skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How will artists/creators make money in a post-copyright world?
There has been a lot of discussion lately, spurred mainly by the SOPA/PIPA issue, on whether copyright protection should exist at all.

The argument goes like this: due to technology, copying content has zero cost and we are in a post-scarcity society. People used to the old way of making money impose artificial scarcity (via DRM, laws, etc) in order to keep making money, instead of adapting to the times and finding new ways of making money that are more in line with today's reality.

My question for HN is: How do you propose artists/creators make money in a post-copyright world?

* For musicians, the answer is rather simple: concerts and live performances

* For movie makers, the answer may lie in making the theater experience so compelling that people will pay to see it at the theater instead of seeing it at home on their TV/computer. (I think 3D and IMAX screens are an attempt in that direction)

* For book authors, I have no idea how they would make money if copying their books was 100% legal. Any ideas?

* What about other content creators?
"Still, when I recently reread Origin..."

It's surprising to me he had to read it twice to realise the implication he cites in that paragraph.

By changing the timescale you can affect remarkable changes in human perception.

What is "time"?

Is it just an idea? One that varies from person to person? Or is it something else?
Solar power is a classic disruptive technology. It currently does not meet the mainstream market's needs in terms of:

- availability
- cost per MWh
- suitable locations (close to established high voltage power lines)

Each of these factors is being steadily improved over time. And once solar technology meets the mainstream market's expectations for energy production, incumbent producers will need to retreat their offerings into a vanishingly small market for those needs not met by solar.
At some point we will have to stop and ask ourselves what's the point. Lack of self esteem starts when you begin to want approval from people around you. Listen, fuck this. Be your own person.

If you cannot get a table at this place, go to the next one. The "hole in the wall" where no-one gives a rat's ass if you are regular or not, they just love what they do and take care of people.

I was a bartender for 4 years and yes I had lots of regulars whom I enjoyed talking to, but I can tell you that there are lots of times when someone totally new would come in and make our day just by being themselves. If your bartender cannot appreciate that, then so be it.
That's probably what they will create next. A special type of account that allows download/upload access to users other than the original owner of the account.
ICT != Programming
I don't think Hollywood as a monolithic creatures should be killed by another monolithic creature, even if it's a lot more efficient.

I think Hollywood can only be killed by a thousand cuts. Make websites, companies or tools that do one thing very well, and better than that part of Hollywood. Then, when enough of these companies are built to replace every part of Hollywood, this whole cluster of companies can end up killing Hollywood.
You start with this model and if your successful, you'll be able to fund Avatar too.
What if they are selling an unique product and there is no other vendor? Is there a market when the same product is negotiated at a different price with each customer?
Yeah, the ONS should have a category for the industry of programmers.

As far as I know, ICT is a superset.
I agree with you though I concede that one should hire a lawyer when facing litigation or starting it. I meant more along the lines of starting a project, finding an idea to take further. I think that it is this stage where an entrepreneur when researching should read some law books and was wondering if there were any some could suggest..
Doesn't Kick-start (in aggregate) routinely raise that type of money?
> Consumers have a level of disposable income. Just because they spent 0.99 on your movie doesn't mean that they won't also spend $10.50 on Avatar.

The number of movies people see isn't limited by their disposable income, it's limited by the number of movies they want to watch. If they get one for five dollars instead of twenty they're probably going to put the change on their mortgage or their car, or maybe their spending on food will increase as they realise they have a little more money to play with.

What they won't do is go to four times as many films as they otherwise might. I'll grant that demand is elastic, but it's not a linear relationship. Reducing the cost of film viewing in this way will absolutely reduce the amount of money spent on it.

(That disagreement aside, I think the rest of your post is pretty reasonable.)
Filesonic Shuts Its Doors To Sharing
I've read some people here on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496070), saying that they will start using TrueCrypt to hide their data. This is explicitly discouraged by EFF, stating:

Although TrueCrypt hidden volumes may have some practical applications, we think they are unlikely to be useful in the border search context because they are most helpful when lying to someone about whether there is additional hidden data on a disk. Lying to border agents is not advisable, because it can be a serious crime.

I'll add this here, so it can be read by someone reading your resume.
A lot of negative comments here. This should be expected. Revolutionary and disruptive ideas never start with much buy in. That's what makes them innovative.

Remember when people thought it was impossible to put a computer in every household?
711 - Closed

I see what you did there...
Ouch. This is gonna hurt their profits a lot, for the last year they've been one of the top filesharing sites used by pirates. It will likely bankrupt them. Having to shut down because of a lack of profits is way better than being sent to jail though.
The services that are reacting to Megaupload are the ones that we all know operated exactly the same -- with actual knowledge of infringement, removing only links instead of files, not disabling accounts of infringers, etc. Every underground media and software sharing forum has thousands of links to these handful of services with identical business models. There are even "multi-upload sites" that let someone distribute their file to all these services at the same time.

