MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-05 13:35:17+00:00
The value of the back catalog is still substantial for years to come. But you are right about the landscape changing dramatically for new productions.

Hollywood was premised on economies of scale. Concentrate a lot of talent in one place and then put infrastructure in place for block buster productions to happen (studios, tech, money).

That's being disrupted by several things:

- LA and the US are no longer cheap places to be. A lot of blockbuster content is filmed outside the US at this point. Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. LA and Hollywood are still important but mainly because that's where the money is. It's not necessarily where the money is being spent.

- Independent content producers self publishing content on platforms like Youtube and growing audiences rivaling those of popular TV shows.

- AI is starting to drive down the cost of special effects, digital processing, etc. And it's probably also going to erode the value of needing actors at all for especially a lot of the less glamorous roles (think all the extras in big movie productions). This is a sensitive topic in particularly Hollywood. But not enough to delay the inevitable by very long.

All this is driving down the cost of creating decent quality things that people still want to pay for. That's a critical distinction. There's a lot of ad sponsored stuff that people don't really pay for as well. To make money, you need quality. AI is working its way up the chain here, with increasingly better stuff. But most of it is still pretty low value.

But things like soap operas, third rate series that Netflix bulk purchases from places like South Korea, etc. are all fair game for AI.

Netflix adding the WB back catalog is a great move for them. Their own back catalog isn't strong enough to keep people and expanding with newly created production it is a very slow and expensive process. And they've had some flops and cost control issues. There just isn't enough there to keep me permanently. I tend to sign up for just a few months and then cancel. I'm probably going to cancel soon again. HBO did not actually offer their streaming services in Germany until recently. And I was considering trying that for a while. Now I might not have to.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-12-05 13:35:34+00:00
House of Cards is the original Netflix Original, and it came out in 2013. Prime started competing with Netflix the same year.

But the other platforms - Disney+ (2019), Apple TV (2016/2019), HBO Max (2020), Peacock (2020), Paramount+/CBS All Access (2021 / 2014) - are all later.
by runako | 2025-12-05 13:35:41+00:00
> HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage

If you leave the featured areas and venture into any of the categories, you will see that HBO is also full of junk. HBO -> Browse by Genre -> A-Z -> any of them are full of junk.

The Netflix featured pages are more geared to showing you stuff you haven't seen yet, while HBO is geared toward showing you popular stuff, even if you have watched it on HBO.
by emporas | 2025-12-05 13:36:00+00:00
I remember when I was around 11-12 years old, my father got me a computer given to him for free. It had only a console and a black screen, and I figured out by myself how to open, edit files, lock them, navigate the file system, run programs like a calculator and more, with no manual, no internet, and I didn't even know english good enough.

1-2 years later, the teacher at school showed us how to program the turtle program, and I got it stuck in an infinite loop in 10 minutes. The teacher started swearing "Your chair is smashing the ethernet cable. The program is good and you fucked it up."

Around that time, I remember going to a barber shop for a haircut and stealing his nude/porn magazines. Even younger, I used to sneak up to my uncle's bedroom where he hid alcohol, and drunk half a bottle of whisky in an hour, and getting knocked out every time.

I used to get involved in fights all the time, since 8 years old, and my favorite activity at that age, was to climb to roofs of abandoned houses at night, and wander around inside of them.

My parents regularly tried to talk some sense into me, and I was beaten up by my father for all the stuff I did.

When I was sixteen, I managed to steal a car by myself, I drove it around for 1-2 hours and I didn't know how to drive, I figured it out at that moment. After that I returned the car where it was at the start, I didn't do anything with it, but when driving it I managed to flat the tire somehow.

When I was at the university, at some point around 20 years old, I downloaded Kevin Mitnick's book from torrents, I read it, and I got inspired to phone to my university, pretend I am a professor and I want pass a student (me) for 2 courses. I passed the courses without even taking the exam.

It was around that time, a friend of mine, while he was playing the guitar at his house, he looked at me at the eyes and said dead serious: "Man, if you go on like this, you will end up in jail." It was actually earth shattering! First time someone talk some sense into me. I thought, this cannot continue, he is right.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-05 13:36:08+00:00
A totally free market is of course utopia, but a lot of markets actually come close. Think your local butchers, bakeries and mechanics. All business with less than 10 employees and the boss is actually working. There are not that much markets that are actually problematic, but of course we talk about them a lot. Most local markets are actually fine, it's the big multinational corporations that are the problem.

> As for capitalism - capture of the state by monied interests has always been a central feature.

