skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He had done a direct to video movie before Emily Rose, a Hellraiser thing with a budget of about $2 million. For that he likely made around $100k salary and if he had any net, it was worth nothing.

But that project proved he could direct an acceptable film, which isn't as common a skill as you might imagine.

So once he'd done that, he had the chance to move up to the next budget range, $20ish million, plus or minus. For that, as I mentioned above, he probably got in the neighborhood of $500k. Maybe a little more, but certainly less than $1 million.

Then when that movie did extremely well, he went on to do The Day The Earth Stood Still, an $80 million dollar project. Whatever he got paid for that is highly variable, but it was likely a million or two.

As he mentions in the podcast, TDTESS did 80 million domestic, total of 240 global. Which made it a success in terms of money, but since the domestic was so low it wasn't perceived as such in the industry.

So he didn't move to the A list after that. He said he got offers for things like big franchise sequels, but his own dream projects weren't able to get the greenlight. If he'd taken the hired gun route on studio sequels, he said he'd probably make a couple million per.

So what he did instead was go and make his own film, cheap. He made the current movie Sinister for $3 million. Again he's back in the few hundred thousand range at most for salary. But this time, since it was his movie and he made it cheap, he's got real gross participation.

As he says in the podcast, after the movie hits a certain breakeven point (which it likely is very close to doing if it hasn't already), the money starts rolling in for him and he'll be "rich". From the podcast, it seems likely his deal on this project will let him get what would be called FU Money here.

It's not a terrible system, really. Directors aren't completely screwed, they do ok for themselves.

The real secret is to own the property yourself.
Another shameless plug. I'm slowly bootstrapping MightyCV - a resume platform with hacker leanings. It has integrations with HN, github and StackOverflow along with some other cool features.

http://robeastham.mightycv.com

If you like the look of it you can sign up for an invite at http://www.mightycv.com
This is going to need better documentation than a Yacc description if it is going to catch on.
so if the money is reinvested, as it presumably would be by vcs, this doesn't apply?
The Second Billion Smartphone Users
France is destroying its future wealth and its destroying it fast.

It's already one of the country with the most obstacles when you want to create a business: there are laws at basically every "level of power" and because it's one of the most socialist country of the planet (despite them always saying neo-liberal are supposedly in power) there are a great many level of powers. It's mad. Consider yourself lucky if you want to start a technology startup: it's relatively "easy" compared to, say, wanting to create a factory.

Why are there no french Google, FaceBook, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, etc.?

And the people defending these socialists are intellectually dishonest: we're assisting at the utter failure of the nanny-state (think socialist Greece and socialist Spain that skyrocketed the debt and drove the country into the wall) and yet the socialist manage (by propaganda, being basically in control of both written and televisualized press) to make believe it's all the fault of the liberals.

This is sick. Just sick.

Now I'm fighting teeth and nails to get my point across: if you're a french entrepreneur, do like me: leave your country. We're in a world where, thankfully, people are still free to move. So move while you can. Incorporate your startup in Luxembourg (like Skype did). Incorporate in Switzerland.

Flee France. That country doesn't deserves you nor the future wealth you're going to create.
You must not have got to the end of the article? He doesn't need to have ever figured out the odds before when he was always just buying it for the entertainment value.

>I think of it as a discretionary entertainment spend. I get literally hours of enjoyment from fantasizing what I’d do if I won.
Similar thing happened to a friend of mine who worked at a game development startup. A company was set up for that game, and the whole crew of developers were hired by it, while the two "founders" held the parent company. Everyone worked for low-to-no wages under the promise that they would see bonuses based on sales.

When the game released, all the sales revenue went to the parent company and the only ones receiving bonuses were the two founders.
Unless you can use per-user keys (for example, if you control the server API) you basically can't do it. This is the same problem that DRM faces: you can't give the user the keys to the car and prevent them from driving it.
Hedge funds are hedging against (sort of) specific bad things happening. To do this, they buy into an investment that (hopefully ;-) has a [edit] positive correlation to the "bad thing" they are hedging against so that, if the bad thing messes up your primary investment, the hedge investment gains compensate (some of) your losses.

