skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with "killing" Hollywood and replacing it with other forms of entertainment is that GOOD movies fulfil a very specific function: through storytelling they shed light on the human psyche and give us an insight into life itself and our journey through it. This has been the function of stories since our ancestors sat in the dark around fires. (It could be argued that when we sit down in a dark cinema we are tapping into this latent desire to share a common story experience.) The idea of a shared experience hearing a story is as old as the humanity itself.

Good novels give us insight into life/ourselves but I doubt video games or surfing the web can be held up as providing the same. They are just ways to pass the time, which could also be said for 90% of Hollywood's current output.

Independent film makers therefore have an opportunity to tell the stories the studios do not. So, this begs the question; why haven't we seen the first internet blockbuster?

Movie studios' sole focus is money. Money allows them to hire movie stars, to use the best equipment, to buy ad space and to rent movie theatres. In short, money (and how much they are prepared to spend) is what separates anyone with a video camera and an idea, and the major movie studios.

Indie filmmakers cannot compete on a level monetary footing. So they must disrupt and stay lean, not only in production but ALSO in marketing and distribution.

This is where I believe a lot of indie film makers need to focus on: disruptive distribution.

As an example, I directed a movie and treated it as a lean startup from pre production.

We are looking to disrupt traditional movie distribution by offering individuals and businesses something tangible and of intrinsic value when they buy our movie: to feature them on a billboard on Times Square. More info on our strategy can be found at: http://on.fb.me/osp0oE
Adam Curry explains how Hollywood could learn from MU rather than bust them
For what it's worth and though I shamefully fed it, this seems to be a troll account created solely to insult a few people of the python community: only three comments insulting Jacob here and Jesse Noller in an other thread. I'm pretty sure the guy is not looking for discussion, he should just be flagged and ignored.
That, and: he was the guy who seemed _more_ sane than Lieberman.

Seriously, I actually liked Dodd. He was a friendly, sanely leftist Senator. Where did the MPAA bit even come from?

What worries me is the unpredictability here. Haven't researched this (downvotes incoming, I suppose) but Connecticut has few ties to Hollywood...how can we know which Senators will leap from a reasonable voting record to outright offensive actions within months?
Mission Control II: WebGL video gallery from Süperfad
Description and tech details at the Superfad site: http://superfad.com/work/project/mission_control_ii
Wanting to get email to "work" is a noble effort, but that means different things to different people.

A more intuitive user interface will sadly not magically transform email into something usable.

Receiving fewer emails, might.
When the people don't care too much about what goes on at the top, or when the people at the top notice how easy it is to sway public opinion on certain policies one way or the other, they start caring less and less about stuff like that.
I'm sick and tired of to-do list apps...
Ten reasons PostgreSQL is better than MSSQL (accurate flamebait)
> any replacement has to succeed because it's better than hollywood. something even more awesome will come along and replace it

Don’t forget, when it comes along, it will probably appear to be worse than hollywood, just as text messaging is worse than email and email is worse than an express envelope.

That’s the nature of a disruption. It’s obviously worse. Until, after the fact, everyone suddenly claims it’s so much better.
They had a twilio integrated page that allowed anyone in the US to call their representatives from the page. 300,000 people directed there during the blackout from Mozilla alone did exactly that. I don't have complete numbers, but they were far from silent.
Windows 8 Store : User Experience Preview
a to-do list that others can put things on. This becomes the WORST to-do list ever.

If you still do the work that emails contain, you still have a todo list other people can put things on, don't you?

So what's the real problem with inbox-as-todo-list? That new work goes at the top? That work and non-work are mixed? That one TODO item can be in several revisions over many visually separated emails? That you can't track partially done things?
I imagine it has more to do with their public defiance and PR ability. The MPAA and RIAA want to frame the debate in their own terms. The Pirate Bay and the political organizations they inspired are a threat to that.
Lowest priced online billing system?
The startup that I work at has built a Saas application that has around 20 customers so far. We make anywhere between $1000-3000 per customer depending on usage. We collect this revenue via check or bank wire, which reduces the number of fees we incur.
We are in process of opening up the application to more users at a lower price point, but are not sure how to bill many people easily at an affordable rate.
What is the lowest priced online billing that we can use?
SQL: the successful cousin of Haskell
So basically GMail with elaborate filters and better search?
"Hollywood" has traditionally favored Democratic candidates. If this stays a "hot" issue it is going to turn into a political battle one way or another. Still, this seems to me a far better situation than some under the table deals.

I am still thankful to Reddit, Jimbo, even Google who forced through their blackouts traditional media to report about it and therefore not allowing to push it off as some "resistance by stealing pirates from the internets".
The Psychology of Color
"If WebM is ready for mainstream, Google can just make it the main format for Youtube, and with a fallback to Flash. That shouldn't affect regular users at all (again, if WebM is good enough)."

