skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally I don't think the filtering will ever become law. The Australian govt are pandering to a single evangelical senator (Steven Fielding) who's vote is critical in getting a lot of their legislation passed. My guess is that they're holding out filtering as a carrot to get other things through. They know it'll be blocked by the other parties if it ever comes to a vote so they don't have to worry about it.

[Edit] Yes, it is embarrassing all the same!
But the upside: Apocalyptic scenarios in general give lots of options for plot and character development and interaction.

That's kinda what I was aiming at, plus on the upside, one can generate lots of zombie models randomly fairly quickly and use scripts to animate their shambling.

What I'd want out of a zombie movie is some focus on some character development and the filmmaker resisting the temptation to have the "dumb, defiant, big-boobed blond girl who doesn't listen to the leader and thus gets impaled on a fence and eaten"

Well one of the things I'm looking at is producing episodic web content, so character development (and subsequent demise) is on the agenda. I'm pulling a lot of influence from the Band of Brother's series in that respect.

My beef with zombie movies is that they're usually cliche, and are going for "cheap scares" first and foremost. Often they're punctuated by gore for the sake of gore,

Yeah, I'm trying to judge what people's expectations on blood are.

Thanks for your comments mate, really appreciated.
The article mentions a twitter account with no link to it. Can anybody provide that?
Seriously. I ran a little experiment back one high school summer when I had a helium tank laying around and was bored/curious to know how far your typical lost-to-the-sky "Walmart" helium balloon would travel.

I launched about 50 balloons of varying inflation levels and groups (i.e. 1,2, and 3 balloons) and attached ribbons to them and tied laminated index cards with a numeric-ID and my email address.

I ended up getting a few responses and I believe one of the single balloons traveled over 76 miles before setting down in someone's backyard. The average was something like 50 miles, and that was on a warm night with <5mph wind.
"I really doubt I would have enough in common to be attracted to a high school student" - definitely not emotionally attracted, but physically, I would guess there are many who would be, judging by the preponderance of such scenarios in commercial porn.
Oh, woops! Misread TextEdit for TextMate! That said, I find that Wordpad is a fantastic simplistic tool for creating school papers. For Linux I tend to use the slightly more complex (yet still very clean) LyX.
I love these photos!

http://www.austin360.com/calendar/mediahub/media/slideshow/i...
I like the idea that if a company is too big to be allowed to fail, then it's to big to be allowed to exist. After we recover, possibly if, companies like AIG that are single points of failure need to be broken up.

I don't know if this is practical or not, but what if future regulation were aimed at limiting the total size/amount of money/whatever that a company is allowed to own with the goal of keeping risk distributed enough so that we wouldn't fear letting bad companies fail?

They'd also have to monitor board membership and stock ownership to ensure you didn't end up with hundreds of companies being virtually one giant company behind the scenes all following the same bad policies.

I'd imagine this isn't all that dissimilar to dealing with monopolies. Too little competition is bad and now we've learned that allowing any single point of failure is just as bad.

As all hackers know, single points of failure are risky, even if a crash is unlikely. Our economies load needs to be better distributed.
I do like both to be honest, the shambling ones I like because it looks very well done in large packs of zombies. Also I do understand why people use the enhanced reflex ones, because they can use those traits to startle an audience effectively.

Personally, from a startup perspective, I'd be more inclined to go with a shambling type zombie, purely because keyframing the animation can be achieved fairly effectively with python scripts and then motions adjusted with bezier curves on an individual basis.

Doing more with less basically.

Also, stylistically I think the whole "tortoise and the hare" effect with fast protagonists and slow moving, shambling antagonists is quite amusing.
Netbook, tablet and refrigerator magnet in one, running Linux
But you can't just depend on where it's downloaded, you'd simply manually download everything to your cache folder just to be technically not breaking the law.

Obviously, I think people who like child porn are bad; however, I can't help but think all these attempts to prevent it is just pissing in the wind. You simply cannot filter information that people, however misguided, want to trade with each other. They will find a way around any system you attempt to put in place.

