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I never quite understood why they don't just rebrand the Pfizer vaccine (or effective one) and move on.

What is the point of having all that propaganda apparatus if you can even do that?


I think nobody is in charge. I assume that Xi wanted to use COVID to solidify his power. But that failed and now everybody is waiting since he does not have enough power to change the narrative …

There is a rumor there are a lot of officials which still wait for approval from Hu Jintao and his group to do anything. But that rumor is from person who was not in China for 5 years.


Interesting angle there for a form of 'insider trading' - people in tv/film industry could easily buy this up and slide their assets into their own creations.

What I don't quite get is why the royalty payers don't start buying as well, feels like an easy way of boosting profits (assuming they can finance at a lower rate)


For the songs I assume because they produce fewer and fewer royalties over time, and the only ones for sale are those that aren’t worth that much.

But it would be amusing to get that Shrek set heh.


A brief article about the lessons learned on our recent adventure with Flutter.

TLDR - really quite liked it.


A minor tip I saw on a video about the development of the Doom levels was to do them in reverse. The theory being that you get better at designing levels with time and the best levels should be near the beginning. Always liked the idea, but not had a chance to use it, yet.


Yeah, John Romero explains that the famous e1m1 was the last level he designed for the original Doom, in this fantastic developer commentary he did for the game's first episode with IGN, for the game's 20th anniversary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUU7_BthBWM

'the classic horseshoe design' - show inaccessible teasers of later areas of the stage near the beginning to drive the player forward


If that's true, then throw away and redo the end levels.


One bad thing about this is that your game will get progressively worse as the player progresses, which isn't great.

An interleaved method will give better results.


Just released a new app to teach people how to solve cryptic crosswords - initial version is on iOS but the Android version is coming soon.


https://wolfstreet.com/2017/11/07/how-can-a-company-once-wor...

Has a fairly bleak write up. It makes the point that if enriching the founders is the aim they are doing pretty well.


I love that sales projection that demonstrates some people are unaware that there are potential uptake numbers lower than 1% :D.

> "Even if only 1% of people buy them we'll still profit!"


I love that sales projection that demonstrates some people are unaware that there are potential uptake numbers lower than 1%

"The number smaller than 1 is 0, and we're obviously going to sell more than 0" ;)


The people who made that projection are pretty aware. They are sales guys trying to push the stock.


What is remarkable is that given how low interest rates have been and the whole thing still collapses, it makes it looking very suspicious the leveraging was ever in the company's interest.

As one of the comments says it'll be used as textbook example of stripping a company.


Interesting analysis of the death of Jawbone. Wolfstreet is the other site I tend to visit along with HN, between the two bubbles I'm hoping to get a sensible average :)

They (wolfstreet) are pretty bleak about most finance/tech/stocks stuff...


Full process and results here - https://github.com/Alnaimi-/database-benchmark


Small nit pick, but I would be worried about a mobile development place that thinks it has only been around 8 years, not heard of J2ME, Symbian and Windows CE etc?

I do agree with the idea of hiring decent engineers and just training them, my only concern would be that without having had the mobile experience they might not know that they don't like it - it can be quite painful getting code to work nicely on a large collection of different hardware.


That is a pretty small nitpick you've got there ;)

It's a bit like saying "don't they know human flight existed before the Wright Bros." or "don't they know cars predate the Model T?"

Of course, but the iPhone (and subsequently Android) presented a gigantic turning point in mobile development, to such a degree that mobile development can largely be categorized into "pre-iPhone" and "post-iPhone".

Pre-iPhone mobile development was a vanishing small industry compared to today and used technologies that are largely completely not around today (see: J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE).

So yeah, maybe they could've said "mobile development in the modern context centered around multitouch-centric interfaces using soft keyboards has only been around 8 years", but that's kind of a mouthful, and unless we're trying to write an accurate history of mobile software, not particularly relevant to anything.


I would agree with the pre/post iPhone shift - but the likes of EA/Glu and other major games companies shifted an awful lot of apps pre iPhone.

The big shift is that touch became the only game in town (along with all the associated dev wrinkles). Also the demise of all content aggregators meant we could just upload our apps to a store and keep 70% (prior to this we got ~20% i.e. operator took 60-70%, aggregator took 30% and we got 50/50 on that).


True but those who worked with those systems still have relevant mobile knowledge. Optimizing for various screen resolutions, working with many implementations by OEM providers that have slight differences (Android), etc.


I think a more accurate example is it like saying: "don't they know cars predate the Tesla" and given it is electric all prior cars don't matter.

Just showing my age really :^)


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