skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right that producers have the right to price.

However, it's not just about price, it's also about being able to get a product in the form and through the channel that a consumer wants. This relates to the current argument about the availability of legal downloads vs pirated downloads. And wait, wait, yes, you're correct, producers have the right to determine product form and channel. :)

The way that piracy can work for market correction is that it's information. A product's sales may not be performing as well as a producer would like. Is it because it's too expensive? Or do people just not want it? It could be one, or the other, or both, or other. Piracy, while illegal, is still an indication that yes, people do want the product, and it's desirable enough to break the law to get it. So what can we, the producer, change to convert those pirates and other non-consumers into paying customers?

A producer could (doesn't have to) use that extra information to help him think about his product's format, or channel, or price.
I am not sure why the audio cd analogy doesn't hold. Quoting the original post:

"Software ISN'T a t-shirt. A t-shirt needs cotton. That cotton must be dyed, woven, sewn, printed, packaged, shipped. Software ISN'T a meal. A meal has ingredients, and the more you spend on them, the better, and that goes double for your chef's salary. People understand where their money is going. People are just fine with paying through the nose when they get their money's worth. But no one likes to feel like they have been taken to the cleaners."

Looking up on Google, I can get 500 audio cds for around 185$ (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=audio...), per CD cost is 37 cents. Do you think that I should be able to buy the latest album of Backstreet Boys for 37 cents? Where do you account for thousands of dollars spent on recording the album? What about paying the artists? ....you know the 'fixed costs'. We still happily pay 9$ for an audio cd because it gives us pleasure which is worth more than 9$. As he says, 'getting money's worth'.

Tell me again, how is software any different? You buy the software ONLY IF you think software gives you more value than it costs you to acquire it.
"I am surprised that this post reached top of hacker news."

I sometimes upvote articles that I disagree with so that they'll live longer, because I want to see more discussion about them.

Does anyone else do this?
I'm not sure why people come out with these moral axioms whenever piracy comes up.

"Monopolists should not have a legal right to their market"

Such a big statement with no real way of supporting it any further (the converse is also true). None of the rules around copyright or property ever came about because of any kind of "Natural Law" or moral reasoning. John Locke, be damned. Property rules were created based on existing conventions, or in some cases, created to correspond to defensible borders. You can hum a song or talk about it or play it on your guitar when you get home.

You can't sell copies of it? Why? Because printing, pressing & such are (were) possible to regulate with laws. Humming is not.
On the contrary, there are several different ways to interpret "should" and much of economic literature is focused on making those interpretations. For example, is a given policy economically efficient? social welfare maximizing? from a firm's perspective, profit maximizing? or more generally, does it lead to a society that you would want to live in?
You are free to question PG's motives and cry censorship, but to me, that blog post was malicious, tasteless, angry drivel that I really wouldn't want to see on here, whether it was about a YC company or not.
Insofar as a country says "copyright" is a law, it is a real right. But that isn't what i'm saying. I'm saying that making statements based on moral judgement based on economics is wrong.
Hi PG, I really want to apply to YC this time. I browsed through the application but I am not sure if you will consider my case for the application: single founder and based out of India?
That's why I originally voted this up, and why I voted you up. I wanted to see an intelligent HN discussion on the finer points of why this is bullshit.
Too easy, mate!
Sure, SaaS is a good model for some things. It certainly does have that nice feature of being unpiratable. That makes sense of course... in SaaS you aren't selling a digital copy that is fundamentally worthless. You are selling computing power, updates, support... stuff you don't need bunch of arcane laws to protect!

As copyright laws ease, some will turn to SaaS, but others will embrace the model of letting a lot of people have something for free, and charging those that can afford it.

Heck, people like to give books as an example of media that must be protected and that will never be free. But guess what... the most popular Kindle authors these days give many books away for free.

Moreover, the biggest companies have been turning a blind eye to piracy because they believe it helps them sell more software, for ages. Microsoft is the biggest example... as Bill Gates once said (and I paraphrase) - I'd rather you steal my software than buy my competitor's.
Avatar was shot in 3D for more than purely artistic motives.
The issue here is that the IPCC has wielded the 'peer reviewed' phrase like a hammer, and repeatedly knocked anyone on the head with it if they presented something that wasn't peer reviewed. There are many, many quotes from the IPCC brushing off conflicting information with 'it's not peer reviewed, like all of our science'. Now that they've been found to not apply their own standards, others are using that same hammer to hit back with. Even if it's only one or two instances, the damage is done.

Now that one error involving a non-peer reviewed (so called 'grey' reference) has been found, people are crawling all over the rest of their reports, finding other instances. The WWF report from 2005 that contained the himalayan glacier melt story is still cited throughout the report - they just removed the offending factoid about 2035.

