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kpao's comments

kpao | 8 years ago | on: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website

I'm wearing someone else's shoes every day so I can give you a quick feedback of my experience. I'm trans, blonde, pass relatively well and on the feminine side. I have seen a drastic shift in messages I get from people online. I regularly get mansplained obvious things about aviation, tech, coding on social media. People don't assume I'm the CEO of my company or that I have anything to do with engineering anymore. Glad we hired someone else to do support for us...

kpao | 9 years ago | on: A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator

If we get a strange claim like "The 737 at MLW should have a stable approach speed of 170kts, with 70% N1 and 5 degrees of pitch", then asking for a source of information seems pretty reasonable here...

They usually don't find it because it is based on "shower curtain" type of sources. ("my brother told me", or "this other sim behaves this way")

kpao | 9 years ago | on: A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator

It's an everyday occurrence during the development of our app (Infinite Flight).

We often get customers complaining about a misplaced sticker on a livery, a missing exit door in a particular variant of a the 737-900... That type of stuff is easily verifiable. But for things like the airplane not behaving in a way they expect in certain conditions, or perhaps a wrong approach speed or angle, discussions usually start with: "We tuned the airplane based on information available to us at the time we built the airplane. We are happy to make any changes based on an actual report from one or more pilots flying on this airplane, or better yet, the aircraft manual if you can get your hands on one."

The discussion usually ends there :)

One we get often is about why it's possible to do a barrel roll in a jet liner in Infinite Flight. We simply point them to the video of that test pilot who did one in a 707 ;-)

kpao | 9 years ago | on: All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware

Tell that to a pilot who's had an autopilot failure where a servo went crazy all of a sudden. You better act quick, especially in low visibility situations, to turn it off, or pull the circuit breaker. It might happen a bit slower than in a car, but the consequences can be much more dramatic.

kpao | 9 years ago | on: All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware

Pilot here as well, unfortunately, it's a fight that won't be easy to win. If in the mind of people, Autopilot means self driving. It's going to be hard to change the global perception.

When I'm using the Autopilot, I feel like I'm in my airplane, always on guard, and in a practice of recovery from unusual attitude in flight.

There are a few times also where being an engineer has helped a lot. You can pretty much predict the situations where the car will run into issues and conflicts ahead of time, just by looking at the scenario in front of you.

It's something that the majority of population is not trained to do.

Now having said that, I used to own a BMW X5 with Adaptive Cruise Control, and that car was also doing some pretty stupid things at times, especially when cars in front were moving out of the way. The car would suddenly think the way was clear and floor the accelerator...

kpao | 9 years ago | on: FAA Urges Passengers to Not Use Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on Planes

Have you updated that phone regularly? I have one for testing here, and it's become so slow, I don't even know how one could use it every day... Even if they bring back removable batteries, software updates will take care of the deprecation. Just look at an iPad 2 with iOS9 today...

kpao | 10 years ago | on: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

So happy for Miguel and Nat. We worked with Xamarin when we ported Infinite flight from Windows Phone to iOS and Android. We wouldn't be there if it wasn't for them.

One thing I'm really looking forward to is efforts on the QA front. I'm scared to update every time as things are frequently broken, especially on the iOS side.

kpao | 11 years ago | on: My iOS Indie-Game Numbers

This is mostly the feeling I get from reading those articles about lousy sale on iOS. It has become too easy to write those types of simple games, what are those guys expecting? It's a known fact that if you write such a game in a few weeks, it will most likely not generate any money.

kpao | 12 years ago | on: Propose HN: Screenshot Saturday

Thanks! It's written in C#, we use Xamarin to target both iOS and Android. We also have a PC version running on standard MS.NET

I'm not familiar with Harmattan.

kpao | 12 years ago | on: Facebook Fraud [video]

We learned this last year when we started paying for ads on Facebook. Our app is in a niche market (Flight Simulator for mobile devices), I assumed that very little people would click, but we saw a constant increase of about 1K likes/day. After looking at the analytics, I decided to cut Brazil and India. We had a huge disconnect between our App Store country data and those ads, and we also saw no noticeable change in our sales figures.

The accounts also were random like the one in the OP video, a Indian teenage girl liking a Flight Simulator? Why not... Hundreds? nope...

I feel like I've been cheated by Facebook in a way and would like my money back. They sure can find a way to figure out if those clicks are legitimate. Someone has 3K likes of random interests? That's a red flag to me.

kpao | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

Infinite Flight: it's a flight simulator for mobile platforns I had been working on on the side for almost 7 years before finally deciding on joining forces with a friend to ship it on Windows Phone, then iOS and Android. What's cool about it is that it's written entirely in C# while and we still get decent performance on most devices. Also, we're slowly gaining traction with users that prefer flying with us rather than with the established competitors :) You can find more about the app here: http://flyingdevstudio.com and http://infinite-flight.com
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