skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've long had this website bookmarked in my browser toolbar. It is excellent both as a quick reference and as an in-depth guide to commands:

http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml
I thought the point of "the cloud" is companies can relatively easily serve "the long tail" of consumers?
Or, slightly less cynically, demand is always orders of magnitude higher for the first week or two after release, so it's only a short term investment in servers if they can be merged later.
Note that most (if not all, as I only scanned the list) of these games do not depend on an online connection to play the game like Sim City V. They have an offline single-player component and it is the multiplayer functionality that has been shut down.

There are also a good amount of mobile/Facebook apps in the list.

If you are being critical of EA then the worst examples are games that were only released 2-3 years ago, such as many of the sports games like FIFA and Madden. Although these have had at least a couple of new iterations since then because of the yearly release schedule for their sports franchises. The majority of the player base tends to move over to the new version very promptly, much like the COD series.

On the whole this list looks far worse than it actually is. I don't think it is entirely unreasonable to shut down the multiplayer component of games that were released 8 years ago.
Interesting, yes, but definitely reddit material.
America Online Exploits [Buffer Overflow] In Own Software (1999)
So, how big a problem is antisemitism in Russia, in your opinion?
How Microsoft Was Left to Make an Expensive Mistake
I really, really wanted to buy this game. Since I was young I've always loved the SimCity series and was hoping this would be great... I was even going to buy a new PC just to play it.

Fuck you EA - you're disappointing my inner child!
If the only reason people are playing the new game is because the old one shut down, then you're not really releasing a new game; you're renewing their subscription. You should either realize that this is evil and innovate, or realize that this is inefficient and bake it in.
I don't think (1) is a valid reading.
So, when thought through, what he is proposing is just "Literate Programming" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming>.

It has been around since Knuth coined it in the seventies, but I guess it is one of those concepts just bound to be "reinvented" by every new generation.
Honestly, I just trust Linode more than what I might find off of lowendbox.com. I'm happy to support them. For most of us running startups, are we all trying to compete with our competitors purely on who can race the bottom pricing?
In SC4 there was region play. You just played each city in the region locally. It work. Cities XL does simulation locally. Tropico does some but much less.
Does it mean that Google admits that VP8 is patent encumbered now?

No, both the wording and explicit statements made make it clear that VP8 doesn't infringe anything: "if any"..."may be essential".

As if they can't tell whether the patents apply after all those years of throwing FUD at it.
Friends of AT&T Want New Digital Dead Zones
Not quite. Rupture eventually became Origin.
they're probably just running the server code on the ps4 alongside the client. it's easier to secure there
The DMCA counter-notice has been submitted: https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/6a33a213e04e7fc5e74ce3...
In an ideal world, you would be correct. This is not an ideal world.
> to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous

this is not preposterous at all. if all the simulation happens on the server side, its not necessarily trivial to have that run on the client. maybe the server requires unix. maybe the server requires an oracle database.
Experimenting with user namespaces
Is the reasoning behind avoidance of the 'moving mouse' simply because you move your wrist a lot when mousing? I find that with the dpi cranked way up on my mouse it takes considerably less motion to click on things than with a trackpad. Moving my mouse all the way across a 1080p screen is essentially a finger twitch. I've tried the vertical mice before too, but they definitely take some getting used to.
It doesn't even need to be that complicated. They could literally show the real OAuth flow, and inject a script into the page (since they control the WebView) that harvests the username/password. No "oops you got it wrong", no risk of visual inaccuracies.
I should point out that a lot of those on that list are original xbox games, which all would have been shut down on MS's end when they shut off the original Xbox Live. See http://kotaku.com/5535672/the-last-man-to-play-halo-2-on-xbo....
Author here. As far as I understand, the Jewish quotas were not proportional to the population.

The other significant difference is that all these policies were completely opaque, not like you can find out how much Jews the university can accept this year. Officially, no such policy existed, but everyone knew it did.

In my dad's case, he was told he failed the health exam, which was a complete lie.

There were many other cases in my family where a similar thing happened:

- Besides having a passing score, my grandmother was not accepted into a tech university, while her Russian friend with the exact same grade was.

- Another one of her friends disappeared (taken to a political prison camp), after she publicly complained that she wasn't accepted into her desired university because of religion.

- my mom wanted to be a teacher, but had been told by her neighbor (who worked as a professor) to not even try applying to the Pedagogical University of St. Petersburg, as they flat out didn't accept Jews.

