skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One area I would encourage startups to get involved with is hollywood analytics: predicting the revenue of films based on their properties. Ryan Cavanaugh has revolutionized film funding, and there is a real opportunity for analytics startups to compete in this area.

http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/ryan...
Looking for : job in Canada.
I'm Yash, looking for a full time gig.
VB.NET / C# / C-Unix Developer - Desktop/Server applications.
Currently working in US, want to relocate to Canada.
Oh, OK. Indeed some games play much faster than that.

To become very specific: Portal is a fine game. And much shorter.
Not only do they have a devoted fan base, but nearly all of the comments are by women. There's got to be some interesting data there in how they ended up attracting that audience.
I guess Nintendo serves these demographics pretty well. (Not that there's no space for a competitor.)
Who's going to return the money if it runs out before finishing the work?
Part of the overall strategy to turn Picasa (and the rest of Google) into a Facebook clone by killing all the features except sharing, and only making sharing work with Google accountholders.
Apologies in advance - I'm a programmer and not (yet) a businessperson, so outlook may be naive. I would argue that whether or not you take an aggressive approach is not really the point - it all amounts to changing the face of the business whether you are working with them or against them. The important part is that Y Combinator have taken a stand of some sort and indicated that there is money in pursuing this goal. Once the ball gets rolling and some evidence of success starts coming in, other approaches can be taken.

The ideal, for me, would be a massive outpouring of different ideas about what the tech industry can do. Some will fail, but ultimately there will be a better chance of finding a solution that works better than what we have just now.
Analytics still uses flash, as well as most of their charting tools. I believe the attachment uploader in gmail... they've also baked flash into chrome ( http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/bringing-improved-support-f... ). Unlike iOS and Windows8 Metro apps, Android supports flash.

If anti-flash is the strategy for them, I'd question the execution.
I would imagine aspiring actors want fame more than fortune.

How does an entertainment world not dominated by Hollywood threaten this?

Answer: It doesn't.

What we have with Hollywood is execs who obsessively control marketing and distribution channels and thereby get to determine who becomes famous and who does not.

For many people it's just impossible to imagine things any other way. But that does not mean it is actually impossible for things to be another way. Hollywood is a very recent development in the history of entertainment.

We could take the execs out of the system, and the audience would still be able to decide who becomes famous and who does not.

The audience is the final arbiter.

Entertainment execs are only middlemen.
The idea is often called "Steam-engine time", e.g. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fic...
I didn't detect any anger in pg's post. To me it seems more like a stock tip. PSST!! Hey! Invest in entertainment via the internet. Sell Hollywood short, etc.
My idea is to build a strong AI system. Point it at your TV and Movie directory/directories. Let it scan through to evaluate what you watch. Then let it start "pitching" ideas for your evaluation. You now have the basis for a personal Pandora of AI created shows (primarily animated initially, although with CGI advancements you could "rig" humanoid video actors to almost a live effect). You can even share your results with others, and perhaps particularly popular ones could be "picked up" by a YouTube or Netflix for wide distribution (though do you pay me or my AI for it).

I fully expect that by the 20 year goal that you will see this happening. I suspect someone willing to work with an engine such as Blender and build XML files to control it externally could have a rudimentary version in 2-3 years. I will be happy to discuss further if someone is seriously interested.
Small nitpick that doesn't detract from the overall quality of your post: begging the question doesn't mean "raises in response the question." Begging the question involves circular logic. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question (I usually point to http://begthequestion.info but it seems to be down right now)
Lamar Smith: SOPA Author, Copyright Violator
Very sincerely, why is REST an idea worth pursuing?
Answer:

Calculus

Thermodynamics

Fluid Dynamics

Heat Transfer

...
I don't get your point. Are you claiming that the 1961 stats are a result of a small sample size? If not, the larger percentage of the population enrolling isn't going to change the average hours spent per week studying unless students were, on average, spending less time studying.
But you don't really have to stop watching TV or movies. You just have to move the production of such content away from the big media corps.

It reminds me of one of freddiew's Behind the Scenes video, in which him and Jon Favreau were talking how it's so nice when someone provides the toys/funds, but at the end of the day it's the actual artists who call the shot. Why not apply the same kind of contracts movie studios make with directors and actors (base amount, and maybe some % of revenue), in reverse, so the artistic driving force between the project negotiates the same amount of deals with the financier. It would be like a VC deal, where some people/companies would have preferential treatment at getting the money back and all that.
The premise of the article -- and its title -- is fundamentally flawed. The war's already started. Whether or not Y Combinator decides to write that declaration or not. As pg wrote, Hollywood intends on defending its decaying industry by attacking the basic architecture of the Internet. And make no mistake, they will fund another bill. And another. And another.

