skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree there is probably a quality difference in average teaching, but I didn't find much of a difference in the objective/subjective nature (I was a CS major with a philosophy minor).

In the lower-division courses, both CS and most liberal arts have objective answers you can test on, many of which are memorization. Comparison-based sorting can't be done in better than O(n log n); Marx was not present at the Paris Commune (neither was Bakunin, though he was involved in a related uprising in Lyon); most hash-table designs have amortized constant time for most operations; a key difference between Fichte and Kant was that Fichte rejected the notion of a thing-in-itself; etc.

I think it may be true that CS is more likely to actually test on them, in part because many universities expect their liberal-arts courses to double as de-facto "how to write" courses, so they're supposed to have students do essays rather than test them on the subject matter. Imo they would be better structured as having intro-level classes teach subject matter that's tested on in a more rigid style, and then move students to developing their own arguments in essays more towards the 201 level once they've gotten a certain basic amount of factual knowledge under their belt. But that would require teaching intro writing skills somewhere else, and the main alternative, a dedicated "freshman composition" type class, is pretty widely disliked by students and not considered a great success, because it's sort of disembodied writing, "how to write" without any actual subject matter.

Once you got to upper-division courses, most of my philosophy and my CS classes were pretty similar in terms of not really having objective, right-or-wrong answers. There were definitely things you could do that were ridiculous and therefore wrong, but for the most part it involved making a case for something.

A data-mining project, for example: Given a data set, what can you conclude from it? What's your evidence, what are the potential pitfalls with your evidence, how would you present the results?

The methodology is different, but in terms of general approach and the subjectiveness of grading, that felt very similar to me to a philosophy course project, one of which was: develop and argue a case for or against the possibility that machines could produce "creative" output.

In both those examples it has less to do with there really being a "right" answer than with being sufficiently fluent with the tools of the domain to build and coherently present a supportable case, while avoiding doing anything that's clearly "wrong", like misusing statistics or using examples that don't logically support your point.
The problem with this discussion is that it's an echo chamber for people who know nothing about the film industry. For people who do (a few of whom are valiantly trying to impart some perspective), most of the posts here are laughably naive. They are just as embarrassingly ill informed as when movie execs pontificate about the internet.

As someone stuck in the middle (a hacker working in the film industry) the whole exercise is rather depressing, and not because I think pg's startups are going to disrupt my source of income.
It's funny you bring up Bieber. He and Lady Gaga are both talented - both are OK looking (Lady Gaga goes out of her way to avoid clear shots, she's not that stunning), good singers, good dancers, and reasonably good song writers. They are good, but I wouldn't call them great. You couldn't seriously compare them to Madonna and Michael Jackson.

What they are absolute geniuses at is PR, which should be the label's job. Michael Jackson got a similar amount of media attention to Lady Gaga, but it tended to be negative.

The musicians are already starting to do the label's core business (promotions) for them.
If you really want to kill them, just convince Microsoft or Google etc to buy the music industry and change the model. Total revenues for CDs, vinyl, cassettes and digital downloads in the world: $38.6 billion in 1999 in $10.4 billion in 2008 That's the kind of business people want to get out of.

PS: I blame Video games and DVD's for sucking up a lot of the disposable cash flow from people who buy music. Digital content not degrading over time and forcing people to buy yet another copy of the same thing. And piracy destroying the idea that music has value. You used to see CD's with the sound track for a movie selling for just as much as the DVD it's self which is crazy.
Already discussed

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464060

even the same link:

http://torrentfreak.com/us-authorities-silence-ninjavideo-fo...
> The point is people who have good intentions can be reasoned with. The Cold War didn't end with bombs it ended with talk. Because the intentions were good on both sides.

It ended with the economic decline and political collapse of the Soviet Union.

If Hollywood wants to talk during its economic decline, have at it. I don't think anybody was actually suggesting killing it off by bombing it, but rather through economic and market pressure.
Dr.Dobb's Language of the Month: JRuby
Facebook Hacker Cup started
Indeed. There is an opportunity for those kind of productions as evidenced by some movies already out there (Primer, Blairwitch Project, Paranormal activity), but not all of content is suited for those productions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Schindler's List... actually most aren't well suited).

But, you make an interesting point. Ultra low budget movies, character or story driven ideas could get funded and developed via kickstarter, but you still have most of productions which aren't suitable for low budgets no matter what.
MPAA Publicly Threatens to Stop Writing Checks
Oh wow, that's just wrong.
Interesting article, but I find this part a bit disingenuous:

Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China's economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.

