skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was always something very accessible about SCUMM games (not just LucasArts ones, but they certainly had some great ones). The story lines were simple and playful enough for kids to enjoy--even 8 year olds can understand the humor in an evil purple tentacle trying to take over the world, or a talking dog and rabbit solving crimes, or a quiet biker trying to repair his motorcycle.

It didn't take an intricate story or fast-paced action to set the LucasArts games apart from the competition. It was how simple, yet outlandish the plots were. 15 years later, I can still remember using a crowbar to remove a coin from the ground that was stuck there by chewing gum in Day of the Tenacle, or Ben Franklin naming a sandwich after a main character (Hoagie). I remember SCUMM games much in the same way I remember the plots of my favorite books I read as a kid. For me, they were much more like interactive novels or comic books than they were like video games. I remember Full Throttle, Dig, Loom, Monkey Island, and Day of the Tentacle in a very different way than I remember the other video games I played at the same age (Final Fantasy, Link to the Past, Super Mario World).

If you haven't had a chance to play any of these wonderful titles, I would highly recomend you grab the ScummVM and play some of the freeware titles (even if they aren't LucasArts): http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Where_to_get_the_games.
0,1,Many,a Zillion
I imagine some mixture of.

1) They own a number of franchises that had lots of fanboys before EA got them. The fanboys cling to the hope that EA won't screw it up.

2) They own a lot of sports franchises and in some cases have the only games which are officially licensed by the sporting bodies.

3) There are lots of newer , younger and older casual gamers who have completely different expectations about what they want from a gaming experience.

4) They advertise their games a lot , all over the place.
I wish I could afford to take a CS course at UT and get plugged into the culture there.
Working in Austin would be amazing... and probably much more feasible (since it's a two hour-ish drive) than California.
>...you're only adding to the perception that women lie [emphasis added] about sex crimes. And they do [emphasis added]...20%-40%...are simply false... blah blah

Oh. My. Lie. Speaking of sleazy, do tell us more about your oddly worded little insinuation, when the article you linked goes on to say:

"First, the category of 'false accusations' does not distinguish between accusers who lie and those who are honestly mistaken. Nor does it indicate that a rape did not occur, merely that the specific accused is innocent....Third, the 1-in-4 figure has 'fuzzy' aspects that could influence the results. For example, Neufeld and Scheck mention only sexual assault cases that were "referred to the FBI where results could be obtained."
The only way you could think bitcoin is a threat to state revenue is by misunderstanding methods of taxation. Income and corporate taxes are determined almost entirely by self reporting and laws that shift tax burdens from one entity to another which require disclosure. It's relatively easy to evade taxes as long as you operate in a closed loop where no one reports even with modern financial instruments.

The problem only comes when you want to use the money to buy things from taxpayers, which is, you know, most business. This is such a problem that money laundering is primarily concerned with finding ways to pay taxes not to avoid them, so that people can pay for houses and such. Bitcoin actually makes this far more difficult than USD because of the encoded transactional history - just ask anyone sitting on the large piles of stolen bitcoins that have yet to be retransfered.

The methods of enforcement would change, for sure. But anyone who thinks that revenue offices would be unable to model monetary distribution via the blockchain hasn't been paying attention to what US security forces have been doing with the databases of how groups interact based on who they call (association graphs).
Or you're trying to track down head loss caused by construction flaws, especially leaks and drafts caused by cracks or gaps.
Also leaks caused by improperly installed power points.
Missing or settled insulation is also common.
Are you by any chance using the new router (1.0 RC)?
Yet there is value in being able to decide when a versioning point should be created. This is actually a huge annoyance for me when I'm using Apple's apps that are "always and continually auto-saved". Yes, automatic integrity is nice (when it works), but not being able to make certain decisions about a file's state is pretty limiting.
As this device is aimed at the living room, i think Unity makes alot more sense than on the normal desktop. Video drivers have improved recently and Dual-booting is probably easy todo as its just a PC in a nice looking HTPC enclosure.

