skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Who cares about the plot?"

I do. (Sorry for being ...uh .... different).

yes it looks cool. Some of us expectt more in a movie. Sorry about that.

I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious, especially with the clunkiest dialogue I've heard in a decade, and insufficiently compensated for by the technology/visuals. I found the "noble savages" idea and infantile hippy politics and preaching tiresome too.

For some of us lesser mortals good graphics/special effects is just one element of a good Scifi/fantasy movie, and then not the most important aspect.

(from the review) " what it really felt like to me was a fourth movie in the Shrek franchise, pipping the yet-to-be-released Shrek Forever After to extrapolate that series' twin curves of rising technical achievement and plumetting wit to their logical endpoint: a near-immaculate feat of visualisation, accompanied by a staggeringly awful plot in which clunky genre conventions triumph completely over plausibility and originality. Avatar even boasts its very own love story where societal expectations and superficial barriers of size and pastelicity are overcome by generous helpings of pixie dust."

This expresses my feelings perfectly, but I wouldn't be so polite. I think Avatar is a terrible movie with gorgeous visuals and nothing else.

Aliens != Red Indians in fancy dress. The movie insults my intelligence on multiple levels. Yes I know, Caveat Emptor and all that, but I guess it must be because I am one of "these people"?
Here is an example of local knowledge: I once worked in an office at the end of runway 27 right at ohare, chicago. It was known, at least in that circle, that there were over 2000 operations (take-offs and landings) at ohare daily. That was known to be more than the 1440 minutes in the day. That coupled with the knowledge that there were few operations between midnight and 6am meant that at peak hours there were often three events in one minute.
Big In 2010: Internet Video On The TV
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.

I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German.

The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415

That said, I have also read in the linguistics literature a hypothesis that there is a language-universal process of forming creoles and koineization,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_...

and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.
Wikipedia (and its sister projects) uses rsync to deploy new code updates and configuration changes to the production cluster.
Apple May Be On The Verge Of Kneecapping The Cable Industry. Finally.
Sure you can deny it. You picked the classic example of something that seems hard to you because of your native speaker bias. What some languages resolve with conjugations and declensions, others resolve with combinations of prepositions and word order. English verb-preposition combinations are so brutally hard for foreign speakers to master that they publish "collocation dictionaries" to help. Latin's case system is much more predictable and regular, in some ways it's easier to learn.

Ranking human language complexity is a much more difficult task than you might imagine.
let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run

There’s also I do run, I did run, I will run, I shall run, I can run, I could run, I should run, I must run, I might run, I would run, I may run. And all their negations (“I shouldn’t run” is OK but “I mayn’t run” is not). And the special rules for conjugating them: the past tense of “I run” is “I ran”, but the past tense of “I can run” is “I could run”, not “I canned run” or “I can ran”.

These are not complex to native English speakers because we learned most of them without being formally taught, but an adult learning English as a foreign language is not so lucky.

(I see from Googling that German also has modal verbs; I don’t know if the whole set is easier or harder to learn than the English set, from the point of view of someone who knows neither.)
Making the shareholders legally liable is a bad idea. To start, it defeats one of the primary purposes of incorporating (more companies would remain as private entities, and enjoy lower taxes and fewer reporting obligations). In order to justify shareholder liability, more individual control by the shareholders would be necessary. Think of what the decision process would be like if America were a pure democracy. If voters were responsible for what their elected officials did (think corruption by our officials), then we would demand more control over their actions - Why have them if we make all the decisions anyways? The same is true for corporations. Shareholders elect board members, who in turn elect managers who run the company.

The execs are responsible if they commit fraud via the company. I think that making the board of directors as responsible as the management is a good idea, since it requires the board to police the company, instead of turn a blind eye to the management team's fraud when it's producing positive returns. The individual shareholders though, should not be liable for the actions of an often distant management.
Urinal sticker uses male nature to reduce costs at airports
English has a lot of irregular words as well. Of Spanish and German, however, German is much more difficult to learn.
"in the interest of fairness."

