skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's amazing how close this iteration has followed in the path of the original Cities XL.

Take for example the Sim City world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oFKhftK88

If you didn't play the Cities XL beta nor were around for the first bit of Cities XL there was something called the "Planet Offer". The world map Maxis shows 12 seconds into the trailer looks just like the Planet Offer's globe. Maxis even shows a commodities market at 22 seconds which looks like the Planet Offer's trading.

Just like the Planet Offer things did not work out as planned. Core components of the city builder were left undone such as the terrain manipulation or map creation. In part I suspect both were business decisions made to allow a DLC market.

From the beginning EA promised DLC. In the case of Cities XL the DLC was less obvious. The way things worked out the developers of Cities XL went bankrupt and the game was bought out by its current publisher. Every Cities XL game since has just been the original edition plus some extra maps and buildings.

The real shame is that both Cities XL and Sim City 2013 were beautiful and did not lack anything art wise. Instead they just failed at game play. Part of said problem was crippling the game to open DLC avenues. The other part was horrible balancing.

In the case of Cities XL there was no balancing. Every city service cost the exact same with no room to adjust service level like in Sim City 4. Cities XL also made the mistake of tying medium and large density zones plus most services to your city's population. In effect every new city felt the same since you had to bootstrap everything every-time. Of course finances were also dead easy to balance.

During Cities XL beta my biggest problem was opening enough inter-city transport capacity to export my over supply of office services. For a while I could just open international airports one after the other but I soon ran out of space. My city got so big I triggered a rare bug where the game replaced my entire city with a hilly field. Since said hilly field had no export routes I couldn't rebuild. This was a shame since the glitch managed to delete everything which was costing me money but leave all the export revenue. Thus despite being a hilly field I must have amassed more money than any other city during beta.

Sorry back on topic: just like Cities XL's planet offer Maxis is now stepping back from the online. In theory online would be fantastic but first you need to make a fun city builder. Maybe in the future we'll get one.
The first thing I do when setting up a new Mac is make the Caps Lock key into another Control key.

System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys

Saves lots of awkward pinky-bending.
Using mod_rewrite (or the nginx equivalent) with PHP-FPM will work fine. I don't see why it wouldn't work with HipHopVM either.

In over 10+ years of PHP development I have never needed a "native routing component". Call me crazy...
You can also add that it's impossible to reach the site's footer where we expect to find the more detailed navigation elements of a site (like easy access to Contact, About, etc) and that it breaks the back button when designers make up their mind that you just scrolled through 10 'pages' on their site and updated the URL 10 times, so when you click back to escape their overloaded site to the site you came from, you have to click it 10 times to get there.
Paris has an incredibly strong Taxi union, which has enjoyed it's monopoly for many decades. Uber cars not being unionized means they are taking money from this massive institution. I think, quite simply, it's cronyism.

Also, the 15 minute wait is because the taxis-by-dispatch are inherently slower. Instead of trying to compete, the taxi union pushed hard on Paris and got them to pass the restriction.

Generally, rather than innovating and trying to compete, the taxi companies in the union have taken the much simpler route of attempting to blockade the upstart.
Is there a way to do something similar in Linux? I use gnome-terminal but would think about switching to something with a feature this useful.
Supporting violence is the quickest and easiest way to lose people like me who are otherwise be supportive of the right to organize. There is no excuse for this behavior, and calling the victims of unprovoked violence "unprincipled" is absolutely irredeemable.
Well, yeah, that's probably true I suppose.
Too bad I returned my purchase to Amazon after I was unable to play during the first week.

Corporate Execs from companies like EA and even Microsoft/Xbone are ruining gaming.
Is Coming? Isn't it there for a long time already? SimCity 2000 etc...
> We need to build a coalition of free-world nations dedicated to a secure global Internet, and we need to continually push back against bad actors -- both state and non-state -- that work against that goal.

Let's do it. Even though I'm starting to believe that a "secure by default Internet" will come from the wilderness of the Internet and not from committees, because too many corporations (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) and governments (US, China, "5 eyes", etc) will push against those committees' standards, I still think it's important to have at least some large countries support those types of projects when they arrive, or at least not be outright hostile against them and try to ban them "because terrorism/child pornography/money laundering".

These technologies will need some time to incubate, and leak into the mainstream, so at the very least we'll need some countries to turn a 'blind eye' to them until they reach critical mass, and not try to shut them down from day one or threaten people with new laws and arrests if they use them.
"Them" refers to the developers using languages other than Haskell:

"We provided them with a copy of P1 without explaining that it was a program, and based on preconceptions from their past experience, they had studied P1 under the assumption that it was a mixture of requirements speciﬁcation and top level design. They were convinced it was incomplete because it did not address issues such as data structure design and execution order.”

