skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an interesting experiement.

It's been a long time since I really paid close attention to the movie industry, but I remember that one way money was raised, and risks shared, was in the divvying up of distribution rights (and or options on those rights) between domestic theatrical release, DVD sales, cable TV rights, and rights for same in overseas markets.

Amazon is in an interesting position in this regard, they are positioned to make money on physical and digital distribution to consumers through both individual sales and amazon prime subscriptions. They also make money on the home theater systems people use to consume this stuff. And, of course, they are getting into the eBook publishing business. Controlling the film rights to books gives them even more leverage over holywood.

It wasn't until now that I made the connection between the squeeze Amazon is putting on book publishers, and how much leverage that gives them over Hollywood. Good for amazon, but good for Apple too.

I also note that IMDB is an Amazon property, and that IMDB is both a way for consumers to discover media, but also it has made some headway in helpingsource the skills needed to make movies.
Thanks for correcting me. Also, we have similar usernames. ;)
The problem with this proposal is that it specifically puts restrictions not just on speech in general, but on political speech. Allowing the government to mandate the content of political speech and media would set a dangerous precedent for the future, even if that wasn't the intent of the amendment.

And while technically speaking requiring that the LeafStorm News Network has to provide equal airtime for all political candidates might be more "fair," if I own the news network I should be able to accept or reject advertisers as I see fit, and if people don't think it's fair they can start their own news networks. Now if I voluntarily said, "I'm providing ten minutes of ad airtime each day for the candidates in this race free of charge, with no extra advertising permitted, and no PACs either," then that is well within my rights as a network owner, but it's not something we should require everyone to do.
Spec work has been part and parcel of the screenwriting world forever.

As have free options. Something everyone tells you not to do and most people end up doing anyway.
Considering I spend most of the year travelling around or living in East Asia, my best choice is just to avoid the US completely, including transit flights (as we now have our passports checked).

I know the chances of being asked anything, including, "have you bought pirated movies or software while in Asia?" Is pretty hard to refute if you've lived or traveled there for the last decade.
Awesome timing. Amazon studios. http://studios.amazon.com/getting-started
what kind of laptop?
>Is something happening to the quality of this community lately? And if so, is there anything we can or should do about it?

Yup. No way to collect data to back it up, however. I do see more comments down-voted to the very bottom of threads lately.

I don't think calling PG an ass is indicative of a loss in quality, however. It is indicative of abrasiveness. Is he an ass? What was the reason for calling him an ass? Was there evidence given that could substantiate the claim? I mean, maybe there is a good reason to call him an ass. The internet is kind of abrasive, people are more opinionated and bigger jerks than they are in real life. I don't think this is a bad thing, it helps to stimulate discussion.

What we can do, as a community, is go through a checklist:

What is the claim made?
Is it a ridiculous claim?
If it isn't ridiculous, is well substantiated?
If it isn't substantiated, is it purposefully inflammatory?
(The difference between stupid and malicious).

Down-vote or up-vote accordingly.

Anecdotally, I just read an entire thread about whether 'nice guys' finish first or last. No clue whether it would have happened 3 years ago, but it is a very shallow topic.

I think the bigger issue is a proliferation of shallow discussions.
I think you are overstating the problems with hidden volumes.

The EFF advice is as follows:

Although TrueCrypt hidden volumes may have some practical applications, we think they are unlikely to be useful in the border search context because they are most helpful when lying to someone about whether there is additional hidden data on a disk. Lying to border agents is not advisable, because it can be a serious crime.

Lying to border agents clearly is a serious offence, but as far as I can see that is the "only" major problem with hidden volumes. Given many of the suggestions so far involve lying to border agents along with weird schemes that are less technically secure than hidden volumes it would appear hidden volumes have two things going for them:

1) No worse than other options (assuming you have to carry data with you somehow)

2) Give you a higher possibility that you won't need to lie to border agents (failing to tell them about your additional layer of security will get you in trouble, but is more defensible in court than outright lying)
I don't think it's really an issue of passion. Rather, it is an issue of demographics: almost everybody is affected or at least mildly interested in politics; only smaller subsets of the population are interested in Haskell/Erlang/complexity/aglorithms...etc. Frankly, I bet some people are as "passionate" (for a loose definition of "passionate") about, say, functional programming as others are about politics; there are just more people with at least a casual interest in the latter than the former.

Also, as HN gets more readers, it becomes more diverse. I've seen doctors, medical students, lawyers...etc post. It's no surprise somebody like that is going to skip a post about using abstract mathematics to model programming or about optimizing lunch at your startup; they are probably gravitating towards the political articles. On the other hand, just being interested in start-ups and CS does not preclude looking at politics.

