skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, sort of. (Surprised?)

If someone broke into the owner's house or office and copied their work, then clearly a crime has taken place. However, in the vast majority of cases, the owner gives or sells a copy to someone, and a descendant of that copy is what ends up being repackaged or copied for free. In this case, the problem was not that someone "took someone's work and repackaged it as free", but that the owner already sold the work.

The idea that the owner can sell something and still own it is simply at odds with digital copying. No law will change this, but it's apparently harder to communicate than King Canute's point about the tide was. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
Darn, now I'm going to be downmodded into oblivion ;)

But I don't understand. Let's say Wal-Mart is selling a chair. Some guy comes in and steals the chair. Wal-Mart "forgoes some revenue they feel their entitled to" because of the missing chair. Except wait, they were legally entitled to that revenue, same with music's licensing agreements. The only difference is you can't prove that someone that stole music would've bought it if he didn't have the option to steal it.

..So because it's a gray area it's not stealing? Making up a new word to call the behavior just to make everyone feel better seems like a bad idea.
"How would you write a web application to deliver some music without being able to steal it? You can't."

No, web applications are not a panacea. But some business model will work, and finding that business model is far more profitable than attempting to legislate a hold on digital copying. If there's some particular type of thing for which there is no profitable method of distribution, then that thing won't be produced for profit. Law can distort this to a degree, but such distortions always produce more problems than they solve. The market always wins. :)
Well, okay, I totally agree with that. I just feel bad about it because there is intrinsic value in a piece of music, as there is in a book. It's creative, and as such it's a thousand times more valuable than being able to do backflips or other specialized skills.

..But because it's so easily copied, it's not really worth anything unless the laws enforce it, which can be heavy-handed. So I don't know the right balance.
I personally found this very useful. Thanks Nickb!
Damn. I had an idea for this a year ago and never went through with it :( Even bought a .dj domain and made a javascript player. Good luck to AFM.
Stealing is taking the control of property from someone, not just the physical property itself. Because taking control of something is usually done by physically taking it, this aspect seems to define stealing, when really it's secondary to what stealing really is.
I think the first copy of a book or other creative product (that will sell well) is incredibly valuable, and I have some ideas for ways to get a large chunk of that value for the author/artist, but they require micropayments to be widespread, and that's what I'm working on right now. :)
I agree. Build it for your need, but pay attention to how others use it and possibly tailor it for them as well.

Also, maybe, work on some sort of business model so you might be able to continue working on it.
Cool. Good luck! :) I'd like to hear more about it.
Feature request: Please change the UI so it doesn't look so Web 2.Oh :-)
Humans are driven heavily by certain "heuristics and biases". An interesting chapter-length introduction is available at http://www.singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf . You'll be surprised at the results, and you'll see that you've fallen victim to many or all of these biases. He cites some books for more info on the subject (but I haven't read them).

Also, check out the excellent blog http://overcomingbias.com . (Warning: the blog has many authors, and some of the posters are more exciting than the others)
This writeup connects with the video recently posted here:
"TED Talk - How to make your consumers happy - Malcom Gladwell (video)" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38839

The talk was also about how people aren't able to say what they want, but it proceeded more in the direction of how to still get useful results from focus groups and surveys. Instead, Paul handles rationalization more generally, in the larger context.
The difference is that the instance of the chair cost Wal-Mart money.

Imagine if you had a machine that could reproduce something from a photograph of it. You could then go to a shop and take a photo of a chair, and reproduce yourself a chair from it. But the shop wouldn't take an actual loss in that case.

There's nothing gray about that difference. If you steal a chair, the value of their inventory decreases by one chair, and if you merely reproduce one from a photo, it remains the same.

Nor do we need to make up a new word for the behavior. The English word is "copying." It's centuries old at least, and the behavior, in the case of manuscripts, goes back millennia.

