skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has anyone tried out Amazon Studios: http://studios.amazon.com/? That seems to be a big step in this direction. Amazon.com has already created a big threat in the publishing industry with e-books and self-publishing. I think hollywood is next with the democratization of content and technological tools.

It used to be that to create "Hollywood grade" movies would require tons of expensive equipment and capital. I don't see that to be the case anymore. There is powerful software (some even free, e.g., Blender) and hardware (http://www.red.com/) to create high-quality productions at a fraction of the budget.

Having worked at a film studio for a few years, I can say that they are definitely struggling to compete. Mostly because they are slow to adapt to the changing landscape. Slow because they either don't want to change or are too arrogant and feel they don't need to make an effort to change.
Prime example of a page which works better if you have NoScript+RequestPolicy+AdBlock installed. Just opened it in my vanilla Chrome installation so I could see what you meant.
Goodbye Picnik - Google to shutdown Picnik
A while ago I found myself accidentally reading about the origins of Hollywood on the web. There is a surprising amount of writing posted about it. I'm wondering if others are aware where Hollywood "came from". Specifically, who brought it to the US. And why does it have the rules it does, e.g., about what are good or bad characters and themes, about carefully crafted endings, etc.

This might provide some insight about Hollywood is going in the future. As the generations pass from one to another.

I'll let the curious reader chase up the history on their own. But what I gathered is Hollywood was founded by outcasts, refugees, young men who came from difficult circumstances and were faced with growing up without role models.

Are there parallels to today's young hacker crowd?
What monetization options are available in a hyper-efficient distribution model like the one killing Hollywood? Anything besides advertising? Is advertising even enough considering digital media can be manipulated and ads can be parsed out? Are we going to rely on DRM?

What about micro-payments? Can we make small payments easy and efficient enough to work? Is flattr scaling well?

This sounds like the first hurdle.
So you will sell to Hollywood.
And that's fine - I'm not affirming or denying that he's done anything meaningful. That's why I'm saying you should try to look at his statement by filtering out who is saying it, what they've done, and what their ulterior motive might be.

Does anyone disagree that there are bigger problems to be solved than are currently being tackled by many startups? Not that most startups can tackle the daunting task of solving some of these problems themselves (at least, not without some serious IP and capital), but it's useful for a bit of perspective. Are we really solving some fundamental problem in the world by perfecting daily deals? No - it's silly to argue otherwise.
I think that's not an accurate characterization of the Hollywood entertainment industry.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I don't agree that they're not about movies. They are about movies and TV-shows. If if were not of the existence of those, then there would be no need, in their eyes, for distribution control. What would they be controlling, an idea factory?

If they were only channel and no content, they'd have nothing of value to safeguard. Their reason to exist would cease to be.

If Hollywood were _only_ distribution channel, they would have long been disrupted and rendered irrelevant. Their distribution _is_ actively being disrupted by the likes of Apple, Amazon and Netflix --but not the product, so much. They are slowly accepting that they have to acknowledge this new distribution type. On the other hand, Netflix is beginning to create original content --that's not going through the old Hollywood channels, so that's a start to the content production disruption. We'll have to see how that unfurls.

In addition, I don't agree with the "mass-produced" qualifier. Each production is not mass produced or stamped out. Each movie (of which there may be ~500/year, and TV episode are unique productions. The qualifier mass-produced brings me visions of millions of identical, easily reproduced productions -I think the attrition rate of new shows and movie flops attest to the difficulty in producing viable content.
If you meant they were destined for mass-consumption, then yes. But that's altogether different.
This is insightful. Along the line of discussing what art is really about (not money), I would say that it is about sex. Art will not go away if it's no longer possible to become a millionaire doing it. Some evolutionary psychologists propose that art is a never ending game of creative one-upmanship. Women find creative men sexy, men find creative women sexy (the reasons for this are complex and have to do with the mechanics of sexual selection -- I won't go into it here). How do you show people that you're creative? Entertain them. Make them laugh. Make them think. Make a movie, make a song, write a book. Recommend a movie, recommend a good book. You might not get a million bucks out of it, but you might get a husband or a wife. The real game is helping people show their creativity.
We're not quite done investigating the issue and resetting passwords; once that's done, though, we will have a mass email going out.
While I would like to see Hollywood get competition, I suspect real changes in this industry will eventually come from industry insiders. The success of Spotify is essentially one big lobbying campaign.

In the meantime, I would like to see startups that manage to keep an eye on congress while making money. I don't know how, but here are a couple of loose thoughts.

- A service that helps people determine who to vote for and who to avoid voting for.

- Something that keeps track of representatives based on current issues and where they stand.

- An easy way to visualize where backing for new legislation comes from.

