skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason why payment forms are so complicated is because the credit card model is completely broken. Instead of transferring money from your account to their account, you give the other person unlimited and irrevocable access to your account, and then that person takes the money. This is a hilariously stupid way to transfer money. Once they have your credit card number, they can continue to take as much money as they want. Even worse, if they lose the number to some attack, the attacker can take money.

A much better system would be if you could get a temporary number where the merchant can withdraw exactly the amount you need to pay and no more. No charge-backs possible. That's not a problem since the reason we need charge-backs is to patch up the fact that people can randomly take money from you just by knowing the credit card number, which you need to send around to make payments.

Even better is this. At checkout the merchant's site would redirect you to yourbank.com/makepayment?amount=X&target=themerchantsaccount. There you would log in (if you were not already logged in) and click confirm, and the bank would send the money to the merchant. Very user friendly and secure, and no chargebacks. In the Netherlands we have such a system, it's called iDEAL and pretty much all dutch e-commerce uses this. The nice thing is that if your bank is secure, it's secure. You are not relying on thousands of individual merchants implementing security correctly, and you are not relying on the merchant not being evil.

Or bitcoin of course.
How about:
1. Not require always-on DRM for an almost completely single player game.
Doesn't online banking already solve this problem? and without the %5 cut that the credit card apps take for each transaction.
>Such quotas were also in USA.

Are you sure about that past tense? http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/19/fears-of-an-...
Self taught programmers are more discriminated against these days than women, in my opinion. A lot of companies _say_ they don't care if you don't have a degree, but my experience is that the programmer with a degree from Stanford but a blank github account will get the job over a self-taught developer with dozens of shipped projects under their belt.
It seems like they have to create an account. I just think they could definitely grab a user base that way. It wouldn't be the panacea, but they should be attacking parts of facebook now, not the whole thing.
He probably meant SimCity 2000, which can still be played despite being nearly 20 years old... it would surely be on that list if it was more recent.

Has EA ever done so or indicated they will release such a no-DRM patch? I have a feeling they'll just say "too bad." I'd bet many of those games had significant single-player modes that are now inaccessible.

Valve at least has announced they have a patch ready if Steam should ever go offline.
I hate it when people disparage the average American. What makes you think you're in a position to do that? And more to the point, why do you assume that politicians are better than the average American? I'd argue that they are actually worse. I reckon that my housekeeper would take the job of governing far more seriously and show far more common sense than a politician.
Well, the online multiplayer element anyway. I am not a PC gamer as such and so I have never played the games you mention, but even I know that there are no games in the list that are even moderately comparable to Diablo II and Starcraft in terms of longevity. Those two games are iconic PC titles with a huge fanbase/following even today.
I love Android. But I'm always uncertain about downloading apps, especially. I've had apps totally freeze up and blow through my battery while waiting in an airport. It sucks traveling with no smartphone. Never happens on the iPhone.

The simplicity and stability of iOS gives even the most novice users a high level of confidence about computing.
this woman is my new hero. i only hope that i am in a position to do that for someone some day.
Earlier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie

http://craphound.com/down/
Right, but I'm just saying that there isn't nearly enough information to claim the devs let down the CEO (as the parent comment implied). We don't know why things are failing, or or who made the decisions that let to the problems. We don't even know if they have tried to throw more servers at the problem (I hope so).

I agree that given the narrow scope of the online plain in SimCity, they should have an architecture that scales easily. I hope they do a public post-portem.
I love armchairing as much as the next guy, but this is lazy spam, plain and simple:

nslookup api.simcity.com

nslookup socket.simcity.com

nslookup update.prod.simcity.com

Right now these are returning CNAMEs to amazon web services and akamai for me, and I'm told they were days ago as well.

If you're going to talk about how EA should have set up SimCity, maybe you should at least look and see how they ACTUALLY set up SimCity and make sure they didn't do the things that you claim would have fixed their problems?

EDIT: Also, getting a launch right for a tremendously mass-market product is hard work. Until you've actually done it, it's kind of shitty to stand back and shout simple advice like 'use the cloud' or 'use modern devops practices'. I think that's what really bugs me about this post: The minefold guys probably do have useful bits of scaling advice to share here, but they're burying it under lazy swipes at a big competitor that really aren't justified.
So Pandora claims they can't turn a profit due to high royalty rates.

Artists claim Pandora pays them next to nothing in royalties.

Should the rates charged to consumers be higher? Or would that money just get sucked into the record company vortex, never to be seen again?

