TechMeme Gives Up On Fully Automated News - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/03/techmeme-gives-up-on-fully-automated-news/ <comment><USER2> I think it's interesting that Arrington assumes that humans remove objectivity. The BBC for example was always seen as an objective observer of news in the UK. If an editor merely caught "temporal" errors then I don't see a problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had always assumed it was setup this way, via an algorithm selecting newsworthy stories with an editor pushing out the best ones, that would at least explain the bias and lack of spam.

</comment><comment><USER4> Misleading headline, don't you think? Techmeme never tried to be fully automated.</comment>


The Bear Case for Crypto, Part II: The Great Bank Run - <AUTHOR> https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/11/26/the-bear-case-for-crypto-part-ii-fractional-reserve-marmot/ <comment><USER2> This article appears to be written under the assumption that coinbase and other exchanges are counterparties to the price. They are not. They are market makers. It's impossible to have a run on dollar demand for BTC, because the price floats. If there are sufficient people selling, the price will simply fall, and has done so several times in the past, before recovering when equilibrium returned to the market. Exchanges are not taking loans to back the dollar value of BTC.

The author appears to lack basic understanding about how markets work in this space.

<comment><USER3> Hi, author here. A liquidity crunch is not the same thing as a fall in Bitcoin's price. A liquidity crunch implies that the people who provide the dollars to this market (banks, I'm informed) cease doing so because they don't have confidence that the money they lend to provide USD liquidity to fiat on/offramps will be able to be repaid by their counterparties during whatever the maturity period is of the facility. As a result, companies like those on/offramps run out of dollars, and Bitcoin cannot be shifted through those platforms for any price.

This happened to the London interbank lending market during the week of 15 September 2008, when LIBOR jumped to 8% and the banks simply stopped providing loans to each other. The reason? Because they weren't sure the assets their counterparties (other banks) were sitting on were worth anything (resi mortgages) and they didn't want to find themselves an unsecured creditor.

Mortgages during the subprime crisis didn't fall in price so much as they were impossible to price. This made the credit risk of bank borrowers impossible to price. So funding headed for the doors.

Change up the parties a bit and the banks --> offramps, mortgages ---> Bitcoin, and liquidity --> fiat, as in 2008.

There is simply no way that, as Bitcoin goes parabolic, the on/offramps are prepared to handle a change in the weather which results in a huge influx of withdrawals unless their own bank balances rise significantly. My informed supposition is that most such entities should have high-cost liquidity facilities with commercial banks that can step in and address some of that withdrawal demand.

As then, a liquidity shock (availability of dollars) could break the system without needing a precipitous drop in the market price of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER4> > the people who provide the dollars to this market (banks, I'm informed)

You are misinformed. The people who provide the dollars to this market are the customers of the exchanges. It seems like you are not familiar with how a currency exchange works.

A currency exchange does not buy or sell the currencies traded at the exchange. All it does is match buyers with sellers, like an auction house. Buyers must deposit all the dollars that they use to buy _before_ buying, and sellers must deposit all the bitcoins they sell _before_ selling. When someone withdraws dollars after selling, the exchange simply transfers to them the dollars that the buyer deposited earlier. It already has the dollars on hand and does not need to borrow them from a bank, ever.

Now, not all places you can sell Bitcoin for dollars are currency exchanges. There are also brokers that do trade directly with their customers, rather than matching customers together to trade. In fact, Coinbase provides this service. However, they can simply obtain dollars by trading at currency exchanges themselves, and they adjust the price they offer to match the exchange price (plus a fee) so they can't just run out of money. Again, there is no need to borrow dollars from a bank. Furthermore, trading volumes at true currency exchanges absolutely dwarf the volume of any Bitcoin broker.

All that said, nothing prevents a crash in the Bitcoin price. If too many people want to sell and not enough want to buy, the price will go down a lot. But this is true in any market, and it has nothing at all to do with bank lending. Not even a little bit.

<comment><USER5> > You are misinformed. The people who provide the dollars to this market are > the customers of the exchanges. It seems like you are not familiar with how > a currency exchange works.

I fear _you 're_ misinformed. Besides localBitcoins, how does one get fiat to an exchange?

That's right — a bank. Exchanges like Bitfinex only survive because of things like Tether, which requires other _fiat accepting_ exchanges.

If all exchanges were like Bitfinex, there would be a liquidity crunch, as the OP is saying.

<comment><USER4> No, that's not what OP is saying at all. Read his posts. He's under the impression that exchanges take out bank loans to pay dollars to their customers, which is false.

When banks refuse to deal with an exchange like Bitfinex, it has nothing to do with liquidity concerns. It's because banks are required by law to verify who they are transferring money to (AML/KYC), and they don't believe Bitfinex abides by those laws (they are right).

BTW, Bitfinex recently reopened bank deposits and withdrawals.

<comment><USER5> > No, that's not what OP is saying at all. Read his posts. He's under the > impression that exchanges take out bank loans to pay dollars to their > customers, which is false.

Although that would be incorrect, there still are valid fears for a liquidity crunch, as I stated. This, regardless of _why_ (be it laws or fund availability) does create a concern due to liquidity.

> BTW, Bitfinex recently reopened bank deposits and withdrawals.

Clearly not true. Especially for U.S. customers: [https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/227](https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/227)

<comment><USER4> True that US customers are banned from Bitfinex, however they _did_ recently announce that bank deposits and withdrawals are reopened for other countries. If you don't believe them that's fine, I don't trust them either, but they did announce it. [https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/7enpoo/bitf...](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/7enpoo/bitfinex_reopens_usd_deposits_and_withdrawals/)

<comment><USER5> The first string of comments says they haven't announced yet (besides on reddit) and nothing on their site claims anything to that affect either.

Also, if the Fed barred any Bitcoin sales/buys with USD (however unlikely) almost all reputable bank would drop those as well, regardless of country. This has been discussed in detail on r/BitcoinMarkets, actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hacker news has become a terrible discussion forum for new technology relating to cryptocurrencies. It's a shame. Nothing but misinformation, FUD, whataboutism, and naysayers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Preston has been wrong about cryptocurrency for 5 years now. I do wonder if he will ever 'get it'.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it'll be more of an old fashioned speculative bubble burst.

The smart money will start taking profits by selling their coin, as the price goes down those that bought the high will lose their nerve and sell to stem their losses. Then the rest will start selling shortly after. Eventually there'll be nobody willing to buy at any price, it'll be worthless.

<comment><USER9> If that occurs, that's your long term buy signal, right at the moment when it seems like nobody wants it anymore from having fallen so far and hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article assumes that depositor money is used for purposes other than backing the amounts of USD a depositor has in their account. I believe he also thinks that it's possible the money is being used in a fractional-reserve fashion and backed by some bank to ensure liquidity if there is a momentary issue, but there is a real panic the bank will stop lending the money to cover for the moment and cause a real problem.

e.g. it's possible, as it has happened before, that a trusted financial institution is playing a dangerous game to make money off sitting cash and uses someone else as a backup.

The real question is: Does Coinbase (or any other exchange) do anything with the money (fiat) and how much is actually reserved? Same with Bitcoin.

We can assume 100% on each side because they make money on fees of the exchange, but that's the real question here.

</comment><comment><USER11> Found out today you can only take $10,000 a day out of Coinbase. I guess this could be good, because it's essentially a "bail-in" that forces people to stay in the market and prevents a run, but still I had no idea of the lack of liquidity in bitcoin with the current system.

<comment><USER12> I think that actually exacerbates the psychological dynamic that the author of this post is talking about. Not being able to get your money out will drive additional panic.</comment></comment>


Cloud password-cracking tool requires only 20 minutes to crack passwords. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=4097

<comment><USER2> > _Because it is a dictionary attack using a predefined 135-million-word list, > there is no guarantee that you will crack the WPA key, but such an extensive > dictionary attack should be sufficient for any but the most specialized > penetration testing purposes._

Wont work against most high-profile targets, then. I find the use of this is probably limited to either a) attacking idiots, or b) attacking idiotic companies who have nobody who understands basic security.

<comment><USER3> _> attacking idiotic companies who have nobody who understands basic security_

Often, it only takes one idiot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A really awesome and simple solution would be to ask users to use non obvious sentences as their password. Even better would be to ask them to use a non grammatical sentence with deliberate phonetic spelling variations.