Example: http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/6473/where-should-i...

Since winning the lottery is not correlated at all with something bad happening to an investment firm's investments, it is a very poor hedge against their investments failing to come through.
IMHO, it should be stronger than that. When they charge people money for products, they are responsible for supporting them whether they accept it or not. Aren't there any legal protections for customers in scenarios like this ?
I wish projects like this wouldn't force you to install their libraries in order to play with them.

Sure, it's just /usr/local, but @#$#@$@# it's annoying when you have to make install on the dependent library before the core application will install.

Use scons. or a makefile. or cmake. Or build a static binary. I don't care; but look at the go source archive for an example of how to do this right.

This isn't a good first touch of a project:

./configure: line 12296: syntax error near unexpected token `CO2,'
./configure: line 12296: `PKG_CHECK_MODULES(CO2, libco2-1.0 >= 0.1.2,,as_fn_error $? "required module missing" "$LINENO" 5)'

hint: you'll notice autoconf isn't in the list above. :P
VCs have funds with limited timespan. They can't reinvest endlessly. And either way, an investor needs to have a decent measure of liquidity in order for said investment to be attractive, so locking it down even more than it already is would be counterproductive.
110% agree. With 'enterprise agreements' though, which only the large companies can afford, you can get X support tickets, or call in numbers, etc.

I remember working one place that had that in place, and we hit an REALLY odd SQL Server bug (or, atleast it appeared to be a bug to us). We had top level support in place, but only had X per year, and no one would authorize us to use it just yet - "keep working on it for a bit, see if you can figure out a solution", because they didn't want to "waste" one of the calls if it turned out to be our mistake.

MS is in a weirder position, because offering direct support would cut out a lot of the consultants and ecosystem which they've trained/certified. You're expected to engage those people for support (although... they didn't write the software, so how they'd 'fix' something if it went wrong...?) Google has no such ecosystem to point to.

Yes, who would choose a bank for your critical banking needs (or a vehicle company for fleet management, etc) where your primary or only means of support was random forum postings that were staffed by volunteer workers who had no authority to fix things?

I tend to think this state of affairs evolved out of earlier beliefs that computers were "hard" and had some sort of black magic mystique around them.
I had my own Google frustrations lately:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/10/16/the-dreaded-google-loc...

Nothing as serious as a phone number that was already in use, but frustrating nonetheless.

What's even more frustratingly difficult is that they do provide a tremendous amount of value with a series of fairly integrated products.... leaving would be very difficult and costly.
Because it wouldn't make them money (expected value) and would probably be against the rules anyway.
Yes, if they're charging money, I agree. I also think the revenue those money-paying customers bring is such a small slice of the pie that they simply don't care. But yes, there possibly are some consumer protection laws in place. Good luck finding anyone willing to try to sue Google over this though.
I did read the article 6 of the finances law on which my article comments. I'm unsure you have. I am sure however that you neither read my article, or any of the many explaining why this 60% top bracket is significant, ie for investors who are an essential part of the startup ecosystem, and make their money only on a few big hits with large payouts.
Thanks. Like I said, I haven't kept track of Ubuntu, so I wasn't aware of the change of focus.

Given the possible pricing of Surface devices, it would be interesting to see WinRT on the Nexus 7. But I doubt Microsoft would let it last.
As is, the N7 works just fine for me as a SSH terminal to a proper Linux machine in a pinch. Had to hack (or more precisely, hack the hacks in) ConnectBot[0] a bit to make it recognize modifier keys normally on BT keyboards, but not too bad overall.

