Falcon9

I've listened to some LibriVox recordings of public domain works, notably A Princess of Mars. The price was right at the time, though the quality was, as you say, remarkably subpar. If I could have had a neural net read me the book instead of having to change with narrators changing every chapter, that would have been preferable.

That said, I have money now, so give me Todd McLaren narrating Altered Carbon for the cost of an Audible Credit every time.

Agreed. That's the kind of image that will be greatly enhanced by the faked software bokeh coming in a software update soon.

If you clone it on your local machine you also won't receive any automatic updates.

It's simpler than that. Dense population dropoff lines up with dropoff in average rainfall: http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/pcpn/us_precip.gif

From what little I understand, a Dyson Sphere would require so much material in terms of heavy elements that you'd have a great deal of trouble building a significant number of them even if you were raiding the entire universe for these materials. But like I said, I understand very little (and would love clarification).

Too much so, for me, but it came with a nice soundtrack/playlist.

Huh. I actually used Bitcoin to buy Crashlands through the dev's Humble link since they said they get a larger cut there than through Steam, and I decided to cash out my Stellar (or whatever those morphed into recently) which worked out nicely for me. I guess they don't accept Bitcoin for some of their bundles which could then be resold on shady websites.

Not surprising given the incredible overwhelming number of people trying to play the game. I knew it would be huge, I never imagined it would be the phenomenon it is. (Go to a park at lunch or after work if you don't know what I'm talking about. Any park in the country.)

If you create a Pokestop, they will come. One thing Niantic did was turn certain businesses into portals - Pokemon Go could make many times more money with a similar deal.

"Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it`s getting worse."

- Penn Jillette

Of course, the full context of the statement transforms this from a head nodder into a well reasoned argument:

"It's because you get older, your responsibilities are different. Now I'm taking care of children instead of being a child. It makes the world look scarier. That happens to everyone."

That image of the square cut deep dish is so very NSWH. Heck, I'm fully sated at the moment and I want that in my mouth right now. I may have to plan a trip to Chicago.

Daniel Negreanu is always fun to watch, and he has some great streams on Twitch when he's out of the country: https://www.twitch.tv/dnegspoker (He often plays Hearthstone when he's home in Vegas, and that's fun to watch too.)

Such laws vary by state: http://www.innocenceproject.org/compensating-wrongly-convict...

The retrial had very little to do with Serial, and everything to do with the fact that the prosecution withheld a cover page from one of their star witnesses which would have caused him not to give the testimony he gave had he seen it. That's it. A key piece of "evidence" was the Leakin Park call, and the cover sheet that was withheld states that the location data from the Leakin Park call (an incoming call) is not reliable information.

If you listen to the Truth and Justice podcast, there are people doing exactly as you suggest. Often with semi-reckless abandon and very little to support their case, but they're trying to use what evidence they have to figure out what happened and who killed Hae.

Honestly, listening to it only resolves to me that it's better if most people didn't try to turn their attention to what really happened, because they're never going to be able to put together enough of the story at this late date to do more than ruinously speculate. Truth and Justice puts into better perspective how well Serial did finding what story there was to tell, and telling it fairly.

It's a very different experience, and clearly incredibly biased, but I agree that it's a good listen if you got into the case and are curious to learn more about the facts and players. Some of the wild theories they come up with though are simply incredible to me - they seem like level headed people much of the time, but the lengths they will go to suggest a conspiracy (where simple incompetence is a much more probable reality) can truly blow my mind.

He showed an interest in not proving he is Satoshi as well, and didn't prove it. This isn't a negative you can prove (certainly not in the way you're saying.)

I say this every time I read an article approaching my areas of domain knowledge. (And yet I keep reading the articles.) Thankfully we have forums such as this one where more context and clarification and correction can come out.

