skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't necessarily equate many of the rockstars we know of today as artists, more as 'produced'. For every well-known artist out there who is making mega-money there is a cohort of producers, marketers, colluders. Even the Venice Biennale is full of these mega-artists who make huge money because the plastic arts industry survives on the transfer of sums of money.

I think of the artists I genuinely appreciate: independent filmmakers, poets, writers, musicians: without time to pause and focus on their work for weeks at a time we would have little of this. Even a well-recorded indie band needs to raise money for a good production. While we may wish to think so, you just cannot record in your garage without thousands of dollars of tools from microphones, mixers, plugins, then marketing and seed-funding for tours. So yes, these people are doing it for the love it and would like nothing more than to see the mega-industry fail: it leaves more money for them and less glitz in the eye to blind us from accessing their work.
Indeed. I would argue that the state of campaign finance is such that only special interest groups have the influence required with congress to pass or kill anything. When 100% of your time is dedicated to raising money, you only ever talk to the people who provide that money - for better or worse. Representatives need not be in the pocket of industry shills for campaign finance to be a problem, there's simply nobody else around for them to talk to.
That's exactly what I was thinking of as what they will do given "more time". But I still expect them to try a much more traditional "business as usual" first at least a couple of times, before they realize that's going to be necessary. That's way harder than what they do now, which they are used to working very well.
Neither. And ironically I was just logging in to grab everything I had there to move it to a new server, and couldn't log in, emailed them with no response in the last 2 hours then see this here..
"Are we really solving some fundemental problem by letting college kids at elite universities poke each other?"
--your line of argument applied to facebook in its early days
Actually, what should be done is make it easier for small groups of people to make movies. There's always going to be a need for what Hollywood produces. However, for example, if we could start by making Pixar type movies then distribute them somehow for a small fee then lots of independent movie studios would appear. At some point in the next decade or so, we'll be able to create "real people" that replace Hollywood stars.
There's no need to be condescending.
Which anti-SOPA game companies are fighting back, and how
Groupon acquires Mertado (YC W10)
I thought Mozart was buried in a pauper's grave in accordance with the tradition of the day.
Too bad. It was very helpful for editing pics in Flickr.
While Dropbox certainly could be keeping an undeletable log of everything you ever upload, there is no evidence that they are doing so.

It is safer to assume that they are than to assume they are not. Maybe they got an NSL with a gag order that requires them to silently store logs indefinitely. There's no way of knowing, so just assume that's the case and plan accordingly (e.g. don't upload embarrassing college photos that would cause you problems if the upload logs were hacked and released to the public).
Stanford NLP and PGM courses delayed
I sense real anger in this RFS, which is uncharacteristic for pg.
This is for alphadogg (I can't reply directly to his post).

You've been hellbanned, for this post bagging Edward Tufte: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991211

Which doesn't seem worth a hellban, and you seem a reasonable guy, so I thought I'd let you know. Hopefully you'll read this and be able to talk to someone at HN and sort it out.
Strcpycat
The only word missing in your comment is "incentives:" in academia, professors, especially in soft subjects, don't have much of an incentive to grade accurately; they have an incentive to publish "research" that leads to jobs, tenure, and promotion.

If you want professors on the whole to be better and more accurate graders, you have to give them incentives to do so. Which I discuss in more detail here: http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-in....
My time is valuable enough that I'm comfortable paying people to do these things for me.

I think it's still worthwhile to have a superficial understanding of the services you buy, as this allows you to maximize the value of your dollar and avoid getting fleeced.
Portrait, but switching to landscape as needed (videos, page's CSS isn't portrait friendly, Angry Birds).

Also probably worth noting that I have a book-aspect tablet, I might have a different preference if it was less tall.
Top 5 reasons to support SOPA
Regardless of whether the product search stuff counts as an ad or not, the six items on the right definitely do.
Interesting. I think this points out a difference between my lifetime and my parents. Lots of thing (most of things?) were negotiated. I can't even imagine negotiating for something like a candy bar at the grocery store and I certainly can't even try to negotiate with the studios on a movie rental. This complete inability to show any flexibility by the studios (and many other businesses) shows that the inelasticity of the market.
And? Population and demographics have changed as well of course. What does it matter? We're not comparing movies based on which had the biggest impact on the people of their time, we're talking about business. Of course competition in the landscape of entertainment is going to affect that, that's the whole point.
You are probably looking at the wrong games. Most people who aren't already into games, won't buy the 60 USD games. Casual games will catch them. Think Solitaire or Tetris, which lots of people have sunk more than 100 hours over the years into. Or even evil Farmville.
The article and comments here suggest it's because homework and math are hard and non-Engineering students don't work as hard.

