skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taxi drivers are expected to provide a positive environment for their fares. This includes pleasant, casual conversation.

Your driver doesn't know you're deeply interested in tech startups like his employer. Almost all taxi conversations are brief, casual, on the surface. If your next taxi driver took an innocent small-talk question as a chance to air his gripes about his new, better employer, how would you feel at the end of the ride? How are you going to rate that driver? 1 star? Oh shit, now he's canned.

You're getting the only safe answer to your question. For all you know, the drivers are terrified to speak out.
That solves one problem but creates ten more.
Still no answer to the important question, "When will you turn off the servers and what happens then?"
You're bickering a lot throughout this thread with people who have training and education. I was a certified EMT and have vetted these facts with my wife, who's a veterinarian.

This shouldn't be a long, drawn out battle. You said something that was incorrect--perhaps even dangerously so, since your misreading of Wikipedia could lead people to respond inappropriately in an emergency. Ventricular fibrillation is not a death sentence, but your claim made it out to be so, and needed to be corrected.

At this point I think the facts have been sufficiently cleared up and you're just being unnecessarily defensive and argumentative. Please stop.
> We even check to make sure that all the cities saved are legit, so that the region play, leaderboards, challenges and achievements rewards and status have integrity.

Wait, didn't someone demonstrate that a modified client can edit the region as well as their own cities? There's obviously no sanity checking going on with the data the clients return, much less server-side simulation.
Link for the ignorant and lazy, as I once was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd

Seems like a decent idea. According to Wikipedia, Ubuntu considered it in 2006 when they were looking for a new unit system, but didn't like that it was under Apple's own license, which was shortly thereafter changed to the Apache license.

I'll remember it if I want to do something unconventional on a system.
I just got back from San Francisco, where I used Uber for the first time (and continued to use it throughout the trip). I talked to all of the drivers and they seemed quite happy - all had been using the service for over a year, and they had been in the limo business for five to eight years each. They said that now all of their business comes through Uber. However, one stated that there has been a huge increase in Uber drivers, thus making it more difficult to keep busy.

I think that some driver backlash is a normal part of growing, and that Uber should maintain strict quality control.
JavaScript's popularity rankings vary widely
Bringing change is easier said that done. Consider an example from last week's news; US agents captured Osama bin Laden's son-in-law, a former Al Qaeda spokesman, and have brought him to New York to stand trial. Some politicians are incensed, saying that it willmake NY a terrorist target and that he doesn't deserve a criminal trial, and demanded that the fellow instead be sent off to Guantanamo bay and interrogated, with his fate to be decided by a military court (summarized here: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-09/opinions/37579... FWIW I agree with the conclusion of this editorial).

You might remember that Obama attempted to close down the detention facilities in Guantanamo soon after taking office, and wanted to try alleged 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in NYC, but the plan was shelved following vociferous objections, public demonstrations etc. Now I don't want to go all partisan, but I can't help observing that the very same Tea Party type Republicans that object to big government were the very same people that rallied in the streets of NY to argue against transparency and the application of the criminal justice system. For the administration, it's kind of a 'heads you win, tails I love' situation.

Part of the problem is that civil libertarians are not very organized. They don't march on TSA headquarters to demand the right to leave their shoes on, or parade through the streets of NY to champion the criminal justice system, or picket the headquarters of the NSA. When the administration does stand up for civil rights (even in a small way like the above), they get virtually no popular support.
This was dreadful and embarrassing to read through. Zero new information, no apologies, just dodging.

> You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere.

"Anywhere" there's an internet connection, "anytime" their servers are up.

You want to claim its an MMO? You want to claim game-as-a-service? Fine. But sell it as that, charge me $15 a month for an ephemeral product. Not $60 for something I can't even use on my own time.

edit: The point of the last statement isn't to compare it to an MMO, the point is that EA are not upfront about the odds of the game itself being very ephemeral. I'm not sad I can't buy it for $15. I'm sad that its quite possible in just 2 years time that no one can.
I hope they aren't comparing ratings directly for exactly this reason. They should be using something like z-scores where you measure every rating in standard deviation from the mean for that rater.
So are you saying that the problem is that you want everything to be in a single "river of news", but that this means that low volume feed items get lost? To me, this is more of an issue with social networking than RSS: with Reader, you can examine feeds separately if you want.
"he had the bad luck to get"

In fact all of these rating and ranking systems (as well as public commenting) cause businesses to have to expend excess time and energy to keep a small vocal percentage of customers happy for fear of backlash instead of concentrating on simply making a good or acceptable product that satisfies 95% of customers. I'm reminded of this sometimes when I read tripadvisor reviews where people go off because there is a bug in their room or the desk staff was having a bad day the particular day they arrived.
I think it's also very pertinent to point out that they in fact aren't employees of Uber. They aren't being denied work or fired, they're being denied from using Uber's service. This is absolutely no different than hell banning a troublesome user on a site.
Performance tests of different node.js promise libraries
This. We've implemented this on a number of social networks fit reporting nefarious users. Scammers, spammers, etc. to help the community. We found that if a user can report a user with an easy click we were flooded with false positives. Users reporting one another for petty reasons like not replying to messages. The women would report other women seemingly out of spite. We later added an input box that requires a short explanation. The reporting abuse dropped through the floor, and the quality of the feedback from users is far better.

