skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please try reading more carefully. I did not say that nothing would get created without copyright. I said that some things might not created. And in your third paragraph, you state the same thing.
You should launch anyways.

In 2004, I was going to do a startup with some friends that would ship a product allowing enterprises to "firewall" the IM protocols, ensuring that private inter-company messages stayed inside the company's 4 walls. We gave up when 3 other companies launched products to do the same thing, including AOL, all well-financed.

Companies launched after we decided we were outgunned ended up doing better than the companies that were there at the beginning. AOL dropped their product entirely.

Every time a friend of mine has built a product in a space that seemed spoken for, they've done well. Look at Marty Roesch with SourceFire; nobody would have predicted green fields for SourceFire when they launched, but Marty and his team IPO'd.

The single toughest part about getting a company off the ground is product/market fit. It's finding the right group of people to talk to and having the right conversations to figure out what the feature/function/benefit should be, how the product should be packaged, and what it should cost. Think of it this way: someone else did the hardest part of the problem for you.
Exactly. Don't creative people always push the idea that creative people have to create? That it's a matter of what stops us, not what is required for us to do it.

Plenty of artists, many of which spend years honing their craft, not only don't require copyright, but operate in environments which actively work against any kind of ownership (graffiti artists, for example).
Love Gives Me Hope
While in appearance it may appear that software developers would be harmed if copyright were abolished, I suspect that if that were to happen, software developers would become among the few information creators to get really rich out of it.

After all, software is precisely what has helped the information flow faster and better. In a rapidly evolving, copyright-free world, custom software is king.
The word yoga literally means 'yoke', in other words basically a connection to god. That's what those stretches are designed to do. It's a form of mysticism, like Kabbalah.
I use OpenJDK for Clojure development every day. The only difference I've seen vs Oracle's JDK is that the font rendering sometimes isn't as nice.
I know there are exceptions, but most of the time I find myself wanting to post something anonymously it's because I'm saying or doing something I shouldn't. I appreciate Google's stand. All you need to do is look at 4chan to see what happens when anonymity reigns.
No, the article is about how it is not legally theft.
Anonymous != pseudonymous. An account with a pseudonym is still accountable within the limits chosen by its owner. 4chan is completely different.
Copyright infringement is not theft from the people being copied, but theft from the cheaper alternatives finding no traction.

If my choice of entertainment is "the best in the world, for free" or "some aspiring entertainer, for five bucks" then the choice is easy: best in the world! free!

If my choice of entertainment is "the best in the world, for $20" or "some aspiring entertainer, for $5," then some people will choose to pay for the best experience, and some people will choose to get the aspiring entertainer for cheap.

Copyright infringement in the form of piracy really serves to cement the position of the already top-of-the-chart, and make it a lot harder for any alternatives to make a living. Compare word processors: Apart from the libre-software fringe, why are there no wide-spread word processors beside Word? If Word is coke, why is there no Pepsi, or Snapple for word processing? (The "move to the cloud" and "software as a service" movement is beside this point -- that's a change in "what it is" at a more fundamental level)
To be fair, a great many works of art were created by artists who were commissioned to make them for money.

Dostoievsky wrote The Idiot to pay some gambling debt. Da Vinci and Michelangelo and the other Masters of that age did all their work for wealthy patrons. The reason why Victorian novels are so long is partly to do with the fact that authors were paid by the page.

An argument can be made that at least some great works of art would not have existed were it not for the profit motive. Would someone like Mark Twain still have written books if he could not have made a penny out of it? Probably yes, but probably not as many.
Free Month of Hulu Plus Simply by Connecting Your Facebook Account. Smart Mktg
Eric Schmidt has a way with words. And that way has made Google consistently more and more off-putting from my perspective. The message seems clear: we don't think you should have privacy. Disagree? No problem. Go somewhere else. But that's a problem if there is nowhere else to go... True, I don't have to use Google. But Google might offer the best search solution or the best social network. I guess I'm just out of luck in that case. ;\
Is It Time for Hewlett-Packard to Go Back to the Garage?
Not when you can create as many pseudonyms as you want.
Straw man.

Regardless: 4chan is not a model for Internet privacy.
Bullshit. It's an ad-targeting service.
Megapaper: Super Mario World on 16 Spaces
Does your OS support multiple desktops? Relive your childhood!
John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory would seem to disagree with you.

