skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the past, (before around 2002 or so) record labels would put out a bunch of artist and see which one stuck. They would lose money on 80 - 90% of their artist because all they needed was one or two to make it big to make their money back.

When I read this, I thought of VCs and how they'll back many promising startups in the hopes that some percentage of them will generate significant returns for them.

To distill down what you said, would it be accurate to characterize record labels as sort of a marketing agency for musicians, where marketing means branding, positioning, promoting, distribution, public relations, community building, etc?

And that instead of a musician hiring such a marketing agency, these agencies offer their services for a (massive) cut of the musician's earnings?

I ask because it feels like some music startups are in a good position to do this, such as Topspin and Bandcamp. At least, they have the start of a distribution system and some primary promotional features. The whole brand image thing doesn't quite feel like their forte, but they could certainly try adding that too.

To top it off, these startups could build a marketplace of service professionals that help musicians with stylists, managers, promoters, background singers, etc.

The difference between these startups and record labels is how their technologies to allow them to scale without constantly increasing their cuts from musicians' earnings.

Just thinking off the top of my head.
Why are people more hesitant to buy software than other items?
Internet and Global Economic Growth
> The Internet has solved #1. Any content can be distributed to any one in the world for an effective cost of $0.

And thereby created a new problem: Any content can be distributed to any one in the world for an effective profit of $0.
Can I use XULRunner to package my php based app into desktop standalone http://www.mockuptiger.com

It is rendering using html5 and lot of javascript but then would have to convert from php to pure html and then use XULRunner
Other than introducing a new interface I don't understand what new concept is being introduced here. It doesn't sound like they're putting hooks from the email client into other programs, which is really what needs to happen. Email itself could generally go away if instead of asking questions people could send little "applets" that would open inline with the message, and can directly accomplish the task being asked of you.

So instead of sending an email to manually write contact info, someone could send me a "request: contact info" message. Then when I receive that message, I just click one button called "Activate" which would automatically fill out my contact info and fire off an auto-generated response.

The number of times in a year that I have write my name, email, address, phone etc is mindnumbingly stupid. I should be able to have an email program that can auto-fetch all this type of information and more.
Hey, Silicon Valley Engineers: Time To Toss Out The Bankers
The Universe and the Insignificance of Earth.
It's either "I have a dream" or "you're dreaming, man".

Not sure which. I am not american, but I wish I could sign this petition and give it the slightest incremental bigger chance of actually resulting in ... something. If that's even possible.
That sounds like Slashdot's moderation system.
If the journal you work for is behind a paywall, why do you do it?

I mean it as an honest question, I've always wanted to know why someone would work for free for an organization that works for profit. I understand why the academics submit their papers; it's necessary for career advancement, but why do people review for free?
Well legalizing pot should be no problem then.
Email is just fine for me, I don't understand why people need to pretend they reinvent it every other week (social email, todo list email...).

The only thing I'm missing is on the technical side, a transaction system like you describe.

How great would it be if all the servers could reply to my mail client : I have received your email it isn't considered spam and the end user got it.
Those were just reference images for the lookdev and environment mapping (at least in Iron Man) or set background plates in the compositor - feature films are generally recorded at 2K (2048x1556) or (these days moving to) 4K (4096x3112), DSLRs aren't capable of that resolution for movies.
Yes there is a huge problem with American politics, but I don't know that only going after people who PUBLICLY admit this is the right direction. It might be a good start, but I really feel that you'd need more overarching change to actually make a difference.
Why are you comparing to Theora rather than webm/vp8?
Meh. Some of the criticisms are related to the paper itself and are probably valid. "You need to show why we would care" is a rejection of the way the paper is written, and not of the concepts it contains.
Do you mean that the latest version of Safari on iOS 5, released a couple months ago, is an obsolete browser? It is amazingly easy to make a page like that work in every browser made since 1996. And it does work on Firefox, albeit very slowly.

Things like this presentation are the actual reason we got into "this mess". Making your pages accessible to everyone is a necessity. I don't mean to be impolite, but you need to revisit your concepts. HTML5 is all about gracefully handling mark-up errors in a consistent way, not the opposite. HTML is originally a language for authors, not programmers. You're thinking of XHTML vs HTML, and that's a completely different matter.
Define crappy? Biglion has huuuge traffic (alexa #723 as we speak) and it's now arguably coupon service #1 in Russia. Moreover, the problems its customers might have with this site do not revolve around its design being similar to that of Groupon.

