skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since the issue is disk storage, not transistor count, that should be Kryder's Law.

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

Of course if bitcoin transaction volumes rise faster than that, there's a problem. Which, uh oh, they are. By a lot!

http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size
While that is a valid general criticism of Steam, they do provide an offline mode, which the new Sim City does not. Personally I prefer Steam to the previous alternative of having to leave the CD in the drive, or using a dodgy no-cd patch - but that's getting off topic.

The DRM strategy in Sim City is not the same as Steam, and cannot really be compared. EA are forcing unnecessary always-online features into what most people expect to be a single player game, preventing it from being played offline at all, in a thinly veiled attempt to prevent piracy and resale. That would be bad enough, but what makes it utterly unacceptable is that they haven't provided the infrastructure to support it in the short term, and clearly don't have the business model required to support it beyond the first few years.

Why anyone would knowingly support this business practice at all is beyond me, let alone for a game which has had such dubious pre-release reviews and is now essentially unplayable.
Growing Up In The World's Deadliest City
I suspect that you could so something very similar in C# - GetStringAsync returns a Task<string>, and you don't have to await it right away or one by one. So you can do:

var urlTask1 = client.GetStringAsync(url1);
var urlTask2 = client.GetStringAsync(url2);
var firstDone = await Task.WhenAny(new Task[] { urlTask1, urlTask2 });

For the rest of it, see Task.ContinueWith, WhenAny, WhenAll etc. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd235618.aspx

These also return Task<T> objects that you can work with further or await. I'd be very surprised if you can't do the equivalent, also in a totally non-blocking way.
Fenwick & West open-sources startup finance docs on GitHub
Does that guard against a double spend with them or a double spend on the blockchain as a whole?

i.e. could I (theoretically, if this got a lot worse) spend BTC at Satoshidice, count on them not being validated very fast because Satoshidice transactions are ignored by a proportion of miners, and spend the same BTC somewhere else?

I'm just an interested observer at this point, I have no BTC and I'm not into online gambling.
Yes, one of the options is to let the market take care of it.

But then you cannot advertise Bitcoin transactions as free any more, as free TXs will likely be lost at a non-negligible rate in the future.

Blocking Satoshidice is a temporary fix to give time to the developer community to come up with a better plan. So is increasing the soft limit (we are currently at 1/4 of the hard limit, doubling the soft limit will put as at 50% of it, and it will double the blockchain bloating rate).
So is Zend Optimizer meant to replace APC altogether, or just co-exist with APC? I've been using APC quite extensively assuming it would make it into the core eventually.
Wow, those are finally going away? It's almost like the end of an era. Cool.
You can do that, but you perjure yourself in the process, and won't take it down permanently. I could take down Rails by filing a bogus DCMA, but I'd have a lawsuit on my hands if Rails decided to pursue it
If A Driverless Car Crashes, Who's Liable?
Anonymity is different though. Every single transaction is public, yes, but that only leads you to a bitcoin address, which is trivial to change. Perhaps there's a way to unmask them (even if you are smart about changing your "bitcoin identity"), but it is far more anonymous than many other options.
Microsoft apologizes for violating EU antitrust order
Announcing EdWeekend: Your weekly curated education newsletter
If you take into account the 30% expat tax discount (which you should make sure you get at all costs) then here it's about 4 to 6k per month with take home of between 3k and 4.5k and a similar 1 bedroom apartment would be around 900 to 1200.
be sure to send Algernon flowers
It's a long term strategy. If EA never made another Sim City game, eventually, eventually, someone else would. A Sim City game with a different name, sure. But a Sim City game.
Maybe you should just tell the truth about the management. Of course, you should not be too angry, because is your decision, is not like someone fired you.

Maybe, my opinion will be read by someone higher than the management and take action.
.NET has futures and continuations, see Task[1].

I haven't used tasks heavily yet so I'm not sure how to implement everything in your example. But I believe it's all possible.

