Free Business Idea: iPad Marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://amandapeyton.com/blog/2011/05/free-business-idea-ipad-marketplace/

<comment><USER2> Is it not just as likely that platforms like Shopify just make sure their templates are well-optimized for mobile devices?

Ideally, the best mobile app is a well-crafted web site.

<comment><USER3> Good call :-)

Stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds kind of like pg's Viaweb?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb>

</comment><comment><USER5> Would love to have a Ipad App for Shopify.

</comment><comment><USER6> This idea has about as much value as the price he's charging for it

<comment><USER7> "she's"</comment></comment>


Self-Driving RVs, Not Cars, Will Bring About the True Paradigm Shift (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gadflyllc.com/self-driving-rvs-not-cars-will-bring-about-the-true-paradigm-shift/ <comment><USER2> The cost of an RV makes this out of reach of all but the most wealthy. A "paradigm shift" doesn't come from luxury goods, it comes when the cost is within reach of average folks.

The photos in the article are of RVs that cost $100k+ (for the little class B) and $175k+ (for the big diesel pusher class A). People who spend $60k+ on a luxury auto may not blink at that, but I doubt it's gonna be a mainstream thing. It's a high margin industry, but even if we assume it becomes much more widespread and competition increases and margins come down, it's still just really expensive to put a whole apartment in a van/bus.

Also, RVs are a tremendous amount of labor to own even if you don't do the driving. They need a lot more maintenance (if you're barreling down the highway in your living room at 70MPH, shit's gonna break), maintenance is a lot more expensive, and you have to deal with dumping and refilling tanks, among other things. I just don't think everyone is going to want that as part of their normal daily commute.

My sister's family tried renting an RV for trips, rather than flying for a while (because their son liked my motorhome and wanted to try out that kind of travel), but decided not to buy an RV and went back to flying or traveling in their SUV and staying in hotels along the way when they wanted a road trip. As with the boat they bought on a whim, it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth to them.

I live in an RV and travel kinda full-time, and have done so for ~6 of the past ~8 years, so I totally understand the appeal. I love having my whole house with me when I travel, sleeping in my own bed every night, cooking in my familiar kitchen, etc., but I can see how it's not for everyone. And, again, the cost is prohibitive for a lot of people. If you live in the RV full-time and don't have rent or a mortgage payment, it's entirely do-able on a modest income...but, in _addition_ to a primary residence, it's a pricey endeavor, really only within reach of pretty wealthy people.

<comment><USER3> Not everyone has a $100k+ class A motorhome. In fact, lots of us don't ever want one.

The article applies perfectly well to a ~$30k Sprinter or similar van outfitted with queen bed, sink, stove, tv, etc. There is no reason it will cost significantly more than a Model 3 does now.

It makes perfect sense to be able to sleep/eat/cook/wash/read/watch TV whenever the vehicle is moving, once you don't need to drive.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I paid 10 grand for my diesel Fiat Ducato. Put 60,000k on it and only had to replace the battery, tires and brakes.

She's been to 27 countries and 100s of cities, villages and towns....yes, 100s.

From Chernobyl to London, to Southern Greece and Asian side of Turkey... and everything in between.

<comment><USER3> Nice! I drove my $6k Jeep 65,000 kms through 16 countries, then sold it for what I bought it for.

Now I'm driving my ~$35k Jeep through 30 countries in Africa, should be well over 100k kms.

Have fun out there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm skeptical. Class A motorcoaches are already very complex beasts and the people who operate them are in no particular rush to get anywhere from my experiences in Montana and Idaho the last couple of weeks. They're mostly retired people and they wander from RV park to RV park without much care. It's a nice life in some ways. It would drive me batty to live in campgrounds after awhile, but that's me.

My elderly parents bought a 38' Bluebird years ago. They used it some in the first couple of years, but then their health problems began preventing them from going anywhere and now it just sits. The thing is a monster, especially when flat-towing a car behind it. Its huge size has gotten them into all kinds of misadventures because it's like driving a semi around, you have to be careful about bridges, grades, road width, parking, where you're going to turn around, and on and on.

I keep trying to get them to sell it, but they are holding on to a dream that will never be. The punchline is that they could have flown anywhere in the world multiple times and stayed in 4-star hotels for what that stupid RV cost and they would have had a much better time.

Anyhow, I just don't see a lot of people relying on self-driving RVs, sorry.

<comment><USER5> Why the downvote? Do you have any experience with the RV world? I'm telling you--most of the fun is in _driving_ the thing and self-driving takes even that away. People imagine they can hop in some self-driving motorhome and read books and nap until they get to their destination and I'm here to tell you that that is a highly unlikely thing to come to be for all kinds of reasons.

</comment></comment><comment> crooked-v I'm reminded of the Judge Dredd comics, where automated two-lane mega-RVs are an established part of the setting, complete with a subculture of people who have psychological problems if they live somewhere that's not moving most of the time.

<comment><USER6> There was an old, now defunct, satire magazine called "CARtoons" that once did a piece on Earth's entire civilization being confined inside of large self- driving cars all barreling down the highway and going nowhere in particular. Everything was self-driving, the mall, restaurants, offices. It's hard to find any scans of the magazine online, but archive.org has a few (not that issue in particular) if you want to get a feel for them.

[https://archive.org/details/pulpmagazinearchive?and[]=cartoo...](https://archive.org/details/pulpmagazinearchive?and\[\]=cartoons)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Had to stop at point three. There are just too many assumptions in there that are already shown as incorrect by the world in general.

For instance, it's not true that with losing the personality of horses all cars behaved the same. Why should that change when the driving part is automated? There are so many different needs people try to fulfill with cars. One might want to arrive quickly and electricity efficient. He may prefer something like these lay-back bycicles. Another person wants some recreational time with his family and he will prefer the RV version. Another person simply doesn't have the funds to choose anything but still needs to get from A to B. He may add a request to his Uber app, then a grey little box comes, and on the way to B will put him as much as possible into lines with other box to decrease air resistance, even though that will take more time in the end for the customer.

In my experience more automation will end up providing more options not fewer.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think a bigger paradigm shift is going to happen with off-gridding in California with tiny houses and also RVs.

There's a perfect storm of technology and circumstance. Real estate prices are soaring in the cities, solar power is cheap and getting cheaper, more people are able to work off-site via the internet, there's beautiful california land that can be had for thousands of dollars an acre.. the technology that powers water pumps and wells is cheaper and more effective, self driving water/food/garbage collection/road grading/ deliveries will soon be a reality.

<comment><USER9> You forget the psychological aspect though.

I consider myself a loner, often sit alone at times when everyone is out.

I then went to live in the mountains for a while (due to work) sounded great, had internet, a phone, a house 10 times as big with a godly view etc.

However, lonely at home is different from actual loneliness, and I was surprised how much I missed something as simple as seeing a random person walk on the street or a simple child shouting.

You cannot fathom this type of loneliness, unless you actually been in isolation for a while, it changes you.

I think you can substitute most if not all social needs if you have a family, but the paradox is, that people who grew up lonely, more often than not want to live in the city, or at least a place with a certain size off community.

So you either move back "for the kids", or (as you see so often) kids leave for the city as soon as they turn adult. Leaving you alone again.

This is not so much opinion, as it is the nature of the human social mind.

Anecdotally;

One of my friends grew up with a brother and a sister in the mountains. Their parents moved there from the city before they were born, exactly for the dream scenario off living that way. Now they are adults and he now lives in Madrid, his brother in Toronto, his sister in Amsterdam.

Hows that for contrast?

tldr;

Grass is always greener on the other side. Isolation is experienced by many as a golden cage.

<comment><USER8> I spent some time out in the desert on a 5 acre parcel I purchased outright. There were neighbors about a quarter of a mile away and I drove into town every few days. I think complete isolation is probably a different story but low population density doesn't necessarily mean you don't have as many interactions - I actually had more contact with my neighbors out there than I would in an apartment complex.

<comment><USER9> True, I liked it though, but it wasn't populated all year through. When there were some people in up season it was alright.

I just interpreted off-the-grid not just by it's mechanical definition, but also conceptually.

<comment><USER8> Yeah people interpret the term in different ways. Personally, I just consider it to mean living on property that doesn't have utility easements on it. Generally that will put you in an area with a lot of open space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's an active "van dweller" sub on reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers/top/?sort=top&t=all](https://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers/top/?sort=top&t=all)

I can't wait for a future where you can just set a destination (possibly random), go to sleep, and then wake up to a different view each day: [http://i.imgur.com/9T7NuhJ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/9T7NuhJ.jpg)

<comment><USER11> It's called yachting!

<comment><USER12> I think the implication was "without someone else driving / piloting".

<comment><USER13> I think the counter point is that with gps, radar & autopilot... Yachting is there today, to a degree.

