.php>

I met with Ashu & the team a month or so ago and it seems like they're up to something great =]

</comment><comment><USER11> anyone who creates a dead simple tool to bridge the game dev gap deserves praise

</comment><comment><USER12> Can I log in or create an account without facebook?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1732411>

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at this time. We only request your email so we don't have permission to post on your behalf. I understand some people are not fond of FB login, but we'd like to use real identities on the site. If it comes up as a common complaint we will add a separate login.

<comment><USER12> That's unfortunate. I fit in your target audience and I deleted my facebook. A lot of my friends have too, two of which I had already sent the link out to before I realized I couldn't actually log in.

edit: _If it comes up as a common complaint we will add a separate login._

I also like to think the fact that the article I linked to had 504 upvotes certifies that this is, in fact, a common complaint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fun to see an article pop up on this - it was very interesting talking to you a few months ago about this, Jeremy. Hope its going well.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't help but briefly consider the proportion of existing iOS (or Android, for that matter) developers who are high school kids.

</comment><comment><USER11> question: how are you guys different from GameSalad, or Construct2?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not very similar to either of the two (although I'm not too familiar with Construct2). While there is some overlap, those are at the core a game engine. We are a game publisher. Our tutorials teach you to use Cocos2d (an open source game engine for iPhone, which is similar to GameSalad but in native ObjC). Our value proposition is also very different, instead of you paying us for tools to build a game, we only make money if the game does well, in which case you also make money!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wouldn't be making games for Android cheaper? Not having to buy overpriced Apple devices

<comment><USER16> Define "overpriced".

<comment><USER17> 1000€ more for comparable PC hardware in terms of technical specifications.

<comment><USER18> The cheapest Mac laptop is $1,000. The cheapest Mac desktop is $600. So you are saying there are comparable PC's available for free and -400 dollars?

<comment><USER19> I think it's a historically common consensus that high powered macs are considerably more expensive than their equally powered non-mac alternative.

My historical stance on the matter has been that the money goes to R&D. I have no proof to validate my assertion, though.

And some quick links to compare. I could have taken more time on selecting the links, but this was pretty quick:

<http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD104LL/A>

vs

<http://www.alienware.com/Landings/laptops.aspx>

<comment><USER16>
      > I think it's a historically common consensus that high
      > powered macs are considerably more expensive than their
      > equally powered non-mac alternative.

By consensus you mean misconception? I don't remember Macbook Air "clones" being cheaper by $1000. Some are even more expensive. OTOH, I prefer to use computers, not specs. "Multitouch trackpad" may look the same in specs, but in practice it makes huge difference.

<comment><USER19> Those aren't the specs I look at or think about. I look more at:

8GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM

Core i7 3.2Ghz Processor

nVidia 650M

256GB SSD

1920x1080 resolution

My mouse is usually a peripheral.

I would also imagine a clone to cost more than the original anyway, in many cases.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NodeConfEU 2017 Videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0CdgOSSGlBaxNkrUIHrhd1f3ch45f66_#nodeconfeu2017 <comment><USER2> Any recommended vids?

<comment><USER3> Check [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg)

<comment><USER2> If you find yourself nodding along with that 2012 video, you need to try modern Javascript with promises and async/await.

I haven't written a callback API in quite some time.</comment></comment></comment>


Two Things Design Experts Do That Novices Don't - <AUTHOR> http://noisebetweenstations.com/personal/weblogs/?p=2214

<comment><USER2> I think the bit about top-down, breadth-first search is erroneously regarded as a crucial concept of the paper this author cites. That is an excerpt from the introductory portion of the paper, and does not appear to be the rule in terms of being a problem-solving approach.

Particularly interesting is a part in the paper that describes how expert engineers would quickly abandon alternatives that incur higher cognitive cost. It is possible that breadth-first search happens before this, which is not surprising (in fact, is expected, if you think in terms of Ericsson's explanation). The crucial move is what heuristic the expert uses to prune their decision tree, in a rapid, economical, sensible, and ultimately practical fashion.

So in fact, the blog post's claim of "Both product developers and designers have a tendency to jump on the first great idea they generate and head down one path, instead of patiently exploring the space of possible solutions" can't really be called a characterization of novice product devs/designers -- because you may observe the exact same behavior (i.e., observable behavior) in experts.