Haven't everyone figured this out yet by watching all the failed attempts at killing mp3 sharing? Information wants to be free. You just can't stop people from communicating.
The United States has been most conspicuous for one trait: manic energy
shaun of the dead, evil dead, dellamorte dellamore, dawn of the dead (only cliche because it created the cliches)
The selection bias present in this data makes it pointless for the purposes of a profitable entertainment project. You are better off going to your local middle school and having the 8th grade math class run the survey for you.
My pleasure - as for gore, it depends on the audience. I greatly enjoy international films, and personally think that less gore makes it much more effective as a tool - take a look at Japanese horror on one extreme, and compare it to a Schwarzenegger movie. In Total Recall, a guy gets a pipe stuck through his head, and it has no effect on the audience. But it was what was - a fun, man's man action movie. If you produce for intelligent people, you can potentially get a lot of hardcore and intelligent fans. But that means needing to break from the formulas and execute well, neither of which are easy. The mass market stuff works for the mass market of course - so have a think on what you're going for. Maybe take a look at some enthusiast forums or communities - that'd be a smart place to first promote yourself. What are their expectations? What do they like? You can always sell out to the mass market later once you get popular :)
Get Out and Market, Here's a Sure Fire Strategy
I just thought I’d share a quick strategy for everybody out there that worked very well for a company I’ve been consulting with.

FIRST : Define what you are an expert in and how that correlates to your start-up. It’s crucial to be INTERESTING – what knowledge do you have that others would be entertained by, but feeds back into your startup solving a challenge? Doing something better / faster?

SECOND : Contact blogs in your target market category and ask nicely to guest blog, use http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/ or http://www.alltop.com or http://www.blogcatalog.com to find bloggers. Just fill out their “contact us” forms, but write each one personally.

THIRD: Write a 3 – 4 paragraph “article” giving your unique take on the problem you’re working on solving. Point out a flaw and how you’re working to correct it. Don’t be OVERTLY selling your company, but don’t let anybody miss the point that your start-up is solving that problem.

RESULTS:
Our contact to post rate was for each 10 emails we got ~2 rejections, ~5 ignores, ~3 successes.
For each success we wrote a unique article. Same content, written for each audience specially though.

You now have PR friendly inbound links.

You now have curious visitors in your target market.

And if you’re lucky somebody truly useful will notice and repost.
I wish people wouldn't make these sorts of arguments, because they're short-term ones, and don't get the real point across. Whether it technically won't work, or whether it will slow down the internet aren't the real issues, because someday, it technically will work and won't slow down the internet.

The real argument to make is that this is wrong because censorship is wrong, and because this is the thin end of the wedge of tyranny. It always starts with child porn or terrorism, because everyone hates terrorists and pedophiles. Once the government gets the capability, they just start taking more and more. Even this article talks about blocking anti-abortion websites. Abortion is one of the most important social issues today, and they're saying that we can't argue against the government position on the internet? How will we ever make progress as a society if we can't talk about anything different than what we are doing today?
HTC's CEO Says there will be at least 3 new Android devices this year
Is a digital animation studio a startup?

It doesn't really have a huge scaling potential does it? Your output is constrained by your animation stable surely.

The closest analogue to a breakaway product or hot patent would be a hugely popular IP, but you don't need to be a studio to develop a property.

Perhaps you intend to develop animation productivity tools and the studio provides the opportunity to dogfood. That kind of software still has headroom I guess.

As an animator/programmer I'd be very interested in an animation suite that could do what emacs/vim does for my text editing.
Ask HN: What was the first URL you saw in the wild?
With the WWW recently celebrating it's 20th anniversary I was thinking back to the first time I saw a URL on a commercial, advertisement, etc. It was definitely a McDonald's TV commercial probably around 1996. Do you remember your first URL?
Funny, though it would be funnier if applied to Windows Mobile and not an Apple product... I mean, Apple products are kind of the anti-clippy, or at least that's how they're known, no?
This was more than four decades ago. Can you imagine what they're doing today?

