skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This post nails it. You're talking about disrupting two things, neither of which are entertainment: distribution of finished goods (external), and the system within that's been in place since the fall of the studio system in the '60s (internal). Neither of these things have that much to do with entertainment. Technology has made being a filmmaker far, far cheaper than it used to be even in the heyday of indie film in the 90s, though there is still a high financial barrier to entry to pay for all the quality things you need on a set (oh, an idea!). Entertainers absolutely embrace innovation, both creative and technological. It's structures that don't.

Here's two specific targets: Creative Artists Agency and the Screen Actors Guild. Good luck.
Fix the way the Electoral College works, and you've liberated the market. Only then will good ideas actually flourish, and bad ideas/companies fade away.

Until we abolish the "first-past-the-post" system and adopt Proportional Representation, there is no hope in fixing the corruption that takes place in Washington.
Of course the copyright industry is trying to kill this law and is undermining it by running ads that constantly repeat that copying is illegal. Lots of people in Germany have no idea that they are legally allowed to make a small number of copies (up to seven) for personal purposes.

It is even allowed to make a copy of a copy. So if I recieve a song from a friend, I am allowed to give it to a couple of my friends. But I am not allowed to simply seed it to strangers through anonymous filesharing.

Translation of the german wikipedia entry on "Privatkopie":
http://translate.google.com/#de|en|https%3A%2F%2Fde.wikipedi...
1. Democracy allows people to control the government.

2. Corporations are people. (In the US)

3. Corporations are the richest, most powerful, psychopathic people.

It is not hard to see the problem here.
There's an inherent survivorship bias that makes past art look better. The good art survives because people make copies of it, reference it, etc. The bad art just gets forgotten because nobody even wants to make fun of it any more.
Ask HN: Your favorite open source applications/softwares?
Which open source applications you love the most?
As a webdeveloper I hope this won't be the future:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

This might be the edge of HTML5, but is regression of the internet. Remember the "This site should be viewed in IE5 or higher"? I hated it back then, I hate it now.
What you describe is largely how things work right now.

Independent production companies, which represent the origin of most non-blockbuster films, work just like incubators now.

They have a development budget which they use to find and develop scripts in what might as well be an early seed round. They then shop this developed project around to financing sources, of which there are a great number that are not tied to studios. These financing sources may require additional development or even "pivoting" of the project.

Once financing is secured and the people providing the funding are happy, production can proceed. At this point, you're still wholly outside the studio system. You can completely finish your film outside the studios. This happens now, all the time, and it happens not just with Sundance style films, but with mainstream films with pretty substantial budgets.

Sundance, as an aside, is not just a festival, but also a market for these independent productions. Festivals such as Cannes and Toronto are much the same. You'll see a number of stories over the next week about films acquired at Sundance. What this means is that distribution deals were signed for films that were produced using means independent of the studios. The distributors are often, but not always, arms of the studios.

Someone mentioned Brad Pitt. He stars in independently financed projects all the time. In fact, he himself is often the indie producer, via his company Plan B which arranges for the financing through other entities.
The Linux kernel does not mostly use null terminated strings either, except to communicate with user space. Nor does it use libc.

And much of libc is not well designed for modern code. Mostky I ptogram to the system call API in C.
Avatar and Tangled were both pioneers of new technology of course they were expensive, but there are amateur fan effects better than those from multi-million dollar movies and TV shows 15-20 years ago. And the games of 10-15 years ago can be made a couple of people on a shoestring budget. I expect that trend to continue.

>Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.

They won't use Maya. Technology progresses, and tools become easier to use. At some point in the future you'll be able to select an actor, click makeup and adjust some sliders.

>you still need an army of 3D artists

For original creations you do need artists (the tools will continue to improve and make each artist more efficient), but there will come a time when all you'll need to do is take a few photos of tree, or a building to make an ultra high quality 3d model of it.
Only commenting on the coding style: that kind of formatting is just looking for trouble. Quick, tell me which of the functions below contains a bug?

//return = strlen(target)
unsigned strmcat(char *target, const char *source, unsigned length) {
const char *origin = target;
while(*target && length) target++, length--;
return (target - origin) + strmcpy(target, source, length);
}

//return = strlen(target)
unsigned strmcat(char *target, const char *source, unsigned length) {
const char *origin = target;
while(*target && length) target++; length--;
return (target - origin) + strmcpy(target, source, length);
}

How about this?

