skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't feel this is true at all. I think people start to question reality when the plot is weak or when the object that in unrealistic is tied to the plot in a significant way.

I've never sat through Back to the Future and seen a nerd say "but what exactly does a flux capacitor do in order to enable time travel, this movie is so unrealistic!". I think that as long as a minimal effort is given to explain away these points it is satisfactory to most people as long as those points are not essential to the movie: the physics of time travel is not essential to the story of Back to the Future.

However, the more important to the movie, the more time must be spent. Cloning dinosaurs, and specifically how they clone dinosaurs, was pretty important to Jurassic Park. Hence, more effort was placed in explaining this to the audience (they're all girl dinosaurs, fossilized dna, need frog dna, etc etc). This is significantly more involved than "oh we have a flux capacitor for that" explanation. Both are perfectly fine though, since they match their necessity to the movie.

I personally felt that Avatar succeeded at this level of explanation. Aside from "unobtanium" somehow making it past the first edit of the script, the technological/biological stuff was fine: Unoriginal? Yes. Uncomfortably unrealistic? No.

However, I think absolutely everything else about that movie was pretty subpar. The plot was really uninspired. Its sad, so much gloss on top of such an empty story. On top of that, I really was not that impressed with the graphics. I'm sure plenty of people will tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, but when I'm 70 years old and someone asks me, visual effects-wise, what was the highlight of my movie going career, I'm going to say seeing the brachiosaur in Jurassic Park, and probably won't even remember Avatar.
Our startup Webnographer is run by my partner and me. It works well. We have had the funny situation of having separate hotel rooms booked, as a client did not know that we where together.
Does that mean that msdn.microsoft.com performed acceptably in 2003 when you were on MS's network?

I've always found MSDN's online access to be dreadfully slow. The lack of a proper rich client - dynamically updating index in particular - for MSDN content in VS2010, so far, is disturbing to me - I generally find APIs using the index followed by contextual tree navigation, both of which don't work nearly as well in web apps.
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Actually reading the Lua mailing list post http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2010-03/msg00305.html, referenced in the linked text might help:

> For pidigits I'm comparing the pure JS and Lua programs, not the GMP bindings.

I'm comparing these two:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=pidig...

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=pidig...

Both are written in pure Lua and JavaScript and do not use a C binding.
Another important point: simply by virtue of having insurance of some description, you will get different pricing than if you're billed directly as an individual. That's because insurers pay the claim and then settle it with the policyholder, so the healthcare providers don't factor in the same delinquency / nonpayment risk that they apply to people who just walk in off the street and presumably pay in cash. You may get invoiced 2-2.5x more for the same procedure than you would if the billing were going through some kind of policy, which is in itself significant, never mind the limits, deductible or possibility of rescission.
They do. And some other seriously smart people, e.g. in Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.

(P.S. of course they eat a lot of their own dogfood---so they are not the right employer for everyone.)
After 4 years at Accenture with a responsibility for 'process' in one's title and enough free time to gain a familiarity with Dilbert cartoons but not enough to consider the possibility that perhaps people have thought deeply about these problems before. Maybe they even wrote papers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_silver_bullet

And they did, except better. They even came up with that title, except better.
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The text is still readable by bots. Turn off CSS on the demo page.
Up to date list of departures & closures at Sun
By and large it doesn't matter what the contract says, if they don't like what you're doing they may just sue you anyway. What the contract says will affect the outcome of the court case, but that doesn't matter, in the large scheme of things once you're into the realm of your employer suing you you've lost already.
IPad thoughts from Ben Fry (creator of Processing)
Google ‘99.9 Percent’ Sure to Shut Down in China
I think that last one was Shakespeare:

"Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once." - William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, sc. ii (1599)
> When someone picks out the bits that might work for a specific project but doesn’t succeed, the blame that they receive is "you didn’t follow the whole methodology".

I wouldn't say "blame", really; it's more that you shouldn't say you failed while doing X, if you weren't really doing X. That casts a bad light on X, whether it was X's fault or yours that the project failed. Just say you were adopting an organic/syncretic methodology, and leave it at that.
Essentially you're asking if it is possible to scrape google maps.

I'd start with analyzing the javascript code that creates the map view, it has to have some way of retrieving the info layer given a map coordinate.

After that you can try to see if you can access that information without going through the browser.

