Not sure how this story is breaking and unexpected. This is exactly the type and style of program that was expected right after 9/11. It's totally the NSA's playground and the co-operation and/or backdooring of major, communication-funneling corporations would be assured. How is this shocking? It has little to do with political winds and everything to do with the spawn of the military-industrial complex... the military-infocomm complex.
CIA != NSA and I'd be pessimistic on the CIA funding projects for the NSA. They aren't the same org and they have reasons to not be, so they aren't all chummy.
This reminded me of how ham-handed we should expect the media handling of all this will be and how many windmills will be put up for people to teeter at while the real story and grander plan continues to roll past and evolve.
Wish he spent more time on meaningful work instead of retorting inflammatory web postings.
He could have done two things in far shorter time.
1) Debunked the original article
2) Used the space to evangelize to others (while echoing the original article's author's views).
Too many words for HN over any private wedding. If I wanted ceremony, I'd be writing STL.
Sorry folks. We should have been well beyond the point of detached thought experiments about this. Change the power structures or change the power structures. They've gone too far in so many ways. Change from within, change from outside, or stay home and get what you deserve?
Yeah, but those are just questions on paper! They after me lucky charms!
When you sign a legal form, especially tied to a business, you might want to consider the ramifications of how you complete the form. You probably should legal up prospectively if it deals with money and currencies.
This is not surprising for MtGox. Their platform, communications, and, now, essential business acumen all perform at the same unprofessional level. I guess it's back to trading cards then, eh?
Pay bands. Loss of the love/age discrimination. Hours/screw your stress.
Sorry... we don't understand what you do enough to warrant paying you 2x-3x what we pay the grads and we pay grads more than other starters. Pay the programmer more than execs or non-tech with big degrees?
There are also a bunch of folks that ride out the tech that they rode in on when they started. PHP? Classic ASP? COBOL? If you don't love to learn and adapt in both tech and culture, you won't know what the cool kids know nor will you fit well with their group to tell stories about pointers and punch cards.
At 40, those kids of yours are just getting better and better and you might be feeling guilty about missing out on parts of those first years. You might have also done the math on how much of your surplus value you, as developer, are pouring into the sales guys' gas guzzler... You are there when something fails. You are there cashing the checks that the sales people write beyond scope, budget, and/or time. You see that gals' work-life balance compared to yours and say, f-it.
Also, as the guy notes... StackOverflow is a self-selecting group. Which of these highly-paid, older programmers are trying to build up virtual street cred or answering surveys?
I need to underline that he throws video in like it's nothing.
Sure, just for images without responsibility of 6-8 9's for peoples' treasured decade of photos, you can approach the price. I believe Imgur also has, even pro accounts, a 5MB limit on file size and that brings a set of efficiencies on resources. Fine for pictures, trouble for video.
When 1-10 million people are uploading/downloading 200MB/min for video @ maybe 1MB/sec?, storage stops being the most painful problem.
This would be something of a netflix scale problem, but without some set of minimal control about formats, dynamic content throttling, etc.
So you want:
- unlimited storage for a large collection of images
- additional unlimited storage for an acceleratingly large archive of video
- minimal local caching and, likely, very responsive UI
- to do me the favor of profit at $5/mo
I can't get past the entitlement attitude that one should be able to archive unlimited amounts of 1080p 30fps video for $5/mo. 178MB/min. Average youtube video is 4+minutes. That's >700MB per video.
Even at scale, Amazon s3 is .055/GB, so it'd be over $5 just to store 100GB, let alone run the SaaS platform and related overhead. Sure, that's an Amazon retail price for storage, but I don't see how $5/mo. is profitable once everyone is auto-syncing cat videos and their gangam harlem thrift shop videos.
Edit: Sorry for flippancy. I sense the challenge of the over-complete demo. Eventually, the design requires interfacing with developers who are then skewered for not getting it done as fast as the drag and drop mock-up.
It's probably not horribly worse than taking on an HTML5 template from your favorite template garden along with a laundry list of breaking customizations... I find it pretty quick to take the static images and build out without the baggage of more opinionated style work already "complete"
I want to respectfully disparage your statement. Doubling zero is zero. Doubling a small amount is likely still a small amount. They need to sell somewhere like 10k units to make this effort worth repeating, let alone a profit model. That means they better get working on getting this in the hands of 150k pirates.
7% of freeloaders is no small or easy task and compare time and energy trying to convert the sinful vs. pandering to the pious. Stop trying to fix culture or people and make a good product that makes life better and/or easier for paying customers.
This thread would be a fine place to enumerate the devs and studios that had success converting pirates to payers. That's a short list.
Given their platform, you would think progressive crippling of game play hits the correct balance of try before you buy and allowing for player investment to the point where they could be nudged in. Or, why not sell in-game DRM for $8?
So, you just released a game after what was likely a big investment in heart, time, and money and you haven't pulled any money back out yet? Did you expect something different after such a short period of time?
Also, you created a game that has pulled in $1600 in revenue so far and you're thinking that $24k worth of revenue is just not coming in because you can measure the freeloaders. Those freeloaders aren't your customers and likely never will be.
Focus on why 214 people bought the game and make them so happy that they will support you and the extended marketing of the game.
Had you not spent the hours developing, testing, etc. these features and trying to trick worthless freeloaders into exposing themselves for the sake of rhetorical blog posts, you could have improved your bottom line. You COULD have added features important to paying customers.
