skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin is not, practically speaking, going to replace the dollar or euro. This ambition projected onto it by anarchist promoters and alarmist detractors does not have a practical base. Instead, it is competing to be the floating alternative currency of choice. The question of a state taxing on the basis of Bitcoin is thus mis-placed.

The best case for Bitcoin would be inheriting the transactional characteristics of cash, i.e. facilitating transactions that one wishes to keep anonymous (or at least pseudonymous), and asset characteristics of gold, i.e. a fixed supply store of value. It competes solidly as a lightweight and comparatively secure alternative to both.
> giving away SimCity for free to 900k users

Just to clarify, he was referencing the free game offer to people who already bought SimCity. [1]

[1] https://help.ea.com/article/simcity-something-extra
Think of Photoshop as a sketchpad without the limitations/insanity of HTML and CSS... so you can be totally right brain dreaming up stuff; your mind is thinking only on the look at that point, not whether IE 8 is gonna blow it all out of the water.

Once you get the layout into something good then you fire up notepad or whatever and go into left-brain mode and hack your mock-up it into something that works.

I, myself, find Photoshop (or any freeform graphics tool) a bad tool for web mock-ups and HTML/CSS a dreadful syntax to format with... so, either way of doing those is a struggle for me. :-D
"45 million registered users can't be wrong"

when you're misquoting people to make your point, maybe something is wrong with your argument. BTW I have no connection to EA and don't think I own any EA games.
"Stop fingerprinting!" ... "Give us your browser fingerprint!"
I really don't want to be involved in this discussion, but since my name is bring brought up I need to make a couple of things clear:

First, and perhaps this is obvious, we should let the legal and journalistic process unfold. None of us know what is true except for the parties involved. These are very serious criminal allegations. Anything is possible--we just don't know.

Second, I made no mention of these rumors until the story broke and my name was dragged into it. I've sat on these rumors for years because they were just rumors.

Finally, I take no joy in any of this. I'm very happy that Mike and I broke up three years ago because I've been able to focus on my conference without his negativity.
s/git/hg/ and get on with life.
>no matter how proud Torvalds is of the fact that he
>never looked at another version control system for
>inspiration

What gave you that impression? Git was strongly influenced by BitKeeper and to a much lesser extent by Monotone. And, arguably, 'anti-inspired' by several other VCS's Linus would have surely been at least passingly familiar with.
" Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."

This was by far the most aggravating part in his entire "Defense"(as in reading this made go to the consumerist and vote for them as the worst company in America)

Ok maybe he's right, maybe it's not DRM. He provides no proof of it but maybe he's right. What doesn't address was the always on line requirment, for whatever reason they decided it was necessary to put in the game, was broken making the game broken. Essentially they sold a broken product.
Not quite the same, but I know of an employment dispute that was brought to a head by a staff member quenching and MRI scanner by pressing the big red button.
I hear ya, but as you obv know as long as you're pushing to a location only you are pushing to, a force-push is harmless.

Moreover, any loss that does occur is recoverable as long as you keep your clone around. Git doesn't garbage collect refs for at least 30 days. So you're pretty protected if you clone to a location that has regular backups.
Exactly! This is part of a more fundamental problem with the whole concept of responsive web design... It can't be just about media queries. I blogged about this some time ago, and plan to amend with links to this article. Well done. Here's my post --
http://barkgolgafrincham.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/responsive...
Time capsule get sent to baby..
I've no doubt that it can run like that (and given SimCity works for ~30 mins or so without connecting to SimCity's servers, it's no shock to anybody who actually played the game at launch); but that doesn't mean that their intent when conceiving of the game wasn't for the online aspect to be utterly central and integral to how they wanted people to play the game. The always online "requirement" could absolutely have resulted from that desire rather than DRM.

If it was just a matter of DRM, then it's plain inconsistent with how they're approaching DRM with every other PC release they've done recently.
If what you are doing on your blogs isn't worth $5/month each maybe you should stop.
Why does Chrome want permission to use my camera and mic at anytime?
MA is someone not loved here in HN and in the tech blogs.Why is this story on the front page? Who seriously cares what happens in MA's life? (pg,please add a downvote button)
:-( broken on windows.
I understand this. I meant the lack of empathy obviously goes beyond the CEO and wouldn't be an easy problem to fix.
I never knew of the local remote tracking branches in git until now. I just went and looked it up and found this post that explains it more http://longair.net/blog/2009/04/16/git-fetch-and-merge/

git branch -r

will show all the remote tracking branches I had no idea existed. Thanks a lot, git makes much more sense to me now.
The Crowd Loves 3D Printing
Why evacuate for an earthquake no-one can feel?
> we should let the legal and journalistic process unfold

That didn't stop you from leading the conga line on Facebook[1]. That post and your other statements lead to you being used as a source to substantiate the claims, far from 'letting the process unfold'

tl;dr you are part of the problem

[1] https://www.facebook.com/jcalacanis/posts/10151817217978294
To me, this is not tech news. This is celebrity gossip.
You'd think that would be a good thing, but I highly doubt it. Visual Studio and .NET in general is not generally known for it's exceptional use of abstractions.
What a completely and utterly tone-deaf response. "The tallest trees catch the most wind". So EA is hated because it's big? What about Valve? Why doesn't Sony get the same hate?

