5 days before our YC interview we've changed our idea. Help us prove the market. - <AUTHOR> http://dintu.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Keeping a medical diary sucks. We're building something better: An app that periodically asks you questions about your lifestyle and symptoms, and learns to cater its questions and suggestions just for you.

We're aiming to tackle all kinds of chronic medical conditions, starting with migraines. Please register here if you are interested: <http://dintu.com>

<comment><USER2> I think you need a bit more here then just headaches to start with. Seems like you could broaden your initial offering to include other medical maladies that require logging.

My dad needed to start tracking his blood pressure / heart rate / glucose levels at multiple times of day and having a text that acted as a reminder and a reply that acted as a log with the data would've been perfect for him.

Is the number of people that need to log this other information > or < than the number of people that want to track headache triggers. I've honestly never met someone that wanted to track headache triggers but know a lot of people that need to track other medical issues.

Maybe people with those other medical issues tend to be older than the target audience for an iPhone app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not personally interested because I don't get migraines, but I like the "don't keep a diary, we'll just ping you occasionally" method. Very unique, and very interesting. I hate keeping logs, but I respond to texts all the time. If I got a ping a couple times a day with questions that tailored themselves to my habits over time, I could definitely see myself responding. It takes a HUGE hurdle out of the equation.

Knowing people who have had to do this because they get migraines, your process seems like a great idea!

Best of luck. I really like the model.

<comment><USER4> That's a great idea.

A few months ago, my girlfriend was having an allergic reaction to _SOMETHING_. Itching, swelling, hives, the works. We went through a huge list of trial and error: Seafood? Nope. The grass outside? Nope. Soap? Nope. Shampoo? On and on through foods, chemicals, common allergens, etc.

It became pretty cumbersome and we'd forgotten what we had tried and not tried, etc.

We eventually figured it out but something like what you suggested would have been a great tool to have at our disposal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html> #3

<comment><USER6> Absolutely not a marginal niche. If you could predict with reasonable accuracy when someone would get a migraine, all the migraine sufferers I've known would HAPPILY pay for that knowledge. When you're dealing with side effects like loss of memory, loss of vision, vomiting, etc., people would like to know when's a good time to stay home!

<comment><USER7> Just because it's useful to some people doesn't mean it's not a marginal niche. Consider what percentage of the people you know are migraine sufferers, how many of them seek treatment and then of those how many would regularly use a service to monitor their triggers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suffer from migraines and it's very unlikely I'd use any type of digital medical journal. I say that from the experience of setting one up for myself. Due to light sensitivity trying to look at a monitor just makes things much worse for me. Trying to look at a cell phone is torture. Between the brightness of the screen and the small focal area it's just not worth it. Migraine sufferers often report sensitivity to light so I doubt it would be just me finding it impractical.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know how you intend to do your data analysis, but...

I have had an idea for a smartphone app on my Big List for years. This app would implement lag-sequential analysis (see for example <http://www2.gsu.edu/~psyrab/references.pdf>). I haven't actually used it (which is part of why I have procrastinated this one), but my understanding is that LSA is basically a chi-squared analysis with a time function. Chi-squared compares expected vs. actual incidence of something. So LSA would look at expected vs. actual incidence of X happening following Y. The prototypical test would be to prove/disprove that chocolate milk makes kindergarten kids more violent. But you could (as I envisioned it) generalize it to sniff out all kinds of factors that might systematically precede migraines or whatever.

You'll also need to explain to people that a negative result might not be a reliable one unless you get a lot of data and record all variables reliably.

I'm not sure how much my app idea overlaps with yours, but I will cheer you on in any case.

</comment><comment><USER10> A migraine is the only thing in my life that brought me to the point of wanting to end it. Oddly, I don't get them anymore now that I work from home, but for 20 years they plagued me like a demon.

</comment><comment><USER11> As a lifelong sufferer of migraines (I literally fear them on a daily basis and they impact my travel, and work plans regularly).. I'd certainly love to see something like this work.

I'm a bit of a rare case in that I've never been able to identify my triggers and none of the migraine medications work for me.

<comment><USER8> I'm also a lifelong sufferer who has found no trigger or treatment that works. I've seen more doctors than I can keep track of and none had indicated that it was uncommon, of course that could be because I'm primarily seeing specialists.

<comment><USER11> Uncommon? Yes.. The newish beta-blocker meds are reported to work for a pretty large percentage of sufferers (85% or so, I think). If you look at the percentages across the different types of meds, I think you and I are in a relatively significant minority of people that can't find relief without narcotics.

<comment><USER8> I hadn't heard of the beta blockers having such a large success rate. I'll have to look more into that. I tried Propranolol with no luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's a great idea but it's not a big business and likely uninteresting to YC or other investors. Wikipedia tells me that 10% of the world's population has had a migrane (<https://www.thieme- connect.de/DOI/DOI?10.1055/s-0030-1249220>) but how many of those have them regularly? How many seek help? How many would use a tool to manage their triggers?

I think you would be better off canceling the interview, explaining why you are abandoning you last idea and trying again next cycle.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think this would be viable if you interviewed doctors and asked what questions they would ask patients if they had access to them 24/7, and then showed a significant increase in success in treating these patients. Also, I think there's a big connection between what you eat and your health (especially chronic illness), and a lot of people keep food diaries. Mixing a food diary with a symptom log could be excellent.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've gotten migraine headaches for the last 8-10 years, and I still do not keep a diary.

My initial reaction is that different migraine sufferers would need to be asked different questions at different intervals. I would recommend:

\- Have the user access the app/site when they notice they are having a migraine. At that point ask a battery of questions to see if the "triggers" can be narrowed down. I personally have three triggers.

\- Once the user has confirmed a migraine, THEN you should ping the user to see how bad it is, what the current symptoms are, and if is ongoing. I generally have migraines lasting for 3-5 hours with varying symptoms depending on what "stage" I'm in. I have 4 distinct "symptom stages".

==

I'm beginning to understand what PG means now when he says YC looks for teams more than ideas. Please do not take that as a knock against this idea - I do not mean in that way. I would be confident in my team and be honest about it's limitations and potential. As someone in the Healthcare IT line of work, there is a TON of space open to an intelligent young team.

Best of luck.

<comment><USER8> My phone beeping and buzzing at me mid migraine would result in the phone being launched into the nearest wall. These guy's might have more luck with something other than headaches since many migraine sufferers find the pain can be debilitating. If they stick with migraines I hope they take that into account.

When I kept a medical diary for mine the only thing that really worked was pencil and paper because I could actually tolerate writing on a yellow legal pad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have no idea if changing your business plan five days before your interview is a good idea or not.

I can say, however, that I know someone who would find something like this very interesting. I've passed your link along. He's a life long migraine sufferer so maybe this will help him track things down.

</comment><comment><USER14> What kind of 'subject matter expertise' do you have on-board?

</comment><comment><USER15> I will definitely use this if you can generalize it. I don't normally get migraines, but it would be great to correlate things like sore throats, stomach aches, fingernail ridges, skin breakouts, etc. to external factors like food, weather, and pollution.

</comment><comment><USER16> Out of curiosity: What was your original idea?

</comment><comment><USER17> I have migraines on occasion, but I hate doing diaries. I think if it had some FitFu like appeal and made me want to use it, I might be down.

Bill / Tatiana... good luck!

</comment><comment><USER18> I am hoping at least one of you is a "domain expert" on migranes ... else this app is just gonna be using "trending" logic which might not really work.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't have a migraine problem, but I tweeted and shared on FB. Have you analysed any twitter data to predict past headaches for people?

</comment><comment><USER20> Take a look at Mappiness: <http://www.mappiness.org.uk/> It's a UK university research project to measure happiness across different settings. It would ping you with some quick questions a few times a day.

Functionality is similar; it it may offer learnings.

</comment><comment><USER21> Forwarded to my wife, who gets far too many headaches. Interesting concept, good luck.

<comment><USER22> ditto - sent to my girlfriend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Keep track of what I eat and drink then when I get certain symptoms you can tell me what recently changed in my diet that may be the cause.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seen patientslikeme.com?

</comment><comment><USER24> 1a. Come up with strawman idea. 1b. Come up with real idea. 2. Publicly "pivot"* on HN. 3. Funding?

A least there's a step two...

* Could we please declare "pivot" an exhausted concept and move on to the next start-up buzzword?

<comment><USER25> That a term is overused does not mean the underlying concept is exhausted.

<comment><USER24> Maybe I'm too Buddhist or something but "pivot" has come to mean, "observing and adapting to what the universe is saying," which is another word for not being obstinate. It's a linguistic gang sign the insecure flash to show their starters group membership.