Although that would be ineffective against a sophisticated brute force attack to crack the encryption itself over a period of days, but it would be an awesome stopgap.

<comment><AUTHOR> 2011: Recent review of anonymized data finds 34% of users on major internet services using "This is my password." as their password sentence.

<comment><USER4> You know you could match it against a corpus and reject the password as being too weak. Right now it's just a graphic, but if you become proactive about it by education through a meme or something and reject passwords. Then maybe people will learn.

An astonishing number of those users love chain emails. It's certainly not an exclusive set, so why don't we use that? Make it "cool", or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title should also include the price - $35 for the most exhaustive search.

This kind of speed has been around for a while - at the cost of a $50,000 FPGA box (eg, <http://www.picocomputing.com/>). Too expensive for the home user, but I'm guessing the NSA have spent way more, and have much faster computers.

A brute force on WPA is also _very_ parallelizable which makes it easy to throw more machines at the problem.</comment>


Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times - <AUTHOR> http://tinybuild.com/punch-club-has-been-pirated-over-1-million-times <comment><USER2> On a similar note, here's what the devs of Game Dev Tycoon did with pirates of their game.

[http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens- when-...](http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates- play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/)

Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624727)

Interesting article that after reading it made me go out and buy the game (so a solid marketing effort too!)

<comment><USER3> Just read through the Game Dev Tycoon article: [http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens- when-...](http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates- play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/)

I was on the edge of my seat waiting for him to say something like "We used the pirated version that we released to communicate with all the people who pirated the game and we were able to convert 30% of them into paying customers!"

But it didn't happen... It sounds like he just used it to really subtly hint that the people should have bought the game. Seems like a wasted opportunity. I feel like a popup that said something like this would have converted a bunch of people and turned the pirating problem into a marketing opportunity: "Haha, you are playing a pirated copy of this game, that's why you are losing all your money to game pirates. Its all good, but if you upgrade to the paid version this problem will go away, here is a _link_ to buy the game. Happy gaming!"

<comment><USER4> If they knew they were using a doctored copy, they would go and pirate an undoctored one.

Anecdote:

This reminds me of the anti-griefer mechanism I put in to heyreddit/reddit roulette back in the day.

If you received a verified report (following a forced match with myself), you would only got matched with other griefers.

No-one realised why the penis-to-chat ratio was so low, but its because eventually all the penis flashers would only be exposing themselves to each other.

Of course, if I had told people that they would have actively tried to get around it :)

Yes, the downside was a manual verification step :(

<comment><USER3> Cool anecdote, sounds like an elegant way to deal with the griefing problem.

I think there is more to this pirating scenario though. A lot of people probably pirate games because because they aren't sure if they will like them. Once they are at the point where they are losing the game because of the pirated version, they already know they like it. Some of the people who get to this point will want to pay the $8 because they won't want to risk putting more effort into the game and losing progress again because of the pirating. Other people will be more comfortable paying because they no longer have to worry about paying for a game that they won't play.

Even if they convert only 10% of the pirates, they will have increased their sales more than 33%, making them over $800,000 more money.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, i definitely agree with the premise, but as soon as that alert pops up, people would rate the torrent/whatever and say its a bad copy, and then future pirates would download an alternate seed.

Maybe they could "leak" a few different torrents in future and do some testing! :)

<comment><USER3> Ah, interesting. I'm not super familiar with torrents and didn't know about that feature. I suppose he could release many versions with their own unique hashes. Would people be less likely to put the effort into creating a cracked version if they felt there were already a lot out there? I always wondered who does software cracking and how hard it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since in these breakdowns they invariably seem to be using stats collection from the games themselves, I would love to see how many of the pirated copies progress past the fist X% of the game, or continue playing beyond 24-48 hours, whatever the devs would consider around the mark for what they would consider releasing a demo for.

Not that I think all the people that pirate are just demoing, but I think without question many more people pirate than are actual sales, and those that stop early lone are the type of people that probably wouldn't have generated many sales anyway, possibly stopping after the demo if there was one or not have bought it at all.

When these discussions are housed in terms of making enough money to continue, and loss of revenue, ignoring that aspect is ignoring a large part of the picture (even if it's still morally valid).

<comment><USER6> A lot of people collect games like they are pokemon. My mate has a ton of games on steam that he's not even played.

Plus a lot of those games are being pirated by kids who don't have bank accounts and/or are not mature enough to realise that pirating hurts people. If a friend asks another friend 'do you want a copy of <game>' they just say yes and that's the end of the thought process. The 'does this affect anyone' doesn't enter their heads. (source: teacher)

<comment><USER5> > A lot of people collect games like they are pokemon. My mate has a ton of > games on steam that he's not even played.

I have 558 games on Steam. Almost exclusively from Humble Bundle orders, I've installed and played maybe 30-40, and that's because I've made a concerted effort the last year or so. I have another 100+ on GOG.com, mostly titles from my childhood and teen years I've convinced myself I'll some day have time to pick up and finally complete. I can relate.

> Plus a lot of those games are being pirated by kids who don't have bank > accounts and/or are not mature enough to realize that pirating hurts people.

Yes, that was me. The vast majority I never played beyond trying out to see if I liked them (thus my original question). The few that I didn't buy that I did pirate and liked? Well, see the GOG.com note above (but a lot of those are ones I bought _twice_ , or in that case of M&M II or some of the Ultima Series, 3+ times...).

Edit: A portion that was supposed to be offset as a quote wasn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Getting some insight from the pirates would be interesting. If a pirate is detected, pop up a quick radio selection box:

Thank you for playing the game. I noticed you pirated it and would like to know why (you can still play the game):

* I can't afford the price

* My parents wont let me buy games

* I want to try the game free first

* I believe games should be free

* My computer is old and I don't know if it can play this game

etc..

We did this on our site when someone downvotes our content, and it gave us valuable feedback.

<comment><USER8> It's not surprising that Brazil, Russia, and China top the list for pirate users. This game is probably very expensive for users in those countries, if they are even able to easily pay for it.

<comment><USER9> > if they are even able to easily pay for it

I think this is something a lot of people don't realise but online payment systems in China and Russia are near completely different (and isolated) from ours.

China doesn't do Visa, doesn't do Mastercard, doesn't do AMEX, doesn't do PayPal. Try buying something from a Chinese website like Taobao or Baidu. They use things like Alipay which are linked to their local payment systems.

I don't think Chinese CAN buy independent games like this.

<comment><USER10> China does, however, widely use UnionPay, which is Discover-compatible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How do they calculate the number of times it's been pirated?

> We take overall amount of activations minus legit sales per platform minus > 10% (to offset for people who activated a legit copy on more than 1 device).

An assumption of 10% multiple device activations is begging the original question.

Pirating on Windows, Mac, and Android is pretty easy, but on iOS it requires jailbreaking, which is pretty limiting these days. I doubt his piracy numbers are anywhere near what he's claiming.

<comment><USER12> Is a reason given for the 10% figure? (I looked in the article but didn't see anything) I can easily see the figure being much higher (e.g., for PC: laptop+desktop, for iOS: iPhone+iPad)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whose idea was it to have the 2 initial pie graphs switch colors? It makes it look like there's some sort of inverse relationship between pirating and purchasing on a given platform, when in fact it's roughly the same proportion of pirates and purchasers on mobile and PC.

[http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/re...](http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/revenue-split-1.png?fit=446%2C327)

[http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/pi...](http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/pirated-splits.png?fit=446%2C327)

<comment><USER14> Their analysis doesn't match up with the pie graphs either until you look up pricing.

Punch Club costs $9.99 on Steam but only $4.99 on iOS, so the volume of sales in terms of units sold realizes about a 50/50 split between PC and mobile legitimate players, rather than the implied 70/30 indicated by revenue.

NOW their analysis makes sense (more PC pirates than mobile). If the colors of the graph actually matched I would have just assumed their text was wrong!

...unless, of course, the piracy chart is in the same relative terms of cost and instead portrays _lost_ revenue...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would like to point out that Brazil currently is facing a extremely hard crisis, where people can't afford even food.

Don't expect people to pay for entertainment here right now.

EDIT: why the downvotes? What I said is entirely facts, to help explain the massive amount of piracy in Brazil.

<comment><USER16> You are exaggerating.

<comment><USER15> I am?