"The other kind of response had more to do with the 'cleverness' of the solution...[one of them] described the Haskell prototype as being 'too cute for its own good'.

These both sound like they could have been written today.

Reminds me of this from the Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages:

Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that 'a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?'
Is that before or after they move on to using a needle and a steady hand?
or gnome-open.

On Windows the equivalent is start (e.g. start C:\ )
It seems to me the problem is that his 'friends' aren't really friends at all. He lists 'Robert Scoble' as a friend? He's a news source... he's going to have thousands of 'friends' that aren't really his friends.
Most of those 200 cabs would soon disappear, because a cabbie cannot keep cabbing if he/she doesn't get fares.

I wouldn't be surprised if some folks that own taxi companies in your city lobbied the council-people with that social good argument, as a means to maintain an artificial scarcity and keep cab prices up.
In general market regulations start out with good intentions, but the protection they afford specific groups eventually tends to seen as a sacred right by those groups. Especially after the first generation--those who could still remember a time without that regulation--have passed on.

The type of regulations that can work well are those that benefit a large number of diverse groups (i.e. financial regulations preventing banks from doing stupid things with their customers' money) whose interests are so poorly correlated that they cannot effectively organize for a monopoly on some special privelege.
Visited Texas last year (I'm from New England) and stayed with an Obama hating, gun toting, get-off-my-lawn Texan. We got along great, saw eye to eye on many things and generally were quite compatible. Proving the point that a person unlike people can be likable and reasonable on a one-to-one basis despite their different upbringing, background or political positions.

Dangerous to lump all Texans or all of any type into a category simple based on how the state tends to vote, or the media/'s perception of a state.
It's sad how often "Regulation and taxes are for other people" gets relabeled as "Disruption". See: Uber, AirBnB
You can also use Cmd + Return.
Whoa, it would seem that you can option click above the line and go back in history!
It's best to think of many codecs ([en]CODers/DECoders) as sets of tools. The encoder "tools" can be used in many different ways (with different parameters and combinations) to produce valid encoded versions of input data. The decoder then uses various methods to take the tools and data used in the encoded version, and interpolates the encoded data into something resembling the original. Sometimes that interpolation is "lossy" (detail is lost, but may be acceptably close to the original), while other times it is "lossless" (decoded bit-for-bit to be the same as the original).

Just like there are many ways to encode data with a given codec/format, there are often many different ways (or tools used) to decode, some of which - as in the case of lossy codecs - may produce more "natural" or pleasing results than others. For example, some MPEG decoders will analyze motion vectors and interpolate extra spatial resolution that was not present in the original, thereby "upscaling" (e.g., from standard resolution to HD) the output. In this case, it's important to remember that data/detail is never created from nothing, but is instead "guessed", so it may produce nice-looking results, but it's also likely to introduce more artifacts (erroneous details that were actually not present in the original).
NES Game Playing Artificial Intelligence Update
Very nice overview, thanks.
sips -Z 1280 file.jpg to resize a photo easily...
Ask HN: How do you stay focused when waiting for code to compile?
I'm not so sure if this is accurate for all sites, on forums often the amount of posts in a thread is more than 1% of the amount of views of the thread.
Branch gets acquired by Facebook to help build "smart" conversations
I love how osx supports emacs key-bindings by default for any text field.

I miss this feature a lot when I switch back to windows. I find myself pressing ctrl-n in my browser's address bar, expecting to view my URL history, and instead I get a new windows.

If anyone knows of a way to get similar functionality in windows, I would love to hear about it!
Top 5 productivity -boosting devices from CES 2014
Can't a good person disagree with the strikers in a particular case? Why does walking around holding a sign mean that your cause is just? Is it wrong to help escort patients through the pickets in front of abortion clinics?
GoDaddy Teams Up With Microsoft to Offer Small Businesses Office 365
It's cool if they're responding to the user base and meeting the demand. It's not cool if they're unveiling this like a feature sans apology for prior behavior.

They're restoring original, sane functionality. The GM should be expecting relief/forgiveness, not excitement.
A product management view of CES 2014
Ah, got it.

I think the 'flat-style' laptop makes it look like it's not an actual screenshot.

Thanks! Will think about a way to make this aspect work.
> Did you forget the popular outcry that got SOPA killed?

Did you really think they'd just shrug and give up their plans then? "Oh well, the people don't actually want SOPA. I guess we'll just have to give up on our plans", huh? :P

Do you think they were trying to pass SOPA because people wanted it? Did it look like they stopped there? CISPA, anyone? -Who knows what came after CISPA? -Did anyone even notice? Did they pass some comparable liberty/privacy -raping bullshit already, while the world's people weren't looking?