Where does this money go? Why? What service is being provided by those taking the money?
I'm seriously considering it, but it sounds hard to get paid. Is this the case, and how far does $40k go in Santiago for a team of 2-3?
Minecraft seems to strike the right balance here. Authenticate players on public servers to avoid spoofing other accounts, but also allow people to run their own private servers and disable online mode. Granted this enables piracy but I'm sure it hasn't put a dent in their sales.
My perspective is this: people write the dictionary just like people write any other book. It's not the end-all-be-all of any word. There are probably many sources on sexism that agree with me, and many that do not. It goes without saying, such is the nature of a controversial subject. I am not trying to be sarcastic here: Have you read any books on sexism or feminism? Because realistically, I think it's hard to grok those subjects with only a dictionary entry at your disposal.

I agree that sexism affects men negatively, as well. While men benefit the most from patriarchy, they also suffer. In order to reap its benefits, they have to play into the system. Most guys don't want to do that, and are appalled by people who do. But a future in which men and women overcome sexism is quite uncertain, and it is far easier to passively support male domination rather than to fight it. So yes, while I agree that men are negatively affected by sexism, I would disagree that men are negatively affected by sexism in the way that women are.
Steam also presents a risk, but it's at least actively working to make it less bad for the consumer:

1) You can play most of games offline if you have a flaky connection;
2) They don't have a standard practice of turning off servers to 'obsolete' games, unlike EA. The Steam games are expected to work as long as Steam itself works; but SimCity most likely won't work much longer after the next SimCity is released, as we can see from EA current practices.
I feel the same way about QWERTY -- I've been typing in Dvorak for ten years now, and on the rare occasions I have to go back to QWERTY on a full-size keyboard it feels like I'm tying my fingers into knots.
You’re Not Too Dumb For Algebra: So Get Ready For a Lot More Of It in School
nVidia Tegra-3 ships in fairly massive volume.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-3-processor.html

But your point still stands. Hardware support is still rare,
and it's extremely beneficial, nearly required.
Can you explain about these "unofficial quotas against Asians"? I'm genuinely curious if this actually exists. Note that less than 5% of Americans are Asian, but:

40% of UC students are asian (and it's higher at Cal, UCLA and UCSD (i.e. the better schools)).[1]

23% of Stanford students are asian (probably higher since that excludes "international" and "decline to state").[2]

26% of MIT students are.[3]

In other words, at (a small sampling of) the top schools, Asians are over-represented by anywhere from 400% to 1000%. It just doesn't seem like any sort of quota system exists, looking at the data.

[1]http://diversity.universityofcalifornia.edu/documents/divers...

[2]http://www.stanford.edu/dept/humsci/external/under/demograph...

[3]http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N31/admissions.html
Maybe the thought is that if they change the design to resemble what teens are using, those teens might accidentally use FB without noticing.
Machine.js: behaviour trees in JavaScript
This cartoon is an interesting take on EA acquisitions...

http://i.imgur.com/zFrTB.jpg
I shed a tear for Westwood studios.
Too late to edit my top comment, so I shall reply here: I apologize for perpetuating the problem, because now there's several top comments discussing how parent was actually correct, and the real discussion is yet again derailed.
Exactly. We can get into a discussion of AWS best practices but without more detail on their application's structure their usage of AWS right out of the gate shows that somebody at EA/Maxis has their head in the right place.
"If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

Via http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can't believe a list of commands is GPL licensed, this is ridiculous...
I'm not disagreeing with you, but at the end of the day EA has the exact numbers of how many players move from one game to the next, and are making business decisions with that in mind.
It kills me a little inside to know this is probably 100% correct.
Show HN: Bing maps, geolocation, predictive search, and an activity feed
This just inverts the colors, so it really only works on plaintext.
Bitcoins and Gaming
I can see how you read it that way, but that's not what they said. They said that the Cisco Nexus 7000 is the only Cisco device that could handle their routing requirements.
So they are taking back the change that required pages to pay if they wanted their posts to show up?
That's an overly narrow view. I start with the assumption that Costco has already found the optimum wage to pay their employees. It's a rare business that does well by mistreating their employees. I'm trying to emphasize that this has nothing at all to do with any altruistic motives and is entirely consistent with profit maximization.
People like narratives :)
The patch would cost a lot more development dollars. In order to make always-on DRM effective there needs to be some significant logic kept on the company servers. If it was a simple on/off switch it would be very easy to break. Thus, creating a patch to move that logic from the company servers to the players computer is going to cost a lot of money at a time when the company is shutting down the servers because they're trying to save money. Not going to happen.
Game of Life in a Tweet (Clojure)
>I'm generally in favor of class-based advantages for lower-income applicants.

I find it hard not to favor this. What's the point of encouraging diversity of skin color if you're not getting much actual cultural diversity? Students at top universities have much more to learn from the experiences of poorer students than they do from other upper middle class students who happen to have darker skin.
>Physicists would hardly be intimidated by being shown the algebra of Bayes's Theorem.

