skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is quite simply nonsense.

Will the cost of channels rise for some of the reasons he says, sure. But one of three things will happen:

a) total spend/investment (in aggregate of time and surplus attention arbitraged to ads) across ALL channels will rise - this will hit us all in the pockets, but also raise the overall budget for content production... this doesn't lead to his conclusions.

b) total spend and therefore the same amount will be available as is available now for content

c) total spend will go down. This might superficially appear to support his conclusions but it doesn't if you think about it. If ESPN rises but other things fall in price and I lose a few things I virtually never watch, and my overall bill is lower - which it will be on average if the total spend is down - then I don't CARE that ESPN is $20 per month instead of $5.

What will happen is called a market!

We'll have a marketplace for content. There will be a certain amount that people are prepared to spend on content, and how much surplus attention they're prepared to pay for ads which will subsidize content. The allocation of these resources will be made more efficient by a more efficient market dynamic. We'll invest more in things we value, less in things we don't. So the BBC and NFL Network will make money out of me for Dr. Who and the football season. But I'll no longer be squandering monthly bills in shit I never watch.

Plus as content moves to apps on TV the playing field is leveled for independent producers to rise up and the barriers to entry will be much lower than they are today for a show to garner - or KEEP - an audience and revenue stream large enough to sustain it.

Imagine if Firefly had been able to say: Fox has bailed on us, but if we can get a million of you to pay just $20 a year we can keep it on the air and send you a copy of the season on DVD after it's over... or something to that effect.

This article is garbage. It's amazing how much ink old media dedicates - even on their new media sites - to trying to argue against the inevitable changes ahead. Perversely it also highlights why old media doesn't have some natural right to survive and have us all protect it against this onslaught. Their content is often mediocre, like this. (And yes I know the Atlantic has a ton of great content, that's not the point.)
Did you even read my comment?

It has everything to do with Islam and Islamic culture, which are two different things, both of which have different presences around the world.

For the record, I don't like Islamic culture. I don't judge individual people, but I believe that a religion that was founded by a pedophile [aisha] and murderer [jews and others] should not have any influence on the world today. The best way to get rid of Islam is to stop believing in it, but oddly enough Muslims have a habit of stoning apostates.
The "double consent" requirement is irrelevant all the time Sweden has in recent history violated their own laws as well as international treaties to hand political asylum seekers to the CIA for shipment back to the very regime they were fleeing from.

Meanwhile, the UK actually relatively regularly refuse extradition requests.

If I worried about the US government, I know very well where I'd rather be, and Sweden would be _far_ down that list.
I think twitter used to be an example. You could tell because all their links were to http://twitter.com#the-specific-url-information-here so the data had to be loaded via javascript.

The problem is you get bad first-page load times (double-latency), but you get better second-page load times (no waiting for templates, just data requests).
His blog shows an image of shot from The Big Bang Theory. TBBT has done excellent job for on-demand content. The minute their weekly show ends, they post that video on their website (http://www.cbs.com/shows/big_bang_theory/) for week. I haven't watched a single episode on TV since they started doing this. It's currently free and supported by pre-roll video advertising. I don't mind ads as I'm getting content on-demand and free.

I don't buy that TV is going to be dead. I'd love to watch TV along with my family in our living room. However, I also want flexibility that on-demand offers. I'm sure TBBT is getting lot of money with this experiment.

The question about Netflix is complicated one and I hope author goes into unit economics in his future column. I also agree, at the current rates (for netflix subscription), it will be hard for Netflix to show latest on-demand content. I imagine we will have premium fees for such feature.
"If the universe changes and they [viewers] want us to bring the content directly to them, then we can."

What does he mean if the universe changes?

I'm also not entirely sure that people would continue subscribing to "ESPN" in this new world. More likely, you'd subscribe to individual sports or sporting events. Similarly, I don't think you'd be subscribing to "CBS", you'd be subscribing The Big Bang Theory, or whatever individual show you're actually interested in.

To be honest, though, I don't think he really means what he says there. They're going to fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
Does Pi contain all possible number combinations?
The real problem that is skewing his thinking, that he's misdiagnosing IMHO is content fragmentation - huge numbers of options necessarily diluting spend/quality. But that's a trend the same networks, cable companies and content producers crying foul today have initiated and continued. They made this bed. Lie in it and quit complaining.
Show HN: Recently dropped .com's in order of pronounceability
Maybe not I'm every instance, but I think it's easy to assume that lower overall budgets lead to lower overall quality.
(Former NYer)

Uber is a fairly good idea. But the rules/laws in place that define how livery vehicles are allowed to operate in NYC are also full of good ideas (some bad ones too).