The only question left is to decide what side you're on.
That's actually quite useful... I was working off a modified vimrc that had this remap on it and got used to it. Maybe leader f to redo? Though I haven't checked if that is taken by something else. Thanks for the tip.
can you please clarify:

- correct definition of 'cat'

- what is wrong with '$ cat file | grep word"

edit: formatting
Dude. Factor out the strlen(3) calls. My eyes!
Oh for goodness sakes. I'm sick of this woe-is-me, I-wasn't-around-for-the-90s, entrepreneurship is killing Silicon Valley bs.

It is hard for Facebook to get an engineer. It is hard for Google to get an engineer. It is not particularly hard for a reasonably funded startup to get an engineer.

I have a startup in San Francisco. When I post job opening, I get 50+ applications. When I email my network, I pick up even more. Because I'm picky, it probably takes 100 resumés before I find someone I'm looking for. However, there are plenty of people out there that, with six months of training, could easily meet your needs. Unfortunately as a small startup, I can't really afford that. Facebook can. They choose not to.

Further, I would like to point out the difference between doing Big Things and doing Great Things. I was the Chief Architect of Napster. I did Big Things. Were they Great Things? Probably not. Is the Facebook Like button or Facebook Pages a Great Thing? Almost certainly not.
As a 30 year game industry vet I have to say I agree with you... but... maybe games that depend less on the controller will capture BOTH of your attentions.

I'll give you an example. At a board game company, I do those too, I proposed a card game where playing the cards moved the story along, and each section of the story formed pages in a comic book format. At the end of the game you could take pictures o the "pages" and put them for others to enjoy. Then mix the cards up gain, and since the play order would be different, a slightly different story resulted. I say slightly because if it was a murder mystery a replay wouldn't make it a story about horses.

I think that games are ready for the next evolution and that will continue the killing of movies and TV.
Destroying Hollywood would not destroy ability for entertainers to entertain. If anything it would probably increase the ability for an entertainer to entertain.

Hollywood doesn't really "make" movies so much as market and distribute them.

Destroying "hollywood" according to the ideas proposed would likely open up millions MORE opportunities for entertainers to entertain and would likely change the market dynamics from a winner take all market dominated by a few "stars" to a more yeoman farmer type system where everyone does OK.

"Hollywood" makes entertainers sign grossly unfair contracts at the beginning of their careers justified only by the winner take all market they propagate. Hollywood is unnecessary in an age where anyone can put blender on their computer, buy an HD video camera and start making movies. You don't need huge budgets to make decent movies. Hollywood keeps most artists starving in order to gain leverage, if most artists did OK it would dramatically change the landscape at the bargaining table.

The average artist will do better with out hollywood at the expense of the "stars".

After Hollywood is dead there probably won't be any entertainers who have "millions" of fans but likely far more that have tens of thousands of fans.

If Hollywood dies because of the RFS it will be because the people voted with their feet and decided the offerings of the RFS are superior to the offerings of Hollywood. I believe that's called a "free market". 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.
I think the article is misguided. No matter how creative content is being delivered, actors are going to be acting parts and delivering lines written by writers and directed by directors. And everyone "below the line" stays employed. The problem is with the business entities in Hollywood, not the creative entities.

I didn't read PG's essay as a call to destroy that "stage" so much as rethink, reinvent, and re-imagine it: the stage itself, and the way the stage gets delivered to you.

My take away was: Hollywood studios are damage, we must route creative content around it. Let's create new, direct-to-consumer pipelines that deliver stuff (maybe stuff like today's TV and movies, maybe new stuff we haven't seen yet) without the middleman.

Indie filmmakers, DIY musicians, etc. have been doing this for 50 years. YouTube-based serials have been doing it for a few years now. We have plenty of good (and failed) examples to based ideas on.
Think about how much longer a college course would take if you didn't have: electronic calculators, word processors, 24-hour communications (email), Wikipedia.

