skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Large games are still costing an enormous amount of money to make. Think in something like GTA 4, Skyrim, COD Series, WOW. Indie games have their market and can even become massive (Rovio?), but console and pc games in general are at a whole other level. I wish I could make Skyrim in my garage =) !! But that's not going to happen any time soon.

As you said, I think that there are platforms already here to distribute music. What we should start to put our focus on is in how to finance TV series, and eventually Movies (that are much more expensive).
Great list. I use most of the resources listed there, but really, the Emacs wiki usually answers most of my questions.
Remote console for mobile web diagnosis
production and distribution costs are negligible nowadays. record labels are marketing powerhouses that can push their product (music and the artists) through traditional channels like radio, concert tours, and other partnerships.

independent artists have a harder time since there's no equivalent marketing vehicle for discovery. and many don't have a chance with the major labels since not every artist has the labels' definition of mass-market appeal.

some of the smaller labels (at least in EDM) are more forward-thinking and push out music via podcasts, exclusive tracks on social networks, etc. but it's not solving discovery: finding great music from artists i've never heard about. once you have that, you can start building artist-specific apps and so on.

related: i'm building a minimalistic music player (for Mac initially) that helps you make playlists from SoundCloud tracks and other sources. if you have suggestions about the discovery angle, i'd love to hear them! email in profile.
Sorry to burst your bubble but no. Karma gives you no entitlement to ad hominem attacks and means absolutely nothing. It's quite pathetic you looked up that guy's karma and used it as an argument. Stick to arguing the points made on the original post, please.
Although video game is not meant to be created as a passive entertainment, I think it is going that direction. With the combination of plot and amazing graphics, I don't see why a video game cannot be watched. Take for example Onlive, which allows you to stream game play of other total strangers. Or streamed Starcraft2 games. I know for a fact that a lot of my hard core gamer friends watch live stream from South Korea all the time.

From my personal experience, I used to actually play all the video games I thought was fun. However, ever since college ended, and when I have to use my time more wisely, playing a demanding video game counter intuitive as a stress relief. However, watching my roommate play video game is both entertaining and lacks the necessary attention I would need to attribute if I were playing the game. Of course, after watching my roommate play Skyrim twice might get a bit old. But then again, who watches the same TV show for over 30 hrs straight? I don't care how good mad men is, if I were to do two or three consecutive marathon of it, I would get tired of it too.
The project has an objective find an alternative to Hollywood. But like everything else, baby steps are in order. I don't know why it is assumed that a beta solution should ship with the ability to produce "Avatar" caliber productions.

When it comes to technology, I'm optimistic that it has almost limitless potential to revolutionize. My instinct tells me though that a startup aimed at competing against Hollywood doesn't have to be about inventing alternate forms of entertainment, but rather to work at optimizing on alternate means of production and distribution of the already successful form of entertainment. Recent efforts with other media have shown that most optimizations are about cutting out as much unnecessary intermediary layers as possible.

I'm convinced that a number of people currently working within the Hollywoodian system are unhappy with the present arrangements and I would not be surprised if a few were to come out the woodwork because of this YC invitation. Their expertise will be essential, because if my guess is correct, I think that a large majority of people on HN are complete ignorami when it comes to making a movie or a tv show. We're more consumers and critics than we are creators or producers of such material.

Another thing would be to look at what currently exist that tries to spearhead such alternate efforts. Is it successful? What are the problems? What has been tried? Where's the data?

First, let's ask the people who currently work on the fringe of Hollywood how they're doing it.
The EU invented the Database Right, which is like copyright but for collections of facts.

Not their finest hour.
You can lose your temper as much as you want (nothing wrong with being angry). Being disrespectful to others and making personal attacks on the other hand, is well...just disrespectful.
It's a battle cry. Schumpeterian creative destrucion; can't have one without the other.

Also embedded in pg's rhetoric is the social malignancy that is coming out of the dying Hollywood. That's why it should be priorities to be "killed".

And when we say "kill", we mean make more efficient. À la Schumpeter. The rent-seeking middle men will be eliminated; theoretically, the creatives will have more take on their contributions.

It's not okay to set off on an industry on a level playing field. But the MPAA and RIAA with SOPA/PIPA created a toxic playing field. I will still play by the rules. But in creating something that does their job better and thus destroying them, I will know I have helped society one more turn.
There is one specific way to help bring this about by solving 2 semi-specific problems that I know of.