25 titles arent many but then again my Xbox360 had like 5 games available when it was released.
Depends what needs fixing. If it's "have access to experienced engineers that aren't currently in the US", that wouldn't help.
Window 8 has really gotten the OEMs running scared.
Well, the latter would cause a reload, but the former sounds good. I'll try it, thanks!
"At EA we remain proud and unbowed."

Enjoy until you go bankrupt, dear Mr Moore.

At the beginning I thought it was good piece of humble thoughts: What did we do wrong ? How can we improve ? Then I realized it was exactly the contrary. Atrocious.
> Again: just because you have a bunch of people willing to pay you money for your crap, doesn't mean it isn't crap and you couldn't be doing better.

Personally I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with F2P games with micro transactions. I feel Riot has created a great F2P game with League of Legends. Micro transactions are only used for non-essential stuffs (for example skins for your heroes or to "buy" heroes quicker then possible by the normal "grind").

For the rest I agree with your opinion. And with regards to SimCity, I really feel they should change the game to make the always-online functionality not required. Sooner or later the services will go down and in the current state the game will be useless.
Wow, the financial press is falling in love with writing about Bitcoin.

Now that it's been linked to Cyprus there's an increased probability of Bitcoin being discussed in reference to future Eurozone economic events. Which means more mainstream awareness & more potential adopters.

I have a hard time seeing Bitcoin going away in the near future. Even if it's a bubble, and I have my doubts about that, odds are we have yet to reach the peak.

It's political nature also holds a lot of potential. There are some very, very discontent people all over the world, both Western and non-Western. Segments of the Greek population have latched onto neo-nazism -- is it really that unrealistic that another desperate population might latch onto Bitcoin?
I wasn't aware of the poll. Just voted for EA after reading "bring it on." And here I was hoping for something apologetic...
I like this, i spent a good 30 min playing in it at work.
Bruce Sterling considered this, thirteen years ago: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,997255,00.html
Twitter Cards Expansion and What it Means for Ecommerce
The title that required me to install Origin first was Battlefield 3 and thats a pretty awesome game by every measure, if you are into these kind of big budget military shooters that is.
EA still does make great games, sometimes. Their problems tend to be more toward customer-hostile actions (see: SimCity, the myriad Origin customer service horror stories, the letter that spawned this thread) and their tendency to eat smaller studios that were fan favorites before their acquisition (BioWare, Maxis, and so on). That last one is important to understand the vitriol thrown at the company, I think; it's a bit galling to see a franchise like SimCity, that touched so many people's childhoods (like mine), become the joke that it has.
No one who writes a version control rant could be an evil man.
Simplicity. Many apps are missing simplicity of use, simplicity of design, and simplicity of features.
Brasileiro na area
I agree with you - like I said, there are many reasons to hate EA. :) But still I would not vote it for the worst company in America...
Just a public service announcement: Please respect trademarks and avoid naming things tied to others peoples' branding work. I know it's usually an homage, but there's no reason to do it and it does bend trademark law (if not break it) sometimes.
Not mentioned in the article (strangely) was the innovative music system in X-wing, iMuse, where the music dynamically and seamlessly shifted depending on the situation. It's surprising how useful and immersive that was from a game play perspective and it was often my only cue not only that enemies were inbound, but how large the threat was (squadron vs capital ship). I admit there's some nostalgia here, but how often do you play games scored by John Williams?

Perhaps not the first time it's ever been done, but their execution of it was amazing. Lucasarts was literally a game changer.
Game consoles that launch in 2013 with the lowest-priced version having no Bluray support at $599?
Is the lottery nationality based, or completely random?
Hmm, this is basically pointing out that power users take the time to learn the craft and make shortcuts. I learned all this stuff not because of Starcraft but because mousing around a 21" screen (which was amazing back in 2007) started giving me RSI.

Funnily enough, a lot of designers tend not to bother with the shortcut stuff, arguably as they don't tend to be doing it day-in day-out.

