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Submission + - Why Flappy Bird Is/Was So Successful And Popular But So Difficult To Learn (mauronewmedia.com)

efisher writes: This article presents a cognitive teardown of the user experience of the highly popular Flappy Bird game, covering how powerful the promise of simplicity in a UI can be, the man-machine interactive attributes that are correlated with highly effective motivational factors, and a discussion of the cognitive science behind concepts such as simplicity/complexity deceit, error tolerance, transfer of learning, and reward systems. The post ends with a round of applause for Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen, who succeeded in promising simplicity, delivering brilliant complexity, and sustaining player motivations beyond all reasonable expectations.

Submission + - Suicide Bomb Trainer in Iraq Accidentally Blows Up His Class (nytimes.com) 4

vikingpower writes: If there were such a thing, it would probably be rule No. 1 in the teaching manual for instructors of aspiring suicide bombers: Don’t give lessons with live explosives.

In what represented a cautionary tale for terrorist teachers, and a cause of dark humor for ordinary Iraqis, a commander at a secluded terrorist training camp north of Baghdad unwittingly used a belt packed with explosives while conducting a demonstration early Monday for a group of militants, killing himself and 21 other members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, army and police officials said.

Al Qaeda had already disavowedd the group, although it is not known whether this was due to....um.... "lack of terrorist professionality".

Comment Dumb question - simple solution (Score 1) 361

For NYT it is very easy.

You can clear your history after you hit their paywall block or you can just view in Privacy mode and then close the tab once you're hitting the paywall.

Then open a new tab and try again and it will work.

NYT does tracking using cookies and what should you do with cookies ? Eat them!

Comment How does one prevent this ? (Score 4, Interesting) 120

I have a genuine question. Assuming one uses Twitter from the phone, how does one prevent the Twitter app on the phone to scan the browsing history ? If they cannot scan my browsing history they cannot give me ads.

On another note, if there are companies who can scan tweets (such as stocktwits) to give you sentiment analysis, why cant Twitter do the same ? Have they realized that they just have a bunch of web developers who know only Javascript and can't do text processing using it ?

Comment Death of HP, Dell and IBM inevitable (Score 2) 135

The death of large firms like HP, Dell and IBM is inevitable. Whether the process of dying involves offshoring their services and/or manufacturing of their main hardware products, the cause is simply mismanagement from the top and lack of innovation on a large scale. IBM innovates in things like the Watson computer but that is a small division which if separated out from the main services division might prosper better on its own. Blaming employees in other countries who work for IBM for the reason for IBM's downfall is just bigoted nonsense and shows a closeted approach to looking at the real causes which is shitty management.

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