There are commercial vendors of such information too.
It wouldn't be better at all. What made it so great was it went straight to the point without filling with the random-bullshit-to-make-it-longer many blog posts have.
Update about the malfunctioning link: it seems like http://inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good... works (removed "www" and the trailing slash). I've contacted the author so that he may do something about it :)
There are no such thing as old jokes, my friend. To a newborn, every joke is a world première.
Ask HN: Donation for tweets? Is this grey area..
1. Customer purchases product from company

2. After sale, company offers to make donation in name of customer to charity of their choice in exchange for tweet or status update shout out for company.

Is this grey area? Does this near the realm of paying for tweets/links?
It can work well or it can be that one day you wake up next to your business partner instead of your wife.

The chances of that happening are larger as you get more successful.

I've tried this in one of my '9 lives', I will not try it again.
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Facebook command Daily Mail to spill the beans
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I sort of expect someone who's held a job in tech and self-describes as a CTO of a start-up to actually know some of the good old jokes. My expectations of newborns, are, as you suggest, less stringent.
Apple Inc v Wholesale Central Pty Ltd [2010] ATMO 7
There is no mystery here. Movies take a significant amount of time to produce, and they spend a fair amount of time in various pre-production phases as well. As it turns out, the entertainment industry is a fairly small world, just about everybody knows what just about everybody else is doing. If nothing else, movie productions must maintain some degree of publicity in order to attract talent for the cast and crew to work on the movie itself. And in recent years anyone with a subscription to IMDB pro has access to all that information. The fact that often there are movies with highly similar themes that are released in close succession is most likely attributable to nothing more than folks copying what seem to be "hot" ideas of others.
eh, right now I've got more customers than I can handle, (see capital problem above) I'm re-entrenching and focusing on my original (and most profitable) market, the hobbiest crowd, (and developers who know *NIX well enough to handle a low-ram instance) so hopefully that will iron out the capital bottlenecks for me, and get me some more hardware so I can start selling larger domains, too.

But yeah, I agree, finding a good co-founder is very difficult, even before you start hitting the co-founder problems that aren't problems when you have employees.
Have you tried Google Notebook? It's no longer in development, but it does the job for me - it's fast, clean, shareable.
[However, I suspect that if you haven't used it before, Google doesn't let you start using it... I might be wrong]

Good luck in your search, and let us know what you choose in the end!
I've worked in the auto parts industry - while it's true that Toyota is ruthless in that market, so is everyone else. In fact, during my short time there we all hated GM with a raging passion - they constantly demanded more and more from suppliers while slashing prices thinner and thinner. Threats of outsourcing manufacturing to China and Korea were common, and because of these tactics suppliers were going belly up day by day.

None of the major car companies are saints - all are guilty of failing to maintain an effective ecosystem. Their behaviour is as deplorable as Wal-Mart but far less infamous.
that sure sounds like good advice, until you start thinking... how does someone without a sales skillset evaluate a salesman? how does someone without a technical background evaluate an Engineer?
I tend to write for my readers as opposed to writing for myself. I've rarely found out something that I didn't already know, from reading one of my own blog posts!

It seems you got this impression from reading this post that this is a new realisation for me - it's not, I just happened to write about it now. I'll try to make that clearer in future posts.
Mommyblog Like Me
Imagine the legislators running a distributed version-control system, exchanging diffs, pull requests, etc., with each contribution able to be logged and credited to an author. This whole thing is actually a merge of two branches in the health care bill source. Of course, our legislation is not run by intelligent people trying to get things done as efficiently as possible, so it's not done this way. In fact, if you can imagine the complete opposite of DVCS (or even regular monolithic VCS) that seems to be pretty close to what's going on.

Difficult to know who authored exactly what. Nebulous states of various parts of bills at various points in time. Opaque language designed to shift potential blame in the future if something goes wrong. Vestigial formatting rules, incomprehensible phrasing (to those who would equate law with plain English) and a high level of redundancy.

Question for lawyers: if law (as in legal writing) is written as a sort of code built up over time based on past rulings and with concrete (or semi-concrete) meanings in terms of what effects it's supposed to have, why do we not get any 'comments' in legislative law? For example, it makes sense for a contract between two corporations to not have 'comments' to go along with the 'legal writing code' -- you're using the contract against someone else, so it's their job to decipher what effects it will have (right?)

But legislation isn't supposed to be used as a competitive chokepoint between two entities, it's supposed to be something that people who are affected by it (in the case of medical insurance reform, everybody) can understand. Reading legal writing to me seems like reading source code without comments, and you just don't give source code without comments to someone asking to read your code unless you have a grudge against them.
Make sure someone doesn't actually call whilst you're doing the on-phone-to-secretary trick...
Each character is wrapped in a <span> tag. I would imagine most address collector bots don't bother to actually parse HTML, so they would be thrown off by that.