Where I live at least, and considering my personal situation, it is no exaggeration.

I doubt that most of the population in a 5km radius within me can afford to buy several games, or even only one game.

I know lots of people (including family members) that are having a diet almost entirely based on potatoes, because anything else is too expensive.

EDIT: some hard data, freely available on IBGE site, I got that data in february, so now it might be slightly different:

Average wage on last ten years rose 44%, inflation was 78%, and food prices inflation was 124%

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ugh, do I see what I think I see, and there is a _pie_ chart of piracy _ratios_ in different countries (that is, a pie chart of numbers that do not add up to 1)?!

<comment><USER18> I thought this was going to be a joke: pie + ratio = pirate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pie charts are terrible

[http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the- worst-2013...](http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013-6)

<comment><USER20> It doesn't help that in the first two (side-by-side) pie charts they swap the colors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Similar situation happened with Monument Valley, a game that hit #1 on app store and won a 2014 Apple Design award. The devs tweeted that only 5% of Android players paid for the app. On iOS, 40% paid [1]. Later they released some sales numbers that show only 2.4m sales but 10m+ installs, implying that the majority of their installs weren't paid for. [2]

[1] _Hit mobile game Monument Valley and piracy: 'Only 5%' of Android players paid for it_ [https://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all- ba...](https://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-bad-says- monument-valley-producer-qa/)

[2] _Monument Valley in Numbers_ [http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument-v...](http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument- valley-in-numbers)

<comment><USER11> I'm sorry, but the Monument Valley iOS piracy numbers from Dan Gray quoted in that article are positively nonsense.

> It's impossible for us to track that data. The only thing we can do is, two > bits of data: One, how many purchases we have and, two, how many installs > we've got. And we just leave people to draw conclusions from that as they > wish, because we can't clarify any further than that.

Once you purchase an app on an iTunes account, you can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into. So the fact that Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases is 100% consistent with zero piracy, and with the fact that as people replace their devices they want to redownload the apps with the greatest replay value. This is not some weird trick that Apple overlooked, either. They clearly want the user to believe that the apps and the data are tied to the account rather than the phone, because new hardware sales are where they make the lion's share of their profit.

(I thought his numbers were bogus, which is what motivated me to read the article. In recent years, jailbreaking iOS devices, which is a prerequisite for pirating apps, has become increasingly bothersome and decreasingly useful. So the thought that there were this many jailbreakers didn't coincide with my model of the world.)

<comment><USER21> > You can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into ... > So Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases

No, it doesn't work like that. Android and iOS installs are separate, if you buy it through one app store it doesn't transfer to the other. Combining the Android and iOS numbers together to reduce that ratio is dishonest. Just looking at Android, the installs to purchases ratio works out to 20 to 1 ... do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs? C'mon.

Read through the OP article as well. He also a encountered significant amount of mobile piracy, specifically on Android. There is widespread mobile piracy going on, arguing about installs-to-purchases ratios does nothing to hide it.

<comment><USER11> > do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs?

No, I don't. My point was specifically about iOS, because I know how much of a pain it is to keep a jailbroken phone, and I have a good sense of the general population and how many of them do so.

(I develop a rather popular iOS app, and we have telemetry in the app that determines whether the device is jailbroken. We have multiple tests for whether a device is jailbroken. Jailbreak developers could fool all of our tests if they chose to do so. However, since we don't actually do anything with that data, we don't give anyone a reason to spoof them. In our population of users, jailbreakers make up less than 1%.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The one thing that really doesn't resonate with me is the undertone of bitterness.

First, I bought Punch Club on steam, and enjoyed it.

But I think the assumption that's easy to make is "Look at all the money I would have made if people didn't pirate." It's not that simple. Some people who pirate would never have bought it in the first place.

<comment><USER23> > undertone of bitterness.

I didn't read this at all.

Just the facts and thoughts on solutions.

<comment><USER24> I think it depends on what angle you're looking at it from. The article does kind of read as: "hey look, we could have made 5x more sales if we'd been smarter about piracy". Not everyone agrees with this, and I think this argument is unhealthy in general.

I'd wager that if you made piracy completely impossible, most of the current pirates - who tend to hail from regions where the international pricing is prohibitive - would simply opt out of buying it. This may even have a negative effect by limiting the viral advertising indie hits like Punch Club have ("hey, what game is that on your phone", etc).

This is not to defend the act of piracy as such, but I think if someone wants to have a productive "facts and solutions" discussion, they should frame it differently.

<comment><USER25> This is an idiotic wager. People are only pirating because they want to play the game. Of course some percentage them would of bought it if they couldn't easily get it for free. The marketing effect doesn't make up for thousands of lost sales. Piracy has completely wiped out music sales, the only reason it hasn't wiped out games yet is because of anti-piracy measures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It sucks that we live in a world where people decide whether to translate a game into a language, making it accessible for a country, based on how many people from that country will steal it.

</comment><comment><USER27> So from the charts it seems like mobile gamers are actually (slightly) more likely to pirate than PC gamers. Also I would be interested how the Windows:Mac:Linux split actually looks.

<comment><USER28> It seems that Android users are very likely to pirate while IOS users are not. I think the numbers were something like 12 pirated copies for every Android version sold and 2 to 1 for IOS.

<comment><USER29> > It seems that Android users are very likely to pirate while IOS users are > not.

Yeah because no one actually jailbreaks their device anymore... it's just hard and risky, and on Android all you need is to install the apk file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> An amusing incongruity from the article: "Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate."

Yet the article is primarily about piracy problems with Portuguese, surely the most westernly language in Europe.

<comment><USER31> Assuming you weren't making a joke, the article clearly states that the piracy is coming from Brazil, not Portugal.

<comment><USER32> Still, it's ambiguous whether the article recommends that Portugese localisation should still be done despite the piracy from Brazil, or whether other western european languages should be done excluding Portugese.

<comment><USER33> There's no harm of translating something into Portugese: If you translate there will be some piracy from Brazil, but if you don't translate users from Brazil won't buy your game at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > The most interesting conclusion though is Localization and its impact. Punch > Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays > off, and has a very low piracy rate.

</comment><comment><USER35> The tables in the "Top pirated countries on PC, Portuguese Localization Launch Day" section would make much more sense if they were about the % of pirates instead of raw numbers...

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if Google Play allows pricing segmentation per area. I'm seeing a $6.55AUD game, which is higher than most, although if it frees me from any kind of IAP I'd consider it.

<comment><USER37> Prices can be manually entered per country or calculated from a base price in your account currency. In either case it does not change again until the developer updates it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So localize in English, German, and French (maybe Spanish) and don't bother with an Android version, good to know.

<comment><USER5> If you are interested in profit, the number of pirated copies is _entirely irrelevant_. The only metric that matters in that case is the cost of supplying the game for that demographic and how much money is expected to be made. This is the same whether it's a language or marketplace.

For example, if it costs you $100,000 to supply and Android version, but you expect to make $1,000,000 event after all the (assumed) piracy, it still makes sense to release for Android.

<comment><USER38> No because having an easily pirated version out there might otherwise cut into sales. I mean it's why a shoe store wouldn't simply give away unsold merchandise because then they're dramatically reduced the demand for shoes.

<comment><USER5> You should read my statement again. If the choice is whether to sell in a market or not, and you care about making a profit, the bottom line is whether at the end of the day you made more money than it cost to serve that market. Full stop. This is not about allowing or disallowing piracy in a market you are already serving.

In your analogy, it's like a shoe store opening a shop in China even though they strongly suspect if the shoes become popular knock-offs will pop up fairly quickly. The question of whether it's worth opening the store in China is answered by whether in the end they can make a profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The only interesting question in this is how many would they sell if 1.5 mil people wouldn't pirate it.

Unfortunately no-one knows hence the silly debacle. I'd bet they'd be amazingly happy if it turned out that each 0.5 mil of pirates translates to 100 k in sales.

</comment><comment><USER40> If they pirate your game and play it AND if they wouldn't have bought it anyway, you should be happy because they're not giving money to your competitors: they don't have the time for it because they're playing your game. It didn't cost you anything but you're gaining something. Obviously people plays several games at the same time, still this reasoning works and in many markets. If they are happy enough with your pirated games, music, videos, clothes, bags they won't buy your competitors products. If your sales are higher than theirs, pirates are helping you to starve your competitors.

