skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just picked three; here's some more:

(It still could be coincidence I suppose, but it feels like more than that)

http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Damn_Near_Identical_Movies...

http://www.filmjunk.com/2007/03/07/when-movies-come-in-pairs...
I get the impression that the micro-decisions that people obsess about and make top 10 lists out of are usually far less important than the quality of the founders.
Oh baby, you know I'm going to post if I'm rejected or accepted.
Ask HN: What's the best way to phrase "back to the homepage"?
I'm working on finishing up a menu, and I want to include some short phrase that lets people know they'll be going back to the homepage.

"Back" - was too short and could mean the last page visited.
"Back to the home page" - the idea of a "home page" seems kind of outdated to me and I'm trying to get it better than this.
"Back to the index" - maybe too technical? I feel like novice users (my grandma etc) might not understand the concept of the index being the first page of the site.

Google didn't help me out so I'm turning to you.

Extra credit: Have you run into similar phrasing issues such as this in the past, and what were they? Solved or unsolved.
Talker - Fast, intuitive and extensible group chat
Any references?

Rings true enough, but why is that? Is it because young bodies can absorb more on impact? Or because young people have better survival instincts?
I would go for "Home" or "Front Page".. cheers!
Does microsoft employ hackers? News to me.
Need to consolidate information security compliance efforts? Try open source.
but as they have been demoing this sense 2008 this is really a non-story.
I'm running ubuntu 10.04 right now (upgraded this morning), it's just not that annoying. I'd like it to be fixed (I think the chromium close/redize/minimize buttons look much better), but I think the flurry about this is over statued.
Modeling Evolution in vitro and in silico
Ah, birthdate makes much more sense. My confusion stemmed from misreading the comment as "using these properties: [given age](?), [gender], [zip code]" instead of "given these properties: [age], [gender], [zip code]".
I should have elaborated. It's a bit of unique menu and the rest of the menu include longer titles, such as "Having trouble making up your mind? ..." I'm trying to fit the theme of the rest of the menu. Your advice is spot on though :)
Elsewhere on the site:

http://www.philipkdick.com/films_bladerunner.html

Bladerunner is a favorite movie of mine, I must have watched it 10 times or more over the years. From the soundtrack (Vangelis) to the pre-CG visuals it's really impressive, it also realistically captures the mood of a possible near-future.

After all these years I still haven't gotten around to reading the book, but that's just got bumped up quite a bit on the todo list.

It's funny how the photography enhancement scene from Bladerunner is replicated in many movies later in time but never quite with the same feeling of it being possible.

Is this part of the test ?
Not sure why I was downvoted. A 2 minute search yields just these patents:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7069755.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5701828.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5974367.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5999095.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6325429.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6867685.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6483424.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6609738.html

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5886644.html
actually that didn't even occur to me until just now.
Font-face generator
I don't get the "There is no binary compatibility between distributions" point really... Examples against it: Firefox, OpenOffice, Quake. They seem to work quite well on most distributions even as binaries.

Also - you can always write for Python / .NET / Java / ... and be portable for that VM.
I've read it, and I think it's silly to ascribe societal success based on the various random incedental facotrs surrounding it.
Apple Sells at Most 51,000 iPads in First Two Hours
>>IIRC, they were warned about the fact that the second prize was revealing too much information, but went forward with it anyways.

I did not know that. That changes my opinion about Netflix acting in "good faith".

The argument I was making is rooted in my belief that in order to have a healthy environment for business enterprise, your legal system cannot be setup to punish innovation whenever something doesnt go as planned. There needs to be balance, i.e. for medical innovation the bar is higher than for movie ratings.
good article. made me realize I should just remove HN from my feed. see you guys.
Yahoo Answer Fail
I read the Wikipedia article and there's an awesome section called "Waking Dead". I did some googling and found another holy-crap Youtube video, embedded here: http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/derren_brown_waking_dead.ph...

Here is a description from Wikipedia:

In June 2005, a clip from the second series was widely circulated on the internet. In this clip, Brown claims to have created a video game he calls "Waking Dead" which "is able to put roughly 1/3 of the people who play it into a catatonic trance". In this episode, he places the video game in a pub to lure a supposedly unsuspecting patron into playing the game. He then "kidnaps" the catatonic "victim" and places him in a real-life recreation of the video game, having him fire an air gun at actors, pretending to be zombies and outfitted with explosive squibs.
If you have an account with a high end broker (e.g. the private wealth management division of an investment bank), they'll usually let you buy them. You have to meet a pretty high net worth threshold to open that sort of account though.
I'm a noob and so here is my question: What will I be able to create after I go through all the books mentioned on the list?