The world is a strange place.

30 years ago, you could fly from New York to Paris in 3.5 hours (Concorde). Now it takes more than 7. You'd think technology would always move forward, but apparently that's not the case. If something is good enough, that might be good enough forever. Depressing.
Well, FF 3.1 (or 3.5, whatever) will have an improved tabbing system, including the ability to drag tabs out of the window to create new windows, etc, but they will still lack the inherent feature that, IMO, makes Chrome a real innovator: per-tab processes. That's really the single-biggest feature that I would love to see in Firefox.

If not for a few must-have plugins that keep me coming back to Firefox, and of course the lack of Linux support, I would have switched to Chrome the moment it came out on that single feature alone.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520341

?
The local ISP's website, and Altavista I guess.
I'm an enormous fan of Simon Pegg as a writer. He wrote an incredible article in defense of zombies and convinced me a lot. (His article was actually about how the slow model of zombie is the only worthwhile kind.) And Edgar Wright is a brilliant director: Shaun of the Dead is a very scary movie at the same time as it's incredibly hilarious.

That said, I'd love to compare it to Night of the Living Dead. I'm just scared that it'll be a letdown.
Oh No! God forbid we call something for what it is.

"Evil (n) - that which causes harm or destruction or misfortune"

It isn't all abuse? Oh, well, fine, I'm so glad that is cleared up because some sick fuck says that "its not all abuse". I can't wait for my kids to hear "Not all methamphetamine will cause you harm" from a speed freak. That logic makes infinite sense.

Whether you like it or not, Evil most certainly exists in this world, regardless of whether or not there is a reason that it came in to existence.

So, there you go, even though you don't feel comfortable labeling something for what it clearly is, feel free to label this post with a down vote.
One of my professors, at an ivy league school no less, mentioned how he thinks admissions would get the same quality student body if they admitted every fifth candidate, as long as they didn't tell anyone they were doing things that way. I'm inclined to agree.
Ditto, per process tabs are something that someone should have thought of a long time ago. As soon as they drop a Linux version I'm switching.
I see not reason to think that Twitter won't maintain its monopoly for the exact same reason.

What monopoly? Facebook has more people posting status updates and more sources of revenue...
The problem with your thinking is that you assume Google really cares about how many Chrome users it has.

I'm sure that the Chrome team would be absolutely stoked to have a lot of users, but strategically, it simply doesn't matter. The goal here is to advance the state of the art in browsers. Performance, stability, and security (in terms of process isolation) were and still are lacking in all other browsers compared to Chrome. This is very much about pushing the state of the web, not about gaining market share. Google Chrome delivers in this regards.
Wordpad is really good, but it lacks the wow factor of TextEdit (which I'm slightly addicted to).

I've never used LyX; forgive me if this is a dumb question, but is it available for Ubuntu? I might boot up a virtual machine and give it a try if so.
Intro to Load Balancing for Developers - How They Work
As I recall, the bleeding-edge Safari, Firefox, and Chrome JS engines are all pretty competitive. IE and Opera are behind in public, but Opera is writing a new engine. The multiprocess structure and UI are the only real advantages Chrome has left from my point of view.
Google pushed dozens of patches transparently in the background. My understanding is that you could have every different tab running a different version if you kept them open over long periods of time.

The video-related crashes totally disappeared for me within the first month of use. The Gmail related crashes disappeared shortly after that. I haven't seen it crash since and I use it almost exclusively.
As I understand it - it was actually ONLY the specific page on wikileaks that is actually blocked. So just linking to the Top Domain is not blocked yet. See here for a major news org linking to wikileaks: http://www.smh.com.au/news/home/technology/banned-hyperlinks...

From the political side - this is likely (hopefully) a bit of a dead duck. Kevin Rudd (and the Labour Party) have the majority in the lower house (the House of Reps) - but don't have that in the upper house (Senate). To get through the Senate - Labour needs either the support of the Liberal Party (who are our 'right-wing' major party) - OR the support of The Greens (5 senators), Steve Fielding (from the 'Family First' party) and the one Independant (Nick Xenophon). The Greens and the Liberals have some out against this policy, as has Nick Xenophon. So unless something dramatic changes - then this wont pass the Senate.

We've also got the ridiculous lack of classification of R rated games. So games like GTA IV can't get released here (without being modified).

All that being said - I've been giving some thought to this.. If I import a package, bring home a suitcase, etc - it may get inspected (either based on a suspicion or on random screening). Can I get some wisdom from the HN crowd - how is random screening / occasional screening of Packets logically or legally different to this? Obviously there are technical problems - but I can't see a logical difference.

Another thought on our Internet access - it's slow and we all have download caps (usually with shaping after that - occasionally with extra charges) Parrt of this is our major telco (Telstra) dragging their feet - but large parts are the fact that theres only so many cables linking us to the rest of the world...

So what's so good about Australia? Good weather, great beaches, banks that aren't bankrupt, friendly people... :D
Stupid question or retarded question: Which is this?
"of" != "from"
There was a grammatical ambiguity in my sentence. I think we would be better off with a regulated internet than with no internet.
Hmm, the great firewall of Australia?
Best of Altgate.com
seems to work for North Korea.
I found a similar balloon in a tree once. It had been launched at a birthday party for an 85 year old woman and travelled about 250 kms.

We launched thousands of baloons with index cards, once a year, in primary school but I never received a reply from any of mine.

It's definitely fun though!
here's my algorithm:

1) first assume that no upsets will occur

2) then apply the upset rule to all brackets and to the final games.

upset rule:

- teams from the east beat teams from the north and midwest (2 seed points)

- teams from the south beat teams from the west (1 seed point)

YMMV
I like Action Zombie films, like Resident Evil (Milla doesn't hurt either), and don't really like Horror Zombie films (or really most Horror films)
How will you choose a subject?
The thing I love about zombies is coming up with clever ways of dealing with them. Think about it: the zombies have a numerical advantage, and sometimes decent speed, but they're idiots. Humans have brains, a base of operations that'll be safeish for a while, and a bunch of abandoned hardware lying around. It's like "Junkyard Wars", but spiced up with the living dead.

Also, the single best zombie variety I've seen come from Zombie Hunters: http://www.thezombiehunters.com/

They've got the zombies set up almost like social insects: a vast majority of slow lumbering, easy-to-animate ones, plus a few special zombies to spice things up a little. Like the zombies that can spit acid. And infected people don't turn into zombies until they die of natural causes. This doesn't give you the opportunity for "kill your lived one before he turns" moments, but I'm kind of sick of those; they strike me as cheap.

Best of luck in your project. I look forward to seeing what you make!
> The current owner will provide written instructions on how he earned $100K in a year to the new owner.

LIMITED OFFER: Buy snake oil instructions for growing your own snake oil business.
Looks like the hackers don't understand that Hacker News is a nice hack altogether.
The zombie TV series "Dead Set" really drew me in, though it did prompt Simon Pegg to write scathingly about its use of "fast-moving" zombies, instead of the traditional shuffling kind (as mentioned by unalone above). Which I kind of agree with. Still, brilliant series made with a small budget.
28 Days Later is the best Zombie movie I've seen. It could stand up to a film-class analysis, on top of its scariness. The "sequel" was terrible, though.

Runner up, for me, would be Dawn of the Dead (2004). Resident Evil isn't bad, either.
Sure is, it's in the repo so "sudo apt-get install lyx" should grab it.

It's also available for Windows/OS X so you might be better off just trying it on your primary OS.

http://www.lyx.org/

I don't think you're going to find the kind of simplicity you enjoy in TextEdit though.

Personally I use text-editors e.g. vim, for every kind of writing I do, code or not.