1) I and a bunch of people I know love to post personal videos with music overlaid on top. Anyways I'm not sure when this started, but Facebook now checks the songs that accompany video uploads. (As an interesting aside, these vids weren't public; they were only shared with friends or friends of friends.) When it feels that it finds a match, it either disallows the video upload or it just kills all the sound. If there was a service sold mini-licenses for (indy) songs to normal people for use on Facebook, that would be great.

To get to the point: This would be a great way for people to hear new music, especially if the video had the name of the artist and song.

2) I'm not sure if this exists, but I remember hearing that you need a record label to get your music published iTunes. It would be nice to have a easy and cheap intermediary that acts as a record label to iTunes and feels like an App Store for developers to the actual bands and artists.
I am not sure who wrote it, or where to even find it again, but I have read exactly what virmundi is referring to. It is possible he is confusing authors.

The long and the short of the document was that a REST client must be able to navigate the entire API when given just a single endpoint URL, much like you can navigate an entire website just by entering the homepage URL into your browser, but without the dependance on HTML.

The leap the document made, and what virmundi seems to be referring to, is that a REST client that speaks, say, JSON is not enough to traverse any random service, as everyone will provide a completely different JSON representation of their data. When you start hardcoding site-specific keys in which to find the action descriptions, you lose all of the flexibility the author claimed REST would provide in the first place.
Pusher: hosted API for awesome realtime web and mobile apps
Steve also managed to create a company sickly obsessed with the patent system. Fostering innovation, but only if they were the ones on the steering wheel. Is that really what we want?
Call us when you have traction
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The thing I wonder about with stuff from jacobian.org is whether the guy can actually write ANY code. My gut feeling is he a guy that has very good political skills and somehow used this a way to mind control geeks.

Basically, I can't understand why anything he writes is somehow hackernews worthy...is he self-promoting?
> You're looking to tear down something without suggesting something else to take its place.

That's why he's asking for people to give him ideas to fund.

> There's no point to add more hate to the world.

On that I can agree, but I would note that I believe that pg is acting out of self preservation rather than hate.

> I know record executives. I know executives at movie studios. And guess what, they're good guys.

Well, then they should be running honest businesses that won't be disrupted by some startup trying to give artists a good deal, rather than the raw deals they so frequently get, and they will therefore have nothing to fear.
I can't really empathize with your argument because I have no respect for today's Hollywood but I agree that the article took an active, even aggressive stance. You have to understand though that while you may know movie and music executives personally and you don't think they're bad guys (I read your previous comments) Paul is just as high up in this industry as they are in theirs, and they almost just fucked this industry up terribly with their insane amounts of political lobbying.

The attack wasn't on your friends, it was on a personification of Hollywood. And as a whole it indeed is very old and seemingly dying.

It's not me downvoting you by the way.
I only have 2. Am I allowed to speak?
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If you haven't played it, you should take a look at King of Chicago by Cinemaware for the Amiga, which was pretty much the first game to let the gamer be arbitrarily passive (playing pretty much like a movie if you didn't do anything, but allowing you to decide every action if you wanted).
For God's sakes if you're going to use a phrase at least know what it means. Ad Hominem means "an argument appealing to emotion" or "attacking an opponents motives rather than the content of their points". I did neither of those things.

Ironically you did both of those things in this comment.

But for the record I did not, in any way, mean to suggest that natep was lesser in any way. But I do think there's an arrogance to him schooling me on how things work on HN given our relative positions.

My karma rating means I've been around. I've read A LOT of comment threads and I've seen how names that are familiar to me react to things. So I have some idea of the norm and what is and is not acceptable (though in fairness I was so pissed when I made the original post that I didn't really care and I'll admit to that)

In that experience I've seen many people who have been around longer than I have lose their tempers and violate the guidelines in the occasional, rare post. My behavior was in line with that.

