skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very common problem with similar optimistic analysis is that they compare end-user price (includes taxes and distribution costs) with the price of solar panels (no installation and maintenance costs).

In reality, you have to calculate additional costs when dealing with unpredictable sources. Either you have to have 100% backup in traditional source or you have to conserve the energy (usually below 50% efficiency).
MediaFire CEO: Unlike Megaupload, our business model isn’t built on piracy
Similarly, if the internet were banned your friend will buy DVD's.

The lesson learned here is simple. Your friend will pay for the most convenient way to get his movies. The answer for movie studios is to use their resources to create the most convenient way not kill those more convenient than theirs.
Hmm, well if the amount spent was the same it comes down who does more with the money.
Where does the money go:

megaupload owners - fast cars, hookers and blow

studios - fast cars, hookers and blow

actors - fast cars, hookers and blow

apple - wages for workers in china.

I guess the lesser evil is the studios...at least they are employing local hookers!
I give that arrangement until your friend realizes he can only shift his content onto 5 devices, at which point his content is lost forever. Or when his hard drive crashes and he realizes he can't re-download tv episodes.

Personally, I value my money too much to spent $100 to "rent" tv shows. My pain point is being able to own the things I buy. Until then, it's bittorrent until the bluray comes out, then buying that.
While there is a large black market of people pirating content, it is unclear as to whether that market would be willing to enter the legal market at any price point.

Improving the distribution system is not a source of explosive growth, rather, it is I disagree with your assertion that the content industry is requisite for mere survival industry. There's no potential for explosive growth because piracy is an income problem, not an internet problem. Cracking down on file-sharing sites will not solve the problem because the illegal activity merely shifts elsewhere. Improving distribution systems will not solve the problem because free is still cheaper than not-free.
During the writer's strike of 2007, there were a few interesting articles about this. This NYTimes article is pretty good:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/business/media/05writers.h...
I would like to hear more on this thought!

To me, I would say that when you compare the effort needed to create the "final" print of the film (the one with the CG and professional actors) vs an early test take made with your family, the delta between the cost of the two would be very high.

I feel that a closer metaphor would be that a good treatment and a demo are the "pitch deck" for the real film you want to make, not first versions of it.
Name five democratic or republican candidate who support changing the status quo so that it helps smaller parties.
Making a movie requires a very special set of circumstances and people. Consider all the involved:

- Director, actors, writers and crew. The creative team behind the movie.

- The producer: the business side.

- The movie studio: the financial, marketing and distribution side.

When YC asks for startups to think of ways to "Kill Hollywood", they are talking about the last category. So far I have not seen a single comment talking about cutting out directors or producers. The problem is the movie studios, and their Walmart-like hold on the industry.

Now that that's established, what can we do about this? How to we break up the relationships between the creative team and the movie studios? I see several ways:

1. We need a simple and cheap distribution channel. In 20 years there will be no movie theaters. They might remain as a novelty, but 90% of them will be gone. They are already not making much money and as home theater setups get better, there is no way that people will want to go to a theater and overpay for the soda and popcorn. Platforms like Roku and iTunes or "networks" like Hulu and Netflix are the future. Allowing people to publish directly to these channels and making it transparent how much return there is "per view" is key here.

2. We need independent marketing for movies. A director who, for the sake of the argument, self-financed a movie needs a way to market it. This is analogous to a web app developer marketing her app via Google AdWords. Once again content platforms like Roku and iTunes can help greatly here since they already have access to lots of people and are common places to seek movie trailers, etc.

3. We need a new source of finance. The problem is that a successful blockbuster movie takes many millions of dollars and someone has to front the money before any return is made. This problem has some technical solutions. For one, we could create a web app that matches the creative team with potential investors. The investors get to read the script, watch the castings, even interact with the team if they for example are looking to invest >$10k, etc. Then if the movie meets its budget (the interface would be similar to Donors Choose), production starts. Investors wait, watch and pray, potentially even trading their investments in these movies (this is risk sharing after all). Once the movie is made it goes into marketing and distribution and the returns come in, where they get split up between the investors.

The above are not business plans, just a quick brainstorm of different approaches to disrupting or evolving the industry. I have no experience making movies beyond taking videos with my phone so this is a bunch of hogwash with 99.5% probability.
Contrary to what the article states, the current talks do not state that it will be a comedy series, but a drama.
In that case, games with non-gendered characters should be popular among women. For example, Galaga, Mechwarrior, Metroid, etc. Similarly, games with male and female characters such as Golden Axe (clad in a mankini and bikini, respectively) should be equally popular.

Does reality agree with this?
Just to be pedantic:

Calling someone an ass is not itself an ad-hominem argument -- unless he was being literal, as in "pg is a donkey; as we all know, donkeys are dumb, so pg's arguments are dumb".