It irritates me because listening to MBAs speak is an exercise in suicide preparation, and starters are accumulating their own distinct but equivalent lexicon of fancy words that refer to simple, everyday concepts.</comment></comment></comment>


The Software Developer's Library: A Treasure Trove of Books - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-software-developer-s-library-a-treasure-trove-of-books-for-people-who-love-code-f9bc92c7883b <comment><USER2> no, this is a treasure trove of AMZN links.</comment>


Show HN: YComments Embedded HN Discussions - <AUTHOR> https://ycomments.benwinding.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys,

Most websites discussed on Hacker News or Reddit, have no link to the original post.

I made this for websites who want to show that people ARE talking about their pages.

(also this post will be embedded on the link above!)

Feedback appreciated, Ben</comment>


Countries Statistics API - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I am looking for countries statistics like population, poverty level some kind a api for grab the datas. Is there any ? Thanks <comment><USER2> You could take a look at the United Nations Demographic Statistics on Azure Marketplace. [http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/unitednations/demographi...](http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/unitednations/demographic)

[http://datamarket.azure.com/browse/data?category=demographic...](http://datamarket.azure.com/browse/data?category=demographics&publisher=68c1c378-2326-458d-ac46-53fbf7e4f374&sort=publisher)

</comment><comment><USER3> You could try scraping the CIA World Factbook, which should have all of that information. There's no formal API, but someone has written a scraper[0] that you could rerun to get newer data (or, for that matter, you could write your own scraper).

[0]: <https://github.com/twigkit/worldfactbook-dataset>

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried looking at the World Data Bank?

<http://databank.worldbank.org/data/home.aspx></comment>


Tales of an Aging Gamer: We keep getting older, the games stay the same - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/tales-of-an-aging-gamer-why-dont-i-pick-up-a-controller-as-often-as-i-used-to/ <comment><USER2> I sort of fit the mould described, so does my partner, but I think there's more to it. We're in our 50s, and started with Defender and Tempest, even Space Invaders in the arcades. :) Yes, I've definitely lost interest in MMOs, any social gaming, and 95% of anything that is on consoles or counts as an AAA title.

I _think_ that's as much because most of those games contain tons of what I'd call cynical time and money sinks. Loot boxes, RNG designed to keep you playing "enough" so force you to farm. Building weapons and armour, delays or maps, even the whole gameplay around those $$ related additions. I don't like open world games that are so tightly on rails it's almost like playing an old laserdisc game like Dragon's Lair. The first couple of Call of Duty games were very much this. So dull.

We mostly play indie titles and can spend as much time as we ever did. We spend time because it's fun. If it's designed to take time, I'll try something else. Sometimes, they'll take far more hours than the alleged AAA titles. Factorio, Shenzen or some of the recent (and very welcome) resurrection of turn based RPGs like Divinity and Pillars of Eternity have all felt far more substantial than any major titles.

Of the majors I can think of Civ and Skyrim, and if Paradox count as a major Europa Universalis. That really is about it. Of the rest, I couldn't care less. I'd prefer Skyrim to be, or at least feel, more like the depth and complexity of Morrowind.

I think we both tend to play in shorter spurts - real life shows up that bit more.

How much of that is me aging, and how much the arrival of the ability to milk revenue from every game? :)

<comment><USER3> I've been playing games off and on a long time. I had pretty much lost interest in social gaming, but Fortnite came around and it was fun enough for me to keep at it. Now I have decent enough skill to at least compete with the presumably younger people that sink hours and hours daily into it. And interestingly, I find that I approach the game tactics with a bit more wisdom and circumspection than I would've as a younger man, which can be an advantage.

Now, I wholeheartedly agree on your assessment of many games being cynical time and money sinks. It's really a shame. The coolest thing to me about a video game is the world it creates. And I'd rather not my time in that world be devoted to picking up coins everywhere. BioShock Infinite, I'm looking at you. Horizon Zero Dawn, on the other hand, does have some monotony, but overall the game is so enthralling you don't even mind. We need more games like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I stopped calling myself a gamer years ago after I found myself playing less than 2 new games a year. I realized it was like calling myself a movie buff and only watching a handful a year.

Part of it is that games no longer challenge me like they once did. I played through Breath of the Wild and of the 100 or so puzzle shrines, only a few took more than 5 seconds to figure out their gimmick. However my girlfriend played it and would routinely get stuck for multiple hours. She is smart, but did not grow up playing games like I did. Her play style reminds me of how I played through them as a child. I have just learned all the tricks, the little hints that game developers put in to guide the player. BOTW is a well designed game, but that means it uses standard patterns to teach the player, and I am more attuned to those patterns than she is.

The other side of challenge in games is just grinding skill. Like learning all the characters in Smash Brothers and how to counter them, or improving my aim in Counter Strike. At the end of the day that is a more muscle memory based skill, and I am just not interested in sinking the time into it.

Rogue likes are the closest to the challenge I'm looking for. But even those eventually reduce to memorizing all the random events and forming a plan based on possible future events.

</comment><comment><USER5> For me games are competence porn. The good ones create an illusion of competence like movies create an illusion of motion. They've helped me realize that I have a deep need for that feeling, one I don't seem to get enough of from the few areas I'm actually competent in.

But then the bubble bursts. It turns out that not only am I not that competent in reality, I'm not even competent at the game that just made me feel competent. Five minutes on Twitch proves that.

So beyond a certain point it feels like a bad habit, and keeping it below that point is about as easy as eating one Dorito.

<comment><USER6> I've definitely been using games for the purposes of finding this sense of comptency/accomplishment that I also desire and appear to be lacking in meat space despite becoming a senior in three years

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm in my early 30s now, and while I agree with some points in the article (no interest in competitive, minimal interest in twitch-reliant anything) I've still been able to find a few games a year that really capture me.

2018 - Subnautica, God of War

2017 - Horizon Zero Dawn, Prey, Sundered

2016 - Hitman 2016, Life is Strange

2015 - MGS 5, Invisible Inc

2014 - The Long Dark, Factorio

I feel like there's quite a bit of variety out there (these days more then ever), and while I've gradually dropped various genres from my list of "things I'm willing to play", there's still enough to keep it as one of my primary sources of entertainment. Roguelikes/roguelites, especially, have done well the past few years (Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, FTL, Risk of Rain, Darkest Dungeon, etc.) and provide high quality, no filler gameplay at low cost, and often in convenient time increments.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ahh, yes this speaks right to me. I went through a loop in the latter half of 2018 trying all the best of modern gaming: World of Warcraft, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Breath of the Wild...

I have always loved games and been an enthusiastic gamer, but there was precious little fun to be had. My keyboard wary hands went through the motions, and I sat on my arse.

I sold off all my systems and found my mind open wide for reading again. Now, I have since discovered gog.com and it seems to be a splendourous portal for gamers of age. Casual, strategic, relaxing... It is much more my speed.

For me, I am a gamer — but my tastes rapidly and deeply changed with time. Smaller doses, more puzzling puzzles, and less comrades.

</comment><comment><USER9> In my case, the games literally stay the same. I keep coming back to a handful of games. Master of Magic. Panzer General. XCOM2: Terror From the Deep. Railroad Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon 2. Sid Meirs' Alpha Centauri. Heroes of Might and Magic 2. The last game I've added to the rotation is FTL. I have next to no time for gaming, so I'm very happy to fire up DosBox or Wine and spend 20 minutes with an old favorite.

What all those games have in common is that I know them very well, it's easy to save at any point and come back later, and I can play them from my archive without looking for a physical disc.

</comment><comment><USER10> >Despite a wider variety than ever before, video games don't have the same effect on me as they used to.

I must have hit the jackpot then, because in my 40s, games absolutely feel to me now like they used to. They continue to excite me and some of them even still take over all my free time for a while, pushing out all my other hobbies and what little social life I have.

Do all of them? Nope, but they didn't all hit me like that back in my teens, either. Some of them are just astounding, though, and after playing one of those games I actually get a little sad that no other game is there to take me up to that same level of fun.

The most recent game for me like that was Ni No Kuno 2, which turned out to be a lot better than I expected. (I hated the combat in NNK 1 and didn't complete it, and wasn't expecting much from NNK 2.) So glad to be proven wrong there.

Other games like Uru, Fallout New Vegas, and The Witness have done the same in the past, and there's usually at least 1 each year that does it for me, if not more.

Many of the games that don't hit that level of obsession still are a ton of fun, too.

</comment><comment><USER11> An interesting side-effect emerges. The total video game backlog stretches far back into history, with many games from the past 10 years alone still being relevant today.

