skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, come on. Seriously? Film and TV are here to stay. Forever. All the non-parasites actually making film and TV are assured of continued employment.

All PG is talking about is taking out the parasitic channels and blocks that impede content from being made and enjoyed if they don't get their pound of flesh. All the arrogance that makes them demand not only that law be rewritten and diplomacy bound to their will, but that anybody daring to speak against them be castigated as enemies of democracy and capitalism and presumably Mom and apple pie.

They deserve to shuffle off into the dustbin - let's get back to having fun and making things. That's what PG is after, and he's right. Everybody knows the emperor's naked - those fat cats do nothing creative, and nothing to improve anything at all except their bank balances; they're rentiers so deeply to the core that they see nothing at all wrong with wanting their money back after buying the President of the United States when he failed to dance to their tune for three minutes this week.

Good riddance to the lot of them.
Global Implications of China's Challenges
Right now Hollywood make money out of the game by converting them to a movie. I think the next "big thing" would be creating artificial game polygon, where people can go in, pay the same amount of money as they pay for the ticket and play the game as player, not just watcher. People can were all artificial gadgets ( helmets, gloves, even the full suite) and be part of the action. Imagine you can create avatar and play Quake 3 arena death match, or be part of the Fallout, etc. Computer power is already there to create it, it's just a matter to allocate money and gaming developing will begin. It will be win-win scenario, since this new type of entertainment will attract all industry from software / hardware to graphic designed and script writers. And then it can be monetizing the same way as movie.
Yes - but the real point is about those 'artists' who work voluntarily on projects of their own choosing for (at best) speculative financial return. Sometimes they might get nothing for their efforts, and this has to be accepted.
>Hollywood is a specialized VC community.

That's true, but we dont need a VC community that specializes in handing out tens of millions when, thanks to technology, movies can be made for tens of thousands.
haha, I helped build that one :) I was wondering what others are out there. Glad you like it. Hopefully we will be updating it soon.
Entertainment often involves art made by artists, but things can be entertaining with no art or artists involved. Nascar races, reality shows, youtube videos of people using chainsaws, reddit threads.
Is it really that usual? I've used computers daily for 23 years, and I've never had a hard disk crash.
Well no, the alternative is to not work at all. And I know plenty of people (heh, Berkeley) who get along fine without working. Some of them are probably happier than plenty of employed people.

I know this isn't strictly relevant, but I really believe that thanks to technology improvements, we need to work on dispelling the idea that everybody has to work. Unemployment should gradually stop being a horrible fate worthy of pity or derision, but rather a viable career path. One of these days...
"Do we have a good name for them?"

No. I agree it's klunky, but it seemed like a diversion to try to nail the semantic jello to the wall. It's an amorphous, fuzzy group, but there's definitely a group of companies and interests who were directly threatened by SOPA.
People left Engineering when I was studying it because they got into it for the wrong reason. They took it because they thought it was good money and/or because they were told that they were well-suited for it. Unfortunately, the workload is such that, unless you really, really wanted to do it, it wasn't worth the hassle. (At the time, I worked in the lab with people taking Computer Science who had about 24 hours per week of lectures, tutorials and labs (before homework), while we had between 37-40)

I remember going to an upper-level math student with a problem when I was in second year and they guy had no idea what my coursework was or how to do it. They would blast you with about 2.5 years of insane math and other tools, and the last 1.5 years consisted of explaining to you how stringing those tools together allowed you to do just about anything.
indiegogo.com started off focused on independent film making though they're now a more generalized crowdfunding platform (like kickstarter). I don't know much about their platform these days, but I know they had a lot of similar ideas when they started out.

There are definitely a lot of state and federal securities laws implicated with items 6-12 (and international laws if you allow shares to be issued internationally). These laws are what prevent kickstarter and indigogo from adopting a similar model in their current platform. US Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts has proposed some legislation that may make these kinds of structures more possible. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/scott-brown-next-stev...
I'm quite fond of Inconsolata for editing code, and it's free.

http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
What?! Right as that was getting good, it ended. I looked to see if there was a second page. How does it go from the changes in the 1970s to empty factories today?
"Destroying Hollywood would not destroy ability for entertainers to entertain. If anything it would probably increase the ability for an entertainer to entertain."

Agreed. If anything, new tech could create a new medium for truly determined entertainers to reach a large audience. Right now it seems like most of the youtube celebrities are, for the most part, jokesters. But perhaps a new sphere of entertainment can be created where the next great actors/directors can make it big without Hollywood.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120104/04545217274/cato-i...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits...
The first thing that came to mind when I saw 'Kill Hollywood' was Guy Kawasaki's 'Killer Gene' theory of business plans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4etXBEq-ug

Just sayin'.
In a sense, Hollywood has died once before: the studio system used to be the only way of doing business in the movies. The breakup of the union between distribution and production lead to the current system of direct investment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_system

Films have been made with other forms of investment, production, and distribution. While films like The Godfather came out of the present model, there's nothing that indicates to me that the present model is the only one that works. And, indeed, the production The Godfather in particular is one of the early successes of that model, and after 40 years its not surprising if the cracks are starting to show.
This is a very tough decision, one which I am currently going through at the moment. Experiences are great, but giving up on the chance of a good relationship is hard. Experiences may be more predictable / controllable, but sometimes the less predictable experience can lead you places you never thought you would end up.
Disclaimer: I work in film.

This discussion is very strange. Hollywood films are extremely expensive and difficult to make, do you think the studios would spend all that money and effort if they could get the same return of investment knocking out budget films shot in someone's living room with a DSLR? I'm quite sure film won't remain at the top of tree for mass market entertainment forever, but it's going to be replaced by ever more immersive games, not tech startups. And those are pretty expensive to make as well.
I would move and spend at least a few weeks looking for a job. Get more than one offer, negotiate the best deal you can get at the company that looks to have the best prospects, best work environment and is the most interesting to you.

Also spend that time doing neighborhood scouting and apartment hunting; stay in a hotel or AirBnb until you pick the job and then get the best place close to your offices; although beware startups often move as they grow.

Having moved to new cities myself, it takes a few iterations to find the area where you really like living. See as much of the area as you can (rent a car), and talk to people there. Finding the area you love as quickly as possible will make living and working there that much better.
> "Each family agreed to turn over some of what they grew to the government, and to the collective"

Despite the articles pro-capitalist rhetoric, note that the 'collective' is also creating its own taxes (presumably to help those less well off) - though it unhelpfully doesnt say what these were.
Free Software is not Just Vi or Emacs. It evolves into Android, Firefox, Chrome, Eclipse, jQuery, etc. You may get to see work before it is fully ready... But finished products in Free software can also be user friendly and mainstream. And for niches it serves, Free software does a far better job than than the Lowest common denominator that suits the masses.
I'm happy to wait and have a better course for sure!
There's nothing wrong with trying to understand the author's original intent. But the author's intent isn't necessarily more important than the reader's interpretation (and trying to separate the two can miss the point of art.)
We were younger back then too. Now put that in a bottle and you could replace more than Hollywood!

What I miss from that time was the ability to sit around with friends and argue about simple issues of fact. E.g. "who was the actor in that old movie blah.." "no it wasn't, it was ..."

Smart phones + IMDB & Wikipedia killed that. How could one bring that back?
PS. that's not to say you shouldn't have interviews lined up before you fly out there.
> Interesting thought experiment: how would the world look like if all art was created by hobbyists? (honest question)

Linux.
The point is that nobody can be compelled to preform labor. Both sides have the right to negotiate.
(psst... there's a button for that :-)
Here is MY idea.

Anyone can post a movie to the web service (website access/roku access). Hollywood, or freelancer gets to publish on the platform free.

Anyone can stream a movie completely free, but every 10-15 minutes the price to see the last 10 minutes of the movie cost 1 dollar more. (ratio variable)

You can pay a dollar after the first 10 minutes and watch the whole movie for just a dollar, or you watch all of the movie free but dont see the last 15 minutes ending.

/end crazy idea.
Great idea, I can't see anyone paying to watch Avatar 2 when they can see someone overdubbing their Skyrim avatar with Battlestar Galactica fanfic.
I am still digesting all the comments, but think I agree.

Storytelling has existed as a form of entertainment for quite some time. The primary change has been the delivery mechanism, which provided for alternative ways to consume the content, altered how it was made (think putting on a play vs making a film), and also shifted the power structure. Seven years ago it cost over $60 million to make a Hollywood blockbuster, and nearly another $40 million was spent on marketing (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3564377.stm). Getting that kind of reach requires deep pockets, hence few large players.

I may be thinking small here, but I think any significant changes to this power structure in the near-term will have to start with new delivery systems. At least in terms of consuming video content in the home, I imagine most of it occurs in front of the tv. I know there are various ways to watch movies, shows, and sometimes even sports without needing a cable or satellite subscription, but the options are still limited and way too spread out. The content that I want isn't available where I want it to be, when I want it to be, in a manner easily usable by most people.

I'm sure this is only one piece of the puzzle. I imagine if more content was more readily available, that would change things as well. Ultimately I think people are willing to pay for content they enjoy, but the current availability and especially packaging are outdated.
Hollywood only allows a tiny fraction of people with talent to suceed... The remaining 99% who never got into hollywood would want to work if they could succeed. Probably becoming millionares rather than billionares.
Kruhft - music discography and other (legal) torrents
Go here: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences - go down to demographics. Google thinks I'm a 35 y.o. male, interested in Sci-Fi, and gadgets.

I'm guessing google thinks you won't get breast reduction.
Let's take a look at Obama's statement, which the popular press described as opposition to SOPA:

"That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders"

This isn't rocket surgery. And no, Reddit blacking out their site does not qualify as a "titanic force". The total campaign contributions for every single Reddit reader for a year are what, $10,000? Chris Dodd has more than that in his freezer right now.
And honestly, I don't think the media industry accounted for more than a few hundred thou. He can afford to stiff them - and thus he did so. By doing that, he simulated having a spine on an issue that has clear bipartisan public support and is guaranteed not to piss off the _real_ power - banks.

Obvious calculus. Obama's a shitty President, but man is he a fantastic campaigner.
I make a distinction between "labor" and "selling 'intellectual property'". Nobody has the right to make money off selling something that doesn't exist.
This is excellent, why should a convention be preserved solely for the reason that some want to continue to extract profit? It's like having a great new technology that cures everything, but physicians opposing it because it endangers their livelihood.
I'll note that recently Hollywood has largely abandoned the mid-range productions as being too risky for the potential payoff. It's all go big or go home for the studios.
you're strictly a "command line user" and you are reinventing the visual art and entertainment world?
Then I can't see 80% of the "Show HN" stuff that enters the newsfeed!
Kill Hollywood Remixed
If $100m+ movies continue to exist, Hollywood will continue to exist, because the majority goes to see those types of movies. To kill Hollywood, all costs around the creation & distribution of movies need to decrease tremendously to the point where they wouldn't even know how to spend $100m+ creating a movie.
There are remedies other than copyright law.

For example is someone took something I wrote and published it under his own name, that would be fraud.

Or if someone used my song for the soundtrack of a porn without making it clear that I wasn't involved, I would argue defamation because they led the public to believe that I was involved in pornography.
If you read 'Count Zero', one of the ideas there is that going online into a 3D chat didn't really catch on until there were realistic human faces.

One of the characters in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson mentions that accurate modelling of human facial expressions was a key component in the success of that world's VR environment.

Fictional anecdotes are even less like data than real-life anecdotes, but I think it says something that when humans try to annotate text with emotions, faces are the closest graphical analogue:

:) :( O_o
Keep an eye out for All Points Bulletin's second death. They spend over $100 million dollars developing the world's most advanced character design system and forgot to build an actual game around it. The original developer had to shut the game down after the first month or so, but then someone else bought it for a fraction of the development costs and reworked it into a Free To Play game. By all accounts, the gameplay is still absolutely terrible. Should only be a matter of time before they shut it down again.

There are a few reasons why I think this MMO would make an awesome engine for this startup.

1. The character customization system includes the ability to design clothing and tattoos for the character. If you don't like the wardrobe included in the game, you can design your own.

2. There is an equally extensive toolset to modify your character's physical appearance.

3. The customization was a main selling point for this game. People were supposed to be able to sell the clothing they designed in game and even exchange the virtual currency for more play time. This emphasis on user creativity means that the average APB player is probably more likely to begin playing with the intent to create their own content.

4. The studio that now owns the game didn't have to eat a $100 million loss, so they don't have to get a huge amount of money if they sell the game again. This combined with the fact that it failed once, and might again would ensure that there wouldn't be any competitors.

P.S. Another possible solution would be to just license the engine to create your own game. This is a common practice in the game industry and is usually far cheaper than trying to purchase a complete game.
The RIAA are pikers next to Hollywood accountants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting/
>Destroying Hollywood would not destroy ability for entertainers to entertain. If anything it would probably increase the ability for an entertainer to entertain.

How does that follow? No one needs to follow Hollywood as it is. Anyone can create and post their product on their personal site or Youtube etc.

What Hollywood gives artists is a great vehicle. No one needs to use that vehicle. People are free to act in local productions, etc. Besides, I think there are at least two kinds of artists, ones who do it for the joy/love and others who do it for fame/recognition. The latter would likely feel out of place in new environment where they were not widely known. I admit, that's my impression, and not based on any study or such.

It feels almost as if people would wish that artists/actors, etc. would return to a time of travelling acts like vaudeville
shows. Those people barely made ends meet. A modern, technologically enhanced version of this, but still.

>It's not up to PG, me, Ben Parr or anyone else to decide what is best for the people, it is up to the people decide what is best for them. Any projected funded by YC will only succeed to the degree that it provides a better experience to consumers.

This I agree with.
Who will miss Mission Impossible 4, when the alternative is something new? Hollywood killed the art in most of his movies already. Think about this Viacom coolness-metric-optimization-crap and stuff like Zookeeper.

People like Nolan will still make gigantic hits with decent movies.
Would it be wrong to call philosophy "abstract {math|logic}"?
"So we can find a better solution."

Yeah. Make Hollywood run a real business without jackbooted support, that would be a better solution.

You know what happened here? For a couple of hours on Wednesday, a whole bunch of Americans realized that politics might actually affect their lives - and Congress felt the icy knife of knowledge of how close they came to utter destruction of their gravy train. Because if that American beast ever actually wakes up, times are going to get interesting.
The term, at least to me, does not necessarily refer to storage of large amounts of data. At Bloomberg, we process a large amount of data in realtime. When focusing on the processing of realtime market data, the hardware topology looks different than when you are, say, doing a map reduce across a huge number of nodes. You often have a single point of entry for a particular stream (with redundancy, of course), but then the trick is to efficiently distribute the data to the many places that require it with as near zero latency as possible. Obviously there is a need for longer term storage and instantaneous retrieval of billions of data points, but the largest focus is on near-zero latency from point of consumption, distributing to all internal nodes/apps and to many thousands of sites in 180+ countries with a large number of "nines".

The biggest challenge is that data feeds originate in nearly all of those countries and also need to be distributed efficiently to every other country. (e.g., NASDAQ originates in the US and reaches around the globe, and the same is true for realtime feeds on the opposite side of the globe in the Middle East, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc.) The Internet is not reliable from a latency point of view so coupled with the required hardware is the required network. We operate one of the largest private networks in the world.

edit: Also, from a processing point of view we have had great success with speeding up complex algorithms that would normally take minutes to run across huge compute clusters, bringing them down to seconds by porting them to run on large GPU clusters. Certain things are definitely suited for running on GPUs, but I feel it is still pretty foreign to most programmers and hard for companies to decide to jump into that kind of project. You're starting to see more specialized use of GPU or slower-clock-but-massively-parallel compute devices for a wider variety of tasks. (e.g., http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/facebook-tilera-w...)
Design for Refactoring, Not Maintenance
any serious 'pirate site' has absolutely no ads. The only 'pirate sites' that have ads are the ones open to the public - and they are not so serious, but rather unreliable with no community. I am guessing you are not a member of a private tracker.
You're currently attacking some of the representatives who actually tried to prevent/mitigate the damage of SOPA (yes, before the PR storm) over some quotes you've heard out of context. The term "experts" actually was used as well, it's just not good comedy fodder.

You shouldn't comment if you aren't at all informed on the subject.
Can I ask, why Photopia?
When playing games like Dues Ex or Half Life, I've often wanted the ability to scale the difficulty on the fly from hardcore to easy to passive without penalty. I'm guilty of watching "Let's Play" editions of games on YouTube for that reason.
As a counterargument (although I agree with you in this case): it was just as well George Lucas had less control over the original Star Wars films, as the prequels proved.
Wifi at Events Demonstrates How Existing Business Practices Can Slow Innovation
There certainly seems to be confusion about what the RFS advocates "killing." Is it the production and distribution system, or the medium itself? Hollywood can mean many things, and some of the RFS seems to be championing alternative delivery while other parts encourage creating alternatives to the medium itself. Those are two very different goals, and it seems that Ben has interpreted the latter as the RFC's message..
Yeah, it's a pretty dreadful article. This is a better one from our local paper:

http://www.mercurynews.com/cupertino/ci_19501921
Antipiracy Case Sends Shivers Through Some Legitimate Storage Sites
I like the functionality. Sweet. I want to use it, but not when it looks so fugly.

Tone the look down. Use one font, Helvetica, and change the colors to white, greys and black. Then you'll have the beginnings of a great product.