skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Traffic congestion seems to make sense.

Did you read the article? The congestion makes no sense.

And to the best of my recollection previous versions of SimCity were able to handle traffic just fine. I certainly do not remember them suffering from the congestion problems this version seems to be afflicted by.
It makes perfect sense for there to be a patch on release day. There is a non-trivial amount of time between the completion of a game and when the discs are pressed, packaged and shipped to retailers in preparation for a release. There are bound to be both discoveries and opportunities to fix them during that period.

That said, it's absolutely absurd to ship a game with universal bugs affecting core mechanics.
The biggest problem with same-day shipping: It’s not fast enough
Firefox OS is two things: an idea, and a particular implementation of that idea.

The idea is that you write apps in HTML/js/etc, using some well-defined APIs to access the underlying hardware capabilities.

The implementation is an underlying Linux system (Gonk), and Firefox's rendering/javascript/etc engines.

If you ask, 'can it run alternate browsers', what exactly are you asking? The browser app of FF OS is written the same way other apps are -- in that sense you definitely can. But it'll still be running on top of Gecko et al.

Ok, so can you replace Gonk/Gecko with some other underlying implementation? Well, that's kind of the whole idea! But if you do that, you won't be running FF OS anymore.

The reason we care about alternate browsers is choice. FF OS enables choice by promoting standards. They want an app written for the system to work just as well on Chrome or Safari (whenever Google/Apple get around to implementing the same APIs.)
myself and 3 others at my company did the same. Everyone but me got a ticket. One of them was hit by the google wallet problem, but just closed and re-opened that popup and got it to go through on the 4th attempt.
I begrudgingly understand the delta in content from region to region due to licensing deals. But can anyone explain to me why they would do the same with functionality that wouldn't fall under any such licensing deals?
IIRC, other users on the forum started complaining that the offending user was using pr0n, he (or the forum owner) then complained to the person from whom content was being leeched who promptly told them to suck it.
> trick the redirection scheme that Facebook uses into thinking that you are
> the legitimate owner of an application whilst using your own backend-flow URL

Thanks for this summary which demonstrates the importance of both effective communication skills and reading comprehension since I didn't come up with anything close from my dash through the blog post.
Customer got hacked via .htaccess
Which is one of the reason those degrees are viewed as less valuable than a similar degree from a more prestigious institution which is assumed to have higher (teaching/admission/grading) standards. That is still the biggest obstacle for non-traditional education. How do you assess the value of the degree and then communicate that value to others?
The special interests behind legislation like CISPA have professional lobbyists and millions of dollars to pay them. If you're a private citizen and want a law passed at the federal level, you need to have a cute and young white child who died due to something your law legislates against. Otherwise you don't stand a chance of being heard.
Unless you amend the Constitution. Good luck!

EDIT: Another option is for the courts to decide that freedom was guaranteed in the Constitution all along. But courts are unpredictable so again, good luck!
Well there seems to be several things in this article: the pathfinding issue seems quite glaring, but maybe it only occurs in certain corner cases. Working around pathfinding issues is also a classic in videogame history :).

The first point (each sim not actually having its own "life") seems harder to catch, however in my opinion that is the main issue here.

They can (and probably will) fix or at least improve pathfinding in following patches. However having the glassbox engine simulating individual "sims" instead of using heuristics and statistics to create traffic jams and the like was something that was advertised early on. It was also one of the major improvements over simcity 4 (which also had pathfinding issues by the way).

I believe it was also the reason why they only allowed smaller cities that what was possible in simcity 4, simulating a huge number of citizen was supposedly too demanding. But if they don't do it properly in the end, what's the point anyway? Might as well go back to what 2003's simcity was doing.
I agree. While this behavior was apparently known and explained somewhat prior to release, I didn't know about it. I was prepared to give the a game a go once the connectivity issues were taken care of, but with this information I'm not even remotely interested anymore.
Ha, independent gaming press. Good one.
It seems relevant- this must be a new milestone for Kickstarter.
Don't forget an "add person to cyber threat watchlist" button!

It should automatically advise internet services that a person/account may be trouble, thus granting those private companies the blanket "exemption from liability... for decisions made based on cyber threat information identified, obtained, or shared under this [law]." (That's one of the most concerning vague and elastic provisions in the current proposed bill text.)