<comment><USER14> You may not need to physically hold the wheel but someone does have to be awake on watch at all times, even with radar & AIS.

<comment><USER12> Someone should tell the US Navy: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/22/us_navy_4th_ship_mi...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/22/us_navy_4th_ship_mishap_of_the_year/)

I don't care how many fancy screens you have, _one_ person on watch with a pair of binoculars should have spotted a bloody oil tanker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Clicked it because no idea what RVs are: Recreational Vehicles, meaning vehicles with fancy interior, e.g. kitchen and so on

<comment><USER12> Ridiculously generic name. Skateboards are also recreational vehicles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> twenty miles per gallon in a RV? Only on class B (van conversions) and even then a limited subset of small ones. I certainly would not want to do a 12k trip in one. Throw in that you only save over hotels if you don't stop anywhere because many campgrounds can be nearly half the price of a hotel if not similar depending on time of year.

then lets throw in reliability. there is so much more to break and none of it cheap to fix as outside of appliances most of it is unique to the manufacturer.

Class A (the big boys) are also a whole different world than B and C which are based on vehicles which have crash test regulation and protection. Class A and many Class C are sub 10 miles per gallon.

self driving long distance trucking is where its at. companies can absorb the cost much easier than individuals. as for the comment about liability, yeah I don't expect level 5 any time soon and even level 4 as an option.

<comment><USER17> From what I see around me, the preferred stopping place of the average modern RV owner is not the campground, but rather the Walmart parking lot.

<comment><USER5> That's just where you are. Out west, RVs are the thing for traveling the vast distances and there are tons of RV parks. It's a weird subculture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't want to be a party pooper but I am kinda worried that self-driving cars are an ecological disaster in the making. We already need to limit GHG emissions, and switching to public transport is a good way to do it. However, with self-driving cars, one of the main incentives for public transport (you don't have to drive) is gone.

<comment><USER19> Presumably once you have full autonomy in some number of decades, you'll also have a lot more electric vehicles and renewables. That said, there's every reason to think that you will see vastly more miles driven. What may encourage transit is the increase in miles may make cars in urban cores that much less tenable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Even if all the high end stuff switched over tomorrow it would take a very long time for this to trickle down. Look at class A and C motor-homes on CList. The average age is probably 15yr +/\- some depending on how wealthy the area you're looking in is.

Currently there is no fielded system to enable trucks pulling doubles to back those doubles easily (cutting brakes would be enough, the hardware is already there).

Currently major truck rental fleet operators like Uhaul and Budget do not buy vehicles that make it very hard for people who have no business driving a truck that side to do things like knock over light posts by taking a turn too tight.

Even if the technology exists it's not at the cost/benefit point where it's worth adopting for most use cases.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use my campervan as my regular car, have for the last 6 years. Sleeps 6, has a hot shower and a kitchen. Amazing way to cruise around and if you're bored, park and have a nap.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was thinking about our relation to space and location. With ubiquitous networking and self driving vehicles instead of all going to a spot, the spot might move near us; or others ways fitting; and now you're at "work". That is for information jobs.

</comment><comment><USER22> Will the RV occupants, excluding the occasional bathroom trip, not be tied to a chair with seat-belts? At least in my country seat-belts are required to be worn by law by all car occupants.

<comment><USER19> Not true in the US AFAIK. (It's on a state by state basis.)

<comment><USER23> In the EU you can only have as many people in an RV as it has seats with seatbelts(while it's moving, obviously) and everyone has to be sitting and buckled up on the road. Anything over 3.5 tonnes(so most of these large ones count, but the modified Mercedes Sprinter from the article probably doesn't) requires a separate C class licence(so a licence to drive a truck basically).

<comment><USER24> Yes - but when/if we get safe(r) self driving vehicles will seatbelt laws change?

<comment><USER23> Presumably? Who knows? It's like trying to guess the weather. Personally I think truly autonomous level 5 vehicles are at least 50-100 years away, so wondering how will the laws change in half a century is a bit pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> No mention of the fact that by the time autonomous cars are a reality then internal combustion engines will likely be illegal as well? MPG figures are irrelevant.

Is it realistic to have a large, economically viable, electric RV with reasonable performance and a decent range? That's going to need a huge, expensive battery, surely?

<comment><USER23> I think there's literally zero chance that combustion engines will be made straight up illegal, just like we haven't made steam engines illegal. They will fade into obscurity and be only used on special occasions, mostly because of raising fuel prices but also competitiveness from electric vehicles. I see no problem in someone firing up a combustion engine to power a vintage car if there is close to zero of them on the road. Even now you can see examples of it happening with some really really old tanks, which are only started up during shows and only if there is a tonne of funding for them, since they use a few gallons of fuel just to start.

Once the fuel hits $20+/gallon there won't be any need to ban ICEs, they will push themselves out.

<comment><USER20> Why would fuel hit $20/gallon?

If demand is low it's not worth taxing (either for the money or just to punish people for using it). It will just be harder to get.

The countries that could soak up so much fuel as to raise global prices like that (China, India, etc) are also the ones where just making ICEs illegal is more politically possible and have the biggest local environmental incentives to do so.

<comment><USER23> It might not hit $20/gallon wholesale, but it certainly can at the pump. Why would a gas station owner continue selling fuel at $3/gallon if he gets ten customers a day? A lot of gas stations will close, and those that won't will have to charge more to stay open.

<comment><USER20> They'll either go out of business or switch to selling something else. It will be a niche like propane.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Epic Games releases "Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite" ad - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euiSHuaw6Q4 <comment><USER2> The whole strategy here feels pretty unprecedented.

Usually these kind of lawsuits happen in the background but Epic seems to be going full force with making it a public campaign.

> Apple is blocking your ability to get the latest Fortnite updates! All > players should have a choice in payment providers and save up to 20%. Apple > wants to limit your payment choices! Join the fight against @AppStore on > social with #FreeFortnite

Can't imagine being in the room of Apple's PR team reacting to this.

<comment><USER3> I'm not a fan of what Apple is doing, and am happy to see it be tested in court.

But, I'm not a fan of another multi-million dollar company making such a blatant appeal to emotion, as if Fortnite needs to be "freed", to the common person who has no concept of how nuanced the legalities of this entire thing are.

I'll be happy when the theatrics are over with, and we can simply view the outcome of the legal precedent that is about to be set. This is a battle for the courts, not Twitter.

<comment><USER4> That's correct, Epic's not altruistic here. But who else would be able to fight Apple's lawyers if not another multi-million dollar company?

<comment><USER3> If they did so without overtly manipulating people via appeal to emotion and over-simplification, and not attempting to simultaneously run a PR campaign designed to whip people into a social media frenzy, I would not have the dirty taste in my mouth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't put my finger on its validity, but it all resonates the same to me:

\- Listening to billionaires arguing with each other about what society should be for the benefit of all since this recession started

&

\- Trillions and billions of dollar companies battling it out as if they were the underdog in the public arena for the sympathy of us mere wage earners.

The pervading sense I think from Left to Right is the system is rotten and we're mere spectators being told to root for one unfathomably rich entity vs another unfathomably rich entity. You can almost understand the anarchist, burn it all down meme.

<comment><USER6> Burn it all down. Create a new society formed from mutual aid and non- heirchial power structures. Capitalism is the disease.

<comment><USER7> Great ideology. Shame we'll all starve or kill each other on the way and it'll turn to shit the moment someone is more equal than someone else...

<comment><USER8> No no no, that's because you didn't burn it down the right way. You just need to fundamentally change human behavior and motivations for it to work. I don't get why this is so hard to understand

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In case you haven't seen it (like I hadn't), this ad is a parody of the 1984 Apple Macintosh ad: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I)

<comment><USER10> Oh man... That ad was huge... HUGE when it was released. It has its own wikipedia entry:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_\(advertisement\))

<comment><USER11> Well hugeish ... originally it only played nationwide once (but in the superbowl)

However Epic's rework is very on point - Apple has become what it originally claimed it was rising up against

<comment><USER10> Well they got enough press that they didn't have to air it themselves. The media was doing it for them. :)

For example, I've seen the commercial multiple times on various programs and I wasn't even born when it was released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't care about Fortnite, but I would love to have the option to install alternative apps stores on iOS.

This has to be the most dramatic example of "running to the press" to date, which I'm sure Apple loathes. If nothing else it's entertaining.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious as to why as a user you want alternative app stores? I understand as a developer why you would but it is less obvious to me how it would improve the experience for users.

<comment><USER12> There are lots of private apis in iOS which developers are not allowed to use but would allow for a richer, wider variety of apps.

For example f.lux has a large feature set which isn't built into Apple's night shift. F.lux relies on a private api so the only way to get it on iOS is through Cydia or some other jailbreak App Store.