AFAIK, iOS supports neither Flash nor WebM.
EnterpriseDB Is Giving Oracle a Run For Its Money (?)
If you modified your statement to "The minute Barack Obama does something I really don't like, the minute I stop donating tens of millions of dollars to his campaign." the outcome might be different.
Everyone seems to be falling over backwards trying to assert that MU was a legitimate business because it had a small number of legitimate users...

If the majority of MegaUploads revenues came from clicks/views of ads on downloads of illegal content, then I'd say the government's assertions are correct.

Kind of hard to make 150MM with a few paid users uploading/downloading own content.
Samsung Galaxy Ace Gingerbread 2.3.6 update available in India
The bigger "miracle" to me is how they fostered a 4chan-like creative atmosphere without going overboard. This is a very tricky balance but they managed to do it really well.
You don't need a startup to kill hollywood.

Here are simple steps

Cut down your TV time by 1 hour daily
Go to movies only 1 every 2 months

-So here is an application idea
An application that can be installed on as a plugin somewhere (don't know where) that would automatically flash a alert on the TV screen if you go above 1 hour time limit.

But again think about why the human has become so dependent on external stimulus for being constantly entertained.

For e.g My kid wants constant attention or entertained.

He either wants me to play with him all day
Or
Watch TV continuously
OR
Play video games

Finding other ways of getting entertained in order to kill hollywood is not the sane idea. The root of the problem is becoming more dependent on external medium for entertainent
I'm guessing they're going through the same emotions as every ordinary voter has gone through for the past few decades...
I totally get why this rfs was posted. SOPA is pretty egregious, and the YCombinator folks went beyond complaining and decided to do something about it. There's nothing more positive than funding startups to create the better world you envision.

I certainly appreciate that they didn't gloss over the fact that SOPA's potential damage to civil liberties and the world economy was what raised their awareness of the viability of startups in this space. People should publicly stand up for causes they believe in.

I've been looking into this space for a while with plans of disruption. I see a lot of posts on here from people who work in the industry talking about how expensive it is to create high-quality video. As an independent filmmaker and entrepreneur, I only somewhat agree (on the price of hiring indie filmmakers: http://crewtide.com/2011/11/03/price-of-video-narrative-vs-v...). There are a number of things that make Hollywood productions so expensive, like name actors or car crashes/explosions. But another big one is location, location, location. Hollywood production studios are expensive because they can create any location you can imagine. Crowdsource to award-winning independent filmmakers (as my startup will do) and each of them will shoot in whatever amazing-looking locations they know they can shoot in for free.

sanjiallblue writes as if every independent film shoot uses non-professional cast and crew -- that is ridiculous. In my recent shoot (we're releasing a six-episode thriller-romance web series around Valentine's Day) the only conflict was that one of our leads got into a play with the American Repertory Theater. I'm interviewing 20 independent filmmakers for my blog this month and all of them are full-time filmmakers -- some have day jobs shooting for local TV stations or editing for production studios, but most are full-time freelancers doing commercials, corporate work, music videos, and their own shorts and features.

By the way, brands are beating Y Combinator to the punch. Who has funded television since it began? Brands, and they're starting to skip tv and the exorbitant price of advertising there and create their own content. Since BMW's The Hire series early last decade, plenty of other brands have jumped on board creating their own mini TV shows (http://crewtide.com/2011/10/14/branded-entertainment-example...). You should really read these guys take on it: http://www.reelseo.com/every-brand-will-be-a-studio/. ReelSEO always has the latest news & best commentary on this industry.

Right now BMW, Kmart, YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu are still going to Hollywood to get their content produced, and they're paying through the nose. Kmart spent $100,000 per 8-mninute episode of a low-budget web series by going to Hollywood; an indie filmmaker could have made that for 1/10th the price with an all-professional crew.
A very useful round of editing of Google's webfont directory with a simple and uncluttered, "everything at a glance" interface. Awesome!
Now we just need a faster WebM encoder. libvpx is always slower than x264, even up to 2 times slower.
it's about the community and how the site is structured to support that community (and cats.)
Now change "does something I really don't like" to "stops executing policies I dictate" and you're getting somewhere..
According to this blog post http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/12/picking-right-driver.htm... the difference between WebM in software vs WebM in hardware is around 36%. There's also a nice graph that shows that on high brightness, the difference is smaller.
Myth Busting CakePHP
Beware the fake Megaupload sites
SOPA dies only for two more bills to appear
ACTA - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmQN93NqqDM&list=LLDU6AlHwdt_Prtzsn2seXHA&index=1&feature=plpp_video_

and Protect Children from Online Pornographers Act http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/the-legislation-that-could-kill-internet-privacy-for-good/242853/
I wonder how long it takes to make a southpark episode. Or one of those news reinactment cg segments that asian outfit is famous for. Perhaps new forms of media won't take the same shape or have the same factors apply.
Interesting to see the traditional pink-as-a-feminine color enforced here so clearly.