Until they comprehensively go back and apply their own standards more rigourously, they are going to attract more and more scrutiny, more errors will be found (the sheer length of the report almost guarantees that). And their current position of 'it's only one error' is going to look bad.

If they are to be effective, there's going to need to be some serious changes put in place. People's support for the IPCC-backed science and policies in Western countries is eroding (if you believe the polls) and while not yet under the 50% mark, it's not in the direction the IPCC wants. Until they make some changes, I don't see their support rising again.
I agree: 2D Boy does not serve as a good example or counterexample of the OP.
To be fair to the subversion guys, its pretty darn easy to setup real-time backups. Use svnsync and hook it up in some post-commit hook.

Having said that, to have git completely backed up, it's not as simple as a clone. You will need to mirror another repository so that you can get all of the branches, tags, etc. Additionally you will need some sort of post-receive hook so that your mirror is kept up-to-date.

Now, my conclusion with backups for svn and git - both need some intervention. Its not as simple as "press this button and it just works".
And that one was a copy/paste from my late comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071727
You're kidding. Does this mean that people with something to hide can act to protect their secrets by traducing would-be whistleblowers?

This changes .. everything.
> it's also about being able to get a product in the form and through the channel that a consumer wants

Why do consumers have the right to their choice of form, channel and price?

If the seller is unwilling to provide as the consumer prefers, where does the consumer get the right to force the producer's hand?

What's wrong with "if the buyer and seller don't agree on terms, the deal doesn't happen"?
A Playland for Apps in a Tablet World
While I agree with you, you might ask the same of Debian's swirl logo. Both parties were rather petty and hypocritical.
> The copyright holder should realize that rampant "theft" would indicate that their price is too high, and they should lower the price or create higher value work that people value at their desired price.

And if the copyright holder doesn't realize or doesn't lower her price, then what?
I am sorry, but I disagree.

Producer has the complete right over their product. They can price however they want, they can decide the form and the channel by which you will be able to acquire the product. Piracy doesn't provide information. A free market with healthy competition lets producers know what consumers are looking for. And trust me, they do a fine job at it.

Imagine for a second that there was a 100% fool proof way to protect digital content. Do you think recording companies will be fighting with Apple about letting them sell the music on iTunes? If I were to guess, there would be an online music store from Amazon, from Microsoft, from Google, from Pandora and what not. All competing with each other trying to sell music. A song would probably cost less than a dollar because suddenly you can tap in to much larger consumer base. Unfortunately, there is no way to protect digital content and we are back to our imperfect world.
I have to admit Basecamp is really underfeatured, no matter how they want to sell it. But the cost having my own hardware installing and managing it, even if its just 1-2 hours of my time is more expense then a year of Basecamp or one its competitors as a hosted. service.
Yes, I imagine some do. The U.S. MSM continue to act as if he is alive and the various messages that keep popping up are likely to be from him. That, for a lot of people, represents the normal point of view, from which any deviation, however well supported, is suspect. (See the Wikipedia article on ObL for the sad results of this phenomenon.)
I specifically said 'large-scale piracy' because I agree that a sufficiently dedicated individual will always be able to steal intellectual property.

That said, an IP market doesn't need perfect government protection to survive. It just needs to be good enough that those who wish to steal additional copies incur substantive risk and/or cost.

I'm not arguing it's the best or only way to proceed, simply that it is a possible and seemingly viable way to do so, and as such, people would do well to recognize that the future is not guaranteed to be copyright and patent-free.
> Of course, there's a massive externality to deal with: how do the people who create media get money for it? But in an optimal system (which we might not be able to create) everyone would still be able to consume as much as they want.

How is it "optimal" if it doesn't address the obvious cost?

We don't consider compensating producers as an externality where physical goods are concerned, so why is it an externality for intangible goods?
You're basically asserting that people are rational agents doing subconscious (or perhaps conscious) algebra in their heads. I thought we learned long ago that people are not rational agents. Sometimes it is useful to model people as rational agents, and sometimes not. But to say that people are actually motivated, in a real factual sense, by some cost equation, just doesn't correspond to reality.
"Producer has the complete right over their product."

I completely agree with you.

"Piracy doesn't provide information."

Everything is information. Some is more relevant than others, and relevance can be because you decide to treat it as relevant.
Probably querying UIDevice.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UIKi...
Perhaps I'm missing something but I don't see too much benefit from OTPs. If the machine in front of me is compromised (e.g. Firefox bug, Flash bug, Adobe Reader bug, Linux kernel bug, Windows bug, etc etc), a OTP doesn't stop a man-in-the-middle attack. Once the attacker is on the remote system they can open a backdoor. Game over.

