skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism To me, there is no intuitive moral wrong here to start with.

>Let's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying?

Trent Reznor actually did this recently with his Ghosts I-IV album. It was released under a CC non-commercial license, making it freely copyable. But the only Reznor-endorsed way to download it was to pay him $5. In this particular case, at least, there is absolutely nothing immoral about downloading Ghosts from The Pirate Bay, even if Reznor would like the $5.

Reznor seemed guilty about pulling the pay me to download a CC album; his most recent album had sanctioned free bittorrent downloads of ultra-high resolution music files.
An online-ordering based cookie delivery system would be a nice addition to your store.
In two sentences:

Copyright and theft occupy different legal, historical, and philosophical spheres. Therefore arguing against copyright infringement because it is a kind of theft is fallacious.
If Reznor had not CC'd it, had simply posted it at a URL on his site along with a PayPal link, and said "do not download this until you've paid me", would it still be moral to download it from The Pirate Bay?
My moral relativism on this issue is as liberal as it gets, so my personal answer is a combination of "yes" and "it doesn't matter."
Useful, unless you're my ISP and you dictate that 1Gb = 1000Mb.

Ah, Telstra Bigpond - a team that would mandate pi=3.0 because the value of simplicity far outweighs, you know, actually having practical applications.
i think you answered it yourself. it is just another tool, and it's ridiculously overemphasized
You're right. Copyright infringement is trivial to argue against as a form of free riding. Does your blog post make it in any way easier to reconcile Watterson's rights with the RIAA's demands and the Free Culture people?
Which is why I have to suffer FairPlay DRM to download songs from iTunes. Thanks.
I have one Waffles invite left... ;)
I'm not sure what there is to rescue. I feel like I'm repeating myself.

Matt's argument, however implicit, was that copyright infringement is wrong because it's a kind of theft. It's not, nor has it ever been and therefore his argument is fallacious.

If that's a semantic argument then I guess I'll have to live with that.
Is anybody else getting a 404 when trying to access google doc files?
This is really frustrating... anybody else having the same problem?
Very flawed approach. The restaurant business is the hardest type of business to get into. It's terribly difficult to survive for more than a few months. And the only way to survive is if you have an extremly detailed financial breakdown, with all possible scenarios - worst case and best case.

Only if those all look rosy should you start. And if you want to start that way, you need to do surveys of other businesses in the area as well as your potential customers. This is what people learn in business school, and starting without having a business school person on your team is a great risk.

Also, funding is not your problem. This type of business you are talking about is what bank loans are designed for. The bank loan is made out to the company, so if you fold, you are not personally liable.

If I were you, I'd only do this if I were really passionate about milk and cookies. Personally, I like neither milk nor cookies, so you would not have me as a customer.

At the same time, you cannot start such a store without focusing to a large part on cofee. Coffee is addictive, and will make your customers return. Milk is not addictive, and it tastes the same everywhere, and is much cheaper. What incentive do you have towards making people return to your store when the milk is just the same as everywhere else, but overpriced?
What if I would paint a painting and hung it to my outside wall. I would require every passager that would go by and maybe look at it to pay me $5. I wouldn't be able to legally stop them for looking for free. They would walk away with a copy of my paiting in their heads.

I think this is a one problem. In the internet almost anything is public good. It's available for almost everyone and you cannot or you don't want to shut people of from consuming.

Not related, but the second problem of the copyright is that it's hard and expensive to use it properly. If you would want to legally use a song in your presentation, make a mixtape or even sing a song on your mom's birthday, you would have to go through riias, companys, individual artists, lawyers and applications to get proper rights.

Above process is fine for big corporations, they have the time, money and maybe motivation to do this. Individuals don't have this luxury. We all know that singing that song for your mom is copyright infringement, therefore as mattmaroon says, theft, don't we?
I'd rather sulk.
The Origin of Consciousness
Programming is easy. But most people are not interested in learning it because they have other things they would rather do. But of those interested in learning it, they come forward quite quickly. As opposed to those trying to learn physics or math, both of which are hard subjects.
I would love to come to a place like this. In fact, I go code at a coffee shop near my house, and usually get a tea and a shortbread bar. As others have pointed out, with such a narrow product scope, I think you might have a problem selling enough to make it work. Maybe you could also run a bakery-style operation and sell larger orders...pre-order by the dozen. Perhaps look into distribution possibilities with other places (coffee shops, convenience stores, ?) However, I think the cookies will need to be fairly special/unique to make this happen. This is somewhat similar to cupcakes shops...might be able to find out how they make it work (I bet it isn't one cupcake at a time.)
I'm not arguing against abstraction. I'm arguing that explicitly wiring between components is better than implicit.