Of course, if that's the case, then the <span> trick can be used on its own without a CSS font at all.
EBuddy for iPhone update
Ah, another "decision engine". I tried out Hunch, it seems like an interesting concept, but there are lots of flaws in the UX process. It seems to be more of a fun game than an actual engine for data. Its actually kind of like a reverse Yahoo Ask, since a lot of the "recommendations" are silly and its pointless to use in practical terms.
Does it mean that it doesn't make any difference for those people if they pay their mortgages or not? The houses will be taken over anyways... does it really make a big difference at this point?
Leaders are often insulated from reality by people around them, especially if they have a penchant for violent outbursts.

See the 'chair' incident and the movie 'Der Untergang'.

I'm sure Jobs and others in the industry have similar reality distortion fields around them.

But I highly doubt that at the lower levels in the microsoft organization they'd be this myopic, and a bunch of anecdotes here and elsewhere about microsoft employees owning hardware produced by competitors and displaying them openly at work seems to confirm that doubt.
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It seems you got this impression from reading this post that this is a new realisation for me - it's not

I didn't know you were the author of the post. The impression I got was that you were blithely unaware of the basic literature on the subject. And really, if you're going to make a post called 'No best practices' and don't reference Brooks at all, it's hard to come up with explanations other than 'plagiarism' or 'ignorance'.

In fact, while I have you on the line, let me ask you directly - had you read the Brooks essay?
But that is gain at the cost of people suffering from lack of clarity.

You could say same things about lack of clarity as you can say about corruption. It's huge potential gain for some people but horrible waste of resources to every one.
The cartoon underlines today's false assumptions: cars, nuke and fuel can be green. They ain't. Train is the greenest transport mean. Overconsumption of energy is the CORE problem. The demise of the dollar will force the US to acknowldge this reality, when petrol will become unaffordable.
Nice thing would be to have automatically checked assertions, constraints so help spot interactions between law to be introduced with existing laws.

All that would require to parse language into what it actually means. So we will probably have to wait for strong AI to see any significant improvement in lawmaking.

But as author of this post postulates using readily available tools for dealing with complex text documents today also would be nice.
87,700 Ford
68,500 GM
58,000 Chrysler
36,000 US employees for Toyota

If you take into account that Toyota is the largest non-domestic producer of cars in the US then it makes good sense.
The rumor I've heard here in Beijing is that, among other things, the Chinese government was interested in the actual search-engine tech to help fuel their own CCTV search engine (which is to eventually be expanded beyond video search). Baidu is not considered friendly enough to government policies, so they want to spin their own version.

Just a rumor, but it doesn't sound too outlandish to me.

(An interesting and tangential question is how good could a state-run search engine be? My personal belief is that they could make it pretty good if they really focused on it (consider, for example, the Soviet Union and the nuclear arms race)).
Yes, I have. I'm not quite sure how "someone wrote a related paper 30 years ago" prevents me from writing a blog post on a topic that I want to write about, though.
I doubt it, there is substantial evidence by now to rule that out, some very experienced drivers have had this happen to them.

Software glitch seems to be a good candidate.
I'm pretty sure this article is one of those filler pieces that are in the writer's back pocket in case he can't think of something else to write about.

I take my iPhone and MBP up to the Bellevue and Redmond offices all the time. I get some weird looks sometimes when I pull out the laptop in the cafeteria but when they see I'm running Windows 7 and I'm doing stuff on the intranet, their attitude turns to curiosity. I've had many questions like "How does CorpNet work on your Mac?" My usual response: "Very well."

Sure you can eat your own dog food or whatever the cool new term for this is but there's also something about using the tools that work well for the job. I don't really run anything important for work on my Mac. All of my code builds/runs on lab machines or a desktop that sits in the office which I can connect to via Remote Desktop Connection. My Mac works great as a thin client to these machines.
I'm not convinced it falls apart. It seems more like a failure to take account for the distance you must travel on your return from the menu bar.
Seeks, a metasearch engine
The National Broadband Plan
As for the iPad, it is not enough to create a tagline. Maybe it is magical, maybe not - chances are, it is mostly just a computer, not magic...
Well the thing is, someone actually wrote a seminal, much quoted paper 30 years ago. You wrote a "related" platitude-laden derivative and borrowed the title 30 years later. Nothing prevents you from doing that at all. Common decency suggests you should reference the original, if you were, as you claim, well aware of it. That's all.
Personalized Movies.
Based on your past viewing history, it creates a new movie that no one else has seen and you can possibly share with your friends.