- post graduation, my dad wanted to work at a high-tech Moscow university lab. Back then, you were assigned to a job after graduation based on your grades. The Moscow lab was reserved for the top of the class (and my dad was in the top 5%). However, during the assignment committee, the director repeated "David Vladimirovich" twice. This was a common Jewish name, and he made sure that everyone knew it. The committee decided that my dad was to go work in a lab in Ufa (2000 km away - http://goo.gl/maps/a342A). Far places like that were reserved for lower placing students. When my dad asked why he didn't place into the Moscow lab, they told him, "we're the ones that ask the questions here."
This Twitter client situation reminded me of some ancient (1999) history, so in case you're wondering how far companies will go to try to enforce a theoretically-impossible preference for one client of their service...

The MSN Messenger team added America Online chat support to the Messenger client. AOL didn't like that and tried a variety of approaches to reject Messenger. The protocol was undocumented, so there were lots of tricks they could play. At one point they went (IMHO) a bit too far: they deliberately exploited a buffer overflow in their own client!

One person's contemporaneous summary: http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/security/aim/index.htm
What if I tell you I didn't know Git when I got my first job and she has a bunch of green dots in her Github profile?
This is perhaps an inflection point for bitcoin. It's one thing to have bitcoin-only gambling, but to be in a large poker network with real money involved is a big step forward.

If any other poker sites follow it could be an actual use case for bitcoin and drive adoption into other areas.
If you could go and write a Rails-killer (let's say, using node), I wish you all the best.
In terms of online multiplayer, yeah.
I wonder if the tooth fairy will pay Rand more than minimum wage for pulling those teeth.
Cool, thanks for the feedback! Please give it a try and let me know if you need any help getting set up or if you have any feature requirements: phil@initialround.com
Same thing happened to me, only it was in Armenia and grown-up Armenians were talking sh*t to me for being a half-Russian kid (think 1st-grade age). I wouldn't say "Russians are discriminatory", just "people from the former USSR are usually discriminatory". From my experience, in both countries, Armenia was a lot worse.
Search results beat FDA in finding drug combo side effects
This is really neat! Kudos to github.

Here is a question: as one of two engineers at a 6-person seed-round startup, what could we be doing to contribute to the ecosystem of people who support women in technology? We don't have the office space - much less the money - to find or sponsor a monthly talk. So within the context of running our business, what can we do?

Sometimes I fear that, until we have a successful and profitable company (with spare conference rooms, clout to find people who would like to give lectures here, or an otherwise large audience), there isn't much we can do to contribute.

What can smaller companies or even individuals within organizations do?
No problem, really. I didn't take it negatively at all, I understand that's a lot of time.

The best thing we could do to test the product was to find a few users (paying users) and do some mechanical turk work. When the testing period ended they were willing to pay double to continue using the product, but our costs were growing by 10x. They knew upfront it was just a temporary service, we promised them 6 months of free service when we finally finish it.

To mitigate the consequences of our failure, none of us quit our other company (we are working there part time) and we didn't get into debt. We hired some very bright guys to help us, we tried getting things faster by hiring more people, it didn't work out very well.
How about introducing "credit cards" implemented as smartcards with an USB plug (and maybe a microUSB one too for smartphones), an LCD display to show the charge amount, payee and a "pay" button?

That would instantly make fraud impossible short of physical theft of the device.
All DRM is eventually bypassed, why do game studios even bother?
As a new customer who has had nothing but a great experience so far, thank you.
There is no such thing as "dead to rights" in a patent war over algorithms. It would come down to the jury, and it would be a gamble (as the disagreement amongst people who should know about whether VP8 infringes or not shows).

The risk for MPEG-LA in not agreeing is that the patent pool would collapse - if Google isn't in then why should anyone else remain in the pool?

I do agree that this agreement seems to be pretty good for Google though. Their ability to sub license VP8 has the potential to undermine royalties for H264 to the patent pool.

BTW, MPEG-LA isn't a patent troll by any conventional definition.

Firstly, MPEG-LA doesn't patent anything itself, they are merely an organisation to pool related patents amongst member organisations.

Secondly, the member organisations are mostly (all?) the opposite of patent trolls, too: they hold patents in the field because they are actively producing software in the field. That is the opposite of the typical non-practising-entity patent troll model.

Thirdly, if you do accept software patents then the patent pool model is actually quite a nice way to manage them. It means people who want to work in the field only have to deal with one entity and gain protection from patent claims from any other company in the field. (Note: I don't accept software patents at all - just pointing out that while they exist this isn't a bad way to do them).