Async/await is "just" syntactic sugar for tasks. So I'm not sure what you mean by "still blocking from the perspective of the caller". When you call an async method, you get back a Task. When you use await on a task, the compiler rewrites your code to introduce continuations. If you need some more powerful Task features hidden by the syntactic sugar, you always still have the option of using tasks explicitly.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd321424.aspx
Not related to devtools but please make the facebook addon or plugin or whatever removable
Sounds interesting, I'll have to give that a look.
...and this kind of comment is probably what was being called out. Its typical of HN comments - it deconstructs what was going on, and ranks it.

A sensitive person (read: designer) would call it mean. I think its just a different mode of discourse. It is not sweet or kind; it just is. No more mean than a compiler error message.
But... check if you're the only one with this problem :)
There's also a lot to be said for people who loyally provide/demonstrate leadership (especially when it's not part of their job description) as a core value, thus contributing to the improved performance and morale of others whose jobs were not automated our of existence by the hotshot codeslinger. And maybe imbuing some leadership in others, as well. Something else that cannot be done by here today, gone tomorrow folks.
> considering how many good franchises they own that would just be a lie

Which? The last game they made that can be described as "more than mediocre" was Mirror's Edge.
How Amazon’s Navigation Is So Damn Fast
Here are a few jobs like that in Amsterdam: http://www.itjobboard.nl/IT-Jobs/Software%20Developer/Amster...
I sincerely doubt that this really is the worst part of HN. Trolling might be.
Interesting, but I was more impressed by the Solar Roadway idea, personally.. ( http://www.solarroadways.com/ )
Currently yes ( with the official client). But this is not a requirement of the system. Theoretically you can announce transactions without looking at the block chain, but then you do not know how much BTCs are in your account. There is another optimization, the block chain consists of an Merkle tree, such that you can verify the block chain without storing all the previous blocks. In this case you still need to download all blocks, but you only need to store ~ 80 Bytes per block. [1]

[1] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Uh, you were the one who suggested JS wasn't OOP-oriented. It's all JS to me. jQuery is just a function that's spits out adapter/decorator objects. Just as Angular, Knockout, Backbone, Ember, etc... are all just bloatworks that miss one critical point. We already had the V and the C pretty well covered. They're throwing a big veil of abstraction over one that was already there and worked fine. It's like webforms all over again only this time we're trying to pretend the client-side isn't already what it is rather than not there at all. And while yes, IMO, we should think of web apps as two separate apps, the client-side's concerns are localized enough that it's kind of silly to try and apply MVC to it (not that what any of this stuff does can really be called MVC or MV-whatever anyway). What is it with modern developers wanting frameworks to be the answer before they understood the question in the question in the first place? How do you even write this stuff without starting to feel a lot silly about the fact that you're just duplicating effort? Because at some point they all have to bind with the mechanisms already in place to bind to their own bindings and that's just stupid.
You're right, those are different things. The article doesn't make the distinction, but in the screenshot the user says, "I can call my bank and have the refund done that way."
If you're using words like "asshole," you are definitely adding fuel to the fire. I sense you know this. In general, your argument strikes me as a "Tu Quoque:" They are bullies, so it's wrong for them to point out when we are mean.

You then go on for a while about what makes them bullies, all of which is tangential to whether or not HN is mean.

I caution against this kind of rhetoric. It leads to a place where the rule is, "It's ok to be mean to people we don't like, for whatever reason."

Civility is a form of justice. It should be extended to those we respect but also to those we don't respect. Extending justice to the guilty is part of what makes a nation just. Extending civility to those we disrespect is what makes a community civil.
work at Facebook.
>>> I might have my facts incorrect here but if an App is removed from the Play / iOS app stores isn't it removed from users devices?

No, it's not (at least on iOS)

Source: I've bought a Navigation-App which since seems to be discontinued (N-Drive or something like that).
Too bad this would be useless here in Brazil, in fact MORE useless...