The Lawson study cited in Nigel Cross's paper said the recurring theme in expert designers was their claim to be keeping multiple concepts in parallel. This is a reiteration of Ericsson's theories (long term working memory). The key difference, as it seems, is, unsurprisingly, exposure and experience.

IMHO, "pragmatists" vs. "realists" is a suboptimal generalization.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see it over and over in engineering, novices get tangled in the details, and don't step back to look at the bigger picture.

Ineffective programmers sweat the little details, and tend either tend to spend too much time on them, or solve them in such a way (usually isolated), that it hurts the design of the whole system, and shoot themselves in the foot for later one. Usually this is manifested in spaghetti code, or over- complicated engineering of things that should be simple.

While an experienced programmer, sees them as details that have to be solved, but without loosing touch of the bigger picture.

<comment><USER4> Actually the expert does not have to step back to see the bigger picture, because he already has it from his experience.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. It is precisely the experience that allows the expert to maintain the "big picture" in their head without incurring a penalizing cognitive load -- an ability that novices lack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd frame it that Experts deal with increasingly abstracted-out ideas. Expert physicists differ from pre-schooolers in "not having to sweat out arithmetic, algebra, etc."

There's a natural abstraction hierarchy in every field I know. I claim that those fields that _don't_ have good abstractions are precisely those that don't fare very well.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting parallel: Y Combinator is a breadth-first search through the possible solution space. It galvanizes a number of potential solutions (similar to following a number of promising concept designs) and eventually is successful.

So, in my experience, concept designs are best used when two wildly varying ideas are able to combine. Do two failed startups take their ideas, mesh them together, and produce one new totally innovative one?

I'd like to hear stories about that.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is something I have found very true. I try to avoid talking about certain problems with certain people because they will just focus on small seemingly unsolvable problems that don't matter much in the end.

My attitude has always been worry about that problem when we get there, and find a solution that is acceptable - not necessarily the one you had in mind first.

One line that I always try repeat to myself (especially in circuit design) is "If the solution seems difficult, try to restate or reconfigure the problem.

Its like the old getting lost in the trees cliche

</comment><comment><USER8> When you're experienced at something you might not know a solution to a problem in that area, but you will often know what isn't the solution.

Understanding what something isn't is as important as understanding what something is - in my experience anyway.

</comment><comment><USER9> www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html</comment>


The Lambda Calculus for Absolute Dummies (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://palmstroem.blogspot.com/2012/05/lambda-calculus-for-absolute-dummies.html <comment><USER2> I don't actually find this explanation easier to understand...

I find "To Dissect A Mockingbird" a more intuitive and simpler explanation of Lambda Calculus. I think the visuals help a lot.

[http://dkeenan.com/Lambda/](http://dkeenan.com/Lambda/)

<comment><USER3> These diagrams are interesting too: [http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/diagrams.html](http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/diagrams.html)

There is also Bret Victor's Alligator Eggs game: [http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/](http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/)

I know about these because I'm currently trying to learn λ-calculus by deriving and implementing functions in CoffeeScript: [https://github.com/rbonvall/lambda- coffee/blob/master/lambda...](https://github.com/rbonvall/lambda- coffee/blob/master/lambda.coffee)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like this talk [http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1287-rubyconf2012-y-not- adve...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1287-rubyconf2012-y-not-adventures- in-functional-programming)

<comment> anti-thought Jim Weirich was an excellent speaker, and this was one of his best presentations. I thought his method of building up to the purpose of combinators (not just the Y) was much better than just an explanation. He references [1] (note url change) which does something similar and is also a good read/view.

[1] - [http://codon.com/programming-with- nothing](http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's so funny about watching/reading all these explanations (videos, images, tutorials etc.) is the utter lack of mastery displayed by all the computer scientists / programmers in presenting a simple, rigorous, complete mathematical definition. Due to leaving out these essential details, and unable to actually define what 'the lambda calculus' is, they end up confusing people. Jim Weirich never actually articulates a clear definition and ends up uttering a jumble of words.. although I'm sure he understands it intuitively, he's not able to convey it.