Also I can imagine there would be lots of possibilities for third party watches if apps could have properly backgrounded processes. Android watches are generally crippled on iOS when compared to the Apple Watch.

<comment><USER13> I didn't consider that angle. Although to me that is almost a separate issue. Even If Apple allowed separate App Stores I suspect they would still find a way to prevent access to private APIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is going to be a fascinating PR war. Apple was probably caught by surprise with how immediately public Epic was willing to take this.

But besides the fun of that wonderful drama unfolding over the next months/years, I actually feel like this could be catastrophic for Apple's image. Epic has an underestimated amount of influence and clout over the Gen Z crowd, and by aggressively rallying teenage gamers against Apple, I think anti-Apple sentiment could become popular (or viral) where it basically was nonexistent before (outside of some techie/developer circles).

<comment><USER15> I don't think Epic has _that_ much influence. If I were Apple's PR team, I think I'd just completely ignore them. Treat them as utterly and completely irrelevant.

Personally I think Apple's 30% cut is ridiculous and the fact that there is zero market pressure on that them to price it appropriately should mean something. But at the same time I'm not sure Epic has any legal leg to stand on.

<comment><USER16> And that is exactly why you are not Apple's PR team. I understand your POW and I would have shared it also if not for the kids in the house where you can actually see how dominating Epic is. There is a whole sub-culture around Fortnite, it expands from just playing a simple game on your iPad to being a way of communication on TikTok (e.g. dance moves). And you bet that when those little kids start whining to their parents, some noise will be generated.

I have honestly nothing more to say, except well played Fortnite! Perfect execution.

<comment><USER15> I play Fortnite and my kids play Fortnite and I still don't think it's _that_ dominating. Kids have plenty of outlets and Fortnite is one of many. But even if I agree what, exactly, is Apple going to be able to say or do? What response could they possibly have that would placate children?

It's better to not fuel the flames.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A decade ago, yet another company (the upstart doubleTwist) dared to challenge Apple's control of their platform by advocating for a secondary content store:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdVzboF2E2Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdVzboF2E2Q)

Story:

[https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/29/doubletwist-remakes- apples...](https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/29/doubletwist-remakes-apples- classic-1984-ad-with-a-new-dictator-steve-jobs/)

HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851088)

History repeats, and rhymes.

<comment><USER18> But doubleTwist was much smaller with a really niche audience.

<comment><USER17> You're right, but I'm just establishing there's precedence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone who neither uses the App Store nor plays Fortnite, this is fascinating to watch unfold.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought it was cool that in the video, the Apple developer agreement (requiring a 30% cut) was faintly placed on the walls.

A nod to the "walled garden" term.

</comment><comment><USER21> Didn't these guys build their own distribution channel and withhold their best game from a competitor so they could 1) build their own walled garden and 2) avoid Steam's 20-30% fee?

<comment><USER22> And paid devs who were previously planning Linux releases for exclusivity on their Windows/Mac-only store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm not sure weaponising a demographic not known for particularly rational responses to things is _that_ good of an idea.

<comment><USER24> are you talking about the demographic of "people who play video games"?

<comment><USER23> No, more the hardcore minority that give people who play videogames (like myself for 30+ years!) a bad name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So the next IT revolution is turning kids against one of the biggest corporation in the world? Sounds good to me.

<comment><USER26> Weaponizing the firehose of vitriol of gamers is a wild approach to take. Let's see if it pays off for them.

<comment><USER27> It's a tried and true approach at this point in history. Remember Steve Bannon? [1] Weaponizing (angry, disenfranchised) gamers is the hot trend of the last decade.

[1] [https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/s...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve- bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Apple has become what they hated in IBM and Epic Games called them out.

<comment><USER29> I think they stopped hating it when they walked away from the openness of Apple II into the all-closed design of the original Macintosh.

Apple wanted to be a huge corporation, and they succeeded. They also wanted to be a sexy and adored big corp, and here their success is colossal, no IBM could compare.

Google used to compare, but they started to lose their luster in the eyes of the tech-savvy trendsetters some time around 2015. I suspect Apple is going to get a similar treatment some time in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I find it fascinating that in that ad the schlubs that are sitting there watching the television are Fortnite default skins and not say, replicas of the characters that hold the same position in the original Apple ad. This really supports Dan Olson manufactured discontent assertion[0].

Even if you support them and play their game, if you don't spend money for skins, you're still in Big Brother's audience. The wildest thing is that the Jackboots behind the hammer thrower are approximate replicas of the Apple Ad.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0)

<comment><USER31> I don't play games anymore and I'm not a big fan of the whole microtransactions/F2P model, but I found that video somewhat uncompelling.

Not that long ago, the MMO standard was $15 a month* (plus the initial $50+). Not to unlock the cool stuff, but simply to play at all. And nobody felt like there was anything sinister about it.

With Fortnite, you can play for free as much as you like, or (based on what I gathered from the video) pay <$10 every 2.5 months to be on the cool track. Seems like a pretty good deal in comparison, assuming that they're rolling out new (non-shop) content at a reasonable rate.

 _Even if you support them and play their game_

How are you supporting them if you don't pay? Sure, they benefit from network effects, but ultimately they obviously need a lot of paying customers. Have we really gotten to the point where people expect to play AAA games for free and view it as audacious if the developers incentivize people to pay for things? As mentioned, I did much prefer the old model because it precluded this kind of stuff from seeping into the experience, but I don't think there's anything fundamentally sinister or wrong with trying to push people towards paying for your game (though I will say the "let me see your Marsh Walk emote" stuff was pretty cringey, but that's another story).

*I realize that Fortnite is not an MMO but it seems to fit the bill for something you would pay a subscription for these days. You could hold the Battle Pass for over a year for the classic $50-60 game price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do the ends justify the means? The way I see it Apple will be rightfully scrutinised but only because a giant corporation used propoganda on its users. The lowest common denominator: "they're stopping you playing the game!!!"

<comment><USER33> They're only preventing new installs. Most Fortnite fans with iPhones will already have the game installed. It still works fine. I just tried it myself

<comment><USER32> Until there's an update.

<comment><USER33> It downloaded a 1.4 gig update when I opened it

<comment><USER32> Interesting. Does your ability to download past updates mean you'll be able to download future ones though?

There's no doubt in my mind epic are using the they are stopping you playing argument - they literally say in the advert it's been blocked from a billion devices.

I mean if that statement is technically not true then don't you think it's propoganda?

Edit: I shouldn't have said technically not true but that they are being very economical with the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In all the hullabaloo around this drama, I haven't seen any actual mention about what anti trust/ competition is supposed to be about. All I see is "private company, anything goes" vs "Apple owns the market. Apple bad".

Not a lawyer. But I've heard some podcasts with lawyers on them. So I'm basically an expert. Isn't the whole pov of courts supposed to be: is this harmful to the consumer? They arrived at this "razor" because just being big and successful by itself isn't automatically bad. What if you're huge because run your business better than everyone else? What if you use your size to invest in more efficient capex that lets you make stuff cheaper? If you pass those on to the consumer, that should be kosher.

If you use your large size to push for things that's only good for your own bottom line and pass that cost on to your partners, who then have to pass it onto the customer, then by my crude layman's definition of anti competitiveness, Apple looks very naughty. Especially when the reason you can push certain unpalatable things is because your business is so pervasive and has high switching costs. Most of the time it's fine to let businesses charge whatever the hell they want. If eBay went from 10% fees to 30%! fees people could just go to any other market place. Yeah it sucks to relist inventory, copy photos over, start with no feedback, but it's doable.

But I can't just switch simply from Apple to Android. Do you remember the first time you tried to use Linux or macos? How painful was that? And we're nerds! How is the majority of people who don't give a shit about tech deal?

And I see the argument of "Apple good" because most of the experience just works so I can definitely swallow a closed appstore with any fees they want to impose.

That's exactly the problem though. This is using their size and prevalence in their customers lives to their own disadvantage. This feels anti competitive

</comment><comment><USER34> Move over Netflix, this Apple vs Epic is the shit worth watching. Your move Apple.

<comment><USER35> Not really. It's basic contract law versus some small game company lawyers (compared to Apple's). Also, putting out parody ads and making fun of the whole thing will get you zero points in any court. Even if a court accepts this at all it will take years to finish. Meanwhile Epic is out of luck.

<comment><USER36> Epic isn't trying to win at judicial court with this ad; it's trying to win at the court of popular opinion here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> In 2010, Valve made a 1984-esque trailer for Half Life, titled "Free Yourself". Ironically, it announced that Half Life was ported _to_ Mac OS X.

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=2zkLh_QMFdQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=2zkLh_QMFdQ)

</comment><comment><USER38> They must've made this video prior to launching their new payments system because they knew this was going to happen. This is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER39> This reality is crazy. Every year we're thinking it can't get more surreal.

