gistblog - My iOS Indie-Game Numbers
Yesterday, Jared Sinclair published a very candid writeup of the download and sales numbers for his app Unread. It was very refreshing to see such an honest post and to see someone publicly admit that spending so much time on an independent app did not result in the numbers he was hoping for.
Hasnain says:
"Even though I managed to bring in a paltry $498 for a year's worth of side-project time, it gets even worse. I paid nearly $700 in Facebook and Twitter mobile ads to try and market them. I also bought an iPad Mini and an iPod Touch for development and testing, so I'm even deeper in the hole overall."
Posted on 2014-07-31T01:42:35+0000
Nukes of Hazard - The New Yorker
On January 25, 1995, at 9:28 A.M. Moscow time, an aide handed a briefcase to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. A small light near the handle was on, and inside was a screen displaying information indicating that a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from somewhere in the vicinity of…
Hasnain says:
"And so, for six minutes in 1995, the future of the species hung in the balance because a mid-level Russian official left work early, or neglected to find a proper procedure for dealing with a message that someone was sending up a rocket, at an unspecified time, to look at the northern lights. It’s like the forty-six-cent computer chip. There was no redundancy built into the system. If one piece failed, the whole system was imperilled."
Posted on 2014-07-31T01:37:59+0000
Markov Chains
Markov chains, named after Andrey Markov, are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with o…
Hasnain says:
This is one of the best visualizations and explanations I've seen.
Posted on 2014-07-31T01:26:42+0000
My first unikernel - Thomas Leonard's blog
I wanted to make a simple REST service for queuing file uploads, deployable as a virtual machine. The traditional way to do this is to download a …
Hasnain says:
Unikernels in Ocaml.
"This demonstrates both the good and the bad of Mirage: the bug was easy to find and fix, using regular debugging tools. I’m sure fixing a filesystem corruption bug in the Linux kernel would have been vastly more difficult. On the other hard, Linux is rather well tested, whereas I appear to be the first person ever to try deleting a file in Mirage!"
Posted on 2014-07-31T01:17:45+0000
Eloquent JavaScript
Eloquent JavaScriptsecond editionThis is a book about JavaScript, programming, and the wonders of the digital. You can read it online here, and a paper version is being worked on.Written by Marijn Haverbeke.Licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. All code in this book ma…
Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System - ACM Queue
Cloud computing has been pioneering the business of renting computing resources in large data centers to multiple (and possibly competing) tenants. The basic enabling technology for the cloud is virtualization such as Xen1 or VMWare, which allows customers to multiplex VMs (virtual machines) on a sh…
Hasnain says:
This is a new perspective on operating system design and containerization/virtualization. For all the systems folk.
Posted on 2014-07-31T01:08:47+0000
Use of illicit drugs becomes part of Silicon Valley's work culture
With a tech boom lubricated by VC cash, a startup culture cranked up by fiercely competitive VPs and adrenaline-driven coders, and a corporate model that encourages stressed-out managers to look the other way, illicit drugs and black-market painkillers have become part of the landscape here in the w…
Readings in distributed systems
Inspired by a recent purchase of the Red Book , which provides a curated list of important papers around database systems, I?ve decided to begin assembling a list of important papers in distributed systems.
Game about Squares
A little HTML5 puzzle game that takes a few seconds to take off and a few hours to beat. Playable right in the browser, including mobile
Hasnain says:
For all those people who want their lives sucked into another addictive game, here you go.
(also I'm counting down till the mobile clones appear)
Posted on 2014-07-27T18:04:41+0000
What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?
A refrigeration boom is changing the way Chinese people eat — and threatening the planet in the process.
Hasnain says:
"‘So many people these days have these massive refrigerators, and there is this sense that we need to keep them well stocked,’ Bloom said. ‘But there’s no way you can eat all that food before it goes bad.'"
Posted on 2014-07-27T18:01:35+0000