On the other hand, an illustrator colleague knows all the shortcuts as well as I do (related: the one peeve I had with the near-future tech of Charlie Brooker's 'Be Right Back' ep of Black Mirror was this exact scenario, where an illustrator is using a highly gestural interface to do work. Her whole arms would be aching after just a few hours!)
Agreed. Its good because its not an identifier with the action, not the object.
Magic:the Gathering and Poker have lots of randomness in them and yet they're both very successful competitive games.
I think H1B visa is pretty horrible for start-up employees. Large Indian outsourcing companies like TCS, Infoasys etc. are using H1B for sending their half-trained software donkeys as cheap labor to US.

How can you equate a start-up founder with a QA guy working in TCS ?
Do I understand it right, that lottery will be only for applications made on 5th day, not for applications made through whole week? My application was on 1st and I don't know if I still can get screwed by randomness.
For reference, a list of discontinued EA titles:

https://www.ea.com/1/service-updates
This just seems like yet another case of someone who thinks he's too smart to read the manual. RTFM exists for a reason.
Maybe listen to the complaints and adress them instead of just dismissing them as wrong. This article just made me upset, they would of done better just shutting up.
The company didn't have insurance on it shipment of cars lost from Sandy? That doesn't sound right.
It is completely random, so an international student who is a CS grad from Stanford is in the same boat as a Infosys QA guy from India.
With photoshop you can design free style and are not limited by HTML and browser limitations. Layers transparencies masking and GUI wysiwyg tools make it easier for creative people
In other words: "I was told to write this story, but I have no hard data on anything. Here's what the rumor mill is saying. We take stories like this seriously."

What a non-statement. Not sure why it was published. Maybe because it's Friday and the author wanted to leave?
You are an Indian who has just finished your MS in Stanford. To get a job now you compete in a lottery which puts you and a software donkey from TCS with a degree from pretentious engineering college at the same odds.
I cannot forgive EA for the NFL Licensing deal that ended NFL 2K. You shut down better games to push inferior products.

I believe gaming would be in a much better place overall if EA did not exist, despite many early hit titles.

The overall effect on gaming as a whole has been negative.
Google turns its back on Nexus4 bug
Excellent catch and you just taught me 50-cent word. I love it.

To be fair, I did just go back and search and anachronism had been used but skeuomorphism was not. Looks like I've been spending too much time on HN and Reddit!
Same here, I think there is still randomness for us, the lottery is perhaps the the total applicants versus the 60K cap. I am not sure though.
Yeah, I was trying to remember what they were. There was one that spread pretty far pretty fast, but it ended up annoying people so much that it died. Can't remember what it was, though. Some sort of Mafia Wars type thing?
Republican Party's agenda... of building a long-ass fence across the US-Mexico border, or of punishing the kids of illegal immigrants for choices their parents made decades ago?
I would think cheap, "eMachines" boxes are what would reflect badly on Ubuntu.
"then allocate any remaining H1-Bs for consultancy agencies from India" The idea of companies eliminating a source of relatively cheap labor is unheard of, not gonna happen. While I agree with your statement, this is the crux of the problem, and why I am against 20k increase in STEM visas. Its bad for every worker, US citizen, Green Card Holder, and Visa alike in this country.
HN is not the place for these types of cheap political potshots. Please take it elsewhere, thanks.
man gittutorial
Lying - maybe not. It sure works like a DRM scheme. But EAs position to this has always been "we did it for the social interactions, and to make simCity possible by computing things on our servers!" (sure, that last part was a lie). SimCity can run offline, but it's hard to argue about motivation. Maybe one should give him that point.

In the same spirit - here the sentence he wrote which offended me the most:

> The complaints against us last year were our support of SOPA (not true), and that they didn’t like the ending to Mass Effect 3.

The complaints against the ending of Mass Effect 3 reach far deeper than "not liking". The ending broke every promise and every announcement made about it prior and it lead to the feeling that every decision made in the whole trilogy was meaningless, because no decision had any effect in the ending at all, neither in the result nor in the fight before(!). That is not "not liking", that broke hundreds of thousands of gamer-hearts and still hurts.