Travis fully knew his wrist would be slapped hard by the multiple stake-holders (including organized crime) involved in the taxi and limousine racket in NYC.

And... after living in Manhattan for 8 years, I've never had trouble getting a car when I want a car instead of the relatively effective (dirty) subway. Just keep the numbers of 10-12 limo drivers or gypsy cab drivers you like in your phone... one of them will always be available, they'll remember you, and it's almost always so close to the price of a cab as to be the same.
Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
I was one of the female attendees at Startup School and I was floored by the gender ratio - being in tech, I'm used to being a minority, but this was possibly the most extreme balance I've seen.

I'm genuinely interested in whether people have theories about why this might be, and whether any women considered attending but decided not to? Or is this simply a real life manifestation of the HN community?
You're spot on. What are ESPN's expenses? It's the royalties it shells out for the rights to broadcast specific events and leagues. They will have a better leverage now against NFLs and NBAs of the world, who would have to accept lower rates, passing the savings onto consumers.
"And that's before we get into paying the cost of delivering the video in high quality to your HDTV or iPad, since it's hardly cheap to house and stream hi-def to tens of millions of homes".

Except it IS cheap to distribute content on the Internet. Shows are already being distributed to millions of homes without costing the content owners a dime (It's just currently being done illegally using bit-torrent).
This analysis completely ignores the fact that producing a TV show is (or should be) far, far cheaper than it used to be.
So Sweden tortures. Cute.
Other than a time-trial mode (which seems to be a 'Flow Free' innovation, so I'm disinclined to copy that outright) and sprite-themes ('halloween pack' instead of letters from the alphabet), I can't think of much at the moment.

I don't know about hints being a core feature though. Flow Free includes as many as 600 free levels but only 3 free hints. It could be that they are monetizing poorly on level packs, relative to downloads, and hoping to catch up with hints.
Ahaha... I think paylaşırsında means "shared" or something similar, and probably John was translated from my name, Burak. So the best I could figure out was something like:

"Burak, my teacher, I won't vote your shared fuck"

I still can't figure out what it means. My Turkish is very weak.
IMO terminal protocols are more suited to UDP than TCP and I use ssh over UDP all the time. There are three main advantages:

* There is no connection session, so you can close your laptop or put it to sleep and open it up again and the connection will still be there.

* You don't have the lag of sending and then responding, it appears locally immediately

* It is much easier to get UDP around firewalls and it can't be blocked easily in the same way most VPN protocols or SSH can. I have yet to find a network where I can't get my terminal UDP packets through.

The alternative to Mosh is setting up OpenVPN[1]. It is especially worthwhile if you have a network of public servers that you administer. It is easy to setup[2] and works on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD etc.

The best tip is to add a second interface to all your machines and setup a private VLAN across them. This way if you are experiencing a DoS attack or high traffic you can still login and administer the machine (this also applies with standard ssh - you put it in a different range of IPs and on your public machines then only have 80 and 443 open).

EC2[3], Linode[4] et al all support adding a second network interface to each machine (or to just one of the machines, which is then used as a gateway to the remainder) which can be assigned an IP address in a different range. You then setup a separate hostname to this network, or even register a separate administrative domain name (eg. company-admin.com) which you keep on a different registrar, whois record, etc.

[1] http://openvpn.net/

[2] http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto...

[3] http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/07/multiple-ip-addresses-for...

[4] http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/Multiple_IPs
This story reminds me of http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-Possibl...
One point against matte screens that you need to consider...

Matte screen coatings eliminate reflections by diffusing them over the entire field of view. As the total brightness of your room increases, matte screens diffuse all of it evenly, eliminating reflections but also losing contrast ratio.

As the total ambient light increases, your screen's contrast ratio can drop from 800:1 to 50:1 (or worse). Any contrast ratio lower than about 300:1 can cause eye strain.

End result: with a typical screen of about 200cd/m^2 a matte coating is totally unusable if your room is brighter than about 1000 lux but falls below 300:1 contrast around 450 lux (typical office lux is between 350 and 500).

In summary... you need to know your environment. Matte screens work great in dark rooms with lots of spot lights to cause reflections. Glossy screens work great in bright ambient conditions with even lighting. Semi matte works well if you need a balance.
Finally, Google translate accurately translated something! Though I meant "anlamadim" as "I didn't understand you".. which is close enough to "I beg your pardon", I guess.
That's not the general assertion the article makes.

Roth complained about an interpretation of _The Human Stain_ that had been made in numerous extremely reputable secondary sources, despite the fact that the article included a recitation of Roth's own intent.

