mninm

I have no real idea what the ins-and-outs of 1099-K and so I could be completely wrong.

However, it seems like there may be some sort of threshold listed in the reporting requirements.

Would it be legally possible to allow your users to use the enhanced functionality of your platform up to the edge of that threshold?

Cutting off access to the premium services that the sellers of erotic coo-coo clocks (or whatever) have come to value might incentivize them enough to overcome the 1099-K hurdle. You could make the process gentler by constantly displaying the amount of revenue left that they can transact before being cut off.

Be careful though. Cutting off access will equally incentivize users to bypass the restrictions you've put in place by creating multiple accounts, etc.

Lacking the above you could also try to focus on the part of your platform the sellers do want to use and sell a premium tier to sellers that has features that would make them stand out to buyers. For example premium users could have flair (think something akin to a verified checkmark) next to their listings in searches and the ability to post an extra video of their clocks.

A mercenary satellite is a wild concept. It raises an number of ethical questions.

It also feels like another step down the path toward a cyberpunk dystopia. I'll add it to the list with robotic policing and subscription based airbags.

Colleges often make deals with local businesses. If you look around you may find that the student council, or student affairs, or somebody can hook you up with cheap movie tickets, coupons for pizza, etc.

At the college I attended I found that administrative guidelines were not as inflexible as they seemed on their face. I can't remember the number of times I was wait-listed for a class but was able to get in anyway because I showed up the first day and asked the professor if they could help me out. Generally my strategy to any bureaucratic problem I encountered was to work my way up the food chain until I found someone that was empowered to help me.

Back in the 90's I remember my family got a new Compaq (I think) PC. On it it came preloaded with this great dos tutorial that was essentially a fake terminal that would walk the user through DOS commands letting them try various things in a safe environment and let them see the effects.

It was definitely effective in teaching my young self the basics of DOS and was a big step on my path to becoming proficient with a computer.

A video game wiki I use sometimes:

gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/

Games you can play on Gopher:

gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/

gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/--/Winnifred_Huck

There was another HN Gopher thread recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31392145#31410764

gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/

This gopher hole is a good example of how Gopher doesn't have an notion of cookies. You can see what is either gamestate or some sort of session id encoded in the URL.

Another way to do this kind of thing is to generate "parallel universes". It involves generating enough gopher "directories" AKA "pages" to encode every possible game state and then link them together like you would a "Choose Your Own Adventure". Essentially trading dynamic page generation for hard drive space.

You can see an example of the "parallel universes" approach used in the easter egg text adventure game located at:

gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/--/Winnifred_Huck

Thank you for making free software!

There is a video game wiki gopher hole that I use occasionally. gopher://giantgopher.com/ is a gopher front end for GiantBomb.com but with what I find to be a better search interface.

There aren't a whole lot of good Gopher browsers out there for Windows. I use http://jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows with the text color set to green and the background set to black. From what I hear there is also a Gopher chrome plugin that isn't too bad.

For those interested in playing around with gopher development in addition to the tools that are mentioned in the the article there is an old abandoned yet serviceable gopher version of flask kicking around out there that is quick and easy to get going.

Cool gameplay loop! Lots of short jumps makes it easier. Maybe change it so that every time a paddle is hit the player gets 10 points but looses a point every time they jump.

I was trying to figure out what font they are using and when I was inspecting the page I found the comment below. I have nothing in particular to say about it. I just thought it was interesting.

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                       YOU ARE YOUR OWN GOD.
               YOU HAVE THE POWER TO CHANGE THE WORLD.
                       MAKE THE MOST OF IT.
    -->

What I realized years ago is that the upvote on Stack Overflow don't mean "I tried this and it works for me" or "I'm an expert and this is the answer". No, the upvotes on Stack Overflow are along the line of the upvotes/likes one would find on Reddit or HN. More like "you sound confident" or "I was looking for this but I haven't tried it yet"

Plus the report is referring to incidents of contact with contaminated surfaces not some random individual surface.

I also am not a lawyer but from what I understand the situation is actually more severe than that.