Pink = Clean, Calming, Warm

So women can't be rough, excited or cold? We need more heroines like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbeth_Salander
How to disable autocomplete urls in Firefox 12
Stripe.com, although not sure about #3.
How "invisible" is critical? If not really, then Plimus looks nice, share*it also has subscriptions. Both are quite easy to integrate (web callbacks).
Regarder Senegal vs Zambia en direct live CAN 2012
I'm going with "wait for Stripe to arrive" personally.
Dodd got a taste of money when he ran for President. He instantly turned from a progressive to a cash hound. At the start of his campaign, he sponsored an email drive to oppose some anti-corruption bill (I forget which), but it was actually just a front to collect email addresses for his campaign fundraising. Way to misread your constituency under the influence of greed.
Yes. The whole point of the post is to consider <video> support.
Even worse, in the UK they've managed to trick the generally trusted national charity Citizens Advice Bureau into endorsing their "Our cookies are for your convenience!" claptrap. The CAB is featured prominently on their marketing all over.

http://www.google.co.uk/goodtoknow/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8827809/Google-...
First online music player for iPhone with tons of music
Show HN:Google Instant like Search for Movie Ratings and Trailers
Sounds a bit like the Zoho Creator, check it out if you haven't already http://www.zoho.com/creator/ There are other 'online databases' of a similar vein, Caspio Bridge comes to mind, googling will take you to them.

(There are also offline RAD web app development applications that lower the barrier to entry than learning a contemporary stack, see a few reviewed here http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/infoworld-review-... )
I assume their justification are the push notification servers, though that's a bit thin for my taste.
Summit Series Basecamp: Robots, Tech Talks and Mountaintops
Have you even looked at the guidelines [1] in your 4 years here? The parent comment has more violations than your original.

* "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation." (at least I hope you wouldn't call me "Mr 278" to my face. I am not my HN Karma)

* "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."" (You didn't have to bring up my karma at all)

* "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." (Twice in parent comment)

Not that I agree with everyone posting on 'my side' of this issue, but as we can see here, karma is not a perfect system. Just because I haven't spent as much time commenting here, you think you can simply ignore my arguments, put forward independently of my own credentials. The guidelines exist so that they can be followed, and we can always have meaningful, productive discussions. Not so that certain people can flagrantly break them. But, if you won't listen to other arguments against breaking the guidelines, will you listen to your own? If I may,

> Second, plenty of people are wrong every day. That doesn't mean they need to be called an ass. it means you talk to them civilly. Try to convince them of the error or their ways. That's why Steve Jobs formed a friendship with Rupert Murdoch. Not because they're such kindred spirits.

I kinda wish you had responded to the OT portions of my comment, but I feel like that would have been equally fruitless.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think the animation in southpark is the easy part. But consistently writing great comedy week after week, that targets enough people is very hard. for example , aqua teen hunger force , and sealab 2021 are also using low cost animation , but didn't have much success.

I don't know much about comedy writing, but it seems it takes a lot of work and a lot of talent to write great comedy. I think comedy writing is one place that startups could do interesting stuff there.
Dwollar

check it out
I wonder how the Google fanboys will reconcile this with "Don't Be Evil". Colluding to keep salaries low and to prevent career mobility for your employees is pretty fucking evil in my book.
Start-up spotlight: Capsule aims to be group events' one-stop app
Origami stroller charges iPhone, has headlights but no airbags
'How' - Digg bloated and went belly up, Reddit welcomed the fallout.
They answer the question about Chrome in the FAQ at the end now:

"You Are Counting Chrome as Supporting H.264 Even Though They Dropped Support!

In January 2011, they announced that H.264 support would be dropped. As of January 2012, Chrome has not yet dropped support for H.264."

Regarding the figures, they look anomalous until you realise that IE8 and older don't support HTML5 video at all, and that the figures for browsers that do have a lot of overlap because most recent browsers support multiple video formats. Since H.264 via Flash is excluded, so are older IE browsers, and IE9 has a much smaller market share than IE as a whole, which explains why the side with Firefox on it works out a bit bigger than the side with IE on it in your comparison there.
Yes, it counts Chrome as supporting H.264.

Only IE9 and above support <video>, so the share of IE8 and older doesn't count as H.264 share. Firefox 9 has a larger usage share than IE9.