Sand boxing seems to be a good idea (e.g .http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2008/09/three-approac...). KVM and Xen seem pretty heavyweight. I was looking into using Smack to do lighter weight sandboxing but didn't get too far yet.
Monkey sphere: http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
"Why do consumers have the right to their choice of form, channel and price?"

I'm not saying they have that right, not beyond deciding to buy or not. I'm pointing out that some consumers do try to appropriate that right, and that's one indication of demand.
"we don't do any blackhat... Kind of silly."
http://twitter.com/Jason/status/8177377715

Note that if he did do black hat shit, and wanted this to blow over, this is the perfect dismissive response: starve the story.
It looks like we certainly have enough people to get a meetup put together. I will put together an invite for sometime in early February.
Maybe Firefox is superior on OS X. Chrome definitely runs it faster on my XP box.
You just described the field of journalism.
They can determine the capabilities of the device running software with their analytics (e.g. OS version, camera resolution, display resolution, etc.).
Merlin is blacklisted from Hacker News? Link to discussion about this?
Once bitten, twice shy
Flurry provides a phone-home library that gets linked into your application.

Apple seems to have been careful to avoid press over a new User-Agent showing up in logs, but I guess they didn't bother spoofing syscalls or using an app firewall.
I've had to use some non-scriptable, proprietary software that this might actually be useful for in doing repetitive tasks. This is especially true at some places where I have done some engineering consulting (non-software). It would probably fall in the category of ugly hack, but would also save some headache for me.
Wow thanks! I'm always surprised at the generosity of people on the internet. =)

P.S. If there's anything that you need some help with, feel free to contact me through the email in my profile.
It is bullshit.

It's confusing between the economic outcome in a perfectly competitive market, "price drops to marginal costs" with a normative statement "price should drop to marginal costs."

Every business article you need. Every way of gaining "competitive advantage" is a strategy for avoiding this outcome. If the moral imperative,price should drop to marginal costs, existed and was enforced, doing business would practically be illegal.
That's why we have the "flag" button. It doesn't blacklist sites that are mean to YC companies.
"... Four years ago, when my brother and I launched the very first beta version of Oodles.com, we actually received an offer from Wotif.com to acquire the business. Not surprisingly, we popped the champagne. But we didn’t stop there. Even though nothing was signed at this stage, we actually put our stuff in storage and moved to Brisbane to continue negotiations. To top things off, I even sold shares in a competing business so as to avoid any conflict of interest. Of course, the deal fell through. Wotif.com was immersed in preparation for its $400 million IPO and felt the acquisition would become too much of a distraction. ..."

Heard that stumble before, #13 "we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated" ~ http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
Cheap Life Insurance In your San Jose
We offer the affordable and best life insurance coverage in your San Jose. Invest wisely in San Jose life insurance now to make your future secured financially.
Girls of Pic Gallery
Sikuli is a Python scripting engine with easy image recognition
Sikuli is the coolest Python project I have ever seen in my ten year hobbyist career. An MIT oepn source project, Sikuli uses Python to automate GUI tasks (in any GUI or GUI based app that runs the JVM) by simply drag and dropping GUI elements into Python scripts as function arguments. Download at http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/ I also did this podcast about Sikuli http://media.libsyn.com/media/..._20100124_Sikuli.mp3

What do you think?
It is also an indication of the demand for car stereos when someone cinderblocks my window and rips the stereo out of the dash.
Github is US-hosted so presumably it has to follow suit?
pivotal tracker is the best.

pivotal tracker site: http://pivotaltracker.com

my own blog post on initial reaction to using pivotal tracker: http://proudly.procrasdonate.com/project-management-and-moti...

a follow-up post: http://proudly.procrasdonate.com/retrospective/
Dunbar's number generally applies to communities that are organized around content or ideology.

So for example, a web forum gets too large for everyone to agree on what's on topic or off topic, so it splits in two. Or a democratically run government can't agree on whether the society should be gemeinschaft or gezellschaft.

The YC network is more like a dating site than a polis, so while there may be some limiting factor I don't think it would be Dunbar's number.
Feature requests from Sales
"submit successive drafts of your application as you modify it"

My favorite quote, I like that. I've never been a big fan of college applications in one shot.
Not true... Everything is data, not everything is information. Information is processed data that has been able to produce useful conclusions.
Christopher Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us
And thereby repeat the mistake in a different form ?. Here is an oppurtunity to make the web more 'open' and they are trying hard to do it.
Even a casual search of ScribD content will reveal the motives for Mr. Mann's post. He has every right to be angry. The malice has been well-earned by ScribD's repeated actions with other creator's content for nearly its entire history.