More than anything, I'm confused as to just who his intended audience is, here. Certainly none of the gamers who have had long-standing issues with EA for years would find this "mea culpa" convincing. The only people I can imagine would be convinced or swayed by this would be EA employees and management. Is it part of some internal political battle being played out in public?

Either we're not the intended audience for this message, or the C-levels at EA really are so delusional and detached from their customers that they think they can rub a little PR pixie dust on their reputation and make it all better.
> I thought one can write in Python and other languages for plugins now?

Yes and no. Technically this is possible, but it's almost as unpleasant as just using vimscript.

Scripting vim in python involves using the vim module, which provides a very limited api to interact with vim. It doesn't allow the interception of any events, and interacting with vim more often than not seems to involve calling vim.command() or vim.eval(), which take vimscript as a string.

That said, I still think this is the direction vim needs to go. I think if the vim python integration improves in future releases it will be much appreciated, and will provide a boost to the vim plugin community.
I really disklike Arrington, i think hes an arrogant tool, but my opinion is based on his writings over the years, nothing else. I think this kind of scumbag tabloid journalism is a disgrace to the tech industry and techcrunch is a plague on all our houses. This matter should be dealt with by the authorities and those that report on it are feigning their concern in an effort to push up their pageviews.
Man, talk about not getting it.

I don't think EA deserves to be voted the worst company in America by a long shot. But I do think they need to be publicly shamed to the point that they actually listen to why people don't like them (I don't know if public shaming helps people realize things, I'm not a parent, but it seems like a good idea). Their otherwise interesting products are made far less compelling in order to satisfy business requirements. It's just dumb business. Meet your business objectives in smarter ways while creating smarter products and people will like you more.

In the field of entertainment software, the user experience is paramount. There's also something to be said for letting customers feel like they "own" their games rather than simply leasing them until you close your servers. If you take this away, you'd damn well better provide some fantastic value in its place. To think that people resent you purely because of your choice of cover atheletes, micro-transactions or support of LGBT rights, polarizing as these can be, is evidence of the same sort of thinking which pervades your product development.
DOTT sold me to PC games.
They surely don't read the entire application unless it's appealing. Some applications scream "fail" within the first minute. I read an article from one of the partners stating what they look for and they did mention that if an application doesn't look appealing, they won't finish reading it. I mean...why would they? You should be clean and concise while not over saturating them with detail.
As opposed to the "New repository" button on the github.com front page...
Pretty Much Sums Up My Feelings About Drupal
It's more of a paraphrase than a misquote. Even if it was a misquote, there is nothing wrong with his factual argument nonetheless.

Also, if you are uncertain of who publishes the games you own, you can't outright deny connection with a publisher.
Gnome 3 is awesome; what are you talking about?
What It's Like to Be Kidnapped
The other part is that whereas the flu knocks you out, mental illness can make you harder to predict, which is potentially more dangerous. Some of that stigma is probably built in by evolution.
There's a long list of prominent names being investigated or (not) prosecuted (basically scape-goating single employees): GS, Barclays, HSBC, UBS, Deutsche to name the most prominent ones.

And the (so far officially) biggest fish - Wachovia - and how this was (not) prosecuted, nobody really hold accountable, no (real) funds confiscated. A quick reminder on the size of that "business" (300 times bigger than Bitcoin even on the current blown-up total Bitcoin circulation):

"... Wachovia was fined $50m and made to surrender $110m in proven drug profits, but was shown to have inadequately monitored a staggering $376bn through the casa de cambio over four years, of which $10bn was in cash..."

( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/21/drug-cartels-ban... and a longer article http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-d...)

All this is going on for decades. And please also don't forget: Like individuals or (private) companies, governments and politicians are using the same means to make illicit funds appear or disappear.
Being Gay at Jerry Falwell's University
Doesn't your company has to have an office there already or open one if you work for them from Canada?
I'm amazed this wasn't flagged or slaughtered immediately.
The Joke’s on Louis C.K.
The exact quote is "45 million registered users are proving that wrong."