<comment><USER6> Umm, Jim Weirich's explanation in this video makes pretty much perfect sense: [http://vimeo.com/45140590](http://vimeo.com/45140590)

<comment><USER5> Not if you don't already know what it is. It's not a definition. This is exactly what he says and shows starting at 6:30

Audio: "This is the basics of lambda calculus right here. You've got the little lambda function, a lambda character and that's indicates the beginning of a function definition. you say this function takes a varia..uh argument called x. The period denotes the beginning of the body of the function, and then whatever comes after the period is what is returned by the function. So this is an identify function here. Anything you give it, it returns back the same value. You have arguments, well ok you have variables, and you have functions. That's all you have in lambda calculus. There is nothing else, but variables and functions. "

Visual: There is a title to the slide, "λ-calculus". There is an image on the center of the slide with λx.x, and there are these words with arrows going to λx.x :

"punctuation", with two arrows coming out of it, going λ and . "argument (variable)" with an arrow to the first x "body (λ-expression)" with an arrow to the second x.

This person would fail the first definition-proof based math exam at Harvard. Let's say, the question is "What is a function?"

You can't say, well, uh, you have your f there, so basically, that's the function, and you have these arrows, and the x between the arrows, that's uh, your variable. f takes that, and uh, returns whatever's after the equal. So that's basically a function.

And I'd draw an image of f(x) = y, and have arrows to ()= saying punctuation, to f, "function", and x,y "variables".

Sloppy thinking like this is what resulted in inconsistencies in calculus, until people got rigorous and started giving good definitions of what exactly they're talking about. Here's a standard definition:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)#Definiti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_\(mathematics\)#Definition)

Common Intuition is not always a good guide for mathematics or computer science. The world is not as it seems. You have things like the Banach Tarski paradox, or Brouwer's fixed-point theorem which may be counterintuitive but once things clearly defined, makes more sense.

<comment><USER7> He wasn't given a lecture about lambda calculus, he was giving a lecture about Y Combinators. While he gave a quick overview of lambda calculus _(an overview which I would describe as effective and _sufficient for the rest of the lecture_)_ , that should not be confused with an attempt to give a lecture about lambda calculus.

A more rigorous or 'correct' treatment of lambda calculus would not have improved his talk, it would have distracted from it..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is actually really confusing...

</comment><comment><USER9> People hate math formalism because it only makes sense if you already understand it.

<comment><AUTHOR> how to teach recursion

<comment><USER10>
      def teach(something):
          lesson = None
          // Aye, there's the rub...
          if knowsHowToTeach():
              lesson = createLessonForSomething(something)
          else:
              lesson = teach(something)
          return lesson

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see no inherent value in writing 2x3=6 as:

2 x 3 = MULTIPLY 2 3 :⇔ (λ abc.a(bc)) (λ sz.s(s(z))) (λ xy.x(x(x(y)))) = λ c.(λ sz.s(s(z)))((λ xy.x(x(x(y))))c) = λ cz.((λ xy.x(x(x(y))))c)(((λ xy.x(x(x(y))))c)(z)) = λ cz.(λ y.c(c(c(y)))) (c(c(c(z)))) = λ cz.c(c(c(c(c(c(z)))))) = 6

This makes Brainf*ck look elegant!

<comment><USER12> Lambda calculus is the computational equivalent of compass and straightedge geometrical construction[1]. It's about starting with fundamental and simple components and building higher-level abstractions upon these firm foundations. Euclid's Elements, which heavily relied on this approach and made it famous, was arguably the most influential mathematical text ever written.

By combining simple constructs according to simple rules, you can be certain that more complex constructs are themselves correct. This also often highlights simplicity and elegance in the underlying structure of otherwise complex constructs.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass-and- straightedge_constr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass-and- straightedge_construction)

<comment><USER13> ... and just as Euclidean geometry, nobody actually uses it, and it is a controversial matter whether it is a good teaching tool [1].

It's elegant, but elitist, because it's unnecessarily difficult and hostile.

[1]: [http://mathoverflow.net/questions/152352/is-euclid- dead](http://mathoverflow.net/questions/152352/is-euclid-dead)

<comment><USER7> Oh give me a break. Lambda calculus was created to study computation. To study computation in a rigorous manner, a mathematical model of computation was necessary. The more complex the model of computation, the more axioms you need. Complex models with many axioms are more difficult to reason about but are not actually more powerful (since they are all equivalent...) With a simple model of computation you can quickly build yourself more user-friendly systems (such as demonstrating how Church Encoding works, then proceeding to use it instead of writing it all out every time). It wasn't created out of some sense of elitism, it was created out of _pragmatism_.