I have no real opinion on VP8 vs H264, but I do know that the patent situation is much more complex than you seem to believe.
I think the US unofficial quotas against Asians are somewhat similar to the Soviet ones against Jews, though not so spitefully motivated. Essentially, it boils down to "We don't want our own kids to have to compete on even terms with these hard-working, incredibly studious outsiders."
"hipster" is the most overused and annoying word that the "complaining about things on the internet" community uses.
If there's an automatic block, it's more likely to be related to refund requests.
The bug bounty is for a security bug with no exploit. That makes it a lot less work for the security researcher. See the release notes on the Google Chrome blog for details of bounties paid.

Google also sponsors Pwn2Own and Pwnium with bigger prizes for bugs with working exploits.
It's crazy really to use an ordinary keyboard. It's basically the same as when the keyboard was invented. At that time there was some justification for having to fit your hands to the machine. Now there is none really. The Microsoft one is pretty cheap. If I have to use an ordinary keyboard now it feels fine for the first five minutes but then I start to feel what it really is - cramped.
Ask HN: I am good at something and I started doing it for free. Now what?
I've been working as the head of IT for the better part of 10 years. Over the past year, I've started working directly with the CEO to handle company operations.

I'm being told "we're not big on titles here" and that they will formalize my new role, but that was 3 months ago. It's a father/son company and historically has been a very flat hierarchy.

I've got the respect of the teams that goes exactly as far as it is convenient for them. Then it becomes a "aren't you just the IT guy?" remark of incredulity.

Has anyone else experienced a similar situation? Am I in a no-win scenario? Can or should I stop the portions of the job that go above and beyond? How can I bring this to a peaceful resolution without delivering an ultimatum?
Your tone, demanding for examples is a bit off putting...

Direct contacts, very fast responses, phone support that picks up almost instantly and works with you for as long as it takes to resolve a problem.

I've been very pleased, and most of the time the issues have been our fault, yet they've always helped us resolve the issue.

I've used Linode too, no complaints at all, but you get a lot more power with the AWS tools, so there's really no choice for us.
Yes, definitely. I used it for a project presentation the other day and it was a hit. I started it off with, "So here's what I've been building for the last few months" and Harlemified the site, people were amused.
Ubuntu/Debian Firewall in Mintues
Perhaps a refugee from 'pink' ?

Codec wars are pretty old though, just look at discussions of Ogg vs MP3. My hope is that a bit of traction out there on it and it will establish itself by virtue of its lack of royalties.
A Flask Application Skeleton
Fair enough. I was referring to the larger discussion.
Great post, and a very sad story (with a happy ending).
Unfortunately, US (and others) universities applied similar policies (probably, more subtly though) up to 1970:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus...
The awk run against a file containing almost no duplicates finished after over an hour (compared to 43sec for the sort method).

$ time awk '!x[$0]++' x.out | wc -l
16759719

real 64m41.089s
user 64m31.970s
sys 0m3.136s

Peak memory usage (given that it was a 128MB input file) was (pid, rss, vsz, comm):

8972 1239744 1246488 \_ awk

So > 1GB for a 128MB input file.
> Why create something separate for women? Isn't that further separation?

Segregation is not considered segregation if it has good intentions. The political term is "affirmative action" [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action
No, Amazon stopped using DRM to have a competitive advantage versus Apple, the music companies went along because it gave them a real competitor to iTunes, and eventually Apple managed to renegotiate their contracts so they could also remove the DRM.
Kind of defeats the purpose of doing an AMA if you're not allowed to answer any of the interesting questions. I sympathise if that was the case, but people should remember what the second 'A' stands for.
It's not a technical bug, but it's a deliberately made flaw - and it illustrates what will happen when after a couple of years they'll turn the servers off (The current list http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0L266ui... shows even games of 2011 disabled already), leaving the game that you "bought" useless.

Digital Restrictions Management = Defective by Design.
like this http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-...
I'm sure that list of sports titles will grow every year which is rather unsettling. Especially considering EA has an exclusive license with most of the sports leagues so other publishers can't even compete in the area.
I went to a a magnet school (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology) which does NOT discriminate against Asians in the way that so many colleges do. Last year more than 50% of students were Asian-American. This is what these colleges are trying to prevent, rather than simply wanting to benefit their own children.

I'm not sure that I approve of ANY targeted racial goals for schools, though I'm generally in favor of class-based advantages for lower-income applicants.
Will do I edited my other response but I'd like to be able to take my own test.
At public schools in the US, quota systems are officially illegal (UC Regents v. Bakke), but they are allowed to use admissions to encourage diversity (Grutter v. Bollinger).

In general, both public and private schools tend to over-admit minorities (in proportion to their presence in the population), so from the other perspective, are discriminating against majorities.
I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt because this is the internet and it is very difficult to judge one's own written tone, but I hope you'll reread what you have written to see why it makes you come off as a deeply arrogant person. You seem not to have read at all what I have written; you appear to think that I was engaged in criticizing the article. You also continue this nonsense about reading that can only have the effect of being insulting.
I was surprised when they asked, that's for sure.