Also, the sad freeloaders posts stink of fabrication. They may well not be, but my cynicism puts together a picture of a hacker-news-abuse viral marketing scheme. Every link in the chain has an unsoiled feel to it. The game is about a game dev company, not FPS gore. The freeloaders write in full sentences and precisely nail talking points as if they came from a game industry association. The dev has taken great care to handle freeloaders gently in the post. exposing everything. Even if this were a marketing scam, the backlash would be ho-hum because everything is just so meek.
AND... of course there's an actionable pitch and link thrown right in there. You were supposed to hold back and wait for the crowd to demand links.
This game always had a very limited audience. RPG of a gaming software development company? Plan the scale and scope of your project accordingly.
The cynic in me says, "How Kaggle wastes the time of many talented individuals while enabling corporations to give the finger to their staff."
I should start providing prizes for the best start-up. I'll give you a $20k prize and then turn around and sell it for $1M or more. You can put it on your resume. Win win.
EDIT: Sure, it's good for various things, but it is so detached from the reality that it's a bit out in the thicket. The cynic in me just doesn't get over the value handed over by competitors to the sponsors.
Talk about putting up a shingle and calling yourself an exchange.
The clamor from the crowd that they need to do better PR gets me chuckling the most. They are fairly transparent about their lack of technical expertise, hinting at major issues in their understanding or seriousness of what they are doing.
When one noisy person tells you how to do your job and you know they're wrong, whatever. Brush it off.
When a fistful of redditors are telling you 15 different ways that you should be doing your job and it's pretty easy to show that they understand the problem domain and issues better than the team... that's a big problem.
I guess people hope MtGoxs new trading platform scales better, but that is not the sort of thought/wonder to be having when you are about to press submit on thousands in trades.
Bitcoin. Currency like kids and potato cannons. What could go wrong? Fire it up!
How useful is a "currency" if it 1) has volatility like a penny stock and 2) raises the stakes on 0-day defense to something ridiculous?
When I hear interviews where people (bitcoin founder) suggest that you don't transfer into bitcoins any state currency you aren't willing to lose... it sort of peels the "inflation-hedge" covers off the whole thing. How unstable and unsecure does a currency have to be to be nearly worthless? USDollars look pretty safe again.
This is so much a game of hacker gambling. A great experiment. Too bad it consumes so much productive time and energy.
The beautiful narrative of the reclusive, open-society, eastern hacker that designs this thing which grows to be the godzilla it is... The story arc on bitcoin is borderline trite. Michael Bay is all over this in a year.
So, the disappointment is merely a naming problem that Apple baked for itself by starting/sticking to a numbering scheme when most device makers have an "internal" code and then there's the name that each carrier tacks on. The only time you get iterations is when a device "hits" (Razor, Galaxy, One, etc.)
The disappointments surely aren't because, spec-by-spec and material ounce-per-ounce, bloggers and the public look at the value proposition and shrug about the AAPL premium. The former certainly would also never try to clickbait fanboys to their ad-laden pages to profusely pound the Book of Jobs upon heretics.
To give them the finger, because he knows that no matter what Apple delivers for their updated flagship, it will be 100% better than anything else out there in all respects. Anyone disappointed? THE FINGER!!!
It's almost like there's an IRC channel devoted to dispatching those invested in the scheme to flood the online community consciousness with fanciful ideas of wealth and splendour.
So financial journalists have no idea how these things are made, used, or what place they have within transactions, economies, etc. and you expect masses of people to eventually feel comfortable with the stuff?
The fear that is engendered by a non-tangible, value-containing set of bytes of data on a computer in the age of hacker doom-dom is quite likely the extent of what you need to know about its foreseeable viability and should put the current "value rollercoaster" into perspective.
How does the layman NOT lump the early adopters/hype pumpers in with the same crowd vandalizing paypal and credit card companies? So these kids created a currency to reject the system and they think this is the future?
It's like watching some unruly teenagers with a very large potato gun mounted to their friend's back and saying... "This is the future of the postal service. Buy stamps while they're cheap."
It's the emperor's new clothes. That's not a currency. It's barely a digital promise to anonymous posters on 4chan. As long as there isn't anybody with a strong incentive to pull the plug, this thing will continue to eat up every online "watering hole." It's great for silk road, but spare us the hype machine. The only people with incentive are adopters.
They shut that zeek's reqards down in NC and now everyone is hopping on the p2p currency train. Start your own business! Invest in the peoples' coin!
Don't be so dramatic. From a usability perspective, it works enough. Also, interactivity is changing and themes are options. People don't hover or click with touch devices.
Many UI concepts are in flux (again). Link? Button? Collapsible? Let go of what you know and watch people using flat UI.
There are many ways to hint interactions within flat design. As has always been, stick to more abstract interaction fundamentals and processes and don't wed yourself to fads based on current (or old) tooling trends.
It's easy enough to use color, contrast, font, positioning, size, shape, etc. all to indicate interaction points. That's all a gradient button is compared to the text in an old message box.
Also, there are two major thrusts in flat ui that make it compelling. One is the additional focus on content since the UI takes a step back once you spend less time tweaking artificial details. Which leads into the second point others are making. The time and energy spent in details to achieve fake results in a digital context are dishonest at best and grossly out of place from a design perspective. There's a little bit for everyone in there.
James Bamford