I'm okay with this stance. If you don't want to use real names, find another service.
This article is pretty heavy on speculation, but even leaving that aside, I don't think the underlying question is one that's likely to be resolved by debate on this specific point. It's essentially an instance of the broader question of how ethics should balance individual versus collective benefit (when, if ever, is it ethically permitted, or perhaps even required, to do something "unethical" seeming to one person if it benefits many more people?), which ties into debates over things like utilitarianism.
Wow. I wonder if HN will follow this trend too. Reddit was nothing like this just 2 years ago.
Agreed. I've lost a lot of respect for Eric Schmidt since reading this.

That said, all this proves is this: No matter what you think of Google and G+, vis-a-vis Facebook - or what you think of any other centralized social-network that's controlled by some central authority - the bottom line is that they all suffer from the same problem: autocratic, dictatorial control by a cabal of leaders who aren't accountable to the users.

This whole debate should serve to remind all of us of the importance of research, development, and standards work around decentralized, federated, distributed social-networks where the user maintains control of their information. Whether it's Appleseed, Diaspora, OneSocialWeb or something that hasn't even come along yet, we need the ability to walk away from the Facebooks and G+s off the world, while not giving up on this form of communication.
I tested it and I don't recommend it. (It was like a year ago though)
It was really slow and some blog posts about the reliability of the data storage backend were a little bit scary.

I would recommend using zfs-fuse. You don't have the FUSE->File on a filesystem->Hard disk indirection (thus more speed). And additionaly you get all the cool ZFS features!
If you need even more speed there is a ZFS kernel module for linux and a dedup patch for btrfs. I don't think those are production ready though.
Lawrence Lessig once wrote something to the effect of, on the Internet, we're bound less by the paper laws contrived by policymakers and more by the intrinsic policy decisions made by code. The point I take from that is, one way or another, people are making decisions for you. Unless you can both build infrastructure and secure adoption for it, someone else is making decisions that curtail your liberty.

In this case, one of the same people who says DNS filtering will break the Internet just one year ago advocated a whole new piece of infrastructure to allow people to filter the DNS.

When Vixie did it, it was to suppress malware sites. I agree that this is a more admirable use of fiat third-party filtering than anti-piracy (note though that unlike the rest of HN, I think anti-piracy is a fine goal). But fundamentally, what's happening in both cases is mostly the same; other people making decisions about what you can and can't see on the Internet. And my point is, maybe that's OK.

Note also that nobody can impeach the DNS administrators and standards group sherpas.
Still Building the Dream of Equality and Peace
Nope. I got you. Excellent distillation.

I was just saying the purpose here was to distill enough to keep a short list, while not too much to leave out significant details. (Common mistakes)

You are absolutely right about observe and theory. If I had to take it to two words, those would the the ones.
The apple logo is also designed to be viewed by others, NOT the owner.

Thinkpad's branding ("Lenovo" and the angled "Thinkpad" in the corner) face the owner when the laptop is closed.

The Apple is inverted. When the laptop lid is up (in use), it's advertising Apple to others. When the laptop lid is closed, the owner sees an upside-down apple.

That's marketing genius.

(Typed on a Thinkpad, running Debian GNU/Linux, of course: while I appreciate marketing genius, I prefer technical superiority ;-)
per ampliora ad altiora = from breadth to depth
The "speed of cognition" I'd imagine is mainly limited by the fact that most people say (in their mind) what they read/write as they go along and we can only speak so fast. With writing we are also limited by our fingers but reading can go much faster if one learns to get rid of the inner voice (speed reading).

And even though I agree with you that touch-typing isn't that much of a limiting factor when compared to the time required to come up with something sensible but unfortunately, at least for me, those deep analytical and creative thoughts doesn't produce a steady stream of characters but rather bursts of sentences and paragraphs and taking the time to writing them out obstructs the thought process (depending on what I'm doing (most of what I do isn't that challenging)). So I'd say that the speed improvements of touch-typing compared to handwriting can be quite useful (and being able to get rid of it entirely by taking 'snapshots' of a current thought process, continue, and then later go back and summarize and formulate all snapshots would be awesome).
I am an atheist and have never felt a connection to any god while stretching. You may have different experiences, though.
> Eric Schmidt has a way with words.

The words in the article were not Eric's, they were the questioner paraphrasing Eric's response.
The problem is that solid products do not come from one guy who works on one idea for a while. It comes from large teams that do all kinds of boring work to make the product solid.

As an example, for most users, using Linux on the desktop is a lot more painful than using Windows on the desktop, because Microsoft has to pay a lot of people to do boring work that makes Windows less painful to the user. Linux only gains the features that someone feels it is rewarding to work on.