[0] https://github.com/ConstantineXVI/connectbot
Reminds me of https://live.gnome.org/Vala
A mathematically friend who gambles a bit expressed it this way:

"Chances of winning - 1 in <some ridiculously high number>
...I'll play anyway - somebody's got to win."
I love how you say "the Nexus 7's OS" when clearly, Android is used on a wide variety of devices (who calls the software on their phone the Droid Razr's OS or the Galaxy SII's OS? just saying...).

Oh, and honest answer: It's a full-suited desktop OS, so you're right - it's not different than throwing Windows on it (aside from the obvious differences in the Windows/Linux software architecture and distribution models). You still get all the benefits of a full desktop OS :)
It's fine to say I play the lottery because I like to be irrational, but in that case it's a complete red herring to play the I-am-a-statistician card.
I don't think it ended up selling that many tyres but a cost benefit analysis would be interesting. It was a good branding exercise.
Sorry, my explanations were confusing.

The thing is I don't "replace" asteriks with HTLM tags, I keep the asterisks visible.

If star text star displays star text star in bold (ie, not removing the stars, inserting </b> stuff around the whole construct), is it still a "markup language" ?

Let say I process a text file to display it in HTML and the only addition I do is say "quoted content gets italicized". Is that a "markup language", or just some "text embellishment"?

The issue I am trying to address is the learning curve with all the existing markup languages. Without going the "wysiwyg" editing way, that is.

I figured out that if the "marks" are visible in the final result, they get easy to learn.
A new invention for filmmakers, a light weight and strong stabilizer.
You didn't look very hard.

http://www.rabbitmq.com/ha.html
I used to look for the best product on the market when I was considering a new service.

I no longer do that. I now look for the product whose support will be there for me when disaster strikes.

No matter what product you choose, at some point, something bad will happen.
Of course they'd make token gestures to block it, to appease their shareholders. But like their loose grip on Office piracy, a WinRT pirate is far better for Microsoft than a legitimate Android or iOS user.
Then you'd have to pay for the services they provide. The reason banks can afford to have support staff is because they're paid (quite a lot) for the services they provide (directly or indirectly.) Not so for Google or Microsoft (Google's profit/person << banks' profit/person)
"It said it was a North American standard."

A little confused, North America (or the individual countries) doesn't have a standard for side for gas.
Go for it. I grew up without TV other than occasional exposure. Its a good choice. There is an opportunity to introduce children to Wikipedia before TV now. Creation before consumption. Could be interesting. Clay Shirky wrote a lot about creation first.
Archive of some of the best articles from Marc Andreessen
What happened to the commenting system? I found that to be useful for annotations
I call this BS. Ms have quite large support organization. comparing Google's non existent support Ms show how clueless you are.
Insurance is about trading money for utility. The assumption is that your utility curve in the lossy region is sublinear, i.e. U(-$1e6) << 1e6 x U(-$1), and that the probability of a large loss is low (e.g., 1e-6).

In that case, if you pay a guaranteed -$1, your expected utility loss is U(-$1). If you have a 1e-6 chance of losing $1e6, your expected utility loss is 1e-6 U(-$1e6) < U($1).

Thus, it makes sense to pay $1 to avoid the risk of losing $1e6.

Insurance which pays for high probability, low cost events (e.g., gas for your car, birth control pills) is indeed foolish.
>We couldn’t seem to find any way to subscribe to events and publish events without a single point of failure.

Really? You think this doesn't exist? In fact, this is nothing but a deployment concern for any mature message broker.

http://www.rabbitmq.com/ha.html

http://activemq.apache.org/masterslave.html

http://hornetq.sourceforge.net/docs/hornetq-2.0.0.GA/user-ma...

There are lots more options than these, and you can also use heartbeat/lvs to take something like redis and make it HA.

I'm glad you had fun inventing your own distributed hash infrastructure, but please do not attempt to convince other people that there are no other options out there for reliable and highly available messaging.
No life found in Antarctica's buried Lake Vostok
Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course at Coursera, week 1 contains about 1 hour Linear Algebra review: lectures on vectors, matrices, their multiplication, transpose and inverse.