Though not explicitly stated, the passage seems to imply that the rise from poverty is wholly due to the capitalistic reforms, and a china without these reforms would not have seen any (at least major) similar change. Now this is a china that just decades earlier was destroyed by both the japanese and a civil war. Improvements take time, and these kind of cheap tricks ignore both that and a historical perspective.
Sorry for the rant, but these tricks are all too common, and I think we can afford ourselves some more intellectual honesty rather then let things pass with these ideological slants, unintentional though they may be.
I disagree with your assertion as I was pretty plainly addressing YCombinator itself and, more specifically, its declaration.

I also fail to see how the mere existence of the tech industry somehow should mandate that studio executives understand how IT architecture works. In fact, I find that downright baffling how you could believe such a thing.

Your assertion that "they fired the first shot" is really the kind of rhetoric I was condemning as this isn't some kind of malicious attack born from intelligent observations of reality. Instead, it is misinformation born from overzealous and irresponsible legal analysis, a point which I detailed in my post and you aren't exactly addressing.

The final line is emotional and irrational and doesn't deserve a response.
Picnik is closing, to merge with Google+
This seems to base the idea of profitability on US box office alone, which makes it more or less meaningless.

The bigger the budget, the more likely there are strong revenue streams from other sources. For example, for large tentpole pictures domestic box office is often only 1/3 of the total global box office.

This study appears to be rather shallow.
I'll give you an example. After a few projects I'm working on now are finished (this year), I'm preping my first feature film. I have great actors that will work for free, I also have all of the film equipment I need gratis too (all of equiment, cameras, grip, lights, everything)... and I still need $1.5 million to make that movie, which even if I raise (I think I will) I have no idea what to do with after it's made but run it through festivals and maybe some kind of online distribution or (more probable) a deal with TV network for them to buy out rights.
Using accept headers and browser discoverability do not have to be mutually exclusive. You can recognize browsers based on user agent and relax the requirements on accept headers.
A lot of opinion on that kind of thing is pretty much axiomatic and not changeable by reasoned debate
What you're talking about is good old-fashioned business development and sales prospecting - go for it.

Lots of small business and brick and mortar business owners do business online as an afterthought, because their focus and expertise is on their product or service.

As long as you put together a thorough proposal in which you've done your homework to understand their business and their challenges, and pitch your proposal in terms of their business goals and measurable results, I'm sure most small business owners would give you the time of day.

You're on the right track - start in your city, call them on the phone to get an appointment, and present your proposal in person.
I guess I wasn't clear on my question. I do know how to track events but I need to know if that's the right thing to do. Advertisers usually look at 'pageviews' while advertising but single page ajax apps do not garner enough page views even with high traffic for the simple reason that once the user logs in the page is never refreshed.

So, is it ok to increment the page view count each time a new page is loaded via ajax?
I've thought last.fm should be an amazing source for recommendations. After all, they have an amazing database of music that I don't just buy, or like, but that I actually listen to. They know how much I listen to something and when and so on. That's got to be a great basis for recommendations. And somehow...it's not. I've often wondered why not.
So this sounds like a double edged problem -
1. The actual cost of producing films, as you've mentioned already does it really have to cost so much? Technology could help with this but I don't think is the only solution.
2. The financing of the movie - what if some kind of mutual fund/investment vehicle was created that only invested in film productions? look to individuals as well as institutions for investors.

Incidentally Francis Ford Coppola's comments quoted below are quite telling. If we are viewing movies as an art form then the cost (and revenue) generated should be a lot lower. If it is viewed as entertainment then it will be run as a business; making money will trump creativity and artistry every time.
What's the advantages of using FireFox as your platform? Why not use HTML5/CSS3 or a cross-os platform like Adobe Air?
How To Jailbreak iPhone 4S and iPad 2 on iOS 5.0/5.0.1 on Windows/Mac Using CLI
Same here, but I'm not going to look for it on Wikipedia
Eh. There are ways to keep reversible encryption pretty secure, but while I agree with the notion, it makes a huge difference if the asshole on the other end of the phone keeps yelling about PLAIN TEXT passwords.
The recent film The Devil Inside is a good example.

Independently produced outside the system. Shot in Romania, I believe. Reported budget "just under a million", but that's often code for "a few hundred thousand", which is what it looks like.

Acquired by Paramount Insurge for a million. Insurge is a brand formed after the success of Paranormal Activity to make very low budget projects.

But then Paramount spent $15 million to market the thing. So the cost of production was tiny percentage of the overall cost. It was the marketing that mattered in the end.

And it worked. Opening weekend box office alone brought the film to breakeven, even after you deduct everything else. $35 million dollars gross.

And it's almost universally thought to be an awful movie.

But that didn't matter.