</comment><comment><USER40> Epic is showing the commercial on an infinite loop on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/FortniteGame/status/1294006412931223552](https://twitter.com/FortniteGame/status/1294006412931223552)

(Infinite Loop pun not intended)

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder if anyone has any data on what percentage of the kids who play Fortnite on iOS have access to anything else to play it on. Because I feel like that number will be very important to anyone at Apple contemplating "okay, fuck it, who cares, what if we just pulled Epic's authorization to run these things on iOS entirely".

There are probably a bunch of other reasons to not consider that option but I would bet money there are people on both sides of this argument giving serious thought to that option.

</comment><comment><USER42> Spotify had created a dedicated website for similar reasons.

[https://www.timetoplayfair.com/](https://www.timetoplayfair.com/)

</comment><comment><USER43> If I was apple I'd quickly exempt Epic and allow them to charge however they want, but not change the rules for anyone else. The number of other players that are large enough to have this kind of sway (so could try the same thing) must be pretty small, and going through the courts might hurt more.

<comment><USER44> Tim Cook just testified to Congress two weeks ago that they treat all developers equally. That's not a good option for them right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I know this is almost off topic, but I find it fascinating and really funny that a company/game well known for "borrowing" pop culture (i.e. the whole dancing thing) is doing the same thing to get their message across.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm interested to see if other companies will join or not. It would be interesting to see if Apple will remove every one of them from App Store or not.

Epic parody of 1984 is epic.

</comment><comment><USER47> wow, the drama begins

I think Epic did the right thing. 30% Apple Tax needs to go and go for good.

Apple provided limited usefulness in the whole transaction, yet they claim 30% of it. Why?

</comment><comment><USER48> How did this update get passed the App Store audit?

</comment><comment><USER49> The villain in the original ad was, I believe, the IBM.

</comment><comment> david-cako Wild times we live in. Steve would be proud.

</comment><comment><USER50> I like the font they use at the end, anybody got its name?

<comment><USER51> Probably this, since it's the "Fortnite Font": [https://houseind.com/hi/burbank](https://houseind.com/hi/burbank)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It is Zoomers vs Boomers.

<comment><USER53> Hmmm, essential oil powered zoomers versus psychic surgery killed boomers? Which one will win?!

<comment><USER54> Zoomers are no the ones selling essential oil. You're a few generations off there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> That sucked way more than I was expecting.

</comment><comment><USER26> Who watches this ad and doesn't immediately realize how ridiculous it is? Epic is a multi-billion dollar company taking pot shots at another multi-billion dollar company.

Are people so easily swayed to their particular favorite capitalists? Have we really not moved on from "Sega does what Nintendon't"?

Edit: To be clear, I'm not supporting Apple here. I just think this particular ad is a _wild_ shot to take. I know it's a reference to the original Apple ad, I just think it's completely overdone.

<comment><USER56> It is a ridiculous comparison, but it also was when Apple did it it in 1984: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Apple is providing the platform that enables Epic to distribute their game for FREE to a billion+ users. Why shouldn't they take a cut from the in-app purchase monetization? It costs Apple server hosting, bandwidth, engineering to provide this service.

Providing an alternative payment method at a discount is not the answer here, obviously players will choose the cheaper option.

If Epic wants more money, maybe they should negotiate a smaller cut.

<comment><USER58> > Apple is providing the platform that enables Epic to distribute their game > for FREE to a billion+ users. Why shouldn't they take a cut from the in-app > purchase monetization?

Then they should charge the developer for install costs + profit, not charge for _all transactions happening in the game that have nothing to do with Apple and impose no cost on them_. That's retarded.

It's like a landlord taking 30% of sales from the local florist rather than just charging rent. Totally messed up.

<comment><USER59> This literally exists and is commonplace in commercial real estate. [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/percentage- lease.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/percentage-lease.asp)

<comment><USER58> I'm not surprised! It seems like a reasonable option for those who have no initial capital to pay for their lease.

But for those who come with capital ready, it can be a horrible deal. Being made to accept that option when you don't need it means you end up wasting much more money than you otherwise would.

Same happens in the app store, in its absence of an option between these methods.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Serverless doc writing app built using Cloudflare Workers and KV Store - <AUTHOR> https://telex.blog <comment><USER2> Nice, but I'm disappointed a website behind CloudFlare [1] allows XSS [2]

[1] [https://www.cloudflare.com/waf/](https://www.cloudflare.com/waf/)

[2] [https://telex.blog/p/0yg14u6j](https://telex.blog/p/0yg14u6j)

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: Has been fixed now.

<comment><USER3> Still able to XSS with link 2.

<comment><AUTHOR> That must be an old link. I have left them untouched.

<comment><AUTHOR> The old links have been fixed now. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well done!

I hear a lot of complaints about serverless for performance and cost but I think this is exactly what Serverless is meant to do - Reduce upfront cost for low traffic and remove the barrier of managing infrastructure.

Many app welcome the benefits despite the tradeoffs.

</comment><comment><USER5> Amazingly quick loads, slick project. I'd suggest adding a required class or warning to the inputs, I was hitting the publish button a few times wondering why it didn't publish until I filled out the title as I thought the "name" field was the title field.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Will add the warnings for sure. I just built this in under an hour to test Workers KV. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can you drop a link to the source code?

Also I saw kv has a 10s possible eventual consistency for writes, did you bump into this at all? (This is what's stopping me using it for crud apps)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have been looking into the viability of putting auth and basic user data in Worker + KV. For auth I'm currently using firebase/google auth and I'm wondering if there's a strategy to authenticate with firebase that wouldn't require a auth request to firebase on every request but instead allow sessions and possibly caching session info in KV. Have any thoughts?

<comment><USER8> PM of KV here.

People have certainly done auth with Workers and KV before. [https://liftcodeplay.com/2018/10/16/pushing-my-api-to-the- ed...](https://liftcodeplay.com/2018/10/16/pushing-my-api-to-the-edge- part-2-authentication-and-authorization/) and [https://gist.github.com/bcnzer/04620abc992da72f83f6f1c61d71c...](https://gist.github.com/bcnzer/04620abc992da72f83f6f1c61d71c93c) are two examples I've seen using JWT. We added expirations to KV to handle these sorts of use cases. I don't have a pre-built firebase example handy, but I think this should work pretty well. You'd store the ID and refresh tokens in KV, and then use those when talking to Firebase. Sounds about right. Feel free to reach out if you give it a shot and run into issues: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER7> Thanks @steveklabnik! That helps a lot! I'll reach out if I run into trouble!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty interesting. I am interested in learning more about serverless so I will be excited when the source code becomes available

</comment><comment><USER10> Is static site hosting an usecase for CF workers or is this being hosted somewhere else?

<comment><USER11> [https://workers.cloudflare.com/sites/](https://workers.cloudflare.com/sites/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do CF Workers need an API-Gateway, like AWS Lambda?

(I know Lambda can also be accessed via the SDK)

<comment><USER8> They do not.

<comment><USER12> Oh btw.

Is there a plan to change the 30 worker limit?

It seems to limit the system to small/medium projects only when you can only have 30 workers and every worker can only have 1MB scripts.

I mean, they don't even offer to pay for more. They just tall about some nebulous enterprise option on the "limits" page.

<comment><USER8> I'm not in charge of that part of things, so I'm not sure, to be honest. We do sometimes give folks more on a case-by-case basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You should consider sanitizing user input.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! I just built this quickly to demonstrate the capability of Workers KV. Will take care of it. Thanks for the comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> did you publish the source code?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet. I am planning to write a tutorial soon with code snippets.

<comment><USER15> Please do! Would love to read about how you did it :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Breaking Bin Laden: visualizing the power of a single tweet - <AUTHOR> http://blog.socialflow.com/post/5246404319/breaking-bin-laden-visualizing-the-power-of-a-single <comment><USER2> This is a really cool article. I used to think that things couldn't get more current after we had witnesses at the 7/7 London Bombings uploading live photos. Now we can do by-the-second analysis of how a story spreads thanks to analytics. Web 3.0 will really be all about data.</comment>


Introducing Linodes in Frankfurt - <AUTHOR> https://blog.linode.com/2015/08/03/introducing-linodes-in-frankfurt/ <comment><USER2> Related question -- does anyone run a site which is hosted in multiple locations?

Say you have a read-only site, and you have one copy in the Fremont CA data center, one in Frankfurt, and one in Asia. How do you direct users to the closest one network-wise?

(For static content, you can offload this problem to a CDN, but I'm wondering if you can do it just on Linode)

An old way to do it would be to have the users choose and set a cookie that redirects. But I wonder if you can do it transparently, like Google or Yahoo. Is there a DNS trick which implements this, or something else?