There should also be a 'redress number' subsystem, for when people on the watchlist start noticing their accounts being restricted or disabled, and want to make the case they're not the bad guy the agent who pressed the button thought they were.
Good point, I want to see what my Netflix friends are watching for ideas on what to watch, and I want to share selected things I liked. But I don't necessarily want Netflix to automatically tell the world that I just watched "Giant Zombie Time-Traveling Alien Nazi Wasps" because I was bored and there was nothing else good around.
I used to rag on the whole "patches on release day" thing, but you have to compare that to the idea that getting a "final" build through 1st parties like Microsoft and Sony is a long process that can go for weeks (or much longer, if you're actually doing a physical disc). If you wait until you have an actually final gold master version of the game, you then have developers working on "Day 1 DLC" (which gets quite a lot of flak as it is), or sitting on their hands. So what you actually do is ship your version 0.98 with the bugs that you expect to be able to fix within your window, start both the process for submitting the game and the process for submitting a patch, and hope that you allocated your development time properly.

Needless to say, this comes back and bites a lot of people in the ass, but for a lot of small game studios a 2-6 week delay in a game ship can be the difference between solvency and firing everyone in the office.

*Needless to say, this is probably a completely inappropriate workflow for someone like EA/Maxis, who probably had some suits that said said "well, other people do it, so we should do it too".
Well, I will be skeptic.

As the past of being white hacker shows, keep hacking but shut up! Because even if you tell the author you find a way to get into their system and you havent cause any damage, they sure will come after you in a legal way.

In example herein, not only time after time the author proves that there are serious holes in FB auth system, but is also very happy to blog about it. You see, FB is publicly traded company. The management answers to stockholders and the board. If some Joe Hacker keeps finding holes in the system, someone somewhere reading that blog may be thinking of abandoning the FB platform due to it security layer looking like a swiss cheese. And management doesnt like that, because less users == less eyeballs for $.

My gut tells me, if this guy did not get offer to work for Facebook just yet, it means they are building a lawsuit against him, as you perfectly know FB TOS forbids anyone from fiddling with any of their URLs.
This is not very surprising. Brazilians have a very fluid concept of time, such that being a few hours late or not showing at all is considered normal behavior. However, you do not keep someone more important than you waiting. That's just rude.
That's just it though, SimCity 5's problem is that it insisted on agent-based micro-simulation even though technical limitations would require these agents to be lobotomized.

In previous SimCity games simulation was performed on the macro scale - not on each citizen. Any micro-scale view was just a visualization of the macro simulation. This meant you couldn't follow a sim's car from home to work and back, but it also meant scalability and the freedom to have a proper simulation model rather than a grossly dumbed-down one.

Agent-based simulation is the correct implementation (i.e., closest to reality) technically, but only in a world where we have infinite CPU power. A macro-simulation like previous SimCity games would have meant far fewer corners cut and a much less buggy behavior that are the result of emergent negative agent-agent interactions.

To take your analogy - SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 use billboards and textures for fake smoke. SimCity 5 tries to go all-in and simulate the hydrodynamics of each particle - but has to cut so many corners to run that it doesn't even look like smoke anymore.
A Framework for Happiness
If someone has coded up a "self respecting bot" then I think we've lost all hope against the spam harvesters (unless, of course, that bot's notion of self respect includes the recognition that spam is annoying to innocent people :)
> But my sense of it is that it is a neurological phenomenon, the brain and the eye working together ...

Yes, that's correct -- it's both.

> So I still conclude that light falls continunously on the retina, and is continuously processed.

Yes, unless it's periodically interrupted, as with a flashing source. In that case, it's a discontinuous flow of visual information that we must assemble into something meaningful.

> to make sense of a visual phenomenon that does not exist in nature, but only under artificial circumstances.

People are wired by natural selection to fuse a discontinuous series of images into an apparent continuous sequence on the ground that this makes us more fit to survive -- so it does exist in nature, it's not artificial.

Consider a primitive man, or one of humanity's predecessors in the long history of evolution, watching a prey animal running through a forest. Our distant relative sees the prey animal between two closely spaced trees at one moment, then sees him between two other trees a bit later. With this limited information, he is able to infer (a) the prey's speed, and (b) where he will be five seconds from now, where he intends to be. This is all based on our ability to ... wait for it ... fuse many discontinuous images together.
This was clear to anyone that followed the development of the game. It was made clear in many developers interviews and videos about the GlassBox engine. Hell, there are official developer videos that describe the GlassBox engine in detail dating back to early 2012. RPS knew about this behavior before the release of the game, to act surprised now is rather disingenuous and malevolent.
I Googled your company and I guess you write bible software? For non-religious coders is there a reason your code matters? If you're looking specifically for Christian coders it might be good to specify that in the video. If there is a reason why non-Christian coders would think their code matters in your company it would be good to specify that as well.
This isn't really useful. Netflix needs more content, not more 'features' that only benefit the company.
Sim City 4, which I think was the only previous one that actually modeled traffic, had some congestion issues. I don't remember them being as bad as this, however.
Vincent: They think I killed the mission director.

Jerome: What makes you think that?

Vincent: They found my eye lash.

Jerome: Where?