As a single data point to add to the discussion, while Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is available for sale, I chose to purchase Modern Warfare 2 instead, for me, my wife, and a few friends for below the cost of a single license for the former game. The graphics and gameplay are considerably richer, in my opinion, than PUBG and Fortnite. The graphics are comparable.

This is a staggering revelation to me. To get something dramatically better in terms of visual fidelity, I would have to purchase a game like Battlefield V. But the cost is unappealing in a global market with several industries increasing prices across the board.

I'm searching for better values in a world with increasing costs, and finding that many people are still playing these older games, in part because they're not much different than new blockbusters.

Additionally, I'd rather not pay 60 USD for what has been called at times a "beta." I'm good.

<comment><USER12> You actually only have to go back a year or two to pick up AAA titles for £5 or so.

I recently picked up Batman Arkham Knight for £4 and Doom for ~£7. Both absolutely phenomenal games, graphics that rival anything out in 2018 and of course all those nasty PC port bugs totally squashed.

It also means building a PC capable of doing them justice is a little more affordable too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a statistical issue with the study he quotes, I didn't dig deep enough to find a conclusion:

Is the study longitudinal, ie does it follow gamers as they get older?

You want to do that, because you don't want to confuse the issue of what cohort the gamer belongs to. You want to differentiate between "people like games less as they age" and "people who were born in 1980 like games less than people born in 1990".

In my own experience, once you have kids, that's it. You can't invest in any game that takes time to learn. Before kids, you could have a 2nd job healing or tanking for 3-8 hours every evening after your real life job. Or working on your shooting skills. Or watching RTS videos.

Now I can do casual gaming, which works when you're commuting, but it's not nearly the same commitment.

<comment><USER14> I would also like to see more about the effects of generation/cohort on this issue. We took our Vive and our Switch to my parents' for the holidays, and my nearly 70-year-old parents really enjoyed them. They both _really_ got into Beat Saber, while my dad picked up Mario Kart and Smash really fast, and my mom is diving into Divinity: Original Sin 2 (and has been playing Bejeweled and Chuchel on her own).

They were born in the early 50s, long before computers and consoles were anything like mainstream. They watched us game as kids, but it wasn't until very recently that either of them has actually tried playing much. They're both responding to games like teenagers, but that's anecdotes, not data.

I'd love to know if it's an issue of age alone, age+responsibilities (i.e., do 30- to 40-year-olds who don't have kids or other time-consuming responsibilities shift their preferences the same way equivalent-aged parents do?), or _age of their gaming career_ (i.e., do people who pick up gaming in their middle years or later start with the same interests as young gamers and gradually age out of them with time, or do they start with the interests of "old" gamers?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm almost 40, and haven't really played video games since college. No time, no interest..and I'm not really that great at video games anyway.

For christmas, I bought my kids a Switch, and I've definitely been playing it way more than them. Just finished Mario Odyssey, and it was a lot of fun, and I think I may be addicted. Getting the new Zelda later today...

I think my brain just needed the right game and some time off. 20 years did the trick.

<comment><USER16> In my huge comment in this thread I make the argument that games that don't try to pull you in are more appealing to older gamers.

I don't want business to try and addict me. I don't even want character progression or saves of any kind -- except your story progress.

I feel part of console games and a lot of handheld consoles -- and older- generation games like Half Life, Quake and Mortal Kombat -- get it right.

Nowadays most games try their damnest to latch onto our sunk cost fallacy brain vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER17> I've found that as I've gotten older (only 26, mind you), I've turned to more single-player games. In fact, the only multiplayer games I play regularly are _Path of Exile_ , Smash (and I play mostly solo mode, or against friends locally) and Splatoon (which is the only shooter I like). While I don't mind grinding for levels to beat a boss and such, I don't want to have to grind my technical skills at the game just to have fun. And, since that's all a lot of online games are, it gets extremely frustrating and tiresome really quickly. Plus, I've found that a lot of single player games are also less likely to try to tempt you into buying stuff -- like hell am I going to buy anything (DLC excluded, of course) when I'm already paying $60 for the base game! And, becuase of that, I think they don't try as hard to make them super addictive, since they're not counting on many sells from that aspect of them; sadly, I've also found enjoyable single player games getting less and less common...

<comment><USER16> Same here for me and my wife. We only haven't bought the PS4 Pro because we can't find enough place to put the couch but we're working on that.

Many modern PC games imitate the mobile games monetization model and are increasingly hostile to any semblance of long-lasting community. Throw in the mix the clueless multiplayer implementations of many games where people are as toxic as it can get and it's easily understandable why so many people leave those games when the novelty wears off.

We're gonna transition fully to console [and partially to PC] single player games with good stories and graphics (Lara Croft, Horizon: Zero Dawn, God of War come to mind) -- as soon as we handle our logistics problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am really struggling to enjoy games at the moment, the last memorable ones have been

* Arma 3 because its a sandbox and I can script my own missions etc.

* Doom reboot, purely for the nostalgia

For older games from my childhood like Half Life, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Command and Conquer. I might dust them out for an hour or two but the novelty goes away quickly, maybe its because of ageing graphics or I don't remember them as I used to.

Another factor is that working on a PC all day makes its less desirable for me to then come home and sit on my home PC and play games.

The reboot situation is interesting as it gives companies a chance to make money out of an old IP and the fanbase can rekindle some of their younger days playing those games.

<comment><USER19> > I might dust them out for an hour or two but the novelty goes away quickly

This has been my experience as well. Over the last few years over and over again I'll start games I've played before but within an hour or two I've lost interest in playing. I remember enough of the overall plot and mechanics that the only thing that still sticks out to me is the repetitive, grindy bits of the game (and all games have them). A few times I've turned to cheating to level characters, unlock stuff, bypass all the grind parts and just enjoy the story or game mechanics, but even then it's not as interesting as it used to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can identify with playing games less as I age, and I agree with a lot of what they are saying. When I was in high school, A lot of my hobbies/social activity were built into schooling, so at the end of the day, I had time to come home and play.

As an adult, I have social circles both within and outside of my job, a relationship (though she likes playing video games too), I have new hobbies, and hobbies that I can't do at work. I also have time and money to be able to go out and do new things that I couldn't do when I was younger.

As a result, when I do play, usually it is in 30 to 45 minute spurts, usually the weekend. Even then, it is usually a social thing. My siblings and I have Switches, and we have been bonding over playing online with each other (we don't live near each other), or I will play with my significant other.

The competitive one is an interesting thing. I have never been a competitive person, but I think the competitiveness drops off because off bad experiences. I completely stopped playing Magic the Gathering because of dealing with toxic players, and I played online with strangers for exactly one session, and that was soured by toxic gamers. I imagine a lot of others have had similar experiences, and that sours that sort of competition for the majority of people.

EDIT: I forgot to add, being on a computer for 8 hours a day at work also really kills my desire to stare at another screen for even more time.

<comment><USER21> I can concur with the lack of patience for dealing with other players. I spent entirely too much time with counterstrike, but having a prepubescent kid call me a noob because my skills have atrophied is the last thing i want to do in my spare time.

I've actually gravitated towards single-player, mainly due to time constraints. That is one of the reasons I still love FTL, I can actually do an entire playthrough in one sitting. And the only multi-player game I play is Elite Dangerous, which is boredom personified (and I haven't seen another player in game in over 9 months).

I don't agree with the doom and gloom tone of the article, however. In my experience, there has never been a better time to be a gamer with non- mainstream tastes. Especially if you are on PC, the indie market and kickstarter have revived things like CRPGS.

<comment><USER20> I agree %100 with the indie market. I think the two most played games on my Switch are Overcooked 1/2 and Stardew Valley. Overcooked 2 has been awesome in that my siblings, our significant others, and I can get on a phone chat then play it as if we are on the couch together. We have been carving out a night a week so we can do it, and it has been a great experience.

Sadly, we wanted to do that with Super Mario Party and Super Smash Bros (we played those games extensively as kids), and both of those games online mode are hampered to the point that we tried playing it once, then going back to Overcooked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> kris-s If this article resonates with you, here are some games I'd recommend you try. They are all indie puzzle games, they can all be easily picked up and put down in a moment, and they're all fairly cross platform.