<comment><USER3> The easiest way would be to use GeoDNS. You just have your DNS server send out a different IP according to the IP of the request.

See [http://www.caraytech.com/geodns/](http://www.caraytech.com/geodns/) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodns)

I've found this nice answer on StackOverlow that show the differences between Anycast, GeoDNS and using an http redirect: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/25678199](http://stackoverflow.com/a/25678199)

<comment><USER2> Great thanks! It looks like the questioner ended up using AWS Route 53, which supports this kind of thing. I'm not using AWS, and there are other options, but that is the kind of thing I am happy to offload to AWS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazing effort by Linode that they keep striving to improve and have pushed up a gear to new features unlike years ago but Linode has the storage problem where they only offer SSD disk storage and there is nothing comparable to AWS S3 or even their SSD disk rates are not comparable to EBS - I do understand that Linode's SSD are better performance wise but when I do not need the performance I have no other options.. There is a bigger problem with Linodes is the Linode Images[1], how do they expect the disk images to be less than 2GB and here goes there policy on images- "There is no additional charge to store images for Linode users, with a limit of 2GB per Image, with a total of 10GB total Image storage and 100 Images per account."

[1][https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode- images](https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-images)

<comment><USER5> >nlike years ago but Linode has the storage problem where they only offer SSD disk storage

Are you confusing them with Digital Ocean? Their SSD option is fairly new, and much, much later than DO's offerings. Linode announced offering SSDs in April of 2014.

[https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds- double-...](https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/17/linode-cloud-ssds-double-ram- much-more/)

<comment><USER6> AFAIK, linode currently only offers SSD storage. I agree that this can be a problem for some use-cases. Vultr is often a better alternative for people who require large storage with lighter performance requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice to see Linode adding another data center!

Off-top, but (hopefully) interesting: We've been using Linode to host an Aerospike [1] cluster. They're one of the few cloud providers that give you direct raw access to the SSD drives. (Raw being you can mount an unformatted SSD partition). Performance has been stellar.

[1] [http://www.aerospike.com/](http://www.aerospike.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> How do you get a custom 32 Bit image running on Linode, on both Xen and KVM? I tried to get a KVM system running and I failed after going through a hard time. Why don't they simply make it OpenStack compatible so you can run a KVM system like it should?

My free credit is going to waste!!

</comment><comment><USER9> Do anyone know if you can easily move servers to a new linode datacentre?

<comment><USER10> Yes, just open a support ticket. It's tricky if you want to do it without any downtime though.</comment></comment>


I Think You're Fat: The Radical Honesty Movement - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/print-this/honesty0707?x

<comment><USER3> I resent him for creating a "difficult to learn" lifestyle that conveniently requires people to spend $2,800 per workshop to learn. The reason I resent that is because I'm jealous of how much money he makes.

<comment><USER4> I upped your karma points because I thought your comment was witty, but mostly because we're applying to YC together and Paul Graham says it might help our odds :).

<comment><USER4> I'm wrong. I upped your points because it was funny and I know you. Doing it for YC points is just the most shallow pathetic and pointless reason which sometimes seems like THE reasons because it makes the other reasons seem like niceties or excuses.

I don't think we are our worst thoughts. Sure guys think about sex every 3 minutes but we're not a bunch of women clubbing apes. We respect the people we're with and we care about their interests. We treat them as such.

I think honesty in relationships is hugely key, but only constructive honesty. Telling someone only what they want to hear is doing them a disservice. But scratching every itch that comes into your head is equally unhelpful. Criticism is something that needs to be thought out and analyzed before handed out (or received). In my experience initial critical instincts often tend to be based on societal norms, prejudice or other forms of unoriginal thought.

<comment><USER5> > Sure guys think about sex every 3 minutes but we're not a bunch of women > clubbing apes.

I dunno, you can see plenty of women clubbing apes in Sheffield on a Friday night...

<comment><USER6> True women clubbing apes only think of sex once or twice a year. Thinking about sex every 3 minutes proves you have the restraint to _stop_ thinking about sex that often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is stupid fucking shit.

(I think the implicit message of the article is that the addition of 'fucking' to any statement makes it inherently more honest, hence the above).

<comment><USER8> At least you're being honest.

<comment><USER7> It was a risky joke. Looks like I am losing some karma for it.

Like I fucking care!

:P

<comment><USER6> I resent you for being a fake punk. If you didn't care, you wouldn't have mentioned it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Besides the issues you have with how he's popularizing/selling his ideas, what do you think about the concepts he's presenting? Are they useful, dangerous, morally superior/inferior?

<comment><USER5> Sounds like someone who's watched way too much House, frankly. It's laziness, just as much as lying because you don't want to hurt someone's feelings is laziness; it's a different path of least resistance, that's all. There are ways to tell people the truth that aren't brutal; tact and empathy are hard, sure, but that doesn't make them useless or optional.

Nonetheless, there's a difference between caring about people and caring about people's feelings. The latter is really all about oneself; if you lie to avoid hurting people's feelings, you're really trying to avoid them being pissed off at you. If you don't think someone is able to process the truth, better to say nothing at all.

<comment><USER6> ..or read too much Dilbert, for that matter. They both capitalize on the fact that honesty is liberating and hence fun.

My take on this is that tact should be the default in any relationship, but if you have a true interest in it, you should try and learn to what extent the other person can take honesty, and relax protocols accordingly for a more authentic communication. It takes empathy and tact to do this well.

I tend to gravitate towards people with a sense of humour, esp. an ability to laugh at themselves, and avoid fragile egos like the plague if I can help it. Then again, I expect some prudent distance from strangers until I have somehow cued them/welcome them/asked them to tell me their opinions about my stuff.

<comment><USER5> > It takes empathy and tact to do this well.

It also takes _time_.

<comment><USER6> It depends(TM).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cf. James Morrow's novella _City of Truth_ ([http://www.amazon.com/City-Truth- Harvest-James-Morrow/dp/015...](http://www.amazon.com/City-Truth-Harvest- James-Morrow/dp/0156180421/))

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the whole concept is rather flawed in that the truth is usually not so clear cut. For example, when he sits down with the editor, it might be true that he would like to have sex with her, but it is also true that he doesn't want to piss her off by being rude. So which truth wins? I think the human mind should be given a break here: we are not all of our thoughts. The mind should be allowed to think most of what it wants to think, but we are only those thoughts that we decide to act upon.

</comment><comment><USER12> Third sentence, first lie. Talking about beautiful women, the author says:

     and maybe if I get divorced or become a widower, I can have sex with them

The truth is, he wants sex with them. Right here. Right now. I didnt read any further.

<comment><USER5> Yes, because human motivation is always simple and one-dimensional, and humans never find themselves caught between conflicting goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is an acceptable line between a world full of Enron executives and a world full of Diogenes.

<comment><USER6> Anyway, it is sad that our world is more like the former than like the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is why people like dogs better than other humans. They have more tact.

<comment><USER6> I myself like dogs better than most other humans for the opposite reason: they're more transparent and less full of it.

<comment><USER5> I like cats better than humans, because they know to leave each other the fuck alone.

<comment><USER6> Most cats have no empathy for anything. I don't like these any more than lizards or flies. They're cute and fun when they're young and playful though.

<comment><USER5> As a devoted owner of three of them, I can tell you that you're quite wrong about that; cats are highly sensitive creatures, and have plenty of empathy. They're also amongst the most conscientiously polite creatures around; if one watches cats interact, there are precise and elaborate manners around interaction, and stepping out of line earns a claw in the nose regardless of hierarchy. (Indeed, one of my lads seems to be personally offended by feline rudeness.) I believe that the former traits lead directly to the latter - <USER2> be honest, sometimes I think felines have more highly evolved social interaction than humans.

Don't confuse prey-defeating behaviour with cruelty, either. Cats rely on their senses and have less-than-wonderful immune systems; getting bitten in the face by a mouse could potentially knock out their ability to successfully track their next prey for longer than they can survive without. The elaborate batting/playing is actually defensive behaviour - she _needs_ that mouse to stop moving before she severs its spine.

++ Indeed, I believe that empathy varies inversely with preferred proximity, both between species and within them. Dogs are pack creatures, and the members of the pack will often treat each other abominably; the incidence of sociopathy in humans skyrockets in inner cities; sensitive beings tend to be more empathic, but also to be introspective, shy, reserved...

<comment><USER6> I'm landlord and feeder of (let me count...) 5 cats atm- it got as bad as 8 at some point. Actually one of them is much like a dog- that's why I specified I was talking about _most_ cats.

Intricate etiquette and highly evolved social interaction don't imply empathy. Bees and ants have the former but AFAICT not the latter. I'm of the opinion that the adherence of cats to social rules comes from enough claws on the nose, rather than for any appreciation for the feelings of others.

