skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Save the Cat" may be popular, but the idea of breaking down the three-act structure for screenplays has been around for a while. I took a screenwriting class that had a similar template that was taught to UCLA screenwriters who have then taught it to others. Wikipedia has a page on the three-act structure as it relates to screenplays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure

I like to think of it as a pattern -- something that has been proven as one way to tell a story. Screenplays are particularly conducive to this patterning because (1) movies are generally about 90-120 minutes so not a huge variation in length, (2) each page of the screenplay is about a minute on screen so you can easily project where critical points usually sit, e.g., the inciting incident, and (3) really big budget films seem to be made more on how not to lose money rather than how to try something original and potentially misfire. The third point is why Hollywood prefers making a movie with a proven market and audience (i.e., proven book sales) than using original spec screenplays.
Analyzing ‘Analyzing the Analyzers’: an Analysis
The other thing to keep in mind is that well over half the battle in becoming a bestseller is even landing a publisher in the first place. There's serious cumulative advantage inherent to being Stephen King, or JK Rowling, in that you can submit your "anonymous" work to your ordinary publisher and at least guarantee some amount of distribution.

A truly anonymous play would be if Rowling or King submitted their pseudonymous work to agents and publishers, unsolicited, without any trace whatsoever of their existing relationships. (This might not be possible due to contactual obligations, however).
In all seriousness, where is this happening? I don't remember being taught to write sonnets in school. If this is something relatively recent, maybe education has improved a little.
Well... you should be fine now :)

You can now have your own free 30gb git repo as well.

Words of caution:
- Buy a second SD card ;
- once you have a running rPi tweaked to your liking clone it with dd to prevent eventual data loss.
The article isn't that well written so there's some wiggle room in either direction, but by my reading while he does say the same thing directly, he attributes that view to the author of the book and then attempts to refute it, while mostly failing (IMO).

Snyder, who died in 2009, would almost certainly dispute
this characterization. In Save the Cat!, he stresses that
his beat sheet is a structure, not a formula, one based in
time-tested screen-story principles. It’s a way of making
a product that’s likely to work—not a fill-in-the-blanks
method of screenwriting.

Maybe that’s what Snyder intended. But that’s not how it
turned out.

The way I read it, I'm agreeing with what the author of the article thinks the now-dead author of the book would have said, but the author of the article himself claims to have a view at odds with this view (but then goes on to fail in proving his view, IMO).
I dislike Stephen King's fiction, but this title is regarded by many as the single greatest book on writing of all time.
"When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal."
My ASPIE son is quite familiar with panic attacks and I got use to dealing with him when he has them. After I lost my other son to suicide I had a very complicated grief, felt into profound depression and had panic attacks in the beginning. There are medications you can take to control your panic attacks. I tried some and found one that worked for me until I didn't have them anymore. My son always refused to take any kind of medication, so we had to use some behavioral training to help him identify what triggers a panic attack, when it is starting and how he can mitigate them, shortening its duration and avoiding worse consequences. Because of him being aspie, I have his support network that is made of very few people, informed about panic attacks and how to deal with him when he is having one. If I was you, I would look for a good psychiatrist that can help you pinpoint the origin of your panic attacks, if they are related to another condition (depression, for example) and look for options to treat the condition. Also, seek your support network, family, friends, spouse, that can help you.
"I think I can ...."

Instead, why don't you post some examples of what you have done ? May be build a mock MVP for a simple CRUD app ? You are asking for no money upfront. In that case, I think you are better off building a mock MVP and putting it in front of HN to decide whether your work is worth the $200. What do you think ?
Smart And Effective Ways To Budget Your College Expenses
Does that have the broken EFI implementation? I only tried to boot linux on a MacBook Pro (17" unibody, 2011 I think) and while it worked, it was pretty annoying. Since the EFI implementation was non-standard, I had to boot with some BIOS emulation layer that started my SSD in IDE mode (slower), prevented proper sleep (forced to do a full shutdown whenever moving locations), and reduced battery life from 6.5 hours to about 2.

If all that's a thing of the past, that'd be excellent news.
Innovation vs the world's worst CEO.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
Also, it was marketed as something that's a laptop replacement- it runs windows! it has a keyboard! Oh but it only has 15GB of available storage. Never mind, I guess I'll just get a laptop after all.
Infographics: Use Infographic Marketing To Generate Leads
I think you might have a bug. The winning version was on the right side for me nearly every time I tried (n equals more than 30).
The comment above just said that TDK was "regarded by many as the greatest "action" movie of all time.", rather than making an absolute judgement.

I think that's a reasonably defensible statement - http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-dark-knight.
Looks similar to the brightbox CLi - http://docs.brightbox.com/guides/cli/
not to mention that node-webkit will enable clojurescript to be a major player in large desktop production tools (light-table).
The problem with the US is that the sales tax can be set by three different levels of government---the state, the county and the city---for instance, the state might have a sales tax of 5%, the county none and one particular city in that county 1%. What price do you advertise for the following?