Well no they probably wouldn't, but my point wasn't about intimidation and not sure how it's relevant.

Personally I'm a huge fan of Bayes theory both theoretically and practically speaking, I'm using it in two side projects I'm currently working on. My only issue was a stylistic quibble with the author, and I will have to accept it if you frame it as humor. I'll grant I probably should have left it out in retrospect, since it deals with interpersonal subject matter.

>Regarding the rest of your comment, this is addressed in the second linked post.

No you haven't I was specifically referring to the second post.

I made two central claims, neither were responded to.[1]

1. Decoherence is not a thing on the macro scale.

2. Physicists do not take your claim that MWI is falsifiable seriously.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
What if the code in the game server contains non-GPL/free libraries? What if it includes bindings to proprietary services and sensitive data? How much time should EA devote to repackaging game server code for open source release, knowing that it will barely get any use and could only result in less sales in the future?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_the_nose_to_spite_t...
Sexism is an institution, so to speak. A single individual could not "bring sexism into existence". Women do not have enough power, as it stands, to impose a systemic oppression of men. Perhaps in the future, or in some female dominated societies, sexism against men exists...but not in the United States.
تحميل لعبة زوما
لعبة زوما الشهيرة والاصلية اللعبة المفضلة لدي الصغار والكبار لعبة
زوما من تطوير شركة بوب كاب , طريقة اللعب سهلة وبسيطة فهي تلعب عن طريق
الماوس كل ماعليك فعله هو محاولة تدمير جميع الكرات
SaaS Game, very well put!

Do we need a new acronym for games that required black-box server side components (Not just DRM but entire chunks of game code) not controlled by the consumer?

GaaS? (Game as a Service)?

Ubisoft did the same thing with the last silent Hunter game IIRC.
The author is not saying big data isn't "real" - he's saying the term is overused. I agree completely, it's a technical term referring to datasets so large it's difficult (or impossible) to work with using conventional database tools. But lately it's become just a marketing buzzword used by people/companies that are dealing with data that is anything but "big" by technical terms.
The pace of change within family businesses is often different than other ownership structures. On the one hand, the odds that you will be CEO are low. On the other hand, moving into the circle of trust can be permanent.

Keep in mind that on the timeline of family relationships, three months is nothing. Decide if you are in it for the long haul.
>It's always stunned me that the same community that hates on patent trolls is in love with H264

There is no hypocrisy here; I am allowed to love technology while simultaneously hating the practices if its authors. I am allowed to benefit from the good produce of a bad regime. In no way does that compromise my argument for reform.

Those who try to argue that reformers ought to boycott everything they disagree with are making a kind of appeal to hypocrisy; a logical fallacy.
They don't really give you a choice, do they? Wouldn't it be in their interest to drop support after two years, even if 25% of people were still playing to push them to buy a new copy?
Ok so then they appear to be "misusing" AWS. It's built for exactly the kind of problem they are having. Kudos for getting on it but they appear to have mis-designed their architecture then or something else.

I'm not sure what's worse, as the author intimated, making a massive online game not using cloud tech, or using cloud tech and still suffering massive server resource shortage and being unable to scale anyways due to poor architecture?
Perhaps of equal interest is that continuations got discovered more than once. Something that advanced is ordinarily considered for "Intellectual Property" status. Multiple independent discoveries short of ruin the "property" part of "IP".
I don't agree with this. There's nothing wrong with having the site look better; although it looks pretty good now. I like the minimal design; but some things (like the font used for writing comments) need to go.
Interesting. I was pretty young so I can't really chime in but I know my parents were in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) so urban areas may have had more awareness? They were also part of some underground Jewish study groups which would have given them a different perspective.
Testing Django against Multiple Python Versions with Travis
Social discovery platform At The Pool Wants to be the Anti-Facebook
The new newsfeed might make me start using Facebook again
How to structurally fix injection bugs
Hacking your bundle for fun and profit
When torrenting your game offers a better user experience than paying for it, well...
With restaurant bills, things get rather complicated when everyone orders different items, someone bought a Groupon, etc. Unless people are OK with over/under paying, a bill splitting app can be pretty useful to figure out what everyone actually owes.

Cash works well when everyone has it, but from what I've seen that doesn't happen all that often. Also, you get a lot of restaurants that refuse to itemize the bill (maybe their point of sale system doesn't support it), and sometimes they'll only take 1 credit card. Integration with payment apps is great for that. It goes beyond saving time...an app can help make sure people pay up and the IOUs don't become permanent.