Vincent: In the corridor.

Jerome: Ah well it could be worse. They could have found it in your eye.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
I've never tried co-watch. Can you enlighten me with your past experience with that? Presumably, it's great for watching live events. For watching a TV or movies, how would that be practical? Can you only watch together with your friends or you can do that with random people?
> Release some educational content.

Like very well documented and widely used compiler of some language to JavaScript, perhaps?
Pretty sure Win2k did have USB support, though you may have needed to install a SP.
EBay: Our paid Google advertising was a total waste of money
Web scraping in R
Finding the Right Mentors
And a Rifftrax plugin ;)
That's rude. I read the article and already acknowledged there are bugs. In previous versions of SimCity traffic was completely unrealistic. Cars would just fade in and fade out a few seconds later. There were no congestion problems like in SimCity 5 in older versions because individual cars didn't try to get from point A to point B.

edit: clarity
Preview of Qt 5 for Android
Industrial espionage is still very powerful, and recovery of boosters is also possible.
What are the odds that this has been exploited before?
not only related, that's exactly the same thing
Think Google ads don't matter? Stop advertising and wait for an upstart competitor to gain a foothold through those empty slots.
This is exactly what I was hoping for when reading this title... but of course it's just the tired "share this on Facebook" feature that Netflix had for a minute a few years ago and every non-VPPA-affected site has had for years. When will companies start getting more creative with social?
>> "After x years of using Go, Erlang and Scala, here is our comparison on what works well and what doesn't and how each one of them perform under different conditions"

I WANT TO WORK AT THIS COMPANY!
Exactly. I would prefer Netflix's initial friend system with an option to integrate with FB. I find there are very few of my friends whom I would be interested in their taste, and vice versa. A very small percentage of my friends would want to watch Blade Runner and 400 blows on repeat, and I doubt that any of them would be interested that that is what I choose to watch.

There are different social spheres, and facebook is a public sphere now.

What is stopping Netflix from creating their own social network? Where you could follow people whose movies taste you like?

So I for one will not connect, and hope that they create a real customizable social experience that is unique to Netflix. Nothing is worse than frictionless sharing, that's not a social experience that I think has a sustainable future.
It's ironic that this article about terrible Web designs is hosted on a site with a terrible Web design.
"it means they are building a lawsuit against him, as you perfectly know FB TOS forbids anyone from fiddling with any of their URLs."

Not true: http://www.facebook.com/whitehat/
Cute. If nothing else, I watched it. Video is really engaging, but i'm not sure you're really looking for developers that are quite as committed to procrastination as those who will spend 3 minutes watching an ad. OTOH, everything seems to indicate hiring is really hard. maybe this will pull some great talent for you.

I think your 24 pack was actually a 12 pack.
Real-world levitation to inspire better pharmaceuticals
I've always had a little bit of a soft spot for SuSE, and I had my fingers crossed that when they were acquired by Novell, it would become more popular in the business world.

I think two main things are holding it back from becoming one of the 'main' distributions. The first is YaST, which is just strange in the land of yum and apt. The second is just the sheer amount of support distros like Ubuntu have. There's not as many resources out there, even though the last time I checked OpenSUSE had a strong, but small community.
Spaced Out Effect
Greed is Groupon: can anyone save the company from itself?
Watched video, laughed, would not apply. This was pretty obviously done without any input from developers.

"Code that matters", Free Soda, and Ping Pong? Those are the selling points of working at logos.com? You can keep them. How about things that matter like:

* we actually use TDD
* you don't have to work til 10PM every night
* deadlines are based on real estimates, not #'s made up by managers
* you'll get to learn and use new technologies on the job
* we fix existing bugs before building new features
* developers get a quiet, private offices to work in

I could go on. But I've got work to do in my quiet, private office working with a language I've always wanted to use but never had a chance to at any other job.
It hurts how this video pokes fun at the "trying too hard" style of recruiting (using "code ninjas" in air quotes) while simultaneously itself trying way, way, way, WAY too hard.

And I just came away with the impression that the protagonist has a massive unchecked ego and would probably be a terrible person to work with.

While I'm at it, it would benefit from tighter editing.

