skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Moreover, the game is so unintuitive at a mechanical level such that you can build a successful city of 200k+ sims with only residential zoning.
This article was written incredibly poorly. I mean, it opens with a history lesson rather than the thing we're supposed to be outraged by. For two long sentences it reminds us of what happend with SOPA, and then in a subordinate clause of the second-to-last sentence it mentions CISPA.

This is not how you write a story. It's a classic readability problem and burying the lead. Here's my rewrite:

Congress is getting ready to pass Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) as soon as next month. It's got the support of Obama and a majority of Congress, and, according to privacy and data-freedom experts from the EFF and the FSF, if passed it threatens to destroy our digital civil liberties as we know them.

This in itself isn't so strange - it seems like every other week the government is asking for (and more often than not, getting) more unchecked power under the guise of fighting terrorism. The odd thing here is that the internet hasn't said a word.

Etc.
Is The Death Of JavaScript Upon Us, Or Is A Transformation Underway?
The importance of serial media vs. sampled and Google Reader
It is a very high number, but people aren't getting that they didn't buy the codebase or the team. They bought the waiting list. If Dropbox had been wanting to get into the email game, a waiting list of 1M people is a pretty good way to start. Sure they could have emailed out a blast to all their users and gotten a ton of traction that way, but they can _still_ do that.

Not to mention, the name Mailbox is a pretty perfect match for Dropbox.
Isn't it really about how this "law" is written. Stopping posting negative notifications is equivalent to "notifying the suspect". In the end they can wrap it up in a black box and say "we don't care what mechanism you used, we told you not to notify the suspect and you did, this a violation of this law, whether it was done via posting or refusing to continue post-ing something to a website it doesn't really matter".
I agree that it's funny, and would probably be a turn-off to most people. Consequently, I doubt Google cares if many people sign up for that. Back in the early days of GAE, I remember success stories told by some companies. Anyone established businesses building apps that will bring in serious business revenue might just jump to the Platinum Support. I know this means a lot of indie developers might not be excited about this, but perhaps Google just doesn't care since they might be making money off of the big customers...?
I think most people who actually care are already afraid of doing anything that creates a larger 'public surface,' so to speak, and have gone to ground, happy to to vote what they think and enjoy blaming everyone else when they continue to get ignored until it inevitably goes bad.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5186387
That doesn't make sense. That would be $1k per name on the waiting list.
This is disappointing, and almost misleading. There are several main reasons why people "don't care" about their privacy.

1) It hasn't been threatened in their lifetime before. The past 60 or so years have been pretty good for those fighting for civil liberties, though recently we seem to have reached a tipping point.

2) Lack of (good) education in the humanities and philosophies. I'd say the vast majority of America cannot correctly define "socialism" and "capitalism", much less be able to articulate the paths societies take towards them. For most to be able to imagine and understand a deterioration towards totalitarianism is almost absurd.

3) They don't care. "I don't care that the government knows my secrets." They have "nothing to hide". This ties in with number 2, in that there is a lack of fundamental understanding of concepts like "liberty" and "privacy", which creates a dichotomy where people can appreciate privacy, but still voluntarily give it up.

And that's not even including things like "protest fatigue", willful obfuscation of issues, and the vast amount of money changing hands.

Edit: It seems like the WaPo article is hardly better. For shame, really. It almost seems like a purposeful attack (though I shouldn't attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity)
> What some people may not realize is that the cities in this new game are pitifully small (probably so that a computer can handle trying to update 20k sims at a time), so in order to actually do anything of significance, you usually have to draw from surrounding cities for materials, people, etc. This is the part of the game that requires online-only, because unless you want to be simulating all of the cities in your region (which I'm assuming you don't, but I don't really know whether the computation costs would be that high), you need some sort of server to handle that for you.

I don't think anyone is debating this. What people are upset about is that Maxis seems to be making the argument that introducing such a mechanic was done for the "vision" of the game. Perhaps they are genuine. But if they are, it leads one to question what exactly their vision was focused on.
Is it just me, or is it a little ... obsessive to be this annoyed with having to use `set()` instead of `{@}`?
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-8
After reading the RPS link[1] posted here[2], it seems to me that the
multiplayer-is-required aspect probably was bolted on towards the end of
development. While this doesn't preclude the possibility of fully preparing
their servers for the launch, it does hint that a lack of direction could have
led to confusion and/or a lack of planning for these issues. (Though this is
really just shooting in the dark because we can only go on what public
statements they make)

[1] http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/16/simcity-bosss-str...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5384314
this is amazing, I am so happy someone took the time to put this together. Love it!!! Where is Objective-C? :(
Home | Indians In Africa Media Gallery
in Java?