If we don't have copyright, then we have no way of rewarding dull work that only makes economic sense when replicated across millions. Think of the garbage truck: it's dull and smelly work, and you have to get up in the middle of the night. Almost nobody would do that if they didn't get paid. Yet society needs that work done -- yet we figure out how to compensate that work so it gets done.

Perhaps we can come up with a better way to compensate this kind of development work, but your argument does not provide a credible alternative.
Why you should learn just a little Awk - A Tutorial by Example
I fail to see why people make such a big fuss about Google's real name policy. If using your real name online puts your life at stake, use a damn fake name. I'm pretty sure Google won't ask for a scan of your ID card. Edit: Apparently Google can ask for your ID card (under exceptional circumstances)
the internet would be better if we knew you were a real person rather than a dog or a fake person. Some people are just evil and we should be able to ID them and rank them downward.

This is a ridiculous argument. How often have you wondered, "Is this person I'm talking to really a dog?" Of course it's a real person, even if he goes by a stupid name like me.

If Google is really trying to build an identity service rather than a social network, they need to come up with better arguments than this as to why that's a good idea.
The Red Cross is a religious organization because Jesus - a well-known religious figure - was crucified. On a cross.
I'm personally not a fan of anonymity on the web, most people are using it to insult others, being racists, bigoted and cowardly telling you things they wouldn't tell you to your face. If you live under a repressive government or need to whistle-blow, then sure, post your critics on an anonymous blog or to wikileaks, but apart from these rare cases, people should take responsibility for what they say and stop the annoying coward attacks. This is how it works in real life, when you have a comment or critic to do, you show your face and who you are before talking.
The problem is that you're trying to change people. People naturally resist that. I've long speculated that many otherwise-irrational behaviors have resistance to manipulation as their basis.

That said, there are other ways to make money. The notion that one can do one bit of work and live off of it forever is attractive, but not necessarily good for society. You can end up with the most capable people doing nothing productive. I'm sure there are individuals where that's not the case, I'm less sure about people in general.
Whoa, what? There's still something called "long distance"?
Yeah, it's not something I'd attempt without a fume hood and someone who knows what they're doing.

The pic of mine had a simple brazed metal 'lid', which I managed to separate by scraping out the solder with a scalpel, and then finally a hot-air gun to melt the rest and pop the top off.

I'm sure I've seen references to HF (Hydrofluoric acid) used in depackaging, but since it also etches silicon, I'd imagine you'd need to be pretty amazingly accurate with it.
Losing hope in G+ very fast.

They're going to make the same mistakes that are killing Facebook. I'm also concerned about them selling data from G+, since Schmidt describes it as an identity service. It's a very evil concept.
I'm kind of disappointed in their handling of it. I personally would like Google+ to succeed and at first glance it seems the real-name policy is not good for publicity, and subsequently not good for Google+'s growth.

The majority of people will use their real names anyway so I can't imagine why forcing it on everyone would help much of anything.

Can someone help me understand their rationale?
It's a bait-and-switch, though. Most of the book is awful dragons-and-swords fantasy.
First Circuit Affirms Right to Record the Police
The dynamics are different when it's the mainstream hating you and those being discriminated against are significantly outnumbered. Where that applies to which group definitely varies widely by social circle.
Well, you see the username I'm using?

I'm 'ubernostrum' here. And also on reddit. And also on a bunch of other websites. And on Twitter. And also on IRC. And it's part of my most-often-publicly-distributed email address. I've been 'ubernostrum' since the last millennium, and I actually get annoyed when I find a site where someone else already has the name, because that means someone's using it who isn't me.

This is the difference between anonymity and pseudonymity. Someone who's anonymous is a one-off. Someone who's pseudonymous is the same person, the same identity, consistently over time -- just not their actual real name. And that's an incredibly common thing in the tech world, and I'm surprised so many people don't get that when they've probably been living happily in a pseudonymous world for years.
Apple's software engineering salaries appear to be commensurate with Google's[1]. At the high end, Apple may pay less, but this might be an artifact of having 25% of the data points that are provided for Google.

> Why does extra money paid to a CEO definitely and absolutely result in a better CEO

When did I say this?

> Keep in mind the studies that show highly paid CEOs underperform low-paid ones when you answer.

I'd love to see these studies. I'm very curious to see how these CEOs' compensation packages are structured.

If you go back through my comments from the past week, you'll run into this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907364. Although you didn't mention this, I think it's still relevant to this conversation.