I'm sure stuff like this already exist, but I suspect it's not easy enough for most people to bother using. It should be dead simple and connect with ordinary stuff people follow in the news.
To be fair, + wasn't really doing much anyway. I found out the other day that Google's segmentation algorithm is so good that you don't even need to put spaces in your search; searching for "givemealistofsearchengines" does!
That's interesting that you feel my blog is about addressing weaknesses. I'm generally not a fan of "fixing weaknesses" and more about "developing strengths". However, I do think that being afraid of something is different from generally being bad at it. Many people confuse the two because they are sometimes related.

When I was learning a new skill in gymnastics, I was bad at it and often scared of it. But that's because it was brand new. As I overcame my fear and figured out the skill, I got better. Sometimes I realized it was not worth learning, but that realization is decoupled with my fear of it.

The issue is that when building a startup (again where pg indicates being resourceful is valuable) you have to go beyond your areas of strength and do / learn things that you aren't good at. That doesn't mean you are "fixing weaknesses", it just means you have to go beyond your core strengths to get the job done. It also means being creative, flexible and persistent - the elements of resourcefulness.
Idea: Open-source "movies". Both the tools and the resulting content are open-source.

(Incidentally, making a good movie doesn't necessarily have to be expensive. However, making yet another boring car chase scene does.)
Another idea: choose your own adventure movies.
Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but its free so:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/55945011/An-Introduction-to-Stock-...
Brilliant, I agree with just about everything said in this post. There is no credible evidence that piracy actually damages artists, and plenty of empirical case studies where it greatly benefited them. It is horrendously disappointing to see the american government, supposedly the elected representation of the people, ignore all the scientific evidence produced and wholly adopt the viewpoint they are fed by a miniscule but rich group of media companies. If only there was some way of stopping the flow of money from corporations into politics...

I just posted a similar rant on my own website on the characterization of pirates that also refers to the Swiss study that Coulton brings up, plus another study commissioned by the Dutch government that reached very similar conclusions.

http://tusk.se/2012/01/20/piracy-3-character/
US government shuts down Megaupload.com
TL;DR it hasn't, Danny Sullivan is a bit confused.

They're shutting down the (cool but forgotten & neglected) Social Graph API that Brad Fitzpatrick created when he moved over to Google. It has the word "social" in its name, I guess.

That said it wouldn't be completely unexpected if they dropped OpenSocial from my.google.com. What do the Google+ games use?
I think there is a lot of interesting data in the stores. I'm interested at finding a correlation from app descriptions, update frequency of them and store rankings.
Precisely. When the government shuts down a website that is a punishment. Our laws are designed such that for any punishment meted out by authority there must be due process. The accused have a right to a trial, to counsel, to face their accusers, to see and rebut the evidence against them. The authorities have limits on the way they can gather evidence. The accused enjoy the assumption of innocence and the requirement to prove guilt. Even if one trial finds the accused guilty of a crime there are multiple stages of appeals to higher courts available.

Fully half of the bill of rights concerns freedom of expression or due process. SOPA was an attempt to rip that away, to stamp the internet as a constitution free zone. Considering that the internet will soon be the primary backbone of industry, personal and business communication, and the dissemination of news, that is a very dangerous development if we wish to preserve individual liberty.
If I was driving in the desert, of course I would learn how to fix a car. You might as well have said, "if you go scuba diving don't whine if you get decompression sickness while surfacing". What a really bad analogy.

Where do you draw the line? Do you make your own yoghurt? What about milk your own cows? I very much doubt you do that. My time is valuable enough that I'm comfortable paying people to do these things for me.

If person A offers a service to person B, there needs to be some level of trust and expectation. In this instance, the government is responsible for destroying people's assets and I hope they get sued to oblivion for screwing up. Other times, companies are at fault.

Gotta love the Libertarian mindset that appears to prevail here. Sheesh.
We tell users exactly how we use their data. We're even running an ad campaign on the NYC subway (and presumably elsewhere) about how we use user data in non-intuitive ways.

Here's the relevant section:

http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/data-on-google/
As someone who loves tricks and tactics it pains me to suggest this, but one sure way to replace Hollywood would be a frontal assault. Get a ton of money and make your own movies. You would definitely distribute them better than Hollywood, you might be able to make them better too. Do this for long enough and eventually you'll reach a tipping point.
The Googlebot doesn't fetch external css or javascript. How can it be rendering the full page if it doesn't have those resources?
Hollywood might answer this with a 'Request for Discovery' in some future lawsuit.
It's definitely possible to kill hollywood, think about how Old Time Radio was killed by TV.

However, whatever kills Hollywood must revolve around storytelling and not just generic entertainment. People won't completely move away from story-based entertainment.
I have always been bothered about cpanel passwords coming through in plain text. To confirm, is this the same storage system with mail passwords also?

