skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well maybe. But I don't see a lot of hype about voice communication on the web. I am really surprised it's so poorly supported by browsers.

Even voice chat had privacy and umm appropriateness issues, but video chat, fuuurgedaboutit.
FTA:
Thorium DOESN'T GENERATE NUCLEAR WEAPONS MATERIAL.

I remember seeing a Ford prototype from the 50's of a car designed to run on nuclear power. With good thorium reactors that could be a real thing. Imagine only having to refill your "tank" once every six months. Also, combine this with UAVs and you could revolutionize shipping.
Disagree. Sorry, but I rather like keeping random strangers on the Internet at arms length, despite our shared interest in "grilled salmon recipes" or whatever I'm googling at the moment. In terms of intimacy, I view communications like this:

Email -> Chat -> Voice -> Video -> In-person

Chat is already a stretch for the most part, in terms of stretching my comfort level. Have you participated in the live chat on justin.tv? Yeah, now imagine if that were voice. No thanks.
I only see it at the end of the entire post . . .
x2. This is some really impressive work. I wonder which platform they will use for the synthesis? This (regrettably discontinued) device yields the most impressive results that I'm aware of without using pre-programmed phonemes: http://music.yamaha.com/products/features.html?productId=624...
Yes. Because transforming the web into a conference call is not only revolutionary, but what everyone really, truly wants.

Or not.

I haven't seen many predictions that are as off the mark as this one.
Yeah, Princess Mononoke is really a lovely film. I thought when Spirited Away came out and became popular that people would naturally go back and check out Mononoke, but it didn't happen that much. Definitely worth a watch.

As for Avatar -

My two biggest complaints:

1. It paints it as black and white, good vs. evil. This is such a common source of human misery and brainwashing that I thought we'd started to move past in cinema. Every leader worth anything tries to play the underdog card. Ask yourself about every cause you sincerely respect and believe in - do any of your leaders not paint it as you vs. the world? The New York Yankees are the only organization I can think of that don't try to play the underdog external evil enemies card. All the world religions do, all political parties do, all nations do, and so on.

2. My housemate had a great quote - he said, "They completed de-humanized the humans before doing all the violence to them." It's quite right - the evil military industrial capitalist marines have no family members, loved ones, passions, or good about them. They exist to be eaten by dinosaurs, shot by arrows, crushed, beaten, and shredded. There's no marine who signed on for a security job, got a little freaked out what's happening, and died due to the complex violent decisions of the leaders. Nope, all the marines are not even human or worth sympathizing with at all - destroy the expoiters, make violence on them, and they deserve all the hells we can visit upon them.

When you take "we're completely good and they're completely evil" and mix it with "our enemies aren't even human", you get a recipe for horrible atrocities. I watched a documentary of what the Imperial Japanese Army soldiers was thinking at Nanking. They regarded their cause as God's work, and their Chinese enemies as not human.

Never mind the specific politics. Do we really want our epic, landmark art to assert that there is in fact pure good, pure evil, and the people with different views than us are pure evil and aren't even human? I kept trying to think of if I had a kid, how I'd talk to him or her after watching that to understand that the "clear good and evil" thinking leads to very bad places.
It's because they already have that technology. It's called the telephone.
I too enjoyed the movie quite a bit. I can agree that the plot was simplistic, but I for one did not find the dialog horrible. Like the review points out, it comes off like something mixing elements of Disney movies like "The Lion King" and "Pocahontas," which admittedly are movies I get a little choked up at. For me personally, that gave it a certain innocence and heartfelt quality. Is it predictable?Sure, but that doesn't neccessarily make it bad. I was emotionally engaded as well as visually stimulated, if not intellectually challenged by the film. For better or worse, that made it great for me.
Holiday Fun: How Programming Language Fanboys See Each Others’ Languages
Hum. Somehow, I got redirected to:

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-op...

Which is the same post, on a different Google blog, with a different layout.
One of the first iPhone jail-break systems depended on a vulnerability in Safari's TIFF loader, and TIFF files aren't supposed to contain any executable code at all. Why would NES games be any different?
I don't know why people keep comparing this film to Pocahontas; It's really more like FernGully in space.
Entertainment Computing
Customer Development solves this problem. You have to leave the building and identify real needs among real customers, a real market niche, and to validate your product hypothesis. Then you're not aimless anymore, you're trying to solve a real problem for real people that you've personally met outside the building.

http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/

I've never personally met any startup founders that weren't acutely aware of their limited runway. Generally they are haunted by it day and night. People do get aimless - because they don't test their idea in the real market. In a vacuum, its easy to get lost.
I recommend three of them: Permutation City, Diaspora, and Axiomatic. Here's the opening chapter of Diaspora:

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphano...
Yeah. An alternate reading of Avatar (supported by the text) is the story of a stolid marine colonel's tragic death in support of a mission to establish humanity's last hope for escaping the dying Earth. Sending humanity back at the end of the movie, with the exception of two collaborators, is genocide of the entire human race.