Here I've seen many times asphalt with objects embedded on it (usually bottle caps), because many places in Brazil get hot enough to asphalt partially melt, this technology here would be REALLY self-healing.

The problem is, asphalt that is very cheap to fix, and more durable, or cheaper in long term, is not interesting, because it means less money to steal, in Brazil everyone knows that the purpose of roads is steal public money, not to use, this is why every road or is full of holes, or full of patches.

Typical brazillian road: http://postagemteste.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/03.jpg
What type of solutions could developers come up with? Would most of the solutions involve a "hard fork" that I've been hearing about?
So long as there's someone who mines coins and who accepts satoshidice transactions, they will eventually be completed. Being discriminated against slows your transactions down, it does not prevent them.

The way the system is designed to deal with discriminating miners is to allow all discrimination (a miner can choose which txns to include based on any criteria he/she wishes), but diluting their choices by having enough miners.

SatoshiDice is actually very useful for the network, because it allows us to test how it functions in a saturated environment long enough in advance that we can make changes if they are needed.
The striking similarity b/w google+ and new Facebook feed.
The government will usually be about 10 years behind what is actually happening. If we want a solution that works it has to be a market based one.

For example, if one wanted to create a DRM free version of Sim City now would be an excellent time to start a kickstarter.
Goto http://satoshidice.com/ and look. They have pre-calculated addresses that all start with '1dice' and payments to these addresses are considered a bet.

The miners are not really filtering satoshidice, they are filtering all transactions that start with '1dice' this includes them and a tiny number of false positive matches.
I tried to register on DN but it is invite only. I can understand that but they don't even have a "Contact us" link so I can ask how to get an invite or ask any question for that matter.

I remember reading the HTML Hell page:
http://catb.org/esr/html-hell.html
It is really annoying when someone (or groups of people) wish to be heard (that is the reason they are on a publicly available site right?) but they don't give a damn about their visitors' opinions.

I can't call a site like that friendly either. Correct me if my point of view is flawed.
True.

Yay! The Big-Enterprison teaches the youth VERY effectively why it scks by destroying their fun* with games ... this time: Simcity.

Is this "disaster" some sort of an ideological paradox intervention?

How bad can this get? I mean how do you manage to fail at such scale with a brand like this.
Don't they need the money anymore?
Don't they want it?

Interesting.
This is ridiculous. The OP said he was going to dispute the charge with his credit card company at which point the customer service rep said if he does that they will ban his account. This is so people don't buy the game, dispute the charge and keep playing that game for free.

There are people that are good at customer support and those that aren't. I would think this individual falls into the latter category. Does that mean EA is plotting to scam everybody? Hell no. It means that this CSA didn't do a good job explaining WHY they won't issue a refund. This "article" is just fanning the flames of hatred towards EA and not adding anything. If the OP is truly that unhappy, talk to the credit card company to get the money back and then re-buy when the game is stable. But don't expect money back AND the ability to play the game.
> built and maintained a large-scale Flex app

I see your problem right there :)

Also, I am not aware of any stable platform for game development. Browsers and iOS have both changed a lot in the last 5 years as well.
PeopleBrowsr vs. Twitter Legal Battle Returns to San Francisco Court
Yeah man, that's what it's all about. Just as long as people remember it isn't about setting restrictions on the outcome, but on the process itself. Then your outcome will have better conditions to grow.
hmmm seems this has been taken down for copyright issues.
It is fantastic that the most powerful nation on earth can be stalled, at least for a little while, because one guy feels strongly enough to stall it in the hopes that it takes notice.
Researchers create air-breathing biobattery
You're right, actually. I'm going to change that single word. I hope that enables you to see my post in another light, because I don't really recognize your characterization of what I said. To make it absolutely clear: at no point did I mean to imply that LV deserve to be bullied only because they are behaving badly. I did use the "a word" to describe behavior, not personality, but I acknowledge that was misguided.
I found Mirror's Edge to be distinctly mediocre but I imagine Battlefield and the fact that they seem to create most of the "official license" sports franchises is what is being referred to.
Yes, I believe this user threatened to do so. He was advised that contesting the "no refund" policy (presumably via a chargeback) would result in his Origin account being banned.