1. A country side advertising campaign?
2. A state wide advertising campaign?
3. A local newspaper that serves the county?

As odd as it seems, that's the way it is here in the States (but I can sympathize, a friend from Sweden was horribly annoyed by the differences between sticker price and final price because of the tax rate).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

I must be living under a rock as I only barely recognized the name. That all read bad enough but then the part where they are likely putting stuff on pirate bay to then prosecute people...the more of this I read the more outlandish it seems.
Argh! I'm in the same boat. I'm 2 days from expiration and I have the activation code. I just couldn't do it at work and forgot to update my home computer Xcode the one evening that I had a chance before this outage.
I have a 2-yr old daughter, who is a bit young for this. But she named one of her dolls Isla Baila, which I'm taking as a good sign (either that, or she is going to be into dancing). Either way, looking forward to introducing her to a language like this when she is old enough.
The best CCG I've seen is Dominions [1], because it eliminates the more annoying and expensive aspects of the game involving accumulating and managing large, valuable collections of cards. But I've always been more interested in the strategy aspect of games much more than the collectability aspect.

But from a business standpoint, the latter tendency is more desirable to cultivate in players because it's more profitable. When I actively played both, I spent at least an order of magnitude more annually on Magic cards than on Dominion and its expansions.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(card_game)
It's pretty awesome to know that you can get something that powerful inside your palm (the Atmega 328) for less than $3 single unit prices.

After some minor conversion, the Atmega/Arduino has almost exactly same storage space and RAM. Only, the Arduino clocks at 16MHz. Still, awesome regardless.
That sign is real.
"A sign that's... fake? As in, not real?"
don't think about that too hard, you may have a seizure.

"In this case, it means that the signs were not posted by the authorities."
well, i think in this case it really means a sign that lies, because if they were posted by the authorities or not, if they tell the truth, who would call them fake?

but then, a sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie...

i think i just had a seizure.
Show HN: Just built a cool way to search email on your iPhone
Ask HN: What QR Reader app do you use?
I'm told this was scheduled.
Determined by "many".

Granted, that's vague, but certainly among people I know, The Dark Knight is considered the high water mark of modern action films.

And while this still is just more anecdotal data and not scientific proof, the movie sits at #6 on imdb's list of top 250 movies of all time:

http://www.imdb.com/chart/top?ref_=nb_mv_3_chttp

Which suggests strongly that this view is shared more widely in the general movie-watching population.
When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood.

Yes, like The Writer's Journey was an explosion that ripped through hollywood, and Story and a bunch of other books. It's amusing and instructive to look at classics like the Iliad or Macbeth through this structural formule. Clearly, this nefarious writer also owns a time machine!

Hey, I think that story could sell...
I wrote a few sonnets in 11th (iirc, may have been 12th) grade English class (public school, prior to the standardization craze apparently). We did half a year on English Renaissance drama, and wrote some sonnets while we were learning about Shakespeare. I assumed this was relatively typical.

It was pretty fun, I think one of mine was about bears on the moon. We basically just learned the rhyming scheme 'abab cdcd efef gg'.
Like the design of thyself.io.

Looks interesting, I've been thinking about building a journal application just for myself for a while (none of the ones I looked at ever did what I wanted and since I'm a programmer that isn't an excuse I can really live with).

I think for the engagement thing I'll have mine send me an SMS (Nexmo makes this very easy), Emails I silence outside of work but SMS's I always check (as that's how I know servers have gone down).
In the mid 90s, writer David Siegel argued (in his writing and consulting) that a very, very similar "9 act" structure was the key to Hollywood screenplay success, based on his study of hundreds of blockbusters. See:

http://web.archive.org/web/19980206083911/http://www.dsiegel...

So I agree with others that the 2005 book is more descriptive of long-existing patterns (and requirements of the movie format), than prescriptive and culpable for recent practice.
Look into a Nevis LLC or IBC. Pretty cheap to start ($2k USD) modeled after US Delaware LLC and they have a stable British based law system. Anybody who wants to sue you must post a $25k USD bond to the Nevis government before even proceeding. And this doesn't include the money they'd have to spend to fly down, hire a local attorney and then sue your company.

http://www.nestmann.com/nevis-llcs/

Edit: I see you're from Bolivia. A Panama corporation might be a better choice for you. They'd have to first hire a translator to sue you : )
SHA-2 has no collisions found as of yet [1]. The collision attacks on md5 required a lot of junk data, so not sure how much of a problem that would be.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2#Comparison_of_SHA_functi...
This reminds me of pop music.