To start a PR-fluff-piece with a misleading on such an emotional topic doesn't seem very smart to me.
Yes but you see it in use incorrectly all the time (including in that thread).

In fact, the Windows 8 machine I'm on (shudder) actually represents "Shut Down" using the standby icon.
No, USCIS collects all the applications received during the 1st five business days and put them together before they are lottried out. So any application received after today would automatically be rejected.
You say that, but the next version of Visual Studio's gonna have git built in. Seriously. Gonna be a lot of new (and probably confused) users out there.
"The tallest trees catch the most wind."

I hated the article starting there.

It is cowardly, evasive and deceitful. It completely ignores the issues people have with EA.
The IRS already requires this for cash today.
And its full of fraud...at this point these companies should be banned, its highly unethical.
It's worth pointing out that in most of the world facts is not copyrightable, and the copyright status of a collection of facts is often not copyrightable. In those instances, CC-BY or whatever license you apply will be unenforceable. I believe Creative Commons themselves explicitly believe that CC-BY and similar licenses are not appropriate for collections of facts.

E.g. they explicitly say on their website: "Copyright does not protect the facts or ideas underlying the creative expression. So, Creative Commons licenses do not apply to ideas, factual information or other non-creative elements that are not protected by copyright."

Courts in many jurisdiction explicitly refuse to accept "sweat of the brow" arguments for copyright, explicitly requiring an element of creativity. Some countries do have "database copyrights" that can protect arrangements of facts in certain ways, while in others a collection of straight up facts can not be copyrighted pretty much no matter what.
Git doesn't have much of a user interface because it's target is developers who want to use the command line. Git is confusing until it's not, and then it's awesome.

It's kinda like you're using wget to surf the web, and complaining that it doesn't have a GUI.

http://git-scm.com/downloads/guis
Git has a lot of UI problems. This is not really surprising. It's gotten a lot better, but I do think that no matter how proud Torvalds is of the fact that he never looked at another version control system for inspiration, a lot of pain could have been avoided if he had (even while still going in the different directions he did). Not all of us had the 'luxury' of never working with version control before.

But don't get me wrong. On the whole, git is fantastic and a real improvement on its predecessors.
I agree 100% to your points.
This is incredible how aggressive this post is, literally saying how stupid we are for not liking what EA do and how wrong we are.
No explanation on what they are going to do, and argumentation worst than an 8th grader "LOL WE HAVE PEOPLE ON ORIGIN SO ITS BETTER THAN STEAM"
no it's not, I play BF3 and wished it was on steam and not origin.
I mean, I PLAYED, because, it's so full of bugs and a pain in the ass just to launch a game with my friends, I never gave them money for the addons...
more coverage on gawker:
http://gawker.com/5993695/techcrunch-founder-michael-arringt...

http://gawker.com/5993171

http://gawker.com/5993507/former-friend-of-michael-arrington...
I don't necessarily agree with that either, I prefer Republican party's stance over high tech legal immigration. We need to give Green Cards to qualified people who will start tech startups and employ thousands of qualified people in america before we start giving green card to illegal aliens.
> However, git will not pull matching branches. That means that all your branches except your current branch will not get updated when you pull.

> Of course, a less good but at least sane behavior would have been if pull also pulled matching branches by default