If you've got a dozen other games, that'd be a big hit.
Another curiosity I had. Has anyone considered storing files in the block chain?

Obviously it wouldn't be practical but it might help with censored files.
> So pay with credit card, then if someone pulls this crap call your bank and file a "product not as advertised/doesn't work" complaint ?

If you try this with Steam, they flag you for fraud and shut down your without recourse. All previously bought games are lost.

If you try this with Amazon, they flag you for fraud and shut down your account without recourse. Your previously bought e-books are automatically deleted from all your devices.
Looks like we have a classic case of not understanding the currency.

Bitcoin can be anonymous because you can create wallets and transact between them without any proof of ownership of the wallets.

Put another way, yes, they can see that one coin that you originally owned eventually made it to a specific party, but they can't prove that you were the parties in between.

tldr; Don't make assertions about stuff you don't understand.
Map of the Internet: This mobile app visualizes the Internet in 3D
> Weather is shit almost the entire time.

I'll give you that one.

> There are more shops selling weed than daily staples like bread and milk.

In case you're not trolling; it seems like you're describing Amsterdam's inner city center which is mostly just a large tourist attraction.

Go a bit further out and a coffee shop will be a relatively rare sight and there will be an Albert Heijn on every corner.

> The rent and the taxes are both very high.

We have quite a generous 30% tax deduction for expats. It makes our tax rates quite competitive.
very hilarious, if this works like this with it anyone can talk on any topic.
Regulation Could Mean E-Commerce Slowdown in China
By "account" he was referring to the Origin account, which contains more games than just SimCity. Threatening to remove SimCity from his account would be perfectly fine. But blocking access to ALL other games as well is simply criminal.
I know that this marks me as a graybeard, but this has nothing to do with the Finder; it's (after 10 minutes investigating) a decent mc style file browser. The Finder was the spatial interface to the Mac file system. It's been dead for years; the zombie Finder that Apple currently ships is a hideous, mutant hybrid, neither Workspace fish nor Finder fowl.
Every three words in this article is DynamoDB. I'm sure this is an interesting post but I stopped reading due to DynamoDB stuffing. I really don't need your brand hammered on my brain in order to realize how great your product is.
Yet this action does seem like collusion which was the oringal point. I didn't know transactions could be excluded as well. Who's to say that in the future miners could collude against certain merchants?
Those people with high power nodes will be known as banks - see Dan Kaminsky's thoughts: http://www.slideshare.net/dakami/bitcoin-8776098
How long does the induction truck (I'm calling it a road zamboni) take to heal the surface?

Is summer enough to auto heal?
Six useful JavaScript libraries for dealing with data
Ask HN - Yet-another-productivity-app?
Doing it Wrong
I fairly certain you can't just disclaim things like that. It's similar to adding illegal clauses to a contract - just because you signed it, it doesn't suddenly change the law.
I understand your opinion but I think that this won't change soon. This site is used by a lot of technical people and by definition their behavior tend to be like what you described above.
I think it's fair that "free TXs will likely be lost". That's really just the market at work - If Satoshidice would pay proper fees, I bet those miners would be very happy to lift their block. In a sense making it "worth their effort".

Any P2P network dies when leeching of resources completely outweighs sharing of resources. I think Bitcoin with its transaction fees has a very clever mechanism to prevent that from happening.
I found this hugely useful, thanks. Also that is a beautiful blog design.
Thankfully so... I once ran an Ohio-class SSBN aground in a channel in a loss-of-all-possible-NAVAIDS casualty. Luckily it was in a simulator (unluckily, our bosses were there to see it happen).
I was just about to add that it's important to distinguish between "harsh" and "mean."