<comment><USER41> I honestly don't think game developers are interested in starving other game developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Url changed from [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/game-dev-reveals- corre...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/game-dev-reveals-correlation- between-a-translation-and-a-regions-piracy/), which points to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Dang :).</comment></comment>


Wells Fargo and Intuit Join Forces to Ruin My Weekend - <AUTHOR> http://augustjackson.net/2011/08/14/wells-fargo-and-intuit-join-forces-to-ruin-my-weekend/

<comment><USER2> if he's so angry at intuit, why did he give them more of his money? there are plenty of alternatives out there that work on a mac and can download OFX transaction data; ibank and gnucash being two off the top of my head.

back in 2005, i spent $200 on quickbooks basic to do invoicing for my software business. i had a dedicated windows machine just to run the software, and it was terrible. the interface was confusing, it wouldn't do what i needed it to, and it had a ton of things that i didn't need. worst of all, i was constantly bombarded with messages in the application advertising intuit's other products and services like check printing, payroll, and online data backup. at one point i needed to prepare an estimate, only to get a popup message telling me the $200 version i just bought didn't have that feature, but that i could easily spend more money and upgrade to a better version.

at that point i gave up and made my own web-based billing system (<http://corduroysite.com>) to do what i needed, and then turned it into a SaaS.

<comment><USER3> > if he's so angry at intuit, why did he give them more of his money?

Because he's just trying to _get some shit done_ in the short term.

I use GnuCash for my business accounting. It is very painful software. And I run it on my Win 7 virtual machine because the OS X support stinks -- and that kind of musical OS chairs is one thing he is trying to avoid.

<comment><USER2> then why do you use it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been very happy with my switch to Ledger (<http://ledger-cli.org>). Quickbooks was a blackhole to me. I was never entirely sure what was going on behind the scenes. Ledger has helped me _get_ accounting.

<comment><USER5> Be careful though because many of the things that Ledger advocates muddy the water between cash and accrual accounting, and it offers 'features' that are natural to the way a programmer thinks but that are against proper accounting practices. Ledger is fine when you know accounting and want a text-based tool to take out the drudge work, but it's not good to learn accounting from.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the heads up. Admittedly my finances are pretty easy. I do everything on a cash basis. My statement about _getting_ accounting was a bit broad. Ledger simply has helped me understand how money flows and I'm more comfortable managing it because Ledger feels transparent to be. I can debug it if needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another reason to go for open source software. I use homebank and the files work seamlessly across platforms (linux mac windows) and they accept qif, csv etc imports. GnuCash is actually a pretty decent clone of quicken if you are more used to that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Small business accounting remains a wide open category for new entrants. However, I'm not sure web-based solutions are the right approach. For whatever reason, it feels like accounting should be a piece of client software. Perhaps because there is some UX richness that is still lacking in the browser. Perhaps because because it feels like the data should be local.

Also, I think it would be difficult to do a lousier job in putting forth standardize financial data formats than what Intuit has done. In most cases, a simple CSV file would have sufficed. But Intuit with all of it's complicated, multi-dimensional data formats, one for each product with many becoming outdated. Yuck.

<comment><USER8> As a small business bookkeeper, I agree that new blood could really improve things.

I think it could be web-based though, as long as security took top priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You probably should have known better. Mac support for Quicken and Quickbooks have always been terrible. Here is their official word on the subject:

       http://quicken.intuit.com/support/articles/getting-started/upgrading-and-conversion/8207.html

If you want to experiment, here's a link to the pre-release of Quickbooks 2011

       http://web.me.com/quickbooksmac/2011/pre-rel.html

I wish there were real alternatives but there's really nothing on the market which does the job as well as qb/quicken

</comment><comment><USER10> How good is Mint in filling the role of these softwares. I would naively guess that someone could better accommodate these people.

<comment><USER9> It's not geared towards business owners (invoicing, vendors, cutting checks, double entry book keeping, reconciling, etc)

Mint hits that sweet spot with single individuals, maybe married couples, with multiple accounts who want to get an overview and bottom line.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. As an individual, I switched to Mint from Quicken precisely because Quicken was too much tool for the job.

Mint works for tracking your spending, Quicken (and related products) are more sophisticated.</comment></comment></comment>


HP: What Léo Apotheker's Decisions Mean - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/08/21/hp-what-leo-apotheker%E2%80%99s-decisions-mean/

<comment><USER2> Excellent analysis - JLG is right on the mark here. (I liked it in part because he too brought up the obvious question not many are asking - Why did HP prematurely declare spinning off of their PC business when the uncertainty can kill off sales and undervalue any sale of PSG. It pissed off the investors too.)

For fun he suggests Microsoft buy HP's PC business - amusing! If they did end up buying it though Microsoft might have a chance at going after Apple with integration. Highly unlikely though - not because that will piss of their partners (they have nowhere to go) - but Microsoft doesn't really need a volatile, costly and low margin PC business to provide integration - there are cheaper/better ways of doing it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have only one question: how long until Apotheker is fired?</comment>


Devshirme - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme <comment><USER2> I find it a very human contradiction that parents responded both in extreme resentment and by leaning in to it. When it felt like their sons were being stolen away from them, the parents were willing to disfigure them in order to prevent them from being sent off. But later on, when Devshirme became prestigious and a path towards potential power or a viziership, the parents were suddenly bribing scouts to take their sons.</comment>


Startup idea: Collaborative payment for open-source dev - <AUTHOR> http://startup-ideas.posterous.com/collaborative-payment-for-open-source-dev

<comment><USER2> another idea - "OpenCompany"

<http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/opencompany>

<http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/Open_company></comment>


Your Facebook Posts are 'Public' - <AUTHOR> http://devcodehack.com/your-facebook-posts-are-public/

<comment><USER2> Google+ posts are also public when posted as "public".</comment>


Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years! - <AUTHOR> http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8R4H0Q00&show_article=1

<comment><USER2> Yawn. Call me once you have results, or at least a reasonable theory justifying your optimism. Getting a bunch of lipids to assemble into a sphere doesn't convince me that you are going to soon create "wet artificial life".

</comment><comment><USER3> While the paranoia prone part of my mind worries, I believe this is definitely a wonderful thing. Imagine the possibilities for the planet and beyond.</comment>


Using Estimates, Experiments, and Evidence to Understand Your Customers - <AUTHOR> http://hookfeed.com/blog/using-estimates-experiments-evidence-to-understand-your-customers/

<comment><USER2> I'm the original author. Glad to answer any questions you might have. Also can give a deeper in-depth look into specific areas.</comment>


Jupiter Awaits Arrival of Juno - <AUTHOR> http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1623/?lang <comment><USER2> For those interested in the timeline of Juno Orbit Insertion events, see this post [1] at the Planetary Society

[1] [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2016/0616123...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2016/06161235-timeline-of-juno-jupiter-orbit-insertion.html)

<comment><USER3> Also good is the linked-to JunoCam explainer [1] which includes a nice map showing the orbits and explains what we could expect to see in terms of imaging data coming from the mission and when. Hint: images are not the main reason they sent Juno.

[1] [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2016/0609060...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2016/06090600-what-to-expect-from-junocam.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Vote and comment on where to point JunoCam and which features to image on Jupiter using the new JunoCam web platform on this site. [https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/](https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This NASA documentary is a little hokey, but it gives a reasonable intro to the mission and each of the instruments.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka6OERznXh4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka6OERznXh4)

<comment><USER6> NASA is getting better at PR. This is arriving July 4th!

<comment><USER7> As did Mars pathfinder, 1997.

<comment><USER8> Maybe not so much a coincidence then? You'd think both of these orbital alignments are a little beyond our control. Or maybe there was enough fuel budget both times to get +/\- a couple days to get the insertion dates we wanted.

<comment><USER9> Yes, there's usually enough flexibility to move things around a bit. Robert Farquhar, the man who planned the trajectory of ISEE-3 (the craft re-contacted by amateurs during an Earth flyby two years ago) enjoyed arranging his missions so that important milestones happened on the birthdays or anniversaries of friends and family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm still a little disappointed they chose to send a probe to Jupiter instead of Uranus or Neptune.

I am certain the Jovian system is madly interesting and there's lots and lots of fascinating things to be discovered. But on the other hand, Galileo has already spent several years exploring it, while we still know comparatively little about Uranus and Neptune.