So really, I think this is a function of diversity: in a purely democratic system--everybody has an equal vote--less specialized things really have an advantage. This is why I don't bother reading the newspaper or front page of reddit, but still enjoy /r/haskell.

I'm sure there are also plenty of confounding variables; I just think it's more broad appeal than passion. (Seriously, have you read the responses to people's blindly disparaging functional programming? At least as passionate as most political posts ;).)
Everything you say is correct, but there's a middle-ground between "youtube comments" and "lifeless group-think".

There's still interesting discussion on HN for me (otherwise I wouldn't be here), but I'm finding it's drifting towards the latter. Now recently with a monthly meta-discussion bemoaning its own demise.

Name-calling is obviously not the way to go. But the immortal words of Dr. Strangelove aren't either: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
Also: http://gigaom.com/2012/01/05/bittorrent-share-app/
I am perfectly happy to pay artists and creators directly for their efforts.

But I am a traditional consumer - I buy music from iTunes happily, watch movies on-demand even though I hate the cable company, and occasionally buy art directly from the artist.
Its never THAT simple. Harvey Weinstein did the same thing. Still costs him millions to produce a movie and had to strike distribution deals with major hollywood studios. He eventually ran out of money and almost went bankrupt.
The original anti-Hollywood startup (United Artists)
There's been a great deal of talk on HN lately about PG's declaration of war on Hollywood. As a Hollywood refugee myself, I'm intrigued. And here we are now, brainstorming alternatives. It's exciting. I would argue, however, that the past might offer us glimpse into the future.

Those unfamiliar with the history of United Artists -- a studio founded by leading talent, looking to declare independence from the Hollywood of their day -- might find the story of its rise and fall intriguing, if not a bit bittersweet. It's the story of a house ultimately divided, then fallen.

Today, a smaller-scale analogue (of a sort) exists in Maker Studios, an LA-based collective of viral YouTube artists collaborating and co-producing each other's work. Time will tell what becomes of this enterprise, but it's off to an interesting start.

IMO, today's studio system is critically vulnerable precisely because its leading talent is eager to jump ship. If better options presented themselves, some of the best writers and artists in the business would gladly participate.
Heywhatsupbro? - "Laidback consulting with bros”
Idea made for fun in under 3 hours.
Does it disturb anyone else that the government is basically using the threat of very questionable prosecutions to scare people that were at least purportedly adhering to US law into essentially shuttering their businesses? I've read the Mega Upload indictment. It's pretty weak, and could easily apply to YouTube. If innovative businesses that believe they are following the letter of the law must live under constant threat of arbitrary criminal prosecution that will destroy them whether or not they are ultimately acquitted, it's going to have a serious chilling effect on our economy.
If you think you can't make a minimally viable movie check out 'Primer'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_%28film%29 ($7K)

Another one would be 'The man from Earth'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth ($200K)

Both are (I believe) awesome movies, especially taken into account the very limited budgets.
In my happy, isolated world, this has long been done through scp/git. Of course, I understand that this does not scale, has some issues and won't work for technically uninclined people. But it's still an option in certain cases (e.g. for college students).
That's why you use a VPN-service, which doesn't keep any logs.
Support an Open Internet, create your own freedom.txt
Don't kill the messenger, but here is a real scenario.

My "friend" used to use megaupload, filesonic, and other services to watch all his tv content every night, and even paying for a megaupload account (never putting any money back to the creators of content). It was really convenient and the price was right. Now without it, even in the last few days, the pain point has shifted enough that he started buying the seasons of shows he is interested in on itunes. (giving a cut to the creators)

There was a point even a year ago that he could get the latest film on piratebay so easily that there was no point going to the theatre. Now it seems a little harder to find the releases, or at least more inconvenient, so my friend has gone to the movies a lot more.

Now I personally get the whole internet freedom side of things, but at the same time I have seen my friend screw the content creators out of their cut because some middle man made it a lot more convenient to get the content.

I get the idea that some people have used these services for personal content, but if the business model of a service is _primarily_ around the sharing of copyrighted content then something should be done. And especially if the service pays the uploader based on how popular the stolen content they upload is.

At least in my friends case, he spent $100 on itunes in the last day, _only_ because megaupload was not there, and there was enough pain to look for another source.

If there are millions of people out there like my friend, that is a lot more revenue for the creators/studios.

And no, I'm not a troll from the film industry. This is just a real observation.
You have 5th amendment rights against self incrimination.

Not if you aren't a US citizen.
The Right Click
Not really. YCombinator invests < 25,000$ for < 10% stakes in early-stage startups, some of them already showing traction and revenue. To kill Hollywood, you'd need to invest 1000x that, for projects that are be contrast much risker, and that don't benefit from the advantage of teams being able to "iterate" quickly if things don't work out.
Out of curiosity, has there been any exchange (either formal or informal) of ideas and/or data with other organizations which suffer from the same issue?

