HTML5 is definitely not the only way to write a game for iOS. It seems glaringly obvious, but the OP could perhaps try writing their game as a native app.
It may be a little misguided to say that companies like Parse are speeding up the iteration cycle for mobile apps. Every business is going to need a backend to store all its data, so the time spent architecting and building the backend layer should be equal regardless of whether your frontend is browser-based or native mobile.
Parse only helps if you don't have anyone on your team who is fluent in building backends. That being said, Parse is an excellent choice when you're in that situation.
I'd say M2 research is way off the mark for the estimate of cost for a mobile title.
Let's take the $5K cost and break it down.
A competent young programmer, making $80K/year, would be paid $5K in 3.3 weeks.
However, games don't just need programmers, they also require art, so let's take $1K to pay for the artist's time. That leaves us with only 2.6 weeks of the programmer's time. Let's also say that we have a game designer who we pay $1K. That leaves us with only 2 weeks of the programmer's time.
Having been a professional mobile game developer for 7 years, I've never seen a game take only 3 people and only 2 weeks. The minimum, in my experience, is about 2 months and around 5 people, or roughly $60K, for a very simplistic game. I'd even venture to say that it is impossible to create a quality finished product in 2 weeks.
There's nothing that guarantees success for the passionate.
If you are passionate about being a screenplay writer, your talent will be drowned out in the deluge of other passionate and hardworking people also trying to be screenplay writers. For the vast majority of people, that kind of pursuit is better left as a hobby.
I think you (and I, and most of us here in HN) should count ourselves lucky that we happen to be passionate about programming. It's a tool that allows us to bring out ideas to life - anything from games to Mars rovers to businesses. People passionate about 19th century Russian literature don't have the luxury that we do because that's not going to earn them a living, no matter how great their passion may be.
This "they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps" notion is a little misguided, IMO. Instead, I'd say the screenplay writer should see if she can get herself to be at least passably comfortable in a marketable field, while leaving the writing for the weekends.
I declared a double major of dance and creative writing when I entered college. Nobody discouraged me. It was sheer luck that I stumbled across computer science, fell in love, and never looked back. I shudder to think how my life would have turned out if I had stuck with what had originally interested me.
I'm not sure why college students aren't told that a degree in anthropology/english/women's studies is not going to give you marketable skills, while a degree in nursing/engineering/computer science will. Perhaps incoming freshmen should be given better guidance?
Part of the claim was that for most people, the tablet (with the retina display) is enough for all the computing they want to do. I think "most people" excludes us - the programmers/makers. We will always need a full general computing machine.
Luckily, the acquiree knows that "It doesn't look so hard, we can build it ourselves" is almost certainly a mistaken belief on the part of the acquirer. I've found that any system, no matter how complicated, when explained by a competent engineer who knows the system well and is a good communicator, sounds "not so hard, I could build it myself". I have to remind myself that it is probably hard, and I could probably not build it myself for less than the cost of the acquisition.
This is exactly what I felt when I was taking Adderall when I was about 25. I chose to stop taking it after a few months because I just couldn't handle the sense of impending doom, and at times fear, which would strike every day around 7pm.
I'm assuming that by "smartphone" this article is only referring to Android devices? As far as I know, it's not possible (without jailbreaking the user's device) to get read access to SMS on iPhone.
Apple's ARC documentation explains how to deal with those kinds of things. It's as accessible to an iOS beginner as retain/release are, perhaps more so. Specifically, regarding strong vs weak, the point is that you are to think about your object graph instead of thinking about memory management.
"ARC is awesome, but I highly suggest that you don’t use it until you can manage memory yourself. In other words, don’t rely on ARC until you understand what it’s doing."
This is not good advice.
ARC is meant to free the programmer from having to think about memory management and allow us to instead think about what we're trying to express in our object graphs and algorithms. Deciding where to call retain and release is an old, tired dance and is where the vast majority of memory leaks and app crashes come from. With ARC, we can just relax and let the compiler insert all those pesky retains and releases where it knows they should go.
There is no reason for newcomers to learn the old style. If a newcomer is reading old-style code, she can skip over the retain/release calls and pretend they're not even there, because they don't affect the algorithm.
This sentiment is probably why there is such a proportionately low number of devs who take the time to learn Objective-C, which in turn makes those who do learn it even more valuable.
>But right now thats like saying a kid won't have a good job because of his grade 5 scores.
Conversely, would you say that a kid in grade 5 who has bad scores is going to have a great job when he grows up, just you wait and see? We can only judge the mobile web as a platform (if one can even say that it is one platform and not many) by what it offers on mobile handsets today, not by what we hope it will one day become. Also, we can't judge it by hoping that one day, all the mobile browsers will conform to the WC3's standards, because we know how good a job today's desktop browsers do at quickly becoming standards-compliant.
Is it true that there is a dearth of women in online dating sites in general? If so, where did you see that info? Or is that an assumption you're working from based on the gender ratio in bars/clubs?
Why would you move back to NYC from the bay area? Having just made the move from SF to NYC myself (for personal reasons, although it's been working out professionally so far as well), I feel like the bay is really the place to be for the non-technical cofounder looking for their bad-ass CTO. NYC is absolutely flooded with non-technical cofounders like the OP - it's really a buyer's market in that sense. For me, as a technical cofounder, I'm definitely in the minority here and I can feel the desperation in the voices of all these non-technical people with their "great ideas, just need a CTO". I want to tell them all to move to the bay because there aren't enough of me to go around in NYC.
I'm not a front end developer, but it seems to me that pre-evaluation of javascript, or even compiling the js into byte code, would be something that front end developers would want to try in order to speed up their own users' experience of their site. Is there anything that the cloud part of Silk is doing that can be applied to websites in general, regardless of what browser is doing the rendering? Or is this optimization uniquely possible because Amazon controls the browser itself?
There also seems to be a contingent of knowledgeable Twitter users in a boat off the west coast of Africa.
(I'm kidding - this is due to tweets where lat,lon = (0,0))
After many other tattoos, some spur-of-the-moment and some thoroughly considered for years, I realized that I like my spur-of-the-moment ones a lot more. They never had any significance to lose, whereas the well-thought-out ones are more embarrassingly telling of what I once thought was so deep and passionate, which all turned out to look naive after a few years.
This article skips discussing one reason why jobs are in a sense ends to themselves: the feeling of being useful. Retired people often complain that they don't know what to do with themselves after leaving the workforce, so they go do things like volunteering. A friend of mine recently took 2 months off between jobs and nearing the end of that time, she started becoming very depressed and realized it was because she wasn't contributing to society or to herself. I think most people work not only to pay the bills or to acquire luxury items, but to have a sense of self-worth.
I was 19, my second semester in college, when I started programming. Incidentally, I've heard from at least 3 other successful women programmers that they started in college as well. (I'm defining "successful" as "speaks at conferences, generally well known and respected in their fields").
My favorite of these is http://twitter.com/#!/big_ben_clock, which tweets on the hour in London. (I copied this idea and made @sf_o_clock). The idea of devices broadcasting information to provide ambient data to anyone who cares to listen is so fascinating. This could go way beyond the obvious things like time, stocks and weather, and into... well, things I can't imagine yet.
Unfortunately, no matter what safety mechanisms Airbnb puts in place, messes like this are still going to happen. Even if there were a reliable rating or karma system, and you could exchange messages with a potential renter before accepting them, you will still have the "Ebay problem" - where a malicious party gains access to a trusted user's account and uses it to fool people into renting to them.