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Comment by 51Cards | Hacker News Reader

"The Uncanny Valley is a term that originated from the computer animation industry. In 1992, while finishing A Bug’s Life, Pixar had to build a digital valley for..."

Ummm....

Wikipedia: "The term was coined by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori as Bukimi no Tani Genshō in 1970. The hypothesis has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of the "uncanny" identified in a 1906 essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny"."

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If you read the rest of the paragraph, it's quite clear that the entire description is intentionally humorous nonsense. I mean, the third sentence had to make that clear... ;)

> They ended up illustrating a crate of Campbell’s® Tomato Soup™ in the corner to make it feel a bit more canny.

I have mixed feelings about misleading stealth jokes like this (I wouldn't want someone reading to "learn" that Pixar coined the term in 1992), but this one's pretty obvious and probably worth it for the laugh.

The missing word kind of broke the joke for me ("so he [can/could] get a vasectomy") - I got so hung up on wondering whether part of the sentence was missing or whether something had been lost in translation that I missed the fact that it was just an attempt at humor.

Copy editing - it's important!

Agreed. Without that auxiliary verb, it was really hard to know the author was kidding about Buzz Lightyear getting a vasectomy in A Bug's Life.

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