How exactly is "fairness" defined? I see that word used in discussions of social matters ("fair-trade coffee", "fair wages", "fair share of taxes") and it's assumed that everyone is just going to have the same idea of "fair" (or not bothering analyzing what the word is supposed to mean in the given context), and think, hey, *fair", who could be against that? People use it, but no one defines it.

It's like asking someone if they like good food or good movies without making clear whose taste is deciding things.

The only interesting argument I've seen that argued against inheritance asserted that once a person was dead they were no longer able to make any claim on the money, nor was there any person from whom that money could be taken; there's no owner; they simply not exist. Decisions made about property while still alive had no bearing; when you're dead, you're out of the picture. (It seems to avoid the whole issue of "fairness", too.)

What wasn't explained to me was how one goes from that idea to it being OK then for the State to come and just take the wealth left behind.
German's use of modal verbs is almost identical to English's, in fact most of its verb usage is, with the notable exception that English prominently features a romance-language-like gerund: "I am running."

The funny bit with your example? Despite the similar usage, German complicates things further by splitting the primary and auxiliary verbs, with the primary being transported to the end of the clause:

Ich sollte nach Hause laufen.

Literally:

I should to home run.

This is no coincidence, since English grammar is basically a simplified version of German grammar. There's a clear continuum from German to English via Frisian and Dutch where the grammar is continually simplified relative to its Germanic root. You can see the same sort of progression in the Romance languages. Modern Italian is pretty much uncontroversially simpler than Latin.
There is much to admire here, and his admittedly grandiose words about the open being the future of government, commerce, entertainment and culture generally sound great to the optimist in all of us. I have a few minor quibbles with conflating their Android efforts with everything else, but in general this is an admirable policy eloquent expressed and stoutly defended.

I think the most important part is this:
"All other things being equal, a 10 percent increase in share or a 10 percent increase in industry value should lead to the same outcome. ... As long as we contribute a steady stream of great products we will prosper along with the entire ecosystem. We may get a smaller piece, but it will come from a bigger pie."

I wish more companies had the courage to take this position, but it's so much easier to accept a guaranteed slice of a known pie.
Greek and Latin are not "cousins" to English, more like great-grandfathers, given the large amount of borrowing from both.

Second cousins or great grand uncles would be the proper analogy. They share a common ancestor is all.

The borrowings are a later artifact following millennia of independent development.
"Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management" is the second line after the title.
It seems like "Whorfism" is always making a come-back with Geeks. I think it appeals to a kind sci-fi imagination.

Chomsky's theory is usually presented as all languages work the same in the brain. I think the later versions of the Chomskian theory are more like, all languages allow one to accomplish the same thing - especially, all languages have recursion (despite the counter-claims around the Peraha, I think that's actually demonstrated pretty well).
Nice read, but this is a bit shameless:

>In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in.

Convenient, huh? Open just happens to win except for the part that strategically keeping closed makes Google gazillions of dollars. And claiming search is highly competitive? Google has more than 4 x the market share of their nearest competitor.
I use this little bash script (as a daily cron job) to selectively mirror directories on two hard drives in case I lose one (very poor man's backup solution). I imagine it could be used for deploying code (modified for remote machine of course):

#!/bin/sh

RSYNC="/usr/bin/rsync" # Verify with 'which rsync'
DIRS="/home/xich /etc" # Directories to be backed up.
TARGET="/mnt/secondhd/backup" # Directory into which all backups are placed.

# For instance, if TARGET is /mnt/secondhd/backup and DIRS is "/home/user1 /home/user2"
# then after running, there will exist a /mnt/secondhd/backup/user1 and
# /mnt/secondhd/backup/user2. DO NOT use trailing slashes for any of these paths,
# as that will change the behavior of rsync.