The nature of the internet is that there is usually only one global winner. Compare worldwide search (Google is bigger than everybody else combined) with worldwide car makers (10+ big names of comparable size, local brands in many countries).
That one global winner tends to be an US-based megacorp.
Given that, a country has exactly two choices.
First one is let those megagiants colonize the local market, harnessing all the profits and then maybe opening some local offices someday; second one is try to fend off the global number ones and develop own services controlling the same business model slots, understanding that these local players would not be very different from a global player (either by cloning like VKontakte or by converging like Yandex), and that the global megacorp would probably be overally more advanced (counterexample is south korea where local services run circles around clumsy google in the terms of tech).

Doing the first way you submit all your market to US megacorps and then try to fit in some original, tiny but global, business niche (since all the big slots would already be taken). So I applaud that Russia could go the second way, for sure.
Opening this presentation pegs my Firefox 9 at 100% CPU. What the hell?
While this is funny, bribery has a very specific meaning, and every politician learned it very well during the whole Jack Abramhoff scandal.

What the MPAA, and Chris Dodd, are suggesting here is that they're less willing to make campaign contributions (on the up-and-up, as dubious as the up-and-up has become post-Citizen's United).

I'm quickly tiring of the hyperbole from both sides of the issue. As the days go on, this is clearly becoming less a matter of facts at hand and more a boiling over of old media vs. new media attitudes that have been simmering for 15 years.

I know what this conflict is like first hand. I work on the tech/web side of an old media company. Everything becomes us vs. them, and everything appears on the surface to have ulterior motive, when in fact it almost always first stems from a serious lack of understanding, which breeds frustration, which breeds paranoia, which breeds stupid bills like SOPA, with actual ulterior motives and all.

Honestly, I'm interested what types of companies PG and YC think will "kill Hollywood." My feeling is that killing it will necessitate a much, much more understanding and symbiotic approach to Hollywood than many on HN are willing to acknowledge.
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I second this, http://chargify.com has many more features than Braintree, Spreedly, and Recurly. Also, they work with international merchant accounts/gateways.
Consider Bitcoin yet?
How about Trello? It uses Node.js for the back-end update processing and event handling. http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/
Well, yeah, if you're hacking a Facebook app, that implies that you have connectivity, right?

The primary reason for a native app is to provide functionality with poor or no signal. If you're doing something that's directly tied to the Internet, you may as well do it with all Internet technologies and reap the benefits (faster development, instant deployment of new versions, etc).
Chris Dodd Speaking At Sundance Panel Monday
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If this is Dodd's understanding of how congressmen work, I'd like to see an investigation into Dodd's time in congress. Who wrote him checks? What kind of attention he paid in return?
There is a fancy name for those "empty spaces" that aren't controlled via legislation...liberties.
Ask HN: Can I fund an anti-SOPA/PIPA TV commercial
A quick check of the TOS on kickstarter lists "causes" as something they won't allow. I have a question out to actblue.com to see if I can list myself as a donation recipient if I'm not running for any elective office, but do have a message to share.

My goal is to make something of an "Internet Lobby" since we have a relatively quiet voice were it not for the lobbyists that Google and other Internet companies pay for, as well as their very publicly initiated "black out". I've written a screenplay / script which I intend on posting publicly, prior to production, to solicit feedback and changes from the Internet community.

Some may agree or disagree that this can be effective, but I'm looking for a legal way to accept donations online for which 100% of the funds will be used for getting the "Internet" message out to the public and to lawmakers who seldom hear us.
Great for consumers, deadly for certain businesses' profits.
Show HN: TameFiles - Fastest way to email files - my 3 day project
Fissure opens in chess AI scene
Except on slashdot you also have to state a reason for upvoting.

The main problem with downvoting for me is that often people vote down out of disagreement, resulting in groupthink. In my opinion, downvotes should hide comments and punish commenters that don't contribute to the discussion. By making downvoting slightly harder, you could focus on the proper subset of comments that should be punished, like spam and insults.

(and by the way fix the UI problem of two arrows that are much too close to each other)
I'm not accused of having Obama in my pocket. If everyone was accusing me of having bought out Obama, you darn well bet I wouldn't mention him and money in the same paragraph.
How Google Destroyed American Democracy
Assuming the person has the ability to learn from his mistake. Unfortunately this is not a quality everyone possesses.
Does anyone else have a lot of trouble getting logged in? I don't just mean that the form doesn't provide any feedback, but that even after logging in (I just reset my password and successfully logged in), when I go back to a petition page I get logged out again (yes I'm refreshing the page).

I'd much rather see a petition for a better website. :/
Make sure you take the time to spec out any task that will take more than a couple of days. Nothing is more frustrating than going from working on well-defined projects to a stream of "arbitrary" requests every other day.
Fields medalist Tim Gowers: Elsevier — my part in its downfall
Nicely summarized and a valid question.