(I included the script so that people could read it to see what was counted instead of speculating...)
10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D.
IPad 3 to have a low-res Retina display
The iBooks 2.0 built-in widgets
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Trnsfr now supports https and UK numbers too
Cosmic Log - Solar blast heading our way [incl. vid.]
Founder of Shuttered Web Site Sought Limelight
I searched for "office" in this thread and nothing showed up. Why is the far more effective option of running for office never considered in our circles? We could certainly use a new political party, and we most definitely could use public representatives who actually "represent" us.

Running for office, of course, will not address the critical short-term, but do consider that the intersect between Technology and Governance will become even more critical in the upcoming years. To sum: we shouldn't complain about public servants being servants of moneyed interests, if none of us danes to ever even think of serving our nation as public servants. Run for office.
Sortable - Taking the pain out of buying
Website Hosting Lessons for the Starters
AFAIK OpenCL isn't good for video decoding.
Windows 8 Mobile Tablets & Broadband, Microsoft Looks Ahead
Forget 4G LTE, 5G Mobile Could Be Around The Corner
Android 4.0 - Ice Cream Sandwich - Google's Golden OS?
I like that Reddit's voting system is a lot more democratic than Digg's system where there were "power users". I think this also helped create the strong and, at the same time, large community.
This is analogous to the Hollywood debate that's going on right now. It's a similarly broken model that can benefit from some startup help.
This ignores the fact that H.264 often has full hardware acceleration...

Yes, the rise of WebM-enabled browser market share ignores this fact.
As far as I know the page/brin pagerank paper was also rejected by SIGIR (the main information retrieval conference) before being published in WWW.
The enemy of my enemy
Depending on the signal strength at the place you are visiting you could invest in a 3G Mobile Broadband dongle.

Alternatively if you have plenty of time before the trip you could train someone to handle the business for you on a freelance basis.
Apropos reddit, here’s how Alexis Ohanian deflects the blame from redditors onto the victims of their creepy facebook-stalking and harassment: “Your kids need to know that any time they take an image and put it in a digital format… they should assume that it is now public content… That’s the useful thing I think CNN could have reported on, instead of making up a bunch of jibber-jabber about reddit.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXZYvrue1BE&feature=youtu...
> If you still do the work that emails contain, you still have a todo list other people can put things on, don't you?

Sometimes, but not always. As your inbox volume increases, the % of things that come in that you don't want to become work for you also increases.

Note: I don't consider myself "famous". That said, I've gotten some good mainstream press related to my projects and I've also gone out of my way to make myself available to people by sharing my time, experiences, and lessons learned. This has paid off MASSIVELY and I wouldn't change that. What it's lead to, though, is the impact of a lot of people who don't think about the work they're creating for someone before they hit send. They're not forming complete thoughts, really asking for what they want/need, and in some cases, even asking anything at all.

I wouldn't give up the 20% of high quality email I get for the 80% of difficult to process email I get, but the 80% is still there.

That means that a pretty significant % of the non-spam emails I get are emails that need more work done to them before they're complete enough for me to do anything with them.

If I think of my inbox and assistant as a worker queue, it's their job is to keep incoming messages from being lost and disorganized, and in many cases, preparing the information/requests in the email for being worked on by me.

Maybe the issue is that the person adding things to my to-do list knows my workload, my priorities. The person emailing me doesn't have that context, and rarely has the consideration of it in the first place.
Just a quick note that the standalone version has a number of bugs (e.g. plugins might not install, templates might not install, etc.). So if you get an error, try the Firefox based one which works very well.
Forever Alone in New York City? The EDC Is Here to Help
Kickstarter is presale marketing venue to raise startup funds "kickstarter". It doesn't matter to Kickstarter what the seller offers in exchange for those funds.

This is just a more honest approach than vendors who lie about already creating a product before they sell it. (Hello, 1977 Bill Gates and most startups ever.)
There are more important differences:

1. Apples are fungible; one apple is as good as the next one: unlike Harry Potter movies you can consume apples in any order.

2. Nobody holds the copyright on a particular apple. There are many companies growing apples.

3. You can grow apple trees in your own garden from seeds. If this takes too long, you can buy a tree.

4. You can not download an apple. 5. Eating destroys apples. 6. Apples can rot. etc...
SOPA/PIPA Discussed More Than Super Bowl, Oscars, Oprah Finale, Am Idol
Top 3 Exploit Modules in Metasploit for Pawning your Windows XP at Home
Lobbying is legal. Donating to campaigns of politicians you like is legal. I'm not sure why people are surprised.

The answer isn't to kick these specific bums out. It is to change campaign finance laws to make contributions illegal. I'm not sure what people here would agree to that doesn't amount to censorship though. Should the MPAA be disallowed to make a political commercial and pay for its broadcast?