Capitalism is about the concept of private ownership and an economy primarily controlled by the decisions of private business oriented societies. Capture of the state isn't necessary, but common and normal up to a point.
by brandensilva | 2025-12-05 13:36:19+00:00
They have always been stuck between prosumer, pro business, and enterprise.

They have tried to go subscription based licensing but that can be conflicting for companies who just want decent reliable network gear in all the above market segments.

I fit in the prosumer category and have about $10,000 in gear and while it's great for my needs I don't see myself ever spending money for network gear subscriptions.
by hylaride | 2025-12-05 13:36:30+00:00
You can't even measure it cleanly. It was so isolated and its currency wasn't even convertible, but by most measures Japan and West Germany had larger economies with far, far, far better living standards. Go to per-capita level equivalents and you'd be hard pressed to find it higher than any western developed country. Even economic basket-case countries in South America often had better living standards.

North Korea is sending things into space. You can't measure a country on its isolated accomplishments, even if they're impressive.
by Hilift | 2025-12-05 13:37:01+00:00
2023: "A Party in Cannes Announces a New Hollywood Power Player". Something like ~300 attendees, probably $10 million. Zaslav and Graydon Carter co-hosted. There were rumored to be thousands of bottles of Dom champagne, which is probably inexpensive in bulk.

https://archive.is/ITc2a
by sesm | 2025-12-05 13:37:18+00:00
No, it does not.

Rust approach to shared memory is in-place mutation guarded by locks. This approach is old and well-know, and has known problems: deadlocks, lock contention, etc. Rust specifically encourages coarse-granular locks by design, so lock contention problem is very pressing.

There are other approaches to shared memory, like ML-style mutable pointers to immutable data (perfected in Clojure) and actors. Rust has nothing to do with them, and as far as I understand the core choices made by the language make implementing them very problematic.
by this_user | 2025-12-05 13:37:22+00:00
I can almost guarantee you that these models will underperform the market in the long run, because they are simply not designed for this purpose. LLMs are designed to simulate a conversation, not predict forward returns of a time series. What's more, most of the widely disseminated knowledge out there on the topic is effectively worthless, because there is an entire cottage industry of fake trading gurus and grifters, and the LLMs have no ability to separate actual information from the BS.

If you really wanted to do this, you would have to train specialist models - not LLMs - for trading, which is what firms are doing, but those are strictly proprietary.

The only other option would be to train an LLM on actually correct information and then see if it can design the specialist model itself, but most of the information you would need for that purpose is effectively hidden and not found in public sources. It is also entirely possible that these trading firms have already been trying this: using their proprietary knowledge and data to attempt to train a model that can act as a quant researcher.
by andyferris | 2025-12-05 13:38:06+00:00
> floats can be NaN and integers should be low(int) if they are invalid (low(int) is a pointless value anyway as it has no positive equivalent).

I have long thought that we need a NaI (not an integer) value for our signed ints. Ideally, the CPU would have overflow-aware instructions similar to floats that return this value on overflow and cost the same as wrapping addition/multiplication/etc.
by beached_whale | 2025-12-05 13:38:19+00:00
Nice of them to start the conversations with a probably lie, that it will be less expensive for consumes because they can now bundle HBO/Netflix. Except this has never been true for more than enough time that for people to forget and past the time to change it, if at all. It will be less selection and cost more, like the usual.

They made the comment and CBC reported on it https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/us-netflix-warner-bros...
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-05 13:38:31+00:00
They reach a million miles because they're taxis, not in spite of it.

What kills the hybrids is that the kind of people who buy these sorts of "peak appliance" cars tend to be the same kind of people who'll obliviously let some critical fluid run too low. You get orders of magnitude less of that sort of behavior in taxi fleets.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 13:39:02+00:00
> Terraform has modules which are an elaborate method of doing function calls

... What? How is modules a function call? It's just a hierarchy, everything about/with modules is still declarative.

> HCL 2 has loops and conditionals. It is most definitely imperative.

So what? Just because there is loops and conditionals doesn't mean it's suddenly imperative.

How exactly you do loops in HCL? Last time I used it, you still used declarative configuration for that, and use `for_each` as an declared option, you don't "call for_each which returns config", all that happens inside of HCL/TF, because it is declarative.

Did something change like yesterday or are people even here on HN so ignorant about what declarative vs imperative actually means?
by 11mariom | 2025-12-05 13:39:46+00:00
> Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system.

Next time when the fuse switch in my home I'll buy new home. I shouldn't normally switch on auto-fuse again!