There was a book of this sort written for pop music, too: The Manual, or How to Have a Number One the Easy Way by Bill Drummond and Jim Cauty, also known as The KLF.

It's brilliant and hilarious; at one point they describe "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley as the perfect pop song because it plays so deliberately into schoolgirls' fantasies.
Technology companies today have to be sexy. There has be an innate desire for the products.

Just look at the resurgence of Samsung, that's sexy.

Microsoft? Some of their dev products might be okay, but Windows 8 and the new Xbox are downright awful. Horrible campaigns behind both.
I was raised to believe that a core tenet of the government was checks and balances.
Author believes the assumed social imposition of reading a message without replying is worse than the benefit of understanding whether the receiving connection is open.

They also make a statement that iOS turns on read-receipts in iMessage by default now, and I'm not sure when that was started, since I had to turn mine on explicitly.
I look forward to the day where the American public realizes its government thinks its citizens are no better than enemies.
FISA Court Renews NSA Phone Surveillance
Yes. No dividends for most of that period too, which usually compensates for inflation.
Two points stuck out at me here:

> We formalized a process to enable our customer team (account reps & support) to give anyone trial extensions if they had a real need... folks that received a trial extension were 2.5X more likely to convert and 5X more likely to upgrade at some future point.

I'm glad there's data (at least for one company) to support what was always my intuition. Many companies are hesitant to offer a trial extension, but the cost of doing so in most cases seems absolutely trivial. Now that at least some data is out there, perhaps more people will adopt this pattern.

> Another successful change was to change how we handled existing paid accounts that had a billing issue and were to be downgraded. In the past we would just downgrade those accounts to a Free plan, send an email and that was it. From talking to some customers we realized that some people would get downgraded and not notice that their functionality had changed.

I wonder, isn't there some way you could know ahead of time that the account might experience billing issues and send them a warning email before their account is downgraded? Assuming you have their credit card information, at least one issue you could anticipate is their card's expiration. As a customer, I'd prefer the heads-up notice as opposed to something after-the-fact. My takeway instead of "make it obvious when people are auto-downgraded" would be, "prevent people from being auto-downgraded at all," if you can.
In a stable market with no big changes, he would be an excellent CEO, and he was generally considered a good one until the last few years (some would say after Vista, other after the iPhone).
The government deciding what is and what is not constitutional?

What could go wrong.
Another infuriating and disappointing move by the Obama administration. On the contrary, this will be challenged in the courts by groups like the EFF and ACLU until they've won.

Let's make Feds remember that they work for us instead of special interests, corporations and the military/surveillance-industrial complex.
It should be noted that their position on standing comes straight from Clapper v. Amnesty International, No. 11-1025 which the Supreme Court decided in the government's favor this year.

The decision is that likely targets of surveillance who cannot prove that they were ACTUALLY surveilled have no standing to file a court case where they could issue subpoenas to the government which could prove whether they were. In short it is a catch-22. You can't sue about being unconstitutionally searched unless you can prove it happened. But you can't prove it happened without suing.

And the Supreme Court thinks that this is acceptable.
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not as Smart as a 4-Year-Old Child
i'd look at using pv for the input, makes for a nicer output

pv /dev/da0 | ssh user@rsync.net "dd of=backup.dd"
The government isn't deciding it. It's asserting its position. To a judge, who will make the actual decision.
Saw your work on this a while ago. Love the changes you've made to it since then. Hoping to get a weekend free to try it out.

edit: Your link sends a user directly to the content. I love the structure of the content, I was just a little confused, because I thought you linked us to the homepage. It also might just be my 13' macbook, but I think it may be zoomed in a little too much. I had to zoom out to ~75% for it to be comfortable reading.
> “one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government.”

Common, don't be shy! Don't pretend there are some "non-democratic" governments somewhere that do even more surveillance!

Largest ever launched by any government, by far.
How a hobbyist game dev broke into the App Store's top 25
Sure, but nobody's going to take the time to do so.
Except that the lawyer is a partner and partners aren't just "fired".
Bravo sir, bravo. Not sure why you felt the need to create a throwaway account for it as it is a completely valid point of view. To completely capture the meme though a "and git off my lawn!" is needed there at the end :-)

As for your rhetorical question about who cares, I'm guessing the folks who've seen Google stock go from $600 to $900 are wondering if its time to switch to something else. If you're anonymous opinion is common among their users then the answer to their question would be "yes, definitely."
> An image without a scale it worthless..

