skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's great that Netflix finally beat HBO's subscriber figures but given that subscriber figures are cyclical (though HBO's have evened out now that HBO Go is out -- which incidentally was largely the impetus behind HBO GO, to curb subscriber churn during period's when new series aren't on), it'll take consistent effort and good programming for Netflix to remain in this position.

The problem is, that strategy takes money. And that $8 a month per household is probably half of what HBO is getting per household for its 29m subscribers (plus what they get from home video, licensing and international).

Netflix has pivoted from trying to be cable to trying to be HBO. That's all well and good but let's not try to spin this as how cord-cutting is "winning." It's not. If cord-cutting was winning, Netflix would have had more subscribers than HBO quarters ago. Instead, Netflix's next big strategy is to get bundled WITH cable providers (which incidentally is a smart approach and could be what really lets Netflix's subscriber base balloon).

HBO, Netflix and Showtime require original content to really push the needle. HBO has an advantage of having spent the last 20 years (since Larry Sanders, really) cultivating the best showrunners and writing talent that have in turn, brought in some of the best programming in the history of the medium.

Moreover, HBO has a financial advantage in that they make most of their original series in-house. Netflix does it two ways. They fund series outright like House of Cards and Arrested Development (but to be clear, 20th Century Fox still produced and owns the video and syndication rights to AD) or they acquire the first-run rights (Lillyhammer, Tom Fontana's Borgia). Even in the cases where they do fund the development, a secondary production company usually still does everything -- it's not in-house. HBO, by virtue of being a subsidiary (and the most profitable subsidiary) of Time Warner, has access to Warner Bros. Television, which cuts down on a lot ancillary costs before it comes time for distribution.

It'll be interesting to see if Netflix can afford to acquire or do full-contracts with certain production companies and creator shingles to get rights to future projects. Alan Ball has a longstanding deal with HBO and David Milch has a semi-exclusive with them too.

TL;DR This is great for Netflix, but all it really does is make them a real contender as a premium content network. It doesn't impact HBO's current economics or have any impact on the realities of running a content business. Which is basically that good shit is expensive.
If you're a real hacker, you should probably manage your own email/file server.
PwC report on Startups in Australia
Doesn't that need to be normalized by the change in the auto fatality rate for the whole population? I recall that fatalities have dropped off for everyone because of advances in safety technology in cars.
> The parent also said that particular app is well established and that his newer apps do not fair as well.

Wrong. The parent post claimed that the higher cost app $12.99 led to much higher revenue than the lower priced apps at FREE with ads and $.99 to $1.99 cost. In fact so much so that the parent post wrote that no more low cost premium or premium apps would be developed.

Please, do your research so as to not waste people's time correcting you on this website.
For someone live in a country where traveling to work require an hour or two, the "How" will be much more interesting than the "Why".
At ~$200 for a decent tablet, they're cheap enough that you can start using them as single purpose devices. The kitchen grocery list. Outside of every meeting room, showing the room calendar.

Did you see the Kindle Weather Display? It's basically that, just in monochrome, and a Kindle is $69.

http://imgur.com/a/17Y89
You just say "VSRE doesn't work" without mentioning that the only reason is that people don't already say it. That's my point. Maybe we can agree that we shouldn't jump straight to the acronym. But if we want this kind of custom, and I do, it has to start somewhere, not with a global memo but with people just doing it. I'm just going to start saying "short reply ok". With any luck that will catch on, and then we can abbreviate to "SRO" or whatever people wind up using, and the world will be an ever so slightly more efficient place.
Berkeley responsible for massive privacy breach. "sorry"
I have two Geeksphone Keons in here

And how are they? Are they stable enough for everyday use? Are they nice to use?
Yes, both for being surprised with how much a random person could do, and for how little a so-called "qualified" candidate could.
Netflix Shareholder Presentation - Profiles are Making a Return
Wisdom from comp.lang.perl.misc from the mid '90s, that's served me well my whole career: "_Always_ throw away the first version."