\- Monument Valley

\- A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build

\- Mini Metro

\- Braid

\- The Witness

\- Snakebird

\- Gunpoint

<comment><USER22> All great recommendations. More indie gems:

\- Spelunky

\- Don't Starve

\- Factorio

\- Stardew Valley

\- Faster than Light

\- Kerbal Space Program

\- Dungeon Warfare (if you're a TD fan)

\- Return of Obra Dinn

\- Cities: Skylines

\- Frostpunk

\- All Zachtronic's games

\- RimWorld

\- Darkest Dungeon

<comment><USER23> Factorio was great at first, but at some point it felt like work. I'm a systems engineer, and I begun asking myself why I'm doing this, when it's basically what I do all day long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rc-1140 I could keep playing shooters for as long as my hands could hold out as I aged, but all of the new ones are so bad. The last shooter that I saw that wasn't a student project/impeccably tiny indie venture and actually managed to capture the spirit of shooting while applying good modernization was DOOM 4 (the DOOM reboot). I'm super excited for Rage 2 and DOOM Eternal, and I say that as someone who was bored to tears by Rage 1 to the point where I put 45 minutes into it and stopped. The last good multiplayer shooter was Tribes Ascend, and that had plenty of flaws apart from being developed by Hi-Rez.

Meanwhile, JRPGs are there for me as the shooter market has been swallowed up by the battle royale genre and Overwatch. If anything, I'm enjoying JRPGs more now than I did when I was younger. Indie (FTL, Immortal Redneck) and Doujin (Momodora, 100% Orange Juice) games have also been coming along in a big way as well. Age of Empires 2 is there for me in the modern day on modern systems with the HD release and the expansion packs, but it and Brood War Remastered seem to be the exceptions for RTS rather than the norm. I also picked up Smash Brothers for the first time in give-or-take 15 years, and I'm having a blast. There's so much work being put in to making these games fun.

I wish shooters were as interesting as they used to be. Even relatively new stuff like Tribes Ascend was a blast; easy enough to get into, but with enough of a skill ceiling to really sink your teeth into it. If anything, getting older has just left me for a want for something other than CounterStrike and far better than battle royales and Overwatch.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am not QUITE at this person's point yet, as I am currently 29. But I am struggling to find a game I enjoy lately.

I would argue that games have not stayed the same. Video games have become aggressively monetized at the expense of the consumer. Companies are now looking to exploit a small percentage of core users, "whales", hoping to get them to spend hundreds of dollars on microtransactions.

There is also a focus on "live services". Basically releasing the game as a poorly constructed product, and then slowly updating it over years and years while charging for the updates along the way. Look at the most played games right now, and you will notice very few of them are from 2018, but rather are older games that have been continually updated.

Some examples:

1\. The other day I logged back into my Destiny 2 account after lapsing over the holiday seasons, and to my dismay I discover that I am now expected to pay an additional $20 on top of the $80 I have already paid total for the game.

2\. So, I decide to log into a game that had launched around a year ago but was not in a state I considered acceptable, Battletech. I figured more time in the oven would make it better. BOOM. $20 season pass, otherwise I am locked out of new parts of the game.

3\. So I switch over to Call of Duty Black Ops: 4, a game I had not played in a few months but thought was fun enough when I started playing. In the time between they added gameplay affecting micro-transactions AND a $20 "expansion pack" that consisted of a few levels.

4\. Last year's Star Wars BattleFront 2 was LAMBASTED due to being a full- priced $60 product which monetized all progression with an absurdly expensive loot-box scheme. After people did the math they realized it could cost hundreds of dollars to acquire some of the characters in the game, and that the drops from the loot boxes heavily influenced gameplay.

Video games have become excessively monetized. Companies have realized they can make more money by making the same games over and over again. Gone is the risky, interesting "AA" games of the last generation. Now the only games are being made are extremely expensive to produce and obnoxiously monetized "AAA" games. Now that these companies have gotten a taste of the loot-box whale money, they do not want to go without it.

Take a look at the work done by Jim Sterling for a more detailed analysis.

edit, adding more thoughts:

Another thing is that they are all the same games. Low TTK shooters turned into team shooters transformed into Battle Royale games.

There is nothing like Unreal Tournament or Quake anymore. Games with interesting movement mechanics. It is all low TTK tactical shooters. Low TTK is an equalizer between low-skill and high-skill players. Even a very bad player can get a point if they sneak up on a good player.

The thing is, the mobile game industry is RAKING IN CASH and the AAA game industry wants a piece of that action. It is becoming hard to justify creating Call of Duty 5 if you can make a lame gatcha mobile game and make more money. Investors want that mobile game money so the big game companies are getting desperate chasing that dragon.

<comment><USER25> Sorry to focus on a single point from a longer post, but...

> There is nothing like Unreal Tournament or Quake anymore. Games with > interesting movement mechanics.

Both Paladins and Overwatch have characters with interesting movement, to the point where almost every Overwatch character has a movement ability. Both are following in the footsteps of TF2 movement. In contrast, the funky movement mechanics in Quake weren't always explicitly designed and were often much more difficult to execute properly - that's fine in a symmetric game but causes balance issues in anything asymmetric.

Fortnite and CoD have both added a grappling hook, and Fortnite in particular seems to be experimenting quite a bit with movement via jump pads, planes, trolleys, bouncey-shardy-things (you can tell I don't play it...). The latest Spiderman game has seen universal praise for the swinging movement. My personal favorite game of 2018 was Wizard of Legend, which has a no-cooldown dash ability - something that would normally break balance.

Anyway, I think I'm just trying to say there's a ton of experimentation with movement mechanics in modern games.

<comment><USER24> I was gold rank in Overwatch and I just did not end up enjoying the game. There is a lot to love in the game, but I stand by what I said.

Compare Overwatch and Paladins to Quake or Tribes and the differences are stark.

The movement mechanics in Overwatch are less interesting TO ME than what we had in the past.

> Both Paladins and Overwatch have characters with interesting movement, to > the point where almost every Overwatch character has a movement ability.

A movement ability like "Jump high and then walk very slowly" or "Boost jump and then glide with pack" are not particularly interesting to me. Nor are they experimental They had been done many times before. The entire game is basically a reworked TF2.

In Quake, everyone had access to the rocket jump and plasma climb. Everyone could strafe jump and move at absurd speeds ALL THE TIME and it made the game CRAZY FAST and fun. Other than Quake live, I cannot think of a modern competitive game that does this.

In Overwatch, you are still mostly walking around at a snails pace waiting for your ult to charge.

> Both are following in the footsteps of TF2 movement.

I would argue that TF2 walked in the footsteps of TFC, which was literally spawned from the Quake mod Team Fortress, which utilized the weapon and movement mechanics of Quake in a class based system.

Really, when you get down to it, many of the weapons and abilities in Overwatch can trace their lineage to Quake.

Off the top of my head: Junkrat has the grenade launcher, Pharah has the classic rocket launcher, Sombra has the teleporter, widow has the rail gun, Torbjorn has the shotgun, Bastion has the machine gun, Winston has the chain gun, Symmetra has the lightning gun.

> In contrast, the funky movement mechanics in Quake weren't always explicitly > designed

This is a misconception. They discovered strafe jumping in Quake 1 and then ported it to the sequels because it was FUN and people liked it. I agree they were more difficult to execute, but if you play the game you get then hang of it very quickly: The difficulty is greatly exaggerated.

> and were often much more difficult to execute properly - that's fine in a > symmetric game but causes balance issues in anything asymmetric.

This is totally fair, and I agree that they are different games. I just prefer the old-style Quake games to the new hero shooters. And you cannot deny there have been a LOT of them haha

Additionally, these movement mechanics were fun ON THEIR OWN! I still enjoy hoping into a Quake Live race server from time to time to see how fast I can go.

> Fortnite and CoD have both added a grappling hook, and Fortnite in > particular seems to be experimenting quite a bit with movement via jump > pads, planes, trolleys, bouncey-shardy-things (you can tell I don't play > it...). The latest Spiderman game has seen universal praise for the swinging > movement.

Fortnite and CoD have the occasional opportunity to utilize different movement mechanics. This is very different from the deeply integrated movement mechanics of Quake and Tribes.

Additionally, they are EXACTLY the battle royale and fast TTK realistic shooters I called out elsewhere in my comment.

> My personal favorite game of 2018 was Wizard of Legend, which has a no- > cooldown dash ability - something that would normally break balance.

WoL is a teeny little indie game. Great game, but far outside of mainstream gaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Games are also getting worse and worse. Less hacks, mods, cheats, no free demos any more, instead we have DRM which decreases performance by 20% for paying customers, micro transactions, pay-to-win, kids screaming at us, less welcoming and tolerant players who kick you for going to bathroom during a game break, more platform locking, ads and activity tracking... Internet or service provide is down? Screw you, you can't play single-player!

<comment><USER27> Games in general are definitely not getting worse. There are more excellent indie and medium-size studio games coming out than ever. If you don't like those things you complain about, play other games.

Even the big studios are starting to learn that pay-to-win and crazy microtransactions turn people off-- the business model for Fortnite, the biggest game out there, is pretty user-friendly by providing a free game with 100% of gameplay available for $0. All purchases are cosmetic and (I believe) aren't locked in lootboxes. EA famously rolled back their microtransaction models last year after a few bad releases.