Quora, which spoke very openly about the problem of mantaining a high standard of quality in spite of growth, is a prime example since the structured Q&A format makes inadequacies even more evident; as of today, it seems hard not to think that their efforts could simply fail. (If you are interested in this specific case, take a look at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_can_quora_balance_q... or, for a longer read, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_quora/all/1)
I miss the old Apple iSight webcams that had a metal iris that would close when you turned it off. There was a time when Steve Jobs apparently didn't want to be Big Brother.
I cite an extensively researched high quality source, which actually addresses and supports every single statement I made.

There's nothing abut your essay to indicate that the book you mentioned was a source for anything other than the anecdote about the sociopathic clinical psychologist, and the Inuit culture. Is that book the source of every claim you made? That's not even remotely clear to me from reading your post. Most of your claims are all extremely vague and you don't connect them to the book at all, so they sound like you just spouting your opinions.

Where is your evidence? Where is your research? Where is your support?

I don't need any evidence, research, or support, because I didn't make any claims. You made some extraordinary claims, so you need to provide the support.

I'm a highly educated expert on this subject

If you're a "highly educated expert on this subject", I'd expect a little more actual data. For example, you could say something like "37% of those who worked their way to wealth are sociopaths" instead of "Sociopaths are found in large proportions among those who worked their way to wealth". If you're an expert you should probably at least roughly know that number, and without out, I don't know what "large proportion" means. Does that mean 40%? Or does it mean 1% and that's a large proportion because that's 20x the rate that sociopaths are found in society at large?

exemplary sources that are entirely based on hard science

Sorry, but none of this is based on "hard science", because psychology isn't a hard science. There's not even an accepted definition and difference for sociopath vs. psychopath and neither is a diagnosis in the DSM, which is part of why your post was confusing. Though some psychologists use the term differently, sociopaths are generally considered to be more fringe and abnormal, whereas psychopaths are more likely to appear charming and successful on the outside. Which seems like it would apply to most of your claims far more than the term sociopath. But perhaps Ms. Stout uses the term interchangeably.

...I'm just about done with this anti-intellectual community...

...little know-nothing blogger peons like you...

You might find a more receptive audience in this community for your extraordinary and unsupported claims if you took the time to give actual statistics, cited your sources, and refrained from name-calling. Just a thought.
List of Business Failures
OK, thanks very much for the recommendation, I will try that. I never even considered using bittorrent for 1 to 1 file transfers. Does require that clients are willing to use bittorrent, which won't always be the case but it's good to have options.

I do realize there are still other cyberlockers up, but it seems highly possible they are all going down soon, disabling service to the US, or will be severely feature limited.
Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 Qualification Round is undergoing
hey zeppelin, thx for submitting this and giving it a little more attention. & cool to own up : http://www.isingh.info/freedom.txt
Mass transit is what I had in mind.

Personally, I prefer the car. But if I had to bear all of the costs of using a car directly, and urban sprawl were not so preferred by planners, mass transit would be my choice more often.

This is especially true at rush hour. Most highway construction happens just to serve rush hour traffic, a time when mass transit is at its most efficient.

If these subsidies did not exist, mass transit would be much more widely used. There'd be many more choices and there'd be no need to subsidize mass transit.

We actually have subsidies to counter the negative effects of other subsidies. Getting rid of all subsidies would be better and allow people to make the right choices for them with fewer negative side effects.
I'd recommend reading The Road to Serfdom before continuing down that line of thought.
Mazin's argument is that if you were good enough to write a script that grosses over $60 million you could get a better deal than $600,000 for the script. But I don't know if that's true. First time spec sales over $600k are very, very rare. A number of things have to come together in a way the resembles luck more than anything else for that to happen.

For an established screenwriter, sure, they could do better. For a first timer...I'm not so sure.
In Thai restaurants, all you ever get are spoons and forks :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_cuisine#Serving
I feel it's a balance between both, yes, you're right the distribution channels are already there, but the quality of the productions that use those channels are not even close to the quality Hollywood productions have.

We need to find a way to give independent studios a way to develop quality content that can be easily distributed and develop technology that lowers the production cost, because probably Hollywood studios won't shift until they see there's a market, where independent studios are actually making profits.
HBO and Scott Rudin secure rights to TV Show about Indie Game Developers
Visualization of How People on Twitter Reacted to the Internet Blackout
Another Clue in the Mystery of Autism
> And especially if the service pays the uploader
> based on how popular the stolen content they
> upload is.