Marketing. It's what the studios do best.
Fundamental Oracle DB flaw revealed
We may be "total control freaks " but since our application stores Protected Health Information (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_health_information , except our requirements are even more strict), given our budget constraints and very good talent availability we're rolling our own, starting with buying the motherboard, CPU and 1U enclosures on up. Using the Xen XCP system as a good "just works" distribution of Xen, not as it was intended (a pool of multiple interchangeable hosts). Aren't messing with incoming email and stuff like that, companies that specialize in that sort of stuff are OK and decrease our attack surface.
The History, and Future, of Web Protest
Every line of code is a user interface
Inside the Lavish Life Of Web's Mr. Dotcom
WebM-Enabled Browser Usage Share Exceeds H.264-Enabled ones
I was struck by that as well. I can't imagine that flying over here in the UK (I would hope not, certainly). Legal indictments are supposed to be precise and dispassionate, accurately and succinctly itemising all offences believed to have been committed. I would hope that this kind of prejudicial framing would see the case looked at unfavourably by most juries/judges.
The Faces of Censorship
Remote host path completion when scp'ing or rsync'ing would be great
Luma: a Scheme-inspired macro system for Lua
It doesn't really matter who fired first. What matters is whether you've got the ammunition to win. If you want to fight Hollywood you need to provide a more compelling replacement for its creative output and not merely a conduit for its delivery. Will Hollywood's legions of talent (and hacks churning out formulaic crap that sells extremely well) switch "sides"?

Well the book publishing industry could have been destroyed by now: its constituent parts have been replaced by digital distribution methods offering authors far better paper terms. But almost all top authors continue to accept big advances to do things the old fashioned way. And lumping Hollywood creatives in the "part of the problem" space isn't exactly the way to win their favour.

Similarities between hackers and painters notwithstanding, I'm not sure Ycombinator's skill in selecting the best engineers translates to disrupting the future of the arts. Which raises the possibility that throwing money at second-best alternatives is more likely to damage YC than Hollywood.
Disrupted body clock may prime you for schizophrenia.
Entirely agree, if you watch any artist or musician work, the amount of attention paid to detail is astonishing.

It's the same as when a programmer will constantly re-factor their code to provide better abstractions or improve efficiency. Or when a designer spends hours deciding on how to a lay an interface out.

The tools to create generic copy-paste movies and music are already out there in the same way you can build a website by buying something from template monster and copy pasting a bunch of Javascript and PHP that you found on google around.

Of course tools will get better and make efficiency better but all that will do is raise the bar. People want to see movies that will wow them , either with better special effects than they have seen before or with clever/funny dialogue etc.

The people who have the skills to do this best will want to work for the big media companies because these are the ones who will open their wallets and pay them a good salary to do what they love all day with the best tools available.
Actually 'ssh shared connections' does the trick and enables that feature
Do you know what's involved in making high end mass-market entertainment as produced by Hollywood or the games industry? A massive amount of work by large groups of very talented, highly qualified, incredibly hard working people. You see, unlike most tech startups, making movies is a really big collaborative endeavour. As an example, let's consider post production/VFX.

VFX companies are external contractors to the studios and compete to bid on upcoming projects. Competition is tough and the studios are more than willing to go wherever they can to achieve the best price/quality ratio. Yet still VFX can amount to a significant fraction of the production budget for a modern blockbuster. The studios are happy to pay for this though since they know that VFX driven films generally do better than the alternative.

http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/

So if the VFX companies aren't making massive profits, what are their costs? The costs are employing hundreds of artists and developers to create content. And content is what people are ultimately paying money to see. It's exactly the same in the games industry.

So to create an alternative to Hollywood, you'd need to generate content that's as good as Hollywood. And you're not going to do that without lots of highly paid content creators. Doesn't seem like particularly low hanging fruit to me.
Python. Nginx. Ubuntu. Android. Eclipse. TrueCrypt. Gzip. OpenSSH. PuTTY.
I have been using this trick for a while. It is annoying in two ways: first, it includes misspelled hosts. Second, it does not work for scp and sftp. Otherwise, it may save you time.
Humor aside, is MS trying to shoot themselves in the foot. Why drive potential devs away with a crippled free version, and outrageously expensive full version.
http://blogs.perl.org/users/smylers/2011/08/ssh-productivity...
The problem you have is that you might build a great movie startup and find some great young talent but sooner or later they are going to realise that they can make more money elsewhere once the big hollywood companies start waving their chequebooks around.

Make the movies the way you would build a lean start-up. And bank on innovation in the movies and scripts, rather than recycling popular content and make it very flashy.

Problem is that this is very high risk and the public are fickle, if your innovative idea does not take off then you have lost money. If it does take off then you will be very tempted to milk that one idea for as long as you can.
One of the best photography blogs I read.
For Firefox 3.5???
Could not find any compatible versions for 9.0
Yes, it does matter, because whatever replaces Hollywood will 1) let me consume better entertainment products in ways I prefer, and 2) not require legislation to remain viable. I have no problem with whatever and whomever eventually disrupts Hollywood getting rich off me buying their stuff.

