EvilTrout

Ah, that makes sense, thanks.

Question: In the example given, you supply a salt and a domain when coming up with your UDID.

Isn't the salt of another app really easy to decompile and figure out?

After that, a competing app could find out if you've used the device ID already, which actually seems less secure than the original UDID apple provided.

The last thing I want is for apps I install to phone home with a list of other apps I have installed!

I'm not sure why, but this article and supporting discussion was removed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3739913

No! I saw it here in Toronto and it was hilarious.

Just bought it for $5 to re-watch!

Github absolutely uses Rails. Twitter too, although I understand less so than when they launched.

I'd say Hacker News succeeds despite its UX. You can't collapse threads, many pages miss basic navigation elements, etc.

Why not just create a User model that has a null username and password field? If they sign up, you fill in those attributes. No need for a second table!

Actually Alice in Wonderland's 3D was done in post.

Fun tidbit for gamers: in Half Life 2, the headcrab that causes the portal mixup is named Lamarr, after Hedy. Get it?

I plan on collecting it for a while and updating the report regularly.

The PS1 was released before the N64 and supported C compilation. In fact, in the early days Sony didn't want people to use much ASM because they were worried about backwards compatibility on future systems. The PS1 port of Doom suffered from a lack of assembly optimization.

I suspect the second method is just an example of how you could make an asynchronous operation that performs a subtracting of two numbers, after a method (CountEveryBitByHand) is completed.

To keep it simple they should have left out the second method.

Unless I'm incredibly wrong!

The screenshot comparisons are quite damning.

Also, previously on Hacker News:

Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1675483

I looked into this and could only find mention of an app for The Score and Cineplex. Seems like nothing related to games to me, so the acquisition seems odd?

Toronto already has around half a dozen mobile game developers - I'm curious as to why they chose to acquire this particular shop.

Without expiry or LRU it's no where near as useful, not to mention performant.

I don't disagree.

But I offer this thought: do you feel like you might tell your kids or grandkids that you remember a time when any of your friends could try out the software your created on their own devices? When anyone had the ability to do whatever they wanted with their devices, without having to agree to a license agreement first?

We weren't upset because other people got away with something. In fact, I don't think anyone has created a remotely similar app.

We were upset because it demonstrates that Apple can effectively make up reasons to block your app when none previously exist.

Moreover, it shows they clearly have no sense of humor.

I am not a laywer but I believe my web based MMO, Forumwarz, meets the criteria.

Forumwarz launched in 2007. You can buy brownie points with real currency. The brownie points can be converted into the game's currency, Flezz, which can then be gambled through conversations with GambleBot, a robot you can speak to via IM in the game.

Your winnings can be used to purchase virtual items, those items can be traded with other players through our auction house (the auction house was added in 2009, I believe).

There are limits on how you can trade the virtual items to discourage people just buying their way to the top of the game.

Obviously I'm not a lawyer but I feel like if our game isn't exactly prior art, it's pretty damn close!

I have a dedicated server I bought myself years ago and host it at a coloc in downtown Toronto.

I don't think it's fair to say it costs you more than $1500 to host one blog when in fact it's a series of sites. It gives people the wrong impression of how much the database costs relative to hosting.

(As an aside, I run a site that gets over two million hits A DAY, I pay nothing for my database, and about $100/mo for hosting.)

I never ran Phusion in production for long because of the issue with blocking when spawning, and now I see it's been fixed: http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/29/the-road-to-passenger-3-te...

In fact, looking through the site, the changes that make up Phusion 3 are incredible. If it works as advertised, there should be no advantages to running Unicorn or a pack of Mongrels anymore. I can hardly wait to try it out!

I was an avid Bloglines user back in the early 2000s. I remember loving the product so much that I emailed them asking how I could pay for it. I got a reply saying they were still figuring out how to make money.

I wonder now if they ever did get around to charging for the service.

I don't consider myself screwed at all. They held my money until I gave them proper documentation. When you run a business this kind of thing happens all the time. Just paying taxes to the government was way more complicated and intrusive.

Yes they can earn interest on money, but it's much more likely to me that they are covering their asses about the money rather than earning a small amount of interest on it.

Paypal has to deal with a lot of fraud. If you listen to the owners in interviews they say they lost a ridiculous amount of money in the early years to fraudulent users. It is reasonable for them, in my opinion, to make sure the money was owed to you before giving it to you.

I run a browser based MMO that once upon a time earned a fair amount of money (not at Minecraft's astonishing levels though!) and Paypal is my only method of payment. The first time I made a large withdrawal (10s of thousands) they did something similar.

I think people are being very knee-jerk with their reactions about all of this. Yes, it's annoying to have your money frozen temporarily, but Paypal is basically on the line for all of that money if it turns out to be fraudulent. All they need is a series of business documents proving you really are who you say you are, and then they will hand over the money.

Let's face it, few people show up out of nowhere and earn a million dollars in a month!

Notch even knows this, if you read his blog post he says he's sure it'll get sorted out. Once you go through this process once they will not do it again.

Many of the security attacks on Apache (and other browesers) were based on invalid requests.

The original Mongrel was known for its powerful request handler that didn't let many of the same security attacks through. In fact, in the Ruby world, many other non-mongrel web servers used the mongrel handler for that very reason.

Ruby is written in C. However, many of the standard libraries are written in Ruby itself. The author of this gem has gone and converted one of the Ruby ones to C for performance reasons.

Most Ruby developers will never use C unless they really care about extracting every last drip of performance from something. In most production deployments I've seen, the only gem that is compiled from C is the mysql one, for example.

This is a good question and the answer is it's both.

It requires a completely different approach to programming so many programmers haven't made the leap. Additionally, some kinds of software problems seem to be unparallelizable by default.

Having said that, there is an advantage to a many-core machine right now: you can run many tasks (programs) simultaneously. Even if a program can only use one core, your OS should be smart enough to run it on its own core.

Of course then they might contend for other resources, like disk or video throughput.

I worked on Forumwarz for about 3.5 years full time, although my salary was far from glamorous. I'd say I was eating a lot better than ramen though :)

It was amazing experience that I wouldn't trade for anything, and I met so many amazing people and learned a lot, but eventually I realized that earning half of what I was capable of earning as a developer wasn't a good idea in the long term.

I now maintain the site on a part time basis along with a half dozen volunteers. The site still pays its operating costs but there isn't too much left over.

My goal is to run the site as long as possible, which is a lot more affordable now that it isn't doing 40M pageviews a month.

There are tons of sites where people can (and do!) pay money for a simple PNG.

I'd know: my web based MMO, Forumwarz is one. People can pay to buy some kinds of "E-Peen" which is our version of badges.

What about Interact online? I've used it on a bunch of Canadian sites and it allows me to pay directly from my online bank account.