So do you think these lectures are not enough to bring one up to speed in applying these concepts in linear regression?

Of course, a formally educated person has taken a full semester of Linear Algebra, and solved dozens of homeworks of "transpose this", "invert that" etc. so it's difficult to guess how much homework of the boring kind would be needed before one is able to apply these concepts in problem solving.
> Is the Django Book ready to use as it is to learn Django? The Django docs I think are not enough for someone starting out learning their first web framework(they seem to go deep right away and don't provide a structured way of learning).

It's pretty outdated by now, so you'll likely spend more time checking the differences (i.e. class based views). Same goes for Practical Django Projects[3].

You're best off looking at some online tutorials, another Django Book[1], or thinking of something to build and approaching it from scratch. Django's docs are very good, and there's a lot of open source projects out there that have likely accomplished something similar.

PS: I'm disappointed Reinout van Rees book was canned[2]

[1]: https://github.com/mariuz/django-book
[2]: http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2012/05/23/djangobook-schl...
[3]: http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Django-Projects-Experts-Deve...
Zoy
The article talks about stuff like meditation, that isn't really a placebo or custom. There is research done that is showing benefits of this.
This finally happened. Narrow specialization at its best.
Er. This seems a little overly hostile for something that amounted to "Hey, here's this fun thing I made. Anyone else want to play with it?"

Rather than arguing this point again, I'll just point at the other comment thread that addressed these concerns.

Fun fact: I didn't mention highly available messaging in the post at all. I mentioned single points of failure and bottlenecks. Those aren't quite the same.
It says "provisionally accepted". What's the provision?
Well, it automatically implies a pretty high baseline of performance and (if it's done right) unmatched portability.
That the only thing left to do is to pay the "processing fees".
I thought you just missed this. Apparently I was wrong.

I think you're missing the point a little.
We are indeed less willing to agree on what constitutes truth
The Principle of Charity and Theories of the Mind
http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/ top right hoover over "Menu"
Oh, sounds like a very prestigious journal.
By interactive do you mean you made a webpage for your resume? That's been a good idea (for tech/programming jobs) for years now.

Shameless example, mine: http://stephenballnc.com/resume/
The reviewer did not even look at the references... They are certainly the best part.
C is eternal. Have you tried Go?
No, that's not what happened: this journal is a scam, they publish anything vaguely math paper-like in exchange for $500.
http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/speakerdiarization
A highly available system has no single point of failure.
Thanks for the django-book updated link. This seem to be exactly the scope of the linked github in the op.

The amazon book looks outdated and I am a bit surprised by the lack of django 1.4 learning material for newcomers to the framework as this is key for it's popularity.

I hope the linked updated django-book will provide enough teaching to get me up and running and be able to mainly use the django docs after.
I fail to see how that would get your down voters to respond to you.
Yeah, this is about the only reason I'd be interested in such an OS (the switch to a linux workstation with just a mouse/keyboard). I don't think Canonical has the manpower to produce a polished OS like Android Jellybean. Oh well, it'll be interesting to follow.
You're correct that MS has a large support organisation. But your message is pretty aggressive. That kind of tone isn't liked here, and you're probably going to get down voted for it.

Welcome to HN though.
France is doing us foreigners a big favor by taking on an experience in wealth redistribution through extreme taxation. It takes some balls to do something that may destroy your economy to this extent.

We should all thank the French voters who took on the risk to put this government in control.

(I think it'll end in tears, but it will serve to deter the voters in other countries the next time they think of starting a class warfare against their entrepreneurs)
You either have far too much free time on your hands or you're attempting to break into advertising. If anything you've exposed one of the dirty little secrets about the Web: essentially that people can quite easily be fooled and will routinely accept things they see and hear at face value without fact-checking or understanding if the information originates from a credible source.
> The assumption is that your utility curve in the lossy region is sublinear

Which makes lottery tickets all the more a bad idea. Not only is the expected return in dollars less than your investment, but thanks to the diminishing marginal utility of money your ten millionth dollar will be worth less than your ten thousandth. Lottery tickets are actually worse than their already crappy EV.
I have not... Should I?
This!