(That isn't to say I'm proud of said behavior just for the record)
I guess you meant "couldn't" care less? :)

http://incompetech.com/gallimaufry/care_less.html

But I'm in total agreement with you. I too like the productions of Hollywood. I just don't like their political power.
Does it necessarily have to be this way? The internet has provided a way of sharing and proliferating and distributing content. As long as a content is quality enough, people will tend to share the content and as more people distribute and share the content, you have a relatively inexpensive way to market and distribute the content. Now all this needs is a startup cracks a way for artist and content creators to monetize this way of distribution and marketing method online. I have posted my idea somewhere on this page. Care to discuss what you think? It would be great if small production companies can allow me to test my hypothesis =)
Here's my proposal: "Vertical Facebooks", social networks for certain industries, are a big opportunity. Hollywood is the biggest and best opportunity for this. If Ben Stiller needs to pitch his new project to, say, Mila Kunis, it's pretty inefficient. If a screenwriter has finished a script and wants to tell people about it, same thing. IMDB is already used by studios to vet people -- this is broken and could be made much better.

Once you've built and instituted such a Hollywood Facebook (where privacy is everything and joining requires clearing some big barriers), if they try something like SOPA again, you can just go dark. They would be helpless and quickly back down. Don't kill the horse -- just give it a harness.

My email is in my profile if you like this.
The problem with movies is that even when the argument may seem very interesting at first, the realization can make it a disaster. That's what differentiates an awesome director from a bad one.

That's why I see hard to visualize crowd-financing to movies. The risk may be just too high.
You don't even need to play by union rules. The unions are broken in Vancouver, Toronto, the Czech Republic and other non-Hollywood film centers. You get the exact same people showing up to work on the latest TCF or GEP productions as you do the non-union indies in these places. The same is possibly true of Hollywood and New York, but it's been years since I've worked in either of those places.
Megavideo could be profitable for the copyright owners
Who said I was better? That said the idea that everyone is equal regardless of their contribution is laughable. That's not to say people who have contributed more are "better" but it is to say they've proven themselves to some extent.
This is a somewhat misleading analysis, as the costs of Hollywood movies are not implicit relative to their production values.

Movies do not have a typical accounting structure and that impacts their budgeted "costs".

In a typical collaborative venture with some degree of risk one might expect for most of the principals (director, actors, etc.) to take most of their compensation in the form of profit sharing. However, this is untenable in Hollywood because the standard is to use a fucked up accounting structure which results in most movies showing no profit on paper. Instead, a small number of people end up taking home a percentage of the gross revenues of the movie and most of the earnings for everyone else are upfront in cash.

This has several negative effects. For one it makes any movie staring a big star very much more expensive because you have to pay them $x million out of pocket. Also, because it raises the budget floor for making a top tier feature film it forces the industry to take fewer perceived risks, because a financial loss would be more devastating.

But this is only Hollywood's poisonous culture, not a fundamental aspect for making films. A production company that was founded on firmer and more ethical financial ground could implement proper profit sharing for actors, directors, other creatives, and even effects houses. It would allow movies to operate on lower budgets and embrace higher risk projects.
I'm really happy that finally someone with considerable clout has noticed that the business side of the content industries is a threat to our society and needs to be eradicated.
If we do create new disruptive companies in the music industry, can we start by not owning the copyrights of the artists? I'd like to see this as a change in the copyright law, but that's probably impossible to do at this stage, so the next best thing would be a bottom-up movement to give back copyright ownership to the artists.

Corporations owning the copyrights have created this terrible incentive for them to try to extend the copyright perpetually every 20 years. I'd like to see the copyright terms be reduced to the original 14 years, too, but I'm not sure that's possible without changing the copyright laws first.

So let the artists themselves keep the copyright, and your label only gets to "license" those copyrights for the whole period of the contract, so you can promote and sell their music. You should also give them like 70% of the revenues, or more if possible. All these should be competitive advantages over the big labels.
I came to iOS from basic Java/Python experience, and I find this series of tutorials really confusing* and overly lengthy. But I have zero experience with web programming--are web programmers finding these articles helpful?

*Not confusing as in "I can't understand this" but confusing as in "I think this could have been explained in a simpler manner"
I understand your point but for the record he was attacking my friends and everyone else. He specifically advocated tearing down the entire industry. That means everyone.

As for the downvote I have to say when you go into a topic like this where you know most people are going to be against you the downvotes become a point of pride. Whether people want to admit it here or not Karma is of some value (otherwise why would it be there). Being willing to lose something of value to stand up for what you feel is right actually feels kind of good.
I hope SHADO [1] will do it.