I love that studios are trying out new business models, even if some suck. Some of my favorite games (Counterstrike and Crusader Kings 2) use user- friendly "microtransactions" to continue 6+ years of development and feedback.

<comment><USER26> >EA famously rolled back their microtransaction models last year after a few bad releases.

Because their business model was set as illegal in several EU countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if the "Aging Gamer" described is the title is really a gamer, i.e. someone passionate about videogames, or just some kind of consumerist who only keeps up with whatever is marketed towards him or her.

I play videogames, but I can't call myself a gamer. Maybe I was back when I had free time to practice fighting games, and played competitively. Maybe I was a gamer when I played a bunch of niche titles, regardless of genre. Maybe I was a gamer when I collected rare games and hardware. I'm certainly not a gamer now though.

I think about the decline of time I spend on gaming. A lot of it comes down to not having enough time (with a full time job and other interests I didn't have when I was younger), but I'll make time for the right game. I think the article jives with this, but I'm not sure if this is specific to gaming. It reminds me of a similar article I read on here a few years ago that talked about how after a certain age, people stop seeking out new music as well.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have fond memories of playing Final Fantasy II as a kid. I downloaded Octopath Traveller on the Switch and couldn't get through the introduction I was so bored. Going back and playing Final Fantasy on the NES Classic, I can't believe I used to have so much time on my hands and so much patience to play this stuff.

Then again, I've gotten deeply in chess lately...

</comment><comment><USER30> If they just took a popular game and used the engine like skyrim, fallout, gears, halo, etc. Just pump out more of the same. Using new maps. Keep the same enemies even. I'd buy it, a lot of people would. Why are they leaving money on the table?

<comment><USER17> Because they can get more money by addicting (young) people to lootboxes and skins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really don't care about keeping up anymore. I'm just playing the games I enjoy. Lately, it's been Dragon Quest XI, Phoenix Wright Spirit of Justice, Metroid Samus Returns, and 20xx.

</comment><comment><USER32> Games have decidedly not stayed the same for me. Even if we don't include industry trends of microtransactions and dlc there have been major changes. Just to name a few:

* Shooters are more multiplayer focused now by a large margin

* Ubisoft style open world games have become a huge trend

* The RTS genre rarely sees entries anymore

* Space Fighter games are less common these days by a lot as well

</comment><comment><USER33> As a not so old gamer (30), I do find there is a big change which is important for me and a lot of people: games are more "safe" for minorities. There's less sexism and racism. You see plenty of games about LGBT or illegal migrants struggles. There's more and more strong female characters (Kassandra in the last Assassin's Creed is so great). So it might a problem of generation.

EDIT: this is a response to the comments here, not the article.

<comment><USER34> I'm of the same generation as you, and I'm not sure I agree. If this were true, I think we'd see this in other forms of media as well. A good counterexample would be the new Doctor Who series. That show is getting utterly eviscerated by longtime fans (of our generation mostly) that hate it BECAUSE they are pushing minority based plotpoints/storylines.

Putting on my subjective cap, I personally don't like the move towards such content. Nothing to do with the actual underlying messages (Samus has and probably always will be my favorite Nintendo character, and I actually don't mind the new Doctor), but rather the hamfisted, uninspired, force fed way it is delivered these days. If I were the audience this was targeted towards, I'd be fairly pissed as they are wrapping these good messages in a package that requires zero critical thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm sure I'm missing something about the business, but I've wondered why you so frequently only get a year of paid DLC for a title. They burn a lot of resources making a game, then abandon it to do it all over again. They'll repackage Skyrim a half-dozen times to sell it again, obviously people are playing it. Why aren't they pushing new DLC for these people?

<comment><USER36> It's what Paradox does with their games. Personally, I love their model and so do many others. But many also complain about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Overwatch is the only game during my adult life that has given me the same level of enjoyment from video games like when I was a kid.

<comment><USER38> Second this. After years of not playing anything, this was the game that brought me back into the fold.

<comment><USER37> I genuinely like how they implemented loot boxes in Overwatch. It ONLY gives cosmetic items and delivers enough currency that feels like it rewards you for playing.

<comment><USER38> Yeah it stands in stark contrast to the pay-to-win model a lot of games are incorporating nowadays. I also really love how all the new updates/maps/characters have been completely free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if Star Citizen is/was so successful in raising money - because it plays perfectly into this demographic.

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting, I don't play as much as I used but instead I watch a few different gamers I enjoy who play the games I used to play a lot. Mostly I don't play them as much now since I'm too slow - either my work day has drained too much out of me or literally my reflexes are not as good nor my vision.

<comment><USER41> With the brain its "use it or lose it". I was relatively good at CS:S. I was backup in a few matches for some pros. Then I took a break for 10 years. When I went back to it, I sucked all over again. With twitch-reflex games it is not at all like riding a bike.

It took me a month of 8 hours a day one summer to get marginally ok. I'm guessing it would take me a similar amount of time now (15 years out). I don't really want to take that time, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Games are still games, what do people expect? Also the cost of creating games has skyrocket but the price is the same for the last 20 years. I think most people forget that an average 35y/o has 20 years of video game experience, it's not like he's going to discover anything new.

</comment><comment><USER43> "Season pass". that's the cancer of current video games.

</comment><comment><USER44> i've been playing Rocket League. that has kept my interest, is skills-based, takes time to learn, and has a sports-like element to it that is pleasant. for anyone that doesn't know you drive a car around on a soccer field and play soccer (or hockey or basketball). and you can fly through the air with boosts that can get very complex.

</comment><comment><USER45> Early 30's here. By chance I got really into Fortnite from nearly the moment the BR mode launched, but have also "quit" it multiple times, most recently yesterday. It has an interesting core idea for PVP multiplayer(build as you fight) that is submerged beneath a morass of marketing-driven ideas(BR gameplay, vehicles, rare overpowered items, etc.). But they keep changing the game at a reckless pace, so I keep coming back. On the most recent occasion I was really enjoying the "high explosives 50v50" mode which removed all the regular guns and most of the items, leaving a very Quake-esque experience where you had grenades, rocket launchers and grappling hooks, plus building to shield yourself, in the context of a large teams battle.

But then they swapped it out for another mode yesterday and I got pissed off by the hitscan and sniper weapons(which of course are the preference of cheaters). It was a much less satisfying experience.

I've heard this about marketing other media: that it's hard to target older audiences because their tastes diverge more. Teenagers remain teenagers each year, and will reliably fall for the same scenarios and stories with a fresh coat of paint. And I don't think games are any different, in that games where you shoot things, go on a quest or adventure, solve puzzles, gain power and wealth, and compete against others have all been reliably popular in every era, in a multitude of permutations. A popular, accessible video game has to have an appropriate mix of fantasy (what you imagine you do) and reality (the actions you actually perform which should cohere with the stated fantasy). A mismatch of the two makes for incoherent gobbledegook.

So the challenge game developers face(and aren't fully aware of, since most folks trying their hand at it are still young game fans themselves) is in doing something that's actually differentiated while maintaining a compelling marketing message. If it leans too much on the usual tropes, any kind of underlying design wizardry is obscured. If it looks too "weird", it becomes hard to engage with on the level of fantasy.

After getting annoyed with Fortnite last night, I sampled a few other recent games. First I tried free-to-play "Dreadnought", in which you control a giant spaceship in slow-paced team battles. I got annoyed immediately by the opacity of the strategy: it threw a bunch of different classes of ships at me and told me to pick one and not worry, basically. The game was bulked up with systems upon systems that were clearly intended to hold my attention for the long term, but without knowing what to focus on, and not really feeling the core fantasy in what I had right in front of me, I just played it like it was homework and then stopped after about an hour. This is a very typical reaction I have to AAA experiences: they're overconfident in their ability to stall me by leaning on levels and unlocks and item loadouts and so forth, instead of communicating something about how I should start _appreciating_ the game.

Then I went on itch.io and after browsing tried "Skitopia", a ski resort management sim. Even though it's an indie project at a proof-of-concept level of development, has almost no features and started experiencing GC thrashing after about 50 guests, I was having a good time building chairlifts and ski runs.

Indie games would be amazing if they could all just hit the mark like that, but that's the exception, of course. Most of them lose their way in trying to be mini-AAA experiences, so they both communicate nothing and do it poorly.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are many factors at play.

\</comment><comment>---- 1\. Gaming is an escapism.