From what I gather, direct campaign contributions and the way corporations are funneling money into elections are not connected. Corporations are NOT making direct contributions to campaigns. They are making indirect and anonymous contributions to superpacs.

We don't need to "make contributions illegal." Nor do we _need_ publicly financed campaigns. That would be very hard to get.

We can start by having superpacs disclose their donors. Or by setting a limit on individual, and by extension corporate, contribution to said superpacs.

The loophole is that you can't make a large contribution directly to a campaign, yet you can make a contribution of any size, anonymously, indirectly to the corresponding superpac. This is why money = voice.

In answer to your question: "Should the MPAA be disallowed to make a political commercial and pay for its broadcast?" They should be allowed to make a political statement by contributing to a superpac that runs the commercial, but the contribution should not be unlimited nor anonymous. In effect, they'll need other companies in the pool to get enough money for that commercial. Now we can say corporations are people, problem solved.
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This was a Planet Money podcast. I don't know if it was any different (I just skimmed it), but I always really enjoy the presentation and style of Planet Money.

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=944...
What's hilarious is that Dodd was painted as one of the "good guys" during the 2008 presidential campaign. Oh what a difference a few years makes.
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12 Games To Look Out For In 2012
tl;dr:

David Pollack created lift. He also created and ran scala-tools.org, a maven repo and documentation host for scala stuff. He's recently decided to transition off much of his scala involvement, in part because his new startup visi.pro uses neither scala nor the jvm.

Several months ago he asked for help taking over scala-tools. There was not much response, and amongst the handful of people who stepped up, there was some sort of personality conflict.

In response, he temporarily shut it down and is transitioning the site to new hosts and maintainers. The internet is pitching a tantrum. Pollack is put out, since all the whiners where invisible when he was asking for new maintainers several months ago. Also, whiners who neither helped then and aren't stepping up to help now reek of entitlement: what right do they enjoy to Pollack's continued donation of time and money, just because he historically provided something the community liked?
Why would you migrate to BrainTree instead of Stripe? The latter costs about the same and seems to have a much nicer API and use case.
AFAIK OpenCL isn't really good for "anything" as of right now. There is really nothing practical that uses OpenCL out yet. I'd give it 5 years & then we'll see where we're at. Later versions of OpenCL might even contain video decoding specific extensions that are hardware agnostic.
Pro-Israeli Hacker Posts 100,000 Facebook Account Details
Paper iPad, iPhone Popular for Chinese New Year Ritual
TL;DR - The internet is full of ungrateful dicks.

It often bothers me the vitriol that open source projects get for not fixing some bug or even add some feature that certain user considers important. But I don't see a best course of action than simply ignoring them. There's no upside to wasting your time and mental energy replying.

(By the way, I agree with the author. I just think this post is preaching to the choir. The targeted people will just disregard it).
I can't get the intro movie to work in any browser (it doesn't even appear in IE9).
email sucks. collaborative tools are what you should be backing VCs!
Strangely, he didn't include his large campaign contributions from the Entertainment industry in his analysis of the laws.

I might respect his position a bit more if he commented on this. However, I can see the position of these guys since this is really the ONLY way to hurt non-US-based sources of pirated and "fake" merchandise.

Of course, no analysis from the industry or Congress has every shown any conclusive evidence that piracy or "fake" consumer goods causes any major financial hardship towards manufacturers. Many people contend that these goods would just not be purchased if people's only option was the "full price" or "legal" versions.
Agreed. Where is the TechCrunch of independent YouTube videos? A place equivalent to Ebert that would tell me what content is worth watching online. If you can do it and build a following of millions, that would be amazing.
I think the argument here is that Chris Dodd is wilfully admitting there isn't a boundary between "bribery" and "campaign donation" in his, or his corporations, mind.

His tone is that his campaign donations should have got him above and beyond treatment from those who didn't. A campaign donation lends no credence of reciprocal action from a candidate. The whole point of backing a candidate is that you believe that candidate supports ideals that are beneficial to you and the public, however Dodd appears to believe that the point of backing a candidate is to pay the most malleable candidate into office.

In Dodd's mindset he committed bribery with his campaign donations. Bribery: "the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in charge of a public or legal duty." [emphasis mine]

Dodd believes his donation should influence the actions of his chosen official, thus via the very specific meaning of bribery, he committed it and publicly admitted it.
[OT] Scala is definitely the current hot spot for PL drama
This reminds me of Neil Gaiman's "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch" essay, about reader entitlement:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.htm...
Email works fine, the problem is that lots of software implements it incorrectly.