My hunch is that students drop majors because the initial appeal doesn't match up with the actual path. Numbers weren't given for math majors who drop math, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were lower than for engineering: perhaps math majors know what they're getting into.

To my 10th grade mind, engineering was where students bolted together wacky gizmos to suit their own desires, rather than study consistent strategies to minimize cost, maximize performance, etc. I'm sympathetic to the idea that engineering could have a glamerous outward appearance (despite Dilbert) that doesn't match up to what it's actually like. And math is hard.
It may be aimed at establishing oneself within the hierarchy - which happens all over the animal kingdom.
Video - Who Is Kim Dotcom? MegaUpload Founder Arrested in New Zealand
Question: Mega-productions like avatar rely mostly on special effects than storytelling. Are people still impressed by special effects and stunts? Aren't video games becoming more impressive to look at than movies? As a result, are these technical skills becoming less important?
Dollars to donuts they tie this with Child Porn or something like that so that no one can vote against it.
Sure , but houses rarely burn down. Computers crash a lot. In fact, I'd venture to say that most (or maybe close to most?) computers end up in some state where their owners either can't or think they can't retrieve data from them. Based on the likelihood of this happening to their customers, it'd be decent to let users re-download media you know they've already paid for and been given access to...
"The bill was defeated once, what makes you think it wouldn't be defeated again?"

Because each time those in opposition much launch a larger more costly campaign and take time out of their normal productive jobs.

Proposing bullshit legislation does not cost the Congressmen/women anything extra, and at times can actually be profitable for them.

They can just bring it up next week and we all have to drop everything again and try to defeat it. Eventually people get fatigued or decide the continued fight is no longer worth it.
For more on bogus numbers: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-...
Social Games: What Does The Future Hold?
Is there a social network / kickstarter like site for making movies. A LinkedIn for Actors, Writers, Directors and everybody else you need to make film and television.

I'd be interested in building a site that helps people find each other, review projects and scrape together whatever funding they need to make indie films happen.

There have got to be hundreds of people floating around Hollywood trying to get into the mainstream industry.

How hard is it for these people to find each other right now?
> There would be no Godfather without Hollywood. No Apocalypse Now. (also no Taxi Driver, no Star Wars, no Indiana Jones, no MASH or Nashville) In the absence of Hollywood, you get movies like Youth Without Youth and Tetro - two wonderful oddities, but you'd be hard pressed to make the case for them against Coppola's early masterpieces.

Those movies you mentioned were a result of being within/outside Hollywood, not a function of Hollywood's existence.
The leading British film critic Mark Kermode hypothesises that Michael Bay style blockbusters are hits solely because they were expensive to make.

He likens these films to a PT Barnum sideshow - people aren't expecting anything of artistic merit, but are instead driven by curiosity as to what the producers spent $140m on. Media attention is inevitable, in the same way that a restaurant announcing a $1000 hamburger is easy fodder for a slow news day.

The logic is persuasive in light of the fact that critics and moviegoers alike don't enjoy these films much, nor expect to enjoy them. There's a culture of "movie events", a self-fulfilling prophecy of huge budgets and massive opening weekends.

If the theory is valid, I have no idea how you'd beat Hollywood; I'm fairly certain that the answer won't involve making anything with cultural or artistic worth.
As a minority, I'm fine with this. Hollywood constantly casts minorities as stereotypes and almost always casts a white lead with the occasional African American.
I see the line between television and commercial blurring so much [more than it already is] that everything is grey. Shows wont exist anymore, there will just be "characters" with shows, movies, music albums, etc orbiting around them.
I'd agree that Philosophy is a tough subject.

The reason I'd give for this is that in some sense philosophy does have correct answers, if and only if a question is framed within an existing philosophical model.

The point of philosophy (as I see it) is trying to work out which philosophical model is most correct - a bit like a choosing between scientific theories.

Instead of testing against measurable things in the real world, philosophers derive logical outcomes from propositions within linguistic/logical systems and compare them to detect inconsistencies.

Therefore it's fine to ask a question about the consequences of a particular line of thought if a particular philosophical framework is specified, because you can mark a student not only on whether they arrived at an expected answer but also on the quality of their argument (i.e. how they got there).
It seems like this line of reasoning perhaps conflates sexual arousal with attractiveness?

To illustrate, if you're looking to marry (and have kids), and you had a choice between a physically attractive but dull porno actress, and an attractive and intelligent writer (you know because she's fun to talk to and wrote a very popular book), you'd go with the porno actress?