That's why many people hesitate to call themselves gamers or even admit it in certain (more conservative) social settings. Thinking back, gaming was a chill activity for me only a single-digit percent of the time and now at 38 y/o I am ashamed that I didn't admit that to myself earlier. And yes, many people still view "gamers" and teenagers with no cares at all. They haven't noticed that the world changed and these teenagers now play together with their kids. And that even company CEOs have admitted to be gaming.

\</comment><comment>---- 2\. Games aren't increasing in diversity or quality.

Quite the contrary, even the big AAA studios drop the ball and start milking nostalgia -- recent releases like Fallout 76 and WoW's latest expansion Battle for Azeroth are a prime example. Them not being quality games is not an universal truth of course but if you visit any gaming forum outlet you'll quickly discover they are a very divisive topic. This wasn't true even as back as 2-3 years ago for many games (the above two included).

\</comment><comment>---- 3\. I'm glad the article debunked that your abilities start to deteriorate at your 30s.

At 38 I can still pop in a random Quake3 server and absolutely dominate the others there. Many times they teamed up 5v1 against me and still lost on total score. As you get "older" (if 30s are "being old") your abilities can even self-perfect -- my wife several times noted that when I played a game for a week and quit it and then got back to it 6 months later I was suddenly extremely good at it and better than her who played it casually for those 6 months. It's as if your brain has been periodically replaying your experience with the game and gradually perfected the schemata that makes you much more efficient at the game. Probably while you slept.

\</comment><comment>---- 4\. Aggressive monetization.

As the stable income from selling games dwindles, many businessmen imagine that they are forced to introduce microtransactions or release half-finished games and then basically make you pay for a DLC that costs as much as the original game itself for you to get the "full" game -- this isn't an undeniable fact but many feel that way about a lot of EA / Ubisoft games.

Whatever the reason, microtransactions are killing the desire of many to play. We the humans get emotionally invested in everything we do. The fact that the businesses want to prey on the sunk cost fallacy, or nostalgia, or bait-and- switch tactics, is something that even people at 20 years old now reliably detect and try to stay away from.

The customers are getting smarter and the business makes less and less effort to market / advertise their games in an appealing way. Cleavage shots or shiny costumes and mounts don't seem to be cutting it anymore -- or at least not so well as the businesses would like.

\</comment><comment>---- 5\. Our priorities change, yes.

I ain't gonna bore anyone with sob stories but I had a pretty awful life and learned helplessness is something I have to fight my every waking second (people keep telling me I do an awesome job and I honestly can't believe it and that's not a fake modesty, I really can't; many other examples abound). At certain point you just sit down and start thinking what you are doing with your life -- and time, and energy. That the popular breeds of gaming lost most of its appeal is indeed a gradual process as the article assesses it to be.

And I indeed don't care about competition, like at all. Nobody can tempt me with "you're just afraid I am gonna beat you". I just shrug and say "you're a champion, are we done with this discussion?".

Me and my wife recently chatted at length about our diminished pleasure in games and concluded that we are gonna buy a PS4 Pro and a very comfy couch and probably won't touch a multiplayer game more than a few times a year. It's just how it is. She gets a lot of calming influence from just trying to figure out the next Lara Croft puzzle or a movement sequence so the character cat get somewhere important. And watching her play sometimes, I get the same vibes.

That, and some casual and non-engaging games like Smash Bros. You can just hop in, play a bit, get out. Which brings me to my last point...

\</comment><comment>---- 6\. Games try very hard to pull you in, addict you and make you feel like they are your life.

There are plenty of gullible human beings that fall for that and they are probably the reason why many modern games even survive.

As an "older" gamer I miss the experience of starting a game, typing a nickname somewhere, joining a server, playing for how much you want, and then getting out. No central servers, no character progression, no worries that somebody paid their way to them dominating you.

Games like Half Life, Quake 2 and 3, Re-Volt and Star Wars Episode 1 Racer (two of the best racing games I ever played!), and the fighting games like Mortal Kombat were perfect for this. They had a compelling gameplay but didn't try to tie you to anything. If you wanted to play, you came back. There were no psychological tactics to make you come back for more. They already sold you the game -- whether you are gonna play 1 hour in total or waste your life in it doesn't bother them.

\</comment><comment>----

I believe for many mature games this is the strongest factor. Stop trying to make us believe your game is our life. Make a good game. Make paying only for cosmetics or minor quality-of-life improvements. Put in good net code.

Gamers will come. You won't have to do absurd marketing campaigns all over YouTube. People will come to you by word of mouth if your game is not scummy.

But IMO gaming will have to almost die until it gets back to what made it popular and awesome in the first place.</comment>


IM-like micro-startup for unlimited encrypted NAT-friendly file transfer in beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.filephile.net/

<comment><USER2> I'm going to assume this service is faster than a regular IM Send File. If not, I don't know why I pay to use it beyond my free IM or the free alternatives like DropSend or Dreamhost Files Forever, among many many others.

<comment><AUTHOR> IM send file almost never works if both parties are behind firewalls. Skype works, but it tends to be very slow since it almost always ends up relaying (sometimes several times) to get around the NAT problem.

This uses some sophisticated NAT traversal magic. It usually is as fast as a direct TCP connection or nearly so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why charge so little? Anything so cheap might as well be free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because it costs far, far less than this per user to operate. All I run is a rendezvous server, which uses very little bandwidth per user.

The economics are actually pretty good for a small thing like this. It ain't gonna be Google, but it might be sufficient to help me bootstrap. (I am working on bigger stuff too.)

<comment><USER3> I suspect that people are either willing to pay substantially more than $2/month for this service, or they're not willing to pay anything. So you could probably increase your profit by increasing the price or becoming ad- supported (or both).</comment></comment></comment>


How I was able to track the location of any Tinder user - <AUTHOR> http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/02/how-i-was-able-to-track-location-of-any.html <comment><USER2> It's a horrible shame that many developers don't think through the consequences of their implementations before publishing services that trade in personal information. The technique published in this disclosure, as well as the fact that the service sent users' exact coordinates before July, should have been some of the most obvious concerns in building a service that shares one's picture while purporting to keep one's identity and location hidden.

Is Tinder still sending date of birth instead of a calculated age, like in the API example? It seems that no one there has given any thought at all to this topic other than to splash some water at the earlier fire. (IncludeSecurity, could you let us know whether Tinder is still sending the birth date data?)

I can understand that many people don't think through the consequences of sharing personal information, but it's hard to believe how many developers dealing with other people's information give it so little thought as well.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it was originally viewed through a performance perspective only, with the idea that all of the data crunching should happen on the front end to provide a faster server response?

<comment><USER4> Just rounding a location integer can be done in less than 10 assembly instructions. May be the time spent on that can well be compensated by transferring less data (orginally we transfer a float now we only transfer an integer).

Anyway, the point is processing this one sensetive information on server side really take little time. Maybe only several nanoseconds? The network latency is the botttleneck, not the proceesing of several bits of data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest privacy vulnerability for dating services is a simple reverse image search. The majority of users use the same images for their dating service as they do for every other social network.

Once you've found their Twitter/Instagram/whatever, then you have a name. Now you have their Facebook profile.

<comment><USER6> Also, once a person gives you one bit of information it becomes infinitely easier to find them.

Especially with the facebook graph search you can do something like: "women who live near me named _____ who like _____ and graduated from ____." And then you have their facebook profile...

I am still sort of shocked that facebook just allows anyone to do this.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, that is (was?) the entire point of facebook. Allowing people to connect and answering the question "Remember that girl "Jane Doe" from college, what is she up to?" was basically the killer feature.

<comment><USER5> That's a far cry from "show me all female friends of my friends near me who are single and like the walking dead" or "all males in nyc who work at X company and use tindr app".

Facebook gives zero privacy to anyone using it. If I walk into a coffee shop and see someone interesting working there, I can just run a graph search and page through the results until I have their entire life history online.

<comment><USER8> Wow I didn't know you could search apps too, it appears you can see all apps someone uses "Apps used by <name>". I guess that could avoid the awkward moment on dates... "Hey do you like Candy Crush?"

<comment><USER9> Hence the 'See all friends using the Bang with Friends app' incident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If their fix uses random noise per api call they are again vulnerable (just take the average of the each result).

Also again reduced precision on the reported distance won't fix the issue, you can sweep the map for changes in the last digit (by changing the attackers reported position)

They must reduce the precision of the users input not the reported distances precision.

ps. the problem in here is the accuracy not the precision

<comment><USER11> _They must reduce the precision of the users input not the reported distances precision._

That's an interesting idea: randomly perturbing a user's reported location.

I've been developing a social network app that, in v1 (development was outsourced to someone else), sent the distance to a particular profile (I'm not sure how accurately). In v2, I wasn't sure what to do so I've left it out, but it's currently at number 3 on my TODO list.