Do you really think that Alonzo Church made his own work more difficult just to make others feel excluded? That's ludicrous.

<comment><USER13> ... just like Euclidean geometry, it was created by a geometer for "internal usage". I am not contesting the usefulness of lambda calculus in academic contexts!

I am just saying that lambda calculus is not the best approach in an engineering context, because it's too abstract, just like in practical terms, I see little use of Euclidean geometry in proving new theorems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I lost interest at the 'minimalist gossip newspaper' analogy. In my opinion the power of the analogy is exaggerated. The text was easy to undestand until that part.

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought it was clear. I would start with 1, not 0 for the first example of the derivation of Natural numbers via succession or the related Peano axiom. I know some texts start with 1 and others 0, but given counting most likely started with objects, it is more fundamental to begin with 1. The concept of nothing or zero just seems an abstract step away. Nice treatment of the lambda calculus.

<comment><USER16> It makes for a more elegant (imho) recursive definition of the sum. Instead of:

        a + S(b) = S(a) + b
        a + 0 = a

you would have:

        a + S(b) = S(a) + b
        a + 1 = S(a)

And also you would not be able to express 1 as a sum of two numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lambda Calculus is actually extremely simple, and in my opinion, boring. When I took a unit on it in college, I guess the prof didn't do a good job motivating it. It's just substitution, and sometimes renaming variables. Nothing really useful, innovative, or interesting, except as representing computable functions.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish I was an absolute dummy to get all of that...

<comment><USER19> yeah, TL;DR

My ADD brain just ain't up for that particular challenge tonight.</comment></comment>


Look Up - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY

<comment><USER2> Sometimes, we cannot simple turn off the computer because of workload and find a real life. I think that we must prioritize: turn off those notifications and those apps seeking your attention; and talk to your friends around you instead of those online friends.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. Something I found quite interesting though is that this study says that: "Online Dating Leads To Higher Marriage Satisfaction, Lower Divorce Rates" Being online all the time is obviously not a great thing but just as he missed the woman looking at his phone, you also will definitely miss things by not looking at it. :)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/online-dating- leads...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/online-dating-leads-to- hi_n_3384721.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's a touching video. I wonder if we have reached a point of no return.</comment>


Did you know that Twitter always crops images to focus on text - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sekachov/status/1259920347278737409 <comment><USER2> The smarts behind it might be more interesting for the HN crowd - [https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2018/Smart- Auto-Cropping-of-Images.html)

<comment><USER3> Twitter seems to be an awkward composite of smart technology like that on the back end and a really awful UX on the front.

I groan when someone sends me a Twitter link because it'll probably need a dozen clicks just to read the post of interest, unless "something went wrong" and I can't get that far.

Even just scrolling down a Twitter page is jerky and sluggish. It's just text and small preview JPEGs, it should load instantly and scroll like butter. Just like that engineering page...

Why won't someone step forward in the organisation and challenge the status quo?</comment></comment>


The Perfect Agile/Scrum Stand-up - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/12/the-perfect-agi.php <comment><USER2> _It's like this: Agile is all about dynamic process tailoring. That means, yes, that teams control the degree of paperwork and process they need to accomplish. But it's also like this: there are some "recipes" that the community has found over and over again that work. You'd be a complete fool to ignore them._

For Agile (whatever that is) it may be true. Many of the Scrum books I've seen, however, emphasize that Scrum is an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you get buy in from management and you go Scrum all the way or you don't do Scrum at all. The justification given is that Scrum is a set of interlocking practices, and adopting some of the practices without adopting the whole set doesn't get you any benefit, and may even harm the project.

<comment><USER3> I have always viewed scrum as a management technique... easily wrapped around delivering a software product. Since scrum is pretty light-weight, I guess doing it "all" is not that cumbersome, but you could probably jettison/modify some parts that don't fit your culture/context. (Just know why...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you think agile is a set of fixed steps, you are wrong. If you think a standup is a status meeting "for the boss," use jira and avoid the standup.</comment>


Ask HN: How does A/B Testing improve your Dev Process (Short Survey) - <AUTHOR>

How do you use A/B-Testing in your dev process? Could you do me a favour and fill our 5 minute survey?<p>Thank you very much. <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the survey link: [https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/99P22WM](https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/99P22WM)</comment>