//return = strlen(target)
unsigned strmcat(char *target, const char *source, unsigned length) {
const char *origin = target;
while(*target && length)
target++, length--;
return (target - origin) + strmcpy(target, source, length);
}

//return = strlen(target)
unsigned strmcat(char *target, const char *source, unsigned length) {
const char *origin = target;
while(*target && length)
target++;
length--;
return (target - origin) + strmcpy(target, source, length);
}

Granted, it's a tiny example, but you're going to be writing fewer bugs in the long run if you avoid being clever. So here are two rules to start with:

1. Never put more than one statement on one line.

2. Never use the comma operator outside the "for" syntax.
Genuine interest: Marco calls this a 'campaign finance problem', but isn't politicians submitting bills for money usually called 'corruption'? Why aren't the Americans really mad about it?
The years of stagnation and the poodles of power
It does, but an actor can come in for a week and bang out an entire script if he's just voice acting.

Also there are computer generated singing voices good enough to fool Japanese audiences.
> Having said that I've always believed media should be treated as a monopoly and regulated accordingly.

I believe there are compulsory licenses for sound recordings. It could be interesting to make all copyrighted works subject to something like that, but I can't imagine the details required to make it workable. Larry Ellison would probably have a heart attack...
One guy will never have the talent to do it all at a top level. Even if there's incredible automation, there will still be choices to be made. The choices are of a diverse enough nature that specialization will still trump a jack of all trades.
My mistake. I just checked my server logs and can see Googlebot fetching these resources now.
You are almost certainly correct. We are only hearing one side to this issue and (as you point out) such extreme restrictions on parental contact indicate that the issues are rather far reaching and have little to do with not using spoons.
> The thing I wonder about with stuff from jacobian.org is whether the guy can actually write ANY code. My gut feeling is he a guy that has very good political skills and somehow used this a way to mind control geeks.

So you have no idea who he is, apparently did not look for any information (such as his gh page or his being one of Django's lead devs) and decided he was all about "political skills". And somehow failed to realized the article linked above is 3 years old.

> Basically, I can't understand why anything he writes is somehow hackernews worthy...

But that does not prevent you from judging him as "a politician who can't write code". Nice.

> is he self-promoting?

He "self-promotes" 3 years old articles by not even posting them himself? What sense does that make?

Here's an idea: maybe he wrote good content, and he's not too bad a writer. But you know, if you want to insult him you could at least do it to his face, he's a member on HN after all: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacobian
I don't think the feds have a problem with storage; it is more the sharing part.
> Allowing say 100,000 to 1,000,000 people, who are outraged enough, to be able to at least postpone a bad bill when Congress tries to pass it quickly.

That sounds nice when you only think about "good" people opposing "bad" bills, but you can say goodbye to any kind of social reform under that system.

Repealing DADT, Repealing the Defense of Marriage act, same-sex marriage are some social reforms that would never happen under such a system because you can easily find millions of americans that are extremely outraged about those issues.

The protests against SOPA and PIPA worked because the absolute majority of the american population didn't care and didn't have an opinion either way, but the tech community had an expert opinion against it based on facts and technical knowledge.

But if you open up your suggested system to issues where everyone has an opinion and noone really knows the effects, the results are going to be abysmal.

I wonder what the US would look like with a proportional representation system instead. Where you would have an actual Tea-party party with as many seats in congress as they actually have nationwide support for. And where the other "factions" of the Democrats and the Republicans formed parties in their own right, and people could have a more active role in shaping the policies of the "block" of their choosing, instead of just voting for it because they don't want the other side to win.

I wonder what it would look like if every vote counted, if there were no swing-states, no gerrymandering, if the electoral college votes where also proportional, so that voting for a third candidate is meaningful, or a fourth, or a fifth. I wonder what would happen if the election results showed the "purple" America that actually exists, instead of the red vs. blue illusion.
we need one for vim. I always feel there's something new to learn.
> The hard part is the culture change.

No that's good. At a Macro level change can only lead to reduce the power of the incumbents.

Anything we can do to fight the kind of people who actually believe that the internet is really a "series of tubes" (again, at a Macro level, this'll be the Boomers) is a GOOD thing.
I think that a huge part of all that is simply because most of us are stuck listening to a dozen or so radio stations in our cars.

People listen to the artists they hear 20 times a day during their commute.