I ask this question keeping the current state of AI in mind.
Reflections on Avatar by Ray Kurzweil
Flashback: Search Spam Fight – Mahalo: 1; Squidoo: 0
I don't see where randomness comes into his explanation. Rather, I see his explanation for technological success as hinging on massive societies which specialize, which is in turn based on highly developed domestic agriculture, which is in turn based on the East-West axis of Eurasia with origins in the Fertile Crescent and East Asia.
Well, for some scripts, nearly everyone in the business has read it by the time it gets attached to a director and/or star.
Whatever wikipedia volunteers did not choose to write about in open source gaming, I swallowed their long tail!

So in short, whenever wikipedia choose to write about something, they dominate. Whenever they choose not to write about, a niche wiki filled it.
To be fair, nobody can claim to have seen the final cut and the continuing proliferation of versions supports the notion of it being a very important (if perennially unfinished) film.

You're right that the book is very different from the film, but even here it's much different than most adaptations, as key dialog is lifted almost verbatim from the book. I think if this letter is legitimate, Dick was probably more excited about the portrayal of the universe his stories took place in, rather than the faithfulness of the script to a single one of his works.
How many perfectly viable web properties have failed because they decided they were going to scale to 1MM uniques before they monetized and ran out of cash? A lot.

I've seen my share. I won't ever buy into this hype again. You don't open a grocery store without a cash register, why start a website without a revenue plan?
Deep Impact was better than Armageddon. Oil roughnecks in space with nuclear bombs, are you kidding me!
You didn't think it was interesting how he made his graph? This guy is pretty smart even if his style doesn't fit in with things we're used to seeing on HN. His quick break down of the recovery chart was more informative than any HN comments were when this issue came up last month. I rarely submit anything anyway though, so I wouldn't worry about it if you disagree.
There's a big difference between letting the user decide and choosing for the user but making it possible for the user to switch.
People aren't good at understanding big numbers. Slicing off a small part of the mortgage crisis and providing a detailed history of that small part makes it much easier for people to understand what's going on.

It's just like unemployment rates -- saying "ten million people are out of work" doesn't mean as much to most people as "one of your ten closest friends is out of work".
Might be a little bit off topic, but the detached menu bar gradually pisses me off as screen gets bigger. It's really a long-distance travel for the mouse to click the menu on a 1920x1200 screen. Now Apple is rolling out 27' iMac with an even bigger screen ...

The situation gets even worse when I use multiple monitors as menu bar only shows on one of them.
A lot of employers will bait their workers with this lure of "time credit" through the lie of comp time. A lot of people never have the opportunity to take any of the unknown amount of "comp time" that they've amassed over the years because things are too busy at work.
If it is classified as a "sale" rather than financing, shouldn't the bank have to pay sales tax (which would amount to billions)?
Indeed.

See this: http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely-identifyin...

I imagine gender and DoB factor in heavily to something like a recommendation engine, and I'm sure zip code would come into play when trying to get those last couple percent as is the case with the Netflix prizes.
I'm sure if you zoomed out you would see a whole lot of nothing. No more than a handful more cows or pigs or shoes or cookies that are in the shots we see here. NK is just a big vacant husk of a nation.

He has to be aware of that, at least.
Except Picasa, YouTube, etc. are not part of the big Google square. Weird.
Lest we be too proud of our ability to detect the forced, artificial nature of these photographs, this link from the 'Big Picture' comment thread should be considered:

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/02/obama_being_forced_to_l...

(Our photo op rituals aren't that much better. US photographers show a lot more creativity in composition, though.)
I think this makes a fairly good case for performance based and measured employment. I've never understood why most management seems obsessed with just simply doing and not what you're doing or how you're doing it. If you are operating at 100% all the time, there is no time to reflect, revise and improve the tasks your are responsible for. Perhaps it's due to the illusion that employers need to squeeze every last minute of productivity out you, when in fact productivity was never intended to be measured in minutes.
If I got plenty of experience noticing I have no breaks in situations where I really needed them ... does that count?
(drove a piece of shit of a car for quite some time)

I also ended up in situations where my instinct or experience told me to accelerate instead of pushing the breaks. This happens often.

Got plenty of experience driving on glazed frost. I even crashed once because of the car skidding ... went off-road, with the car rolling over a couple of times, and me and the other passenger survived with minor injuries.

From that experience I learned that whatever you do (besides wearing a seat-belt) you have to avoid trees.

IMHO, more experienced drivers are better, and I've seen some pretty good instincts coming from 40-50 year-old or so acquaintances.