The key difference between Tim Cook and, say, Leo Apotheker is that Tim's been at Apple for 12 or 13 years, and plans to be there for another 10 at least. He's been inculcated in the culture, and still has to answer to one of the co-founders. I doubt Leo lasts longer than three years. What does Leo care if the company's long-term strategic positions are weakened as long as he maximizes his compensation package?

[1] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Software-Engineer-Sala... and http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-Sal...
That's because, during the Renaissance, "copying" something (like a painting) took (almost) as much labor as creating it, so you might as well create new things. What if "copying" a movie cost $100M?
The Evolution of Internet Based Advertising
But we’re not talking about anonymity on the web, we’re talking about choice of names in a certain social network.

I’m less likely to use G+ when I can’t use it to talk to people who aren’t using the form of their name that’s on their birth certificate. That’s quite different from anonymous griefers.
Which is their argument about why it shouldn't be called theft informally, either.

If there was an article about why people shouldn't call monitors "the CPU" that went into detail about what a central processing unit was and why techs call it that, would you accuse the tech who was trying to explain what a CPU is of being confused about informal usage?
You do realize that (a) The John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is a joke, and (b) its inventor, John Gabriel, is a fictional character with a fake name?
"Can someone help me understand their rationale?"

Google is ultimately trying to turn the web into their own app store so that anyone who wants to create, view, monetize, or share content has to do it using their proprietary services.
Perhaps their rationale has something to do with a bigger plan of correlating G+ info with names of people they find online.
This is the same guy who said that if you are doing something and you don't want Google to know about it, then you should probably not be doing it in the first place! He clearly does not get privacy!
Pen and paper then Inkscape/Gimp.
Schmidt gets lambasted by the media every time he says something pragmatic about Google's services. I respect him for sticking to his guns. Here is a quote from Schmidt about Google Search that he got crucified for two years ago:

Judgement matters... If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place... If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

What he said two years ago about Google Search, and what he is trying to say now about Google+, is that these services are not for those with high security and privacy needs. And he's right; they aren't. As a US company, Google must conform to US law. This means Google must store certain information and under various circumstances provide the police and the government with said information. You really think Google+ allowing you to use a pseudonym would then make it ok for use by those with strong anonymity requirements? Absolutely not.

EDIT: Please see jrockway's comment for a correction. Google is not legally required in the US to store information; still, they are in the EU. In any case, they are legally required to provide information they do have in many situations. Google chooses to retain some information in order to produce a more competitive product. This is how Google chooses to do business and it would be silly for those with strong anonymity requirements to use Google's services.
I can see both sides of the "real name" argument, but one thing I don't understand is why Google is getting so much flak about this when Facebook has basically the same policy AFAICT. Are Google's rules stricter somehow?
> What if "copying" a movie cost $100M?

Then they'd be worth nothing, because you couldn't distribute them to a large enough audience to recoup your costs.
a great many works of art were created by artists who were commissioned to make them for money.

Isn't that exactly what people are suggesting as an alternative to copyright? This isn't an argument against receiving money for your craft (I would argue that "profit motive" is inaccurate), but an argument against a legal construct which allows you to continually benefit in perpetuity via artificial constraints.

Would someone like Mark Twain still have written books if he could not have made a penny out of it?

Didn't Mark Twain marry into wealth specifically so he could write without any monetary worries?
These types of sites, TED, Khan Academy, etc. get me so excited for the future. Unfortunately the phrase 'everyone, everywhere' comes with that little asterisk: *with high-speed internet access. I think a movement to get internet to 'everyone, everywhere' needs to happen along side this internet education movement to be as potentially world-changing as I'd like to imagine it. Not that the education movement alone isn't great, there is a huge gap between being able to afford high-speed internet and affording/getting into a good college.
On the flip side, those who advocate for real names are often those in the best position to not be harmed by the consequences of discussing their social/political/etc. views in public.
It's a historical fact, it has nothing to do with your experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga
A Clearly Established First Amendment Right to Film Officers In A Public Space
I would like to recommend the LLVM tutorial too:
http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/LangImpl1.html

It takes you from zero to codegen in a few tutorials, using Recursive Descent Parsing and Operator-Precedence Parsing.
Hey, thanks for the links
I was like a minority arguing against my friends on FB all these days
E.g. early versions of ClojureScript had a critical bug on the OpenJDK that gave me the impression that (many of) the core developers are using the Sun package and are optimizing for it. There is also the issue of performance, which is supposedly better with the Sun version, but I should benchmark that for my particular applications before making up my mind. What do you use in production? There is a fine line between an acceptable difference in terms of reliability and speed and being too finicky for production. I'd love to hear more about what you're using.