It will be interesting to see what happens when something like Spotify or Pandora is widely available in-car.
You can host videos on Youtube that don’t show up in search results and link to them from 3rd party websites. That’s exactly like Megaupload, but with streaming.
Well that or you could have just make 7000 mediocre posts. Just by your post count in this thread alone, that doesn't seem unlikely.
This is exactly the same primary problem you'd face taking on the movie studios.

In a way, it makes sense to try to beat the music industry first.
Ask HN: Biz owners,would you entertain freelancer coming with improvements?
This is a question for small business (not necessarily online businesses - any kind of business) owners or anybody who knows such owners.

If an experienced (9+ years) software freelancer - who loves to build better software systems - approached you with an enthusiastic improvement proposal for your online business or online component of your business - which could improve your revenues - would you give them a hearing, or would you shoo them away? I'm just trying to get a feel for how the other side of the table thinks...

Now the background behind this question...
It has struck me often that the websites of many small or medium sized brick-and-mortar businesses could be improved drastically to bring them more revenue.

Now I'm not referring to something subjective like beautifying the front end design - that may or may not improve revenues.
I'm talking about more concrete functionality behind the scenes - like better and more intelligent search, easier payment integration, customer analytics and so on (my skills are mostly in these areas, though I do have above average front end development skills).

As a concrete example, there was a news item recently about a brick-and-mortar book retailer in my city. The owner was ruing that their profits have been dipping because people prefer more convenient online retailers. I went to this brick-and-mortar retailer's site, and saw that their book search capabilities are pathetic. Even the simplest queries gave 0 results, though I know for a fact that they stock this book. In a way, their mediocre website is damaging their own business.

It got me thinking, why can't I approach this owner with a well thought out improvement proposal?
In fact, why can't I make this my business - finding out less than optimal online business properties, and proactively approach their owners with improvement proposals?

I'm rather bored of passively getting work via freelancing sites, after 3 years of doing it. I became a freelancer to get exposure to different domains and technologies, but I've begun to feel freelancing sites are not the best option for this (though they have been much better than the salaried jobs I did for 6 years).

I'm a product builder at heart - I want to build products. I want software to improve peoples' lives and businesses. I have the necessary range of skills - both domain and technical - for this. The only question is, are many business owners looking for somebody like me? What do you think?
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I'm currently using the first one on my KickStarter campaign but it's not doing too well. I'm thinking maybe the format is too different?
Thanks for this comment; this is news to me, I had no idea these things existed.

I just watched one video and it's just like you said: a combination of talk radio, motion picture and reality TV (sort of like Jackass meets NPR...)

Who would have thought watching someone else play a game could be entertaining, but if the player has funny comments and insights, it sure is. That could become big (or is it already...?)
> Then use HTML. Or some other representation with known link semantics.

Or define link semantics in JSON, the one documentation a restful service should have is that of media types (the documents returned) anyway, the only URL which should appear in the documentation is the root of the service.

Whining that JSON has no link semantics is nonsensical, SGML does not have any either, HTML added those when it was first created as an application of SGML, just as text/xhtml+xml is an application of XML defining links, "XML" as a meta-type does not know about links either.
> To me there seems to be an abstraction leak. Specifically he's baked HTML into his entire thesis.

No he's not, he's baked hyperlinks into his thesis as the base of REST, that has nothing to do with HTML.

> One of his goals was that a document would be able to provide links to another document in a natural, intuitive way.

No. His goal is merely that documents be hyperlinked, how is the application's domain.

> It is ment to be so intuitive in fact that the interchange of the document doesn't need a schema or WSDL like system.

I don't know where you got that one, but it's definitely not part of Fielding's thesis or his comments on the subject since. It's in fact exactly the opposite, the one thing Fielding notes must be documented in details in a RESTful service is media types, aka the documents returned by the service. That's where hyperlink semantics are added.

> JSON however doesn't.

Neither does SGML or XML, that's not an issue.

> If one wants to nest links in JSON, one has to tell the client how those links will appear.

Just as one has done with HTML.

> On has to define the structure beyond merely syntaxical correctness.

Just as with HTML.

> This is where REST falls down, IMHO.

That's complete and utter nonsense.

The only difference between HTML and JSON is that HTML is already an application of a meta-document type (well used to be, of SGML, it's drifted further but conceptually it still is) whereas JSON, much like XML, is a meta-document type from which users build applications (what do you think application/xhtml+xml is?).