Fuse blows, so you know something went wrong, you check corresponding part, fix it, and enable/change fuse. Nothing special. In home perspective - it could be plugging too many energy needy receivers into one outlet.
by balamatom | 2025-12-05 13:40:26+00:00
Of course the only comment representing the perspective of the actual "protected group" is near the very bottom of the section and unanswered.

Every time someone says "think of the children", just remember that nobody is motivated by protecting children from their parents; it's all to protect parents from their children. Always has been.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-the-f...

And, on a larger scale, to keep us all infantilized indefinitely.
by zaphar | 2025-12-05 13:41:50+00:00
I think I'm mostly of the opinion these days that there is no such thing as an "outdated technology". There are technologies that are no longer fit for purpose but that is almost never because of their age. It nearly always because of one of as examples: Needing to run in an environment it can't support, Having bugs that are not getting fixed/no longer maintained, Missing features necessary to solve new problems or add new features, Hitting scale limits.

Outdated may sometimes be a euphemism for one of the above but usually when I see it in a discussion it just means "old" or "out of fashion" instead.
by stego-tech | 2025-12-05 13:42:48+00:00
Then I would say that communities and administrators need to do a better job of restricting the internet access of those devices they provide kids, rather than punishing the outside world for the bad decisions of a handful of adults in neglecting their obligations. My schools implemented restricted ISPs with curated content as I was growing up, and eventually just a basic DNS filter by the time I reached HS. My current employer implements similar DNS checks on the firewall to block social media sites and, presumably, adult content (I’m not dumb enough to test the latter). My schools also had no problem providing local storage and collaboration tooling without internet access, so perhaps the argument should be made that schools shouldn’t be getting kids hooked on Big Tech cloud services a la iPads and Chromebooks, especially when children and parents become captive markets via school equipment mandates. Maybe we should be loaning out Linux laptops without WiFi or Ethernet ports with “Internet in a Box” preloaded on them for reference material, rather than shoving kids out into the wild internet absent guidance and context.

I also flatly refuse the whole “we ID people in real life all the time” argument. The physical world is a default shared space, with finite boundaries and clear obligations. The digital world is the exact opposite: vague, nebulous, ever-shifting and changing, with no clear demarcation between states, or countries, or people. That argument reveals a complete misunderstanding of why physical ID checks work and digital ones never, ever will at scale, and I refuse to entertain anything predicated upon it.

And here’s the dirty, nasty, disgusting little secret that parents don’t seem to realize or care about: bad actors in education are leveraging the fact kids have internet devices to spy on them. I’ve had CIO-equivalents in public and private education ask me to build surveillance tools to scan messages and photos on students’ private devices when connected to school networks under the guise of “safety”, which I refused to do because hell naw does anyone other than parents need full access to a child’s device. I have worked in the education sector, I have seen first hand the mismatch between the goals of parents, the needs of children, and the ambitions of grotesquely underpaid technical talent and the resultant quality of candidates that often seems to attract (or lack thereof - no disrespect to the good ones out there, but ya’ll are the fringe minority based on my experiences).

Website age checks aren’t protecting kids, they’re harming adults. And bad adults are exploiting this knowledge gap to harm kids, too.
by afavour | 2025-12-05 13:44:09+00:00
Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers. But at least it wasn’t bought by Larry Ellison, as was considered very likely (assuming this merger gets approved, in the current administration you never know).

From a Hacker News perspective, I wonder what this means for engineers working on HBO Max. Netflix says they’re keeping the company separate but surely you’d be looking to move them to Netflix backend infrastructure at the very least.
by estsauver | 2025-12-05 13:44:13+00:00
“I don't necessarily think community seed banks should be banned, but I think it's important context to know. There are people for whom they really need any seed, crops which are not served commercially well, and a whole bunch of other use cases I immediately understand for a community seed bank. But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest people. (I'll also just say I'm not up to date on this law, the court case, or how it's been applied in the country.)”
by mrweasel | 2025-12-05 13:44:14+00:00
That's my thinking. I get the argument for "reduced competition" but Netflix and HBO aren't competitors. They are just two companies in the same line of business, but with different production lines.

I do wonder what it will do for their sports deals. HBO have had the rights to a lot of sports, including Tour de France and the olympics and is the only way to get EuroSport, as well as a number of TV channels, including some country specific ones.
by JB_Dev | 2025-12-05 13:44:18+00:00
Yea agree.. This is the same discussion point that came up last time they had an incident.

I really don’t buy this requirement to always deploy state changes 100% globally immediately. Why can’t they just roll out to 1%, scaling to 100% over 5 minutes (configurable), with automated health checks and pauses? That will go along way towards reducing the impact of these regressions.