[1] http://entertainment.shado.tv/
I'm pretty sure you can use services like TuneCore (http://www.tunecore.com/) to get your music on iTunes etc. without the need of a label.
Children put in foster care for "having been fed differently"?
We even have the crypto theory for safe e-voting, which is being implemented in Norway[1], which can help direct democracy to turn into a reality. The hard part is the culture change.

[1] http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/195
They're working to kill Netflix, though.

First by restricting just how early it could get videos, then by making them pay for streaming on every user, not just those who stream. I understood that to be the whole point of the ill-fated attempt at splitting the company, in fact.
Here is a newspaper version with more details : http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111224/jsp/frontpage/story_14...

Edit: This is hard to believe. Perhaps there is more to the matter than is being said? Taking kids away from their parents and not allowing to reunite till 18 years of age is, to put it mildly, an extreme step. To do that solely based on culturally-different eating and sleeping routines seems barbaric.
Two wrongs don't make a right but for the record pg started it. If you call the people in Hollywood mean and advocate taking their livelihood away and I have friends in Hollywood that means you're disrespecting them.

Second I don't think calling someone out is disrespecting them. Disrespecting them is letting them be an ass and not saying anything. Because calling them out means you care enough about them as a person to care about their behavior and try to get them to correct it

(though for the record I do wish I'd said "you're being an ass" rather than "you're an ass" since he's not an ass in everything)
Garage Band + open distribution platform?
Well, Netflix still isn't available to most of the world (even with its recent international expansions), so I wouldn't say that everyone is happy just yet. And I'm sure it's not technical issues that make going truly global so difficult for them - it's the machinations of old-guard media companies.
Their is no scarcity of people who want to become stars on Youtube.
Interview of the Developer - Steve Jobs Tribute Calendar
There are plenty of options for 2), one of them is http://www.tunecore.com/
Oh neat, thanks for posting this.

I should note that I usually write articles to kick off discussions on my own forum, and then revise them after all input is gathered. They almost never appear on other sites, especially pre-revision.

I'm not saying the strmcpy/cat functions there now are the best solution, and I'm open to hearing what's wrong with them so that we can improve upon them.
"We are the explorers" - Simon Collison
Show HN: Launching my very first product, The Calendar Reinvented on KickStarter
The reason this worked out right (still crossing fingers) in my opinion, was because much of the tech community were on the same side in this one. But there are other occasions where this would have been a mess. So, the message would not have been clear. The congress and media would have thought "some people say yes, some people say no... nothing new".
Let's jump out way into the future first. Ideal entertainment would be full immersion Matrix-style virtual reality.

Closer than that, as a New Yorker, I have found going to the cinema increasingly rare. It feels quaint - arranging my schedule around a place and time of another's choosing.

Based on this, I think the film will become more personal. Some have interpreted this as meaning interactive. I think this violates the human need for story telling and receiving - interactivity changes the social function of storytelling profoundly.

Instead, I see a more intimate experience. The key part would be entertainment, films, specifically designed for the format.

Note that intimate and social are not mutually exclusive. Better than interactivity would probably be characters and settings that build off their audience. Down to the dialogue.

That is something that I don't think Hollywood can do today.
Zsh.

It absolutely mystifies me when people get all excited about trivial enhancements to Bash, when Zsh has had those features for a decade.
Something I think which is worth adding under "Emacs Squires" is Rick Dillon's "Hack Emacs" series of videos.

https://www.youtube.com/user/rpdillon/featured
Actually, I have almost as much fun watching as playing. And if they're any good, sometimes even more. I often let the kids play and just help them with advice (this is how you loop your skills to make them boost each other, or here's what you can build with a mob spawner, or here's how to make a pump stack reaching down to the magma sea), letting them do all the work.
Is it just me or is jnoller abusing hackernews to self promote PyCon and his own agenda.

#tryingtoohardmuch

It is kind of cute, but brings into question ANY story you submit on hackernews. What is your end game dude?
Well here's to you standing up for what you believe. Good night.
The was a thread here on HN about another copycat app but I can't find it for now.

It was a slightly different case in that both apps were in the Apple App store, and I guess it would be easy to prove "prior art".

Your case is different in that Apple hav no record of your app being in their echo system, you would have to demonstrate prior art somehow, otherwise it could be argued that you have copied them.

If you have any documentation proving the dates on which your app was accepted into the Android market, that would help.
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