skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is data. People are claiming that the game _does not work_, so if it's working for somebody, then the servers must be doing something. People are claiming that the servers have literally been down for the past week and a half, when this is simply not true. I'll agree that it hasn't been the smoothest of gameplay all the time, but it's not as extreme as some people are claiming it is.

I agree with all your other points though.
I'm not sure which bad work conditions articles you're referring to but if you're a developer and your employer is giving you a hard time or being unfair you should quit. That is a much better solution than expecting someone else to legislate some kind of solution to your problem (with all the externalities that usually go along with such "solutions").
That's not the important part here. If two parties go to court to resolve a dispute over the legality or constitutionality of something that's normal. What's quite unusual is the DoJ attempting to deny the ability of telcos to use the court system at all.

As an analogy imagine that you've just been arrested by a police officer and you are sitting in a dark, windowless room in handcuffs. The officer comes in and you say very clearly and plainly "I want a lawyer, I know my rights". Then the officer responds "you don't have any rights here, you're not getting a lawyer". Most people would probably be outraged, most people would probably experience a chill running down their spine accompanied by an onrush of fear. But this is not so different from what the DoJ was attempting here.
Or maybe people are just numb because of so many laws threatening our liberties simultaneously. There's just so much to protest against.
Then ignore them and please publish.
Try sending someone any of the dozen different filetypes gmail has blacklisted sometime. They even peer into your archive files!

Maybe GDrive lets you store those formats, but I've never had GMail offer that as an alternative. It just stops me from sending executables around even though that is an integral part of what I do.
If they consider this "Straight Answers" their disconnect from reality explains why they thought an always online Sim City was a good idea.
Well ain't that the biggest false dichotomy I've seen all year!

Either:

a.) You're an individualist and you value "privacy, ownership, sovereignty, expression, and choice."

or

b.) You're not an individualist and you value "transparency, sharing, global citizenship, and wisdom."

Nope. No overlap here. No sir! I'm proceeding to read the WaPo article in hopes that there is actually some substance to this matter.
When time travel is achieved, many of us will need this when our future programmer selves come back to retaliate.
Then don't attach tips, though maybe this would allow for more accurate reviews? I always give 5 stars, because its easy and all rides have been great.

Only one driver though, provided me with water bottles and candy. That was a superb experience. Maybe the only superb one while the rest were fine.
I think if you have no skills the best way to get into startup is to get rich first and become an angel investor! I believe there are more high probability ways to get rich than starting a startup.
I still don't understand why anyone would want to use AWS unless you had money to burn. I haven't followed the prices as of a couple years ago but I'd say most people on here are smart enough to find cheaper solutions that can achieve the same thing. If saving money is your goal you can make it happen--there are providers out there with the right APIs that allow you to build something that can scale (or adapts) at a fixed/linear cost. If you have the money and it isn't worth your time to setup the infrastructure then AWS would be the right decision. I just don't understand the infatuation.
Their research for the vision they have developed for the new SimCity had quite a different result from the basic Facebook poll I did earlier this week amongst my friends.

Self-selected responders replied to my post asking if they were interested in playing the new game as SP, MP or both, along with how many have purchased and how many would like to or will.

Of sixty responses, two chose MP only. Fifty-three both SP & MP(including sandbox option I hadn't initially mentioned), and five SP only. Three had purchased the game, all wanting refunds because a lack of SP and server issues (which had to do with their own connection issue in one case).

Over fifty had played one of the previous versions of SimCity. Almost none now wanted to buy/license this version, because of the issues, connectivity, and lack of SP gameplay.

Granted it was a small sample, not scientifically done, and self-selecting responders, but I very much doubt the sincerity of EA's reply that the "vision" they have developed for this new version is based on actual user feedback, or the users are an EA selected group designed to give that them the response they want.
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> Are they gonna bump the price to $10 and hope to sell 10 million copies?

Surely you don't really believe that is how companies are valued
The alternative is that Uber's drivers are somehow entitled to a better deal than they are getting, can you explain how that is the case?

I may not be a blue collar worker but that doesn't mean I expect to be owed any sort of deal from anyone. If I feel like I'm getting a raw deal I'm going to leave that situation and find a better deal elsewhere. It's that simple.
> "I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity,"

I really cannot believe they actually started the post with that line. The very reason they are in this PR nightmare is because people have been unable to play the game.