You can be sensitive and not empathetic. You can feel very intensely about what is of selfish interest to you, while being mostly blind and deaf to the feelings of others. I think this the type of sensitivity that cats display.

Their behaviour to mice was never a factor in my opinion. Empathy for one's prey is not much of an evolutive advantage for any species, so I never expected that.

I see no contradiction in observing that the species which are most capable of empathy are just as capable of evil and cruelty. Indeed, I think the ability to feel/understand the pain you're inflicting on others is necessary for true cruelty (as opposed to instinctive viciousness, which can be explained in evolutionary terms, as you did).

You have a point in the grandparent post that cats are low maintenance. But then again, so are cacti, and they have a positive oxygen to CO2 contribution. :>

<comment><USER5> Low maintenance? Huh! sometimes they can be positively exhausting...

Anyway, I think we'll have to agree to differ here, since both of us appear to have have reached our conclusions through observation. All I will add is that I have no doubt that my love for my cats is reciprocated... you can draw your own conclusions about my objectivity thence. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> aka: The Life Going Nowhere Fast Movement.

<comment><USER16> as opposed to the conventional: The Life Going Nowhere, Slowly, Movement

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This shit is fucking truth. I am no saint, but i tell the truth most of the time, when I know it will get me in trouble. I cannot stand fucking liars. It's like being scared of someone or what they are going to do. What you will realize is that by always telling the truth everybody around you will envy you for it.

<comment><USER5> > I cannot stand fucking liars.

Keep your trousers zipped and you'll be fine...

 _Everybody_ lies. The most successful liars are the ones who can hoodwink themselves - if you can convince yourself that you don't lie, you have _carte blanche_ to foist off any other bullshit you can dream up on anyone gullible enough to swallow it. As a corollary, one should direct most of one's suspicion at the conspicuously honest...</comment></comment>


Wi-Fi "as free as air" – totally false story - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/wi-fi-as-free-as-air-the-totally-false-story-that-refuses-to-die/ <comment><USER2> There are three things to learn from this story:

1\. The advertising-supported media model is broken.

2\. People on the internet are distressingly credulous.

3\. There is a _huge_ pent-up demand in the US for a next-generation communications network at reasonable cost. Somehow we can do long distance phone service for a low monthly flat rate, and have done for ~20 years, but you can't get moderate speed consumer internet service in a major metro for less than about $65/month.

<comment><USER3> I read some of the other comments and don't understand your point 3. Do you expect huge demand to drive the price down? I'd tend to expect the opposite.

<comment><USER4> I dunno, bandwidth doesn't seem to be finite in the same sense that oil or gold are.

Not to mention that bandwidth doesn't 'roll-over.'

<comment><USER5> Bandwidth isn't a non-renewable resource but supply won't increase without incentive. Why isn't there sufficient incentive?

<comment><USER6> Most would-be providers of bandwidth to consumers are guarding legacy premium bandwidth sales. The phone company would like to sell you differentiated phone bandwidth at 10x market rates. The cable company would like to sell you differentiated TV bandwidth at 10x market rates.

One approach would be to unbundle internet from premium bandwidth services offered by the same company over the same channel. Suppose the US was organized with a tier of companies competing to offer you cheap, reliable bandwidth, and a tier of companies competing to offer you premium services riding atop that bandwidth. Other countries have a model similar to this, and they generally have much better bandwidth services. In the US, we're tied to legacy investments in carrier infrastructure that make moving to such a system very difficult.

Personally, I think we should just pay them off and start fresh. Unfortunately, that ends up basically looking like nationalization, which in the US is extremely difficult politically.

<comment><USER7> _Personally, I think we should just pay them off and start fresh. Unfortunately, that ends up basically looking like nationalization, which in the US is extremely difficult politically._

Actually if the Government broke up the monopolies that have a stranglehold on connection points and wires to the homes -- competition would sort everything out without a bunch of needless Government bureaucracy creating huge unintended consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Cognitive" or "White-space" radio, the subject of the actual FCC notice, is real though. In simplistic terms, it means making fixed "FCC style" spectrum management largely obsolete, by pairing each radio transmitter with a receiver. The receiver is used to monitor the surrounding radio environment, and the system makes a determination, in real-time, of what (if anything) it can transmit whilst avoiding interference with other users of the spectrum.

Cognitive radio offers the potential for large increases in data capacity since the radio spectrum is currently underutilised. I was at a conference a few years ago, where a presenter had done the measurements, and the utilisation of the radio spectrum (averaged across time and frequency) was about 5%. It turns out that most licensees hardly, if ever, transmit.

There's currently a regulatory push to allow others to use a chunk of spectrum, as long as they don't interfere with the licensee, meaning the licensee gets guaranteed access, rather than exclusive access. It should be interesting, since it will open the (cheaper?) alternative of buying smarter radios instead of buying spectrum.

<comment><USER9> Note that sensing-based whitespace radio has a number of issues. The biggest one is the hidden node problem - you can interfere with receivers without being able to hear the transmitter. There is also the issue that the licensed users of the band need to be very interference-resilient for the first few ms of their transmissions, until all of the sensing-radio users realise that they aren't allowed to be there anymore (and then the sensing radios need to have a consistent way to keep the link up).

The first problem can be mitigated by making the sensing receiver significantly more powerful than the transmitter, although you still have issues with specific terrain layouts (e.g. something big and RF-attenuating between you and the transmitter). The second problem makes it very difficult to interoperate with _existing_ licensees (who assume exclusive use of the spectrum); it may be possible to make it work better with new licensees.

There is another interesting approach to cognitive radio, which is to use a centralised database of spectrum allocation, and then use RF propagation models & surveys to find gaps in space & frequency where you can let people transmit - for example, there are big gaps between terrestrial TV transmitter zones, to avoid the multi-kW transmitters interfering with each other, where you can easily fit "big WiFi"-style transmitters transmitting at a few watts.

Obviously, there are a number of issues here (need GPS or an accurate location on installation, need internet access for the DB, need to restrict movement, inefficient without really good RF models, weather affecting RF propagation) which make this less of a panacea than sensing-based cognitive radio, but it is relatively simple and robust to implement. In particular, a lot of the issues disappear if you use it for "big WiFi" applications - access points already have a fixed location, internet access, and mains power.

It also opens the possibility of a much more dynamic marketplace for spectrum - if all spectrum users are checking with a centralised DB (at least in a particular band), then it becomes much easier to handle short-term/local licenses - for example, providing massive short-term additional cell/wifi service to big events and festivals.

tl;dr Cognitive radio is a very interesting and promising development, but it's _much_ harder than initial intuition suggests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's pretty clear that two things need to be changed about how articles are written and propagated on the internet.

First, only primary sources should be cited. If an article is written by a news source, it stands to reason that is is _not suitable_ for citation by another news source. They are both at the same level of empiricism, one cannot be an adequate citation for another.

And second, the exchange of data has not changed drastically in the says since the story was first reported, so this isn't an internet speed issue. It's an issue of people being less pliable to the truth once they've hit upon a wonderful fallacy.

What that translates to is that news articles need to be less sensationalized, more factual and have a much more rigorous set of criteria for what's true and what's not.

I'm not a journalist, but I wouldn't be surprised if journalists deliberately look for what can be sensationalized in a potential story, to the point of _unintentionally_ fabricating material - it is not inconceivable that a reporter simply skimmed some material about the FCC and then this story hit him like a "Eureka!" moment. I doubt it was fully intentional, it was just being caught up in the prospect of a great story.

<comment><USER11> And when a primary source can be provided, it ought to be linked, e.g., articles based on a study, "new report," or court document. I feel like I am constantly hunting these things down for myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So while many of the posts seem to be focusing on how to pay for it, there is another issue. It's not technically feasible, in urban areas at 700 mhz you would need a very wide block of spectrum, several hundred megs, plus backhaul to provision something that could offer 50 mbit service to everyone, you need this, because of frequency reuse issues (700 carries too far, not enough atmospheric attenuation). In rural areas, you cant pay for the cost of the infrastructure on the subscriber density, rural areas need a much lower frequency to be able to make an affordable site density.

For this to be possible, we need much more dense modulation than we currently have, and a wide block of spectrum. I really believe for urban areas the future is mesh, ala Ricochet (even using some of the same methods), which means cells that extend over a 1-3 block radius and extremely fast/wide backhaul, the backhaul needs to be automatic and self healing, wireline backhaul from anything more then every other 3-5 sites breaks the cost quotient. High Sites wont work in any event, you could deploy something in rural areas looking more like the cell phone network - but again, to enable reuse, you need a really wide block of spectrum.