I don't see any way this could work in the face of potentially having merge conflicts in non-current branches.
That's certainly true, but I'd argue for 99% of the time, automatic saving is what you want.
Yes, contributors please! I've been looking for a WP alternative for my blog but I need the ability to invite guest posters.
It's fun watching the comments get "moderated" in real time.
A really good designer might even start with a scrap of paper or a whiteboard if one is available. The reality is that what's needed is a WYSIWYG tool for HTML/CSS authoring and quite frankly it's pathetic that there isn't a great one out there. Writing HTML by hand is like the old world of specing type for a typesetter instead of using a desktop publishing program. Something coders don't get sometimes is that designers need visual design tools, not a typewriter.
Since the cap was reached today, does that mean 60K cap + all excess applicants that applied today, are put in the lottery for 60K slots?
GUI != UI

parent comment is arguing that the command-line interface is nontrivial, which is a fair criticism. Contrast with 'cp' or 'mv'
And people think radiation is bad. At least radiation decays. The chemicals in this superfund site stay around for ever!
You are confusing 'implementation details' with how does git abstract reality. You are not supposed to know how things are implemented, really.
I'm in the same boat as you. My OPT ends on September 30th, ironically enough (H1B starts Oct 1st).

A backup plan I've been thinking about would be to move to the Canadian west coast if I don't get a visa (EU citizens, your country may or may not have visa agreements with Canada that allow you to work there- France has nice things in that regard) to be not too far from my team.
"USCIS will use a computer-generated random selection process (commonly known as the “lottery”) for all FY 2014 cap-subject petitions received through April 5, 2013."

It says through april 5th. So, All applications will face lottery even if you submitted yours on april 1st.
You can't blame git where you clearly didn't fully understand how it works, and you clearly ignored its error messages, and used the -f option.
There's some very useful tools like "tig" to check the state before pushing.
A good rule of thumb is to never push -f before being absolutely sure of what it's going to do.
And everything is not lost, you can still use "git reflog" to retrieve the previous state.
You're whining about git where you are clearly in fault here :)
> BitPay alone recorded a merchant transaction volume increasing by 7.6x between February ($687k) and March ($5.2M): ... so total transactions increased by a lot more than 7.6x, maybe 10x, 20x, who knows)

your math is not good.

one provider having a large percent increase does not imply that the total market had a larger percentage increase. its entirely possible that BitPay gained a larger share of bitcoin transactions to achieve these numbers.

your argument is like saying: people using Google Chrome have increased by 1.2x over the past year, therefore, people using the internet must have increased by a lot more, maybe 5x or 10x, who knows.
exactly, the applications received were more than quota, thus the lottery.
You design in PhotoShop and you implement it using css and html.
Just like you would make a mock up before starting anything right ?
`git pull --rebase` does not update my remote tracking branch. Though you may not care about this.
> Some former friends of Arrington’s, including Jason Calacanis and Loren Feldman have come forward this week to support her general claim, saying they have heard similar rumors.

Any number of people can hear the same rumor, without it being any more true.
the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.... and they can't even do that

good luck with that one EA
I love these posts, please keep them coming.
How is this tripe modded up? A software donkey? Has it ever occurred to this guy that he is talking about another human being? And has history belonged to only those who passed through the hallow halls of Stanford? WTF?
Probably because it looks like a cover up if they say nothing at all.

The fact they can't get Arrington to say anything on the record is interesting in and of itself.
does posthaven have mp3 file size limit? tumblr's limit is around 10MB.

or, is there a user friendly blog authoring form interface that publishes pages and uploaded media to S3, Google Cloud Storage, Rackspace Cloud File, .. etc?
> so no, I'm not quoting Bossavit blindly

As far as McConnell; as for the other references, aren't you taking Bossavit's claims on trust?
"I wouldn't have guessed there was enough data left in the picture of the gramophone track to recreate audio from it."

I'd bet it's almost the other way around.. the information density would be so low because the information itself is relatively low resolution* that it makes the analysis that much easier.

* "Resolution" in the detail sense of the word, not the visual.
So your computer is brown and you think the internet is broken. Restart your pc
Kind of a tangent to this, but I'm always really amused by generated clean-looking urls that cut out short words. It's very common to have the word "not" or "no" drop out and produce a headline with completely inverted meaning.

localnewspaper.example.com/1934342342/mayor-dropping-race-after-scandal
->
Mayor Not Dropping Out Of Race After Scandal
I don't appreciate this sort of language used in HN either, moderators need to down-vote this comment heavily.