Then if they really think something is so critical that it goes everywhere immediately, then sure set the rollout to start at 100%.

Point is, design the rollout system to give you that flexibility. Routine/non-critical state changes should go through slower ramping rollouts.
by danaris | 2025-12-05 13:44:32+00:00
It's tempting to believe in that kind of a conspiracy—the kind where there's a single person or group pulling the strings, a single entity to blame, and possibly to eliminate, in order to solve many of the world's woes—but the truth is, it's unlikely to actually be something like that.

A conspiracy isn't necessary when the incentives align such that a group of similar people have reason to work toward such a goal independently. And because the problem is those incentives, not the individuals involved, even if you were to somehow change the mind of, imprison, or assassinate everyone pushing for these things today, more would spring up soon after.

The only way to stop this from happening is to remove the power base that those entities use to make these pushes, and remove the mechanisms that allow them to do so legally. Make it impossible to amass that much wealth. Make the worst kinds of lobbying illegal. Ruthlessly enforce antitrust laws, preventing hyperconsolidation like we see today. Make the very idea of a multibillionaire impossible.
by quadrifoliate | 2025-12-05 13:45:55+00:00
> Most technical problems are really people problems. Think about it. Why does technical debt exist? Because requirements weren't properly clarified before work began. Because a salesperson promised an unrealistic deadline to a customer. Because a developer chose an outdated technology because it was comfortable.

I used to be a "stay out of politics" developer. After a few years in the industry and move to a PM role, I have had the benefit of being a bit more detached. What I noticed was that intra-developer politics are sometimes way more entrenched and stubborn than other areas of the business.

Sure, business divisions have infighting and politics but at the end of the day those are tempered by the market. It's far harder to market test Ruby Versus Java in a reasonable manner, especially when you have proponents in both camps singing the praises of their favored technology in a quasi-religious manner. And yes, I have also seen the "Why would I learn anything new, <Technology X> works for me, why would I take the effort to learn a new thing" attitudes in a large number of coworkers, even the younger Gen-Z ones.
by quasarsunnix | 2025-12-05 13:46:05+00:00
We’re witnessing the globalization of television.

When all is said and done there’s going to be a few players left and they’re all going to be American by the current looks of things. You could argue movies were already like this, but for television that’s quite the change as most countries had many television production companies and stations.

Now it seems like they’ll be a few global media companies and maybe some local production houses that have to sell their stuff to these guys or setup their own services like the BBC does with iPlayer in the UK, with somewhat limited success compared to these giants.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-05 13:46:26+00:00
Operating profit, not net profit. Net income (or profit or earnings) can only be calculated for the whole business.

> has more than half the number of Netflix subscribers (196 million vs. 300+ million) in significantly shorter time than Netflix.

I don’t find this impressive. Streaming has been the future for over a decade, and Disney has long had more, and more popular content than Netflix. So why is it taking them so long to catch up to Netflix? They should have surpassed Netflix a long time ago.

Disney even sells sports.
by tomrod | 2025-12-05 13:46:46+00:00
Actually, most would be willing to get rid of it if there were other modes with positive network effects.[0]

"Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. With such externalities to nonusers, standard consumer surplus measures, which take aggregate consumption as given, fail to appropriately capture consumer welfare. We propose an approach to account for these externalities and apply it to estimate consumer welfare from two social media platforms: TikTok and Instagram. Incentivized experiments with college students indicate positive welfare based on the standard measure but negative welfare when accounting for these nonuser externalities. Our findings highlight the existence of product market traps, where active users of a platform prefer it not to exist."

[0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20231468
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-05 13:47:00+00:00
As bad as (3) sounds, I'll strongman the argument: it's important to keep the economic cost of any regulation in mind.*

On the one hand, you'd like to prevent the thing the regulation is seeking to prevent.

On the other hand, you'd have costs for the regulation to be implemented (one-time and/or ongoing).

"Is the good worth the costs?" is a question worth asking every time. (Not least because sometimes it lets you downscope/target regulations to get better good ROI)

*Yes, the easy pessimistic take is 'industry fights all regulation on cost grounds', but the fact that the argument is abused doesn't mean it doesn't have some underlying merit
by tete | 2025-12-05 13:47:14+00:00
Something that is way worse today in my opinion is that back then everyone has nicknames, talks even for deep topics somewhat generically.

Nowadays everyone wants you to put your real name, expects a real photo of you, track every step you take.

I think it would be nice to go back to how you could talk openly, just like you were able to have "discussion forums" in newspapers pseudonymously without it being trivially abused for identity theft, etc.