It provides two major benefits: 1) it lets you give yourself permission to take unwise shortcuts and h=just hack it together til it works, because 2) you've agreed with yourself it's going to get a ground up rewrite, which you'll approach with a much better understanding of the problem (and the solution and the customers and...)
That becomes the question. The problem is that their current production slate indicates that they maybe have one -- maybe two -- standout shows to do a year. HBO typically has 4 (right now that would be Game of Thrones, Girls, Boardwalk Empire and True Blood with The Newsroom being an easy slot for #5).

Right now, Netflix's original programming track record is really spotty aside from House of Cards -- which is absolutely HBO quality and would likely have been an HBO show if Netflix hadn't outbid by such an absurd amount (granted it was the right strategy to make but I get why HBO didn't match)).

Aside from Arrested Development, however, nothing on their current slate looks like it will rise above Starz quality. And that's a problem if you expect people to consistently pay $8 a month.
It mostly doesn't result in catastrophe. That doesn't mean it produces optimal results.
StarDrive doesn't have the 3D RTS elements of Homeworld (which made that game), it's more of a standard top-down affair. They have some fun ideas though, and a new 4X is always fun to learn.

One of Homeworld's strengths was having actual 3D space combat rather than the fake-3D-in-a-2D plane that almost everyone else has. I'm surprised more people didn't take heed of their relatively smooth control system for handling 3D movement.
Kafka 0.8 Producer Performance
That's an interesting question. I'd guess that most code born of academia has a rather short half life in terms of immediacy for the author. However, the benefit of having any sort of second pass look at anything from a software engineer's perspective would be a major boon.

You might have better luck in a quasi-research public venue. For example, I work at a public agency that uses your tax dollars to forecast travel demand, and then use the results of that statistical modeling (plus a thick shmear of political wrangling) to decide how to spend more of your tax dollars.

Much of this model code is developed as part of an honest to goodness research process (yay!) by contract software developers that public agencies can afford (not so yay). In other words, things like revision control and unit tests are mostly dismissed as extravagances and unwarranted delays. Validation that is performed doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

I'm betting there are a million and one of these kind of projects. Some of us are trying to figure out internal and external issues so we can post this sort of thing on places like GitHub. Others are already there.

If you pick a topic you're interested in, and ask the right people, it'll probably be worth some authorship cred.
They're leaving the Facebook platform, because Facebook wasn't a platform up until very recently. It was a communal toilet of shoddy, spammy apps that did add any value to the experience or the brand. Good riddance!
It's like the author realized he didn't have much to say, so he just upped the font size.

It's not a novel observation that people improve as they go on. Strange that the community considers this to be a front page article.
Classic BOFH (#nostalgia)
Did you get your starred.json file from Google takeout, yet?
I'm wondering if this is the mindset that most people have. The idea of putting you're entire personal dataset (and work dataset?) into a free service has always seemed terrifying to me. Especially one whose entire business model is based on using that data to serve you ads! I keep local copies of everything and backup daily. I don't trust anyone with such a complete picture of my digital life. 'The cloud' is overrated, at least the free, ad supported version is IMHO.
Yes. The Windows-Intel platform is fully backwards compatible back to Windows 3.1 with 32-bit.
Yeah, you couldn't pay me enough to live in a city. Comes down to the fact that people suck, and in a city you can't get away from them. I'll take my 2 acre yard any day.
This thing happened to my ex, although it's more likely she did the wipe. She had her home machine and two office machines synched with DB, and her stuff was gone at home and Office One. We went to Office Two, disconnected from the net, turned the machine on and copied her data to USB.
From ages 16 through 36, I lived in Cambridge, MA and then Manhattan, and didn't own a car. (I of course rented cars on business trips, and borrowed my parents' when I visited them.)

What I missed most in not having wheels was convenience in shopping and so on. Groceries aside, that's now largely obviated by e-commerce. And grocery shopping alone is hardly a reason to have a car ...