"Dude, you fucked up" is harsh but not mean, and while it isn't to everyone's taste, it can be a bitter pill that provides the cure. It doesn't really cross the line to mean until the intent becomes more of making someone feel bad than pushing them to get better.
I use brainfuck to cheer up Chinese Taipei team for WBC
+++++ +++++
[
> +++++ ++
> +++
> +++++ +++
<<< -
]

> --- .
>> ++++ .
< ++ .
> +++ .
<< ++++++ .
+++++ .
> + .

One of my friend challenge me to write brainfuck to cheer for the game which is going now.

this is my first time to write brainfuck, it just take me 5 minutes to learn!

and the game is still in the progress, come on, go, go Taiwan, go go Chinese Taipei.
Actually, there are already games similar to Sim-City (we could call them city building simulators) such as http://www2.citiesxl.com/ or http://www.worldoftropico.com/us/index.php

I definitely with the strategy you bring forward. Just let the Sim-City franchise (it is only a name at this point, Will Wright and the majority of original Maxis crew are out), any other studio can get a better game with less stupid DRM.
None of the two scrolled smoothly for me. I guess that makes it a draw :-)
Greed in government and greed in private industry are interchangeable. There isn't some magic fence between the two groups.
Currently, rule-of-thumb is to wait until a transaction has been verified by 5 miners. But instead of counting, most people just wait an hour. Some merchants are more thorough than others, so if you find one that doesn't wait for a transaction to be verified properly, you could certainly defraud them within an increasingly-large time window.

However, eventually the network will include one of your transactions in the longest chain, and the other will be discarded. So the double-spend will not be permanent.
It ran great for me in HTML5 (Firefox 19, Windows7 i7 Q720, 16GB RAM) + Firebug, et al open.
Usually, one account has more than one game bound to it, so banning the account would be the same as revoking the right to play all those games.

Additionally, that does not explain why EA doesn't offer a refund.
Didn't mean to imply a point on how this would develop in the future. I agree, it probably won't change and I think that's alright.
Lord British Presents
Building a smarter workplace
Specifically, why not open with a question that addresses the problem that people want solved?

"Are you certain that your SQL/TomcatInstance/RailsApp is secure?"

Then you can either branch off into teaching them how bad the problem is (e.g. "YOUR STUFF WILL EVENTUALLY BE HACKED FOR CERTAIN!") ala patio11, or tell them how you're going to help them.
Show HN: What do you think about out ToDo list solution?
Hello,

We have made our internal ToDo list solution available for public use and would like to collect a feedback.

WebSocket technology is used over HTTPS secure protocol to establish a full duplex communication channel between a browser web client and a server side to depict all changes made by all parties working together with the same checklist in the same time. No manual refresh required anymore!

Here is a URL you can use to access our web app:
https://apps.skybuffer.com/checklist

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

--
Siarhei
This is so weird, but I love it.
Ahhh well that makes more sense on the severity of the issue. However, I highly doubt that EA would want their CSAs to threaten to ban anybody based on asking for a refund or threatening to do a charge back and it is just the work of a terrible CSA
Designmodo issues DMCA counter-notice to LayerVault
I'm the main developer behind this app. I built this app primarily because of my needs (it sits right in my existing daily workflow), but I've been thinking if this app might be useful for others as well. A lot of this was inspired by my own problems and then a discussion about "Rabbit hole" syndrome in this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5197155

It would be really nice to know the viewpoint of fellow HNers about their existing todo apps and point of views on what would be their perfect todo app.
There is a hard limit on the size of the block. We are already 25% of the way there. This is going to become a problem in another couple of years, because the protocol cannot handle the rate of transactions.
I'm quite certain you can't disclaim implied warranties in some states.

And either way there's a good argument to be made that you can't "sign away your rights" in this regard without EA providing some concrete 'consideration' in return, even in states where you can waive right to implied warranty.

You paid $60 for something (i.e. the game), and until you have a working game EA hasn't provided any consideration in return.