I agree that lobbying power for industries like Hollywood is a problem that needs to be fixed, but that is a much larger context than entertainment. We can both replace Hollywood with a more consumer oriented industry and reform lobbying, but they are two separate goals.
Pooled Oil Paintings by Matthew Davis
Two lessons from the Megaupload seizure
Black screen on iPhone 3G.

Not a very bright future.
Fracking Quakes Shake the Shale Gas Industry
Google Web Fonts Families
Second NinjaVideo Admin Jailed For Copyright Infringement
Best part of the article:

Congratulations, citizens, on your cute little “democracy”
victory in denying us the power to shut down websites
without a trial: we’re now going to shut down one of your
most popular websites without a trial.
Compat Inspector is now available for IE10
EP Scheduling and Budgeting could use an alternative - that's where a startup could make a difference, not a large one though. It costs $500 I think, that is a lot for indies, but not even a small dent in normal productions.

Final Draft is awful, but it's a standard, there are viable alternatives. I've bought 'Fade In' recently and am enjoying it, but I still have Final Draft and will continue to use it.

Largest contributing factor to cost is crew and set construction, equipment next.
So you want to kill and industry that thousands of people love and live for, because you want to 'recreate' it for your own financial gain because you're 'tired' of it. Even though you have absolutely nothing to do with it. Just woke up one morning and went. "Oh, let's kill Hollywood because I have a new idea as to how I want it". Great guys...
Honestly, what do you think YCombinator can bring to the table that isn't already there? How exactly do you propose to disrupt something you know nothing about? It's the equivalent of the head of the MPAA saying 'Fuck it, we'll build our own search engine'. I know the tech scene is full of very smart people, but guess what - the film industry is full of very smart people too!

The thing you have to understand is that smart, talented people are making films right now with innovative scripts and low budgets. And most of them will lose money, because nobody wants to see them. People genuinely prefer watching 'flashy' films with lots of VFX and actors who they've heard of.

Just because you want it to work differently doesn't mean it will.
But I want all data to be locked down at all times unless I want to use it, in which case it should be free.
Generally agreed. You need to pay for people's time. That is 100% certain. (There can of course be exceptions with lots of volunteer time like Iron Sky.)

Is equipment so expensive nowadays anymore? I don't think so. You can buy most with one month's median salary.

You can use still cameras nowadays, as their sensors and processors have sped up and they've overtaken traditional cinema cameras of a few years back already. They work quite well even in natural light. (Especially if you use a hack and enable high bit rate encoding.) You can edit with a normal computer. There are led lights etc. Cranes and dollies can be much lighter, simpler and cheaper with this modern technology too.

There's lots of possibilities of "lean" film making with this new technology.

I presume the revolution would happen in documentaries first as the technologically adventurous people wouldn't generally be those who have grand visions or are good at organizing the other parts like scripts, talent, sets etc the whole "running a play" thing.

Hell, there are character centric Dogma movies like Open Hearts that get rid of a lot of fancy technical stuff, and it never bothered me when watching them.

Look at what guys like Philip Bloom or Andrew Reid make with ordinary cameras. The freedom is already there, people just don't know how to use it.
I suppose it could allocate an extra byte anyway, and set that byte to null. It seems like that could cause issues with memory alignment if you go thinking every string is 256-bytes, but it's 257-bytes because of that. Not that big of a deal, of course.

The length value in that case would also be invalid for C usage, because std::string does allow storing nulls inside the string, but it would eliminate the need for allocation.
Chrome: Basic text rendering broken
An experiment in this field is "Iron Sky"[1] - while most of their financing (EUR 6.3M out of EUR 7.5M ~ USD 10M) comes from traditional sources, they also tried to raise EUR 1.2M from the crowd. This financing would come in two parts: as investment (900k) and as funding (300k).

They managed to collect 67% of the goal as an investment, and they give no numbers for funding.

[1]: http://www.ironsky.net/site/support/finance/
If len overflows and wraps (i.e. the sum of string lengths is > SIZE_MAX-1), you'll allocate less memory than is required and memcpy will write outside of buffer bounds.
Public Libraries Stepping into the Future
-webkit-cross-fade seems pretty unnecessary. Just putting the second image over the top of the first with variable opacity accomplishes precisely the same thing.
Ugh. The way you filter a RESTful resource is using the query string. /heroes/superman/powers/detailed is borderline OK: it could conceivably return a 404. However, the filter business is just messy. /heroes/superman/friends?powers=flight is more elegant.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4024271/rest-api-best-pra...