dominostars

Got a mirror up somewhere?

Were they talking about net neutrality or digital privacy at the time?

You can also work a normal job and donate a non-trivial amount of your money to organizations working to make a difference.

Is that any different than how the USA works?

Having community, closeness, and realness is so important for our growth but so lacking in our environments. The only way most people know to find community is through partnership (which has its obvious flaws e.g. divorce rates), or in the work place, which is often lacking in meaningful connection. Family structures are weak, and the communities formerly facilitated by religions are not being supplemented in our new, growingly secular world.

The internet can provide some amount of valuable community and support, but it's limited. Words in text can only convey so much. You can't be held. You can't shout and scream and be irrational. It's easier to hide than confront difficult emotions.

Therapy is so valuable, and its stigmatization hurts us all, but it's also limited. It's just one person, with one set of beliefs. They aren't there with you in the heat of a difficult situation. And honestly, there's something so gross about having to pay hundreds of dollars just to find someone to be real with.

Something getting lost in the responses here is the "stress" factor of these interviews. When encountering a difficult architectural or algorithm decision, experience has taught me to develop slowly, prototype often, investigate previous work, and even step away from the issue. Meanwhile, engineering interviews require you to code immediately, in isolation, and then be judged on the first solution you crap out of your brain.

In a recent interview, my solution to a question was bad, I knew it was bad, and I informed my interviewees it was bad. It was difficult for me to come up with other solutions on the spot under pressure of judging eyes and limited time. Immediately after getting off the phone I was able to assess better ways to approach and solve the problem, but too late, those 45 minutes were more important to them than my many years of provable, directly related experience.

Could somebody please shed some light on this? I'm having a hard time digesting Thiel's book, and I see this development as a perfect example of competition being positive.

Is this really relevant to Hacker News?

Pun threads, memes, and complaining about post quality have been a part of reddit since I started frequenting over 5 years ago. Honestly, with the popularity of so many niche forums the general quality of the website has probably gone up. The problem many people face is after frequenting for awhile you begin to see trends: before opening a post you can predict what kinds of responses are going to be upvoted to the top. It feels like the website has gotten worse, but the only thing that's changed is your enjoyment of it.

> Well, in that case your product, however much your toiled and however much you spend to make it, is not viable?

Exactly, it's not viable. Only IAP driven games are. That is the problem being discussed here.

Has anyone else had experience with the Pomodoro Technique? It feels like a way for the website to just sell you books/timers/etc.

I did not discuss the morality of addictive game mechanics. I was responding to the assertion that people regret making in app purchases. The author was operating under the assumption that users are being misled or tricked into making purchases that they would later regret. I was merely explaining why most successful IAP-driven games could not reach success this way.

I can tell you from my admittedly limited mobile social game development experience that user acquisition is really expensive. You need the users you get to make lots of purchases. If your purchases suck, or elicit regret, you're not going survive for very long. It is very common industry advice that purchases should feel really good and provide instant gratification. Industry experts know that once a user makes a first purchase they have a smaller barrier of entry for making more. The industry is all about whales, not about making a quick buck on a user who doesn't know better.

Of course there are companies who don't know any better that are trying to money grab as much as possible, but they're not as successful as you might think. They achieve ranking with a large advertising budget before disappearing into obscurity. But what a lot of people don't want to accept is that a game like FarmVille is a good game that many people legitimately enjoy and feel good spending money on.

$20 games don't make money on the App Store unless it's a known brand. Just look at the top grossing list. I always see anecdotal evidence in these threads where people claim that they would spend money up front, but all evidence points elsewhere. The App Store has been a race to the bottom since day 1.

Ads in aps don't make money. These days they're mostly used for cross promotion.

San Francisco homelessness is not a question about rich vs. poor. It's a question about what to do with people who are mentally handicapped and/or drug abusers. This is partially a money problem, but it's largely a social problem. A lot of other countries deal with this better because they have stronger family support structures. Programming can help, but this isn't a programming problem. And there's no money in it, so anybody who's trying to solve this problem can't afford to live in San Francisco.

Stepping over homeless people on my way to a cushy tech job has given me loads of cognitive dissonance. I have a really hard time with this, and I think about it every single day on my way to work. Frankly, I'm not sure what to do about it, and I'd love to have an open discussion instead of an anti-american one. Everyone here who's arguing about their superior European social programs are really preaching to the quire, because most Americans on Hacker News would kill to have these social programs.

> The homeless here are people mostly people with mental health issues that reject or don't respond to treatment.

I would speculate that this is true for San Francisco, especially in the downtown (tenderloin) area.

> #2: When done right, it makes people extremely productive.

Do you have any tips as to how to make this "done right"?

I, and a few of my remote friends, have hard a really hard time being nearly as productive while remote. I find myself really proud of being able to accomplish 4 hours of dev work when at a coffee shop or at home, but in an office I can work 8-10 hours without putting much thought into it.

I'll be the first to complain about San Francisco weather, but the weather in the peninsula and south bay is nothing short of amazing.

What about if you're launching a game?

Do we know how good or bad the promoted posts revenue stream is?

Having to spend more time and money marketing just to get my numbers to where they were is a disaster to me, as a developer. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Right now 17 of the top 20 grossing iPhone apps are freemium. Are you suggesting that these apps are only able to succeed because of accidental purchases?

It's the iOS paradigm to make feature simple standalone apps. Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app?

Many users upload photos to Facebook, so there's a huge incentive to make an app that makes it simple to do this. Even if the main Facebook app has feature parity with FBPhotos, it's still going to come with all of the cruft.

This design gives me the immediate impression that this product is related to health care, something that the current drchrono.com does not do. And it's gorgeous, I think he did a great job with this one.

As far as MU, he claims, "I brought the ‘MU Certification’ badge front and center because I’ve been told that potential health incentives factor heavily in a practice’s or hospital’s decision to adopt a new platform."

So it sounds like it's relevant to actual customers.

Agreed. The shoplifting analogy isn't even necessary, just an accurate depiction of what is so scary: "If just one user uploads copyright material to youtube, SOPA allows the government to shut down all of youtube. Even if youtube removes the material as quickly as possible."

You might be thinking of his book "Outliers", which dedicates a large segment to plane crashes.

According to a lot of research, it isn't that the person does abnormal things, it's that the person invests an abnormal amount of time into practicing his skill. It's an important distinction, because it illustrates that 'being the best' is more of a decision than an abnormality.

I can't agree with #2 enough, I've actually emailed support about it. The entire hipmunk experience feels ruined when I get forwarded to Orbitz.

What separates you guys from Kinvey and StackMob?

Thus far, my team has likewise been unable to find a good functional testing suite for iOS. We will definitely be giving this a shot.