It was a little odd because I felt like there is no way I could teach these people anything they didn't already know, but I got really good questions and feedback so at the end I didn't feel nearly as weird about it.
Sadly this isn't usually the case
No, the core issue is: the game doesn't work. Lets face it, gamers would still be buying the game with DRM if it didn't crash.

If what you mean is: "Crashing (to the point of unplayability) is an inherent consequence of DRM"...the many wildly successful games that have DRM would indicate otherwise
In this case it's not just DRM; SimCity has social features that clearly require a server.
This has always been the weird thing for me. I'm ex-facebook so when I get hired companies will often say "wow you know a bunch of facebook people, lets hire them" not realizing they are both insanely expensive and insanely in demand.

I've always said, why not instead of hiring engineers who work at Facebook or Google, maybe beat them at their own game and instead go for the same crop of people they are hiring? Brilliant college kids who are excited to work for you and can learn from your team and develop into the great engineer you want.
I was speaking more broadly.

This isn't the first time EA has seriously blown a launch due to infrastructure issues I realize. EA's main infrastructure server team runs things like a pre-dotbomb forture 5.

I'm slow to throw blame since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA. Technical Directors at Maxis are just as much to blame as well as product/project managers that fail to squeeze load testing into the busy schedule.

I do (sadly) agree that studios seem to lose their magic to us gamers once they join EA. Why?
It’s the Hardware’s Turn in the Spotlight
SimCity system requirements:

Intel players will need, minimally, a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, while our AMD players will need at least a an Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+.

Those sound pretty capable of a significant amount of simulation themselves...
EA is offering refunds but only in some cases, with a very haphazard criteria:
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18gs2vgs50fjijpg/original.jp...
This is an over-simplification of the performance demands of the game. Keep in mind that there are many levels of computation involved in the simulation, from rendering loads to inter-agent complexity, to city management (i.e. taxes). It all adds up, and the graphics needs alone are the limiter in most games.

But beyond the "feather that broke the camel's back" rationale for offloading compute, keep in mind that there are issues around shared data that would vastly improve performance of region-level computations in the cloud. If the region state is maintained in the cloud, any computations on that state will be far more quick when done in a centralized way.

Further, there are fewer challenges around handling client desynchronization, which is a classic problem in large scale strategy games. Reconciling one or more desync'd client's state can get very difficult. Under a centralized system, the master copy reigns.

Obviously there are downsides, but it's not like it's a crazy idea to offload some of the compute to the cloud.
Relaxing their overly aggressive DRM strategy would easily reduce the need for servers by order (orders?) of magnitude, so it would be a possible solution.
Any accurate definition of "the video compression community" is going to include most of the licensors represented by MPEG-LA.
My eyes teared up reading this; what a great dad!
(Disclosure, I work for nCrypted Cloud)

Since you ask and since you appear to be a Dropbox user looking for more security, check out www.ncryptedcloud.com It is a Privacy, Security and Collaboration app that layers on top of dropbox (Skydrive and Googledrive soon)
this is so 2005
>..so that the lawyers can demonstrate being useful without messing with the actual matter of the contract

There's actually a programming version of this referenced on an old StackOverflow question - a "Duck", i.e. a feature submitted so management will take issue with it and not something else more important.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar... - see entry #5
Pandora’s Long-Time CEO Joe Kennedy Abruptly Steps Down
Every single 11 series game being gone is inexcusable. I have friends who own TW11, Madden11, NHL11, FIFA 11 and everything is just dead now. I understand they have to take things offline at some point, but for the amount of money they made this is just shocking.
I think SimCity 2000 was considered abandonware, or was it only the first SimCity game? I'm not really sure about it. But the first 4 games are definitely playable without any internet connection whatsoever.
Orrrr you could just program some simple AI for the other cities in your 'region'.
Most people that play Madden games move yearly to the new releases. The servers that support the old games probably drain fast and are unneeded after some predictable period of time. Whether or not server shutdown behavior encourages this yearly migration is another issue.
The best and brightest are working as US diplomats, or are doing intelligence gathering on NK's capabilities, or are maintaining our nuclear arsenal. It's only within the HN, Silicon Valley echo chamber that the "best and brightest" are working on social networks for cats.
A billboard that creates drinking water out of thin air
Because EA doesn't care about their customers that much. There's no reason on doubling your launch fleet for a few days when it will hardly effect the sales of your game. Save money and let customers bitch for a few days, just more free press about your game.