Now easier rentals -- Zipcar! -- raise a whole other reason not to own one's own car.

Further, there was an era when cars provided teenagers with private space, a bit of a chance for sexual exploration, and so on. When both their parents have jobs, however, that's less needed. That's reason #1 much of the "romance" of cars is gone.

Reason #2 is that electronic items have supplanted cars as major aspirations. Phones, computers, etc. are gateways to the world the way automobiles used to be.

Reason #3 (small but still worth mentioning) that cars lost their romance is their boring, aerodynamically-wise designs. Reason #4, related, is the environmentalist pushback against cars.
It probably should be normalized in many different ways (but if we hypothesize that teenagers are dangerous drivers, taking teenagers off the road would reduce both the teenage fatality rate and the fatality rate of the general population).
Thanks for replying. Yes, and I have the html file from GBookmarks, Python 2.6.8 and 3.3.1 too.
> It wasn't so long ago that you were a douche if you walked around in public talking into a cell phone.

You still are. It's still considered rude to subject everyone to your cell phone call. These people walk up to the register while on a call, block the sidewalk while distracted, and otherwise are clearly not actually with us in this universe.

http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/07/12/breaking-the-rules...

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2438977

http://formingthethread.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/cell-phone-...

> Or if you drove around showing off your crazy automobile contraption instead of riding a horse like a normal person.

Yep, the 'showing off' part is still douche.

> Or if you wore a timepiece strapped to your wrist, instead of on a chain in your pocket like a proper gentleman. (And later, if the watch on your wrist was some kind of ugly LCD thing, instead of a handsome analog face.)

This one too. Once watches stopped being a functional item (the advent of phones), they became douche status badges.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/fashion/watches-are-redisc...

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/30/150719282/in-cell-era-timepiec...
> This is a great development, considering the recklessness of many young drivers and their relatively high accident rates

A lot of people think that if obtaining a license is harder, the roads will be safer, but it's more an urban wisdom than science. If you take various numbers from around the world, you will notice there is no linear correlation between those two, especially when harder is pay more than you should and sit in class harder, instead of learn how to run a special stage on snow and ice harder. Also, in places where driving is a privilege, drivers tend to feel privileged. The sad truth is just that almost everywhere driving training simply sucks, with the well-known exception of Finland.
Thanks mate, I've reworded that as it was a bit awkward anyway :)
If you live in a (bigger) city you simply don't need a car...

I can drive to the store by bike or even walk there if I want.

I work in a different city than I live and travel to my workplace by train in 30min.

The only things I need a car for are travels to are tiny town which doesn't have good public transports or when I need to transport something thats to heavy to carry.
Unlike these other things, owning Glass is an "all-in" proposition. You can put the cell phone away. You can park the car. Hell, you can get off the Segway even.

Glass? It is on your face. It is part of your identity. Having met a few people wearing it, it is hard to imagine a more in-your-face device to own. It's one step shy of a tattoo on your forehead. When you meet someone wearing these things while they are not commonplace, the first thing you will notice when you meet them is Glass. If the perception is that Glass = douche, guess what, your first impression everywhere you go is going to be "douche" before you even get to introduce yourself.

You can take it off, sure, but if people are wearing them around their neck all the time they will eventually start just leaving them at home.

It's a huge, huge problem. I wish Google luck but also at the same time worry they are going to set back wearables for some time by pushing a Segway-like device onto the public before it's ready.
I couldn't watch more than 15 minutes of lilyhammer
Couldn't these things just be increasingly safe car designs? When I started driving in 2005 side curtain airbags weren't even that common much less all the safety features we have today.
It's absolutely licensing.

When content is licensed, there are different licenses that are distributed based on who pays and what the service is:

* First-run -- you get to broadcast it first
* Syndication -- you get to broadcast second
* Digital -- you can also show the product on a digital platform (this was how Netflix was able to do their loophole with Starz back in the day, Starz sold the digital license and streaming license to Netflix because the content owners hadn't specified that such a license was unable to be resold or relicensed -- that' since changed and now it's an extra fee if you want to do that like EPIX does)
* Digital streaming -- can be streamed but not watched offline
* Rental -- traditionally DVD/Blu-ray
* Digital rental -- iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, etc. -- includes offline

Netflix would have to pay significantly more for its content to offer an offline mode. Even HBO, who owns most of its original content -- doesn't do offline because again, the costs would be exorbitant.