Something is deeply wrong with this world.)
I think you're off by an order of magnitude. 1M people on the waiting list = $100 / name. Still a lot.
The Product I Shipped as a 14 Year Old
Without Reader, No Android?
Wufoo exited for 35 million. Although they didn't take 14 million in investment: just 118,000 according this:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/25/wufoo-35-million-surveymonk...
What, you've never gone and hacked an interpreter because you were mildly annoyed by something? I don't think he actually means for it to be used in production.
I don't know if Uber still does this, but at one point in the past they would drop you an email if you rated a driver 3 or lower to ask what happened.
ZipCar CEO resigns, hours after Avis acquisition
Wow. That smart car piece almost describes the Tesla. Especially the whole part about there being more storage space. It made me think of front cargo area on the Tesla since there is no engine.

However, they failed to predict that half of America still believes bigger, louder, and burn more fuel is the way to go... Not to mention actively work to suppress progress in this area.
"Inequality and insecurity are perennial features of capitalism."
As I see it, inequality and insecurity are features of life. All the youth, wealth and success in the world doesn't stop you from dying in an instant. Life isn't fair and it never will be.
Glad to see some books coming from the community!
you spelled dessert wrong
So, in essence, the problem is that KickStarter is noisy at scale and you're essentially selling a filter. Maybe the title of the post should have been "KickStarter Sucks, Long Live KickStarter"
It shouldn't feel like a victory that the DOJ didn't prevail here.

Instead, it should feel like a loss that we are even having to argue this. NSLs are flagrantly unconstitutional warrantless searches.

How far gone we are since 9/11. We gave up so many rights in virtually one fell swoop, and now we are having to claw and fight to try to win back some of our most basic protections and freedoms.

It's so bad that we win back a mere semblance of a basic right that should be ours by the Constitution, and we feel like we won the lottery. I was pretty excited myself until I had that realization.

Not to be a party-pooper.
Possibly even instant offline mocking, somewhat like meteor but without the need for a server.
Dear lord, that's a bad rating system. They should just replace the stars with words. "Average" means average, "Outstanding" means outstanding, etc.
How can anyone Not use RSS?
Awesome! I've been waiting for this for a while.
An Open Letter to IIT Students
> It was a good five years before there was anything in the market that gave me any second thought on switching away from gmail as my email browser.

What was it that gave you a second thought, if you don't mind me asking.
Mailbox isn't just a half-decent email UI, it is the best email UI we've seen in ages

I acknowledge that. And I know they didn't just buy the app, but also the brand, the userbase, the marketing headstart, the team, the momentum.

But still. It boils down to a mobile app that could be cloned, bit-for-bit, for way under $5 million. Dropbox has a pretty strong brand of its own already. For instance: Almost everyone I know uses Dropbox. In contrast I have never heard of mailbox.app before. And I'm a nerd, I read Hacker News, I tend to know most of the fancy things before everyone else.

Ok, let's ignore that. Let's assume mailbox.app utterly dominates the (iphone?) market. What would it help them if Dropbox went against them with their clone?

Users are not exactly loyal when there's no network effect. I can't imagine mailbox.app would fare all that well against a (near identical) dropboxmail.app that comes bundled with whatever goodies Dropbox has planned to take it up with Google.

Sorry, I understand your angle (and your proposed strategy sounds plausible to me), but I just can't get over that number. Framing it as a long-term strategy for Dropbox makes it only more batshit insane to me, because even in my wildest imagination I can't see what mailbox.app brings to the table that Dropbox couldn't replicate for a fraction of the money in a very short timespan. And "fraction of money" means a difference of tens of millions of dollars here.

I expect the next moves to be either developing or acquiring media sharing (photos, videos, etc) apps

By that logic their next move will be to pull another Color.app?
Dave Grohl SXSW Keynote
Open Letter To All DJs Playing In Germany
"Make sure not to copy in our country"
Because Maxis is a wholly owned subsidiary, I assume what is said by Lucy Bradshaw is actually filter and vetted, if not scripted, by EA corporate PR. If not, shame on Lucy for being so tin eared. If so, shame on Lucy for letting it happen.
>But if they are, it leads one to question what exactly their vision was focused on.

I think it's pretty clear that their vision is focused on the "social" aspects, and with that comes the idea of having all of your friends build a single small city in your region, and you all interact with each other and stuff. I've seen some examples of this happening, it looks pretty fun. I'm sure people would like the option to build single huge cities, but Sim City 3 still works just fine for that.

> I don't think anyone is debating this.

Have you been reading the same news that I have? I hear a lot of people complaining that the servers are basically doing nothing but saving cities to the cloud, so everything should be able to be run client side, and either don't realize or refuse to acknowledge that the servers might be doing other things/useful. I dunno. Maybe things will clear up in the next week or so, when server issues will hopefully get better, and we can stop having front page posts about a company who doesn't know how to scale an online game.
you don't import sets , set() is available right away.
I really wish I were surrounded (or perceived myself to be surrounded) by more productive people. Seeing someone better than yourself can be a great motivator. But when most people you see set low standards for themselves (relatively speaking), it's easy to slip and forget to work hard.