Sure it's not 100% word-for-word, but the sentiment is spot-on. What's your problem with his quotation?
I'm not a javascript nor browser pro but I wonder why the compilation is done client side. Cant's the servers do it and send the jit code to the client instead?
As someone who works from home, I get a similar response when I'm out of my bathrobe+pjs.
When you assume there was malicious intent in misquoting someone, maybe you should check to see if it was intentional or not before attacking their entire argument. I edited my comment for accuracy, but it doesn't make it any less valid.
I would be pretty harsh on this sort of journalism if it was a one time incident but there really seems to be a lot of smoke here.

And that typically means there is at least one fire.

And that is one fire too many.

Too often powerful figures are allowed to skate by because we want to believe the best of them. The internet is sometimes the only way victims can fight back - the threat of getting blackballed by someone that is asymmetrically powerful like this is otherwise too great to take the risk that a simple police report is going to get them justice.

That said, I hope that now that the potential victims have raised the issue that we all wait for the truth to come out.
The first five paragraphs—particularly the multiple pivots, bringing on a woman co-founder in hopes that it might look good, and spending an inordinate amount of time researching everything about getting into YC—really surprised me. I would think you'd want to get into YC because you have a (hopefully) marketable vision and YC is simply a means to an end in getting that vision shipped.

It looks like the OP finally realized that towards the end, but is the first part a common way to approach YC, where it's an end in and of itself? If so, is the central idea that "well, now that I've been a part of YC, everything will just fall into place"?
There's a rather famous video of him talking about how wonderful his lack of experience with traditional VCS' was for producing git. Obviously he had used bitkeeper (but wasn't very fond of it), and he was probably exaggerating a bit even after that.

I think most of the outside influence came from people who weren't Torvalds, but the command set is just so weirdly different from every other VCS (even where functionality maps nearly 1:1) that it seems likely that it was designed without much consideration for existing use patterns of other VCS'.
Jiminy Christmas. Can you get a better illustration of the seething entitlement of gamers than EA being a finalist in a worst-companies bracket that included ABInBev, both AT&T and Verizon, Ticketmaster, credit-reporting agency Equifax, United Airlines, Carnival Fecal Coliform Cruises, Comcast, yes, really, Comcast, Walmart, and Bank of America?

There is no parallel universe in which EA is worse than half these companies. The result we have now brings discredit to the whole enterprise of worst-company contests.

If EA's COO had a soul, he'd write a long-form blog post about how bad United Airlines, Ticketmaster, Equifax and BofA are.
I thought it was interesting. Not because I think the save button needs a redesign, but because it was fun to watch the design process. I think that everyone that is genuinely complaining in these comments need to chill out a bit. They admitted that the whole thing was academic.
Cool, thanks for the info. Previously when I've seen 'just run it under wine', the hand-waving casualness of the comment didn't gel with my experience in actually using it. Having a library of canned configs is a step forward. I don't mean to disparage wine at all, just that it's not been 'general-public' ready.
To use wget, I often need to read the manual or look up some notes to get the exact command I want.
This is not a news story related to technology or startups, nor is it though provoking or inspirational. I don't see how this belongs on HN, other than for tabloid sensationalism.
headslap

I plead office move today. The 1,1,1-TCA EPA tox report said it was pulled because of ozone layer concerns, and there's a 1,1,1-TFA that is a CFC. But yep, that was a dumb sentence for me to have written.
Koronis Rift and Ballblazer are mentioned on page 5:

> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/189899/why_are_we_stil...

"LucasArts games have always had a special place in my heart; from Loom to Koronis Rift to Ballblazer and the Monkey Island series. [...]"
so you can be totally right brain dreaming up stuff; your mind is thinking only on the look at that point, not whether IE 8 is gonna blow it all out of the water.

Yeah that would be my stumbling block, i'd always be thinking 'ok this looks nice but how will I make it work?' People like me are why they made Bootstrap I guess. Which is odd, since I have a graphic design background originally... but I guess my brain just doesn't like moving between the two modes (or I want to avoid the "turn the psd into html" part of the process...)
So are you saying you've been on H1B visa for 6 years of more as of now? This is a great point, can you please share?
To be fair, I don't think even in the scenario in question the history is truly lost. It'll still be in the reflog at least.
This reads exactly like the way a high-level exec of a massive company would think - numbers focused without truly understanding the issues that people might have with the company. Unable to separate mindless complaints that should be ignored out of hand (cover choice for Madden) versus the always-on or free-to-play mechanic which represent legitimate complaints. EA is not one of the worst companies in America by a long shot. But they have very little respect for the consumer.

