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VladRussian2on Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

>Star Trek, bad sci-fi writing, unbelievable monsters, magic science, red-shirts, ridiculous sets with no purpose and humanoid aliens-of-the-week

as they say, can't see a forest for the trees :)

Relax, man, you don't like it, obviously. Tastes are different. Galaxy Quest is a nice funny movie, Starship Troopers is a brilliant masterpiece. Kandinsky's black square is just a square a child can paint (i think i drew a lot of black squares among everything else while dreaming at classes in school).

VladRussian2on Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

well, in "Escape from Guantanamo Bay" they did show a one who got it :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_rzQtNGaZU&feature=player_d...

VladRussian2on American Energy Data Challenge

the staff photo is like a photo of septuplets.

VladRussian2on IE11 for Windows 7 Globally Available

>Every other major Browser on Windows does not solve, work-with, nor integrates with the metric-tons worth of enterprise and business issues, needs, and past + current solutions. Nor do they take backward compatibility issues seriously.

the life would so much happier without all that enterprise software crap that works only on IE. "Works only with IE" is like a hallmark of usability/quality/performance one can expect from the hallmarked application. And is not just correlation, it is usually a strong causation as the real reason behind it is that the application was most probably produced by mediocre at best team using some enterprise framework treated like a black box.

>This is probably 50% of the game which makes Microsoft money with the Enterprise.

absolutely. I'm always fascinated by how user-candy MS ecosystem looks to an Enterprise on the first date (vs. say Linux) and how bad things become almost immediately once they move in together.

VladRussian2on HealthCare.gov’s head tech guy is out

man!!!!!!! Healthcare reform, now i see. Shhh... It will be our little secret. Jon Stewart will have a heart attack if he learns about it.

//determine if due date is valid

//based on 10-month pregnancy (sprint 9 requirements)

VladRussian2on Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?

http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/04/just-like-one-week-ago-wh...

"Google's Motorola Mobility, which prefers litigation even though it's a grossly unsuccessful strategy for Google "

and

http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/04/setback-for-google-german...

VladRussian2on Microsoft Earns $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties?

>1. Are these generic, broad "idea" patents and hence there is nothing Google/OEMs can really do here to avoid licensing them? If not, why don't they use an alternative implementation to avoid the conflict?

no alternative implementation would help as it is not about some specific patents, it is more about [litigation] threat that some patents in the vast portfolio can be found that may be in some sense considered violated. Basically it is racket called Android Licensing Program - you pay "protection money" to MS in exchange for it not bothering you.

What interesting here is that Google seems to leave its OEMs to fend for themselves, thus instead of fighting one Google over 2B/yearly pot (the show that first row tickets for would sell like for Superball), MS extorts fifty million here and hundred million there which is much easier and safer.

VladRussian2on Tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in our galaxy

i'm not saying that they wouldn't pursue expansionism. A half-billion years ago they could have had a thriving colony on our planet. And, as you said, there is a plenty of time to change their mind, literally, and bodies, so planet surface existence isn't a key anymore, or at least it isn't a big deal to let go the planet which has potential for development of new civilization. We're just so low on the development ladder, that we're a national park, designated wilderness, off-limit for the ones who can reach us.

VladRussian2on Tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in our galaxy

The Fermi paradox is "why a highly developed civilization isn't behaving like a Western colonialists or tourists toward primitive natives of some remote wilderness".

VladRussian2on Tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in our galaxy

Yes, Tatooine under Pootine really sucks, doing even jquery in the Valley beats it by orders of magnitude.

VladRussian2on Everpix was great. This is how it died

>them smiling as if nothing happened

that is the beauty of enterpreneurship here. You can try until you succeed, and a failure is just a step on the ladder to success. Burning through 4M is not even a noise in the humming of the money making Valley machine.

VladRussian2on Tesla lost $38M in third quarter, stock tumbles over 12 percent

>I'd like to see about 100 mile battery only

electric/batteries works great for start/stops. For highway cruising, which 100 miles range would probably include a lot, internal combustion engine isn't that bad. I'd expect that there isn't much practical difference efficiency-wise between 20-30 miles battery range hybrid and a 100-miles range one, especially considering that the latter would be carrying additional at least 200kg of batteries.

I think we will start to see cars' internal combustion engines which are specifically targeted to work only as generators, i.e. highest efficiency only for specific rpm value - current ICEs available are "wide rpm and load range" designed to be a primary engine of a car. Volt (and Karma) as far as i understand have such generic engine, not a "generator" one. Dropping a lot of old requirements and having the ability to match generator to the engine, we may see very different engine types coming in which would match new requirements much better.

VladRussian2on Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

whenever there is discussion about statistics role in science (sometimes even going as far as crossing into how science is statistics) i always remember this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Fraud_alleg...

VladRussian2on Features Firefox should implement to weaken Facebook's stranglehold of the web

well, the new frontier is "dark mail" or more generally "dark net" where interoperability again is the key [as the only way to grow. It is like natural evolution - any non-interoperability efforts will just not grow, and only an interoperability based effort will produce the critical mass]. It is organically decentralized and by its nature a user is the owner of its data even though actual [meaningless to 3rd party] bits may be stored by one or spread around multiple distributed providers ("dark money" style as if you BT wallet is encrypted and replicated though the BT network itself). Content mining and "user is the product", and thus FB and Google as we know it, would be for some time problematic at best and it will be some time before segmentation era of the new net dawns and new Serge/Larry/Zuckenberg appear :)

VladRussian2on Here is my YC application. No interview

Boring, sounds like something that has been done before. 3 by 3 and bonus 4th on fish taco Thurdays. To put it in the terms of your business area, [my impression that] YC is looking to be swept from their feet.