This should be reworded. As I understand it, they weren't limiting payment to only users with stolen content. It's just that the stolen content was probably the most popular.
Cheap doesn't mean minimally viable. The story which the Director was telling was able to be told in a 'present day' simple way. There's no way you can tell the story of "Star Wars" without scale models, expensive cameras, good actors, and special effects.

However, even though Primer only cost a few $K to make, there was nothing "minimal" about it. The entire story needed to be told, and the process of filmmaking already includes editing and pairing down the story. I think that the notion of thinking of products and movies as both things which have unique and compartmentalizable "features" (which lead to the notion of MVP) is a flawed analogy for this reason.

I think that we agree the process of MAKING movies is OK, but the process of distribution and consumption is what needs the change.

Oh, and these movies are awesome.
Okay, this is one example. I personally don't know any such person. The question is not: "can you come up with an example of the MPAA/RIAA/FBI collusive measures working?" It's: "will it really make any difference overall?"
Fileserve have also shut down their affiliate plans http://www.fhscout.com/how-to-move-your-files-from-fileserve...
Can we please not do this?

There hasn't been a trial yet. I doubt you have any inside information on the activities of megaupload. In the US, justice demands a presumption innocence in criminal cases.

I was distrustful of Megaupload and its ilk long before the government made these arrests and filed charges, but I will wait until they've actually won their case in a court of law before I'm going to accept those charges as fact. I hope more people will do the same.
This is creative and awesome, I hope that this is a success for you guys :)
They're fantastic! I'm definitely not trying to say that low budget cinema can't be amazing. In some ways, low-budget indie films more consistently amazing than the blockbusters. But are they MVPs?

For me, the crux is in this argument: http://22ideastreet.com/blog/2012/01/11/signs-you-arent-real...
It's basically a tradeoff. You have a higher chance of getting picked, but a much lousier payday if you do. Nevertheless, it might actually be a decent bet for newbies to the screenwriting trade.

As you've mentioned, and as I concur, your odds of getting discovered in Hollywood are somewhere just shy of your odds of getting beamed aboard the Enterprise. So Amazon's system represents a slightly better way to get a calling-card film made out of your script. Nevertheless, it's a much shittier deal for anyone who's had a script sold or made. So this seems like a one-and-done sort of deal. Get discovered on Amazon, then go get an agent in Hollywood, and eventually, make lots more money than through this system.

Amazon's system needs some way to scale up as the writer's career does. Or else it's always going to be stuck as a AAA farm team for Hollywood. That might not be a bad thing; at least it's a toehold in the business. But it's not going to bring down the system anytime soon.

Unless, of course, the entire cost structure of the film industry changes, and Hollywood stops being able to afford higher-end writers' paydays. Which may indeed happen, sooner or later. Hollywood has a cost-side crash on its hands eventually. It's anyone's guess as to when, but it will happen. Revenues can't keep declining, year over year, while talent costs and budgets keep climbing.
Are you most worried about snarky or rude comments occasionally getting upvoted, or the seeming proliferation of content-free comments? I ask because the rude/mean upvoted comments, though disturbing, are thankfully fairly rare. The content-free comments, on the other hand, seem to be becoming more frequent and less downvoted. Do you think the problems are distinct, or do they both follow from some other change in the community?
That would be fantastic. Forming some sort of relationship with Netflix to kick-start distribution would be a great idea as well.
This is just a real observation.

Your observation is correct, but I'd interpret it differently: The answer should not be to ban MegaUpload.
The answer must be to provide legal services that are at least as convenient as MegaUpload.

There's a huge market of people who pirate content not because they're unwilling to pay for it, but simply because it's either impossible or extremely inconvenient to get legally.
You are confused if you think it is just girls who are ostracized for being "into computers". I'd agree that it may be worse for girls, but I would explain that being due to girls having a much larger propensity to emotional hurt one another than boys.
It's not financing. It's the fact that we don't have a carbon tax. Price carbon near the cost of sequestration and you will see plenty of money invested in alternative energy. Anything else keeps the decision making in the hands of the central planners. Ask Gorbachev how well that worked.
Never a bad thing? The median male developer is so inept at writing correct software that the industry would be better off without him. If these women weren't irresistibly drawn to the work, how can we expect them to be substantially better, rather than merely doubling the amount of crap we're already struggling with? If anything, we need a much tougher filter before we go out and entice the masses.
Reminds me of this little service I used briefly before the Napster shit hit the fan. For the life of me, I can't recall the name, but it was a directory of links (mostly MP3s at the time) and the client appeared to be a SMB client which connected directly to individual PCs for files.

Man, I wish I could remember the name of that program.

Hell, if this file-sharing take-down shit keeps up, we'll end up on USENET again. Better yet, TOR will finally go mainstream.