Too soon Lucy, too soon!
Guild Wars 2 is a game that was designed from the beginning to be a cooperative, online experience, though. SimCity is an iteration on a previously offline design, with no marketing or design data shared with those looking to buy the game to indicate that it's an entirely different game (to justify online-only) than the previous SimCity games. There's also a big difference between a game where all of the computation takes place on the gameservers and a game where you simply replicate your state up to the server. I think that we're at a point in technology where the public, at least core gamers, understand the difference and can make judgment about this themselves without relying on marketing material or other-party commentary.

Edit: For example, there is similar drama* regarding Diablo 2 to Diablo 3 and StarCraft to StarCraft 2 given the former games had offline+LAN support and the latter require a persistent online connection. Guild Wars required a persistent online connection, so Guild Wars 2 requiring the same thing was practically a given.

[*] I can elaborate on this, if you'd like.
I think strait is right. "Elite achiever" only (directly, anyway) has to do with performance, not intelligence.
Your point makes no sense. If they charged you a monthly amount, you'd be ok with it?

They did say it would be online-only long before launch, so anyone who paid for it knew what they were getting in to.
Introducing the "screwed-o-meter"
It is data, you're right. It's anecdotal evidence, and should only be used as a burden of proof if there is no other substantial evidence.

Tell me, If I go to the SimCity forums will I see hundreds of people complaining about a game that doesn't work? If I go to YouTube will I see videos of buggy behavior and reviewers irate about the state of the game?

That too, is anecdotal evidence. But, since you're only worried about data, I guess the larger amount wins out. So, clearly, the data indicates the game has issues.
Well if "it works for this one guy" counts as data I'll add "it simply doesn't work for this guy." Well, didn't anyways.

For about a week, the game simply wouldn't connect to varying degrees. The really frustrating thing was "connecting" happens like 5 times before you actually get to game play which means you can fail at the launch screen, the play button in the second launch screen, or the "claim city" button in create a city mode. It also just might die mid game or your city might be "corrupted" and become unplayed (happened to me). If you're unfortunate enough to have this happen and need to switch "servers" you not only lose your city (it's tied to the other server) but you also have to play or at least start and exit the tutorial. Which btw, introduces a few other points of "unable to connect" possibilities.

I've spent more time trying to get past each of these connection barriers than I have playing the game.

That's a really big problem
Orkut is big in Brazil and India, so it makes sense that Google wouldn't kill the only social media platform they own with an actual mainstream userbase (modulo YouTube).
"Oozing high fructose corn syrup" is what first came to my mind when I read that.
Maybe Guido doesn't like it because it looks weird when compared to the rest of Python's syntax? Still, I think it's cool. Having sets availably without importing anything is one of the things I love about Python.

set = <> is still available.
That's a pretty binary viewpoint. I'm sure that at some point in my life I'll feel like I deserve a raise or a promotion and I will ask for one rather than just quitting when I don't get it.
Hah, I doubt they didn't spin and edit it first, so probably the title should be just "answers", with the quotation marks even.
The convenient thing about protesting government surveillance is you don't have to travel very far to protest.
> And having seen Mailbox, it's very competitive with what is IMO the next-best mobile email client, GMail

But Mailbox only works with GMail email accounts. I wonder how many users Mailbox would have if Google shut them off.
As a friend's dad says, "That's why they call it work."
They could physically destroy all copies of the private key they use if they are served a gag order, making it impossible for them to be coerced into maintaining the canary.
They were planning to (there's already lots of stuff in the Collector's Edition that's also available as DLC). But they were planning to do that with Spore too, and that didn't turn out so well.
I'm just saying that people don't always have the luxury of quitting, especially when you're working because you need the paycheck in the short term which I'm betting is more common for Uber drivers than for software engineers. Like I said, they should quit in the long term if things don't improve but I don't think it's crazy for them to attempt to get their current employer to make improvements before they walk out the door.
Funny you should mention WoW: its launch was arguably much worse than SimCity's, lasting far longer (it took a good month or two to settle down). If you do a search for "wow launch disaster" or "wow launch 2004", you'll find a number of message boards with the same type of anger and frustration demonstrated with the SimCity launch.

And they did that not only charging full retail price, but a $15/month subscription fee. Of course, "first month free" is the standard practice in the MMORPG market, allowing for some leeway, but they did give a few days credit here and there.