In this context, the name-calling was a simple insult, and provides more information about the name-caller than the name-callee.
I agree that just because they work with the studios doesn't mean they don't fit the bill.

I think they don't fit because it's boring. It's scaling up and updating of "I'll help you sell your screenplay" newspaper ads. Open to everyone but with predatory terms.

Another middleman to the studios.

It's not innovative and it's not killing anything.
Modular, Readable, Testable Backbone views in Coffeescript
Negotiating a Job Offer with a Company
I actually carry a lighter computer when travelling than the one I use most often. So yes, it may have gone months unused and it may have just a few tools on it, and little to no content.

There is nothing unusual about that.
Interview w/ Best-Selling author of The Zen of Social Marketing - Shama Kabani
I cannot comment on your proposal as someone with film industry experience, but as a consumer I would give anything to have such a studio. I especially like the high volume, genre based approach. I'm just so bored by so much of what is produced today. I could easily see myself spending more than current theater prices to watch a new movie every week, even if I end up not liking half of them.
The CodeSprint 2 Post-Mortem
I wrote something about this http://kristopolous.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-pirate.html
That's not correct. You have to license different works for different purposes, and there are many, many stakeholders whose permission you have to get. This varies by country. For example, a network may by the exclusive rights to air a show in the US. They only pay for those rights. Then someone else buys the exclusive rights in the UK. And someone else buys another country. Then, when it comes time for internet streaming, you not only have to get licenses from the original owner, plus perhaps this organization or that organization, and then you have to get licenses from....

You get the point. So with all of that work involved they look at the revenue potential of smaller countries and, frankly, it's just not worth it in many cases. They don't know what the demand is there. They don't have a marketing plan, and they have bigger opportunities available to them by working on yet another show's licensing for the US or other large country, so they just don't go to all of that trouble to make things available in smaller markets.
Maybe browsers should include bittorrent support like Opera does.
The opposite of aggressive is passive. Both are bad. What you want to be is assertive, which is the middle road where you look out for your own interests while still respecting others.

There're a bunch of other situations where both extremes are bad. The opposite of indifferent is obsessed, and both are negative qualities in a relationship - you want to be involved. The opposite of flat is sharp, and both are bad - you want to be in tune. The opposite of hypo-anything is hyper-anything, and both are bad - you want to be healthy.
I think the only response to something like this ought to be:

"Hell no. You don't know what you're talking about"

;)
Well said, crewtide. There's a positive paradigm shift taking place, and you seem to be facilitating it.
I have a better suggestion: flag it and move on.
iTerm2 Gets Deep tmux Integration
Your definition of the word "hacker" is unnecessarily limiting. Try reading pg's "Hackers and Painters" to get a better idea of the meaning that I think is most common here. (In a nutshell, it's closer to "maker" than the "hardcore nerd" definition you espouse.) At any rate, I don't think the name is meant to be strictly normative — it was originally called "Startup News."
You're giving Apple an easy pass... a significant cut goes to the executives.
It's a different matter, but yes, I don't go to the USA anymore because of border control. It used to be a nice country to visit but it's just not worth it to me with all the stupid interviews and security theatre. I guess I'm more bitchy than the average person but I'd need a very strong incentive to go now.
sweeet! just got off the phone with a bro haha. works well!
Synchronize your slides with video, deliver engaging pitch
Do Angry Birds and Cut The Rope and Plants Vs Zombies count as "Indie" games?

I don't think that fraction is all that tiny any more.
I tend to think otherwise with the recent Megauploads situation; plenty of people lost their personal data with no warning and through no fault of their own.

The "no fault of their own" part is obviously being challenged by those who claim that the data should have been saved in multiple places. Though I think this just avoids the real issue of the bust having negatively affected users that had legitimate use cases for the service.
Thanks for the feedback! We've gotten similar reports on iPhone devices viewing the site for the first time. We'll be looking for a permanent fix but for now try going to http://clarity.fm first (the site we iframe for calling) and then coming back to http://heywhatsupbro.com
Agree with all of this.

Another angle is the advertisers' participation. Fox doesn't put some of their shows on Hulu not because it's hard, but because they won't make the same $ per impression that they make on TV.

There's work to be done to convince the advertisers (ad agencies?) that placements on digital screens are just as valuable (hopefully more valuable) as TV. Remember that Movie studios are also TV studios, and you can't fight one without the other.
But this is just a threshold issue. What does the difference in cost have to be for you to rent vs buy.
Let's say it's $60 to buy a season of a show on hard media that you can watch as many times you want and yes, you own something that will collect dust for a life time. Perhaps you can resell it, but that just means your initial cost was lower and you in a sense rented it for the difference in price for that time period.
Now if the cost to rent is say $20 for a season would that be worth hassle free experience of the content? How about $10, $5? At some threshold the value vs cost starts to make sense.
There are geopolitical/economics issues that are as important to hackers as algorithms. This past week, of SOPA, PIPA, OPEN, ACTA and other less beloved acronyms are of at least some interest for hackers because they directly impact our ability to hack things, to the point of having pg reminding us that the long-entrenched entertainment industry is ripe for disruptive innovation.