In our case, it's pretty important to be able to do location sorting client side. We have the geo extensions for SQLite and are intending on using that.

So, question: if I randomly perturbed user's locations reported to the server by anywhere from 1-5 miles, would that be sufficient to ensure privacy, while also enabling the app feature, which only needs precision at the level of a few miles?

UPDATE: I thought about this some more, and what I'd do is the following:

1\. Take the location of the device and make it imprecise, but accurate. For example, it could be anywhere within a five square mile radius, but it really would be within that radius.

2\. On a per-user basis, pseudo-randomly but deterministically perturb the imprecise location for that user, to generate the stored location.

The second requirement is to prevent averaging multiple location updates for the same person over time, to pinpoint a location. Each user would have a different random, but deterministic offset for each five square mile area on the globe.

The perturbed location for that device in that area would be the same for everyone, so you wouldn't be able to merge the output of multiple users "view" of that device's location to increase accuracy, either.

I'd appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks.

<comment><USER12> It really depends on what your trying to do - you might be overthinking it. I think rounding all inputs to the nearest minute or two of latitude and longitude is probably sufficient for most cases... Basically, treating the world as a grid of some sort, and dealing in exact points at that level.

<comment><USER13> This sounds like the correct, and simple, way to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a really beautiful hack. Not just some SQL injection run-of-the-mill vulnerability. Very clever.

<comment><USER15> Thanks, these are the kind that we find every week. We also get bored of the SQLi/XSS treadmill....it's much more fun to find a parsing error that leads to a crypto vuln that bypasses authentication (hint hint for a future blog post)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another enormous hole in app privacy is that mobile devices tend to store _location and compass bearing_ in addition to handset model _in every photo taken with the camera_.

So if you run a web or mobile app, scrub these on receipt by re-rasterizing (load .jpg/png -> copy image data -> save to a new file) using something like ImageMagick.

</comment><comment><USER17> Tinder should never known the users exact location anyway. They should be asking the device for a far less accurate coordinate.

</comment><comment><USER18> How could you even prevent this vulnerability?

As long as the undocumented API is publicly accessible, and Tinder intends on reporting a users distance to each other (4.5 miles), it will always be possible to triangulate the position.

The only thing I can think of is to obfuscate the user ID in a way that you cant use the ID to guarantee a lookup of the same user.

<comment><USER19> Instead of having the client use the distance data to filter out people within a certain radius, the server could do the filtering and send back the result.

Of course, you could probably do a lot of requests from different locations and intersect the results to find a more accurate position of the target with this fix too, though with some randomness to each request on the server side it will probably make it not worthwhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's some good work. It's a pity Tinder barely acknowledged the assistance.

<comment><USER21> The lack of acknowledgement to the researcher is pretty shitty. I'd expect it will really hurt Tinder's chance of their next vulnerability being responsibly disclosed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Their "fix" will do nothing to prevent location information leaking. Making more accounts and getting more distances will increase the precision just as seeing more satellites increases GPS position. No matter how much noise they add, they will always be vulnerable to this attack in the same way with enough time, even the most subtle timing attack will be exploitable.

There is a way they can fix it properly though. What they need to do is report the actual position of the user, not the position relative to a position you give it. This may seem less secure but if it gave that latitude and longitude to within 3 miles, for example, it would be impossible to locate a user more precise than that.

<comment><USER23> Idea on top of this: allow a user to pick a landmark or location they want to represent where they are like a university or park, so that its not their actual location being given out, but rather something meaningful near where they usually are from day-to-day.

<comment><USER24> Yeah they should resolve the location to a geographical name. What value is there in the distance then other than, oh I can walk over to your house for casual sex instead of taking the bus. Oh I see...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "January 1st 2014 - We look at the server-side traffic to see if the same issue exists and see that the high precision data is no longer being returned by the server (awesome looks like a fix!)

"February 19th 2014 - As the issue does not seem to be reproducible and we have no updates from the vendor....blog post published."

So, this has been fixed now? The rest of the post wasn't very clear about that.

<comment><USER15> sorry I added "which has since been fixed" to the first paragraph. We like to write C and Ruby langs, still getting used to this English lang.

<comment><USER26> s/seen/since/

<comment><USER15> thnx _sigh_ words

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was actually messing around with something similar (using only the radius information) a couple of weekends ago. In case anyone is curious. Node project just pushed to github:

[https://github.com/tmsh/guess-city-on-radius](https://github.com/tmsh/guess- city-on-radius)

</comment><comment><USER28> So why again isn't this personal information transferred over HTTPS? Secure connections should be enabled by default for every webservice or API, ever. For starters.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love that they published a "Vulnerability Disclosure Timeline" and waited for the company to patch the vulnerability before publishing this blog post.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just curious, would SSL have helped in this situation?

<comment><USER31> No. SSL is security between a client and a server and the purpose of it is to prevent people in between from touching your data. In this case they are not intercepting any data, but using the iPhone API to get data that the iPhone app receives anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Kudos to you for keeping this vulnerability secret and waiting for a fix. You've been waiting for a fix for almost three months, and without much of a response from the side of Tinder. And the latter I think is even more frustrating than the first.

Having been in a similar situation, I don't think I would have waited as long as you did.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't believe they don't do a simple fix that can be done in less than a minute. This is a serious information leaking issue. The time they spent on replying emails to the author are long enough for just get the fix done.

</comment><comment><USER33> Funny, I was just pondering if this would work yesterday. Glad to hear that it's been mitigated to be less accurate.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've always wondered if this could work, but I thought surely apps don't send the exact coordinates of a user.

<comment><USER11> [https://www.apple.com/apps/find-my-friends/](https://www.apple.com/apps/find- my-friends/)

<comment><USER35> That's a bit different; the very purpose of Find My Friends is explicitly to share your precise location with family/friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Really interesting - this exploit could apply to any social app that tells you the distance between you and another user

<comment><USER20> Yes and no. The degree of precision matters a lot. "between 3-4 miles away" isn't the same as "3.42123459921 miles away". In this case, the distance field was encoded in a 64 bit double - which if fully utilized is a ridiculous degree of unnecessary precision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yeah, deviantart had that problem at some point as well (if you gave deviantart your position).

</comment><comment><USER38> To read, inspect <body> and disable {font-family: FontAwesome}.

<comment><USER15> Hey Harlan, we think we fixed the FontAwesome problem, it was false advertising...the font was not awesome at all, it broke our whole damn blog.

<comment><USER39> It actually IS pretty awesome. You just generally don't want to apply it to the body of your entire site!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone have a link to the previous vulnerability (from July 2013)?

</comment><comment><USER40> Securing the channel with SSL should fix the issue, no?

<comment><USER4> No, as long as they send precise distance radius info, a person's location can easily be computed with very very small margin of error.

The easiest fix is just to send less precise location radius. The user does not care whether another user is 6 miles or 6.0000000001 miles away from him anyway.

<comment><USER41> That doesn't seem to fix anything. Suppose you round to miles. Now I just sample the system until I find the "border" where the reported distance changes from 1 to 2 mile, and then I know the distance is exactly 1.5 mile there (or 2 miles if they round down).

Repeat for two more points and you have the same vulnerability.

<comment><USER42> Rounding should work if you round the coordinates instead of the distance. Then you can at best calculate an approximate location very precisely.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Apple closed our entire app store - <AUTHOR> I am asking Hacker News for any help or advice they may have to offer.  This is our situation:
Midnight on Monday we received a termination notice from Apple. The notice vaguely implied 'bad faith' as the reason to terminate our contract.
Tuesday morning all our apps were removed from the app store. We represent several small and large publishers, so almost 100 multimedia apps were pulled down.
Tuesday midday we call dev relations and get a stone-wall from Apple. Dev relations tells us that they will not give us a reason for the termination.
Tuesday afternoon our lawyers get involved.  They try to use back channels to get more information, but are also stone-walled.  They then inform us that they have a conflict of interest with Apple and cannot represent us as apple will not sign a conflict waiver.
Tuesday evening we contact a senior individual within Apple.  He informs us that our account is clean in the app store records and there are no complaints against us and that Legal has requested the termination.  Legal will not provide a response.
Our company employs almost 100 people and relies heavily on the iTunes App Store as a major source of income. We also work with Google, Blackberry, Nokia, Windows 7 and several other app stores and have never been treated in this way.
I'm in shock that Apple has unilaterally terminated our business relationship.  Does anyone have any experience with this situation or any advice? <comment><USER2> Stop yelling fire when there is none. If you want community support, then link your apps.

Link to the apps currently "with Google, Blackberry, Nokia, Windows (Phone) 7, and several other app stores". Tell us the name of your company. Tell us the names of the titles pulled.