I know, that isn't quite the Wars For Oil Suck, Love Your Purple Bambi Earth Goddesses Or You Will Be Brutally Slain thing he was going for, but still.

(Edited to add: Am I a bad person if I sympathized with the marine colonel most out of any character? "Oh blimey, traitors have just stolen a top-of-the-line helicopter gunship armed with missiles that could blow us all apart. Men, masks on! I'm about to blow the door, step unprotected into an environment filled with poisonous gas, and engage them singlehandedly. With a sidearm.")
What makes you say that? Not disagreeing either.
We can already talk over the internet, putting it in a website isn't really that revolutionary.
Where was this job located?
If Mozilla is more committed to open source ideology than making video actually work that's their choice, but they could do things differently if they wanted to.
The apple iPod example is out of place: you can't compare software to hardware. Essentially, with hardware, you have one chance to make a good impression, so every detail counts (for example, the first Zune wasn't much of a hit, and now virtually no one likes Zunes, even the very awesome Zune HD).

These days, with software - especially web software - people tend to be more forgiving of bugs, and because its easy to provide feedback, software tends to get better and better.
So they use a non-risky script, with nothing objectionable in it.

How did we get to the point where "Humans are evil, kill them all!" is a non-risky script with nothing objectionable in it?
> the future of the domestic Internet over the next 5 years

FTFY

Not every Internet user speaks the same language. Unless Google's realtime audio translator works at amazing accuracy.
Do to the 50 inch screen what the iPhone did to the 3 inch screen. The device connected to my tv should be as open and capable as a computer, yet still fit the form factor. ie- an iPhone is a full fledged computer running a real OS. It just meets the form factor and purpose of a 3 inch screen.

What apps would you want to see on a 50 inch screen besides content (which is the killer app)?
How to get tossed from a job application
we've all seen how well voice chat works on say multiplayer console games...no thanks.
As a Yahoo, I assure you this is in no way "as the Internet company searches for new ways to cut costs during the recession". We do this every year, as do other companies -- like Apple, I believe.
I certainly think NES games are a threat. Think of all the successful games on the iphone. A huge percentage of those could run on a NES, or at least dumbed down to run on one.
Greg Egan reviewing Avatar is like Jakob Nielsen reviewing the 2Advanced website.

Totally different levels and types of craft, as many seem to forget.
"I guess I'm of a class of people who disagree with this assertion. My counter-assertion is that all contrived writing is a waste of time, both for the writer and a reader."

I disagree with you in two ways.

First, what I described is not "contrived writing". Just because it's uninteresting doesn't mean it's not useful. Neither the report your boss wants, nor the descriptions of activities for the family reunion, are contrived. They're useful documents that are boring to write and unexciting to read. Your pleasure is not the final word on the value of an activity.

Second, contrived writing can be a great use of time. Contrived exercises are useful for improving your skills in many different fields. From soccer, to engineering, to martial arts, to penmanship, to mathematics, to knitting, contrived exercises perform a very useful function: they're controlled, limited exercises to practice a particular skill. They give you safety (because they're not dangerous to your health or reputation) and allow you to focus on a small part of the full skill set.

And finally, one always has a choice, but there are consequences for one's choices. If you refuse to write that boring report for your boss, you might lose your job. If you refuse to write the paper for class, you might fail the class, and not get to take the classes you are more interested in. If you don't do the soccer drills, you won't have the ball-handling skills during the game. Sometimes the trade-off between the temporary pain of boring work and the reward it brings is worth the pain.
A friend of mine once called Princess Mononoke "Pocahontas done Right"
Seton VS Lobo - responsible for changing views of the environment
I am not surprised Weta doesn't use Isiton. We've had nothing but problems. But they are cheap. And Aspera rocks.
games are almost always the killer app
I agree, sounds scary.
I knew a girl who had seen it twenty-something times. She had issues.

Personally, though, I still think it's quite a good film. Some aspects of the love story grate a little (in particular Leonardo DiCaprio's always-perfect character) as does the characterization of all first class passengers as snooty jerks and all third class passengers as idealized salt of the Earth (come to think of it, that's pretty much the same problem as Avatar) but as soon as the ship starts sinking it becomes a fairly gripping story. Hardly the greatest film in history, but perfectly watchable and rewatchable even if you're not a 17-year-old girl.
Vila dos Orixás website - Morro de Sao Paulo
Generalization of technological progressions
Add pictures, social media, Facebook, twitter, cutesy pics with cats and inane captions. Take all the dreck of cable, but make it interactive and navigable. This will be 10X more addictive through variable reward schedule than channel surfing.