I really don't know what I would do with a sudden acceleration problem. I would probably try to remain calm and wait for it to recover (pushing the acceleration / brake to trigger events, try to stop the engine), and try not crashing.

On a side note ... that's why I don't like cars with automatic transmissions. If my current car experienced a sudden acceleration problem, I could just take it out of gear or do an old-fashioned motor-brake.
Whether it's a democracy depends on what you think a democracy is. My view is that a democracy is a system where all voices are encouraged to speak up, are heard, given due consideration, and approved or rejected by a community. The whole voting thing is one particular implementation of democracy. It's not necessarily a good approximation of those democratic ideals, but it's practical and it scales well, which makes it Good Enough(tm). Wikipedia's policy of considering arguments rather than votes for page-level decisions is something I would call more democratic than straight-up vote-counting, given the scale that it operates at, the strict (and explicit--rule of law is important) guidelines by which positions are weighed, and the general good-faith of those making the judgments.

YMMV. The definition of democracy is probably worth a thread in its own right. However, regardless of whatever label we each choose to call those policies, we're in accord that those policies are generally well-designed.
how would that work?

maybe you have a 1/6 chance of getting banned from the site for an hour forcing people to actually make conversation instead of just clicking "next"
While funny, I do find this depressing.
"LuaJIT's interpreter () beats V8's JIT compiler" - Mike Pall
Why photoshop when you can stage?
One bit of background that gets missed with Avatar is the military contractors are the low bidders and were using outdated military surplus.
no, in the long run you are playing against a known algorithm (assuming you've read the code), and so:

- in the case that it is a deterministic algorithm you should be able to win every hand

- in the case that the algorithm employs randomness then you should be able to win more than 50% of the time (unless the algorithm used is to employ completely random play in which case no matter what you play you will win exactly 50% of the time)
Watch carefully at around 1:15. When the camera comes is shot behind the designers, the envelop is not on the table. It is still in Derren's hand, as it should be. When the camera view switches to the one from behind Derren, the envelope (or whatever that is) is already seen to be on the table. Then it switches back to the view behind the designers, and he has it in his hand again and finally places it on the table. There's lots of other shading editing throughout.
Does the ‘Gifted’ Label Get In the Way of Developing Real Potential?
If you're using most modern web browsers, typing something into the address bar is almost equivalent to typing it into Google. Which, as another comment indicates, is probably where a lot of these hits are coming from.
Google's privacy challenge
Huh? That page contains nothing at all about Kennedy supposedly not knowing how to pull shopping carts apart.

(What it is is an anecdote of Ted Kennedy being boorish. But there has never been a shortage in that department, and it's not what was at issue here.)
One word answer from economics: externalities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Well it took ~200 years from when they first decided to adopt Christianity to the collapse of the commonwealth (if http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iceland#Commonwealth... is to be believed). I suspect the tiny population was a much bigger factor. The article doesn't even address the question of population size or density and the idea that you can freely scale up from a small agrarian society is a rather big assumption.

Mr Whiston mentions slavery in the context of working off a debt, implying that slavery was only a temporary condition, but in fact it seems to have been institutionalized in early Icelandic society. So I suppose this system is good if you are born into a family of free farmers, but if you happen to be the offspring of a slave you might not think it was such a hot proposition.

He makes much of the fact that the poor could sell their right of retribution to a chieftain with the economic or military wherewithal to enforce such a claim, but I fail to see how this is very different from a law firm taking a case on a contingency basis if they think there's clear evidence of a tort having been committed and the chance of a sufficient payout.
Yes, in a big organization, president usually is the head of a division, and the CEO is the overall head. In a startup it's more dubious. I guess the confusion comes in this case that the founder being the "president" but no specific CxO title. Usually when a new CEO comes in, the founder steps aside as CTO, COO, or something. President just sounds empty. Unless that's what it is, he has no real duty.
I'm kind of confused what it has to do with Hacker News in general.
You know, I've always noticed that busy people are always in a hurry. People tend to assume that the latter happens because of the former. But I've recently begun to believe that it's the other way around.
Having a college degree may improve your chances of getting funding
Anyone who thinks this isn't real, go and read some mentalism books. Derren's ebooks and audio books are especially interesting for beginners.

I was staggered at the practicality of many of their ideas. E.g. I now recognise when someone unwittingly is using hypnotic suggestion in a conversation and it doesn't have the effect it may have. I'm able to pretend to be psychic at parties, and can pull of some pretty good cold reading tricks as well now.

It's worth learning how to do memory palaces just for fun (one of Derren's audiobooks has this, which is a good beginner introduction).