To make this concrete, take the example of implementing getters for a class in Python. If my class has four fields

class GetterDone:
a = 1
b = 2
c = 3
d = 4

I can do something like this inside the class to implement getters:

def get_a(self):
return self.a
def get_b(self):
return self.b
def get_c(self):
return self.c
def get_d(self):
return self.d

Or I can do something like this:

def __getattr__(self, attr):
if attr.startswith("get_"):
return lambda: getattr(self, attr[4:])
raise AttributeError

The latter does a good job of eliminating boilerplate, but at the cost of making it near impossible for me to find out how get_a() is implemented (assuming this was buried in a huge codebase).
You'll be competing with every cafe that sells cookies, which is almost all of them. You better have a really good cookie recipe.

For inspiration, read the pinkberry story on wikipedia.
If you plan on trying this, maybe these guys might have some advice for you:

http://www.insomniacookies.com/index.php
I worked on real time analysis for webcam-based interfaces. Nothing very complex, but fast. These days I'm not working on that but I'm going to go back to image dev as soon as I can.
But their post unix, multi-machine, massively parallel, data-centered operating systems are built using unix building blocks...

If you really want to play with a cloud OS, you can find all the parts out there. But wiring them together is not trivial.

places to start:
http://hadoop.apache.org
http://www.cfengine.org/
This Google work was previously posted a little over a month ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176367

Also, it was one of the topics of Norvig's talk at YC's Startup School:

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/peter-norvig-at-start...

(Skip to slide 6 to get right to the image search segment.)
What if you put the picture behind a curtain, and demand $5 to look behind it? It doesn't hurt you when someone shifts the curtain to the side, but it does provide yet another silly example that doesn't resolve the underlying problem.
Google Launches Hosted Site Search; Not Ditching Mini After All
Right. My point was more to highlight the absurdity of saying we shouldn't outlaw natural human behaviors than to get into an argument about the definition of theft. I don't know why he chose to worry so much about whether music piracy is theft or some other crime, it's basically irrelevant to my arguments.
There's enough data to prove it's harmful to some people. Maybe not the overall music industry, and maybe not the artists, but clearly to retailers, record labels, middlemen, etc.
Right, ok, now we're on the same page.

Copyright was created because the old system of guild-based monopolies collapsed and authors demanded that the Parliament deal with the influx of cheaply copied books devaluing their works.

That is, the basis for copyright law is in economics and politics, not morality. Passing off copyright as theft creates an emotionally charged environment where rational discussion is difficult.

I intentionally avoided the larger argument because it's about copyright-as-such and how it applies in the digital age. There are people talking about it who are far smarter than I am.

I'm also intentionally not discussing my opinions about the status quo.
It would clearly be intentionally rude. Is that immoral?
I made no such syllogism. You did. Whether or not it's legally defined as theft is irrelevant to the overall article and not even worth mentioning.
A: Yes, I'd go there. Milk doesn't get enough respect as a drink on its own. However, would I go there more than a few times, once the novelty wore off? Probably not.

B: I really doubt any VC will be interested in this kind of business -- there just isn't enough potential for growth. If you really want to do it, you'll have to do it with some combination of debt and your own money, and unless you already have a fairly large chunk of money already it's just not going to happen.
I would think that it would have a meaning analogous to "grow a set of balls, because you're about to need them".
You're off the rails again. "Theft" isn't what makes it charged. "Crime" is. Plenty of free riding problems are crimes. There's no "economics" versus "morality" issue at play here. Free riding is immoral.
Another potential business model to follow, if you're really interested in the cookie industry is the Byron Bay Cookie Company (www.cookie.com.au)
You don't need to read the article: just admit your mistakes frankly. Repair any damage cause.

Corollary: make mistakes >50% of the time, or you're not really trying.
I find it much more interesting as well. And yes, you can - I showed persisting a closure at the demo, and Gemstone persists continuations as a matter of course in their Seaside port.
"...Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer. You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking."
IE8 will support Selectors API
Use HTTP Basic authentication, probably with .htaccess files? See

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/auth.html
Principles of Disagreement
The long tail, sadly, is mostly urban legend.
This would seem to greatly disagree:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.h...
I agree with you on every point. I hate gauntlet interviews/interviewing and the questions should definitely be targeted towards hire/nonhire.

Only I don't think you meant this the way it sounded, so just to be clear: "does the candidate know how to code?" shouldn't be the only criteria you're testing for in a good hire.

