skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aside from distribution, marketing and screen availability (national/city quotas for Hollywood movies) in some countries, until digital distribution started to roll out in North America, EU, Japan and other countries the biggest limiting factor was the physical film itself. As in the movie was actually distributed on physical film and local overseas distributors did not want to pay for extra copies to be printed, when waiting for a few months (and reducing their own costs of showing the movie), they could obtain the used prints from North America.

While a movie would premiere on 1,000-1,500 screens in the US/Canada on its opening weekend, until some of those screens stopped showing and internal US/Canada distribution was done with most of those physical copies of the movie, the movie could not be distributed overseas for a reduced cost, which incidentally increased the studio's profit.
http://www.glassdoor.com
Here's a project: write a research paper. This paper accounts for 2/3rds this semester's English grade; in other words, it's the major learning objective of the class this semester.

What we're going to do is, here's a project rubric. It breaks the research paper into a series of steps. You make little cards for sources. You organize the cards to "brainstorm". Your turn your brainstorm into an outline. And so on. You're going to follow all these steps, and most of our class time will be spent with you working on these steps and then me, the teacher, evaluating your progress on the steps.

In the end, your grade will be 50% based on the outcome of the paper, and 50% based on your timely adherence to the rubric.

What's wrong with this teaching method?

It prioritizes the "research process" in the assessment, but does not actually explain what the research process is or why it works that way. It presumes that standing up in class spending 5-10 minutes saying "here's why we make little cards, so we can brainstorm" provides adequate context so that combined going through and following the steps, students are learning a research process. That it allows for no other alternatives to the process of organizing a paper is of secondary concern; the primary concern is, it doesn't sell the process, it simply mandates and then grades on it.

An alternative method to teach the research process: have the students pick a research topic and then write a paper on it without following a formal process. Evaluate the papers; they're poorly organized, they don't make coherent points, they lack sourcing, their sources are inadequate, &c. Now do another paper, focusing on how the research process is a corrective for the flaws in the first paper.

This seems strictly better than "You didn't turn in a printed outline in the correct format before handing in a fully cited first and then final draft of the research paper. 50 points on the paper. 10 points on the process. C- for you."

This example extends to every other process-focused assignment I've seen my kid deal with in school: "here's an ambitious outcome, here's a rigidly specified process, and here's a grading system that assesses each individually". This is a great scheme for teaching smart kids why not to take "process" seriously.

I am 1000% sure you do things better than this. This is a message board. Everyone is always the exception to the rule.
Alzheimer's brain plaques 'rapidly cleared' in mice
Best smartphones comparison. Compare smartphones reviews and ratings
Napster was centralized, Gnutella was (is?) decentralized.
Successful Business Tips on How does the Forex Currency work?
Python logging best practices
Yes, I was surprised to see the old one posted here when this new fancy version has recently been made. It has at least twice as many things, and lots of educational text when you click them (although I think he got bored writing them after a point.) The science is more on point than the old one too.
and here I was hoping they were stunt flying it.
Studying hard in university does not help. I scored 88/100 (a very high mark) in my algorithms course at university.

If you ask me if I know <X> algorithm I'll almost definitely say "No". If you ask me in an interview to implement "<Y>" I'll ask you to describe it to me. There's just too many different algorithms and its hard to remember all the names for all the algorithms. I can almost always just use google to find the algorithm on the internet and implement it from pseudo code or something.

When I can't use google it means I'm in an interview...

Sometimes I jokingly tell myself "I'm a software engineer, not a computer scientist!".
مي زيادة
Namely: none of them have taken the time to learn about what a completely detestable theocratic proto-fascist Guy Fawkes was
In the sense of matter distribution, the universe isn't homogeneous on small scales either. But that's not what is meant in the context of a cosmological model. The global spacetime is modeled with a FLRW metric, whose key property is homogeneity and isotropy.
This flight got up to 42,000 feet if you look at the elevation graph. I didn't know planes flew that high.
A 19 hour flight? How was this even possible without running out of fuel?
I haven't looked at the route that Flightaware provides yet, but there are a LOT of defined navigational fixes and standard routes between these fixes. Its possible the crew simply assembled a series of fixes (and standard routes) to get the desired shape.

Enroute charts tend to look a lot more like a US highway map than an Interstate system map.
You are correct. CocoaPods uses MacRuby to read/write Xcode project files.
[edit: Not sure why the downvote, since I was just trying to clarify concepts. "Literate programming" was invented and clearly defined by Don Knuth, and it muddies the water to suggest that merely doing good comments is a "literate programming style". Good commenting should be part of every programming "style", and literate programming does not primarily focus on "good commenting", focus is on two concepts described in Wikipedia article below, (1) tangling" of a primary source into machine-compilable form and (2) "weaving" of a primary source into print-formatted form suitable for human understanding.]