Here we find people of diverse tastes. I am an engineer and, given the possibility, I'd be designing processor architectures and instruction sets. I also like programming - and do it for a living, but I have lost some of my taste for algorithms and data structures and prefer to generate competitive differentials elsewhere on the stack. But I am also very worried by the political background, both here in South America, where I live, in Europe, where my ancestors came from, and with the US, which is a very fine country where a lot of dear friends live and that we shouldn't allow to be ruined by a bunch of crazy people. When I was a teenager, I read 1984 and the idea something like that could happen scared me a lot. It still does. Bad politics is contagious.

I think all is fine, as long as we remain civilized and don't forget to disagree in constructive ways. Community and relationships are important too - I have only one nickname, after all, one which is easily identifiable. All my friends know who I am, where I came from and what my opinions tend to be. I like to think that, in the many times we disagreed about things, we never ourselves a bad example.
CVE-2009-2204 was a vulnerability in iOS' SMS handling (versions < 3.0.1).

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2204
Oh, and this is the kind of thing which increases piracy, and then SOPA http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/22/delay-on-hulu-availability-...
Amazon's product introductions are like a mixture of Apple's product videos and Sesame Street
And I'll add that Apple is one of the best companies to put pressure on. They have a super-strong strong brand and their products often fetch higher prices and profit margins than their competitors. This gives them a strong incentive to protect their brand, and the means to do so.

Part of the reason their products can demand a premium price and healthy profit margins is because they have high standards for quality, profit margins and quality both rely on a strong and well managed supply chain. This well managed supply chain gives Apple greater ability than most to extract compliance with their required labor standards. The demand for quality means, in part, that Apple's suppliers make a greater investment in training their workers, which makes retaining those workers more important.

If Apple's suppliers attract and retain workers with better pay and better working conditions, then that creates pressure on other manufacturers, who must improve the package they offer workers in order to keep them from going to work for Apple's suppliers.

I'm sure there are other good targets for this sort of pressure, but Apple has to be among the best.
Grunt: A Command-Line Build Tool for JS projects
"Researchers at Queen’s University in Canada have compiled a comprehensive study of solar power plants and found that improvements in financing, and industrial streamlining could allow for the technology to become as cost-effective as traditional electrical sources. In other words, a much larger part of the globe could currently reach grid parity if cheap loans and better supply chains were available."

In other words, solar photovoltaics are not yet affordable without technological improvements in the supply chain and without subsidy in the form of below-market financing. I'm glad we've cleared that up.
Airbnb and the Competitors.
This is nice and all but I don't think anyone is going to go to websites and type /freedom.txt to see if it has it. It's much like the humans.txt file. No one actually reads these things.
Here is the sample http://9slides.com/Talks/MicrosoftFreeToolsforTeachers

Suggestions appreciated.
I use Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) for working locally. I create a project folder and use whatever Linux distro, web server, framework, etc. the project calls for. And it's got all kinds of devops goodness by integrating with Chef and Puppet so you can create complex configurations easily.
While I find there are some good features from this change, my overall feeling is that this abstracts too far away from tmux. I attempt to use the same development environment across POSIX systems and this doesn't seem to feel right to me. YMMV
It's certainly not unheard of for memory corruption issues to exist in SMS handling code - see http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2204 . There's also a pretty wide remote exploit vector in MMS - you have an entire TCP + HTTP stack, image decoder, and render mechanism to exploit in that case. I don't know of any published MMS exploits in the wild for any recent phones, but that's not to say it's impossible.

I do agree that the article as a whole sounds like 90s/early-2000s paranoia combined with the standard glorification of "cyberpunks," though - it's just not the "iPhone via text" anecdote that's raising red flags.
I'm unclear what git has to do with 'sharing files with clients.' I'm pretty sure he's not talking about sharing a source repository with clients.

On the other hand, scp could work. There are various visual scp/sftp clients for Windows.
Tumblr seems much like what VOX was aiming for: easy, free, theme-able social blogging. And it looks like Tumblr has trounced TypePad.
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law: http://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurs-Guide-Business-Law/dp/05...