Having said that, I am, of course, excited to see what new and interesting things Juno will allow us to find out. In a way, there are no boring places in our solar system.

<comment><USER11> Something like Juno could only work as far as Jupiter, maybe Saturn, but at some point the size of the solar panels grows too unwieldy. Jupiter gets 1/25 the sunlight of Earth, Saturn is 1/100, Uranus is 1/400 and Neptune 1/900.

<comment><USER10> I did not know Juno used solar panels.

I know that a probe to explore the ice giants would require an RTG (or some other energy source other than solar panels).

Still, I think it would be _very_ interesting to study the ice giants and the respective moons and ring systems more closely.

<comment><USER12> It's the first probe going out that far that uses panels, all the previous ones use RTGs. When it was built (launched in 2011) there was a severe Pu-238 shortage; it's still in short supply, but back in production (as of 2013) and so some future long range RTG powered missions might be back on the table.

<comment><USER10> Oh well, I guess Uranus will still be around in few years. ;-)

<comment><USER13> But is Uranus or Neptune in a position that can be reached with gravity assists?

And even if it is, orbital insertion requires a lot of energy, so a flyby is probably the only possible option.

<comment><USER10> Mmmh. I can still hope, can't I?

I mean, really, assuming that all of the practical problems of building a probe and getting it to Uranus or Neptune were solved, wouldn't you just _love_ to send it there and explore the $expletive out of them?

<comment><USER13> Well you can either keep up (false?) hopes or do the maths and see where the planets are located (pretty easy) and are there any potential gravity assists (not as easy, but there are software packages that help).

If you just want to eyeball the situation, take a look at Celestia.

I think orbital insertion is out of question for the outer planets using conventional space craft propulsion because the difference between high radial velocity required to reach the planet and the low tangential velocity of the planet itself is greater than the spacecraft's delta-v budget.

But there won't be another Voyager mission in our lifetimes, a suitable arrangement of planets happens only once in 400 years or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I watched this NASA "tweetup" a few years back. It's a bit long, but has some very interesting discussions about the science and engineering of the project.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iWgZ_TmL0M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iWgZ_TmL0M)

</comment><comment><USER15> Cute name, Juno.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a Julia user, this was really[0] confusing[1] for a second. Although now it makes me wonder if the Juno IDE for Julia was named that way because of the mythological Jupiter/Juno connection too.

[0] [http://jupyter.org/](http://jupyter.org/)

[1] [http://junolab.org/](http://junolab.org/)</comment>


Show HN: StackHut – Your code as a cloud API, powered by Docker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackhut.com/stackhut/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey all! I'm one of the devs @ StackHut and am here to answer all and any questions/rants/ideas/feedback. Cheers!</comment>


Ask HN: Please review my site... and find a great place to hike - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,
Please review my site http://www.trailbehind.com. TrailBehind is a site that helps you find great places to hike. TrailBehind also lets you collaborate to build social maps of the outdoors.
A couple months back, I posted the site to Hacker News for a review, and I received great feedback, and this new release reflects that feedback in full.
So, if you have any comments or critiques (particularly if you are a hiker, backpacker, or love the outdoors), we'd really appreciate your feedback. By this summer, we hope to have created a great resource for everyone who loves the woods.
ALSO - if you are really into the site, email me at andrewljohnson AT trailbehind dot com, and tell me a bit about yourself. And I'll send you a TrailBehind t-shirt, which we just had delivered, while supplies last! <comment><USER2> I found the search confusing.

When I typed in my address it gave me a list of thing sort of close to where I live (in San Francisco).

When I typed in Point Reyes (a lovely place to hike in Marin County) I got a bunch of trails that sounded really similar.

I think it would be interesting to let people just take the map view directly to the place/zipcode of where they type to scan for trails and then filter them on the map according to their preferences.

I love the idea though.

<comment><AUTHOR> One critical thing missing from the search results is a map. I think that will solve this problem for you. I'll add that this week as well.

For search, what we are thinking is the search will provide search results on the home page, but zoom directly if you invoke the search from the map.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, here's an abbreviated roadmap of features we are working on that are in various stages of done-ness:

* data downloads for your GPS device

* a web crawler that aggregates trip reports and park rules/regulations to our map

* a Flickr integration

* better ways to look at our international data

* faster searches and autocompletes

* improvements to reporting and trip-planning

* RSS feeds of changes to places on the map that you can subscribe to

</comment><comment><USER3> I typed in my address to see what was close. It would be great once you search to be able to increase the distance from your address you are willing to go hiking.

<comment><AUTHOR> You got it. I'll let you scope your search by distance from a point. We're working on a number of improvements to search - that's central for us at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> * Adding the total length of a trail and the difficulty level will be useful.

* More options in the Park Index will be useful. Eg: refine the list to state parks or national parks or refine it by state, then list the trails in a park.

* The map is very slow and unresponsive, I don't think you can do much to improve the map loading speed, but I know that google recently updated their google maps to load faster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comments, I'll file some issues in TRAC. We'll definitely be adding a "parks by state" page, and giving people the difficulty rating of trails, which is actually pretty easy to derive from the timestamps on GPS files.

Per your comment about trail distances, I do believe if you click a trail, it shows you the trail's length in the floating widget, next to the name of the trail. Maybe this needs to be highlighted? Also, if you click several trails, the 'Plan' tab will total up their distances for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here are a few points:

The initial website has a "domain parker" feel to it. I think the colours/design are off. Just my opinion though.

The loading times (especially for the map) seemed long for a production website. The longer I use your site (the more searches I do) the more annoying this feels.

There is good data on here for near where I live.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's definitely too slow right now.

We're paying $15/month to host it on a small slice, and we've been working hard to make it work on few resources so that we can scale it up inexpensively.

That said, I'm getting to the point where I just want to throw a dedicated server at the problem. The site runs smoking fast on our internal Linux server.

We also need to do more caching. We made a lot of progress on this (like if you click a national park the data is cached and fast), but in general, map loads need to be snappier.

One interesting thing to note is the bigger your browser window, the slower the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there a way that you can close the floating widget on the map. When you are looking for something in an area it would be nice to be able to remove it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, I can add that.</comment></comment>


Why You Don't Own Your Logo (and Why You Think You Do) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kunvay.com/you-dont-own-your-logo-and-why-you-think-you-do-why-copyright-transfer-matters-copyright-assignment-copyright-agreement-copyright-form/

<comment><USER2> Not a good sell - OP talks around the point for 3 pages, including some scare tactics about copyright transfer and how confusing it is (how about a boilerplate transfer?) then the video about how easy it is with their product.

This is an example of engineers writing copy. My copyediting spouse calls it the 'mystery story' where they make their point, then reveal the big surprising conclusion somewhere on page three.

Could have put the product link on top of the page, then all the backstory. If I have any interest I get to the meat immediately instead of losing interest somewhere along word 500.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Joe. Thanks for taking the time to share this feedback. We'll definitely consider this. Our non-engineer copywriter was flattered you thought he was an engineer since he's a social science major. Thanks for cheering up a Sunday morning.

<comment><USER2> I used to write the same way, until my spouse fixed me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Important tips to keep in mind when using freelancers to outsource work.</comment>


Why I quit my dream job at Ubisoft - <AUTHOR> http://gingearstudio.com/why-i-quit-my-dream-job-at-ubisoft <comment><USER3> I once worked as a consultant to help users implement some software. I moved on to the development of that software, knowing the dozens of areas that could be improved to make life easier for the users, and honestly with little effort (it's a web app, I did that before the consultancy stuff). At that point in time, that was my dream -- I wanted to help make people's lives a little bit easier, and the people I helped would be those who used our software.

After around a year or so of implementing questionable features, I attempted to get approval for updates to old, well used features to improve them (stability and convenience focused, really), but was shot down. This wouldn't sell the software, because it worked well enough, and we needed more revenue more than retaining old customers. At that point I understood that after the software is sold the customer will be too ingrained into the product to leave without financial repercussions.

A while later, we got bought out by Big Company, so that strategy apparently worked. BC doesn't give half a shit about anything we ever did, and we piled on the features release after release with little concern about anything else. I tried a couple times after the buyout to get approved for existing product improvements, but always got shot down.