While it's true there's no accounting for taste, I suggest you consult the dictionary on the definition of 'drivel'.

At the end of the day, PG can do, essentially, whatever he likes with the content, routing (or lack there of), and posting permissions on Hacker News. It's HIS site.

It's a shame that ScribD doesn't seem to play by an equivalent set of ownership principles. Namely, hosting and making money off other creator's content without so much as asking their permission; let alone proffering any ad-revenue sharing.
How many people steal Quickbooks? How many people steal ERP or CRM software?

Now how many people steal Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and computer games?

Its overpriced for the market, based on the added marginal value. The supply is greater than demand (especially for digital products - versus services - supplies are virtually unlimited), and people are correcting it by downloading it off the internet for free. These people probably wouldn't have bought it anyway - so its not stealing. And its not wasted resources by the these firms so they can't count it on the books as a loss.

This is economics 101. A supply curve goes up with cost, a positive relationship with price. As price goes up, demand goes down, and the market price is where they meet in the middle.

Because it cost virtually nothing to copy bits, the supply goes up. As the supply curve shifts up vertically, the demand doesn't necessarily change (demand curve shifting to the right) to compensate to keep it at the same price. Since demand is still at a constant rate (a certain number of people want to play these games), but supply is practically unlimited, ethically people can talk themselves into stealing it for free (correcting market price).

As software developers I think HN is a perfect forum for audience polarization, but the fact of the matter is both arguments have their merits and can coexist without mutual exclusion.

After reading the article then looking at the comments I was actually very surprised. But I'm merely adding my portion to the discussion.
I'm pretty stunned by how bad the movie player on this site is. In terms of how handles buffering and showing the timeline to the user it's almost the inverse of what you would want to do.
7 people at a LAN party I attended last month were in the process of trying to buy the latest Borderlands DLC when someone pointed out it had Securom. I had it in my Steam cart when I found it out, and promptly removed it. Everyone who played the DLC that night played the pirated version instead.

There are certainly cases where piracy is a market correction of sorts, but you certainly can't just narrow it down to a single cost-to-produce argument like the linked article. It's a large variety of different problems and incentives tied to a single, very polarizing, issue.

Trying to come up with a magic bullet solution/answer is just shooting at the wind.
And that's what surprises me a bit. Apple is known for being super-secretive but they don't think of filtering the network connections of their new device? Sounds like a big oversight.

I'm not saying that this story is not true, and actually, maybe Apple is doing that knowing full well that there are good chances someone will notice it, creating more discussions around their upcoming announcement…
Hm. Cool, but doesn't work on Safari Mac. The "Kinda Player" lib seems to be to blame.
In the US in my experience a full-time employee costs around 150% of their stated salary with some exceptions. It varies depending on local regulations and startups can often finesse these costs by doing without office space, health insurance and tax withholding, but payroll overhead will be a part of your spend.
This is an interesting comment, but it drastically oversimplifies the state of the art. An actually-good Wikipedia article:

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

The short answer is, "use a well-known full disk encryption product, and don't worry about cipher modes".
How many people steal natural gas, electricity (yes you can equate stealing electricity to stealing digital media: it's transient, marginally inexpensive to transmit, etc)?

The difference is simply a matter of enforceability.
Very insightful breakdown. I guess I still feel it must be possible to reconcile the two goals, but I have a feeling you may be right that I should try and put one off for now. Food for thought, certainly. I really appreciate you discussing this with me
Natural gas is a resource that can not be digitally copied, and you may think electricity comes from vapor but I can assure you it costs money to produce it unless you have your own solar panels and are off the grid.

And its not necessarily a matter of enforcability as it is availability. If natural gas and electricity were as easy to steal as computer games or WiFi then people would do it. Natural gas and electricity, while commodities, are still limited by our technology and can not be given to everyone with a computer as easily as computer games.
I don't see how the web browser is the right place for codecs to live. I have multiple web browsers and multiple media players installed. Do I need six copies of every codec?
Fixing the mysql gem install error
Nibavmatrimony.com
Create your matrimonial profile and find your dream life partner.
NibavMatrimony.com was born as the dream product of Nibav IT Solutions Ltd (http://www.nibav.in ) based in Chennai, India. This site would always be a helping hand for the match makers to boost their highness and find the right life partner with minimum effort.
NibavMatrimony.com the free matrimonial network in India aims at ‘minimum effort maximum effect’.
Is the idea here that Apple has just now started testing the new product with actual iPhone apps?

If the idea of the new product is that it runs iPhone apps, it would have been doing so in the shop for many, many months now.
I'm going to vote for JRuby. Simple syntax and excellent project leads.