Do you think it everything is alright when your government is stealthily passing draconian legislation left and right, and a massive public outcry is required to even delay the process for a while?

> Enjoy being a defeatist apathetic loon, I guess.

Look, it doesn't take a genius to realize that governments really aren't looking out for you, or any other ordinary person for that matter. You just have to open your eyes to what they're actually doing. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions most definitely don't benefit the people.

If reading that (or my other posts) makes you "think" (using the word loosely) that I'm some tinfoil-hat nutcase, enjoy being a clueless, statist sheep then, I guess. Feel free to just sit by and watch as a police state engulfs you and your family.
My understanding is that SCO was designed and balanced around player-player interaction between cities, to the point that a single free-standing city couldn't really be "complete." Cities functioned better when they were specialized and interacting with neighbors, than when they tried to be self-sufficient. I didn't play the thing myself, but that's how the devs seemed to portray things.

Given that (and other ways in which the online-ness was pervasive in game design), this seems like the epitome of a band-aid fix on a bullet wound. Just inserting an offline mode won't make the game better, because the game design was based around online play from a very fundamental level, and it's not a feature that can be removed simply. I.e., 'you can take SCO offline, but you can't take the online out of SCO.'
Related:

python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25

A makeshift SMTP server that logs all messages to the console.
I don't know png-nq¹ but in their default use pngcrush and optipng aren't [direct] alternatives to pngquant.

Optipng and pngcrush do lossless recompression and the program in the OP AFAICT does lossy compression to create an image encoded in to PNG without an intermediate representation.

As I understand it pngcrush will reduce the bit-size or apply a new palette if that will reduce the file-size without loss of pixel data. Optipng can optionally add lossy compression too.

¹ - https://github.com/stuart/pngnq looks like it was inspired by pngquant, from that page:

>Pngnq exists because I needed a lot of png images in RGBA format to be quantized. After some searching, the only tool I could find that worked was pngquant. I tried pngquant but found that the median cut algorithm that it uses, with or without dithering, gave inferior looking results to the neuquant algorithm. You can see the difference demonstrated on the neuquant web page: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~dekker/NEUQUANT.HTML . //
It does not support large files, so sometimes I have to fall back to https://npmjs.org/package/http-server
(npm -g install http-server .. then just run http-server /path)
The last time I tried I was with my wife and daughter, trying to get to the airport with luggage. I think the luggage scared them off.

You know that the idea for Uber came from the founder's experience trying to get a taxi in Paris, right? That suggests I'm not alone in my experience with Parisian taxis.

http://blog.uber.com/2010/12/22/ubers-founding/
Its not meaningless, just misdirected. Perhaps directing their angst at their own government which instituted these regulations would be a good start...
Thank you very much! My project will use this to help determine the need/best time to merge against ToT LLVM. Your link has already been passed around the office.
So movies are superficial?!
RSS Feed?

Some of us still use them.. incredibly useful for not having to check back all the time. Also, with a properly specified enclosure can pull down the video separately which is handy.

Or is the new trick to not have RSS and just grab email addresses? Bit of a shame if that's the case.
1% distinct users. Many users comment several times in a thread over the course of a conversation.
3 Things You Must Know Before You Buy Apple MacBook Air (Mid 2013)
Apache Tomcat 7.0.50 released
That doesn't jibe with my understanding.

The Constitutional Convention began on May 25, 1787 and finished in September. It was presented to Congress (organized under the Articles of Confederation), who submitted it to vote by the States. By September 1788, 9 of the states had agreed to it, and Rhode Island was the 13th, in 1790.

The Federalist Papers were written and distributed as part of the public debate, in order to sway those with anti-Federalist leanings.

How is that "secret" and with no "'general public' debate"?
CSP (Content Security Policy)
RE: offline play & non-mod modding:

Too little, too late.
Viewing the source code, it does seem to support sets and dictionaries.
I am pretty sure you can both be principled and think that their strike is stupid. Or by principled do you mean "shares a specific set of principles that I also share"?
A recession, a bailout, and a capital-making boom while the world recovers, maybe?
I don't, I come here.
Agree completely. In the case of cell phones, what I mean by "should" is that, since we carry them around everywhere, it would be extremely desirable for them to be at least very water resistant, and is downright inconvenient to be obligated to protect them from rain, etc. Worth paying a premium!
Adorable Boxer pup and baby, Best friends forever or sworn enemies?
Yes, so far NSA has been successful as promoting mass surveillance as a matter of "security" not just against terrorists (which we now learn is being very wasteful and ineffective), but against "cyber-attacks", too.

