Hacker News Reader

philon Modafinil Is Wall Street’s New Drug of Choice

Skip a dose, and there would be hell to pay. “I really would feel it. It was sort of like being thrust into dirty, messy reality, as opposed to a clean, neatly organized place. It was like crashing, and I actually found what would happen is the anxiety that got dialed down on the way in, when you were coming off it, all of a sudden you went through the reverse. So I got incredibly anxious. Eventually that concerned me.”

Wow, this sounds amazing! Sign me up!

philon Another $1K App on the App Store

Sure -- plenty.

Here's another example. It replaces a custom hardware gadget that costs much more: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tunelab-piano-tuner/id335568...

philon "Attrition is a group statistic. It doesn't apply to me."

This is more or less the same point that Stephen Jay Gould made in "The Median Isn't the Message:"

http://people.umass.edu/biep540w/pdf/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.p...

philon The Barkley Marathons - Few Know How to Enter - Fewer Finish

Not entirely happy to see NYT blowing up the Barkley, but this is a fascinating subculture.

philon When Things Don't Work Out

So, the scenario goes something like this: you've been in business for a few years. You've got let's say 20 employees. And you're profitable! Barely! It looks like with some hard work and a couple more years, you can get the company to about 2x the valuation at its last round. From there who knows.

You'd just fire everyone, walk away, and hope to hit bigger next time? Your investors are unlikely to agree that this is the best way to use your talents...

philon Median Rent SF: One Bedroom Apartment Map

Lol they forgot about the loin.

philon How to do anything

  1. Learn about what's going on in the world.
  2. Make a list of the most interesting things you might want to change...

philon Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

I've subclassed NSManagedObject and added instance variables and custom accessors literally every time I've written Core Data code. It's usually not a problem -- yes, you do have to do a couple things to preserve the underlying behavior.

What problems have you had?

philon Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

That's a pretty carefully thought out list of grievances.

What do you mean by 1), though? The link shows a list of methods you can't override on NSManagedObject, but they're things like -class and -isEqual:, which seems pretty reasonable for a system that needs to inspect and compare its objects.

Core Data does solve a few tough problems well. Faulting, uniquing, and cross-context change merging are probably the top three. Yes, it can be much simpler to just query SQLite, but I've never seen somebody do that and abstract away updating stale copies of objects.

philon Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

Bingo. Core Data concurrency pretty much works these days.

philon YC Demo Day, the Morning After

Here's the opening sentence from Anthony Ha's top list for TC. How much more positive can you get?

Y Combinator was tougher to get into than ever this season, and the quality showed on stage.

philon This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

I looked into this a year ago. You're right: "dry-aged beef" is the fancy expensive stuff your yuppie butcher is selling you. "Wet-aged" is everything else -- they pretty much stick it in a plastic bag in a brine that breaks down tissue. If you don't do anything what you have is a curiously tough meat product.

Wet aging is cheaper because you raise the water content (and thus the weight) a little, whereas in dry aging you lose a bunch of moisture, and because it only takes a week or so.

philon We'll Be Circling Back

Did you know? Jokes are much funnier after you explain them.

philon This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_aging

philon Write Better with Draft

So, you were attracted to the promised simplicity of the service, but turned off by the simplicity of the user model?

philon A New Ideas Machine

They promised us flying cars, and all we got were these electric cars and Bloom boxes!

philon Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

I have for years. Believe me, the idea that the app store is a positive feedback loop and you have to clear the inital hurdle to get anywhere is not news to me.

But the advice you're giving here is roughly equivalent to telling a young cyclist in their first pro race, "hey, listen buddy. If you want to succeed, you've got to dope. Everybody's doing it. There's no other way."

philon Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

This is toxic advice and putting it out there makes the ecosystem worse. Giving it anonymously but backing it by appealing to your authority as an IGF judge, etc is bullshit.

(And that's true regardless of whether it's effective -- it clearly is, though I think mostly in the short term).

Edit: Since I'm being fairly negative here, I want to add that VonGuard's comments on gameplay and adding unique elements seem well-informed and well-intentioned.

philon Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

This is disturbingly cynical advice. If you stand by it, why not attach your real name to it? If not, why put it in public?

And by the way, you're recommending buying fake reviews. Here's a better tactic (and one that's guaranteed not to get you kicked out of the app store): get your launch announcement to the top slot on a popular discussion site, and get the real people there to leave real reviews instead. Which, if you're reading this and want to help these guys, is probably the best thing you can do.

philon Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

Very cool.

This reminds me of Colorbind, one of my all-time favorite iOS games, but expanded and taken 3d. I've always wished there was more to Colorbind...

philon Are You Living in a Fourth Amendment Exclusion Zone?

Michelle Malkin notwithstanding, it's pretty fucking cut and dried, and a national shame.

philon Project Amy - App.net messaging integrated natively into Messages for the Mac

Unfortunately, iOS Messages is not extensible like this.

philon What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision.

The post list stuff like 3D printing (i.e. decentralized/democratized manufacturing). If just that one technology becomes widespread (and it's well on the way) it's going to radically alter the world. All your stuff is going to be made differently. There will be different constraints on how you can treat your stuff and who can decide what it looks like, and that's going to change how you feel about most of the things you own. How much broader a vision could you possibly ask for?

philon Andrew Mason out at Groupon

...And Lefkosky asserting control.

Anyone who follows Groupon more closely understand what that's likely to mean for the changes in direction they had been trying to pull off?

philon An Unremarkable Event in the Tenderloin

That program requires you have verified family/friends to take you in at the other end of the trip, which seems pretty legit.

philon Help Fight Patent Trolls – Support the SHIELD Act

<3 Peter DeFazio

philon Crossing The Street

Hot tip: filter uncommitted make-your-own-rules types by looking at driving instead of walking.

Any Joe Schmo can jaywalk, but it takes a real free spirit to decide no cars are coming and run that red light.

philon Wikipedia over SMS: Getting Wikipedia to the people who need it most

"Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring." - Clay Shirky

philon iMessage Should Have a Dead Battery Auto-Responder

...is a feature iMessage does not offer.

philon Yahoo’s backwards move

Well put.

Few people seem to make a distinction between what's good most of the time and what's good when you're trying to turn around a moribund giant whose dysfunctional processes are a big part of the problem.