Merely having "English narrative" does not get you to literate programming. You can call it a "literate programming style", which is fine, but it's important to understand what true "literate programming" actually requires:

'Literate programming tools are used to obtain two representations from a literate source file: one suitable for further compilation or execution by a computer, the "tangled" code, and another for viewing as formatted documentation, which is said to be "woven" from the literate source.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

Tools like Javadoc are related to the second part of literate programming above, and allow for creating some formatted documentation from source code. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javadoc ) They don't get you all of the second part of a literate "woven" program, though, which includes text with all of the source of a program in a format suitable to be read like a book or literary essay.

Tools like Javadoc also have absolutely nothing to do with the first idea in literate programming (above), which is to have an ultimate source document where code is organized and presented in manner best suitable for human understanding, not in manner that's tailored for machine compilation (e.g., for machine-compilation the code may need to be separated into different units or files, whereas in literate source that would not be done unless it were an aid to understanding).

All that is not to say that trying to be a little more "literate" with comments in regular source code is not a good thing. But it's important to understand that "literate programming" is a clearly defined practice that requires much more than good-quality commenting.
You're welcome -- I'm glad to hear my comment was helpful.

I hope to see you apply to a future batch!
Iran cuts off Internet access
Altitude is determined by direction in alternating chunks of 1000ft. So, say, southbound traffic flies at 29000, then 30000 is westbound, 31k north, 32k east, and then 33 is southbound again.

So at cruising altitudes every airspace can accommodate travel in any direction... the controllers along the way probably didn't even realize that anything out of the ordinary was happening except for talking to a Boeing callsign (as opposed to the call sign of one of the major airlines that typically operate flights at this altitude, Boeing operates its own "airline" in the regulatory sense just for test flights).
It's great to see them do something interesting while they're already in the air burning time/fuel on the new engine testing. The test flight would have occurred for the same duration regardless of the path. They needed a flight that was about 19 hours long for extended operation certification purposes.
WTF? Completely unreadable.
Announcing JavaScript License Web Labels
Alas, I don't have any personal experience with hiring a VA - I've just listened to Rob Walling talk about them a lot.

I've used oDesk several times though for other things and it works fairly well. My suggestion is to write up a short "test" project and hire out five or six competent looking VAs. Give them a hard deadline (two hours tops, etc) and see who completes the job in a satisfactory manner.

Some will totally suck, some will never get back to you, and a few will be awesome. If your entire group sucks, ditch them and move on to a new group of candidates.

Once you find someone that is good and in your price range, give them a larger task and see how it goes.
Is it possible to create a decent game in 1 weekend?
We’ve always wanted to participate in one of those 48-hour game development contests, but have never quite been able to get our schedules to coincide with one. After missing a local contest just a week or so ago, we decided enough is enough, we’d simply do our own.
An empty plane is pretty light so it burns less fuel, AND because they don't have passengers and cargo counting against their MTOW (maximum takeoff weight) they can take off with more fuel.

Most planes don't leave topped-off - they leave with the right amount of fuel to hit the maximum takeoff weight given that day's load.
In some countries that are absolutely poor, it is entirely common to have the local mob recruiter look for young talented kids that they can bring into their organization. They make them an offer when the kids are out begging for change or something like "we'll take care of your mom and make sure she doesn't break her legs if you come and get an education in our school, we might even pay you."

The youngster ends up in basically a run-down warehouse full of other kids each taught how to look for basic exploits like mysql injection or use root kits, and they sit around and do this all day.

This is why some countries are typically COEs for hacking, such as Russia with crimeware kits, and until recently Brazil for bank hacking.

This is also why you need coordinated efforts of special agents armed with assault rifles to clean out some spam-mills sometimes (they're taking them away from some mob).

What I've described is a bit outmoded, typically this behavior is turning into other things such as this: http://abh-news.com/cybercrime-china-hackers-training-camp-c... as well as the makers of exploit scripts are just getting better and recruiting these kids doesn't make sense any more... you can intelligently scan for millions of sites using phpmyadmin and automatically run your exploit with it.

As with any crime you find the trends all over the map: not all robberies are mob related, not all of them aren't, some of them are more elaborate than others, etc.
> I didn't know planes flew that high.

Well, it is a test flight of a brand-new plane. Also, some "planes" can go as high as they want in the atmosphere, even up to space (kinda).
Wes is a rockstar
All thanks to the Germans, because it was Siemens who gave the mullahs their internet toys...
This seems like a waste of fuel for a stupid publicity stunt. Airplanes dump so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Similar attempts:

Gulfstream V: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/GLF17/history/20070206/15...