Not so. If you read the article, it says each is about one micron—a thousandth of a millimeter—in length.
Yes, it is. That's why this argument was being made in a court, to a member of judicial branch, who has the power to rule against the executive branch.
Desvelo.
The current core tenet of the government appears to be the executive branch.
No Azure? No XBox? I feel like those have made Microsoft a decent chunk of cash since they hit the market...
Oh we've realized it. We just don't seem to care enough to do anything about it. If we did try to do anything we would just end up getting arrested for being a terrorist.
I recall being assigned to write an epic poem with heroic couplets back in high school in the 1970s. I wrote mostly about the heroic struggle against boredom that students in our high school's computer science class had to endure.
House votes to dismantle 'No Child Left Behind', federal testing requirements
Why not just dd to a file on your hard drive?
Azure has $1B in revenue [0]. Are you seriously telling me that DigitalOcean is that large?

I think I'm going to need a citation if you want me to believe that.

[0]. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-29/microsoft-azure-sal...
A price that's probably worth it in many cases.
I do need and use eyeglasses to be able to drive.

I don't see any indication if the lens can be formulated, it seems like a huge omission to me.
Electrochemically Mediated Seawater Desalination
edit: bah. im not here to educate you.
You mean like in Hamdi?
And watch Old Boy before Hollywood ruins it.
We are currently unable to confirm or deny there is a flaw in the legal system at this time.
Er, Avengers was pulled off pretty well.

I'm not sure that you should auto write-off comic movies...
I'm not a lawyer, but to say that this "cannot be challenged in court" is a pretty terrible interpretation. The government asks the court system (where this is, in fact, already being challenged) to deny an injunction stopping the metadata collection before this is fully heard in court.
The biggest point of differentiation is asynchronous play. You can't play Magic and most CCGs asynchronously, because every card you play has the option of being responded to (by counterspells, for instance).

The benefit of asynchronous play is that you get to play with your friends and family, regardless of time or location. This makes the game more social and fun, and better than playing random players from the internet.

More info:
http://orbsccg.com/comparison
Dominion isn't a CCG, it's a deck building board game. Two completely different categories that aren't directly competing.
tl;dr:

1. The surveillance occurs in secret

2. Due to #1, you can't possibly prove that you, specifically, are a target of surveillance

3. Due to #2, you have no standing with the court

QED. I am speechless.
That's a good clarification, thanks. I don't think in or understand F grades.
Ballmer got it wrong regarding the iPhone, but I doubt that doing nothing was an option in that case.

Against its rivals in the computer segment, Microsoft didn't have to act, but Apple came at them from a different angle; by leveraging its dominant position in the music player market. Nokia, which had a crushingly dominant place in the smartphone business when Apple joined, tried the "just keep doing what you do" strategy for a long while; their marketshare steadily dropped. Probably not coincidentally, it was an ex-MS exec Elop that changed that strategy, with results comparable to Microsoft's. RIM is still clinging to it, with no success.

In comparison, Google had a more measured, deliberate approach, but they did react to Apple. When Apple went into the smartphone business, Google was gearing up to fight against Nokia, RIM and Microsoft. The disruption caused by Apple forced Google to reevaluate. They figured out key places where Apple was unable or unwilling to compete on, and capitalized on those.
Mvcli
Wow, I'm as much a skeptic of China's economic model as anyone can be, but this article is just saying words with 1) nothing to back them up, and 2) an overt 'no, america isn't anything like this! don't be silly!'.

I mean:

(Since someone is going to raise this issue: no, this
bears very little resemblance to the Federal Reserve’s
policies here.

Really? When an article is written as 'factual' in a 'factual' tone, but contains stupid little personal interjections in it like this, I get :'( face about the fall of journalistic standards.

Needs 'opinion piece, may not reflect reality' at the top.
What does "via Ruby" mean here? Title should probably not include that.
This is somewhat off-topic, but HN'ers may be interested to know the business history of the Magic: The Gathering trading card game that's this YC company's inspiration.

MTG was a bootstrapped startup designed by a mathematics PhD student. A great product that resonated with fans, a then-unique market niche, good retail distribution (pretty important for physical products in the early '90s), and favorable acquisitions led to a nine-figure exit for the founder [1].

[1] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2004/10/01/81...
Is it more accurate to say that the Supreme Court interpreted the law and the law makes this acceptable?
I know it's hard to believe, but they really don't.
The Dark Knight is good despite using a lot of Hollywood conventions, not because of them. What Nolan can shrug off might annihilate the remnants of creativity in a lesser director. I've seen similar things happen in writing.
Yes, you can buy booster packs and starter decks. This is the business model of all virtual goods games. You can also earn cards for free too in the game.
I was taught to write sonnets at school (and most of the other obvious verse forms, from clerihews to iambic pentameter), but then my school also taught Ancient Greek and Latin.
It appears that Orbs is copying the game UI and card design from Magic: The Gathering Online.

The only problem is that UI is literally 11 years old.

http://www.gamershell.com/static/screenshots/4002/61895_full...
I use AeroFS (https://aerofs.com/) on a lowendbox VPS. Pretty cheap and works well for me. Will have to give BitTorrent Sync a try though.