Every time they talked about cyber-attacks, they implied Congress need to give them more powers and more money, which they later used for offensive actions, rather than securing the networks. NSA has zero interest in security networks at this point. Maybe they cared about that a little before 9/11, but I don't think they care about it at all anymore.

All they want to do now is be able to break into everything or have backdoors into everything, which means they will not only hoard systems' vulnerabilities for themselves, but they also won't even use that knowledge to secure domestic systems, because the truth is they want access to domestic systems, too, and to them that has a higher priority than securing those systems even against China and so on.

The NAS has probably always had this corrupted idea about security, but I think it became much more so when they merged the US Cyber Command with the NSA.

Bottomline is that we need to educate others that surveillance is pretty much the opposite of "cyber-security", and we need to call NSA out on it everytime they try to use the lie that they're the same.
Using Content-Security-Policy for Evil
Given that you can play solo regions, I assume you could simply create several specialized cities (I haven't played the game).
Show HN: .dotfile management made easy
Perhaps it doesn't happen in small towns, but French drivers attacking other French drivers doesn't strike me as a healthy sense of community.
Yeah, this was more or less my reaction to this article too. Much before infinite scrolling in apps, there were libraries so overwhelming in sheer volume of content that lead Borges to conceive the universe in the form of "The Library of Babel".

Simply putting a stop to scrolling will not end the feeling of unsatisfaction, it will not end the fear of missing out. Infinite scrolling is the consequence, not the cause of our dissatisfaction.
///host.com or Evolution of Open Redirect Vulnerability
Hmm, ctrl+clicking the links in the article does nothing.
Well if nothing else this suggests there is a lifestyle level business in the Entertainment industry doing "code" inserts. The article lays out all of the things that are challenging (copyright issues, continuity issues, and cost) so building a small consulting firm around providing "code" for these situations cost effectively and reliably solves a need.

The go to market strategy is to get writers in the screenwriters guild aware of your offering, and let the lswyers know you provide guarantees, both that your "set" code will not conflict with anyone else's copyright, but also that copyright can be asserted on it so that the film has greater protection out there. Which gets the lawyers insisting the writers use your stuff.

You'll need a good design asthetic and some markov-chain like software which can generate plausible looking code on demand.
> The leaks show the NSA had a hard time exploiting the Tor network. It's much more thought-out than this project, but in the beginning it too was just hacked together by a few clever people.

At the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

(By any measure, most innovation is done by single persons or small teams, but Tor is an interesting example seeing as it was developed by the U.S. government itself.)
Common (but deadly) MySQL mistakes
Improving the Network Activity Indicator
I have but it has never lead to anything successful. Nothing harsh or abrasive has ever come up, it just ends up being a "Yeah!" reaction that fades with time to "Meh." or "That won't work" on their part.
I think that sounds like an good observation. At first, you have to establish the foundation and ground rules - and fight off all the usual people who try to claim the project for themselves and head it in their own direction. After that is done, and a culture has been established, your own role as a maintainer becomes more contributory than managerial.
Could be, if the 99% bothered to comment.
Except it's not really kidnapping, it's more like theater... A real kidnapping (physically restraining anyone) would be handled by the RAID or GIGN.

Don't get me wrong, French unions are mostly wrong on about everything, but violence against individuals is still a big no-no. Thankfully.
Some of the Star Trek films... Insurrection (9) was better than Nemesis (10) in my opinion.
Is it just me but simcity was the best game I played in 2013, maybe I am just new to the genre, but it was like playing video game for the first time.
you mean with a mouse?

No.
The web is the platform (or, the perils of esoteric setups)
You have an interesting view on the situation.

I'm relatively certain that I have different views than you on the usefulness and appropriateness of unions in the modern world, but I appreciate your counter-position on the thread here.

And, scorn is certainly merited from strikers toward strike-breakers. Scorn from non-strikers toward strike-breakers is for the individual to decide based on their opinion of the strike and the union striking, obviously.
This sort of service-oriented monitoring is very close to the pain point that caused us to create Cabot.

In our case, it was more that there were multiple things we could monitor for that potentially indicated a problem with a service but it was hard, using Nagios or whatever, to tie those individual indicators back to a single service going haywire at 3am, especially if all 50 of them blow up at once.

We don't have the precise problem that you describe though - for us the ability to monitor the number of data series in a graphite collection (so that if a server disappears we can notify, and then if another drops off we can alert) is sufficient. Cabot can use this and the ability to tolerate a number of failures to give behaviour very close to what you talk about. However I don't know if Cabot would support the kinds of checks that you're carrying out out-of-the-box, you'd probably have to extend.
Don't feel bad about returning your game, the game is still horribly broken in many ways that an offline mode won't fix.