If you don't think he's capable of tricks like this without cutscenes, there are some videos floating around of him performing tricks better than this on other top class magicians which couldn't have been faked. I suspect he claims he's doing illusions because it makes it seem less powerful than it really is, and makes us seem more in control than we really are.
I just flagged this, while funny it seems more at home at a place like digg. If there was some analysis about how this reflects changing technical norms or the change in demographics of users it would be interesting. As it is it's just "cheezburger" content.
I'm pretty sure that I read later that the event was staged.
The 'trick' to this guy's videos is that he's making the viewer believe it's true.
Gotta love how the only photo where he is smiling is where he is holding a bottle of vodka :)

http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bi...
Thank you for writing this, it's great food for thought, especially as you're under no obligation to either write it or to write to a particular level of detail.

Reading this was time well spent in the ongoing adjustment of my brain.
I keep noticing lately this kind of blogs: "I made millions without hard work from this simple passive-income scheme with just a small e-book..." etc.

I wonder who's making the REAL money. And what is he selling. These blogs are probably fabricated, but what's their point? Lots of people doing blogs and e-books about lots of niches? Only Google gains from that.

Or maybe lots of unhappy "entrepreneurs" looking for SEO tips? That's more like it...
Daylight Saving Time this weekend, like it or not
I have a good story about this market. A friend of mine is doing this and he bought a $20M portfolio of bad boat loans for less than 1/2 cent on the dollar. He closes on the portfolio and the next day gets a call from a bank in Texas that has repossessed a boat in the portfolio and wants to know his address so they can ship it to him. He tells them to sell the boat ASAP and send him the proceeds. The boat sells for more than he paid for the entire portfolio. There is some gold in this muck.

One word of caution on this is that to collect mortgage payments you have to be licensed as a bank in that state and some states have hefty penalties for illegal collection if you aren't.
Shrinking would give the right results, with line thicknesses proportionally smaller than regular caps. Keeping the same weight and squashing vertically would also give results that, although skewed, wouldn't have fatter lines that the originals.

Whether you label those techniques as 'fake' or not does not change that LaTeX and/or Metafont's displayed results are poorer than Word and OpenOffice in this aspect.
>In a stateless society, men are selected according to their ability. Status, money, power, and greed, everything that the advocates for a strong central government stand for are not prerequisites for leaders

I was unable to make any sense of this, or the rest of the final paragraph. Surely having money and power could help you to get a position of authority in a stateless society. E.g. by advertising, bribing, spending the money on popular philanthropic projects, etc. etc. The possibilities are endless.

(In fact, isn't it almost tautologically false to claim that power is "not a prerequisite" for being a leader? Leaders have power virtually by definition.)

And as far as "men" being selected based on their ability, why on earth should abolishing the state suddenly give everyone perfect judgement?
That video is really crazy -- and quite fun to watch!

I'm just not really sure if something like that is ok to do to a random person -- might cause a serious trauma...
Apple sells 51,000 total items through the Apple store since they started taking pre-orders for the iPad.
I spoke to my patent attorney about this some years ago, and he confirmed that this is indeed the case. Very often similar or identical patents are being filed within a very short timeperiod. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey's filing of the telephone patent is a good example.

They didn't have a name or a cause for it other than pocket philosophy, but it's a generally accepted truth that can be easily observed in their everyday work.
I was actually surprised this was written by Bertrand Russell because it sounds very much like a long winded blog post from 2010.

For a logician I see so many holes in the essay, from the false dichotomy of what work is, to the hand wavey assertions such as investment in enterprises which fail is basically throwing money into a furnace (that enterprise surely spent that money on something, whether it be employees, materials, contractors, etc).

There are always going to be people motivated to work more, work less, work in start ups, work in large enterprises, society gives you a bunch of options, including working four hour days if you want to pursue scientific endeavors.
Precisely. And furthermore, if someone's checkout process is confusing to a significant fraction of it's intended users, it's a bug, just as surely as if you forgot to close a set of braces.
The point is that it is actually fairly easy to trace information back to a user. People who are not familiar with this kind of data just don't realize how little you need to uniquely identify someone.

I am a little surprised to see that people who are generally uproar against companies not respecting privacy think it is perfectly ok to do it if it is for "science".

This is one of the big reasons why academics cannot release data BTW, especially in the social science: anonymizing data almost inherently means destroying valuable information.
Was the Korean War not widely remembered in the 1960s?

The author talks as if he'd never heard of the place before, and apparently needed to research the war.

Says something interesting about the current news cycle if true.
It's doubly funny when you look at the difference between "use knowledge to make an age-reversing potion" which follows with "use knowledge to build flux capacitor"
XeTeX: A modern LaTeX with proper OpenType and Unicode support