EDIT: To be clear I'm not being all-inclusive, as JFB points out below me, there are even nuttier licensing schemes too. And this is before we even talk about international, where you typically have different agreements with every. single. territory.
I think having data open and available is good for everyone.

Not necessarily everyone. Collecting good data is hard, long, and tedious, and the 'glory' part is the analysis. People get accolades for making analyses, not for good groundwork.
There's also the question of whether the original poster was telling the truth, or even told the whole story. If for example, the spreadsheet had a form for the entry of usernames and passwords, and someone came across it (maybe because it was e-mailed out to lots of people), and reported it as an attempted account phishing form, that would certainly explain an account getting suspended for an TOS violation --- and as far as I know, someone who is trying to use their Google account for phishing doesn't get escalating warnings... and I think most people would agree with this.
Do we have any indication that these are actually Leap Motion style gestures? When I read this I assumed it was merely a two-finger gesture on the trackpad on the side of the device. In a recent TED video, a Google UX designer said that they looked into such gestures for Glass and decided not to include them in the product [1].

1. http://ed.ted.com/lessons/rapid-prototyping-google-glass-tom...
I was under the impression that finding a cofounder was something that takes time and shouldn't be rushed, which is why it's often compared to getting married.
Is it good or bad? Both are strong DRM proponents. Where are DRM free alternatives?
I believe you're mistaken; the Time Warner that owns HBO is not affiliated with TWC anymore.
I'm not sure what it means for my account to be dead, it seems I can comment as normal? is there any way to make it undead, without making a whole new account? I'd be willing to change my tone, I'm trying to become more positive this year ^_^
I'm pretty sure people consistently pay $8/mon, despite the original content. You literally need only stay out of my way, be easy to use on multiple devices, and only entertain me 2-4hrs/mon to keep me coming back.
Well that would have ruined the whole point of the article. HBO accounts for 25% of all of Time Warner's profits. That's significantly more than what Netflix can offer. And it would also be useful if they did the revenue per user figure -- but again, that wouldn't be a tweet-worthy and sexy headline. (It would have also required the author to understand the content business but I digress).
"This is a great development, considering the recklessness of many young drivers and their relatively high accident rates."

Wow, restricting people's freedom, a great development? Seriously ? Why not restrict access to computers considering the recklessness of "hackers" ? And so on.

You are going to build a bleak future if people do not drive as much.
> Call people douchebag for their actions.

Like choosing to wear a stupid-looking $1,500 distraction-generator?
>This is a great development

As someone who was socioeconomically prevented from getting a license until his mid-20s, no, it's not. A license in many cases is a ticket out of poverty and a chance to break the cycle of poverty. This is especially true in rural or far-flung suburban areas.

That said, the poor behavior of young drivers is a legitimate concern. I'm all for addressing it. Just not a fan of economically disenfranchising people.
Ask HN: What workloads would this VPS config be good for?
I'm considering starting a VPS hosting company with an emphasis on speed, and I've got some gear on the drawing board which would provide just 2 instances, or tenants- and that's fine for my purposes, which are small to begin with.

I was wondering what kind of workloads the configurations I'd be providing would be good for, so I could get a handle on the target market for who would want this kind of VPS.

So I'm writing in to HN tonight to see if anyone here would care to advise as to what these configs would be good for. What workloads would these VPS' attract?