Disclosure: I recently released Grouptuity (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grouptuity), which tries to solve these problems and integrates with Venmo.
How is this different from the secret Asian admission quota Harvard and the other elite US universities have?
Even if it has put a dent in their sales, Notch doesn't seem to mind.
All-electric Toyota i-ROAD Personal Mobility Vehicle
Using AWS/cloud service/buzzword-of-the-month doesn't magically make your scaling problems disappear.
The thing is, when women's groups are formed, they aren't to "keep men out". The point is that women aren't even thinking about men, they are thinking about other women. So no, I don't think it sends that message.

All this line of thinking does is shift attention towards men, thus reinforcing a male-centered culture.
You could contribute resources to Women in CS organizations at universities. I'm part of one, and we'd love to have engineers come in and give tech talks, especially about web development. You also could donate a bit to sponsor events (we hold events like "Interview Workshop sponsored by Google") or even offer internships. Every bit helps.
I can't imagine it would be more than a couple of hours work. Simcity is just authentication and saves, most games are even less than that. Heck, Battle.net is just a modified IRC server.

It would avoid a lot of the poop storm EA is facing with this. It's presumably costing them millions, and it's something they could have predicted when the beta crapped out.
From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.'

The previous title in the series quite happily did this all locally. Log in and be presented with the area and all the city locations in a grid, pick one and build.
Online Distribution is Changing the Game
The reviews all over the web are terrible, just from their servers being overloaded. Will that be enough to convince EA to remove the 100% online requirement? I hope so!
Increasingly it feels that contracting is the most straight forward way to work for an organisation. They pay X, they get Y. No messing about with broken promises and vague commitments.
Under ethnicity-agnostic admissions standards, those percentages may be even higher.

Note that Stanford's and MIT's percentatges are notable lower than UC's. Why?
You can set up complicated and impractical experiments (for us, but perhaps not for inconceivably advanced aliens) that can experimentally distinguish between MWI and other interpretations of QM. (With the exception of Bohm.) Do you really want to know all the gory details? They are rather obscure.

The executive summary is that it is in theory possible to determine whether a system is in a specific superposition of states, if you know exactly what superposition of states it might be in. So, let's say you wish to see if MWI is true vs a version of Copenhagen that relies on a conscious entity experiencing the results of a measurement in order to cause the wave collapse. If you have an accurate enough model down the very last particle of the entity's brain, and everything else the entity would have to interact with for it to perform an experiment, you can in theory then experiment on the entity to determine if it (plus everything it interacted with) is in the specific superposition of states that MWI would predict.

As I said, not very practical.

Well, David Deutsch argues that it might be practical when the day comes that we have AI's living in quantum computers. (And his experiment is also a bit different from what I described, and a bit more conceivable for us to do with technology we might someday have.) A problem there, is that naysayers will no doubt claim that the AI's aren't conscious.
We understand early on that employing the Ring is too hazardous to contemplate, and will simply lead to a different kind of doom, at best.

Sauron is worried that Saruman or Gandalf or Galadriel or Elrond or Aragorn could successfully command the full powers of the Ring, gather together the might of Men, and beat him down to nothingness, so that he must suffer another 3000 years of powerlessness before trying again.

Sauron may suspect that another could not do as much. But how could he know with certainty? He only has fifth hand reports of Isildur's tenure as the bearer of the Ring. The Ring was intended as a powerful tool for Sauron himself -- its nature in the hands of others may be as much a mystery to Sauron as anyone else.
I just tried it. Mouse wheel just scrolls the page up and down.
I wanted you to back up your rhetoric with something substantial.
I'd edit this into my last comment, but it is too late. Anyway, note this exchange on Twitter with the SimCity producer, Ocean Quigley.

--

Iain Kidd ‏@oceanquigley Just wondering if you regret the decision as creative director to refuse to provide an offline mode now?

Ocean Quigley ‏@iainkidd Making a lot of assumptions there.

https://twitter.com/oceanquigley/status/309710429687537664
Tegra 3 and LInux power tiny computer module
Yes, the "theme be damned, it should be written the way I want" point. Or, the "why I do not read modern fantasy" point.
If you have been following facebook as a developer, you will know that these changes affect the visibility of apps and third parties profoundly. It's not discussed alot, but these changes are circular over the years; there has been barely any innovation since the introduction of the newsfeed. This new sorting they've been working on is the default from a few years back, and the aesthetic is obviously a copy of G+.

Facebook may be considered a successful company, but the truth is that its leaders seem to lack in vision and have the tendency to make the same mistakes expecting different results. Zuck had some great intuitions (quick and aggressive growth, treating all users as wannabe attention whores), but the design of the product is circling around itself since 2009 at least. Their platform became a huge success when Dave Morin was in charge, yet ever since, despite the fact that it has been refactored a gazillion times, nothing substantial has been added to it. As a developer of apps that benefit from exposure to facebook, i brace myself for the forthcoming semantic changes in their platform that is most likely to follow.