olavk

The academy award is called "best adapted screenplay" and awards the best screenplay (by oscar standards) which happen to be an adaptation. Whether the adaption if faithful or improves of the source material is not a factor, only the resulting screenplay.

I'm not disputing the movie is cliched oscar-bait. That is the kind of movies the oscars awards.

The Oscars are not awarded for historical accuracy. Best adapted screenplay does not mean most faithfully adapted, it just means the best screenplay which is adapted from some source (often fictional).

Hollywood is in the business of telling stories, not teaching history. If you get offended by lack of realism or accuracy, then don't watch Hollywood movies. I can't think of any Hollywood movie you couldn't criticize for twisting reality to further the narrative.

"Based on a true story" should always be taken with a large grain of salt and Hollywood itself have often satirized it - e.g. Fargo slapping a "Based on a true story" sign on a wholly fictional story, or American Hustle stating "Some of this actually happened!"

> "Reality is indescribable" becomes a bit of a liar's paradox.

There is a difference between an imperfect description and a lie. Kuhn does not say that all descriptions of the world are lies, or that "anything goes", although he have sometimes been misunderstood as saying that.

No, I do not believe that it is an "entirely independent" statistics/rate. I believe they are very closely related. But if you sincerely believe they are entirely independent statistics then I kind of understand the logic of your argument.

Not necessarily. For example, the history of the Vietnam War is mostly written by Americans, even though the US lost.

I think this ignores the historical context. The US had air control and been bombing the mainland relentlessly for a while. The firebombing of Tokyo had already caused bigger loss of life than the Hiroshima bomb did. So it was clear to both parties that the US did have the destructive capability and were willing to use it. This did not cause the Japanese to surrender. Why would it have made any difference to "demonstrate" the bomb, if actually bombing the capital and killing 100000 did not have that effect?

Even after the second bomb, just before announcing the surrender, there was an attempted coup d'etat by high ranking officers to prevent the surrender. So its not like surrender was a given after seeing a nuclear bomb.

It is only in retrospect it seems obvious that the nuclear bomb would lead to surrender. Even taking about "the decision to drop the bomb" as it was some unique moral dilemma is kind of anachronistic. Of course they were going to drop the bomb, just like they used any other weapon at their disposal.

Just to be clear, do you understand what it means to say that the incarceration rate is six times higher in the US?

The US does have an "imprisoning innocent people" problem, as witnesses by this story and by the Innocence Project.

The problem is the horrifyingly large number of people who are imprisoned for years, some times decades, even though they are innocent.

Do you not find that a problem? Innocent people being imprisoned happen in any country of course, but the problem is much larger in the US than in other first-world countries, both in absolute number and relative to population size.

France does not have similar numbers of innocent people in prison, even when adjusted for the countries size. Unless you will argue that the French police and judicial system is more than six times worse.

This was all in response to the comment questioning why we don't hear as many stories about innocent prisoners in France.

Direct evidence is a witness testifying they directly observed the defendant commit the crime. Any other evidence is circumstantial.

If the incarceration rate is higher then more innocent people will be in jail, even given the same quality of justice. Many more innocent Americans are in prison than innocent Frenchmen (even adjusting for population size). Now you may argue this is not a bad thing since the US also have a lot more guilty prisoners, so overall it is worth it. But it should not be surprising we hear more stories of innocent prisoners from the US compared to countries with lower incarceration rates.

> A country can have a very high incarceration rate without imprisoning a single innocent

No. Unless you are talking imaginary scenarios like Star Trek.

So you are saying other countries are "just as bad" when it comes to imprisoning innocents? I don't see how that is even possible given that the incarceration rate in the US is so much higher.

Given that the the incarceration rate in the US is more than six time the rate in France (https://www.statista.com/statistics/300986/incarceration-rat...), and the US population is much larger in absolute number, you wouldn't expect to hear as many stories, even assuming the French system is just as bad.

Blaming crime shows for miscarriages of justice in the real judicial system? Is there anything which cant be blamed on the media?

The actual killer confessed, I think that is already a "flag".

If you criticize the code by pointing out factual issues, then the the author can lean and improve by understanding these issues and improving the code. Calling the author an idiot does not help to improve anybody.

But personal insults are not direct non-bs communication. Saying to someone they should have been an abortion is not a sign of emotional maturity. Accepting denigriating insults without complaint is not a sign of strength or emotional maturity.

If anyone can opt out the rule of law at any point then it is the same as having no law in the first place. Which means the ones with the most weapons get to decide. Which means we are back to having a government except without any rights and protections for everybody else.

For someone acting in bad faith (e.g. trolling, deceptive agenda) insults are probably justified. On the other hand, this is probably the actors who are not really deterred by insults, so I wonder how constructive it is.