Cessna Logo: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N750CX/history/20080307/1...

Boeing 747: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/BOE523/history/20110802/1...

Also, a thread from one of the pilots: http://flightaware.com/squawks/view/1/7_days/popular/24611/B...

Interestingly, this required a lot of work on our side to pull this off. Since the route field on flights plans expects short input and this flight's route is dramatically longer, it caused an FAA system to split the flight arbitrarily into different legs.

(Disclaimer: I work for FlightAware)
Study confirms BitTorrent piracy doesn't affect US box office ticket sales
A Founder's Framework for Understanding When It's Time to Move On
$10 is not enough money for them to care so they just ban you and move on. It's bullshit, IMO, but unless you are making them much more, they will not care.
This is a myth. Or more precisely, a mmaped region no longer in use will be unmapped whenever the JVM feels like it (which can, of course, be never). Try running the loop:

long size = 0;
while (size >= 0) {
size += Files.map(veryBigFile).capacity();
}

You will see that VSIZE grows to be very big, but will decrease in size whenever the JVM runs the finalizers for the mmaped regions. Adding System.gc() to the loop makes the VSIZE stay constantly low on my machine, proving that at least my JVM (build 1.6.0_29-b11-402-11D50b on a mac) will unmap the underlying regions (JVM is allowed to ignore System.gc()).
10 poorly chosen Ruby gem names
How do you know if you're an Over-Engineer?
Would you prefer they tested it with passangers?
If it were just a publicity stunt, I might agree with you. But they have to use up the fuel in a test flight anyway. It's not like they can go up for 20 minutes and say "all good" and end the test.
Given the finding that piracy demonstrably affects foreign returns, and that the researchers found no correlation to domestic returns, I think the article headline and interpretation is inaccurate. Not finding evidence is not the same as finding there's no effect, particularly when you've just found evidence of a related effect.
pg and dhh need to have a proper one on one debate. I'd love to see that!
I think Kickstarter is the most interesting thing happening on the net today. Simply because it aggregates the most interesting things happening in the real world, by its very nature. Browsing Kickstarter has actually become a fun activity for me.

It's such a simple and genius way of directly connecting producers and consumers, reducing risk for both parties, verifying ideas, creating relationships. So elegant. The number of opportunities this is going to enable is staggering. And Kickstarter themselves, do they have any overhead? These guys are going to be printing money.

And being a patron is fun!

One thing I'm curious about is Kickstarter's exposure to someone who fails to produce the promised rewards for funding. As a funder/patron, do I have any recourse for a producer failing to uphold their end of the bargain?
I actually posted this about 16 hours ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3574619) and I point this out because it's always fascinating to me when the "right" time to post something on different sites is.

For example, I believe days start at 8pm PST on Flickr (can anyone correct me if I'm mistaken) and there's a power-user perspective that will wait to post things so that they can get a leg up on the "interestingness" algorithm.

Anyhow, this post makes me smile even the second time around.
Vive la Différence: Why American Kids Are Brats
America's Next Top Engineer: She Needs Your Role Models
They were going to be in the air for 19 hours as a test flight anyways. Who cares what the path looks like?

There's being environmentally conscious, and then there's being a green freak.
Storing binary data in memory and not explaining what it is to the Boehm GC with one of the macros they supply is the easiest way to fall down. Since "fairly arbitrary" binary data can be encoded as UTF-8 strings (many 32-bit binary codes cannot be a part of a UTF-8 string, but most can) you need to mark strings as non-pointer data too, which people are not always good about doing. If you do things correctly (that is, mark your blobs of arbitrary data properly) then it's reasonably good but of course most people don't and it runs counter to the idea that Boehm is a drop-in replacement.

This isn't Boehm's fault, specifically; any conservative GC would have similar trouble. You can't get completely away from cooperating with the GC and have good GC both.
Most of those pictures seem to be OWS related. Some of them are clearly Tea Party, though.

And to answer your question, because the Tea Party seemed to be all about being American and Fawkes was not only British but also Catholic. I guess pop culture helps.
They're already here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577583
Posted here many many times already:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1835460

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953919

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261816
Excellent point! I have to try harder to not fall victim to the fallacy of post hoc.
They're available under a CC license here -> http://www.designforfun.com/facebookposters/

I'm assuming you can't buy them anywhere else, since the license is non-commercial.
Rated range of the 787 is 15,700km. Actual flight 16,750km (10,408 sm) over 19 hours!
19 hours and not over water which constrains them quite a bit. If they're going to run laps around the continental United States, why not make it fun?
Kickstarter continues to prove that good ideas spread quickly. Where websites show viral growth in user visits, kickstart shows it with real dollars for real products. Very inspiring. Thanks for sharing this post- it lets the community get an insider view of the excitement.
Thank you: https://github.com/raganwald/cafeaulife/issues/20
Newark - Singapore (Singapore Airlines Flight 20) is regularly scheduled for 18hrs and 50mins.

Wikipedia has a good list of long, regularly scheduled, non-stop flights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-stop_flight#Currently_sched...

EDIT: Flight is SQ21, not SQ20
Stanford StartX Demo Day
My bad for getting the name of the book wrong. I thought of it as PAIP for so long I forget what the actual name is :) Great book though, even for those not especially interested in AI or Lisp
Companies without VC funding also fail. They may fail at a higher rate than companies with VC funding. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case, because you have to be pretty good at whatever you do to raise a series A round. So even if VCs didn't help the companies they funded at all, the companies they fund might do better than the ones they don't.

Instead of simply assuming that one of two equally plausible alternatives is true, it would be useful if David tried looking at the world and trying to figure out which actually is true. I'm not asking for a scientific study. It would be a start just to find an industry where some participants are VC funded and some aren't, and then look at how they each fared.
Webinar Series: Introduction to Data Advertising
Is there a post/tutorial/anything that explains the best practices in customizing and/or extending these apps into our own projects, using or not using pinax?

Should we create new apps that subclass parts that we want to extend?
Massively reduced weight without passengers and cargo, maybe?
Kim Jong-ul to receive an unordered list of successors. They may lean on Kim Jong-em
The reason, at least in my own personal experience, is that you really don't know what you don't know.

If there was a place to learn everything there is to know about hosting a site yourself, then that would help. Even better if it was easily accessible, trustworthy, and simple to understand. And more so if it displayed proof that you only need minutes to diagnose and fix the most common problems.
Programming Paradigms and Expressive Power
It's not about supply and demand? It's about transparency? It's about "funding stage" ?

I don't get it.
Steve Blank releases updated book
I wonder if there are certain UI lessons to be learned from other payments startups out there. It would also be interesting to know more about where Sahil gets his inspiration from and how he picked up design over time as a self-taught guy.
A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem
My comment was serious. They have to test the plane, why not fly around in a pattern that is interesting?
THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF WOMEN
Blakeri aka Marta Dahlig is a Polish digital illustrator. She is one of the most popular deviantArt contributor. Check out her Seven Deadly Sins series down here.
Right, I guess I assumed that any manufacturing plan of items put up to KickStarter would include considering mass production and sourcing options in case of major success. But just this morning I had a conversation with an inventor who would be similarly unprepared so this has been helpful to understand.
Looks like the app is breathtaking.. if you happen to be near a breathtaking landscape.. but then again, any ugly app would look breathtaking if pointed to the same landscape.
I've noticed a lot of people do the exact same thing with Powerpoint presentations. Each slide tells the audience exactly what you are going to say and so there is really no point for you to be there. Good presenters put things on their slides that are in addition to what they say so that the slides tend not to make sense without the presenter.
On very large scales, the Universe does seem to be isotropic and homogenous, just like the assumption in the models is.
Dustin, I totally agree with you that the current system is whack. Glacial adoption of W3C standards has a real cost on developers and users, and ends up with rounded corners taking 16 lines of CSS, and gradient fills taking 8.

I don't think that we'll be better off just by making the current process "go faster," though.

There needs to be some proper vetting of features. You'd want to avoid the tyranny of the monied interests. It can't just be Apple/Microsoft/Google making the decisions about what goes in and what doesn't -- even though they're going to shoulder the cost on the user-agent side to implement the feature.

It might just be as simple as leaving the current ecosystem as it is, looking at the adoption rate and success of a given construct, and folding those into the "living" spec (without the prefix, of course) -- and just do this process on a regular, fairly frequent interval, like every 6 months.
We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

I never got this. It sounds catchy, but, holding a grudge forever sounds like a horrific way to live.
Anonymous Takes Down CIA Web Site
Really interesting point, but since kickstarters aren't technically obligated to offer their product as an incentive, it would be pretty simple to get around that without messing with pricing by just saying 'first N backers get a widget' (though, this in itself does also require the foresight to consider your scenario).
I think it would be valuable for a number of reasons to have a community of researchers and research-funders rather than a general community of people that need money and people that want to give money away. The main reason being that it would make it more likely for experts to frequent the site and spend money (i.e. researchers could subscribe to a field of interest to get updates on new projects).

Also, I think the incentives would have to be different than current crowdfunding sites -- in some cases I think it would need to be donation based (which e.g. Kickstarter doesn't support).
They're demonstrating that it's practically impossible for an average person to NOT run afoul of copyright law during natural everyday activities.