That's the core argument beneath the rant. Is that argument _wrong_? If not, it seems pretty compelling, regardless of how the rant itself is written. Facts don't become not facts simply because they're written hyperbolically.
This just reminded me again how different software is from any physical world artifact... It's mind boggling how for lots of software the cost of failure can be reduced to almost ZERO by having the faulty component restart/reload/reboot or just pushing an automatic upgrade to millions of customers that didn't even knew they had a huge security hole...

And the ugly part is realizing how this "almost zero" cost of failure makes people behave:

1. we release software with security whole upon security whole to customers (think Oracle, Ms, Apple... and probably everybody else too...), knowing the fix will only be one upgrade away anyway, or

2. we just code ugly hacks that "just restart the goddam service" when it fails to respond or fails a sanity check, but leave the app otherwise running and just dump everything to a log that nobody will ever care about until performance really starts to degrade, or even then

3. just throw more hardware at the problem and keep restarting stuff that leaks memory or starts to fail some empirical sanity checks

...on the other hand I wished the plane I flew in could just restart/reload/reboot after a failure before it smashed into the ground :) ...so maybe reducing the costs of failure and caring less about it is the way to go.

--
EDIT: realized that the plane/software analogy leaks badly: if the plane I was in were the software, then I would be the data that get corrupted when it fails :|
These are awesome!

All of them look like potential startup names, hehe.
Technology has greatly reduced the cost of filming. If you look on YouTube, you'll see that tiny budgets allow for production values well above typical network television even ten years ago. TV and movies may die by the sword of technological changes, but they also get to live by it.
Are you referring to the linked article? I didn't find any incorrect usages of affect or effect at all.
I think this is an appropriate time for me to mention the service calltrackingmetrics.com. We offer a service, that allows you to manage the call flow as well as track many other features of a call - but in this case I believe the major selling point is we have people who answer the phone and work really hard to make sure your phone numbers port over to our system without issue. The Twilio team also helps make sure this process is exceptional.
A quote: "Converted into ASCII text, somewhere in that infinite string if digits is the name of every person you will ever love, the date, time and manner of your death, and the answers to all the great questions of the universe. ... Is this true? Does it make absolutely any sense?"

Umm, we just had this discussion yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4672601

And the answer is that it depends on whether Pi is normal (in the mathematical sense), which is not known. If Pi is normal, then yes, it's true. But (as explained in the earlier discussion), the problem is not the question of the existence of every imaginable text within Pi, the problem is locating it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

A quote: "In mathematics, a normal number is a real number whose infinite sequence of digits in every base b is distributed uniformly in the sense that each of the b digit values has the same natural density 1/b, also all possible b^2 pairs of digits are equally likely with density b^−2, all b^3 triplets of digits equally likely with density b^−3, etc."

"While a general proof can be given that almost all numbers are normal (in the sense that the set of exceptions has Lebesgue measure zero), this proof is not constructive and only very few specific numbers have been shown to be normal. For example, it is widely believed that the numbers √2, π, and e are normal, but a proof remains elusive."
"One of those" saved time over naming off each country, considering everyone knows which countries I'm referring to. And is my country better? Um... Yeah. By orders of magnitudes it's better.
Almost. Building 4 is there so that they can optimize build quality (vs. cost) so that the things they build can last just long enough to make it through their warranty period. It sounds harsh but not many people would pay an extra $1k retail purchase price to have an alternator in their Fiesta that lasts for 300 years.
It's not just the royalties, the cost of the production itself is significant. I suspect you would lose a lot of the smaller events that simply would no longer be cost efficient.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs New Orleans Saints live stream watch here NFL online
Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs New Orleans Saints live stream watch here NFL
online football Regular season 2012 Week 7 and also enjoy full season
Match scheduled: Date: SUN, OCT 21 2012 Time: 1:00 PM (ET)
NFL Regular season 2012 Week 7 venu: Raymond James Stadium,Tampa Bay
Buccaneers vs New Orleans Saints live stream watch here NFL
online,Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs New Orleans Saints live stream watch
here NFL online,Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs New Orleans Saints live stream
watch here NFL online.
Old woman's face in pure CSS (and a script to make your own)
Community service. Fines. Putting them in prison only delays re-offending. Treatment outside prison is generally more likely to prevent them from committing further crimes.

I might not want to go quite as far as ekianjo, but prison is in general horrible for rehabilitation. I'm Norwegian. The Norwegian prison system has a far better rehabilitation rate than most, and this to a large extent has followed a gradual softening up of the prison system from one that was every bit as inhumane as the US system, but is now regularly described as "holiday camp".

Imprisonment is used far less, and the tendency is to reduce it further. For those who do end up in prison, sentences are generally far shorter, coupled with education and work (you can choose, but you need to do one or the other) in prison. Prisoners often get granted early limited parole (you can start getting weekends out of prison etc. long before a full parole, or monitored time outside the prison - e.g. a famous convicted murderer was recently interviewed at a cafe while she was out on parole, accompanied by a police officer...).