It ends up making open access journals look bad because people make the wrong associations.
I bet he meant the "Nexus 7's OS" as opposed to TouchWiz or Sense or whatever UI has been bolted on top of the Android innards.

> You still get all the benefits of a full desktop OS

like hunt-and-pecking in the smallish menus on a 7" screen? this is just ridiculous, and (given their UI plans) way too early to be useful.
The money is so big because it has rolled over, it has not been won for a while.
Yeah, it looks like they fixed it. All the apostrophes were misconverted most likely from Windows-1252 when I read this yesterday but they are fine now.
The Trouble With Chromebooks
Howard Schultz says Starbucks is not making money in Britain
I found this pretty interesting from an Internet subculture studies viewpoint.

Anyone happen to know any other similar studies/experiments?
Does Uber Keep Half of the Tip?
It's not accepted. The referees were very kind and gave the benefit of doubt to the authors and gave them the option of revising the paper.

I think the Journal should be lauded for being open minded but principled. I think the authors should fess up and offer the reviewers a beer for wasting their time.

PS. Original post http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102

PPS. Well, after reading the response letter it seems the Journal was kind of eager to publish. In the Neurosciences I'm used to more guarded language from editors even for papers that have basically been accepted.
It can, however, have bottlenecks.

All of your solutions, based on the conversation below, separate the messaging into its own service. Which isn't really how I want to work with my software. I guess the best way I can describe it is as a different aesthetic. There are certainly ways to accomplish the same thing, technologically, but they all feel wrong to me. Introducing a message queue, with a broker, and needing to implement HA on that simply to remove that single point of failure... That feels like a workaround to me. I prefer working with a decentralised pub/sub framework. Personally. Personally, that difference is worth the development time and lack of maturity. To me.

Which is why I slapped an alpha label on the project. Why I made no attempt to convince people they should switch over, or even that my way was objectively better than any other way.

I had an itch. I scratched it. I released the backscratcher I used as open source so other people with the same itch could scratch it. I'm not sure why some people think this is a contemptible act.
Wow, that's a great analogy. I will use that next time I have to explain the flaws of client side security to somebody.
Don't the Nordic countries have a lot of taxes? They seem to do ok in the startup scene. My wild guess - I don't know how things are 'on the ground' in either France or the Nordic countries - is that France tends to have more bureaucracy like here in Italy. So that it's not just a matter of "make some money, pay X in taxes" which is pretty easy to reason about, and somewhat "fair" (even if we all have different opinions) if you're paying taxes on profits, but rather feeling like the system is full of obstacles and people who are either indifferent or actively hostile towards the idea of someone opening a business.
Well then he's the world's worst businessman, as there's a Starbucks every 5 blocks in London. Or is he just being charitable and supplying all the ventissimos and "talls" (translation: "small") without caring about making a profit?
As long as new technology emerges, new opportunities will emerge with it. There's also reason to believe that technological change is accelerating, leading to ever more possible great ideas.

Your 'perhaps in a decade or so there will be no more great ideas' reminds me of many failed predictions about the saturation of technology.
Simplify your life with an SSH config file
Netflix Caught Using “Pirated” Subtitles in Finland
Rules to sell thousands of copies of your ebook
Ask HN: Why what worked for GE didnt work for Microsoft
The HR principle of proactively identifying and removing the bottom 10 percent of workforce is cited as one of the great innovations under Jack Welch and as one of the factors in the great progress of GE under his leadership. However a similar method is cited as the reason for Microsoft's lost decade where really smart ppl left the company due to politics introduced by this HR policy and it resulted in affecting team morale.Why did two companies have such dramatically different results with a similar method. Was it an issue of implementation or does the principle only work for manufacturing and not knowledge industries