Requiring a short explanation will def put the average rating to 4.
" We recognize that there are fans – people who love the original SimCity – who want [single player experience]. "

I suspect those people far outnumber those who want a messy online experience
The Destruction of a Nation: Syria’s War Revealed in Satellite Imagery
That would incentivize riders to rate their drivers lower.
Translation: I'm rich and I don't want to pay taxes. Go suck an egg.
5 Fun Things To Do Online With HTML5
Google not showing Upper black bar in Google chrome
Google search is not showing upper black bar for navigation in Google chrome but showing in other browsers.
So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision.

Hindsight is 20/20 indeed.
This is what Ubuntu Touch’s core apps look like so far
Boys' classroom behavior impacts grades, study finds
It's all subjective, so it's hard to detail, but a good Uber ride is a far more enjoyable experience than, say, a taxi ride. The driver is courteous and knowledgable, receptive to conversation if I desire it, and quiet if not. The car is in good condition, with plenty of room, typically with some bottled water available if I'm thirsty. Shows up quickly, easy to find. Driver knows how to get where I want and gets me there in a reasonable amount of time. Etc. etc.
Well Sam, if I had some issue that I wanted to discuss, and the response I got from you was [take it or leave it/piss off/eat crap/sit on it and spin/go fly a kite]. I might down-vote you.

The fact that the drivers want to negotiate means they clearly like something about working with Uber.
Despite harsh words from players and critics alike, EA has stayed true to their guiding principle: "No refunds".
Or why they were unprepared for the launch demand.

Or why it took so long to scale up to manage the "unexpected" demand.
Another reason paramedics are taught to walk around pools is simply to avoid slipping on wet floors. The additional speed isn't worth the increased risk of falling.

(Source: I was a certified EMT-Basic)
Transcript of San Francisco Speech to WUSTL Alumni
Exactly, just what I want, another SOB potentially watching and listening to me, and or recording me/posting me to youtube.
I like the fact that you can substitute a more complex expression anywhere, even in the first position (the function to be called), but everything looks so similar that it's hard to see what's going on. I read more code than I write (I like to read about programming languages) and this:

((lambda (x y) (+ x y)) 3 4)

looks much harder to read than this:

(function(x, y) return x+y end)(3, 4).

In the Lua version, you can easily skim the code: here is a function (rather than a Greek letter), the parameters are inside parenthesis and separated by commas, the body comes next until the "end" keyword, it produces (returns) a value and then you pass the parameters (inside parenthesis and separated by commas again) to the function that was just created.

In the Scheme version, how am I supposed to know where this lambda ends other than counting parenthesis and having a lot of practice to recognize that (....... thing thing) is a function call where the function is more than a single name?

Similarly this:

(define (fn x)
(lambda (a) (+ a x)))

IMHO looks much harder to read than this:

function fn(x)
return function(a)
return a+x
end
end

The second one is much clearer: "return function", you are returning a closure to the caller. The Scheme one makes me think: a function, another function, parenthesis, an expression, then it ends abruptly and I don't know what the hell the code supposed to do. Again, I CAN read that code in Scheme, but only after learning the core concepts in Lua.
Seemed to me like the goal was to land a non technical job in the tech scene. So for people who don't want to learn to code, here's a quick start guide for getting the skills you need to get into BD, QA, etc at a tech startup.
I'm a Dropbox member. I pay $100 a year for the privilege. I use it because it integrates well with my desktop OS and several apps I use on my mobile devices. I'm still on the waiting list for Mailbox, but I'll happily fork over another $100 a year to use it.

A portion of Dropbox's customers have grown accustomed to paying for the service. I believe those are Mailbox's future customers. Mailbox should be a premium add-on to Dropbox.

Even if the Mailbox add-on is priced at $50 a year, if only 1 million of Dropbox's customers subscribe and they stay with the plan for two years, Dropbox will have recouped its investment.

I believe that providing features like this add to the Dropbox brand. It's about adding infrastructure that the OSes are leaving at the wayside. In the same vein, I would like Dropbox to add RSS & and photo/video/music sharing backends that client apps could tie into.
> "Accept that "the grind" is part of the job"

Of all the pieces that struck home for me, this. Especially doing what I'd call my 'dream job', it's 'the grind' that I most struggle with, even if it's ultimately what ends up being the most valuable output.