Each VPS:

4x vCPU @ 3.5 GHz (4GHz Turbo)

16GB Memory

100GB 6Gb/s Intel X25-E SSD-based disk in RAID0

Free 1st NIC/IP, 500Mbps Link, 10TB Bandwidth @ 0.10/GB Overage

+$5/month per NIC/IP Pair >1

-or-

4x vCPU @ 3.5 GHz (4GHz Turbo)

16GB Memory

1.5TB 12Gb/s HGST Ultrastar SSD800MH SSD-based disk in RAID10

Free 1st NIC/IP, 500Mbps Link, 10TB Bandwidth @ 0.10/GB Overage

+$5/month per NIC/IP Pair >1

Thanks in advance.

-c
It is meaningless, but I think saying "it was that one thing" is also probably being too specific, and there is a requirement for a happy medium.

If the answer was obvious (in hindsight even) usually it is imo, an oversimplification of success.

Many times success isnt doing one thing right, its doing the right things right enough, and the wrong things not often enough to piss everyone off.
I've used the car/fridge comparison before, but when I think about it, I'm actually excited to get a new fridge (my current one is too small), and I'm not sure I'll ever want a car. I suppose cars have their uses, but they're expensive, dangerous, boring and smell bad. And I'm nearly 40.
How small is small? Portland is nice, as is Austin. Boulder and Madison are both nice but full of hippies. Boston, Pittsburgh and Philly are all pretty cool if you are thinking mid-Atlantic/northeast; Charleston and Savannah are great if you want to be further south.
Yeah, that's the key, I think. Netflix has a huge amount of viewing-habit data at their disposal, and it's tough to imagine that they didn't target their content acquisitions based on detailed information about their viewers. House of Cards was for the HBO/West Wing set, and Hemlock Grove clearly isn't, but they must know that there's a dedicated audience of schlocky TV-horror enthusiasts in their viewership.
Tragically, children are more likely to be killed in car accidents in American suburbs than by violence in American inner cities.
Using the export2enex.py file?
Thanks for the heads up -- if only they weren't so expensive and if only we already had the expandable ones.
No, by consistently I mean without churn.

See, what happens with Netflix, HBO, Showtime -- even regular cable -- is that subscriber churn happens. It's often cyclical. One of the reasons HBO staggers its release schedule for its programming is to try to get people to pay year-round (it's also why they introduced HBO Go -- in essence they gave up their home video revenue, or greatly limited it -- in exchange for keeping people subscribed year-round because of all the content they could get anytime).

Netflix's own figures show that they can jump and fall by the millions per quarter.

If you want people to continue to subscribe every month -- and not cancel after they see the show they like -- you have to have a constant swath of new and original programming.
How do I transition to SSL without affecting PageRank?
"Inheritance" doesn't really exist in JS. We use that word because we don't have a better substitute, but what Javascript has is simply code sharing. You can share code between multiple objects. This is accomplished by using prototypes. An object has access to all the code defined on its prototype (and its prototype's prototype, and...). If two objects have the same prototype they will have access to the same methods.

Now, unfortunately, the native Javascript way of saying "please set the prototype of this object to X" is not very intuitive. So again we reused an existing word -- "class" -- and defined it to be "a thing that creates an object and sets its prototype to be what I want".

However, actually creating these class things is painful and verbose in vanilla Javascript, so everyone uses a library to do it for them. I use classdef [1] because I wrote it and it works just the way I want it to, but seriously there are a million options out there. Go find one and use it.

[1] https://github.com/7sempra/classdef
I feel like what you consider to be "an actual city" is only the top 5-10 biggest cities in the U.S.
This isn't how fashion, or people in general, work. There is a reason they call it a "fashion statement." It's an action that doesn't require actual action.

Basically Glass requires that Google release a product that is fashionable out of the gate. There really isn't going to be second chances with something like this. Google isn't exactly known for being a company that has good intuitive fashion sense. I'm sure they're A/B testing the damn colors for gods sake.
My vote is Austin, TX.

Crime is low, very affordable, and politics are progressive (but the rest of the state is staunchly conservative). Nightlife is good, due to the large University of Texas being nearby and the tech scene is really exploding. Weather is pretty hot though, so you need to be prepared for that.