Blizzard, however, did have a fair amount of social capital that EA may not have and got through it moving into 2005. Social media wasn't anything near it is today, either: no Reddit, no Hacker News, no Twitter, and Facebook was just getting off the ground being open to colleges only.
Until they've been served the gag order they are under no obligation to follow it.
There's a subtle piece here that a lot of folks are missing: it's not just EA, but also Maxis, independently responding to the community. Maxis being the developer, EA being the publisher. That's why part of this is a shitstorm, Maxis and EA are sharing contrary words with the community, so the community sees double-speak and stops trusting anything from EA or Maxis.
one part not accounted for is that the wide-open internet, while slower and with more latency, is going to be pretty much 100% reliable compared to their dark fiber link between regions.
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I was in high school when it was released. It was notoriously ubiquitous. Everyone had one. People said terrible things to each other - it was a free place to trash anyone you hated and really get them down.

Then, there was a rumor that Formspring was a huge fraud and was built as a complete joke and that they'd release the names of all the people who had posted questions on April Fool's. People freaked out and stopped posting, and those who had Formsprings released that they were happier without Formspring.

This is obviously a very microscopic look, but it wouldn't surprise me if Formspring did achieve the numbers they reported. I didn't know any peers of mine who didn't have one, back in the day and the "popular kids" at my school got hundreds of questions a week about everything.
I want to make video games so bad that I eventually learned programming. Programming is fun, but it's nothing like the passion that motivate people to stay up all night and day and code until they drop.

However, my ability to program is the only thing that I am good at and had earned me money so far. Plus, I like it, even if I can't do 16 hours coding marathon.
To be fair there have been some seriously dangerous threats that have been forestalled by government action.

Unfortunately though there is a widespread pattern of many of these folks effectively being entrapped by the government, but there are a handful of legitimate threats even so.
"The next project Joah tackled was expanding the calculator project by including square roots and trigonometric ratios."
I really can't believe they ran out of people to feature. There are thousands of other kids who are infinitely better than Josh.
Have you spoken to many Americans?

I went to college in Atlanta, Georgia (a pretty liberal place as far as the South goes). A year or so after the 9/11 bombing, I remember my classmates talking about how we should turn the Middle East into a glass parking lot. Quite seriously, with zero disagreement from anyone else. This was at a well-regarded engineering school, so these weren't stupid people, and indeed they were all very nice guys. We're just a tribal people--it's "our tribe" versus "their tribe" and the use of force on people outside the tribe is seen dramatically differently than the use of force on people within the tribe.

You don't need to reach to "bias" and "powerful interests" to see why the media reports the way it does. The media is a reflection of the beliefs of the American people.
What? Did you even look through at how comprehensive the list of APIs they have online here is? I'm a full-time developer . No way I'm going to waste my time making a cheat-sheet for functions I may only write a few calls to when I could be doing productive coding. There's just too many APIs I need to use.

This is an awesome resource.
I am using a similar tool for job automation, history & alert, and it is called Jenkins :)
Lots of respect for what these guys have done and accomplished but at the end of the day I have to ask can it pass the Shark Tank test.
Yeah that doesn't make much sense, because most MMO's are going to run you at least $50 initially, and then you pay the monthly fee in addition. I highly doubt that's what anyone would want at least with the game in its current form -- it'd need regular content updates, which I'm not even sure if they could add anything else of substantive value to a game like SimCity.
You need to distinguish between the different branches of goverment; it's not a monolithic entity, nor is it constituted as one.

It's not as clear as you think that the example above isn't constitutional, because in making immigration law Congress is exercising one of its enumerated powers to 'establish an uniform rule of naturalization,' and an argument can be made that the Judicial branch has business poking its nose into that situation. Likewise, there's a school of legal philosophy - a minority one to be sure, but present nonetheless - that Marbury v. Madison, upon which much of the judicial power to constrain the other branches rests, represented an inappropriate overreach by the Marshall court - a criticism first voiced by no less a personage than Thomas Jefferson. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison#Criticism for example.

That you think this is okay is scary.

You have no idea what I think is OK. I'm telling you how it works now, not how I'd like it to work.
A big reason why the system doesn't work when it doesn't is apathy, if more people merely took the effort to inform themselves and work within the system we'd be light-years ahead of where we are now.
Credo mobile, it's in the article.
I feel as though I just read the political equivalent of watching paint dry, atrocious. No apologies, no explanations, just justification and dodging the real issues. They could have made it all somewhat right by coming out and admitting they made bad choices, instead we get dribble about how they've always had an always online vision, etc.