I'd add a line to the effect of: the grind is easier to handle when you keep focused on the outcome of what you're trying to achieve (cool new feature, happier customers, company success). It's easy, as a programmer, to lose sight of the big picture when you're at the never-ending 80% phase of a big development effort.
It’s Time to Stop Sharing Your Netflix Password
> They all have computers of some sort (mostly iPhones and some tablets), but don't know how in the world they can develop on them. The only way to write native apps for iOS is to buy an apple laptop, get a developer license and learn an advanced programming language. That's beyond the reach of most kids.

It is pretty burdensome that you do need to have an Apple computer (or hackintosh, or complicated unofficial toolchain) in order to developer for iOS, you actually don't need a developer license to start developing apps. You just open the Mac App Store and grab Xcode these days. You do need the $99 subscription in order to test on a device (very unfortunately), and to publish in the App Store. But in spite of these things, if you're a new developer with access to OSX, iOS development is quite accessible and easy to get started with.
Go watch this video: http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/CPRAndECC/HandsOnlyCPR/Hands-O...

That's all you need to know as a lay-rescuer. And if you forget, the 911 operator will walk you through it.

( Or, if you'd rather: http://supersexycpr.com )
The chart of mass shooting casualties leads me to believe this study has underlying bias already.

1) The use of bullets seems like something a media outlet would do to invoke irrational emotional response. I'd hope that if this is a serious scientific study you wouldn't have to resort to such antics.

2) The only chart on this page centers on mass shootings which account for less than 1% of all gun violence. I'd much rather see a comprehensive breakdown of gun violence by incident type (gang, mass, accidental, etc.) and also by weapon (semi-auto handgun, revolver, shotgun, semi-auto rifle, etc.).

EDIT: It would also be nice to see a citation for the underlying chart data.
Four alternatives to Google Reader
The elite players are also probably more likely to be taking beta blockers: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/arts/music/17tind.html?pag...
First .Com Domain Name Turns 28
Fuck you Lucy.
If they charged you $15 per month, they'd have to refund you for the fact it's been down a significant portion of the month; I mean, can you imagine the shitshow if WoW were down for a week and Blizzard just kept charging people (and gave no credit)?

This way they can pretend they aren't just taking your money and completely failing to deliver a viable product on the timing promised.
Los Angeles in 2013 as Predicted in 1988
Except that a non-reply is a form of communication, especially in this context.

Sorry, I'm just not buying that it's acceptable human behavior to bug the heck out of someone because you want something from them, then act as if they owe you.
This seems to be a the type of comment that is catchy, but in truth mostly vacuous. How does one have a 'Draw Something' of email? There is no sticking power to most games. There are high switching costs (in terms of time, productivity, etc.) when it comes to e-mail. Hell, I used Yahoo Mail for years after Gmail came out because I wasn't used to its interface. If Mailbox has managed to get people to switch to their app, it is likely that they will continue to use the app... Not drop it in three months like people did with Draw Something.
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. 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. Vertical search is getting rolled up into search, not just by Google, but by Microsoft too, because ultimately, search engines should be smart enough to understand the semantics of the search to an extern where a special curated vertical isn't needed anymore. When Jean Luc Picard asks the Enterprise computer for the nearest Starbase, it doesn't tell him to phone up StarBases.com and ask them for a list instead.

When I ask "AAPL", I want the current price of AAPL. This has a direct, factual, answer, I am not looking to be sent to finance search engine or portal as the top answer.

Even before Google built reader, the "RSS" market was mostly free. No one was making a killing selling RSS readers, anymore than commercial web browsers really succeeded. Is Mozilla evil because a free open source browser "killed the market" for commercial-for-pay browsers? That ship has already sailed.

What's arguably evil is using a lossleader to kill another product, and then jack up the price once you have a monopoly. But releasing free services when the price was already zero is hardly anything to write home about.

If you want to know who really killed RSS, ask Facebook.
Guild Wars 2 sells an actual MMO as a one-time fee, and they're doing just swell. I've heard most people claim that as one of its benefits, not a downside. Not sure what that means, just wanted to point out that people often do enjoy single-fee game-as-a-services.

Also, when you say "$60 for something I can't even use on my own time" are you claiming that the game doesn't even work, as all of the hyped up gaming articles are claiming? I've been watching someone stream the game for the past week and a half, and he's been doing just fine, playing consistently for about 8 hours a day, each day since the release. So, sure, there are some problems with it, but it's not like the game is so horribly broken that you can't use it.
Or here:

http://www.google.com/patents/US8380765
Screen grab: Pressure on big Internet groups in France
Killing Google Reader is like killing the bees: we'll all be worse off
Guild Wars 2 fan here.