Most porn I've seen isn't very creative, and being in a porno is not something I have on my checklist for attractive mates. I think that's true for most people. I would wager to say that the most effective form of art is the most creative, not the most sexually stimulating.
Similarly y'all might find my Chrome extension for HN interesting.

https://github.com/tkahn6/hn-newcomments-chrome

And if you're interested in using it:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kikfikaiccdaabdilg...
the old social search that actually crawled the web used the information from the Social Graph API - see what it has for you here:

http://www.google.com/s2/search/social

Looks like this is Google betting purely on an owned graph via Google+
The leading British film critic Mark Kermode hypothesises that Michael Bay style blockbusters are hits solely because they were expensive to make.

He likens these films to a PT Barnum sideshow - people aren't expecting anything of artistic merit, but are instead driven by curiosity as to what the producers spent $140m on. Media attention is inevitable, in the same way that a restaurant announcing a $1000 hamburger is easy fodder for a slow news day.

The logic is persuasive in light of the fact that critics and moviegoers alike don't enjoy these films much, nor expect to enjoy them. There's a culture of "movie events", a self-fulfilling prophecy of huge budgets and massive opening weekends. The theory would have it that the re-introduction of 3D is part of this phenomena, with mainstream commercial cinema slowly morphing into the kind of superficial novelty thrill that was once the preserve of IMAX theatres.

If the theory is valid, I have no idea how you'd beat Hollywood; I'm fairly certain that the answer won't involve making anything with cultural or artistic worth.
Eventually Google will rollover their existing users and force them to signup for Google Plus. They are already guilty of this strategy when they forced Gmail users to link their youtube accounts.
None of these people are locked into anything.

They're all essentially freelance workers, moving from one startup to the next. Each project is its own world, and doesn't lock anyone into anything. Well, with the exception of franchises locking in some actors.

I've known both above the line and below the line people to move from the biggest blockbusters to projects with a very-low-five-figure budget and back again. They like working on the gritty no-budget projects where they can exercise a lot more creative freedom. Heck, I've known top crew to show up and work for literally nothing more than a sandwich.

And if you showed up with $100 million tomorrow, they all could and would work on your huge blockbuster. That's pretty much how the system works now. You just need the money if the blockbuster is your goal.

The important thing here is that none of them are locked into anything. The talent is free to go where it will. There's union rules for minimums and such, and if you played long term at something you'd have to comply, but that's not an onerous burden.
Looks like Google is becoming the new Yahoo. The place where great startups go to die.....
This is news to me. When looking at an iPad recently the guy in the Apple store told me that anything I bought on iTunes could be moved to a new device should I ever upgrade. So long as I have the same AppleId (email?)

What else is non-transferable? Books? Music? Apps? (Can iDevices do other things?)
FYI: The forgot password feature does not seem to be working at this time.
The problem with Google+ is any large photo gets re-sized to 2048 x 2048. I did research and tested it. I haven't tried them, but some alternatives being mentioned are fotoflexer.com and advanced.aviary.com.
Well, I'll flat out admit that I'm an idiot. I should have read the fine-print, they surely did tell me somewhere that I'm not allowed to re-download m̶y̶ their movies.

But then again. It's 2012. Is it really such an outrageous assumption that I'd be able to re-download digital content that I paid dearly for?

Steam lets me re-download my games as often as I want. Amazon and all ebook vendors let me re-download my books. Google let's me re-download my android apps. Apple let's me re-download my apps and mp3s.

It just honestly never occurred to me that iTunes movies would be different. When I paid $16.99 for an iTunes movie while the same DVD would have costed $9.99 I was actually mentally justifying the markup with the convenience of not having to care about backups...
Using a font to provide icons on your website. It appears that the Pictos way is a font-replacement method using js? My first thought is that this should be relatively easy to replicate using http://thenounproject.com (or similar) as the source of the icons.

I like the idea: kind of an extension of sprites to using the font file as the sprite holder; not sure if that's any more efficient though due to the cross-browser issues of webfonts.
A great answer...but to a slightly different question.

Which, I think, confirms my suspicion that with both financial institutions and websites it's probably impossible to explain to nonexperts how to judge their credibility.
The last two letters of each acronym really do say a lot:

Javascript Object Notation

eXtended Markup Language
> Your site was "taken from you" but you didn't take that
> artists mp3, just a copy?

I realize that you're just trolling, but I'm bored so I'll bite.

If you copy an mp3, there are now two copies of an mp3. One in the original 'owner's possession, and one in yours.

If I take the hard drive that an artist is storing the only copy of his/her mp3 on, then I have 'stolen' the mp3 because I have deprived the artist of possession.

When the FBI took down MegaUpload, if the only copy of my files were on MegaUpload, the FBI has taken physical possession of them through the seizure of MegaUpload's servers.

What the FBI did would only be analogous to pirating if they copied all of the data off of MegaUpload's servers, but left the servers intact (thereby allowing the original owners to still have access).
Why not? It gives social status, popularity... all good for attracting a mate, especially for men.
Two hours, eh? Maybe they were hoping you would skim through the API docs...