This reads like a comment from someone who didn't read the article. To call this piece fawning? And the author provides plenty of reasons for why Wright might not want to sign a message even if he could, and they're interesting and layered reasons that require going into detail into the warped psychology of a man who appears just crazy enough to be Satoshi and refuse to prove it, and just crazy enough to be willing to pull off an incredible elaborate hoax even knowing that he won't get away with it in the end.

Granted, it's a LOT of reading - over 35,000 words. But why is the top comment on HN (at time of this comment) on an article of this length and breadth one that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the article's actual specific content?

The point of the piece isn't that herein lies the truth -- this is simply the author's experiences (months of them!) laid bare. You could sum it up in this quote from the piece: "The reason poets dislike each other's books is because they seem wrong, false – a kind of lie. 'If you were telling the truth you would be writing the same poems as me.'"

There have been plenty of terse short form blog entries about the saga, if you don't like the style of this piece you're free to close it and walk away without shitting on it.

I spent the afternoon reading this piece and thoroughly enjoyed the writing, including the flavor and detail you call out.

Egan's Quarantine had me checking out dozens of books about Quantum Mechanics while I was in High School. Love Egan's work, even if I had quite a bit of trouble with Diaspora (I probably just need to give the audiobook a second listen).

The logic only looks terrible until you follow the course of actions, read the arguments, understand the situation, and realize that actually it's a pretty fair and balanced process.

As noted in the footnotes, at a cost of $160MM to them based on this verdict! Oops indeed.

Velocity Raptor's end game screen was worth the insanity and craziness of dealing with time dilation at c=3mph. If the speed of light ever slows like that IRL though, I'm refusing to get out of bed.

I'm also working on a game that at one point had a quantum mechanical theme, however it is more backstory than science. Quantum Traffic Control. Watch for it on the App Store sometime in this decade. Hopefully.

Air travel is per-person, vehicular travel becomes more attractive (price-wise) for families or larger groups.

Crashlands! An action adventure game with a crafting component that's fun even for people who don't like crafting games - you have an infinite auto-managed inventory that just gets out of your way - with a funny, quirky storyline and easily over 50 hours of gameplay, all for $5 (on mobile, or $15 on Steam). Oh, and there's cross-platform saves so you can spend $20 to get the game on both platforms and switch back and forth on your same saved game at your leisure! (I'm a big fan of Crashlands, as you can see.)

I think the stigma with pirating a premium PC game is higher than "just" pirating an Android game. I know a lot of people who see mobile apps as disposable and so have no problem downloading them for free. A PC game like Doom carries a different weight to it that makes these same people at least consider the premium purchase. Not saying it makes any sense, but that's been my observation.

I struggled so hard with that game before eventually "winning" my internal battle and deleting it. As you say, the core gameplay is actually really fun and skill based but the psychological pressures at play with all the chests and timers just felt too oppressive. Opening the app just got to feel too much like exposing myself to radioactive highly optimized whale food, and I had to just say "NO!"

I can't speak to Assasin's Creed, but in the case of Crashlands we can see that it was a very good idea: they've made enough money that for the first time they're paying themselves salary and even expanding their studio with two new hires. There's no way their original F2P plans for that game would have succeeded at that level - I bought the game because it was premium and because I had a good experience with the premium game Punch Club that same week and wanted more "real gaming." (I've since become a gigantic fan of Butterscotch Shenanigans, the developer, and have a lot of insight into their operations. Their Game Dev comedy podcast, Coffee with Butterscotch, is the highlight of my week.)

Of course that works for them because they're a small studio with small budgets aren't looking for Clash of Clans levels of success. The ceiling is so much lower on a premium game, but it's plenty high for their current situation, and the competition is so much less severe (so the risk is way lower for such a quality game, which again fits their situation).

No official rules were ever posted (in any traditional legal format) and it was clear to many that there were "legal" weasel outs YC could use (twitter posts asking for upvotes) if it somehow came to that. I doubt any possible legal recourse factored in here. Reputation, yes. Legal? No. (IANAL)