Shell passwords - they're hashed, but are they salted? If not, can they be in future?

Thanks for your time.
How Rupert Murdoch's Fear Is Getting in the Way of Internet TV
I did not explain myself correctly. What I meant is I would not even use queues at all. I would instead use the plain old hg commit and hg rebase.

Try this workflow.
If you define killing hollywood by not actually consuming any of its products either legally or illegally then video game playthoughs are doing it for me.

http://www.youtube.com/user/SSoHPKC/videos

He uploads between 6-10 ten to fifteen minute video's per day on most major releases. Plus multiplayer games like killing floor, pay day the heist, minecraft e.t.c.

A weird mix between talk radio, motion picture and reality tv. And genuinely I'm hooked, if I want to wind down at the end of the day watching half an hour of skyrim walkthrough followed by some minecraft custom maps is perfect.

Now here's the interesting part, this guy and a bunch of his friends who call themselves The Creatures (long obscure story) are going to go live in a house somewhere so they can all record video game playthoughs together.

That's maybe 10+ people producing collectively 3-5 hours of unique content per day who're getting between 25-100k unique views per video.

And that's before they've put themselves in a single physical location. I don't know what they'll end up producing once they are all together in one place, but I'll be watching and a lot of other people will as well.
So if he doesn't fight for your cause by exactly your standards, then any good YC is doing is worthless?

You've set standards in a way that only you could possibly meet them. You should start a business of your own, and you can refuse to do business with everyone you disagree with.
Shoula used S3.
> don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV.

I ran into this a few months ago. I was bored and slightly drunk from brunch on a Saturday afternoon, and got it in my mind that I’d catch up on the final four Harry Potter movies. Whatever. That it was Harry Potter isn’t necessarily the point. Three of these films - Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Part 2 of Deathly Hollows - were available on Amazon video for rental. Score!

Of course, I didn’t realize Part 1 of the Deathly Hollows wasn’t available on Amazon when I started this drunken marathon. But you can believe after the first two, I was in the mood for more. And I wasn’t about to ruin the series by watching Part 2 before Part 1. I won’t say what route I took to watch it, but these were my legal options after scouring Netflix Streaming, Hulu+, Amazon OnDemand and iTunes:

* Wait two-to-three days for a DVD to arrive from Netflix

* Go to Blockbus..oh.

* Go to a DVD sto..oh. I mean, I suppose I could’ve taken the train 20 minutes to Best Buy at Union Square, bought the DVD of a film I was only going to watch once, take the train 20 minutes back home and … shit. I don’t have a DVD player anymore.

I won’t tell you the course of action I took. Only that the entire experience was exasperating, annoying, and thoroughly made me want to not watch the rest of Harry Potter. And I wanted to give them money.

I don’t get how this is hard to understand.
Rock-Paper-ShotGun Forum Hacked
I'm not biased one way or the other, although I find nginx far easier
to work with than apache. And like many here, I've been working with
apache forever.

1. I have no problem consolidating logs. I don't know your particular use
case, though, so maybe you have an edge case that is tricky with nginx.

2. I tried using native wsgi on nginx and didn't enjoy it. So, I
switched to gunicorn. Problem solved. I run graphite and its clan via
gunicorn as a key process in many places; it's rock solid.

3. php fpm as a proxy behind nginx performs just as well as mod-php on
apache, if not better. It's a damn sight easier to scale.

So, I don't share your concerns about nginx. So far, I have found no
reason to reason to continue with apache.

The biggest win has been serving a huge throughput of static images for a
particular client's web-site. We sized a new machine under apache, but
when we deployed with nginx, it used a tiny percentage of apache's
resources.

It's hard not to like nginx.
> I've never met a single person that actually used this feature (most people I know have their laptops plugged in most of the time).

I think he's talking about non-removable batteries in phones and iPods.
Interviews at SOPA/PIPA Protest in San Francisco's Civic Center
Distribution isn't the only issue. The biggest issue is funding. I'd love to be able to fund, directly, my TV and movie entertainment. Right now I feel like I'm at the mercy of anyone with a Nielsen box or the time/money to go the movies every weekend.

Perhaps what there needs to be is kickstarter-like project to initiate some project and a corresponding store to keep it going. Probably TV shows would be the easiest to produce this way. Imagine something like The IT Crowd paid for directly by viewer. Or one-off shows like Louis CK's recent comedy experiment. You could get established entertainers and new talent all in the same place if you did it well.
I would suggest that your strict attention to the rules is rather at odds with your description of yourself as "Hyperthymic Iconoclastic". Perhaps this description is more apt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentiveness
A big THANK YOU from me. I have been talking to my wife for some time about how I'd like for Internet companies to start taking aim at the same people that are aiming at us. It's not about revenge though, but as a way to move forward past what I see as the old ideas of IP.