Social Graph API:
http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/api.html

OpenSocial FAQ:
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/faq.html

OpenSocial Specs:
http://docs.opensocial.org/display/OSD/Specs

Snark aside, OpenSocial is a gadget and container specification built around the Google Gadgets spec. The Social Graph API is a service to let you query information about connections between web pages.

I've written some Google Gadgets (OpenSocial apps) and took a quick look through the Social Graph API spec (a much simpler spec). I sure don't see any connection between them. What's the connection that you see?
They also wouldn't have to compete with the noise produced by lots of money spent on marketing crap. It's difficult for talent to get noticed when crap can succeed by simply yelling louder. Reducing the ability for Hollywood to yell would make things easier for talented artists.
Independent film companies are to L.A. what startups are to Silicon Valley. An independent film company is essentially a startup with all of the uncertainty, hard work, late nights, bootstrapping, cash crunches, etc. The odds are stacked against them. (I closed my film company down as of the end of the year.)

So when I hear "Kill Hollywood" I don't think you really mean what you say. The independent film companies are going to be the ones that will produce the content for all the new digital distribution channels that have sprung up in the past ten years.

A lot of hard working people are employed by the industry and they understand that the game is changing. They realize things are going to be different for them in the new economic models. (One other thing most people don't know is almost 99% of "Hollywood" are contract workers who work for three to nine months and then have no guarantee of another job.)

Silicon Valley isn't defined by Oracle and Intel. Don't define Hollywood by the actions of a few large companies. There already are a bunch of opportunities for the entertainment industry and the Valley to work together and we're still in the early stages of collaboration.
Not youtube today. Though it might come out of youtube one day.
I believe in creating a mix of a.empowering the content creators to create b. quality content that is c. distributed in the most accessible way for consumers and is d. financially sensible for all parties involved.

PirateBay pointed it out yesterday; the entertainment industries got greedy and started demanding more rights and driving up costs to fill their pockets.

Wouldn't it be awesome if you could have a healthy career, making $60,000+, by entertaining people with what you love? As in, do you really need to make $20,000,000 to act/sing/write etc?
> Ecosystem implies some sort of balance, where in fact it is a cutthroat competition [...]

You don't know much about biology, do you?
I agree. I would add that if I want to impress a girl, I might buy tickets to a concert by a great artist. If she's impressed, I get a fraction of attractiveness credit with the girl just by having the ability to recognize good stuff. This doesn't preclude me from personally enjoying the show as well.
Jon Stewart showed 4 people using the word 'nerd'. Three of them were anti-SOPA!

so?

I don't care that they were calling us nerds, but if someone does care do you really think the congressperson's interests temporarily lining up with theirs really makes any difference?
I don't believe you will replace movies with another form of entertainment. They are just stories when distilled when distilled. The stories are a fabric of values, beliefs, morals, and culture that is inseparable from society. Some stories are so representative of the culture it becomes a direct part of culture. Replacing movies will require a more creative way to spread that fabric of ideas.
There's a decent body of research that shows talent doesn't really play much of a role in learning, it's more will and the willingness to work hard.
Device Brings $1,000 Genome Within Reach
Look back a hundred years (or so). Even if you shot the people who invented colour film or sound in films, somebody else would have developed those.
Some people tried that already.
My take: because Monsanto or similar firms are not supporting legislation that immediately threatens YC and the internet in general. SOPA et al is pretty much a declaration of war, it shouldn't be much surprise there's a response to that.
I think it may be the other way around. With the right curated lists of content, it would be more worthwhile to stream instead of downloading everything.
TweetOBox(WPF based Twitter Client) is now on GitHub
I think if you really want to fight Hollywood it would be best to boycott them at the movie theaters and try to support their competitors (Does Netflix count as a competitor?) as much as possible. That means not going to see Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises". Wait for the DVD/Blu-ray release and don't purchase it. Rent it, or borrow it from someone who has purchased it. Spend as little money as possible on Hollywood. Rinse and repeat with other movies.
Pitches don't work like that. If you want other people's time or other people's money, you better throw some more skin into the game. The most simple thing to imagine is creating a small prototype. But there are other ways.
Portrait! Something about landscape makes it way too difficult to hold with one hand.
Mod – A javascript module definition and loading tool.
Isn't that the way gaming is headed too, though? You have massive companies like EA publishing blockbuster hits built by huge development teams.
If the killing the movie industry is anything like the dead software industry, I predict another 10 years of billions in profits before they.. keep making billions in profits?..

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
A week ago Flickr announced that they’d be moving away from Picnik: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2012/01/13/start-the-new-year-fres...