Every minute is precious if you have a goal to reach.
And why are you not surrounded by more productive people?
For those who are interested in alternatives, I recommend the TaskBox app. It's sort of a hybrid between a todo list and an inbox.
Facebook users are also a small minority, if you want to go there.

The problem is that some minorities count more than others, because they are influential (vocal, if you prefer).
I hate to be that guy, but isn't 1lb 16oz?
Not right now. Maybe in the future we'll let you join using e-mail, but for now it makes it a lot easier to prevent people from faking their own profiles and it also speeds up the process of adding friends.
I vaguely recall seeing a mailing list thread where `{-}` was proposed. I think it was rejected based on parsing ambiguity, i.e. `{-1}` vs `{-}`. (Or it's possible I might be losing my memory)
is it wrong that c# is a highly sought-after skill in the market?

I wouldn't say "wrong", but certainly the fact that C#, in most people's minds, is glued to Visual Studio (and .Net), is more to the advantage of Microsoft, than to the society.
This is just fantastic. Thank you for submitting it.

After reading through everything about the beetle, he
shows his next project, a scooter with two jet engines!
set = <> is still available

Did this get misformatted? I don't know what you mean.
I think Wufoo solves a REAL problem - Collection of useful data. That's why it appeals to businesses and enterprises.

Whereas Formspring was more like a third party Facebook status box that served no real purpose (Their slogan was "Formspring is the place to share your perspective on anything."). The difference lies in the target audience - One was aimed at the consumer and the other at the enterprise.
Last summer, I finished a 3-month internship in Japan, and it was the most productive 3 months of my life.

I'm currently a college student, so my work ethic is a little poor. Procrastination and "seeming busy" is standard fare for my day. It's far too easy for me to get distracted by checking Facebook, Twitter, or even tangential data sheets.

Yet, despite my bad habits, the environment at my job forced me to get down and churn through code. Some of my officemates could fit the salaryman stereotype[1], but all of them posessed a capability for relentless focus. I initially tried to settle in by "shooting the breeze" and making smalltalk, but they seemed to prefer communicating through their work: some code, but more importantly, well-done demos.

In the span of those 3 months, while I always brought headphones with me, I never ended up using them: the silence of the office carried a note of tension, the sound of concentration. Listening to this proved to make me more productive than I'd normally be, if I were listening to (even quiet) music.

I came in expecting to be maybe 20% efficient, as the OP mentions: a few minutes here, a half hour there. At the end, it was nearer to 75-80%: instead of procrastinating, I set goals for myself to get things done, because that was really the best way to get through to my neighbors.

While I don't think that this sort of pressure cooker environment is well-suited for all people, I think it speaks volumes to how positive peer pressure, in more ways than one, can force people to shape up. I'm not sure I would've survived for a 6 months or a year, but it very quickly eliminated my excuses. If everyone around you is working their best, it's hard not to get dragged along.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman
I think that different Americans believe different things. Believe it or not, your paragraph of an anecdote from 11 years ago doesn't do much to convince me otherwise.
I don't know, perhaps I'm doing something wrong, or it hasn't happened yet but will happen soon. The latter is less likely because I'm 26 yo already.
You accused me of saying "Expedia has lowest prices, despite it's problems" when I actually said "In case you didn't know, aggregators like Expedia often have the lowest price" and it's 100% true. What's false about it? Booking directly is in many cases more expensive than booking through a third party that has special pricing power.

You either post the full quote next time or drop it, you're wasting time and not achieving your goal, other than irritating people.
Moderately entertaining. It's interesting how many things they got "right" but missed the point entirely. For example, somehow the kid has a hand-held computer but the authors fail to grok the implications. Also, I find it amusing that the authors imagined live-in robots and yet can think of little better use to put them to than pouring a bowl of cereal in the morning. I can fairly confidently say that if there is one chore that doesn't need automating it is pouring cereal.

It's also interesting how pessimistic the authors were about things like pollution (smog, ozone layer), traffic, and water supply.
I originally implemented it that way and had that exact same issue (it's one of the revisions on github). Similarly, {/} would also be a problem.
I found that Smart Car bit in general pretty bang on!
ianstormtaylor edited his comment after I posted, and did not make a note of it. It used to say 100k.
At the end of the day that's still massively putting the cart before the horse. At the core of it startups are about building products - if you have nothing to contribute to any part of the product building process (whether dev, design, bizdev, marketing, etc), you are literally of no use to anyone whatsoever.
I don't understand. Pick up any sci-fi movie, article or a book describing 25 years from now and it will come to life. Doesn't our curiosity about future work like a catalyst for the mechanism of self-fulfilling prophecy?