Besides, entertainment can be better. I believe in what this post says about getting people to actually spend real time together. I know a lot of people who's idea of quality time is sitting in front of the TV wasting away, albeit together.
Google's daily puzzle site
I understand your point but, multi-player aside, how many $60 games (that's the standard pricing these days for AAA titles) provide 100+ hours? They are very rare. Skyrim is the only recent qualifying game that jumps to mind.
Tension Maps: A Process for Identifying Low-Risk Design Opportunities
The regional distribution is definitely something that needs to die fast. I live outside the US, where TV networks buy American tv-series and broadcasts them a year after they are released in the US. No one I know under 30 actually waits for that. They see their friends in other countries talking about the new episode on Facebook and eventually they just end up downloading it. Which is sad, because if they could actually buy it on iTunes (without a US account), they probably would if the price was right.
Because it's really hard and there tend to be absolutely right and wrong answers in the work.

You can't skate through with a b.s., content free essay on the plight of the modern farmer in a consumer world, shackled by the inadequacies of an archaic nation-state governing system or a 5-paragraph essay on the plight of the Hellenic world during the rise and fall of the Roman Empire -- getting A's only because it's properly formatted and has the right number of words, arranged roughly into the right number of paragraphs.

The "soft" subjects in college were easy. I could put off any assignment until the last night, then whip something up before class and guarantee an A.

My engineering classes on the other hand, were so hard, so time consuming, that I spent at least 6-8 hours outside of class for every hour I spent in class. A 12 credit semester might mean 80 hours outside of class writing code, reading books, trying desperately to grok complex data structured and mind-bending math. Write it wrong, and it crashes, or the answer is wrong, and you get an F.
Iridium now has a killer app
Give me the programmers, UI geeks, the money to pay them to do as they are told, and I will build it. I have the idea, and it's actually a proven winner, among a smaller segment of users. Like most other internet phenomena, it's something that was once only done amongst computer nerds only to be later done by the general public as if it was just another usual day-to-day practice. And it actually involves more friends and family and ideally less mass market products.
He wasn't super polite and didn't try to educate him, but I wouldn't call him a dick. There probably isn't any other way to communicate this message except via support.
If movies disappeared (which I don't believe they will as the barrier to entry has lowered so much) I would probably just read books and go out more. Games are great and I fully support them but it's not a form of entertainment for everyone.
Sad day. Picnik wasn't the best photo editing tool, but it was certainly handy to use away from home when you need to edit something quickly and painlessly.
Liberal Arts graduate looking to develop a web app
Howdy,
I've been lurking Hacker News for a few months and have found it very educational. I only took two programming classes while studying for my English B.A., but have been interested in computers and technology since I was young. I've come up with what I'm picturing as a web app that I want to develop to help ease the pain found in long distance relationships. Without going into too much detail about the application at the moment, I want people to be able to share media privately. At the moment, I want to just develop something so my girlfriend and I can watch videos that she or I upload, but I would like to possibly scale it to a larger audience.

What I'm looking for is any guidance. I've only worked with Python and Java in the past, as well as a bit of HTML, and I am wondering what the best framework would be to use? I'm interested in utilizing HTML5 for the most part, but I'm unsure of how to even begin a project like this.
Why Are Racing Developers Heading to the PC?
That's not necessarily a problem. Facebook isn't restricted to high-ad-revenue countries. Their costs are so low that they don't mind making much less money in some places than others. The same is true of YouTube.

The reason so much content is region restricted is traditional Hollywood licensing deals. Just another example of their outmoded business methods.
Of course not.

But it does sound hypocritical (not sure how many times I can use that word) when you're supposedly fighting for "civil liberties and the world economy" when you have a financial interest in a company benefiting from the likes of Monsanto.
The "next big distribution channel" already exists. Why do you think the MPAA and RIAA keep trying to choke off the internet. Fortunately, they got a late start, so there is a chance to keep ahead of their lawyers.
I think video games is one of the reasons Hollywood is dying in the first place. What other thing in the last 30 years has really been a direct competition to Hollywood. The Internet is definitively on the list too.
Why put aside multiplayer? I think I've paid $0.50/hour for my copy of Battlefield 3.
I am a student
i am a student. i live in Bangladesh.
While I agree in part, the issue is that good art, really really good art, is a full-time job that can take years and years of practice. Much like writing good software. Saying art should be free is saying all software should be free - the same amount of work and risk goes into it. There is a balance to be had here and in many countries it is solved with artist grants, recognizing the value to be had from a rich culture.

Composers for example may receive some income from the wealthy or, from the 20th century, grants, but are generally teachers (Vivaldi, Beethoven, Schoenberg, most modern-day composers not working in the film/tv industry) or held posts at the local entertainment theatre: the church (Bach, Handel..).