LOGFILE="/var/log/mirror_hds.log" # For errors only.

for dir in $DIRS; do
INEX=""
if [[ -e "$dir/.mirror_include" ]]; then
INEX="--include-from $dir/.mirror_include"
fi

if [[ -e "$dir/.mirror_exclude" ]]; then
INEX="$INEX --exclude-from $dir/.mirror_exclude"
fi
$RSYNC -av --delete $INEX $dir $TARGET &> $LOGFILE
done

The .mirror_include and .mirror_exclude files are just newline-delimited lists of file masks (they do what you would expect). I did it like this so each user can modify his own exclusion/inclusion lists (the file belongs to the user), and doesn't have to mess with the cron script (which belongs to root). Inclusion takes precedence. As an example, my exclude file:

.* # any file that starts with a period
tv # my tv shows directory
movies

And my include file:

.mirror_include # since this would be filtered out above
.mirror_exclude
.conkyrc
I was expecting it to just be some information written on a cue card or a napkin or something. Not sure why, just seems like he could get away with handing that out.
Facebook Could Eliminate 75% of Its Servers by Changing Their Programming Code
yeah pretty neat. but then i thought, why not two scrollbars?
If you don't like capitalism, move somewhere that doesn't use it as their economical system so life can be more "fair". You might not like that kids get their parent's wealth without technically earning it, but that's the nature of the game. Want the same wealth? Go earn it. That's the beauty of capitalism. The same reason that wealth was created in the first place is why you can also get it.
It's not unfair to give an inheritance to your children; it's unfair not to. But I can't make everyone else do what I think is right.
Hmm...I think you're projecting your own ideas into my answer a bit. Actually, I was able to guess what it was about from the 1440 (as I'm given to passing the time with mental arithmetic, and I liked the point you were making.

I only complained about it being 'weak sauce' because I felt you could have taken more time to develop this concept for the interested reader (which you do successfully in multiple other posts). 'Do more with less' is great advice, but 4 words don't necessarily constitute a complete essay :)
Hebrew and Aramaic definitely get a special “so many frigging affixes that it takes half an hour to figure out the root before you can look up the frigging word in the dictionary” award in my book. I assume I would feel the same way about Arabic if I ever learned enough of it to even attempt to use an Arabic dictionary.

(I should note, though, that while Farsi and Arabic use the same writing system, they are from different language families.)
Alexandre's Notebook: clojure, twitter and test-is
I'll answer the question then. I think that rich people should be made to do what they should do. I like the idea of an estate tax on large estates.
It's also true that if you're spending $300,000,000 making the movie, it's got to play everywhere. EVERYwhere. It's going to be translated into 50 languages, usually badly. It's going to play in villages where no one reads and no one speaks English and the sound system loses half the words anyway.

Simple works. Complex doesn't.

As foreign box office has grown to a higher and higher percentage, this has become more and more true. Avatar did over 2/3rd of it's global box office opening weekend outside of the US and Canada (the "domestic" market).

Cameron did his job.
Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful. Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful.

There is a wonderfully realistic, fully immersive, 3D environment right outside my office window right now, but I don't care.

Want to know why?

Because the plot is boring. I get out of my chair, walk to my car, go to the gas-station, and then go home to play with my dog and go to bed.

The end.

People go to movies because it is better than reality. Perhaps those who never leave their couch are wowed by images that look exactly like reality, but Avatar's visual effects wowed me only in a "well, it looks like they finally did it properly!" sense. No offense to anyone who worked on this film, it is a staggering technical achievement, but it doesn't really do anything that reality doesn't.

/this might be due to my being a bit bitter that I can't see the 3D version due to my non-stereoscopic vision :(.
No its not. Its actually the last line of the post.
English is not my native language, and I agree completely - it's easy to pick up the basics (in terms of grammar and basic vocabulary, at least) but difficult to master (irregular pronunciation, idioms).

On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down - I don't know enough languages to give an example, but it seems plausible.

So, yes, you'd likely get different results if you're comparing languages at different proficiency levels, but a rough comparison should still be possible.
His claim that opening their algorithm would expose them to gaming of the system is hard to rebut, however. Search spam is bad enough already.
"The question was what rich people should be allowed to do with their money."

No, the question was, what people should be allowed to do with their money.

My answer: rich or poor, it's your money, and you should be allowed to buy anything you want with your money, including comfort for your children and fish.

"Why not give away the money to a charity or the government once someone dies?"

If anyone is less deserving of my money than my children after I die, it's the government. They squander it now while I'm watching, I shudder to think what they'll do with it when my eyes are closed.
Thursday. Friday is Christmas, Santa will deliver.
Farsi is Indo-European. Morphologically it's fairly simple (e.g. you have different verb forms for person and number, but not for gender) --- except that some people like to apply Arabic morphology to Arabic loanwords in certain cases (analogous to how some show-offs use obscure Greek plural paradigms like "metropolei" instead of "metropolises" when speaking English).