I wanted to get back to my main point which was not the particular turn of phase in my example, but just that politeness have nothing to do with incompetence. This was in response to the comment that stated that politeness would mean accepting bad code, which I strongly disagree with. You show that a patch can be rejected with a polite and still technically relevant on-the-point message, so we agree about the important point. I don't think politeness implies passive aggressiveness either, so my example sentence might have been badly chosen.

Well if there actually was a bug, as you state, you are clearly in the right to point it out. Both parties in a communication have a responsibility. The party criticizing the code has a responsibility be factual, concrete and constructive, and to only criticize the code, not the personality of the author. The recipient of criticism on the other hand have the responsibility to listen and not become defensive or take criticism of the code personally.

Personally though, it also really irks me when someone carefully explains me something I already know, so I understand the mindset.

In any case, using phrases like "thanks, but..." is an example of politeness.

I guess this depends on the context, but I don't really see the problem. If I reject a patch due to some specific problems with the code, then surely I should reconsider if the submitter could refactor to avoid the reasons for rejection? And if I was actually wrong about X, Y or Z, then I would like to have that pointed out. Everybody can make mistakes.

Why would you start fighting and/or feel resentment if you received a reply like the "polite" example? Genuine question, I don't see the issue but I'm ready to learn.

So you are equating politeness with not halting bad ideas. That is not politeness, that is incompetence. Competent people would halt bad ides, but it can be done in different ways:

- Abrasive: This idea is the dumbest ever and you are an idiot that deserves to die.

- Constructive: This idea have problems X, Y and Z.

- Polite: Thank you for the effort, but I see problems X, Y and Z with the idea in its current form.

A lot of the discussion here is confusing the question of competence with the question of tone. You can be competent and have a nice tone and you can certainly be incompetent and have an abrasive tone. I can understand not having the patience for politeness, but personal insults are obviously counterproductive.

You are comparing a contributor submitting a kernel patch in good faith with people holding a klan meeting in your house?

I'm sure nobody decided that it was an explicit goal of the site to have accessibility issues. It has those issues for historical reasons. Maintainability to me is being able to fix such relatively minor issues without everything coming crashing down. If it is too difficult to fix then the code is not maintainable whether or not the code is super small and compact. (Note I'm not arguing HN should be redesigned to use semantic markup, just using it as an example of reasonable maintenance.)

I would say simplicity is a really important part of maintainability, but that is not the same as smallness. For example, the for-loop mentioned is quite short and compact, no doubt about that. But to me it it not simple, because it is hard to figure out what it does and what happens when you change it. It is tightly coupled to the particulars of the HTML (even including the whitespace) so you have to dive into the HTML to see what nodes is removed and figure out yourself what is the implicit relationship between these three nodes. So is difficult to change without accidentally breaking something.

Making code simpler often leads to it also being shorter, which is good. But making code shorter without making it simpler just leads to unmaintainable cryptic code.

But I acknowledge maintainability also depends a lot on the people who are supposed to do the maintenance. I personal have limited memory, and I would forget what exactly those three nodes represented within hours of writing the code. I use abstraction and simplicity not because of some lofty ideal, but because I simply do not have the mental capacity to keep this amount of accidental complexity in my head. Your mileage may vary.

Thanks for an interesting answer. I really appreciate to hear the thinking behind the design of the code. But when it comes down to it, the argument seem to be that this piece of code is not supposed to be maintainable because you don't find it important to be able to easily change the HTML. Which again is totally fine if that is a deliberate decision, but there is a difference between arguing that some code is designed for maintainability and arguing that it it does not need to be maintainable.

As for adding code, note that my suggestion would remove code - removing a single node in code is obviously simpler than removing a fixed number of nodes in a for loop. But you are correct it introduces an abstraction. I appreciate the cost you assign to abstraction, but I personally think this should be weighed against the cost of more complex and fragile code as here.

Again, I'm not criticizing the code itself, just the assertion that the code is super maintainable. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it is too costly to accommodate users using screen readers (how few and unimportant they may be) because of the complexity and risk of changing the HTML, then you have a maintainability issue.

I don't like criticizing the code since it clearly works as intended and HN works very well, and I am a happy user. But since you argue that the code is very deliberately maintainable I will challenge that, because I am not convinced. The code is tightly coupled to the HTML in a way that makes it difficult to change the HTML without breaking the code. For example it should (if the code is so maintainable) be trivial to change the use of tables for presentation into semantic HTML like say UL/LI. Since this would improve accessibility this is a net win with no drawbacks, right?

While I agree that comment would be very helpful given the code, It would be much better to rewrite the code so it didn't have to know about those three nodes at all. For example by collecting them into a single element which could be removed in a single operation. The comment here is just a bandaid for code which is much more complex than it needed to be.

> Do web designers still exist that only do HTML/CSS but no JS?

That is really beside the point. HTML and JS should not be coupled to the extent that adding or removing some whitespace from the HTML will cause the JS to fail. This kind of things turns a trivial improvement into a nightmare, so you end up not daring to change anything.