I continue to find it odd how the company can be so profit oriented, and yet so averse to improvements. I suppose I'm just wrong or don't actually understand. Either way, it makes it very hard to care about my work these days.

<comment><USER4> If your customers are big companies, then there's another dynamic: the people who make decisions about the software are usually not the ones who use it. So a large part of their decision is driven by how the software is described on paper, i.e. by feature bullet points. You end up with lotus notes.

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianwe...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianweeklytechnologysection)

<comment><USER5> This is exactly why so many terrible "features" and design patterns keep showing up in web sites: People calling the shots are not the developers. They "saw this on XYZ's successful site, plz implement today".

<comment><USER6> Yep. The latest one seems to be newsletter popups that are suddenly infecting the web at large.

<comment><USER7> Pop ups are bad in general.

IMO, the worst are the full page, content-blocking, app install requests that appear on thin-content sites.

It's preposterous.

You've proven that you can't be trusted to present your website content in an acceptable manner, and you want me to install your software?

Instant back button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why to not work at a video game company:

0) Abuse.

1) Executives cut projects: a lot. The budgets are so insane for games executives need to constantly trim budgets and shift things around. It is common to walk over to an artists desk and inform them the art they have worked on for 2 years wont be used. I am convinced telling a wife her husband has passed is the same feeling.

2) The budgets have exploded. My last project for an iPhone game was well over 4million dollars.

3) Complexity is compounding. My last team (for a prototype) consisted of: AI guy, graphics/C++ guy(s), gameplay guy, Art TEAM (vector and raster) and project managers. The art pipelines alone will suck the budget dry.

4) Pay is low. Since you are starting fresh each project (see 5), your working knowledge of the system is similar to someone new. Promotions, salary increases, etc don't make any financial sense (see 1) unless you are a rockstar. The new kids walking in usually burn out and quit because they don't understand the massive shit show the industry is. EA's managers just grind people until they can't walk. Disney is a sweatshop.

5) NOTHING is reused. After your second project, you quickly realize the AI you created for fish has nothing todo with with your AI for a 3d shooter. The asset pipeline you created for a soccer game doesn't translate over to a racing game. Game companies are full of dead code repros. People try to create/use repeatable platforms, but then the game designer guy will walk by and say "Hey is that the newest unreal engine?". In games: Anything reused is quickly spotted as reused. This is why games that have a good series going do really well financially. GTA what like 15?

6) Success is low. After a few years into a project, someone will say: "But its not... fun". Welp, good luck fixing that. Or plan on having it rot in some terrible online store.

7) Rockstars. Executive: "OMG you wrote the AI for GTA2 in 1998??". Welp, this guy is now your boss. AND, because games are almost always a luck play - <USER2> "Rockstar" will teach you absolutely nothing.

My takeaway:

I have talked with guys in the game industry that have been in it 20+ years and asked WTF. Basically, lifers are like high school teachers. They are abused and underpaid: but they _love_ what they do.

<comment><USER9> I've heard all of the horror stories about EA, but the author seems to have enjoyed the premise of the experience at Ubisoft, e.g., good camaraderie, a non-abusive environment. Sure, projects got canceled, but that happens in every industry, especially creative.

Which one is the outlier, Ubisoft or EA? Is the whole games industry a mess, or is EA just exceptionally bad?

<comment><USER10> Having worked at both a small-time and significant studio, I too can confirm the whole industry is nuts, as the sibling comment says.

vvanders' comment is such a perfect illustration of the situation that you should read and re-read it and then force yourself to believe it. I didn't.

None of this will really change the minds of a determined 19 year old to become a gamedev, though. That's why gamedev is able to treat employees as if they worked at a startup while giving none of the benefits. If one leaves, there are ten young people who want to take their place, and are massively excited to do so. For a few years.

<comment><USER11> Yep, I've lost count of the people that I was unable to convince not to join the industry that came back a few years later(hell I was one of them).

Sometimes you can only learn a fire is hot by getting your hand burned in the flame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Since my very beginnings at Ubisoft, I knew I wouldn't spend the rest of my > days here. I already dreamt of starting my own indie company.

Well, then that was probably your dream job instead of Ubisoft.

<comment><USER13> "Dream job" can also be understood as "a job people usually dream about".

<comment><USER14> In the context of the article, and made clear in the first paragraph, it was definitely the author's dream job.

<comment><USER15> To be fair, dreams change. Sounds like the author's initial "oh shit I get to work on <big title>" morphed into "I want ownership of my work."

They could also have meant game design/architecture was the dream, not necessarily working at Ubisoft in particular. You're right though, it's a bit unclear.

<comment><USER16> It sounds more like the romantic ideal of his dream turned into a very different reality and he realized that what he was seeking all along (ownership, significant contribution) just did not exist in AAA games.

<comment><USER17> except he said "since the very beginning"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > No matter what's your job, you don't have a significant contribution on the > game. You're a drop in a glass of water, and as soon as you realize it, your > ownership will evaporate in the sun. And without ownership, no motivation.

A good description of a lot of big corp projects. Do people working on large open source projects eventually feel the same way?

<comment><USER19> I've never really understood that attitude of "if it's not all mine, my contribution doesn't matter."

Maybe it's just my own raging ego, but no matter how small my contribution is to the whole, I remain absurdly proud of whatever I did.

I certainly hope that the guys working on AAA games feel the same way to the point of annoying everyone they know: "You see that? You see the way the guard rubs his stubble in his idle animation? Look at how realistically his fingers make contact with his face! I did that, that was me! You're welcome!"

<comment> sjm-lbm On some Pixar movie (Ratatouille, I think), one of the DVD extras was a set of deleted scenes that happened to be the _entire_ work of individual animators - basically they spent 18 months of their life working on that stubble, and the whole guard was cut because that didn't work with the story.

That's an extreme, but something like that is possible for anyone working on a sufficiently large project. I get how people like that could really feel like their time was wasted - your assumption is that their contribution will be in the final project in a small but interesting way, and that's not an assumption that can always be made.

<comment><USER20> I used to be on the Space Shuttle Primary Flight Software team in Houston. Super motivating environment.

There was another independent team in Huntington Beach that wrote the Backup Flight Software. Never used it in 34 years of flights.

Poor bastards ...

<comment><USER21> I'm pretty sured it was indeed used, at least as part of emergency drills. I think that is pretty good, to know that your backup system works in case it is ever needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This phenomenon is not exclusive to game development. Lots of people want to work for large, prominent companies like Google or FB, dreaming of working on cool projects. But the reality usually turns out to be much less glamorous. Instead of being the guy who comes up with the next killer product or feature, you will likely end up as a small cog in a huge, well-oiled machine, optimising ads to increase some metric in the fifth decimal place.

<comment><USER23> but (I assume) you make more money than elsewhere with better working conditions, and a cool addition on your resume

<comment><USER24> Nope. In C++ land, you can get the same 130k salary at a 30 person company, that builds hardware devices.

<comment><USER25> Google/FB engineers make a heck of a lot more than 130k, that's pretty much base entry level before bonuses and equity grants.

<comment><USER26> Maybe a few outliers, but not all or even most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hope this does not happen to him, but wait until he releases a game (that might even be a really good one) and gets nowhere because 1,000 other people released a game that week. It's a tough industry now! You probably appreciate the indie side of it when you're in AAA, but I can tell you from experience you appreciate the AAA side of it when you're in an indie!

</comment><comment><USER28> > "When your expertise is limited to, let's say, art, level design, > performances or whatever, you'll eventually convince yourself that it's the > most important thing in the game."

This is my experience, too. Without autonomy and ownership across a whole project it's very easy for people to get tunnel vision about what's valuable. This causes general harm to both the team and the outcome of its project.

I'm not sure how to lessen the effect other than perhaps by making projects small enough that they can be worked on by just a few people and using this phase to establish a kernel of good ideas and team cohesion.

Perhaps there might be another structure where the tools that are provided to the team are literally so good that the main project can be done by just a few people working on everything together. (Idealistic vision here.)

<comment><USER29> I don't have the source handy but there is research showing that if you ask individuals on a successful project the % that they contributed, the total of the perceived contributions generally equals around 140%. I've wondered if simply pointing out this issue might help reduce the inflated sense of personal contribution

<comment><USER30> I wasn't able to find your particular point in my searching, but I did find a paper from 2000 that came to a similar conclusion[1]

"This difference in perception has a potential of creating tension within the team and disrupting the cooperation, because there is a possibility that every single team member may feel to be undervalued by others and not receive his or her due."

"The perception gap can be a threat to the team and its goals. Facing the gap requires interpersonal skills on the part of the team management and team members."

[1] [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=077...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=0778BDC8DBA5C04386CB70652FD1EB7F?doi=10.1.1.228.2618&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can well imagine this can occur in larger, non-games software development projects. I wonder if it is the same?

I sort of suspect not. I am currently refactoring an (albeit important) part of the LibreOffice codebase - the VCL font subsystem. Mostly it's reading the code (in fact, 90% is reading and understanding the code), but it's kind of satisfying looking at how changes to the code make things better and... more _elegant_.

Perhaps this is just an Open Source thing. Or maybe I'm unusual in that I like to focus on smaller modules and make them really good, then move on to the next thing.

</comment><comment><USER32> Seems to be his first indie: [http://openbargame.com/](http://openbargame.com/)

<comment><USER33> Looks very cool, but I'm bummed that it's not available yet - I'm afraid I'll forget about it in a week.

<comment><USER34> If you have a bad memory, you should look into mail reminder services. You write something you want to be reminded of and they send you an email about it later on.

Or simply a Google Calendar event.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, I ended up adding a Google Keep entry.

This definitely seems like the case where collecting email would be appropriate - "Enter your email here to be reminded on the 28th", etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Congratulations for pursuing your dreams! I also work at a big game company, not even on a game but on an internal technology: no player will ever see directly the result of my contribution. I still feel great about my work because of reasons not important here, but I totally understand what the author says.

But feeling of being a little cog in the machine aside, some of what is said here is about failure of management: communication problems, useless meetings, bogus decision process, lack of visibility of who is impacted by a decision, etc. It's true that big projects are more difficult to manage than small ones, but in truth a bad management or bad coworker dynamics can destroy motivation in big or small companies alike. I have worked in a few startups and two indie game companies and all were plagued by mismanagement as much if not more than my other experiences at a bank and at a big cell-phone company. I may have been unlucky, but it may a simple truth about the programmer's job: working with other people is hard and team dynamics is very important.

</comment><comment><USER36> > No matter what's your job, you don't have a significant contribution on the > game. You're a drop in a glass of water, and as soon as you realize it, your > ownership will evaporate in the sun. And without ownership, no motivation.

This is why I left my 'dream job' of work working on a AAA MMORPG. I came on board early on as the first member of a 'NetOps' team, a senior linux systems administrator, which later split off and grew into a number of very large, very specialized teams. My loose definition of 'dream job' at that time was 'large scale' and 'video games'. Cool!

It took a few years for me to redefine what a 'dream job' really meant, and being a drop in a bucket was not it, so I left and moved on (slowly) to freelancing, and haven't looked back.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't work in the videogame industry, but I can totally relate. I work in a small website dev studio, and we interact with a lot of companies, both large (though not huge) and small.

As soon as you get people working on a project that are too specialized, no matter the size of the team, you inevitably get conflicting concerns. I think it's very important for managers to understand what those concerns are to be able to take the right decision.

I also think that even specialized people should have some knowledge of other specializations (e.g. designers that understand programming, and vice versa). On very large projects, this is impossible as there are just too many fields, but still I value very much "general knowledge" for that reason.

Anyway, good luck Maxime in your endeavors.

</comment><comment><USER38> I do not get why people, it seems, often use the "...or, how I learned to stop worrying and..." in their blog post titles. Are they doing it as an homage to the film Dr. Strangelove (I'm not sure if that was the originator of this alternate/sub title phrase), or, are they doing it because it has become a meme among bloggers?

If the latter, fine, at the worst they are unoriginal. If the former, then they haven't ever seen the movie, or, don't understand the movie and the absurdity of the title character nonetheless of "loving a bomb".

Or, this phrase is common and I erroneously associate its origin with the film.

In every case but the last, it irks me, but for no good reason ultimately.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, lots of phrases get stripped of their interesting meaning as they become tired second-hand cliches. It's not unusual to see someone quoting a quote of a quote, completely unaware of the original source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This quote stood out to me:

"On large scale projects, good communication is – simply put – just impossible. How do you get the right message to the right people? You can't communicate everything to everyone, there's just too much information. There are hundreds of decisions being taken every week. Inevitably, at some point, someone who should have been consulted before making a decision will be forgotten. This creates frustration over time."

This is an issue I've wrestled with over the years - too small a company and your resources are limited, too large and progress mires, and it mires because of communication.

</comment><comment><USER41> The problem of companies like Ubisoft is mass market approach. Big publishers prefer commercial mass market art to good art. In result, more interesting games come out from independent studios like inXile, Obsidian, CD Projekt Red and others. Not sure how it looks from insider's standpoint, but from gamer's standpoint, big publishers like Ubisoft and EA are plain boring and their games can be compared to pulp fiction and you don't expect to see masterpieces from them (coincidentally they are also most often plagued by DRM in contrast with games from independent studios).

</comment><comment><USER42> Late to the party and this doesn't address what the OP said directly, but the state of the video game industry actually makes me quite sad.

The last AAA game I played was Oblivion, which I couldn't finish. I haven't really played a AAA game since, and have only played two video games all the way through since (Braid, and Monument Valley).

When the OP talks about working on a project so big that no one person really "grocks" the whole thing I can relate, but I also want to say "it shows".

IMO, the current state of AAA games is shit. I think the reason they are this way have to do with what the OP is complaining about, the originating vision of the game comes from Marketing not an artist, and no one person has vision for the game. Maybe video games just have too many resources at there disposal.

I think I read somewhere that either Ocarina of Time or Mario 64 had double or triple the playable content of the released game and Miyamoto had a perfectionist eye for the game and was merciless in what made the cut.

Resource constraints are a good thing, IMO, as it forces people to make a razor focused product that trims the fat mercilessly.

Having unlimited resources is the enemy of good decision making, and it shows in the current state of video games (and film too). Games and movies are just too long/full these days.

</comment><comment><USER43> Fulfillment through structured 40hr+ a week labor is an illusion

</comment><comment><USER44> Fantastic write up. I know this feeling all too well.

A bit related is when you work in big companies like Apple and Tesla. These guys have a "hero" at the top. There is nothing you can do but wait for that headline that talks about a feature you made and it was Elon Musk's doing or Job's amazing leadership. I have nothing against these two but it is very demotivating to work.

<comment><USER45> You should usually get the praise internally from the boss and all your peers know it's down to you. But externally, and the public, you get nothing, and the boss gets all the praise.

<comment><USER44> Yes and that's soul crushing (to me). Especially if the boss makes no mention of you even in passing. The problem with BigCos is you can do nothing about this, other than climbing the ladder. I feel small companies have a nice mix, I know the developers of many startups by name and what they do because of the very fact that they can come out and talk about their work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> So let me just throw this out there, we will always have to answer to someone. Whether it's our middle manager in a big organization, VCs telling us how fast we need to grow, or our demanding users because they are the only way to get revenue.

All software written at this stage is small cogs on a much bigger platform written by teams of brilliant people over the last 30-40 years.

I do think it's fair to say you want to work on actual interesting problems and being one of 20-40 people working on a game engine is probably very tedious. I imagine long code-review cycles since any tiny change could destabilize the entire system several layers up.

Some people need big organization structure to produce their best work while some people need the freedom to have infinite WFH days answering to users to produce their own best.

<comment><USER47> Get financial independence! If you can support yourself with your investments (I'm personally aiming for REITs, MLPs, and holding companies -- I want dividends, not capital gains), you can work on whatever problems you like, whether they pay or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've worked for a couple of small games studios, and once for a big studio working on a AAA game. The headcount observations resonate.. I remember our teams growing, and growing, and growing, and each extra programmer detracted from the "community" feeling of being part of a studio, and added to the complexity of developing such a large code base with so many devs.

Compare that to small studios, where you can really feel like part of a family. It's very different, and all these kinds of feelings are more intense than other IT companies I've worked at. (Probably partly because of the extra time you tend to spend there when working in the games industry...)

Having said that -- some of my best friends were made when working at the big AAA studio! So it's not all bad.

