Clarity1992

I know exactly what you mean, and most of the time I catch myself thinking that it's on a weekend. Possible explanations:

1.) The people that post more technical stuff do so from work and don't use HN as much on weekends.

2.) Everyone is in "weekend mode" and wants to post more fun stuff.

3.) I am in "weekend mode" and my desire to click on fun stuff is biasing my impression of what is posted.

But...but..you didn't give anyone a chance to say "You?" and their girlfriend turn and look annoyed!

By "lost a lot of friends" do you mean you fell out, they died, you just lost touch with them? If falling out, how?

I'm interested because one of my friends fell out with me this year sufficiently that he said "I don't want us to be friends any more". I was shocked and didn't know why. From what he told me it was the result of me making a few comments about his life in a flippant manner that I thought he was amused by, but actually he took it very very badly over the following few days and decided to not be friends any more. It's the only time I'd say I'd "lost" a friend.

If I worked in startups and business I think the chances of losing friends would explode though. It seems there's huge potential for making rational, business-motivated decisions that others perceive as immoral or backstabbing etc. Is that what happened to you?

I completely agree with that.

In this case I liked the fact that it was a one off thing, the guy had to play through the game a few times so they could get the data out of it.

Like if someone needs to take an acoustical reading from a room and you're the guy in the office who plays cello so get asked to work through a few tunes while your colleagues take readings.

Or if you're the office cycling nut, and get called on to fill in when the courier company makes a mistake but your team still has to get those plans to company B across town before 5pm.

Okay, I'm really stretching it. I know. Though that last one really did happen to me when I was 14 on work experience at an architects' firm, and I felt like a HERO. (Though in retrospect perhaps they were just concocting a story to give me a job to do...)

I love the bit where he gets the best guy in the office to play through the game with cheats and grabs the image data from the sessions in order to reconstruct the maps.

Perhaps because I've always been an, er, "dedicated" gamer, there's something about a solution involving playing the game which is really satisfying.

For me the professional production of the video makes a ridiculous difference to how much I enjoy news like this. It's really nicely put together.

Related to that, the way it was posted on CNET added nothing to the information in the video and reminded me that I'm getting increasingly irked by reposting culture.

Hacker News is good because it links to original content with a snappy title and then space to discuss below. Which leads me to wonder why this item links to the CNET article and not straight to the youtube video?

I see where you're running with that, and with a slight adjustment we get 'Anal Rape Taxis'.

OMG, someone call Jack Bauer, this goes all the way to the top.

Possibly as a result of consuming too much conspiracy/crime fiction where both the bad guys and good guys love to put little word puzzles into their work, my first thought as to determining if this is a fake name or not is to run "Alex Tapanaris" through an anagram finder.

Which I ahem leave as an exercise to the reader.

Completely agree. The only explanation I can think of for that being posted is that the writer is sufficiently senior that no-one wants to lose their job by telling him it isn't funny, or worse, it just didn't occur to him to bounce it around the office beforehand for a humour benchmarking.

Thanks, I realised it was old, but didn't bothering figuring out the date.

Personally I would like it if people put the publication year in the title when posting articles such as this.

Yeah, I found the swaying funny too. Seemed like maybe he needed the loo the entire interview :)

If there is a recent event that makes the posting of this three year old article immediately relevant, then it eludes me.

>> people with untreated or untreatable STIs should not be having sex

Why "not be having sex" and not "not be having unprotected sex"?

There's a story about G H Hardy coming across a geneticist's work and proving that recessive genes persist at an equal concentration, against the original author's claims. This article reminds me a lot of that, where an expert in another field says "let me just check that for myself, errrr!".

I believe the Hardy story is told in C P Snow's foreword to A Mathematician's Apology, and the result is now well known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle