skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe that the first step is to shrink the role of the middlemen by enabling content creators to distribute and market their content effectively online. In fact, the internet has provided a great way to do just that (it is the perfect distribution and marketing channel)! All of us are constantly sharing and reproducing the content and this helps expose users with all sorts of content. Now if there is a startup which focuses on "following" and "chasing" the content and sell products related to the content itself, I believe that many users will buy the products that interest them. For instance, when we watch "Mission Impossible" we may be interested in the music tracks, the movie DVD, the clothes that the characters are wearing, toys & merchandises etc. If more products are being sold, this is a reflection of the quality of the content itself. Product companies would then want to sponsor and fund for quality content creators to carry on producing content. Apart from that such a platform may allow more quality content to be placed on Youtube where users are abundant!

The next step is to make content interactive. PG mention "what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?" and I thought of the notion of having the viewers of the content to dictate the direction of the show and making the content engaging that it makes me feel like I am part of it. Currently in many games (esp rpg) I decide the route/path that the character follows and this leads to different game endings. This can be applied to movies as well. A movie can have 4 parts and after each part, the movie may request me to buy a certain choice (eg. the character has 3 roads to choose, which do you choose and this will dictate the progression of the story) or product (there are 3 guns to choose, buy 1 from your local store lol! and key in product keycode or something). This can tie in very well with the idea on paragraph 1 where product companies can help sponsor for the video production.

What do you think about these ideas? I am working on idea 1 and I would be keen for some feedback and would love for people to contribute to this startup. Hit me up!
It is ridiculous that EA's stock has taken a hit over this game. Many people said that Bioware couldn't make a decent MMO, but they ended up making arguably the best MMORPG to date. While the game isn't going to be as profitable as the World of Warcraft, it doesn't mean that they won't make their money back. At one point they had over a million subscribers, so that's at least $60 million right there. If the game keeps even half of them, that's going to be $7.5 million each month. MMOs aren't made for instant profit, they are a long-term investment.

If Bioware had released either a great game with tons of bugs or a crappy game with no bugs, they would likely be looking at a huge loss. Fortunately, the Old Republic's launch was one of the smoothest in the history of MMORPGs and Bioware has a reputation as a developer that continues to release patches long after a game is released.
That's the problem. We can't aim to make $200 M movies from the start.

But I think it is pretty much possible to build a platform where we can finance a TV series like The Big Bang Theory,
by charging only $1 per episode to the subscriber. Just cutting the middle man and setting a deal with a dumb pipe channel like Google (YouTube), where they can make money from ads, and paying the creators some more money... That would be only $4 a month for a series you REALLY love. [1]

And of course, the public wins A LOT, by avoiding unexpected cancellations, time slot changes, etc!

I'd definitely pay for series like Battlestar Galactica, TBBT, MacGyver (lol! how would it be today)...

And of course, if you make it GLOBAL, erasing regional restrictions, you can increase your audience at an enormous level!

I see this model as something ABSOLUTELY plausible today. Why are we still paying to the middle men?!?! Let's make this happen.

[1] http://www.tvguide.com/News/Top-TV-Earners-1021717.aspx
Does anyone have a connection at Netflix, preferably in biz dev or online partnerships of any kind. They make it notoriously hard to get in touch with anyone there, no emails listed, phone call leads to call center support who cant transfer you to anyone worthwhile, no reply from twitter msgs etc..
Let's deal with the biggest threats to the Internet and civil liberties first, which are Hollywood and the music labels.
The Edge of HTML5
generalize to things they use every day
How to find other websites of a same person.
bash_completion does this for most systems. Its also available in mac ports
Myanmar Snub-Nosed Monkey
The threshold is 500 karma.
What's New in HTML5 Media
Hey Carl, thanks for posting this.
You did a great camera work!
Totally agree, the labels put out a slick, well produced product and have a lot of brand loyalty. And they have a huge headstart. But I think startups can build up some of that consumer loyalty by not being evil to their customers, and by providing the value add to music that major labels can't in the form of cool apps. And don't forget, even the now huge Virgin empire started as a little hole in the wall record shop on Notting Hill.
Very true. I think the new money machine will be crowd sourcing. Recent statistics for kickstarter say that they funded nearly 100mil for projects in 2011. Out of which nearly half (50% in money) are media related (film/music/comics etc). People ignore crowd sourcing or discount its power, but we have to remember that crowd sourcing involves the whole world - thanks to the internet.
Ian MacDonald's bash completions (http://www.caliban.org/bash/) do this with known_hosts.
Y Combinator To Startups: Kill Hollywood
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It's not a clarion call to kill an industry, it's a clarion call to accelerate creative destruction on an industry. All that does is puts the bad entities out of business and creates new entities. Sure, there will be some labor displacement, but that's the nature of capitalism. The fact of the matter is that it is inevitable. You can't stop it. The fact that hollywood feels that they have to sue and legislate to protect their declining revenues and profits, shows that they are ripe for disruption.

No need to get pissed about it, you should get on the right side of it.
I usually set up my SSH autocompletes to read from known_hosts. The problem is that on some systems, like say Debian, the hostnames are hashed for security reasons. So you have to add the following line to your .ssh/config to get the hostnames back into a readable form.

HashKnownHosts no
MegaUpload Is Semi-Back
The original post ends by asking the wrong - and an extremely limiting - question.

Technological innovations of camera/film/projectors (and later broadcast & receivers) made motion pictures possible. These came first. The current "Hollywood" production-distribution-revenue model came after, as a result of the economics of what it took to make motion pictures profitable. So, "Hollywood" is less the entertainment, and more the means by which that entertainment is produced and distributed.

Therefore, if one wants to "Kill Hollywood", one doesn't doesn't do it by asking merely "What's the most entertaining thing you can build?" One does it by changing the economics in a way that renders "Hollywood", at least in terms of current studios-distributors-theaters (and studios-channels-Xcasters) model, untenable.

The question to entrepreneurs that the original post should have concluded with is "What can you make that makes making and distributing engrossing entertainment (whatever form that may take) cheaper/easier/more accessible/more capable/more profitable/more easily funded?"

Unless your interest does lie specifically in investing in the entertaining things. Cool. Innovative entertainment may result, but I wouldn't expect any of those investments to result in the thing that "kills Hollywood".
Think in a disruptive way. Actors don't have to be paid $10 million. Special effects don't have to cost tens of millions. Equipment doesn't have to cost millions either.

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

But as I mentioned in another comment, I think to kill Hollywood you need incubators like YCombinator to seed the initial team and script, and attract young talent, and then help them find investors who would put a few millions into the movie, and also build a platform for distribution, like a Youtube for these movies, and a good business model to monetize them.

Some kind of news/community sites would help too, not only to share information about the projects, but also get feedback and build a group of "early adopters" who will evangelize your movie later.
Show Your True Colors - The Hacker Factor Blog
Jagriti Yatra: a journey of entrepreneurship through India
There are. Small production companies. Hundreds of them. But when it comes to marketing and distibuting what you've made, you really need a major studio's support.
It wasn't so bad for me. I suppose I wound up working an average of about 9 hours a day, 5 hours a week. But a lot of that time was in "troll sessions" with friends, and it was fun. I also really enjoyed being around smart and motivated people.

All in all, it was a very positive experience for me, and has paid off handsomely over the years. (Not the degree, I don't give a crap about that, but what I learned. A friend summed it up succinctly with "it's not about learning facts, it's about learning how to think." Learning engineering and science rewires your brain.)
> games used to cost a lot of money and used to be hard. now they cost nothing to make except your time, and you can do it in your garage.

Let's not go overboard here. Just because there is a growing market for indie games like Minecraft does not mean big budget productions like CoD, WoW or Skyrim is at all feasible for a single person to design, code, test, and support from a garage.

Good games are still very hard to make. They dont have to cost a lot of money but if you want to make the next WoW, you better have a big budget.
Spending a few hours up front improving the tools I use saves me hours every day. A small investment in getting your tools right more than pays off. I am insanely productive in my workplace while saving myself from RSI by using smart vim configs.
Indie movies have itunes too. Still, just getting your game in the app store or your music or movie in itunes, doesn't mean it will sell well. Angry birds cost over $100,000[1] to make and those Modern Warfare games cost tens of millions of dollars market and produce. The big budget production typically dominate mind share in these markets.

[1] http://mobilewebgo.com/how-did-angry-birds-become-blockbuste...
I've never been a big REST fan since I'm not sure that shoehorning into HTTP is a great idea. Seems like using a protocol to solve problems it was never really intended for.

When I am trying to connect 2 systems I prefer to think about functions rather than resources , basically create "namespaces" and have something like: www.myapp.com/api/namespace/function
then simply pass all data in using POST vars and serialize anything more complicated into JSON then just have to other end return JSON or XML.

Sometimes I will implement a simple header system with some metadata that should be sent and received with each request.

Getting too worried about POST/GET/PUT seems silly when you can just give your functions appropriate names.

I prefer to think of this as SOAP extra light.
The Concurrency Spectrum: from Callbacks to Coroutines to Craziness
SQL - A Failed Experiment?
The information in the strncpy() / strncat() section is incorrect.

Firstly, strncpy() was not designed to be a "safer strcpy()" at all. It was designed for storing strings in the manner of original UNIX directory entries: in a fixed size buffer, null-padded only if the stored string is shorter than the buffer. This is why it fills the buffer with nulls, and why it doesn't necessarily null-terminate the destination.

Secondly, contrary to what the article implies, strncat() does not work this way: strncat() always null-terminates the destination, and it doesn't write any extra nulls.
> But pg should be encouraging people to build a better system not focusing them on tearing down the current one.

It appears as though you let the title of the piece distract you from the content of it.
The reason is capslock is on the home row, and control is not. I use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, so ctrl is also in a good spot (thumb), but for most people, less stress would be to use the homerow key rather than bend their pinky to hit ctrl. It's a minor thing but it adds up.

If you use escape with vim you're actually "doing it wrong" in the sense that vim was not designed for your keyboard. On older keyboards escape was where the Tab key is now. There's no reason to abuse your wrists with repetitive motions going up to the escape key.
> brand loyalty

Not really. Consumers don't have a clue who the labels are. The labels are great at building brand loyalty for the artists.

There's two horizontals - the promoters (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, MySpace, etc) which let artists connect with fans, and producer/distributers (Amazon, iTunes, indie labels).

You probably won't build a vertical that does both well, like the big labels.

The distribution and production is a solved problem. You won't distribute better than Amazon, and an indie producer will produce good and cheap records in an unscalable fashion.

The promotion thing (getting kickbacks from ads?) is social media. What do the artists need? What do the users need? And how can you do it better than Twitter?
I think you missed a level of indirection: YC does not want to revolutionize entertainment. YC just wants to fund a company that would revolutionize entertainment. I imagine that YC is not exactly full of healthcare or education experts, but they are perfectly happy to fund companies working in those fields; this is the same.
yep, they are proper git submodules, and this way you can specifically control which of them you want to update, and when.
The above comment was a sarcastic one.
Hollywood is killing themselves, pg is merely observing it and analyzing what he thinks it will mean for his own industry.

And also, it's really childish to even bring up karma like that. You were better off citing your 4 years on HN if you needed to validate yourself.
We've got a mass email going out now.
Good question. The good news is that, according to the latest research, HFCS are no worse than honey, or indeed, table sugar.

The bad news is that according to the same research, all three are absolutely terrible for you, and cause metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, fatty liver, and a laundry list of other very serious problems.

Avoiding sugar is much more important than worrying about whether it's 50% fructose (as in table sugar) or 55% fructose (as in your HFCS-sweetened soft drink).
Do you know about http://mixpanel.com ?
Just shell/FTP passwords. As noted above, panel passwords are fine.
Good News TV
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Free plans for students - Dropbox ,Hacker Monthly and more
I think brand loyalty can mean loyalty to existing artists which are signed with existing music labels.
Honestly, simply reading `man bash` from start to finish was one of the best things I ever did. I started doing it with all sorts of stuff. May I suggest you start with `man man`?

Then someone told me about `apropos` which is summarized in it's man page as "search the whatis database for strings". Sooo useful. Not nearly as useful as simply reading man pages from start to finish, but I've only got so much spare time.
This could work, but how good is YCombinator at judging an initial team & script ? The investors YC knows and work with, invest primarily in tech not entertainment. Will the investors be willing to take risk in a different sector ? Not every great talent has a hit on his/her first or even second try.
I'm thinking about teaching a class on this, if you want to be a guinea pig and give me some feedback on what you think are the most relevant parts of a designers oeuvre are, we could try it over coffee and look at some of the specific problems you are trying to tackle. -michael@michaelburkett.com
In the risk of being down voted to hell, this whole thing seems completely misguided to me. I love the product that hollywood produces. I love great movies and great TV. I frankly think "The Wire" is the best example of story telling I know of. I can think of nothing that silicon valley has produced that even comes close. If Zynga disappeared tomorrow, I could care less, and Hollywood and Zynga are both selling entertainment. Zynga's entertainment value is less than worthless to me. I hope hollywood continues to be a massively successful industry in the hope that the next David Simon is created.
I get pissed because of the rhetoric. Not just from this side. I have many friends in the entertainment industry and from there it's all about "thieves". So you have "hate" and "kill" on this side and "theft" and "arrest" on that side and I'm sick of all of it.