You sound like you want some magical silver-bullet through which you don't have to document anything and things suddenly understand each others based on fairy dust. Reality does not work that way.
But it never unseated IMS - that is a bit of a kicker.
generalize to things
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The main purpose is to convince the counselors that you have made the right choice of the topic. Your choice of methodology will give the committee some idea whether you are approaching the subject in the right way or not. You are basically presenting foundations of your thesis to the committee in order to convince them that your extended essay will have some value after full development.
I'm sure that most of the time it will require a small team instead of one guy.

But, I think you overestimate the quality of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Imagine if you put Steven Spielburg in front of a hypothetical movie machine. A machine that could automate everything down to the actors and voices, so all the director had to do was write the script, place everything, and direct all the action (yes I realize something like this is years away). I'd bet that he could produce a movie at least as good as the average summer blockbuster.
I think the indie scene is shaking up the status quo, so hopefully that is also changing.

Maybe an easier way to distribute indie movies to a wide audience?
I agree that the question is limiting, but not necessarily wrong. By creating a new form of entertainment, one can take over a portion of Hollywood's revenue pie and that in a way will create havoc for Hollywood, but not necessarily killing Hollywood since there will be bound to be people who likes Hollywood productions (especially since Hollywood has the finance to fund multi-million dollar productions in a whim).

What Hollywood fails to do is to listen to the voices of common people like me and you. Over and over again, Hollywood has produced films that fail to deliver and blame it on piracy. The point is that there will still be people who wants to reward quality content (or at least this is what I believe) and there needs to be a way for current technology to show this. We need to create a technical platform to reward quality content and show Hollywood the light! I have proposed a startup idea somewhere on this page on how to do this, as well as a way to entertain people like you and me. I would love to hear your input =).
I wonder if this is a uniquely Canadian thing. I never heard anything about this when I was at school, and I don't think I knew anyone who did sixty solid hours of work a week in college; certainly not anyone with only one major.
Megaupload Concerns About Evidence Of Criminal Behavior
is it possible that being a Django "lead dev" is a political position? I noticed he is a literature major at UC Santa Cruz, a school that doesn't give actual letter grades.

Maybe he is the ultimate "trick baby"....or is Django something we cannot question on hacker news. I think this dude is full of shit myself.
> In particular, my doubts about IDs vs URLs is the ability to store those pieces of data in the client (or intermediate caches) - if the service URLs or namespaces change, the client-side URLs become useless even after the client updates the service entry point.

Which is OK, because the client can re-traverse the service to get back to those resources which are now invalid.
There's a lot of dumbth in them, to be sure.

I'm hoping that they'll evolve toward slightly more sanity than insanity.

Some institutional laws suggest that this is wildly optimistic on my part. Security theater exists because bureaucrats and legislators want to appear to be doing something. Vendor-based solutions are mandated because vendors have political clout. Effective tools are difficult to deploy in real-world scenarios -- filled with failing devices, intermittent communications, poor training, and worse end-user understanding.

But give me my dream. Just for this one night.
How about creating a radio device that works over the cell network?

The cost of data on the cell network would be covered by "radio" advertisements. But the device would of course have extensive caching of audio on the device. Now you have a whole new band of "radio" and can show off those talented musicians.
It's ironic Hollywood itself WAS a group of rogue startups, just over 100 years ago.

But here's the thing - you can probably make a dent but "killing it" ?

Wouldn't that be like making professional sports obsolete?

There is just too much money and organization and you are never going to get all the fans to try something else instead and stay with it.
What about a Youtube Recommendation Engine That Works?

I've been on Netflix for about 6 months now, and I'm flabbergasted at the quality of their recommendation engine (which maybe owes much to their Netflix Challenge -- I don't know how efficient it was before).

For every show listed, they predict how much I will like it, and their prediction is almost always right.

On the other hand, Amazon is almost always wrong, and so is Youtube; my guess is Amazon bases its recommendations on what I buy instead of what I like, and Youtube does the same (what I watch instead of what I actually like).

A recommendation engine for Youtube (or all video sites) that would actually work would have a lot of value for users.

There's a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you get enough ratings to be able to make recommendations; this can be addressed by starting in a small niche of specific content: start with a small community of people passionate about a subject.

My two cents.
Bollywood > Hollywood
Strange enough, I think both paid sex and non-commercial file sharing should be perfectly legal.
Sounds like it's time for some process review.

Backup systems admin.

Key passwords available in a shared (but encrypted) repo.

Multiple data links -- tethering through your cell phone or heading to the local cafe or library in a pinch.