In either case, be it mesh, or cell site like things, these have to be engineered networks, you cant just throw it up and expect it to work. Also, the chance for great financial success as a commerical entity is low, see Ricochet and Clearwire.

<comment><USER13> > 700 carries too far, not enough atmospheric attenuation

I'm no RF expert, but couldn't you decrease power to increase cell density?

<comment><USER12> To an extent, yes.

That said, for universal wireless anything, you need a considerable block of spectrum. Consider that between T-Mobile/Sprint/Clearwire/AT&T/Verizon in the Seattle market, they hold something like 400+ mhz of spectrum. To provide this kind of service, you would need a similar (though not as large) block of spectrum. If you just looked at LTE or WiMax, to roll out a nationwide footprint, you would need something like 250 mhz of spectrum, and that includes backhaul pairs, and this is to provide enough carriers per site that most people could get a 'similar to cable internet experience'.

There isnt 250 mhz of spectrum (other than the huge swaths the government has held for itself) in the bands that are useful for both rural and urban environments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've read more stories denying this was true than the reverse. Actually, I hadn't heard about that rumor before reading all the blogs denying it since yesterday. Am I the only one here?

</comment><comment><USER15> These types of rumors that can't be squashed are caused by intense desire for the thing.

People apparently want this so badly that they'll believe anything.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love the fact that Current TV was trying to tape a segment at least a day after their own website had written a piece debunking the story.

Now that's journalism.

</comment><comment><USER17> This remembered me of that post here on HN last week about how a guy invented a false lead about the new Xbox and news sites were running with it without even sending a e-mail back to him asking for more information.

Even worse is that some sites tried to just copy and paste from other sites and change a bit to look original, and ended reporting wrong (invented) facts.

</comment><comment><USER7> What the Washington Post lacks in understanding the facts it makes up for with a lack of journalistic integrity.

No surprise here.

Notice that the "old media" in the article are the ones that refuse to correct incorrect reporting. At this point, the only people continuing to subscribe to their publications can't be driven off with a stick. Their revenue will finally go dry when their subscribers succumb to old age.

<comment><USER18> > What the Washington Post lacks in understanding the facts it makes up for > with a lack of journalistic integrity.

It took me about three passes to understand this sentence. A comma would have helped.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but reading it again; I kind of like the way "the facts it makes up with a lack of journalistic integrity" reads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone think that having Wi-Fi that's "as free as air" would be a bad thing? If the government was actually doing this, wouldn't everyone react positively?

Excluding lobbying from telcos, is there any reason that the FCC hasn't already done this?

<comment><USER20> It wouldn't be "Free as air", it would be buried in your taxes along with twice the bureaucracy necessary to run it. Judging by other government IT projects, especially at the fed level, it would also be more concerned with filling out forms in triplicate than actually getting anybody connected to the Internet.

At the municipal level, though, things seem to run more smoothly and the amount of tax waste seems to be less. Keep the Feds out other than to provide the bandwidth, IMO.

<comment><USER21> In addition to the inefficiency, putting a large proportion of the communications infrastructure directly under Federal control would seem to make political interferance way too easy as well. Assuming they could get the thing up and running as promised, of course.</comment></comment></comment>


Nigeria has now lost 96% of it's forest. Here is an animated map to demonstrate - <AUTHOR> https://i.imgur.com/vtZ3dor.gif <comment><USER2> Lost to what? What's in it's place now?

<comment><USER3> I imagine people are burning it to make charcoal they can sell.

<comment><USER4> it seems a classic self destruction.. people used to know how to live in nature, now you want to live in modern economy.. but it's not there so you destroy nature for a few coins until there's nothing to destroy or live in.

<comment><USER3> People have to eat, and it's an available way to make money. In other African countries (at least in the East which I'm more familiar with) the government has been trying to combat the charcoal trade. The government in Nigeria has less of a presence though, so it's probably been difficult and not a top priority.

This is all speculation though.

<comment><USER4> Tribal way of life found ways to eat too. It's the impedance mismatch of global capitalism and secondary countries that caused a partial harmful migration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oil.

<comment><USER6> Nothing I've read on the topic mentions oil extraction as a cause for deforestation in Nigeria, including the Wikipedia link elsewhere in these comments.</comment></comment>


Start-up Ideas hope this gives someone inspiration - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mikecurry74/startupideas/blob/master/README.md <comment><AUTHOR> If anyone ends up doing any of these, I'd love to see the end product!</comment>


Julian Assange extradition hearing decision – live updates - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2011/feb/24/julian-assange-extradition-decision-live-updates <comment><USER2> Not so much use after the verdict's been all over the news for an hour or two... but thanks.</comment>


Run-Command – small, portable alternative to standard Windows Run-Dialog - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Microsoft/Run-Command <comment><AUTHOR> Author is extremely responsive, I asked for option for width to be increased and it was done.

# Versions History

New in version 2.46 // September 14th 2015

Bug fix: in the text box to enter longer run commands was not possible, the length of the input text was limited to the Edit window width.</comment>


Terminal Wedding – Ruby gem for Prerita and Jai's marriage - <AUTHOR> http://wedding.jai.im/

<comment><USER2> Author of the website here. The last thing a person who is getting married could wish would be getting his wedding invite HNed. I think I am soon going to cross the free plan's limit of typeform.com (which I am using for RSVPing there)

Little history: `sudo gem install wedding` actually works. The gem was first uploaded on rubygems. Which I thought would be the only thing that I would share with my colleagues and hacker friends. Later I realized that it would be too complex a thing to expect from people, so built a mock frontend around it using jcubic's jQuery terminal plugin.

I am happy that people are finding it funny / interesting. The website found its target audience. Just that I wouldn't be able to host this number of people ;-)

<comment><USER3> While looking at the RSVP form I never intended to send, I wondered how many people show up at a wedding in India? In some cultures, a thousand or more might just "drop by" for a little bit to pay their respects.

<comment><USER2> Though, it cant be generalized for India. But it is quite common to have more than thousand people attending a wedding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Each time I see web-based terminal with *nix-looking shell prompt inside it ends up like this:

        ...
        Successfully installed wedding-0.0.1
        7 gems installed
        root@wedding ~$ which wedding
        which is not a valid command
        root@wedding ~$ whoami
        whoami is not a valid command
        root@wedding ~$ id -a
        id is not a valid command
        root@wedding ~$ uname -a
        uname is not a valid command
        root@wedding ~$ ls -la
        -bash: cd: -la: No such file or directory
        root@wedding ~$ logout
        logout is not a valid command

(closes tab)

<comment><AUTHOR> ha ha ;) of course, I tried running $ rm -rf /

<comment><USER5> we all tried that (+ sudo). :P.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome! However, 95% of my guests would be soo confused and we probably would receive a lot of phone calls/emails asking helpdesk questions.

"How does this work" "So we tried the website and we wanted to let you know we will be coming..."

<comment><USER7> Maybe it was the point. ;)

<comment><USER6> ha. nice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the vows are pull requests.

<comment><USER9> It took a while to pass the parental CI

<comment><AUTHOR> What will happen if I fork this :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hope nobody has any issues at the wedding ceremony, and especially nobody wants to take over the project afterwards!

I always love an interactive shell prompt on the net.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope there are no bugs in wedding :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Should be hell of a coincidence. Joined HackerNews today, and found a friend posting his wedding invitation on it.

Great concept.. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm slightly ashamed to admit that the first thing I ever run on this type of thing is 'make me a sandwich'.

</comment><comment><USER13> Congratulations Jai! Awesome invite I must say! \m/ Super impressed!

</comment><comment><USER14> I'll get about 3 people MAX to my wedding with this... AWESOME!

</comment><comment><USER15> This is quite funny. I wish RubyGems was really this fast though!

</comment><comment><USER16> I absolutely loved this concept. I was surprised to some extent that this rubygem name is still available. Appreciated !!

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm amazed at how well this works, in a WebView container no less, on my iPhone! Cool concept, too :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Not my thing, but good for them.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ok, that is actually geekier than the PCB wedding invite I got once. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER20> Very clever! My parents would not get this. At all. :P

<comment><AUTHOR> But all the geek will love it :). Its a real gem, so you can install it. Its the best way to invite other hacker friends. I hope there is no hackathon on wedding. :)

<comment><USER5> I thought you had made a fantastic pun there for a second... Then realized what you really said.

"It's a real gem."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So anyone can RSVP? Is that how weddings work?

<comment><USER22> Thats how Indian weddings are , everyone is invited. I remember my sisters wedding with 2800 people and no place to sit.

We Indians invite everyone we know, friends, friends of friends and our friends even invite their friends who we dont know.

Who can resist Indian wedding food ? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> That is freaking awesome :)

</comment><comment><USER24> shouldn't it be 12am? Or is the Pheres next afternoon?