The most effective solution to problems with the media industry has always been the same: Collaboration.

Look at allthestepisodes.com. This is a site that allowed people to watch every Star Trek episode for free and I personally know an actor who lost residuals because of it. But that problem is gone now. Their traffic has been in a freefall (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/allstepisodes.com/)

Why?

Because Netflix offers all those episodes now. Neflix, a company that engaged the industry rather than trying to kill it, solved that problem and everyone's happy. No one's killed or arrested or anything of the sort.
I disagree - it is distribution. You have a device in your room that is a push channel for Hollywood to stream its (and only its) content to you. It's the cable box. Ditto for cinemas.

You don't need to out-market Hollywood (though achieving parity may be part of the equation). You need to create a more efficient production cycle, from artist to costumer.

I'm thinking lean start-up. How can we reduce cycle time between artist conception of an entertainment pitch and consumers evaluating it?
If there's any way we can bring some direct democracy influences into our representative democracy, it's exactly this. 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. If these people oppose a bill it should immediately be put through a process of public debate for a period of at least 6 months, and it should all be done openly and fairly.

I don't know what the exact balance should be, but I would start low, rather than high. The number of people necessary should be low enough that 80% of the "bad bills" don't pass anymore, but also high enough that you don't have 80% of these oppositions as abuses of the law.

The reason I would start with a lower number first, is because we've already tried the "more representative" version of the Government, and it hasn't been working that well lately, and because it's much easier to get them to raise the number later if it gets too abused, than it is to get them to lower the number, because that would mean giving even more power to the people, and it's not something they'd like to do.

I'm not entirely sure how this opposition should happen - through signatures, I guess? But they should give a lot of information about themselves to verify them easily, or it needs to be done in such a way that a politician can't easily manufacture these to stop an opponent's bill.

Maybe this is a good suggestion, maybe it isn't. But I do believe that in the future we'll need more direct democracy influences on the Republic, for it to stay healthy. The Republic needs to be a lot more bottom-up than it currently is. Voting every 2 or 4 years to change a candidate, from the very few options, when in 98% (fact) of the cases those with the most campaign money win anyway, and then allowing them to do whatever they want when they get there, is just not enough anymore, and it's clear it hasn't been working well. This is why so many people are frustrated with the voting process and don't vote. They know it's mostly useless. The Republic needs to be upgraded for the 21st century.
Agreed. Even if there are some people who prefer watching others play a game, it doesn't mean that this applies to most movies/content.
Not the title but this paragraph...

"Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise."

I have no problem with healthy contributions from startups. I do have a problem with demonizing people especially when I know some of those people are working towards the same goals as technology enthusiasts.
Ditto. Creative destruction involves tearing down the legacy institutions.
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You can check them out here, any feedback would be appreciated! Thanks!

Feed The Rat:
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Failiens: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/failiens/id482476702

Hope you enjoy them!
This doesn't seem to work in Chrome on Windows; do you know of any workarounds there? That's not really a small market segment anymore, and I'm not sure I could sell our design team on font icons without a viable solution.
"Actually, it is the Relations Data Model which might well prove to have been a failed experiment or at the very most a brief distraction."

What a joke. The failed experiment, or brief distraction, of the Relational Model and SQL has gone on twice as long as this guy's programming career, and is still going strong.
New DevTools stuff In Chrome Canary
The idea that your Karma count means you're better than anyone else here is laughable.

Ideas should stand on their own merit and karma, money, or any other arbitrary metric doesn't give you the right to devolve into name-calling when you disagree with someone (but I only have 580+ Karma, so what do I know?).
Karma is a (imperfect) measure of contribution. Time is just time.

As far as Hollywood killing themselves that's not what he was doing. I quote from his post...

"The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down"

That's calling them names and assigning motive. Not observing their behavior and pointing out what the probably consequences will be.