So I'm not proposing we use a new word to make everyone feel better. I'm proposing we continue to use the existing word, instead of the one the music industry is trying to get us to switch to to make everyone feel worse.
Three people on news.yc:

The first makes observations and looks for patterns. "After observing many startups, I've noticed that X is often the case."

The second makes observations and looks for rules. "After observing many startups, I think it's best that founders do X and avoid Y."

The third makes observations and looks for models. "After observing many startups, I've noticed that if you do X you frequently get Y."

(I won't name names.)

Rationality isn't so much a tool as a category of tools. Even among people who are more rational than most, there are still certain thought patterns that we fall back on again and again, even within the sphere of rationality.

As for product design, I can understand treating all people as irrational. After all, all people are sometimes irrational, no one is always irrational, and some people are never rational. It's just a numbers game.
This argument is circular, because it assumes that a digital copy is property in the same way something physical is.

Did a monk making a copy of a manuscript "take control" of it? Not as most people use the word "control."
thanks, i'll do that next time.
The word "copying" works if it's not illegal, but it is. You have to say "illegal copying" for accuracy.

Let's look at it from another angle. Let's say someone paints a nice painting of a hand scrunching up a piece of cloth. If you think about it, an original painting is a form of artificial DRM. It's artificially more valuable than a copy, which causes implicit DRM.

But let's say it wasn't. For whatever reason, people just didn't feel like the originals were worth paying for. What do the artists do who want to make a living that way, if they're not good at other skills yet? Maybe they've devoted their whole life to painting. It puts a lot of creative people out of business for no good reason. It's not because their work isn't valuable, it's just because people can copy it.

Do you think they should be protected?
Sorry to hear about your upload troubles. We've heard that the Linux Flash Player isn't quite prime for handling uploads, and we've gotten a small handful of people who have trouble uploading particular files in any OS. Hope to fix this soon!
I agree 100% with the article.

Many applications are not designed at all to be useful, because in the last months the market didn't rewarded
just useful applications, but a lot of fashionable ones.

Sometimes to build something of really useful is much harder than to build something like twitter, but it's like there is no longer a connection between how well a tool will solve a long time problem and how much buzz, users, money it will get.

Add to this the fact that web 2.0 users tend to be the same set of users using all the services, and trying a lot of new ones: it's ridicolous the number of people that are just happy to add a new website to the list of websites they already use everyday.

Instead to look for web apps solving problems many users are looking for problems that the just-released-web-app can solve. Instead to focus on writing interesting articles for their blogs this users will spend all the day visiting analytics, feedburner, sending messages in twitter about new services, reading tons of RSS, ...

Fortunately there is a parallel web 2.0 market of valuable things that save our time and make our life better. Developers seeking for a real business in the last years should look at this.

It is also very important to try to improve over the useful things already released. To make a better flickr or a better delicious or a better reddit can be ways more interesting than to invent something of totally useless just to be new and original.
85k and not stopping :). In fact we had to start capping people's upload speeds because we're afraid of affecting our other users.
"Let's not turn this into digg, shall we?"

I think we can extract some generality from your comment. Another post mentioned the fall of Reddit. I don't know if Digg was ever as interesting, but the two aren't too dissimilar now. You could have also urged this not become like any of thousands of flaming forums.

I is clear the news.yc community is becoming stronger and more solidified. Hopefully, the small subset of news it is attacking will limit the size and audience to only the most thoughtful. My guess is that you'll have to do more than pleas like this to ensure that.
Optimal mobile internet is not a stripped down version of the desktop or even the desktop itself
RSS feed for newest YC News
Took 5 seconds to do with Feedity: http://www.feedity.com (a startup I founded)

Newest YC News RSS: http://www.feedity.com/?xccH2xIG%252bIhCywXfu149J8ltp3V3aMhk...

