takasc2's comments

Here is how almost every government form in the UK works - long interactive form, mutiple pages of input. Then you get an error message at the end (or, sometimes you submit the form don't get an error message and then receive an error message in the post after 7/14 days). its easy to see how an interactive form that checks for consistency as it goes would win out!

From the article - wind power is projected to reach 30gw worldwide in 2019 - for comparison nuclear power worldwide reached 300gw in the 1980's.

I am not hating - I am just giving my opinion based on what I read on the first page. I guess SEO engineers is a better way to describe your work (tbh like many people SEO is a killer word that stops my attention i did not click through too see this was a tool not a consultancy) so I apologise for that.

So what is the current status of the project? it seems like you have not done anything for a year on the project but now it got submitted to HN? Bitcoin must have changed a lot in that time so i guess this is already a dead business just a cool project idea?

As an abstract idea / bitcoin experiment this is cool. As a company this is a disaster.

Its amazing you can fund a company these days with a statement like "the business model is yet to be discovered - we’ll probably provide paid-for oracle hosting services, or launch/invest in some smart contracts ourselves."

That basically is a business model of "we have no business model or intention of ever making any money - if people stop giving us money perhaps we can host a virtual yard sale - btw bitcoin is cool!!!!!

A three person team of SEO consultants think there is so much value in their understanding of an open source codebase they can somehow turn that into a business because bitcoin - lol.

Taleb does not accept/understand the criticism, and has posted some more mathiness and crude insults as a "response" would be another interpretation

Everyone knows it is not very popular - the limitations are extreme so you have to have a very specific use case for it.

What mistifies me is the sheer callousness/arrogance of the popcorn time developers. They must know they are playing with fire in a very public way but there is no need for them to be doing so. If they were just releasing a torrent client with streaming and media managment capabilities (the interesting part of the app) they would be fine but they insist on being as provocative and explicit about their desire to violate copyright as possible. The focus on public torrents is strange as well - in 2015 public torrents are a poisoned well disaster - they can't even compete with direct download sites any more - the product they were supposed to be more secure than.

Despite growth of Monte Carlo Based programs - Computers play Go(Baduk) only at roughly the level of a very good amateur player. I am very much looking forward to the advances in Go that will come in the next 25 years when computers start to challenge professional players in my preferred game. Until then, there is another useless pure information skill that humans are better than computers at.

I would consider production values part of marketing (a vital part) - they are competing only on PC without the marketing/production values being an issue - iPad is not a platform they can do that with. I don'et think they are necessarily wrong to step away from th iPad from a business perspective, just saying very different audience customer retention strategy and maybe not suited to them.

Games which target iPad first inevitably make design and marketing compromises that harm their other platform performance & experience - whereas games which target other platforms then are adapted can typical make far less painful and less compromising changes (which can work against them or for them).

Yes, it is possible but not easy - look at for example Shenandaoh's Desert Fox / Battle of The Bulge). But I don't know if that is a long term model for success. $19.99 is the highest price point you can set for a game and then you are competing with things like FMC2015 or Xcom (heck, you can get GTA San andreas for $6 or so - is your game better than GTA?!?) which are full PC ports. Clever developers will I think make a game for more established platforms, and if successful port to iPad for additional revenue. The iPad has millions of active premium gamers, but a tiny number compared to any non-portable system.

I looked up the company on pocket tactics, the site I menioned after I posted this. Infact they have had numerous mentions there as well, but no real detailed coverage, no real follow up. I don't think iPad games journalists are failing to cover companies like this - I think these kinds of companies are so anti-marketing in the presentation and design of their games that they fail to stand out or get noticed even by people like me who might have been looking for this kind of experience.

A contrasting company would be someone like inkle's 80 days - that's was an odd iPad game that was hard to sell just on screenshots, but it was marketed brilliantly and had a vision throughout the product that was reflected in taht and the buzz around it was and is huge because of that

I follow Ipad gaming quite closely because it is perfect for my commutes. I would consider myself as close to a hardcore ipad gamer as it is possible to get - I read specialist sites like pockettactics and spend well over a hundred dollars a year on ipad games. I had never heard of this company or its games before.

The ipad is a marketing platform in the best and worst way I can mean that. Looking at this company they seem aggressively anti-marketing. Their entire presentation style and format is opposed to the kind of experience the ipad offers. They are the anti-flipboard. The fact that someone as interested in ipad gaming as me was not even aware their games existed until now suggests it is probably not the best platform for them at all.

A faction of intellectual or pseudointellectual bloggers (depending on your opinion) - it is probably easier to say what they are against progressive politics and modernity, than what they are for - but at times they have openly or covertly advocated wanting to do some/all of bring back monarchy, return to traditional gender roles, abolish the distinction between church and state, isolationist foreign policies, racial segregation or "scientific racism" and so on. So, its pretty easy to see why they are quite controversial.