There's much more to a good engineer than how well they code, of course. Technical skills are key, but hiring managers need to ask things that also help reveal behavioral things like communication, teamplay, unstoppable ego, etc.

These can all be major problems and, in my experience (hundreds of interviews now) by the time they're at an on-site interview, these should be a major (if not the majority of) focus. Ideally, if you handle your interview process in an efficient manner, you should be pretty comfortable with the technical skills before an on-site interview where the primary technical questions/tests should be just to verify they weren't cheating off-site.

In the world of ajaxy collaborative text editors (e.g. Google Docs) and screen sharing tools (e.g. dimdim/GoToMeeting/WebEx), etc, there's no reason you shouldn't include programming assignments as part of phone screens using their home machines, observing their coding live on the phone/screen. Bringing candidates on-site without doing something like this (especially for a 6-hour gauntlet interview circus) is risking a day of theirs and a day of yours to find out something you could gather without bringing them in.
Android will be 100% open source, says Google
Slow Economies Mean Fewer IPOs
The good thing is that even if, starting tomorrow, no one makes any more money from recordings of music, music recordings will still exist. It may even thrive -- music creators, the ones still doing it for fun, suddenly feel a lifting of pressure to maximize or even create profit, and creativity shoots through the roof. A diversity of aural culture previously unknown, spread entirely by word of mouth and recommendation engines, dances mainstream, and everyone is the better for it.
Absolutely correct.

Over on the Lisp lists I sometimes make the point that Lisp failed precisely because it was so powerful that one person could be productive enough to get useful work done by themselves. As a result, Lisp tended (and maybe still tends) to attract people who don't work well with others, whereas if you program in C you have no choice but to work as part of a team if you want to get anything done at all. At the end of the day teamwork wins, even when hobbled by inferior tools.
Thanks for the insult!

My point was intentionally narrow and I don't really think it's necessary for me to repeat it.

Whether copyright infringement is "free riding" and whether or not "free riding" is immoral will have to wait for another day.

Cheers,
Jesse
> Programming is easy.

"Green field" programming is easy. Hell is other people's code.
Even for GUI I have a hard time seeing why it would not be useful. In the typical event based environment (windows, frames, list boxes, whatever), how would you implement it without objects?

I am probably spoiled because I did it for too long, but I find it really hard these days to get by without objects.

I took up Scheme programming again, and I like it. I tried to keep it simple and avoid objects, but I find myself missing them all the time. Writing complex getters and setters with car and cad into deeply nested lists does NOT seem simpler.

I wish some of the functional programming gurus would write tutorials on non-object-oriented programming, instead of ranting against OO programming.
thats pretty amazing because i've found that python w/ django on windows really did my head in. so switched to linux!
Sorry that I managed to insult you. Wasn't my goal.
I really like http://www.b-list.org for python/django related reads.
Null terminated vtables. That's horrid. The performance must be terrible.
Is your startup something other than a web app?
This post is inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=207590 where one member ask advices about a possible venture that is not web related. It is always refreshing to find startups that are working anything other than a web app. Even desktop application would do.
Thank you.
Fair point. What do you think of keeping some sort of virtual machine image/player on the flash stick (qemu?).

That way, you effectively get your own computer where ever you go ...
Often they phrase it as intellectual property that needs to be abandoned...

This is very silly ... such a position would only be taken by someone who doesn't understand the extent of IP.

IP is a huge blanket term, legally speaking. Patent law, copyright law, and trademark law have very little in common, but are all "IP". I haven't met anyone who seriously argued that we should get rid of patents...

As far as copyright goes, in my experience, most intelligent, impartial, and well-informed individuals tend to converge on the constitutional opinion: "Congress should promote the progress of useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors the exclusive right to their respective writings" (this is almost a direct quote from article 1, section 8).

The point of copyright law should be to promote progress of useful arts - I think this is the basis on which we should all agree. The term "intellectual property" muddies the discussion because one's right to property is a fundamental right, whereas one's power to restrict other's copying of your work is a power that congress can grant you for a limited time.
If you listen to a busker on the subway, and you enjoy the music, but you don't tip them anything, is that just as wrong, or less wrong?
I don't think I'd call mine a startup yet (more like a weekend project that will hopefully evolve into a startup after I graduate ...).

But, anyways, it's a centralized physical security application (think automated video monitoring on steroids).

I'm still playing with getting a proof-of-concept off the ground at this point - the math involved is pretty challenging for me.
I have a lot of respect and admiration for people willing to do big things and take flak for intangible benefits. Probably my favorite character trait in other people.

I'd want to work there merely because he's inclined to do things like this, even if I didn't care about the office.
Out of curiosity, have you tapped into running local advertising on your free wifi login page?