They should be scared. What they're doing is illegal in 168 countries. They're not complying with the letter or the spirit of laws like the DMCA that would limit their liability.

I don't think your quote really applies in this case. Megaupload is being prosecuted for plain old copyright infringement, under the Copyright Act of 1976, nothing new. If you want it to be legal for a site's owners to upload DVD rips and pay other users to share them, then that's the law you need to attack.
It's quite nice and responsive. Not as fast as the native UI obviously, but that was expectable (btw. my MacBook Air boots faster ;)).

Small improvement: Log me in on hitting Return.
That was interesting. I also have a hard time believing his claim about infecting a phone with a text.
People won't really care. They just use whatever is easiest for them.

When central storage sites are shutdown other mechanisms will be used for sharing. But why bother as long as it works? You're not locked into a particular site, so there's no reason to use other approaches just because something might happen.
The essence of the Enlightenment is shown where Bishop Ussher looks to scriptures to confirm while Darwin, Kelvin et alia, observe.
That's NOT a solution. Be aware that this is explicitly discouraged by EFF:

Although TrueCrypt hidden volumes may have some practical applications, we think they are unlikely to be useful in the border search context because they are most helpful when lying to someone about whether there is additional hidden data on a disk. Lying to border agents is not advisable, because it can be a serious crime. [PDF: https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/EFF-border-...]
I'm going to focus on fiction writers, because that's what I do ...

One option is to press for alternative compulsory licensing schemes such as PLR to provide grants for productive writers. Drawback: this lets politicians cap authors' incomes and erects barriers to entry. Also, the example of the performing rights societies (like BMI and ASCAP) is a terrible one.

Another is for writers to charge for speaking gigs on the side -- as public intellectuals. Some already do this. Most can't; writing tends to be the domain of introverts.

A more promising route is the revival of the serial novel. Back in the late 18th/early 19th century, pirate printers would release their own copies of popular work as soon as it came out. So the goal of the author was to stay ahead of the curve. Charles Dickens is the best-known name these days, but was an exemplar of a publishing model where he shipped a chapter a month to his own printer, who would print the signatures (bound pages) and distribute them via itinerant booksellers. (Collectors would collect the signatures and take them to a book-binder when the serial was complete.) This model can in principle work today -- you subscribe, and each day/week/whatever a chunk is delivered to your email account/phone/Kindle/whatever. The books will eventually leak, but while it's being produced the author has a very short-term monopoly on the latest instalment. (Also: they can in principle cut off anyone who they identify as a leaker, by use of fingerprinting (rather than DRM). Thus giving subscribers a moderate incentive not to leak.)

Also: Kickstarter. Also: Schneier's "street performer protocol" (essentially a pledge, possibly with funds held in escrow so you pay up-front, the author writes the book when enough folks have signed up, and you get your copy as soon as it's released).
However in these types of stats programming tends to go under ICT.
I'm sorry but this just describes a list of wants without providing any insights into how Hollywood already works, and then prices things from a consumers perspective.

Hollywood started off as studios where actors are essentially employees. They own vertically integrated enterprises which included distributorship as well as cinemas. (Read up on the Studio System).

This started to break down as studios gave certain actors a "star" billing and some actors become independently recognizable and started working as free agents. The trend persisted with now entire teams are assembled virtually on a project by project basis.

On the distribution side of things, secondary markets became increasingly vital. Cable, DVD rental, PPV, DVD sales and international distribution have overtaken box office takings.

The free-wheeling internet has proven to be a problem because some people who are watching movies at home are no longer accessing these through the monetizable channels like rentals, but instead are doing this through the free/unauthorized channels. I don't really know the size of this problem, as I personally don't like the idea of being shaken down by the MPAA or RIAA. Besides, I don't have the time.

Therefore to solve this problem for Hollywood, one working theory is that people don't mind paying a certain amount for the convenience of watching movies where they want it, as long as the price is "reasonable". This is Apple's model.

However, in general, the current way of negotiating individual distributor agreements represent a high degree of friction, and that locks out potentially creative ways for studios to earn back their investment.

If movie makers were to securitize its prices, alternate channels will flourish. I envision it more or less like a mechanical license.

One formulae may be based on days since first released and the size of the screen, and whether it is PPV or multiple viewing.

Then it is up to repackagers like DVD-makers, movie theatres, and online channels to reach the viewers. Repackaging may involve adding ads before and after the movie (brings down the cost of viewing), or even during the movie (as in TV).