Add in real-time video chat so you and your cadre can MST3K commentary everything online at the same time. It's couch-potato crack!
The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
> when I recognized other usernames, I tended to feel an emotional attachment to them

I think this is the source of all politeness/nastiness (both here on HN and in real life). It's hard to be gratuitously rude to someone you know personally... it's hard to even be passive aggressive.

Now that HN is bigger, it is by default more anonymous. It is less a group of friends sharing links as it is a public forum. Where insulting someone used to be equivalent to saying it to their face, it's now more akin to heckling from the stands.

I too have been coming here less and less. I came to HN for the discussion... the links were only secondary to me. Often the best discussions came out of mediocre links. But now I feel like all I see is catfights between minor programming stars, people debating whether relational databases are really dead, and the latest scandal involving rackspace/twitter/zygna/facebook. All of that stuff is destructive. It's all just churning the muck of the internet... and more importantly, doesn't make you a better person for having read it.

We used to laugh whenever the front page would fill with Erlang articles. Even when things were 'that bad' ... they weren't really that bad because the discussion was still insightful. I'm really not trying to sound like one of those 'back in the good old days' people, but I'm starting to become skeptical about the value of coming here.
It's amazing how sentences where [X] kneecapps the Cable Industry make everyone exclaim a little internal "Yay."

We are peons. We are resigned to it. Markets do not work for US cable.

(EDIT: Pedantic version: the US "cable market" doesn't work very well as a free market.)
Russia Is Torn Over Push for Use of Cyrillic Web Domains
While the numbers may be wonky, it's an interesting enough topic. I wouldn't advocate C++ but it not like various languages don't have JIT compilers these days.
Because it wasn't a humans are evil, kill them all plot, it was a standard corporations are evil and stupid and scientists are good and help the natives plot. Humans were the good guys here as well as the bad.
They're not moving fast enough and their On Demand offering is weak. If they don't watch out, someone is going to displace them.
Why use monads?
Sounds like this slipped through the cracks. The SDK ToS are very explicit about executable code, and very strictly prohibit anything along those lines. On that note, I'm buying it now while I can.
I'd argue that a Playstation 3 gets very close to your requirement list. So do most consoles, it just happens to be my favorite of the 3 in terms of design and usability. Both it and the Xbox have access to Netflix for streaming movies, which is a big plus.

You were asking about Netflix below. You might be interested to her I was talking to a film distributor last week, who mentioned that from their perspective video-on-demand and premium channel sales (as served by cable) are almost dead, and while they get fantastic analytics from iTunes movie downloads, they accelerated quickly and then plateaued. Netflix is becoming the revenue generator that distributors pursue prior to the end-user DVD sale for indies.

Obviously, the model is somewhat different for big-ticket films where broadcast will pay a premium for the premiere rights, and/or specialty films (eg cable channels MTV or VH1 are still good for music documentaries). But in his opinion Netflix is becoming the most important secondary market distributor.
The original blog post was posted yesterday:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006497
A simple script isn't the same thing as a bad script, though. Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, Alien... these are simple scripts, but they were all turned into good movies.

The problem with Avatar's script is not so much its simplicity, but its preachiness. A story set in a simplified world of good and evil isn't so annoying (cf Star Wars) unless it's supposed to be making some kind of political commentary on our own world.
Is it? I block flash because on OS X Flash’s performance is ridiculous. I don’t care so much about auto play (the sites I visit are normally polite).
You can use this site:

http://searchyc.com/
@dnsworks - you should chat with @jf (twitter)/(jpf on github) and/or Jeff Lindsay. They've got some pretty awesome ideas for DNS beyond traditional use.
Me thinks Egan is reading too much into things. This is the complexity and imagination of a 1960's 12 year old who grew up reading golden-age sci-fi and then grew up and built his imagination with modern tech.

Critically analyzing this is like critically analyzing a 12 year old's day dreams.

That's about it. It's a thrilling and wild ride, a great place to be for a bit north of 2 hours, and that's it. It's a spectacle with a plot no deeper than Star Wars. But also no less fun that Star Wars.
Well, I have had the definition of blue moon wrong for some time now. Wikipedia gives a pretty thorough rundown currently as well.
Arabic is a hell of language to learn. Even as an Egyptian born in a semi-Arabic speaking house...I'm finding Arabic really difficult to learn.

You're not alone. The US Defense Language Institute teaches many languages, mostly to native English speakers. Of the languages they teach, Arabic takes the longest.