VladRussian2on Here is my YC application. No interview

>It's hard to give a lot of attention to each of these without skimming through and just saying "meh, next".

>Much like an English teacher reading through 30 essays.

An English teacher gets it worse as s/he forced to actually read and comment through "meh" content (i pity ones who read my essays back then in Russian and here in English)

For this application I read only first couple phrases until "3 matches every 3 days", and just being an HN reader for 4 years, i see that this startup isn't YC-material (that isn't saying that they aren't A+/brilliant grade material in general as i didn't read further)

VladRussian2on Doctors participated in torture of suspects after 9/11, taskforce finds

Milgram experiment clearly shows relative weights with which we perceive two alternatives : 1. a negative effect on ourselves vs. 2. a negative effect on somebody else.

In the experiment the 1. was practically non-existent, zero - some researcher telling you what to do, no real authority, no any chance of bad consequences, while 2. - electric shock, heart attack - hard to beat, yet people still chosen 2.

Now, in the torture situation we have the alternative 1. with reasonable perception of potential bad consequnces much higher than in the experiment, ie. pretty seriously sounding very plausible "or else..." from real authority while 2. is significantly lower because it is just terrorist, bad guy, and who will be tortured anyway. People making choice 2. when difference was higher (in the experiment) necessarily and obviously means that they would make such choice when difference is less, like in this case of torture.

VladRussian2on Snapchat is Intrinsically Worthless

>I think there is literally 0 chance for another Facebook. Google tried with Google+ - billions of dollars, millions of man hours by brilliant engineers, crazy bundling strategies by Google. Is Google+ another Facebook yet? Nope, not yet, maybe not ever.

all this still doesn't make it "cool" with 1B of teenagers (don't know what does - if i knew i would probably not be wasting time here :), and 1B a new Facebook would make.

VladRussian2on Doctors participated in torture of suspects after 9/11, taskforce finds

>Are we all turned to geese?

no, unfortunately we're humans:

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

VladRussian2on Massachusetts man uses 3-D printer to make prosthetic hand for his son

"color" 3D printing, i.e. using different kind of cells that make up real liver

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/24/3d-printed-li...

VladRussian2on Superfast rock-paper-scissors robot wins every time

considering that we now already have rifle attached directional sound detection of a source of [enemy] shot and experimental helmet mounted phase array radars that are realtime tracking individual flying bullets, the end of people's participation in any kind of duel/battlefield seems to be visible on the horizon.

VladRussian2on Sprint backlog prioritization can be a hindrance

Scrum is designed for [ guaranteed ] latency, like an RT os, not throughput/productivity or efficiency or any other objective, developers feelings incl.

VladRussian2on How to build an Anti Aircraft Missile: Bayes’ Theorem and the Kalman Filter

or may be because both - the pictures and the 2nd rates movies - try to imitate the 1st rate movies.

Whenever i find Youtube videos from real recent conflicts - it looks nothing like movies, 1st or 2nd rate.

VladRussian2on Homeless turn overnight bus route into Hotel 22

>Otherwise, you'll end up just whitewashing the situation.

no, what you end up with is homeless people having a chance to sleep under the roof whenever they want and for whatever long they want (why shelters kick people out on the street every morning? At least why not provide the homeless with a fixed guaranteed bed every night and a locker to keep her/his stuff?)

VladRussian2on Homeless turn overnight bus route into Hotel 22

>Zoning

it is what "we the people" through our elected representatives use to keep unwanted (i.e. weak/ill/less fortunate ones) out. Shame.

>fire codes

this obviously a necessary and what is most important - pure technically solvable thing for minimum amount of money.

We don't have to go for extreme HK approach. A city like PA, MV, Sunnyvale could easy build on a single-family size lot a shelter that would take a busload of homeless. Considering that MV (San Antonio/El Camino) and Sunnyvale (near downtown) have just had huge redevelopment projects going so fitting a couple of 10-20 bdrm appartments somewhere on the back alley (so it wouldn't offend eyes and noses of our sensitive citizens) would be noise for the projects' cost.

VladRussian2on Facebook has just invited me to interview and now I’m pissed off

sounds like a Great Filter that author's ego didn't fit through (not that i'm in anyway critical of the author, as until we're back in 2003 labor market or i start to feel [undesired] impact of my age on my opportunities, my ego doesn't feel like trying to squeeze through even coarser filters), it is just that moral/ethical/emotional appeals (slavery/etc..) don't work in market.

VladRussian2on Ask HN: What do you think of job hopping?

you'll see what you were missing on when you give a notice to your manager :)

VladRussian2on Google, Oracle Workers Enlisted for Obamacare 'Tech Surge'

i'd speculate that Google is brought in because it is good PR, and Oracle, well, it sounds like healthcare.gov backend is running something like 4-6 node RAC (most probably Exadata). Good luck to them as they would really need it :)

VladRussian2on How We Built a Lean Startup Inside a 200 Person Company

>Lean process,

we've had it (and still have, just the buzzword itself somehow magically stopped flying around). It isn't lean. Process by definition can't be lean, because process itself is the fat, and once the word "process" is uttered, you may be sure that you aren't in Kansas anymore.

VladRussian2on MIT Wristband Could Make Air Conditioning Obsolete

i clicked on the link expecting that they actually cool the blood flow like this (only using more compact wrist device instead of whole glove as we aren't talking extra quick cooling of sweating athletes)

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/cooling-glove-rese...

"The newest version of the device is a rigid plastic mitt, attached by a hose to what looks like a portable cooler. When Grahn sticks his hand in the airtight glove, the device creates a slight vacuum. The veins in the palm expand, drawing blood into the AVAs, where it is rapidly cooled by water circulating through the glove's plastic lining."