Plaintext formats like http://eleanor.rubyforge.org/ (for screenplays) and Taskpaper (for planning/todo lists) are really helpful for this sort of thing.
David Brooks seems like a priest here, signaling to the herds of traumatized readers the way forward is the road that has gotten us here.
One more thing. And this is the idea that helped explain how this stuff worked.

If a school's admitting X kids, you have to completely forget about that number. That number is meaningless. There's a certain percentage of X that's just spoken for. There are kids you have to admit to keep the school running and to meet all its institutional needs. Once you figure out how many kids that is, subtract that from the number of kids you're supposedly admitting. THAT number is your actual class size, the number of kids who get admitted by the full process, being pitted against one another.

I found my job made a lot more sense once I told myself I was working to admit X-Y kids rather than just X kids. So when you hear about how low the admission rates are, realize that in reality, they're significantly lower due to so many spots being claimed in each class by legacies, minorities, athletes, geniuses, politicians kids, potential big donors etc. These kids don't face the same process as everyone else.
Broken record...

If the question is php vs rails. You aren't comparing apples to apples. Rails is a framework and php is a language. If you are gonna use PHP without a framework, you might consider using Rails to get your project done faster. This is assuming you have no experience with either language.

I would argue for Ruby, despite its drawbacks. It will teach you to be a better programmer IMO. You might also consider Python, which I love and adore.
>"I don't know if this is practical or not, but what if future regulation were aimed at limiting the total size/amount of money/whatever that a company is allowed to own with the goal of keeping risk distributed enough so that we wouldn't fear letting bad companies fail?"

Interestingly, during the Great Depression there existed laws which limited the number of branches that banks could have. Politicians preferred to keep banks small, fearing the power of larger banks. You see, anti-capitalism and a populist distaste for financiers are nothing new.

Perhaps surprisingly, states that forced banks to be small were the hardest hit by bank failures in the Depression. The tiny, unthreatening banks did not have the margin of error to wait out the financial chaos. Meanwhile, places like Canada that allowed large national banking conglomerates avoided bank failures almost entirely.

Our recent crisis was very different from the Great Depression. Contrary to the 1930s, scale was often a vulnerability, and not an asset. However, the example of the Great Depression ought to drive home to us the danger of optimizing to the last crisis, lest we precipitate a new one in our rashness.

There is also danger in drawing simple, neat lessons from a messy crisis. Scale was not always our enemy. We must remember that several private firms were bailed out, not by public dollars, but by private acquirers. Wachovia's sale to Wells Fargo would have been legal under many of the world's regulatory regimes, and it was legal in the 2008 United States, but it would not have been legal in the 1998 United States when we still had anti-scale laws on the books. If those regulations were still in place, at least a few more large firms would have been at the government's door, hat in hand.

Populism is politically fruitful, but it can wreak havoc on an economy, and it is almost never thoughtful or well-informed. We ought to pause before giving in to its mellifluous rhetoric.
I second your choices. I love the apocalyptic zombie movies. They have a kind of Red Dawn feel to em (which I also love).

This is also why I liked I am Legend to a lesser degree.

28 Days later seems like the best to imitate. Done on a fairly low budget I believe and came out great.
Firefox (and all other mozilla browsers) can't even have multiple processes sharing the same profile period. It's ridiculously lame.
I love the hell out of zombie movies but unless you're really going to do something unique it may end up being too cliche. I second the advice on just using another variation on the post-apocalyptic setting.
I'd be curious what you think about some NYC Upper East Side parents who think getting into the right pre-school determines the fate of their progeny for getting into an Ivy League..
Talk to the tax man (or woman)
Listen. You need to read the comic book "The Walking Dead." It's an ongoing, episodic story about zombie's taking over the world. It's well-written. It's well-drawn. It's been published for over 5 years. If you're looking for source material or just want to see someone do episodic zombies "right" look no further.
Oh, thanks. :)

I personally never thought TechCrunch to have that great of reading material. For me HN, proggit, /. and a few blogs do it (Coding Horror, Zuckerman's "My Heart's in Africa", etc.). I hope I'm not missing on much else.