If such a pricing evolves, I can see devices such as Roku offer a "legal" way to view a movie even if the user has downloaded it from a torrent. For instance, a user may be prompted whether they wish to deduct the price of the movie from their account in exchange for indemnity if they were prosecuted for illegal downloading.

In the big picture of things though, movies are a huge time drain on society. I, for one, would rather see people having to pay to watch movies. My relatives in Asia who regularly buy pirated DVDs from street stalls watch way too much movies and fritter their lives away.
QuickSnapr - Web Intents + Web cam API = Win
Too Much Funding, Too Few Good Ideas
Anyone else think that there are a lot of ridiculous companies getting funding now? If you have anything to contribute contact me at info@techstartupbubble.com.
>I'm betting that when given a cleaner, more enjoyable alternative to the mandatory commercials, overpriced fatty junk food, and general awfulness that the current moviegoing experience has degraded into, we can steal a fair amount of business.

This is a very important and overlooked part of their machine. The cinema distribution model. If I remember correctly Hollywood charge an astronomical amounts to theater for showing their movies, I think it eats almost 100% of the ticket price. Cinemas then make their profit by selling overpriced popcorn and sugary water.

A new start-up could also focus on an alternative distribution model aimed at smaller theater with more reasonable license prices. This way theaters could focus in the movie experience instead of selling crap to noisy people.
All of the above. Probably.
I'm not sure how I feel about the whole "same syntax as jQuery UI only slightly different" class structure. Maybe change to an "fb-" prefix?
Except Iran.
Book authors already make little to no money so what practical difference would it make?
If you are a programmer in the UK, you already know it's a good time...
The easy and Right way to add caching is to stick something like Varnish in front. It can also handle load-balancing, which is nice.
From the guidelines...

"What to Submit...Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Also from the guidelines...

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
They way I see is that people who upload pirated content to those websites aren't doing for a cause. They do it because they earn "points" when the file is downloaded by a free user. Then, they can use those points to create premium accounts, that can be sold easily.
How to develop your fund-raising strategy
It's a law. The justification is that it's made by democratically elected representatives. It's also not that much of a problem since we have a 5% barrier. Smaller parties usually have less money to spend on TV ads, anyway.

Note that this didn't prevent new parties to become popular. In the last 25 years or so, Germany has seen the rise of the Green party, and the Left party. Today, the Pirate Party seem to be on the rise. It seems to be a rather stable yet permeable system.
I would argue it's a matter of time more than money. I treat a theatre trip as a social event, which means I have to get a group of friends together. There's only so many hours in evenings and weekends when people can get together, and I'd rather not spend all of those hours watching films. Therefore my upper limit is driven by time rather than cost.
Have you been to the Alamo Draft House in Austin, TX? I can no longer watch movies in any other theatre (and I live in San Francisco now, so this means I don't watch movies outside of my home). They have solved all of the problems you mention in the last paragraph, and it's amazing.
In a way, you're still blocked from seeing US-only content. It's just that the US-only content is a region-blocking notice.
Don't be compelled by user data, be inspired.
Raising awareness of the problem is the first step.

A lot of people still do not know why software patents are bad. Similar to sopa and pipa, except to a larger degree here, mostly software engineers and very internet savvy users are aware of the problem with software patents.

We need more anecdotes and evidence, then a way to deliver the message. Once the problem is defined, the solution will present itself. If it doesn't, we have failed at defining and convincing people of the problem.
In the case of a read-heavy database workload, adding some read-only slaves can scale for a while.
Ask HN: Which subreddits do you follow?
Let's compile a list of subreddits that are likely to appeal to the HN crowd.
Be aware that this is explicitly discouraged by EFF:

Although TrueCrypt hidden volumes may have some practical applications, we think they are unlikely to be useful in the border search context because they are most helpful when lying to someone about whether there is additional hidden data on a disk. Lying to border agents is not advisable, because it can be a serious crime. [PDF: https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/EFF-border-...]

PD: Sorry to re-post it here, but I add it, for anyone reading this later. You can get in serious trouble.

And to make it worse:
If you refuse to provide information or assistance upon request, the border agent may seize your device for further inspection or consider you uncooperative, which the agent may take into consideration when deciding whether to allow you to enter the United States.
You need to run Chrome Dev Channel or Canary with --enable-media-stream to get it to use your Web Cam, otherwise you are stuck with my Ugly Mug for 30 seconds.
The only way for it to not be up for debate would be if there existed a perfect discrimination-measuring machine.