Take spam filters for example: The correct way for this (and what I also do on my own private mailserver) is classifying mail during the SMTP session. Thus, if my mailserver considers a particular message as spam the sender receives an error message stating that his message could not be delivered.

And now take Gmail: Happily accepts most messages, but labels some of them as Spam. Of course, no-one ever checks the spam folder. A few misclassified mails and people will start complaining that email is broken.
I love this. Perfect.
In Israel, where I live, some forms of political speech in political TV programming and editorials is disallowed in the pre-election time period.
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"Holding down 'j' is a vim anti-pattern." Better ways to jump long distances
I still don't get the point of this. I see the utility of seeing multiple fonts at once, but I'm sure there is a more subtle point. Because web designers want font families, not just fonts, what does this even mean?
Is there any project active about DNS P2P?
Hi there,

I wonder if you know about any project trying to implement a DNS system relying in a P2P model.

I've seen many projects but they seem forgotten or inactive. Isn't out there any serious attempt to implement it?

Thanks in advance!
Gmail deletes messages and accounts within 60 days:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail#Privacy
Power of Ten Perspective on SOPA
Rather then purchase content from Hollywood, where else could one place their entertainment dollars to help squeeze Hollywood ? Games ?
Dwolla, Stripe, WePay.
These are all paypal alternatives but none of them is good as paypal...yet
Not how I remember it ... Dodd was intimately involved with the government's actions that contributed to the Housing Crisis and was the top recipient of campaign contributions from Freddie & Fannie.

All of which had the makings for a very difficult election battle in 2010, when Dodd recognized as he opted out of running for re-election in 2010.
Not only that, but with Reddit being a political force to be reckoned with, it may become a target of the US government.
It seems like this is getting heavy flagging. I think the rule is if it reach 10 flags before 10 comments the post is killed. So, don't just upvote, comment.
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More rubbish that advocates the false-to-fact concept of "Intellectual Property". In my view, "IP" can't exist. Who invented the light bulb? Who invented radio? Who invented television? Who invented the linked list? Who invented the telegraph? Multiple people, all at about the same time.

Can't happen elsewhere? What about the history of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string matching algorithm?

Independent invention nullifies the ownership of ideas. "Intellectual Property" - bah, humbug! A false concept to try to get governments to enforce monopolies.
Or maybe you could have an "Agree/disagree with parent" on your comment and the top comment got one upvote/downvote for each one of your upvotes, respectively. There are lots of things you can do, who knows if they have any effect, though...
Defending the last free place on earth
Ask YC: any chance to see a special RFS[9] application form?
I really hate the large solid color squares everywhere in Win8. And the flat buttons. I don't know, just a feeling. Maybe I need a texture, a shading or gradient. But that solid colors make me feel like being in front of win 3.1 again =) Well, maybe not that much, but still..

Maybe I just need to get used to it...
As a consumer I personally prefer Amazon Payments. They already have my information and their checkout is familiar.

I can't say if they support international payments though (but they're a good "for US customers" option!)
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RFSes don't have distinct application forms. There's an RFS dropdown on the standard application form.
I can guarantee you that Vembu would not have said it the way you are suggesting & the timing of the "memo". See this link http://www.sramanamitra.com/2007/07/16/happily-bootstrapping... where he was categorical that he is not going to be giving options and there was no expectations.

I think the real issue is not about sharing wealth since it can be shared through other mechanisms for the core team - faster promotions, more cash comp, better work environment...

Its really about whether you want to keep it private. If you want to keep it private, then what is the value of the options if there is no exit?

I presume this is the same thinking that James Goodnight at SAS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute#Company_and_softw...) & Mike Bloomberg would have gone through to try and keep the company private.
The worst fallacy of modern times: that everything comes back to the ego.

I have no idea what you mean by a "more aesthetically pleasurable life," except that apparently it's a bad thing, but if we all truly accepted our insignificance (in the face of the cosmos, God, love, whatever) and that we often do "altruistic" things out of self-interest rather than love and compassion, the world would be an amazing place.
I feel like this was a rant, just for the sake of a rant. It was pretty hard to come across an anti-sopa site that didn't also include tools to contact a local representative, along with links pointing to education about what SOPA is and why it was bad.

And if they didn't, it's not like virtually every tech blog out there worth their spit wasn't filling in the gaps.

The internet at least partially got what they wanted out of the SOPA blackout, the bill has been delayed, people switched sides, it got a dialogue going. Sometimes that in and of itself is an accomplishment people should be proud of.