Until you release any of this, you are yelling fire when there is clearly none.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was advised not to risk any media problem yet by revealing my company. I am asking for any advice or help from anyone who has been in the same situation.

Please contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER3> I hate to do this, but you've wasted a lot of time with your post and comments. Like many people in this thread, I was frustrated by your refusal to give us basic information such as your company name.

You linked to your resume (<http://www.constantwanderer.com/resume/>) a few months ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4033815>

Looking at your LinkedIn profile, I see the company name is Mobifusion. Apple's app store has no results, but searching Google's store gives me this: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Mobifusion,+...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Mobifusion,+Inc)

What does Mobifusion make? Almost 200 apps. A bunch of recipe apps. Lots of cocktail recipe apps. Vegan recipe apps. Various public domain works (Bible, Quran, etc). There are a lot of identical or extremely similar apps. Different versions of the CIA World Factbook. Different versions of the Bible. Some Harry Potter encyclopedias, etc.

It's no wonder Apple removed these. It's no wonder you refused to reveal your company.

Again, I didn't want to do this, but you tried to take advantage of HN. You falsely painted Apple in a bad light and falsely portrayed your own company as blameless. Shame on you.

<comment><USER4> Note his description of his legal problems:

"We were in the middle of an especially tenacious individual who was fraudulently claiming we were using a name he did not have a TM on. As our lawyers were trying to solve the problem, we were shut down."

Here's the example of his app, priced 2.42 EUR:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobi.andro...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobi.android3.NewEarthDeck)

The title of the app uses a best-seller author and book name, and is in fact just the 52 "quotes" from the author.

Then, the real-user review shows that the app doesn't deliver even that:

"The latest update at first told me my licence was invalid, then when I wouldn't fill in my email address to get spam from mobifusion it would crash and exit."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting comment thread.

Not enough information to do anything of course. But these two points stand out:

1) Tuesday afternoon our lawyers get involved. They try to use back channels to get more information, but are also stone-walled. They then inform us that they have a conflict of interest with Apple and cannot represent us as apple will not sign a conflict waiver.

2) Tuesday evening we contact a senior individual within Apple. He informs us that our account is clean in the app store records and there are no complaints against us and that Legal has requested the termination. Legal will not provide a response.

If both of these statements are accurate as represented then Apple Legal determined that you were doing something illegal, further by distributing your Apps it was exposing Apple to potential liability, further your lawyers figured it out too and they don't want anything to do with it.

Looking at the apps that get this sort of treatment in the App store I see things that infringe trademarks or copyrights of other companies (misusing sound-alike names or imagery).

Of course one can't know for sure until you include representative applications that were removed.

<comment><AUTHOR> The lawyers represent both Apple and Us. This was the problem. Evidently a large number of firms are on Apple's retainer and when you get into legal issues with Apple, the firms wont represent you.

<comment><USER5> Well you need new lawyers then in any case. I'm curious when you started your relationship with these lawyers. I ask because they had a conflict of interest the moment they agreed to represent you and Apple and would have settled the issue then not now. (Well any decent lawyers would and Apple tends to hire decent lawyers so by association I'm going to guess they aren't some sketchy organization)

That was why when I read that statement from you, in my head I read it as "The lawyers have made up this story to get out of representing these guys." which I admit was uncharitable to the lawyers. The more charitable interpretation would be "Wow, these lawyers are so clueless they didn't bother establishing ahead of time that a person publishing in the Apple App Store might come into conflict with their marquee customer Apple? It sure is a good thing they recused themselves since if this was representative Tsunami is better off without them."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Name sounded familiar, he says it was shovelware in a previous post on hacker news. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389468>

<comment><USER4> Just a guess: He also claims that his "top sells" are "simple reference apps" and that the users "throw them away" after they "impulse" buy them. He also claims they use clever "brand" names. So I can imagine he calls the app for example "Excel" and in the app content is "Ten tips how you can edit the Excel file."

If something like this is what he makes (app spams) I think it's good he got blocked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If Apple is really in the wrong here, you SHOULD want to "risk any media problem" - especially if they're not your problems, but Apple's.

Bullshit meter is reading pretty high at the moment.

Mostly it sounds like you were breaking laws or violating some fairly obvious TOS rule for them to pull ALL of your apps.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I had to deal with the apple appstore it was really clear that the rules are by Apple for Apple. It is far from a "fair" treatment, especially if your app doesn't generate any revenue for them.

Now I don't know how bad you blew the apple guidelines but _at least_ they should tell you right away what's wrong.

Maybe you have yourself a clue to share ?

</comment><comment><USER9> Post the termination notice in full perhaps?

How many apps went down? Did you violate iTunes/App Store T+C in some noticeable way? Finally, did you violate someone elses rights copyrights, trademarks, intellectual property such that they may have sent a demand letter to Apple?

Perhaps in retrospect, having all the apps tied to a single entity was a bad service for your clients representing a single point of failure.

<comment><USER10> >Perhaps in retrospect, having all the apps tied to a single entity was a bad service for your clients representing a single point of failure.

Yeah I worked at a company the bought an off-the-shelf template for an app from a company that did a lot of customization too for us. They required every client to register the apps at Apple themselves. Smart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Multimedia apps statement is very ambiguous and dangerous. Did you have an video or music app? Or a photo gallery app that users can publish copyrighted photos. Apple probably deserves right to remove your app if they see you as an opponent in the market. Please elaborate the situation and publicize your company name for good.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're with who I think you are, your company's website is down and the company Twitter feed hasn't been updated since last November.

If I had to guess at Apple's reasons (given the "bad faith" line), it'd be that they suspect you of something along the lines of posting bogus reviews/ratings or buying downloads.

</comment><comment><USER13> Are you really that shocked? You should do some research how developers have been treated by Apple before basing your entire company on them. There are dozens upon dozens of similar stories w/ similar non-responsive incidents.

</comment><comment><USER14> What is a "multimedia app"?

Will you provide links to your website as well?

</comment><comment><USER15> Get new lawyers.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ugh. It's moments like this that make me, an Apple fan, really hate Apple.

<comment><USER17> Are you kidding me ? You know NONE of the facts. NONE.

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont know any of the facts either, as Apple is refusing to disclose them or even talk to us about them. The problem is getting them to talk!

<comment><USER18> App names....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can you please provide us with the link to your apps ?

If Apple Legal are involved then 99% of the time it is due to a third party filing a lawsuit against Apple because of something you've done e.g. violate trademarks. So you why do you think Apple has terminated your account ?

Now the other point is why are you representing small and large publishers ? Why don't they have their own developer accounts ? This is very unusual.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its not at all unusual for third parties to develop apps for publishers and manage their sales channels. If you survey the education space, many publishers do this. Its just another way of handling the mobile space.

Our apps have been taken down, so there is no way to link to them unfortunately.

We have occasionally gotten frivolous claims for TM infringement, which we attempt to clean up quickly (If you have a lot of apps, you'll know that you get targeted by random individuals with no case). We were in the middle of an especially tenacious individual who was fraudulently claiming we were using a name he did not have a TM on. As our lawyers were trying to solve the problem, we were shut down.

<comment><USER19> What was the name of the app? (Some of us have access to historical iTunes data.) Alternatively, you mention you are also on other devices; links?

<comment><USER20> Seriously, they'll begin to lose credibility here if you don't list your apps and link to some web-presence

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And this comes to you as a surprise how exactly? Oh you thought you can hand over control over your distribution channel entirely to another entity, over whose decisions and actions you have exactly zero control or recourse, and you expected not to get screwed? Right.

<comment><USER22> What a wildly unhelpful and rude comment.

<comment><USER23> You're right, but so is pyalot. It seems like there's at least one complaint on HN every week about some developer getting nuked by some platform they've tied themselves to; Apple this week, Twitter last week, Facebook, Google ...

To me it's roughly equivalent to weekly complaints from sysadmins that their servers got rooted because they left root remotely accessible with a password of "root". Sympathy quickly gives way to, "well, that sucks, but you should know better."

You tied your sole source of revenue to a company known for its capriciousness. The advantage was that you got access to a huge distribution channel, and a chance at a lot of money. The disadvantage was that one day your number might come up and since you have absolutely no negotiating power or legal leverage with that company, you'll be out of options pretty quick -- unless you're lucky enough to find somebody who cares to solve your problem for you.

So your business plan should reflect that. Either charge high enough margins that you can afford to take six months to a year off after something like this to work on the next thing, or don't do it in the first place.

I'll usually keep this to myself because I really don't want to shit on someone that's having a bad day already. But, these stories are also getting really old fast.</comment></comment></comment>