The writing system's a bit of a pain --- short vowels aren't indicated, and it preserves etymological spelling for Arabic loanwords even though a lot of these sound distinctions have been lost in speech. (Tajik --- the variant of Farsi spoken in Tajikistan, ex-USSR country --- largely eliminated that problem, though, by writing in Cyrillic instead of Arabic script).
My solution using git:

#!/bin/bash
# run in the project root
git add -A # track added files
git commit # local commit
git push # push to remote bare repository
ssh REMOTE_HOST 'cd PROJECT_FOLDER; git pull' # expand a working folder from the remote bare repository; usually public www folder is contained there

extra benefits: two copies of complete history for backup local and remote
I think the video is worth a watch - he starts by discussing how anthropologists think of religion, and goes into how that gets in the way of sensible policymaking.

He talks about the state of National Parks where there's very little conflict in what they're supposed to be for, and yet we still don't do a good job with them, so we're still quite far from understanding what to do in places with more complex sets of tradeoffs, like cities. I enjoyed it thoroughly, got me thinking.
1. Why would you say it is 'unfair' of me to be able to decide who gets the benefit of my lifes work when I pass on?

That's the rational. I earned it, so I decide who gets it. Usually my kids. YMMV from country to country, and state to state yadda.

2. Why not mind your own business. I worked for it, and I'll decide what to do with it. If you'd like to decide the fate of vast wealth, than go earn vast wealth.

3. You could even have a system that prevents people from whinging about how unfair life is on the internet whilst some people don't even have benefit of a decent soapbox, but it wouldn't make much sense either.
Why is it "the nature of the game"? Why can't you have capitalism where you create wealth for yourself and a safety net for everyone?
My native speaker bias for which language? :) I'm not a native English speaker, although I did learn it young, which I'm sure helped.

Still, my native language is Romanian, and I found English verbs easier to learn than French conjugation, even though French is very similar to Romanian in the first place.
Arabic is a hell of language to learn. Even as an Egyptian born in a semi-Arabic speaking house, and in the middle of trying to teach myself the language, I'm finding Arabic really difficult to learn. My two main problems are: a) Many words are not actually written as one word, and so you might have 2 or 3 separated strings of letters that are meant to be read altogether as one, which is ridiculously confusing - and - B) Arabic is commonly written with the vowels omitted. Most Arabic words have a set of unique root consonants, usually 3 or 4 consonants, that help you identify the word you're reading. So they'll eliminate the vowels because the root consonants and modifiers should be sufficient for word recognition. This probably makes reading script faster as there's less to process, and I'm sure it does, but as a beginner, it's tough.
If you've never read the book Predictably Irrational there is an interesting chapter regarding a professor who performed an experiment with deadlines for his 3 papers due in the semester.

[simplified]

Class 1: Set your own deadlines
Class 2: Strict deadlines from the professor
Class 3: No deadlines

Guess who performed best? Strict deadlines.

[edit]

Also, I highly recommend the book : http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
Automating rollbacks, re-huping associated services/servers, rolling out database changes, or coordinating across a cluster of servers.
Then Christmas is gonna suck this year.
English does not have formality encoded in its grammar.

No, instead it's in the vocabulary. ;)

Many of the most basic words of English exist in more formal and less formal versions. Compare horseman and equestrian, or eat and dine, or smell and fragrance, or hug and embrace.

Many of these apparent redundancies derive from the period when Britain was ruled by native French speakers, who tended to use a lot of French- or Latin-derived words.

I certainly wouldn't claim that spoken English doesn't encode plenty of formality:

*Sir, would you care for an aperitif?*

*No, I ain't hungry.*

Though American culture tends to be deliberately sloppy about who speaks formally to whom, especially compared to what I know of German culture.
Because I'm not breaking my back for the benefit of others. Hell, half the time I wonder why I am doing so much work for myself and my family.
Special compiler for compiling Windows
Tour of Blizzard HQ