Today on HN I see a link to a Gamasutra article where industry people are talking about just how incredible some of the LucasArts games were (20 years ago!) and another link where one of the heads of EA is making excuses for why people hate his company. Some of his points are valid, and people can be immature and ridiculous in their reasoning (or downright horrid). But he overlooks some of the valid complaints that people have with EA. And they are valid. He's throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.
Just to clarify, we initially decided to work together because she's an excellent designer and I can't design for shit. I just thought it might help our case.
Is it a coincidence they published this late Friday afternoon?
I think it is possible if you don't do it by yourself at home. For example, I'm joining Ruby on Rails hacknights and the community welcomes you to come up with something you want to build or built in another language and spend the night building it with the team. My guess if after doing it for 1 year plus you will have a network of friends (some who will offer you the job since they know what you built in that year).

You can be quite advanced in that particular skill if you practice enough for a long time. I picked up guitar when I was 27 when I started taking classes. Then it is up to your level of interest and commitment to reach a certain level.

'Expert' is up to interpretation. I'm only as expert as the other person who know and have practised less. When you think you've arrived at Expert level, you will stop advancing as much.
Very nice to see something like this built on Django!
Stupid website won't even let me comment. First I have to sign up. Then it snubs me with a short character count. Finally it won't even do anything when I press "ADD COMMENT".
I've tried both Firefox and Chrome with and without javascript and no luck. Well here:

"The customer base as a whole is annoyed because you release buggy unfinished games with horrible DRM. Not because of your LGBT policy.

Your post doesn't sound sincere to me. It doesn't even sound apologetic. It sounds arrogant and like you're saying we shouldn't be complaining instead of admitting your mistakes. You don't address people's real complaints.

I want my wasted money back; not a free game. I don't want to have to use Origin. I want actual customer support and a longer character lim-"
On Pinterest, while they have a safe harbor according to the DMCA, the user can be sued by the copyright holder, just like here.

In practice, I suspect most copyright holders will send a DMCA takedown anyway, either to you or to the company hosting the site, if you're on a VPS or PaaS service.
If there's a testcase showing the problem, please file bugs! Doesn't need to be minimal or anything, just a link to the page showing the problem.
> I'm not sure what your expectations are of a PR piece...

http://www.apple.com/au/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
Getting into Y Combinator for the sake of getting into Y Combinator seems to be quite common; I wasn't too surprised at that. Could there be scope in the application for a question along the lines of "What do you want to achieve by being a part of Y Combinator?"?
I'm not saying it isn't, but first time I booted it up it took me a good 20 mins to figure out how basic things worked and I'm used to using weird Linux DEs.

I don't think it would leave a great first impression on your average ADHD alienware target customer.
Here is the poll. Now you can go vote for them as the worst company. (I wish they'd linked to it with "bring it on".)

http://consumerist.com/2013/04/05/worst-company-in-america-s...
branches aren't supposed to be "major". That's the major difference between a system like git and svn. branches are cheap. They are supposed to be used often and even be disposable.
I think they aren't very happy today, too. I believe the registration itself is bad customer experience, be it with Origin, U-play or Steam.

I've bough^W licensed a DRM-encumbered game. Well, that happens. Just silently create me a nameless account behind the scenes without bothering me with forms and whatever. Tie it to PC and in case of reinstalls or multiple devices let me authenticate by entering CD key or whatever proof-of-purchase's available and then ask to create a password.

Meanwhile, just lure me to social hub or store with a menu option(s). If I'll find the service useful, I'll eventually fill out the details. If I won't - no reason to care about me anyway, as I won't use the service I don't like unless it's really enforced upon.

Nope. Got a game, but have to fill out forms. They want an email confirmation, secret question, obligatory CAPTCHA, cumbersome launcher software and whatever.
Ah, thanks for clarifying: I read the last sentence in paragraph 3 as you had brought her on to improve your YC application.
Your nose is wrong.
While the technology is coming and I can't wait when they're commonplace, I think it says something when the models shown next to printers aren't practical objects. Many people like these trinkets, but I'm waiting to see stuff which is more useful. This means right now the cost of a 3d printer is only really justified if you have an interest in them. They still need to prove their function before they become something like cars, where even those who have little interest and knowledge in them use them because they provide so much value.
You make it sound like git is unsuitable for this, i disagree. I often use git for one-man projects, both with and without an external repository. Once you learn how to use it it works great. I would never want to return to svn/rsync/zip-files.
I actually didn't have any issue with the micro gaming or F2P structure. I completely agree with you in regards to Riot. I was actually just mentioning it as another example of the PR piece simply saying: "but we've got a whole bunch of other people paying for it, so we can't be that wrong."
Code section 3: why create a new clone of the repo when all he needed was to create a new branch and modify that?

Code section 5 and 6 are apparently modifying the code branch, and the pages branch, respectively, but doing so in separate local clones of the repo. I think there's a typo in code section 6, where I think he meant to start with

cd ../die-git-die.pages

This doesn't seem like a situation where multiple local git repos are needed. What's wrong with managing both branches from one local repo?