It's worth noting that GW2 has a substantial amount of non-trivial in-game purchases to subsidize the persistent costs of maintaining the servers in lieu of an online fee, and some game design is specifically tailored to provide incentives for players to make these purchases.
Tourette Cure
Going to go out on a limb here and say it was intended as a cute little joke.
I think what they actually meant was: 'answers straight from Lucy'.
Some people consider mit/bsd to be a more "free" licence as it doesn't force other people to do anything - they are free to use the code as they wish, as opposed to rms' view that we should all, always write code that is given away freely, and live on a communal stew made from our own toe jam
Didn't they just have a 16 hour long outage this week?
EA should clean house on their PR team. What disastrous responses. To starting this post with, "I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity," is so gross, self congratulatory, and not contrite. That plus doubling down on the dishonesty instead of really offering straight answers is just going to fuel the fires.
"It works for this one guy I know" is not really data.

I think the real problem, though, is that EA has been treating this as a boxed product launch, not a service, and then acting shocked when they have service-type problems. If they had really treated it as a service, internally, they would have done things that might have prevented this, like doing a soft-launch, actual beta stress testing, having transparently scalable servers, etc.
I was planning to do something similar after I learned about Mesos although I haven't found the time. At the moment I'm using a few processes with MySQL publishing with RabbitMQ to handle distribution and node failures. It doesn't have nearly as nice an interface but RabbitMQ isn't terribly difficult to manage. Thanks for open sourcing!
Wow, a new-to-me way to make a site unreadable on my phone.
Google's biggest risk from the press might be regulatory. Politicians and political appointees still pay close attention to the press, and Microsoft is always agitating in the background for an antitrust proceeding against Google. A pissed-off press corps might decide to "take a closer look" at the power Google wields in the online marketplace. This could help provide political cover to move against them.
Heck, they could still do it easily. The game periodically does make encrypted/obfuscated local 'saves' which are automatically deleted over time.

If a release group (against all odds) beats them to it then all the better.
I read more about Lisp than I program in it, and I feel just like you about the language.

Everything looks the same. Some time ago I read that Common Lisp had multiple return values. I was expecting something like Lua, where a function like this:

function fn() return 1, 2, 3 end

Is called like this:

a, b, c = fn()

But in Lisp, it's just the same old

(some-magic-words-here (other-things) (other-things))

Could I have some commas and equals signs to separate things at least? :-(

Then I heard various Lisps have classes, structs, objects and what not. Does it look like this?

{ name: value, name: value }

Or this?

class Name { Type name; Type name; }

No...

It looks like this:

(def-something ((something-here)) (something-else) (((something-else-2))))

If you are lucky you have a few :keywords or &keywords so your eyes have something to hang onto. Other than that, everything looks so... positional, and a closing parenthesis could mean anything from the end of a simple expression like (+ 1 1) or the end of the declarative part and the start of the executable part of a complex structure.

You don't even need to go that far to find these problems: just look at:

(let ((new-var-2 value) (new-var-2 value)) (some-code-here))

(if (condition) (runs-if-true) (runs-if-false))

You'd better use a very consistent indentation, because there is almost no visual separation between the "runs-if-true" and "runs-if-false"!
Relevant:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/16/simcity-bosss-str...

Compares her current 'straight answers' with previous statements from Lucy (and other EA reps) along with the truth. She doesn't do too great.
Yeah, and of course this is just fundamental separation of powers by design, else the government would be exactly a monolithic entity.

But, then this type of victory seems rare these days, as the Executive has grabbed so much power since 9/11. Seems the balance has been upset.
I strongly feel that EA suffers from a big company, we-are-never-wrong syndrome, and instead of a sincere apology, the fans get PR copy
True, even mail from known senders has to be dealt with care as well.

"holy crap, this is you"

This scam could be avoided easily by checking the links actual URL before clicking on it. And even if you click and end up with some malware infected website, disabling all unnecessary and insecure browser plugins and using NoScript should be enough protection. If it's not, the restricted privileges hinder the malware from doing serious damage (e.g. rewriting/deleting system files).
I hear this happens a lot, but how can we stop it?
I've thought about it and it seems an awful lot like anti-piracy measures... anything we might be able to do to prevent it would negatively impact it's utility to legitimate users.
That is a good point. I've avoided it, so I forgot that it can be a large part of the game.

However, one could argue that Maxis will likely be releasing DLC/Expansion packs for Sim City (seeing as they've done this for every other Sim game they've made) so those can be a substitute for the online fee as well. I guess time will tell.
Have you ridden in any cab recently? Every single one of them is equipped with video and audio recording. As is BART and Muni buses.