I couldn't find the reference offhand but I've read that YouTube has no ability to adjudicate the validity of a DMCA takedown request at all. They must responed as proscribed by the DMCA.

Which makes sense because once the DMCA is involved it's ultimately a legal dispute between the person that uploaded the video and the person that claims to own the copyright. And that kind of dispute is something only the courts can decide.

I too was unable to convince my family but based on your comment I just thought of a new (to me) example I might have tried. It leverages the grasp of fractions that you mentioned people already have.

Everyone knows that 1/3 = .333... and it can be pretty easily shown that 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3 = .666...

So I would ask them that since .333... + .333... = .666... does it make sense that .333... + .333... + .333... = .999...? And since .333... = 1/3 isn't .333... + .333... + .333... = .999... the same as saying 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 3/3? And since 3/3 = 1 and 3/3 = .999... it makes sense that 1 = 3/3 = .999...

This might work on your kids but in my experience recalcitrant people will either act bored as if they don't care or will try to claim that somehow they understood it all along.

What's your take on using AWS Flexmatch & GameLift for matchmaking and autoscaling? Do you see any trouble spots in their approach?

I debated whether to respond to your comment at all. Let me first say that I wish you all the best and hope for your continued success. However, some of what you said feels like you're asserting that "up" is in fact "down". So let me first establish my bona fides with this screenshot that was taken on the 25 of last month:

http://imgur.com/a/uv1C6

so you can believe me when I say that I was a pretty good player that spent a lot of time playing your game.

> This was implemented directly to combat the prevalence of bots on the EU & NA servers (and the annoyance some players were facing when they were just playing AIs all the time), where you're now not allowed to bot on. Players have the option of choosing whether or not they wish to play against bots, but if they wish not to they can still play on the NA and EU servers.

Respectfully, yours is not the first game to have these types of problems. People grief and cheat in every online game where it's possible. Creating bot-only servers will not curtail bot use on non-bot servers. It will instead give people who grief and cheat stronger bots that they can pull down from github or wherever and adapt to play on non-bot servers.

They only thing that will stop people from using bots in bot free zones are technological countermeasures. Captchas being the classic example of such technology.

> If you dislike the new movement settings, you are able to disable them in the options menu.

That fact that you suggest this as a way to address my concerns makes me wonder if you actually play your game outside of testing it to see if a new feature works.

When you changed the way players can move you not only changed how I play the game but how everyone else plays against me. Essentially, with this latest revision you've created a substantially different game. Using the option to limit how I move without it changing how my opponent's move would only serve to put me at a disadvantage. It would not roll back the clock to the make the game be like the old game I liked.

All of the tactical nuance that the game used to have was based on timing and multitasking. High level gameplay steamed from getting inside your opponent's head and trying to force them into mistakes. The key to doing that was to realize that if an opponent is trying one thing they most likely aren't doing something else. If you could get them to focus on the wrong thing you gained the advantage. In my opinion the old game had a great balance between strategy and execution. If you weren't good at both you couldn't win. The new control scheme throws that particular balance out window. It's hard to describe in words because it's a million little differences that add up to a whole but suffice it to say that games now to me feel less like a sword fight and more like people running at each other with pots on their heads.

Do bots watch ads?

For the last several weeks I've been an avid generals player. For awhile I was even ranked #7 on the FFA ladder. And I have to say that this is the second change in about a week that has left me confused about who generals is trying to appeal to. Maybe the bots will be fun for humans to play against but I doubt it. Maybe this will be a benign change and the quality of the bots that play generals on the non-bot servers won't improve much from what they are now. But either way why is an ad-supported game encouraging bots to try and take it over? What happens when the bots become so good and so prevalent that humans can't hope to compete? Why would anyone want to play?

Though I guess in the end I don't really care all that much as the recent changes to the movement scheme have really put me off the game. High level play used to be about feints and visibility, cutting off your opponents tendrils whilst building your own, pulling their forces away from your king while trying to find theirs. It really had a nice balance. Now, not so much.