Bagpipes were a nice touch, though.
I'm being idealistic when saying this, but I really hope over the next few years that bloggers stop adding social links to sites. I don't doubt major sites like CNN will continue to flood pages with links, but it would be nice for the content generators to stop using them.
One woman's amazing life
Bad contrast. Right. That contrast attribute should never have been approved in the spec!
I've found that the biggest problems have actually been in the emergency dispatch stuff. For one, police, ambulances, and fire trucks /get stuck in traffic/. Hugely obnoxious and unrealistic (at least, when there are open lanes on the other side of the road). The other problem is when if you have multiple events in the city at a time, e.g. two fires. Usually all or most of your fire trucks will go to the first building (and get stuck on each other in the process) and ignore the second one until its burned down. It's like there's nothing actually coordinating the vehicles and it's purely first-inferno-first-serve.
What happens when the patents are invented in isolation? Is one considered "derived from" the other, despite no information passing between them?
Nostalgia for a time that never existed doesn't bring the world to a better place. It certainly doesn't help the state of technology.
/r/programming thread

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/197dn1/introduc...
Rollercoaster Tycoon has the same mechanic—not only was each person a discrete, persistent individual, they had their own unique mood, stamina, hunger, tolerance for waiting, and individual tastes in amusements, food, etc.
At least this year the tickets are non-transferrable. I'm hoping a lot of scalpers get screwed on this.
It's amazing though, isn't it? KDE, Gnome, XFCE, awesome, Enlightenment... That's a lot of DEs!
Netflix has had Facebook integration outside the US previously; recent changes to the US VPPA act have allowed similar functionality in the USA.
yet, they still want to be paid for that time they don't care about.
I know its the telegraph, which is a vaguely reactionary right wing UK paper, but the whole tone of the piece, which I suspect will appeal to many of its readership, misses the point of so much of the online world.

1. The boxer was going to respond to verbal taunts with violence

2. A really serious case of anti-semitic harrassment got treated like the boy had kicked a ball into the wrong garden

3. trolling - all we need to do is take away anonymity and confront these people. That is not the experience of the world to date.
I'm currently working on adding volume controls (pretty much done) and the ability to use songs already on the device to my Android app StreamClock.
Hmmm. What's the multi-driver and privacy story for this? I see one mention (being able but not required to share your parking location with other drivers) but I'm curious about how this handles eg trip history information when a different smartphone plugs in.
Hopefully they will just honour DMCA regardless.

They probably rip off designs in the hope that they won't get found out. As soon as it looks like a hassle they will hopefully just move to ripping off someone else.
Windows 9 And Windows Phone 9 In The Works, Reveals Job Posting
Luckily, All of this calculation is done on the server, so you won't even need to download a patch when the fix the pathfinding. /snark
Until you picked them up and dropped them 10 tiles from the path, then they got a little lost ;)
Their point was that, deeper down, FFOS is running on Linux.

I have no idea why you brought Darwin into the conversation.
You mean "disingenuous".
Traffic has been "modeled" since SimCity 2000 way back in the 90s. Back then it was a simple capacity measurement depending on nearby buildings, though. There was definitely no concept of a road network and flow.

SC4 was the one that actually tried to model traffic flow throughout your city to locate bottlenecks. The pathfinding algorithm used looks like a variant of A, with the caveat that it would never explore nodes that weren't between you and your destination. This resulted in a lot of finicky behavior - things like your sim not taking the subway to work because he had to walk back a single block to catch it, and insisting on joining the gridlock instead.

This is largely fixed with the NAM mod though, which restored proper pathfinding.

The nice part about SC4 was that you could actually zoom in and see the gridlock. Sure, these weren't actual citizens in their cars, but it is a correct visualization of the simulation's traffic analysis. I for one will gladly give up the ability to follow a sim home for a faster, more scalable, more accurate simulation.
Can't you disable secure boot in the bios?
To add to that list, I viewed the page on my (rather slow) phone, and my User Agent wasn't sufficient to get me to a mobile version of the page (assuming one exists.)

That dismissable footer covered half my screen, and the site ran so slowly that I was entirely unable to get it to dismiss.

And here I thought that relying on a browser's User Agent to make a page usable was bad form.
I'm pretty sure it has to do with local laws covering disclosure of viewing records. The reason this is now possible in the US is that Netflix just managed to get Congress pass an amendment to the VPPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act). This feature disappeared three years ago because someone sued them over an alleged violation of this law.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU
Why mobile video sucks
SimCity 4 has it's share of bugs, even with mods like NAM/CAM/etc installed, but not normally to this extent.
I would bet, at least for the NSA and probably the FBI, this already exists. It just isn't quite as real-time as they would like it to be. Instead of the instant fuzzy-search, it's a couple of quick letters, but the oversight seems to be about the same.
> ...I’ve never used this site before, so immediately asking me to create a free account is absolutely pointless...

Kind of ironic when the very website this article's on has a bright red rising banner asking me to "Join FREE as a Bronze member".

Relating to the content of the article, I find it interesting and rather frustrating how these days pop-up windows are making a comeback. These were so annoying that every major browser at the time came with a pop-up blocker, a trend that continues today. Except nowadays the pop-ups are little HTML/Javascript doodads built into the webpage itself, which means pop-up blockers don't work and will likely never be able to.
The American who shocked Victorian England by picking the world’s strongest lock