Look, if lack of diversity can only be explained by discrimination, you need to show that the field where women are most underrepresented - higher mathematics - is also the most rife with discrimination. I've never seen a female mathematician suggest it is. How do you explain this?
Interestingly enough, Indian restaurants in India will give you cutlery, but that implies a spoon and a fork. Knives are somehow absent.
I just found this development version, it is certainly better than the included version. https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage
Scientists call for 60-day suspension of mutant flu research
Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
Reading someone call PG an "ass" spurred to me to ask the question, though it's far from the only example.

I switched from Slashdot to HN a few years ago to hear more insightful, interesting debate on tech news topics, as opposed to flamewars.

Is something happening to the quality of this community lately? And if so, is there anything we can or should do about it?

(I'm a long time listener, first time poster)
I certainly don't like it either. I think reforms are needed.

My answer was just to help someone stay out of trouble. Trying to mislead border control is a bad idea.
Sure, a lot of jerks are aggressive, but that's only a correlation, not a causation.

That's nice in theory, but there are a lot of people with dysfunctional upbringings for whom "jerks" provide the only role models for success.
I'm not sure I agree that it is idiotic. Certainly the GOP's track record on neutrality is abhorrent, but if the Republicans successfully turn this into a partisan issue where they are against and the dems are for, those who typically vote democrat and also support the internet will be faced with a decision in regard to what issue(s) take priority and who will be rewarded with the vote.

Keep in mind that a republican does't necessarily have to get a democrat's vote to come out ahead in this case. All it takes is for the democratic voter to be so disgusted with his party's position that he either votes third party or doesn't vote at all.

I despise the idea of it becoming a for & against partisan issue because of the swell of support that would ultimately result in, but it could be politically effective in an evil-ish way.
You could however make quite a lot of 3min music videos for the cost of an Avatar (237m according to Wikipedia). If it cost 2m per video, you could make 100 for less than the cost of an avatar, and even if only half of these made the 70m you mention, you'd still have grossed 3.5 billion.
We always talk about ageism in the US but thats really the double whammy if both of these statements are true. I guess you'd have a year long career as a programmer.
At a high level it's not really that much more complex (conceptually) than counting iterations and trying to find closed-form equations to describe the total number of iterations in best/worse/average cases. For example, something that requires one loop that iterates N times for N data points is O(N); something that requires two nested loops, each of which iterates N times, to process the same N data points, is O(N^2), because the inner loop will execute N^2 times, which is clearly worse than two loops in succession, i.e. 2N iterations, which is just O(N). The rest is mostly working out clever schemes to actually quantify more complex iteration (or recursion) patterns, or to find ways of accounting for infrequent expensive operations, like re-hashing ("amortization" basically averages them out across all the intervening steps), among other twists.
Your world model doesn't fit the fact that women have been gaining in every elite profession I can think of over the last 50 years. Take the example of the gender breakdown of law and medicine students:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/equality-for-women-bet...

Also, I would like to journey to this mythical world of yours where programming is considered an "elite" job.
It's OK to walk, it releases nervous energy. Use a short walk to introduce a pause in your talk. Only speak when you are looking at someone and you will speak conversationally.
That isn't really a hard problem to solve - I simply take a small paper towel and grab the door handle with it. There's usually a bin near the door to throw the paper towel away.

I also remember hearing about some research in a TEDx talk where the presenter said that contrary to expectation, the inside handle of bathroom doors is generally cleaner than your kitchen sink.
The quality of comments has been declining very gradually for years. There's a lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet undiscovered. This is somewhat uncharted territory. I'm medium hopeful.
> just arrested in New Zealand for running a company from there

They apparently[1] had some portion of their site running on servers hosted in the US.

> were arrested by US authorities with no extradition
> ...
> no "prosecution in the target jurisdiction"

They were apparently[1] arrested by the NZ police.

They will apparently[1] have a hearing in NZ to determine extradition.

The investigation was apparently[1] coordinated between multiple governments' agencies, and apparently[1] took 2 years.

[1]: This information is based on what I have read so far.
Alternate title: Study finds humans selectively block their empathy towards some fellow mammals
I've not seen this in the jerks I know.
That doesn't necessarily show empathy. In a dangerous environment, for instance, it can be better to have others around to lessen your individual risk. It could be freeing the trapped rat in the hope that when the big nasty humans come back they will pick the other rat.
/r/programming

/r/technology

/r/science

/r/GetMotivated

/r/funny

/r/AskReddit
Dicussion on pretty much the same thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496475
Hmm...

With the amount of time I am on reddit, I find myself in /r/all a lot of the time as I am addicted to information - so I am not a good example. Though I do use RES to filter out /r/ and words I am not interested in or I find offensive.

I also mod on an /r/ or two - but they have nothing to do with HN.