It's a shame the article didn't list the number of weeks the DLI spends on each of the languages. It "only" covers a few dozen languages, but course length would be an excellent proxy for language difficulty for English speakers.
Hungarian is pretty difficult for me as a native English speaker. Spanish/French aren't bad.
I'm working on making a 10 foot ui type site with embedded heyzap games for fun for my HTPC. Different than the console games, but games none the less.
It's pretty simple really, most people can't follow a complex plot. For a big blockbuster movie to make money it has to attract the widest audience possible, and that requires dumbing it down so the average person can follow along and not get confused.

This technology however, once it becomes more widespread and cheaper, will enable future movies to be made so cheaply that it'll become profitable to chase the more targeted audience. You can't make a smart movie for 300 million dollars, you'll lose your ass; there just aren't that many smart people out there that would appreciate it.

But when you can eliminate the actors, and their salaries, and just CG everything and hire a bunch of voice actors, and get that 300 million movie down to 1-10 million, then you can target highly selective audiences with something aimed directly at them profitably.

Take for example Man From Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth shot for 200k, exactly the opposite of Avatar, virtually no budget and a fantastic plot. A movie I loved but couldn't get most people to sit through if I tried, they just wouldn't appreciate the plot and would complain about how cheap it looked.

I loved Avatar by the way, but not for the plot, it was exactly as weak as I expect all blockbuster plots to be, but it was fucking beautiful visually and technically stunning.
I don't understand what you mean by this. There is no "international tax law", just national tax law. Britain's tax law happens to allow exactly what Google is doing.

The EU does have something that might be described as international tax law, but it's really EU tax law, where the EU is something very similar to a federalist nation.
if HN cares that much about not re-posting, HN should make it easier to check. A lot of people don't even know about searchyc. Can't a URL check against searchyc for a high percentage match and give an intermediate "are you sure you want to post this?"
"On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down"

My impression, as a native English speaker who has learned German, is that German is much more like this than English. You have to know quite a bit to say fairly simple sentences. But once you know the basics, there are only a couple of advanced concepts to get you to mastery.
Poisonous Prehistoric 'Raptor' Discovered in China
Ugh. Why would any software be different? Please Google "buffer overflow."
Define "consumer internet startup". Is that any startup that isn't focused on B2B, or what? Isn't that most of them?
No way can they pay each network $3/month for the current MobileMe price of $99/year.
if i understood correctly, fiber the good part of fruits (fructose being the bad part)
ref: ... packaged the poison with the antidote...

very good video, learned a lot
The two of you agree on everything that sane and rational people should. Fraud bad. Innovation good. Prevent fraud good. Hinder innovation bad.

You've just got different internal estimates of the prevalence of fraud, the ease of deterring innovation, and the costs associated with each.

Interestingly, when people disagree like this they almost always either start talking about principles, generalities, or hypotheticals that are obviously very good or very bad. They never say "let's start with some numbers we can both agree on and see if we can figure it out together."

I think that's because people are wired to think with representative symbols (genius inventor, robber baron, welfare queen), and to weight their judgments according to their loyalty to various ideology brands.
Playstation 3 is very close, but it's not open enough. It's not nearly as easy as using a computer to navigate content or add apps. The UI for the PS3 is definitely closest though. Windows, Mac, or Basic Ubuntu just don't work for the living room.

Wow, that's really interesting that Netflix is that important for distribution. Well, moreso that it's that much ahead of the others. I really wish they would have the PlayReady DRM work on linux, not because of desktop linux being so popular, but the plethora of devices that could be built on Linux using Netflix.
Claude Johnson
MySpace profile for Claude Johnson. Find friends, share photos, keep in touch with classmates, and meet new people on MySpace.
> but it doesn't really do anything that reality doesn't.

Apparently you live on Pandora,

where you can look at the office window right now and see the alien planet with floating mountains, giant six legged carnivores, pack hunters, bio-luminescent forests, two kinds (count them 2) of flying dragons and 12 foot tall blue skinned people with tails and braids with autonomous nerve endings at the end that can mentally bond with all of the above (sans the flying mountains).
I was expecting a post on time management, but was pleasantly entertained with this instead.
The Roku runs linux...
Must be a LISP programmer?
That would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_%28film%29

Joe Valdez at This Distracted Globe has a good review: http://thisdistractedglobe.com/2009/01/01/heavens-gate/ TL;DR version: quit perfecting and ship it!
Simple Interop: The Health Internet Node
The device connected to my tv should be as open
and capable as a computer, yet still fit the form
factor.

Beautiful, incredibly easy to use, tightly integrated with your Mac, but not open. Nothing Apple makes these days is open. OS X was the last product they made that was sort of open.

(And I say this as a die-hard Mac user.)