YC News Jobs RSS: http://www.feedity.com/?http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

Btw, I'm seeking micro seed funding or angel investment for Feedity's 2nd major iteration. The startup is based in Melbourne, Australia.
Did you attend the The SF New Tech Meetup?
I went Aug 1st Women in Tech:
http://augustsfnewtech.eventbrite.com/

I liked the iPhone app and thought the speakers were interesting. Nothing really blew me away.

How about you?

Next meetup Sept 5th:
http://newtech.meetup.com/15/
Would you please elaborate?
I don't think most people enter into any such agreement. Usually nothing is said about that before the sale, and any contract presented after the sale cannot be valid.

That doesn't mean US courts won't enforce it anyway, of course. :( Eventually that will change, I expect.
Google Mashup Editor vs Yahoo Pipes: http://www.nilkanth.com/archives/2007/07/06/google-mashup-ed...
A Few Startup Tips from a .Net Startup
Since I develop the Club Starter Kit, a simple ASP.NET starter kit for beginners, I have come across many people that are small startups. I LOVE web startups! Mainly because EagleEnvision.NeT used to be a startup. So I'm going to fire off some tips, for those of you reading this.
In my opinion, the tips are too basic. A startup is not just a web site, its a service with a lucrative edge.

Now that your startup is an year old, what's your user-base and how much revenue has been earned?
The information is the property, it doesn't matter what the format is. iTunes will still charge you .99c even though what you're buying is only a digital copy.

By "control" of something, I mean the ability to decide what happens to it. A monk copying a manuscript doesn't take control of the original, but he is able to then decide what happens to that information. That's what's being taken.

In the case of a monk I would guess spreading a religious text wouldn't be a problem for the person who gave it to him. But when someone copies the latest Harry Potter manuscript the author/publishers do have a problem, because they are losing something. As they can no longer control what happens to that content their ownership is diminished. And when someone's ownership is taken from them against their wishes, what else would you call that, other than "stealing"?
Startup Tip: Save bandwidth with Gzip (Eg: YC News can save upto 80% per page)
The Gzip module compresses the HTML as it sends it out. It is compatible with all major web servers and all web browsers. Using Gzip can save HUGE amounts of bandwidth, and increase the overall performance of the webserver.
Good -- now you just need to keep it from growing once it reaches a certain optimal zone :-)
You're very welcome! :)

PS: Love the site as well. Great tutorial.
I always wondered if there was a feed for New Items. Thanks for this.

One question would you be able to include a link to the YC site to view or leave a comment? If not, it's still cool.
Yes! Thank you. Perfect description.
Apparently Winston Churchill.
Rails and the notion of Stupid Databases Being a Good Idea
How do you host your startup web app?
This is a general survey.

What type of a hosting environment do you use/prefer for your startup web application, regardless of the OS, web server or technologies used?

Choices are:

1. Shared (100+ sites per server)

2. Semi-dedicated (10-50 sites per server, but resources are shared)

3. Virtual Private Server (VPS)

4. Dedicated

5. A custom solution (eg: clustered). Please mention below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_M...

A little post-modernist theory, just to add fuel to the fire. People have been struggling with the issues surrounding cheap and easy reproduction since the 30s - but art has survived. It just changes.
I thought news.yc'ers would appreciate the hack. The new FB platform left this opportunity wide open.
Young Startups with Sweet Offices (Pic)
Move over big corporations, the youngin's are here.
New Yelp API Too Restrictive To Be Useful
Buzzword: Web-Based Office Docs Never Looked So Good
New Processors Present Problems, Payoff
Best Facebook Apps for Supersocial Geeks
Desktop apps are dead (from a desktop apps developer)
More pictures of startup' offices
Premature Ajax-ulation
How's it been working with the AppleTV? I know Apple stripped out a bunch of stuff that wasn't needed by their apps in a software update, but people are still installing 3rd party stuff on it.