The result is a system that fits far better with the reality of the psychological effects one would presumably want a criminal justice system that cares about rehabilitation to have on a prisoner.

A large part of the problem with most prison systems is that they are based on emotions and demands for vengeance rather than an evidence based approach to actually minimizing harm to society.

Sweden has similar success with rehabilitation, though Sweden and Norway also unfortunately shares similar flaws to Sweden when it comes to pre-conviction detention.
Review: The AMEX Bluebird / Serve card (sort of broken)
Down voting is good, but feeding the trolls is not!
Microsoft yanks Xbox’s Twitter and Facebook apps
Despite the loads of spam, the UI does look pretty nice.
Lower overall budgets lead to less spectacle. Personally I'm not that interested in spectacle.
I would disagree. In a world where all sports broadcasting goes through the net, someone will be willing to watch smaller venue games, which means someone will find a way to broadcast it.
I'm so tired of these "seen it before, I'm smarter and more senior than you" responses.

Look, if people vote it up it means they like it. Just because its been talked about before doesn't make it less valuable.
I think they mean that the majority of their current audience wouldn't pay for the content in a per channel or per show way. Basically the same stuff that comes up with Game of Thrones, for HBO the traditional model is still bringing in more money than would be made adding the per show subscription model.
> They are both just numbers.

No, they are ideas. The base of natural logarithms isn't an arbitrary number, it has special properties. It's the same with Pi -- they're ideas that happen to be expressible as numbers. But their numerical value is less important than their identity as ideas.

> e is not infinite, in fact it is less than 3.

Straw man. No one claimed otherwise. But e appears to have an infinite digital sequence, i.e. is "normal" in the mathematical sense.

But, as with Pi, the fact that e is likely "normal" is much less important than the idea it represents.
Thanks, that's encouraging.

I'm not sure about offering individual packs. That bundle is the largest-selling SKU right now. Consider that warning message that the IAP system pops up ('you are about to spend $2.99') everytime one makes an IAP purchase. With a single $3 purchase, we only have to risk the user making it past one such warning. With individual packs, it'll be one warning per pack; I think there will be a significant fall-off on the second and subsequent warnings. That's just intuition of course.

I believe 'CSR Racing' is one of the current how-to-monetize favourites. We just don't have the story and content to be in that league, sadly.
Here are some random ones off the top of my head. I'm happy to accept that you can't think of any value of these to bad guys, but the bad guys are not limited by your or my imagination.

MongoDB and all the drivers https://github.com/mongodb

Mixpanel analytics libraries https://github.com/mixpanel

Sencha Javascript libraries https://github.com/senchalabs

Yahoo YUI and various other JS related gunk https://github.com/yahoo

Shopify ecommerce libraries https://github.com/Shopify

Engine Yard tools & utils https://github.com/engineyard
Great tips but this one in my opinion is pure gold http://blogs.perl.org/users/smylers/2011/08/ssh-productivity...
Zuckerberg is arrogant and full of himself... I want to see the new myspace succeed...
Once the monopoly over distribution is broken, I suspect the unions down the chain will be broken as well leading to lower overall cost. Marketing is usually a different story however.
If only there existed some channels not subsidized by cable industry to give us a clearer picture of what's possible. If only those channels existed as for-profit enterprises in the US. If only they charged subscribers and covered the costs of productions through paid television and merchandise sales. If only their costs also included the cost of HD streaming, maybe they would name such venture with channel name + the word "Go" to drive a point that it's available to subscribers on the go.

But alas, outside of HBO, Starz, Cinemax, Showtime and The Movie Channel none come to mind, so let's engage in theoretical discussions.
How can we use this to make our applications better? Could anybody explain please :-)
> What does "absolute" mean?

in this context, it means without exception

> You don't really seem to understand how the government works.

ouch. that comes off as rude. hopefully you didn't intend that. :) but yeah, I actually have picked up a thing or two about how the US government works over the last 35+ years of life and education.
PH7 Embedded PHP Engine
For the NFL and NBA, ultimately the lower revenues will be passed on to the players in terms of lower salaries, and aside from potential labor disputes, things will continue largely as before. That's because the NFL and NBA are essentially cartels anyway. But soccer will take the hit even harder. Clubs like Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Barcelona depend upon TV revenues to fund themselves, while clubs like PSG and Manchester City have received massive investment with the hope that it'll be recouped in the long run. Without TV revenues, and without anything to replace them, we're likely to see a major impact, and more than a few clubs facing severe financial problems if not outright bankruptcy.
Is there a startup school recording anywhere?
Is that typical? The monitor I'm using right now maxes out at 370 nits, not 200.