<comment><USER2> Point taken, next commit fixes it. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> wohoo.. I been thinking what should I do for mine.

</comment><comment><USER26> no RI or RDOC yay

</comment><comment><USER27> innovative man!</comment>


Obama sex accuser panned as a liar urges Stormy Daniels scrutiny - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/obama-sex-accuser-panned-as-a-liar-urges-stormy-daniels-scrutiny <comment><USER2> In addition to not belonging on HN, this article is stupid. By even reporting on this, it accepts the premise of a known con-man and equates him with Daniels... ignoring the fact that unlike him, she has a contract with Trump as well as photographic evidence both public and not (yet) public.</comment>


Google's plan to make talk less toxic - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39063863 <comment><USER2> I find some implications of this chilling, while on the other hand the potential for humanity is possibly vast. The only thing I really like is the idea of a meter that gives me instant feedback of the "toxicity level" of a post I'm about to make. Unfortunately 1) I and many others would probably, on a "bad day", game this to increase this rating before posting, and 2) I and many others would probably, prior to having a "bad day", turn off comment filters and read the toxic comments anyway, thus exposing ourselves to even more toxic comments than before (because they'd been gamified for maximum toxicity).</comment>


Ask HN: What was your worst screw-up at work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Early in my career (software engineer) I was debugging an issue in our application that was causing some funky data to be written to the DB (turned out to be double encoding of UTF8 strings). While validating the issue locally, I decided the best course of action was to drop the table and recreate it. I did just that, except I still saw the issue. Well, turns out that I was connected to not to my local DB, but instead the production DB.

My manager was very understanding, and walked me through the procedure to restore the DB from backup.

I learned an extremely important lesson that day, and have always remembered it when I see others screw up.

</comment><comment><USER3> First job out of college working at a healthcare organization, our healthcare system db was mssql. There was a column in one of the tables called `recordDeleted` which basically controlled whether or not the document would show up on the front end. I ran an update statement and forgot a where clause (specifying which records I needed to modify), setting thousands of records in prod to 'record delete' status, causing a whirlwind of confusion as to what was happening while workers were servicing clients.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wrote a mail address in source code thinking that no developer ever would test the app configuring a real smtp server.

We ended up sending emails to the board of a multi-billion company containing "bad words" as the dev were filling text fields with insults and whatever during their tests. I didn't get fired but I still think I was very close.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wasted about 20k ad budget in 6 hours by targeting too generic of an audience by accident.

</comment><comment><USER6> Burned myself really bad on a flattop grill. Still have the scar 10 years later

</comment><comment><USER7> Leaving the s3 keys open on a public GitHub account. Rookie mistake.</comment>


New Git client for Windows - <AUTHOR> https://www.git-tower.com/p/windows-beta <comment><USER2> I never heard of "My favorite Git client" ever before. Anyone with hands on experience can tell some benefits? The OSX landing page lets it look as they built a IDE around a git client?

<comment><USER3> It's definitely my favorite git client! It looks great and provides a very nice macOS like experience and and gives access to all git features I need. Especially I like the interface for single-line-staging and managing submodules. I use it everyday.

It's not and IDE as you do not edit your code inside Tower but just use it for staging/committing/push/pull.

It also has support for git-flow [1] but I am not using that.

[1]: [http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git- flo...](http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git-flow/)

<comment><USER2> So you it supports a subset of git with a GUI? So the benefit is a GUI on git?

<comment><USER3> Yes. There are many UIs for git [1] of which in my opinion Tower ist by far the best.

If you prefer git on the command line then it's maybe not for you. But I personally prefer a good GUI over a CLI.

"subset" sounds like there would be features missing in the GUI that you can only access on the command line. Maybe that's true in a strict sense but I did not need to use the CLI in years since using Tower.

[1]: [https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis](https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis)

<comment><USER2> thanks :) So i most likely am not missing out on anything, i understand the the CLI is not for everyone, but i spend half of my day in the CLI anyway so i don't mind :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Trek' tricorder could win $10 million - <AUTHOR> http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/13/6638804-trek-tricorder-could-win-10-million

<comment><USER2> And Richard Branson's prize for technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a bit bigger at $25 million, which is slightly more important to the world. Approximately 2.5 times as important, at least.</comment>


Constructive reasons to use Django instead of Rails - <AUTHOR> http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/why_django <comment><USER2> "Ruby programming tends to favor 'magic'."

Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

It has also been said that you "Cast Spells" in Lisp:

<http://www.lisperati.com/casting.html>

SICP: "People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells."

I think lack of understanding of the semantics of Ruby and Rails causes people to dismiss it as "magic". Create new classes, methods ... etc at runtime is not a sign of laziness. Not wanting to spend the time it takes to learn how metaprogramming is used in Rails is.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're thinking about looking at a Python web framework, you could do worse than to read this O'Reilly book: <http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596513719/>

(Full disclosure: I'm acquainted with the author, and involved with one of the projects discussed in the book, Pylons.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Reddit's moving towards Django. It seems like they're outgrowing web.py, which is really meant for quick & simple web apps.

<comment><USER5> I think it's awesome in what they're doing. Instead of listening to the hype they decided to go with a framework and language that allows them to do certain things that the other cannot do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In this article, this author writes why he chose Python over Ruby: <http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/why_py>

<comment><USER5> Coming from a Java background(to be specific J2ME, I haven't touched any Java framework as of yet.) Ruby was a God send!

I've been using Ruby for over a year now. And I'm having loads of fun using it :-) just recently I've been learning Python and I must say that Ruby has borrowed a lot of conventions from Python. Although I have a bit of a hard time using Python functions as they are not intuitive enough for me as opposed to Ruby functions.

<comment><USER7> Ruby is actually heavily influenced by Perl and Smalltalk and parts of LISP. There are some syntactic similarities to Python, but I think it borrows less from it than the previously mentioned. Matz however did find that reading Python code helped him develop Ruby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> jesusphreak, the author of that blog post, has since moved away from Django. He comes by #pylons every now and then, complaining about the Django community. I'm also not really sure if he ever actually has written anything.

But at any rate, here's a more recent post by him: <http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/vrp1>

<comment><USER8> Makes me wonder if I should not just stick with Java...

<comment><USER3> Oh, there's plenty of good reasons to use Ruby or Python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How come they won't migrate to Rails instead?

<comment><USER4> The way Steve puts it - his original motivation for using python over RoR is that there's too much "magic" involved in rails. I think he doesn't think things being done for him, and rails does a lot for you...

That compounded with rails being slower and requiring an entire rewrite of the site, and it seems the decision to move to django is a no-brainer.

<comment><USER5> Hmmm makes sense, admittedly I love programming in Ruby but this article caused me to check out Python and Django :)</comment></comment></comment>


Playdom CEO John Pleasants: Why social gaming will become the norm - <AUTHOR> http://games.venturebeat.com/2010/07/23/playdom-ceo-john-pleasants-why-social-gaming-will-die/

<comment><USER2> Shame on venturebeat for crafting one of the most misleading titles ever.

I wouldn't have even bothered reading or clicking, except to look for why JP is predicting the death of social gaming. In reality the interview is a total promotion of social gaming.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title twists his meaning a bit by removing context; his next sentence clarifies the statement: "That is, the term will become meaningless, as all games will become social."

</comment><comment><USER4> The claim is actually that "all games will become social", and I doubt very much that this will happen. I have an inkling that Solitaire and Minesweeper are going to stay around for a while.

Moreover, historically new ideas with a high potential tend to expand their influence very rapidly in the beginning and take a large share, but the legacy tools still remain (sometimes still unparalleled in specific niches): hence the telephone in the age of the internet, or mail order books in the age of Amazon (see <http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/indStats_02.htm> ), bicycles in the age of the automobile, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> He likes to say small shops can't make it, and at the same time we know he wants to buy small shops, at least one a month if he can.

He's being disingenuous so he can acquire small shops cheaper. It't total BS that a small company can't make a living at Facebook games, way more than a living. I know multiple 2-3 man shops that do just that.

<comment><USER6> Well there are ways in which a bigger collection of small shops can be stronger than the sum of its parts.

* It's a hit driven business, and this distributes risk.

* Especially in social gaming, it seems important to have a userbase to market to. Playdom can do this across its properties in a very arbitrary and low friction way.

* Playdom can do promotions with big brands across multiple properties at once. Larger brands might not give the time of day to individual game studios.

Obviously there are disadvantages, too. The drive to make a great game just isn't the same when you're part of a larger company. This might not be an issue if you're developing the kind of games _you_ would want to play. But if you're designing a game for children or one that cynically targets user psychology, you may really lose your drive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meta-question: at what point does link-baiting go from being a fun way to catch your attention, to being annoying and dishonest?</comment>