They could have started an arms race with the iPhone hackers with their first update, but they didn't really do anything other than force people with hacks to wipe their phone because the OS wasn't image wasn't in a known state. With any luck, that's all they'll continue to do. We'll have to wait and see. AT&T might be a cranky partner.
If your app is highly data-driven, the default answer for what programming model to use is now "web application", barring special circumstances (e.g., you absolutely need to have computationally intense stuff like 3D graphics or machine learning).

Common installation packages, the ones that tell you to shut down everything else and make you click next 50 times just to install one little app, suck and could be improved.

I don't see how this corresponds to "the desktop is dead".

If your badass uber-leet Ajax app takes 20+ seconds to load, uses up 80-140+ MB of RAM, feels slow on a Pentium 4 machine, does less than an Apple IIe app, and could go down at any time leaving you totally helpless (as happened the other day in spite of the high-speed "backup" systems those high-profile Web 2.0 sites allegedly had), you have failed. Deal with it.

You can use simple reality checks here. If your clunky "rich text" editing widget thingie is crippled in ways Notepad is not, you have failed. If your spreadsheet app is maddeningly frustrating to use for more than 100 rows or if you know any keyboard shortcuts at all, you have failed. And so forth.
good point.

PG: any particular reason you have not turned on compression? Is to get benefits of chunking?
Good article overall (its main message that is), but there were too many generalizations that either aren't true or just stupid:

ex. "After all, people have managed to learn how not to put everything they see in their mouth, learned how to stop on red and go on green... They'll learn not to drop viruses on their desktops."

ummm way easier said than done given the stats and me watching my mom's generation use computers... not to mention how it's a lot harder building something stable and secure as opposed to trying to break it (not to mention MS's general failure at building good stuff)

"Do not point your finger at .NET, it is still a subset of Win32. It is built mostly on top of Win32, and it is still not available for us to use! Yes, .NET runtime is not part of the most popular Desktop out there - Windows XP."

This didn't happen out of stupidity, MS wanted to bundled it. What stopped it was a thing called an anti-trust lawsuit... (.NET was made to kill Java)
I wonder what W Street analyst track records are? If I remember correctly a W Street analyst predicted that PS3 would slaughter everything and that the Nintendo Wii would be a distant 3rd....

Correct me if I'm wrong, but do these bear stearn analysts have their heads up their asses? Yahoo has already been following a social networking strategy (how successful is another subject) - they've already acquired a lot of s-networking sites like delicious and flickr (which ironically happens to be a recommended buy in the bear sterns report - wtf: did I read that incorrectly or do they not know what has already happend in years past?)

Am I completely off base or are these guys full of it?
Well google gave w-street investment banks a nice big middle finger when they did their ipo on their own....
I don't know about data warehousing with spatial data, but two guys I was taking two a couple of months ago were both working on web apps that worked with geospatial data. Both of them were using postgres for geospatial use and endorsed it over both mySQL and MS-SQL.
I see no way to vote. (FF2)
"no one is always irrational, and some people are never rational."

Would you mind clarifying this?
Lawmaker Wants Yahoo Probe
The link above redirects me to an Associated Press page. http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/T/TOO_FAST_COMPUTERS?S... works for me, though. Perhaps I'll comment after I read it, but I thought I should add this for now.
Hyperlinks are better than buttons. I think the blending of information and functionality in web apps is superior to desktop apps, and I'm also a desktop app developer. So many things that are inherently superior in web apps... the web browser platform is a very mature text and graphics rendering engine. Updates happen automatically and seamlessly. I could go on, but its not just .NET
does yc news filter duplicate urls?
i was just wondering if yc filters multiple listings of the same url... because i see a lot of duplication submissions on here when a link extends beyond the first page of links.
Yes. Actually, it takes you to the original thread (and upvotes it for you?).
The Startup Game: Making serious cash off casual web games
"Junky backend" - "Flickr is PHP", ahem. Flickr's backend is actually an object lesson in how to do a good backend and scale it.
Well, if people actually went for "the most attractive" leader, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could have been avoided all together.