I don't want to seem too sour. I had a lot of fun with generals [thanks devs] but now I'm in search of a new favorite game.

PWG

I love the minimalist approach. It would be nice if there was a sound effect when a player is defeated. Not as an aesthetic thing but as a way to keep track of the match without having to constantly check the scoreboard.

Also, the screen you show when a match ends seems like a good place to stick another ad.

If this is true then it's a real bummer. Jailbreaking tends to pave the way for a lot of bad things. Rampant piracy and multiplayer cheating will totally bork the playstation ecosystem.

Edit: I dug into this a little bit and it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that this is credible. A little more info (though no smoking gun) can be found at the tweeters GitHub page http://cturt.github.io/articles.html

Way back when before the Broken Age Kickstarter and before Microsoft bought Minecraft Notch half-jokingly tweeted an offer to personally fund a sequel to Psychonaughts. In interviews Tim Schafer (head of Double Fine) mentioned that that wasn't very realistic as a proper sequel would cost around $13 million.

It's interesting that in the news reports about this latest announcement state that crowd funding will be used alongside outside private investment.

It makes me wonder if this fig campaign is mainly about generating buzz (for both fig and Psychonauts 2) and as a way to prove public interest in order to unlock the aforementioned outside investment.

http://kotaku.com/5885525/bankrolling-psychonauts-2-was-just...

I was a little disappointed that article was about a pilot flying a plane from the ground and not about a plane that flew itself.

Having a human in the loop does bring to mind some fun possibilities though. Imagine one pilot managing several planes at once only interceding at times too out of the norm for the autopilot. Or perhaps imagine a network of Uber pilots all over the world managing planes in their spare time (1).

Either way unmanned aircraft certainly would have made Castaway a much different movie (2).

(1) Whimsy not position.

(2) Two hours of a camera-shot of an empty beach.

I remember this happened to a minor league baseball coach for the Red Barrons back in the '90s. Basically, someone who knew the guy wanted to send the coach an envelope with cocaine in it. So the genius gave the envelope to his secretary to mail. The secretary accedently spilled some coffee on the envelope and decided to open it to check the contents. She found the drugs and called the police.

The police, now having the drugs and the guy that was going to send them, hatch a plan. First, they mail the drugs to the coach. Then shortly after the envelope arrives they search the coach's room. Low and behold they find cocaine and the coach is arrested.

I'm not sure how it turned out but it looks like the coach is still coaching to this day:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...

Trident missiles (a type of ICBM currently being carried aboard US submarines) do just that.

Once launched a Trident, using a camera, gets a fix on a single specific star. It then uses the data on that star's position to correct for any errors in its internal guidance system.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)

I once priced a variety of scales on Amazon and for weeks afterward the stream of recommended products that Amazon shows at the bottom of the page became polluted with all sorts of drug paraphernalia that Amazon sells.

My takeaway is that drug dealers/users use Amazon to buy their supplies just like anyone else. It makes sense, I mean, why wouldn't they?

"We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off."

It always fascinates me how much my world view and the world view of those around me is based on the exceptional and not the mundane. The news outlets report the news assuming that the audience knows what's normal. When the news is used to become informed about the world many people come away with a skewed impression of reality. I am of the opinion that people would be better served by news reports that provide context to explain why the news is in fact news.

Here's some context I find interesting:

According to the CDC:

Americans murdered per year: 16,121

Americans killed in car accidents per year: 33,804

Americans killed by smoking related diseases per year: 480,000

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_...

I prefer http://youtu.be/8H8e-2TLgpA

Lack of innovation means lack of improvement. Endevoring to do things other than the rote way can lead to a better way.

From the article:

"satellite observations and ground-based ecological work. The former gives an overall view of where forests do and don’t exist on the Earth’s surface. But the latter goes underneath the canopy to determine how many trees exist in a given area in a given type of forest."

It seems that satellites give a good measure of the acreage covered by forests but are not suitable for differentiating individual trees. To do that requires on the ground sampling and as more sampling is done it is being discovered that the actual number of trees differs substantially from previously established estimates.