So it will notice your love for sci fi but it will notice you like comedy too, but you dont like your comedy mixed with your sci fi. :D Using this info generates a hollywood standard movie
Notion of a "once in a century" crisis is a fiction
Brain scan can read people's thoughts
Android Surges While the iPhone Stalls Out
I was surprised by the RIM numbers actually. I thought mobile web was dominated by iPhones.
Please note that I said I have read that paper. That doesn't mean I was thinking of that paper when I wrote this blog post. Pardon me for not having absolutely everything I have read in mind whenever I write a blog post.

Anyway, this conversation is incredibly tedious. I'm done with this thread.
The worst enemy of freedom in software is not Microsoft, it's Apple. You're pretty free to develop and distribute software as you want on Windows. On new Apple devices, they control the way the software is distributed, they tax you, they make you obey their rules. Imagine a world with appstore as the main way of distributing software for any kind of devices. This would be hell. This is where Apple is going.
Stop using Apple. Use Linux, or if you can't, use Microsoft.
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i'm curious about your qualms with the FDA and what you'd like to replace it with.
I don't use menus often, either. I guess this design really forces app developers to carefully choose buttons and other widgets on the UI to avoid menu as much as possible.

But on the occasions when menu is required, the experience sucks big on my dual-monitor setting. And there is no keyboard shortcut to ease the pain.
50% of it is determined by birt or genetics.

But this is a misinterpretation of what broad heritability shows.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838534

In other words, it may be that there are environmental interventions that can HUGELY influence happiness that just haven't been tried yet. Better understanding of the development of happiness over the course of life, a line of research evidently being pursued by your professor, may eventually show what some of those interventions are.
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The control that Apple has over the iPhone and the application distribution channel does contribute greatly to the iPhone's success. It makes the platform easily accessible to people who aren't inclined to search the internet for apps and are, in fact, afraid of doing it for all the malware experiences they have on their PCs. They know the App Store has everything, and that they can reasonably expect that the apps won't harm their device.

But, the iPhone is still just a phone. Most people don't hit the walls of the room Apple has them locked in. Heck, most people don't even do much with their iPhones... They rarely browse the web or use it to do serious email (one line replies in a pinch are not "serious email") because they find the screen too small and the experience too cumbersome when compared to a real computer. They install some apps, but never really use them besides the first few minutes, unless they're games, which also says much about the typical iPhone user: phone calls and games.

The people that complain about lack of openness are the exception.

Now, the iPad is not an iPhone. Nobody will buy it to make phone calls, although they will certainly play games in it. The iPad is more of a computer, and more people will hit the walls of Apple's control. _This_ is what's going to define the iPad's success.

It is a beautiful device, but if the average Joe expects it to behave more like a standard computer than an iPhone, and if Apple doesn't make it more open, it may very well end up a failure.

I like the iPhone, and if I weren't the kind of person that lives fine with just a basic phone, I would prefer one over the alternatives (android et al) even though it is much less open. On the other hand, I won't buy an iPad despite how beautiful it is because it is too expensive for something that's not a real computer.
Upvoted both for the content and expository writing style. He did a nice job not just of solving the problem but also showing how he did it.
I wonder how thinking deep and hard for a few hours a day makes you a happier person, anyone ideas?
You noted it here, not in your post. Citing references and work your work is based on is certainly quite tedious. Sometimes doing the right thing is tedious. Doesn't make it any less right.
My point is that it's annoying to read #828282 on #F6F6EF. It's unpleasant contrast.
The 5th location by Fitt's law is the current position of the pointer, and Openbox (Linux) has the ability to open the 'start menu' there.
Help each other to help ourselves
Downvotes
I've noticed quite a trend of downvotes on well-composed comments over the last two months or so. It's disappointing.

I'm concerned that as it gains users, HN is acquiring an attribute common to other social news sites where users simply downvote a comment because they don't agree with it, or because it criticizes something that they favor or like. I believe that downvotes should only be used on content that does not generate interesting discussion, is spammy, or patently and generally offensive.

I've noticed that there is not much language addressing general appropriate voting behavior in the Guidelines (at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). Is this something we want to address, or not?

I think a good way to help curb inappropriate downmodding is to invoke a small cost for each downvote. StackOverflow does this and it seems to work pretty well.

Has anyone else noticed this trend recently? If so, what are your feelings regarding it?
What works for me is green tea like 3 cups but I guess it's the same active ingredient as coffee. For creativity, it does boost me in that department(research caffeine and creativity).

What also works is chamomile tea, relaxes the mind.