If you put me on an automotive focus group (and I'd love to be on one) I would simply point out that the 1965 mustang is many, many times better looking than any car in the last 25 years. Hell, the crappy '62 Ford Falcon shares the same characteristic. The first company that puts out a decent looking car today is going to make 50 billion dollars off of it, simply because the market is utterly starved. Hell, put a 4-banger in it--no one really cares about that.

Sure, we're irrational. But even if Molly Housewife and Joe Sixpack judge people based on good looks, at least their estimations are roughly accurate. GWB is better looking than John Kerry. Who's the idiot: Molly Housewife or the DNC? The republicans went out and looked for "Mr. Electable", while the Democrats looked for...(not the "best")...but the guy with tenure and connections and 3 purple hearts. Very reasonable.
I'm guessing not too many of you use MSFT outlook. I could seriously load up yahoo and google mail 10 times each before outlook is running. There's a certain performance advantage to webapps...the GUI stuff (the real code that renders graphics) is always in RAM. The full process from hitting gmail to displaying email requires very little hard drive access.
currently this page is scoring an 82 on YSlow. Needs to make use of a CDN. Needs to add expires headers to external resources, and Needs to Configure ETags.
I've found a bug. It should work now.
Filtering duplicate URIs isn't enough to get rid of duplicate submissions. There are often several forms of a URI for the same page, and the same writeup is published on several news sites, never mind similar takes on the issue at hand by multiple bloggers.

This isn't something an algorithm can solve, but a good UI for searching old stories and annotating submissions ("this is the eyewitness take on that") could be worth it to reduce the amount of perceived redundancy.
Three Monkeys of Test-Driven Development (TDD)
Library of Data Models for Business Scenarios
10 Largest Databases in the World
So we agree that copying isn't stealing because stealing involves an actual loss for the victim, right?

It's fine with me if people want to use the phrase "illegal copying," but they should understand that they're on swampy semanic ground, because the meaning of "illegal" fluctuates depending what laws the music and movie industries have most recently bribed their pet congressmen to pass.

How to encourage young artists is a totally separate question. However, I will say (having been one) that most social-engineering type approaches go badly wrong.
Kaizen, the oldest productivity improvement tool
How to Moonlight as an Entrepreneur
How I saved over $4000 on software?
You would take someone's ownership of a recording if you took the only copy of the master tape. That would be stealing. Merely making a copy of a digital song on your friend's computer changes the copyright owner's ability to control what happens to their content not one iota. So by your own standard it's not stealing.
Intel IT Manager Game
How do you propose I turn on compression?
What web server do you run? (Apache on *nix Or IIS on Windows)
I'm a big advocate of gzipping the web. People should be aware that enabling gzip can cause some differences with page rendering due to the extra decompression step. It also increases CPU load on the server. There can be other minor issues too. No show-stoppers though.

Also, the percentage of compression savings should not be confused with the savings in load time. An 80% reduction in the size of the response does not mean an automatic 80% reduction in page load time.
thank you for your time and suggestions. yes, i was a webdev in my day job before i quit

you're right - some tagline should be fine.. any ideas?

for viral angle: i plan to make generated code for embeding arena into a web site

gabbly looks interesting, i didn't see it before. thanks for information

cheers
"To be effective, Kaizen needs 100 per cent participation from everyone involved." "Think, rethink and attempt Kaizen, with 100 per cent clarity and understanding;"

If you happen to not see improvement, you can't blame him!
thanks for feedback!

i fixed a bug you've found.
hmm.. but it would take me an additional week.. it's too much time in a web2.0 world ;) btw, your site (altruistiq.com) looks awesome.
New protection against karma bombing, damage undone
I'm considering adding an additional layer of protection against grumps: to only allow users as many downvotes as they've made upvotes. That way each user's net contribution to the global karma would be at least neutral.
mod_gzip & mod_deflate -- for html, css, js files + anything else with content disposition "text/html".

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/07/high_perfor...