</comment><comment><USER49> This was a great read. I worked at a large web agency once and did some pretty decent work. It is definitely rewarding to see people use something that you worked hard on and to see it on tv and in magazines, etc. But that yearn to do your own thing, blaze your own path is a feeling that I'm certain most people who work in creative fields go though.

Sidenote: before he said that the small projects were cancelled, I assumed that they were Evolve ([https://evolvegame.com/agegate/](https://evolvegame.com/agegate/)) (I don't follow games close enough to know which studio makes which game).

I'm curious as to how he was able to, I assume, bootstrap a game company for a year before releasing an iOS game.

</comment><comment><USER50> Good luck to him. Going Indie is a bold choice, especially after Steam Greenlight.

<comment><USER51> This is an odd comment as Steam Greenlight is currently one of the main drivers of getting indie games exposure when it would be near impossible otherwise.

Yes, Steam Greenlight has quality control issues, but it still has a purpose of getting games to the store without going through a publisher.

The environment has been better-than-ever for indies, especially as increasing costs make AAA games harder than ever to make. (in 2015 alone, we have Rocket League, Ark: Survival Evolved, and Undertale)

<comment><USER52> I guess the idea is that Steam Greenlight has grown the indie market and thus given him more competition.

<comment><USER53> I don't think it's necessarily so zero-sum. The videogame market is continuously growing, and competitively-priced indie games can still be a big success.

<comment><USER54> You don't even need to be a big success like the previously mentioned Undertale, Rocket League or Ark. For small teams there's an extremely viable middle ground between the game not selling anything and it going huge.

<comment><USER55> Exactly, AAA games have to make back their multimillion dollar budgets, indies don't have that same pressure.

<comment><USER53> Gunpoint and Risk of Rain are really good low-budget games that fall into that middle ground category. I'm fairly certain each were made by a single developer, but have been very successful.

<comment><USER55> Risk of Rain happens to be one of my favorite games! I'll have to check out Gunpoint.

<comment><USER56> And if you like Gunpoint, don't forget Ronin, also indie and also made by a single dev (and with a general aesthetic similar to Gunpoint, but different gameplay).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> > The team spirit was sooo good! Our motto was "on est crinqués!", which more > or less translates to "we're so hyped!". During our play sessions, we were > so excited we were screaming and shouting all over the place. I think it > bothered colleagues working next to us, but hell, we had so much fun. I > didn't feel too guilty.

Wow. IMO A dream job is a balance between having fun like you described and working on complex problems. I love how you have written this paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER58> I went to business school instead of tech because I too dream of running the head of the ship one day. Tech will always be an interest but I thirst for freedom.

<comment><USER59> What's your definition of freedom? Freedom to make major business decisions or freedom from obligations and responsibilities?

Running your own thing rarely means more free time than if you were working as a tech cog -- it often means much less free time.

<comment><USER58> the former :) isn't the ability to make decisions, to steer and to lead a sort of freedom? it is to me. You're right though - I attended fi.co for example and they scare people away day 1 with the expectation that a business owner needs to bleed all of their lifeblood into the business.

<comment><USER60> Not really, to me. There are (in my experience) very few companies where you have one genius spending most his time making decisions and a bunch of minions just implementing those genius decisions.

If I was to estimate I would say that for every 1 hour you spend making big genius decisions, you spend 99 hours convincing people why those decisions are right, listening to why they are not right, listening to what you should be doing instead, writing reports or communications, listening to what issues people have...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> tl;dr - feeling no ownership doing somebody else's big projects, he quit.

</comment><comment><USER62> Wow, cool stuff. I wish them the best.

I often had dreams of doing the same thing, especially inspired by this guy [http://www.konjak.org/](http://www.konjak.org/) .

It seemed like overkill for me as I could never get a team together.

Though with rise of VR, I've been looking into unity3d. How cool would it be to build your own world, then jump in and visit it.

</comment><comment><USER63> There are no dream jobs, just jobs or dreams:

. Build your own company and you will finish accepting profit as flagship.

. Find a job where you lead the direction and internal politics will make you adapt to a whole way against their life goals.

. Make an open source project that no one will use.

</comment><comment><USER64> I used to work beside UBISOFT here in Montreal. I'd here them talk about videogames during lunch time and it was pitiful. It seemed like having colored hair and geek-chic was more important than actually knowing anything about videogames.

</comment><comment><USER65> We are all just cogs. What I learned is no matter what sized cog I am compared to others, just make sure my interaction with the other cogs is as smooth as possible. I take pride in doing good work no matter how small or large.

</comment><comment><USER66> This reminds me of this TED talk.[1]

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH2Ppjpcho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH2Ppjpcho)

</comment><comment><USER67> Put the guitar on ebay/reverb. Or just send it to me!

Best of luck :-)

</comment><comment><USER68> How large was the development team of Assassin's Creed Syndicate, at its peak? Is the overall budget known, as well?

I wonder how big the _really big_ nowadays is.

<comment><USER69> I don't know about ACS, but GTA5 had 1,000 people working on it at some point:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Aut...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Auto_V#Overview)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> For me my dream job can be writing CRUD web software as long as people need it and appreciate my work.

</comment><comment><USER71> How does this compare to Valve? Maybe having no deadlines can ease the specialization issue

</comment><comment><USER72> Make sure to check out his upcoming game, Openbar. It looks really, really good.</comment>


Tesla Autopilot Review: It classified ~30% of other cars, and 1% of bicyclists - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/startup-grind/tesla-autopilot-review-bikers-will-die-212a8be4d8e7 <comment><USER2> Hasn't this feature been out for like more than a year? Just saw an Elon tweet from last year talking about 250M miles logged on Autopilot... I feel like we would have heard about pedestrians/bikers being mowed down. I recall that the one death I have heard about, the car was not at fault.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Tesla Autopilot Review: Bikers will die"

Sensationalism.

Just because bike riders aren't labelled as such, doesn't mean that the Tesla software doesn't see them as _generic obstacles_ and avoid them successfully.

I commute via bike, so I'm certainly invested in Teslas not killing me...</comment>


ASK HN: Request for macOS browser recommendations - <AUTHOR> Can I get your opinion on which browser I should be running for macOS from a security & privacy standpoint?
My current setup is Safari 11.0.3 w/ 'Prevent cross-site tracking' & 'Ask websites not to track me' enabled. I also have the extension Better (2017.4) installed.
(I have Brave (0.21.18) installed as a backup, but rarely use it.)
Would I be better using eg. Chrome w/ Certbot, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger or similar?
One reason I ask is I've seen recommendations re. physical U2F devices. I use a password manager and 2FA wherever available, but Chrome seems to be the only mainstream browser that handles 2FA at the moment.
Any and all advice gratefully received. Thanks, and sorry if I missed this topic on a search. <comment><USER2> You don't have to choose a browser. You can have multiple browsers and use each as needed for its strengths.

Sort of sidestepping your question because I don't know either which browser is best from the standpoints you talk about. But I have other advice:

One measure that helps a lot with privacy, though it doesn't solve everything, is to use your own private VPN hosted on a service like Digital Ocean. I do this with Firefox. Unfortunately Safari doesn't have a per-app setting for proxies (it's system-wide or nothing with Safari last time I checked), otherwise I would just use Safari. Anyway because I'm using a VPN, my ISP doesn't have a full record of every URL I've ever visited. Digital Ocean would be in a position to have a full record, but at least that's not a business they are actively trying to monetize as far as I can tell, unlike, sadly, my ISP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I have used a couple of VPNs in the past, but it's not an 'every session' thing for me. Should it be?</comment></comment>


Help me Hack? - <AUTHOR>

Trying to play a file that is resident in iTunes and has the "fairplay" DRM through a local AIR (Flash) Client. Ideas? <comment><USER2> Easy solution? Burn it to a CD and re-import it to iTunes, giving you a MP3 file. I don't think you can play Fairplay-protected files using anything other than iTunes, but you could of course use AppleScript from the AIR client to make iTunes play the file. But that's probably more trouble than it's worth.

</comment><comment><USER3> Y!Hack may not be the best forum for finding answers to tech issues. You might try ask.metafilter.com, some smart folks over there and they dig those types of questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Order a CD containing the song from Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER5> Most Y-Combinator folk are in the USA, as such, breaking the protections on this would violate the DMCA.

IANAL, just saying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not trying to break the protection, just play the file. No copying, converting etc......</comment></comment>