How about we get some questions about the horrible path-finding AI and what they plan on doing about it?
And I always imagined LA would end up something like this http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116225/
They might as well have said "we can't hear your complaints over the sound of money rolling in".
I just hope he can keep it up to date. Some cheatsheets/APIs can change considerably over subsequent releases.
Almost: http://consumerist.com/2013/03/12/using-the-eecb-gets-me-a-s...
Even if you can't measure someone's creative thinking ability very well, that doesn't mean that it can't improve with practice.
When is this faster than Google combined with THING.methods ?

At least as far as ruby goes it seems of limited use.
> I could totally see them one day saying, "we're not going to accept email from you unless we've emailed you first or you've contacted us to ask for permission." There would be outrage, but I also wonder how many people would actually stop using gmail if they did this.

Yahoo! is already doing something like this http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html
Where can I recommend missing cheat sheets? I often use the GLSL cheat sheets and I can't see any links to them on the site.
I'll agree that EA did a terrible job of explaining to people why the new game was different than the old ones (i.e. why it might require always-online). I think the key point comes from this (taken from the OP):

> Players who want to reach the peak of each specialization can count on surrounding cities to provide services or resources, even workers. As other players build, your city can draw on their resources.

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.

People claim that they came out with an "offline patch" that allows you to play offline, and while that is true, you then miss out on all the city-sharing features, and thus your cities end up crappy, because it is impossible to manage all the resources within a single city.

I'm not saying that what EA/Maxis is doing is necessary, but people seem to be missing that this is the main reason that the cities are always online, not just for the city saving features or anything.

Also, I do know about the StarCraft to StarCraft 2 drama, and from what I can tell, people don't really care any more, and people have gotten over the fact that they need internet to play their game. Sure, sometimes the internet drops in the middle of a tournament, and people get riled up about it again, but it seems to have died down very much since the launch.
LOL, check out http://www.bonkersworld.net/usual-suspects/ by a googler.
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Previously I had implemented a project that needed to be always-connected, and in order to take network outage into account, we would write to a buffer (a sqlite database actually) if we couldn't detect network. We will sync with server once online and sync the related information as necessary. Simcity can use similar technique because I don't see there is any hard real-time interactions between players or the server. In offline mode, the simulation will run with a default parameter set, or the data from the previous sync, until the next sync happens. In fact, my gut feeling tells me the simulation engine should have an offline switch to let it run stand-alone, or else it would be hell to debug a system that keeps on changing states.
Android/IOS etc Mobile App Update Platform
Yep the media is just starting to get on top of this. I saw another article a month or so ago.

I first took notice when the Chinese bought out Complete Genomics last year.

The future is going to sneak up on us quicker than we think. Well some parts anyway. The Genetics thing has been untapped before, it could explode out.

If you had the choice of raising your babies IQ not many people would chose not too. When it hits, it'll hit quickly.
I don't think Google can realistically do that, both from a tech and a PR standpoint.
Again, I'm not saying "the game is working fine", I'm saying "I know that the servers are not completely shut down because there is at least one person who is able to play consistently". I agree, the game has issues (of which some have been sorta resolved), just not as serious as some people are claiming.
I really wish Github would fill the Groups niche because they would do it 100x better and most of the groups I'm in are coding related anyways. Especially if they really are trying to do collaboration in general...

Agreed about finance too. It's too bad it's so crappy.
They came for the...

etc.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to be a Search Engine, not specifically a "Web Search Engine". People come looking for answers, not just sites.

Their mission changes based on their revenue needs. First it was no ads on top, then send users as fast as possible to other sites, now it's almost all ads and keep users at Google at any cost. Even if what Google provides is sub-standard, very typical of companies that gain a monopoly in a field. You can argue that they might have a right to do it, not that it is the right thing to do. If major websites go out of business, how is the web better off? Google produces no content and now wants to send no clicks to the producers.

>> When I search for "Samsung TV", I don't want a link to another vertical crawler as the top answer, I want links to where I can read reviews and buy it.

Yes, but Google decided that they have the best reviews and best price. Either way, they gained share by being nice and now they are on top, with lots of money to buy off protection from politicians. http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/google-accumulat...

What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly.

Google clones everything and when those cloned go out of business, consumers lose. Any hope that they may charge $1 /month vanishes when Google clones their app /features.

Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.

Mozilla is one company, Google clones a product and uses it's billion users to have it adopted. Imagine if Microsoft used that muscle to have users adopt Bing or IE, by showing ads for them virtually each time you went online.
Eh. Take away everything cool from Blade Runner and that's what actually happened.
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