I can believe that standards have slipped since 1961, but all the productivity enhancers that have been invented since then would have caused homework hours to drop regardless.
I didn't interpret the YC piece as "let's kill Hollywood" (despite the provocative headline) - I saw it more as an observation that support for SOPA is evidence that Hollywood is already in decline, so now us a great time to invest in whatever will replace it.
Delicious Adds Collaboration and One-Ups Pinterest With Privacy
Joint statement from SAG, AFM, AFTRA, DGA, IATSE and IBT regarding PIPA and SOPA
Could setup insurance for such things. If there are enough of these being made, then the percentage that get far enough to be funded but not far enough to finish becomes something an actuary can calculate, and risk can be assigned as well as the cost everyone has to "pay to play". Whether that can be done for a sufficiently small number is a matter of how fast you grow this market, and what things you can put in place to minimize the risk.
I'm confused by the directions. If I have 20 usernames did you reset all 20 passwords for these names to random strings and now I just need to pick new passwords of my liking on my own time?

Or do I need to go through all 20 right this moment and change them from their old value to a new value?

Basically do the hackers possibly have access to my ftp accounts or have you already switched my passwords to random strings?
FWIW, I used vundle for quite a while and went back to pathogen because vim's load time was much faster. Perhaps they have improved that.

vim --startuptime time.txt
Sure, crowdsourced over time (the bible..). But what is wrong with wanting to understand the author's original intent? There is plenty of time over the next hundreds of years for the work to be re-interpreted.

Didn't some of our greatest open-source tools start from a single source before being disseminated among us to evolve?
Maybe the YC article was worded a bit aggressively. But I don't think the OP has sufficiently defended his claim that YC's RFS is short-sighted or irresponsible. The OP doesn't address the RFS' main points:

- that Hollywood is on its way out, because film and TV as forms of entertainment have largely remained the same despite significant technological advances. Movements like SOPA are indicative of the industry's inability to evolve with the times.

- that startups aiming to find better or cheaper forms of entertainment are likely to be extremely big companies in the future, largely by replacing the role in society that Hollywood currently plays.

- and that YC should fund companies it thinks will be big.

That line of logic seems sound.
Right, that's the usage I intended here. The argument that YC's war is "shortsighted" depends on an premise that's implicitly assumed to be true in the argument... that the Hollywood system is required in order for the stars and crew to succeed.
All the animated movies; some of which I think are absolutely great, would not have happened.
Copyright does quite a lot more things than just enabling restrictions on distribution. There's the right to be credited, some limits on derivative works, and limitations to commercial violations. I suppose not every musician would be pleased to find their music used as the soundtrack of a porn movie without their knowledge, for example.
Yeah, very strange that they wouldn't want to show off their product by actually using on their site.
Senator Franken breaks his silence on PIPA.
Unfriend Everyone
If Y Combinator is serious about this they should seriously consider asking John August to speak at Startup School this year. He writes movies for studios, produces his own films, makes iPad apps, and blogs about all of it. He has a better understanding of all of the sides of these issues than almost anybody.

He has had a few posts over the past week that might be enlightening to some. http://johnaugust.com/
And when you change the stylesheet, you'll invalidate the cache on all your images.
Don't forget: Video Games face the same problems that Hollywood does. And games like Skyrim are starting to have pretty massive development budgets.
It's interesting. I guess to me programming a computer seems more clear, because presumably whoever created the programming language did so with the intention that it should actually be useful for programming ( C++ jokes aside. ) But people can be complicated, inconsistent, and resistant to the idea that they can be won over with a simple formula. I suppose it just depends on the teacher.
This was intended. The explanation even mentioned that you should turn off JavaScript or a mobile device if you really need Wikipedia.
My general retort to "it's not stealing", is that it is theft of service. Say you went to get a hair cut, and didn't pay for it. That would be stealing the service. Same applies if the provider of a service splits the purchase among multiple buyers (like an actor in a play, performing for a 1000-seat audience). Anyone that snuck into the theater would be stealing the service. So by extent, the same should apply to the larger case of produced works (single creator, multiple customers splitting the cost).

On the flip side, it doesn't necessarily follow that every one who enjoys the benefits from a created work actually owes the creator anything. Like if you are listening to a CD at a friends house -- does every one in the room then own the artist? Or anyone who admires public architecture. So historically, it has come down to that if there is money to be made off of a created work, it is the original artist that should benefit from it (in the case of publishing books, music, etc). That model works (morally) as long as producing copies of a work requires enough capital investment & individual unit costs so that the publisher is almost guaranteed to need to turn a profit off of each unit -- some of that profit should go to the creator. But that model breaks down when you have zero cost / no profit sharing between individuals. Now we are back to the pre-publishing era again.
"So what have they done lately?"

Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:

Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
Does Pixar count as Hollywood? I guess it does -- but it feels somehow separate.
Mertado acquired by Groupon
Apparently I'm one of the few that actually read the article... The workload is cited as one of the main reasons.