25 years seem hardly news worthy. Had it been 100 years ago, well yes, that could probably be a startling one.
Air pollution has dropped 50% judging by the chart in this article. Much better than the LA Times prediction.

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/stories/study-c...

I guess they were too optimistic on the home robot. Hopefully, they will start to become useful in the next few years. I personally would like to see Microsoft, Google and the other big tech brands launch home robots.
If I were Microsoft I'd be pushing Bing Reader out the door ASAP. I'm sure they'd find a use for all those disgruntled influencers.
What's your point? Yes, there is a minority of Americans that cares about drones blowing up people in Yemen. The media does not cater to those people. None of this refutes my point.
That's interesting, would you mind posting the link to the site or name of the company that was doing this before? Would love to check them out.

I think it's something we're opinionated on: dating doesn't need to be a serious business. It's okay to be humorous, and that's also being honest. If your friends joke around and are sarcastic, you like their sense of humor, and it communicates implicitly "these are the kind of friends I have, if you don't like them, we might not get along."

There's a difference between nasty comments/bullying and sarcasm, and we'll allow bad stuff to get flagged and take it down.
Direct questions hover around 1/1. Questions sent to followers, 5/1. It’s probably a higher engagement, albeit different, than Tumblr/Twitter/FB.

When you ask a question on Twitter, how many of your followers respond? Very few. The nature of both sites is obviously different, but the engagement on Formspring remains pretty good.

Also, there’s only so many times you can answer a question about your favorite movie, or where you met your husband/wife before it gets boring. Original questions (with photos, links, tags) get a far higher response rate.

You really think 5/1 is bad?
I have a PhD in Physics. 8 university years to eventually discover that I am not that interested in research for a living (and not that good at it), even though my speciality was great (Astrophysics). Ten years later, I'm a senior programmer with very interesting things to build, and passion doesn't fade.

I don't regret having done all that Physics (it was freaking Astrophysics, dude!), but I know I would have been miserable after a while, not doing what I was really good at.
Browseable Book of Kells
RSS vs The Regime
This is about playing the wingman role for your friends and helping them out.

What I've noticed happen is that after commenting on my friends' profiles, they've commented on mine. They just want to reciprocate the favor. But nobody joins the site asking their friends to do it.
They have every right to complain (whether or not they stop using Uber). They are (successfully it seems) drawing the wider public's attention to an issue. Low-skilled labour always teeters on the edge of turning into sweatshop conditions (huge working hours, poor security, low pay). This is especially an issue for monopolised industries (like Uber). I'm not sure how bad it is for them really (I live in Australia), but I really don't see how you can take issue with their right to discuss it.

As far as I knew, not being able to complain about conditions was something for China and Africa, not for advanced egalitarian societies...
Dropbox just took a dump on their feng shui/pristine media perception
Any idea what is going on with the progressive Git protocol, I know there was some discussion on the git devel lists but I'm having trouble finding it.

(Essentially it's a protocol based on fast-import to allow access a remote repository without cloning or receiving a pack.)

Also, there are proxies for converting TCP into websocket that should work with the Git protocol, and at least Chrome has some kind of native TCP socket from extensions.
Those numbers are real – even a tiny bit lower than the real ones just because round numbers are easier to remember.
I think the real test of a futurist's predictions, in order to determine if we have in fact arrived in the future, is not to see what came true and what did not come true.

No, the real test is to see how many predicting things make you stop and say, "wait, they didn't already have that back then?"

I stopped several times at the 6AM section and realized I thought something predicted had always worked that way. I would think this only works when the predictions are from before you were born, but I was certainly alive in 1988 and I can't for the life of me remember a time without smart thermostats that run on a schedule or coffee makers with simple timers. When you're astonished that something basic now wasn't already common when the prediction was made (within reason), that's when you're definitely living in the future, even if you're still waiting for your flying car.
This link kills spam
> a minority of Americans that cares about drones

Does "minority" here mean 49%? 1%? You don't know, you don't care. You're pretending to argue using data but really just going from your gut beliefs about media, not from any basis in fact other those precious few you've selectively picked to form your opinion over the years.

That's my point.
dye44 on twitch.tv has a map of 1.1 Million sims on a res only map. It seems likely he can go much higher then that.

He also has a map that has a 'taxi-splosion' one taxi spawns hundreds of taxi's until all the streets are deadlocked with taxi's. He has to log off and back on for the map to work again.

Lastly are the insane, inane, and wacky workarounds he does to have a playable game. EA got too ambitious and couldn't manage all the WTF's they have made with the new engine.
That won't work. You have to have 100+ Facebook friends to join.
As someone who has always wanted to learn Objective-C but has never been able to find up-to-date and easy to understand tutorials on building an app, this is something I can get behind.