If so, is that helping your revenue much?
You specifically equated the "theft" of a song with the theft of a car, but your definition of theft ignores the difference between theft and copyright infringement. These are distinct concepts, legally, historically, and philosophically.

Sorry if I misinterpreted what you were saying, but it sounded like you were arguing that there's a moral force behind copyright and that it rests in its similarity to theft.

I'll update my article accordingly.
Copyright infringement has been responsible in increases for 'victim...

Good example, but I think it's more important to point out where copyright and property law come from - that property is accepted in our society as a fundamental right, while copyright is monopoly power which our government may grant "for a limited time" "to promote the progress of useful arts".

See here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.article...
TechStars: Starting your Startup [video]
ours is a startup thats a webapp that integrates with the real world very closely. Almost all our revenue actions happen off line. The business is very people dependent with the web providing us platform to showcase our capabilities and reaching out users.
| I really like the idea, but are you sure you'd be able to sell enough milk and cookies to make up for the cost of running the place?

That's what I'm wondering. Specifically, coffee shops get by (barely, in some cases) by taking relatively inexpensive ingredients, and adding value to them in the form of a barista that mixes them up in hopefully really tasty ways.

I don't see how you can do that with milk. They might be able to bring in some of the world's finest cocoa powder and come up with a chocolate milk recipe that blows everybody away, but after that ... then what?

How do they plan on running a coffee house model without the coffee revenues?

Also, LA rent has gotta not be cheap, especially in the market areas they would want to target. Maybe something like this would be better somewhere on the edges of the Valley, where rents would be less but they'd still have the right crowd?
I quit my full time job last week to work on a desktop application. It's a Mac GTD app.

As much as I like web programming, I didn't think SaaS would work well for consumer products.
What matters is the fundamental question if one can proclaim things like music, literature and images as his property.

I believe the founders of the USA had this argument exactly, and this is what they came up with:

The Congress shall have power [...] to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

Sigh I wish more people read it: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.article...

In response to your question: no.
A large microsoft division in the bay area ?
Actually...just a quick question here. If microsoft had ended up acquiring yahoo, then yahoo would've been a large division right in the center of all companies who compete with microsoft (oracle, google, apple, adobe etc.)

I wonder if this would hurt the valley in general. by bringing microsoft culture down there..Also microsoft might gain respect points among technical people as it assimilates in the area. Any comments ?
Yeah absolutely, but such is to be expected from industries being transformed. All those small retailers, middlemen and most of record label employees are out of the job with or without copyright, itunes and Amazon kill them just as well.
This reminds me of the Cereality store at PSU that gives out free wifi to its employees, who get to sit around 12 hours a day and surf the web while nobody goes in the store.

You better be selling cookies with crack in them or have an extremely good marketing plan. Otherwise, just selling cookies and milk at normal prices will not work.
I recommend this.

Things are painful when development and production deviate - figuring out how to install a particular module or library becomes double the work, as does anything "low level", and you're always running the risk of doing something non-portable, which translates to a bug in deployment.

All the other benefits of a VM, like snapshotting, certainly don't hurt. And if you do a server install of something like Ubuntu, your VM image shouldn't end up being more than a few gigs.
How To Set Up WebDAV With Apache2 On Debian Etch
Or you can just realize that get_X is the Wrong Thing and you should just write GetterDoneInstance.X instead.
Well, MSFT does actually have a fair amount of office space and employees in the Valley, so I'm not sure the effect would actually be that great. The "SVC" (Silicon Valley Campus) actually houses some interesting projects.. I think, from Googling, those include: Hotmail, MSNTV, parts of XBox, parts of PowerPoint, etc.

See the following for locations:
http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/usaoffices...
My bigger programs tend to be about 60% procedural, 20% OO, 20% FP. The highest level "business logic" is procedural - global functions, global variables. Some lower level supporting code is OO, for polymorphism (make certain kinds of objects interchangeable) and encapsulation (centralized bookkeeping and cleanup for clumps of variables). Other lower level bits are functional (systematically build up side-effect-free helper functions from smaller ones) or a mix. I never use inheritance, design patterns and all that gook.
There's enough data to prove it's harmful to some people. Maybe not the overall music industry, and maybe not the artists...

Aha! But that's precisely the catch! It doesn't matter if it's harmful for some people, because the constitutional foundation for copyright says that its point is to "promote progress of the useful arts". Intellectual "property" is not property. The terms is meant to confuse the law.

The question we should be asking - what system of copyright best promotes progress? It sure as hell isn't the one we have now, but it also isn't an abolition of copyright altogether.