This was true when I was in school, a long time ago.

Engineers could only party on the weekends, because they always had homework to do.

Architects couldn't party at all, because they were always in the lab.

Liberal arts majors were the most fun... They could always party.

Then, at least in my peer group, quite a few of them went to law school and "buckled down"... Now they charge me $250 per hour to review a stinking form contract.
I believe the problem isn't the existence of Hollywood, but that too much power is centralized in the hands of too few. Competition within the city can be likened to a Duopoly; competition in name, but far from it in practice.

I remember reading about how the RIAA companies engineer their licensing contracts in a way that forces maximum payoffs [1], and I wouldn't be surprised to find those problems in Hollywood as well.

[1]: http://gigaom.com/2011/12/11/why-spotify-can-never-be-profit...
Here is a free idea that I tried to get implemented in another country while working for a telecom company that was branching into TV services over their DSL connections.

Simply build a site like YouTube with lots of content to view. But unlike YouTube, this site would be pay per view and 100% of the content would be provided by teams of content creators. No backroom licencing deals.

The end user pays a fixed monthly fee for what they watch. After you watch a show, you must rate it before you get to watch another. That means 100% of viewings are rated. At the end of the month all the shows are ranked according to the ratings, and the portion of the monthly fee that goes to content creators, would be divided according to the rankings.

OK, maybe this is more like Netflix than YouTube. The UI is not as important as the system of acquiring and paying for content which is directly tied to viewer rankings. You would need to have a multiple factor ranking system so that cat videos with shot with a shaky video camera can rank high in entertainment value but low in quality and thus earn less. Also a longer show should earn a bigger share than a 2-minute short.

There are other types of things that would also work for this YC request, but I hope to see this as one of the ones that YC funds.
I think Ben is confused regarding what the intent of the RFS is. This is not an assault on artists. It is important to separate the talented from the studios that profit from artists work. The studios (and by extension production and distribution) are the ones that Y Combinator has declared 'war' on. Other industries are being disrupted in a similar fashion. This is nothing new. I think many in this community realize the damage that the MPAA and the RIAA can cause now. Why not hasten their demise through a process that is already playing out?
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Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 02:09:43 GMT
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X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
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Link: <http://wp.me/1>; rel=shortlink
X-nananana: Batcache
Why pay for a web server when you can use nginx for free?

Trying 72.233.56.139...
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Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: wordpress.org

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 02:10:41 GMT
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Support The Daily WTF in Supporting the Support SOPA
That is because the distribution channel is skimming all the profits. If YC'ers made a new distribution system for content creators it would start with young people fresh from film school doing all the work. But after that takes off you will see the Coppola's of the world doing the math, and shifting their allegiances away from the studios and towards the new world.
Both are true. The candidate most likely to win will raise the most money, and the candidate who raises the most money will be most likely to win.

Positive feedback loops are not a logical fallacy.
Agree 100%. The actual content of the article is very positive and proactive. Rather than saying "I'll pay you to egg them" (not literally), they're saying "I'll pay you to do better stuff than them". The title should probably be something like "Beat Hollywood (at their own game)" instead of "Kill Hollywood," but w/e.
It's Google's service, it's Google's web-spiders, and it's Google's attempt to deliver useful content to their own customers. How is it NOT in Google's interest to police the links they present to visitors of Google's own properties?

If you don't like it, use Yahoo!.
Its an interesting point but one I guess may not be needed. These are real shares being sold so they must come with inherent risk. The hope would be that 1) the film already has momentum and market because it got to funding 2) the Trailer Pitch community (and investors) would be there to watch over it 3) if it can't be finished before the money runs out then some money could be returned, if not its up to the investors to pull the plug when more money is asked for (in the form of a dilution of current shares and a new funding round).
Ask HN: What purpose you use virtual assistant for?
Just wondering, for what purposes you use virtual assistant for. There are lot of task which are time consuming, but explaining them to a person remotely is a pain in itself.
Swimming submarines - The philosophical debate on machine intelligence
This is a war you'll definitely lose. The "raises in response the question" meaning isn't just the most popular usage, it's the only usage most people are aware of.

I'm aware of both meanings and still intentionally use the "wrong" one occasionally . It's well understood by both the speaker and the listener, so I don't think it hurts much. In fact, pointing out the error seems like more of a distraction.
NimbleNotes: write more productively (feedback please)
You stated that you agreed with the message in the post, which included:

But the 100th engineer at Facebook had a greater positive impact on the world
I would like to tack on money management things that are learned when failure is not harsh.