It's the only one you'll need - it basically covers everything required to jump into an intelligent conversation with your attorney.
Google doubles Plus membership with brute-force signup process
Daily Show Twitter Hacked
Amazon's monopsony in the e-book market scares me.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/cutting-...
That really depends on your clients :)
My asus laptop has a physical shutter that i can close.
I tried to upvote you out of the gray because your comment is interesting. There is just one problem with deliberately giving some people more power than others: those whose power is taken will try to use the same arguments used by those doing the taking. Examples: "We know what's best for our children!" "Those idiot evolutionists are trying to force their beliefs on those of us who know better!" etc.

"Since idiots never know they are idiots," how do you prove that you're not the real idiot when you're busy allocating power, and how do you prevent the meritocracy from being manipulated?

It's obvious that the current system isn't leading us to the Utopian paradise we all want to believe is possible, so if you've solved these problems, I'd love to hear the solutions.
Right now the law says that a service provider must take down or block access to the material. Taking down only links (whether they're HTTP links, or pointers in a software app, etc) pointing to the material does not meet that requirement -- the material is still there, and it's still accessible through the other links.

So while it would be sensible to only remove the one link that you were notified of, if there are others, then by not taking them all down the service provider does not gain the safe harbor protection of the DMCA and remains liable for copyright infringement. Right now, as a non-lawyer reading the DMCA, it looks to me like any storage service that dedupes files is required to remove the file (from everyone's account) when any link to that file is reported, even if the other accounts have permission to store that file.
The occasional tic is OK.

When they're utterly distracting ... no.

I've heard professional speakers utterly hampered by "ums", nonsensical random streams of thought, etc., to the point I've had to leave, switch stations/channels, or stop listening. Rare, but memorable.

The exception might be made for someone whose material or story is so utterly compelling that you're willing to overlook such idiosyncrasies. However, most of us are not such special snowflakes.
This is neat, but I'd rather my terminal emulator be virtual-terminal-multiplexing agnostic. Tried tmux, went back to GNU Screen.
I thought he was unnecessarily harsh re: Vim, which is my default text editor these days. That being said, Sublime Text 2 looks impressive in its own way.
A brief bit of Googling suggests mice commonly eat other dead mice.
That would make sense, and I agree.

I feel like this should probably be a grey area to be sorted out in court, if not a reasonable codification into law.

But as I understand it the wording of the DMCA can be interpreted to mean that you must remove all links to the file, regardless of whether or not some of those users had the legal right to distribute while others didn't.
In Search of the Perfect Keyboard
Somehow I am fascinated by the Child Pornography argument. It seems that Child Pornography is in our day and age one of the very few universal themes that nobody tries to challenge. It has become a subject so holy, that as soon as someone pulls it out, it puts the opponent in a long winding act of defense. Old versions of this "ultimate evil" arguments such as "Nazi" or "Communist" appear far more relativistic than child pornography. But it is going to be very interesting to watch over the next years how this issue is going to unfold.
explicitly condones piracy

You don't have to explicitly condone privacy in order to be guilty of privacy.
John Brockman: the man who runs the world's smartest website
This is guerrilla film-making. It's gutsy, but it doesn't pay. There's no market for it. Maybe digital distribution channels will change it - or is already changing it. But the conventional channels discard this approach. Nothing new here.
I know that with my Logitech Pro 9000, the Logitech software that comes with it gives you the ability to turn off the LED. Their software also has remote viewing built in. I'm sure designs vary, but it is at least possible with this camera.
Watch "I think my Facebook Friend Is Dead". I was skeptical about test movies too, but that one is watchable and entertaining enough that you can see how a little production values and more professional actors could make a good movie. It's all about mindset while watching.
[EXPERIMENT] I attached a file to a tweet
The smart person steps away from the table. Alas, that's not an option.
Teaching programming to a nine-year-old
If you're still interested: the funding is / was distributed by number of votes, not number of seats won. Any party that gets over 2% of the vote gets a cut, which means the threshold for entry is fairly low.

Of course, a party with 50% of the vote will still get 50% of the money, which does favour incumbents.
Isn't a movie MVP in the funding process of movies a script with storyboards?

Producers don't film a movie and then get funding.
I wonder how the failure of Solyndra fits into this thesis.
> Really?

I think there is a disconnect here between whether "1-to-1 copy of YouTube" is referring to the content on YouTube or just the general implementation/interface/idea of YouTube.
To which one can say SABnzbd + Sick Beard. Not only do you get exactly what you want in desired quality, you have to spend little to no time looking for it, at least as far as TV shows and movies go.
That sounds like a great start up. Are you allowed to clarify what you mean by efficient infrastructure? That is, do you mean the topology of the network, the routing on the links or the type of nodes? What type of algorithms do you use for load balancing? Are you storing on more efficient batteries for example? What is the chemistry of your batteries? Or are they the dual, fuel based?

Sorry, this has been a bit of a ramble just curious about your system.