skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The nature of property is defined by the extent and limitations of rights. But the shape of those boundaries, and the things that are allowed to be property, changes depending on society, culture, and technology.

Can you own a single word, for example (like, say, sklartch)? Not as a trademark but actually owning the word, owning the right to let people use it, copy it, etc. Of course you can't, because copying a word is trivial. You cannot stop someone from memorizing and writing out a short series of letters, either with a keyboard or with a pen and paper. It is not within anyone's power to restrict or control the writing of the word "sklartch".

And, of course, we accept intuitively that you can't own a word, or a smell, because we have already internalized that it is impossible and thus ridiculous to do so.

We are in the midst of a technological revolution that is rapidly making it ridiculous to attempt to control the copying of digital goods. It is no more possible to control the copying of a movie, song, or book than it is to control the copying of the word sklartch. Does that mean that such things can no longer be property? Perhaps.

It can be disconcerting to traverse the boundary where something goes from being property to not, because of course we have come to believe that obtaining something that is defined as property without paying for it is stealing. But if you were to write the word sklartch on a piece of paper would you feel like a thief? Would you feel like a thief if you intentionally passed by a nearby restaurant because it smells good? Would you feel like a thief if you read a book in a library? Would you feel like a thief if you listened to a song on the radio and turned the radio off as a commercial came on?

Obviously there is additional complexity involved, but this is still a very important part of the discussion about the future of art and its relationship to law and technology.

Edit: how do you make money out of something that can't be property? Well, I put a lot of effort into inventing the word "sklartch" how do I make money off of that? To some degree, this changes what people do and what people make. You don't see people making careers out of inventing new words (except Dr. Seuss). But there are often other business models that still work. Radio/used book stores/libraries haven't destroyed art yet, perhaps file sharing won't either. One strong possibility, that is already a reality for some, is that makers acquire a reputation via their early works and then use a platform like kickstarter to earn money preemptively on their next work. In combination with "pay what you want" models, I think it might be workable.

Also, keep in mind that we are currently entirely blind to all of the activities that would benefit society greatly (including creation of art) but which are very uncommon because it's not possible to make a living from them.
For more than a decade now, I've bought almost no major-label music. Instead, I buy from the artist's website if that's an option, or their CDs at the table in the back after the show (implicitly, going to the show), or the like. Or I go without. (I did have an eMusic subscription for a couple years, and got a lot of stuff from that, but IIRC, there was very little RIAA-member label music on that service at the time.)

Were I hypothetically to have illegally downloaded an album by a major label artist, my calculus would have been, "Well, the artist isn't actually going to see any royalties from this anyway, so the only party getting screwed by my torrenting it is the label," and felt no qualms about it.

Anyone going into the music biz as an artist since Courtney Love's Salon article (which has been on the HN front page at least three or four times since I've been here, but linked here [1] anyway) has had ample opportunity to realize the screwing they're signing up for when they John Hancock the label's contract. I can't muster up much pity for their getting shafted by the smooth-talking record exec they should've known was just going to shaft them anyway.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
> The thing that always worries me when I see software people talking about songs not being property is then what does that make software?

They're exactly the same. There's a reason the industry is moving towards SaaS and building businesses atop FOSS, rather than trying to build a better dongle.
Not to mention the costs of integrating the UK passport system with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Monitor Amazon Web Services RDS instances with Nagios
Sorry, his conclusion may be wrong, but it's simply not spurious.

If you release all the nonviolent offenders, what you're left with are the violent offenders, which is a convenient shorthand for "people who clearly should be in prison".

Conclusion: how ever much we may be over-incarcerating drug offenders, it is also the case that too many people are committing violent crimes.

Devin's hypothesis is that this is a result of half-hearted law enforcement: we have enough enforcement to lock up huge numbers of people, but not enough to make the risk of committing any one violent crime high enough to deter crime.

I wish we could stop discussing this from the premise of "it's controversial whether we should stop locking people up for drug possession". Nobody in this discussion appears to believe that at all. We should get past that point.
From the other side they see it as "You've obtained something that you did not pay for." Which is also a legit mindset.

It's not necessarily legitimate.

For example, I'd love it if everyone who flies in a plane over my house paid me, and at one time that might have been the law[1]. I could argue that they'd obtained something ("flying in my airspace") without paying. Whether or not that is a legitimate mindset is up for discussion. It may depend on other things like democracy and the public good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights
Maybe because only engineers have the luxury of providing a service that can't be duplicated? I have trouble imagining viable SaaS equivalents for media. What would a, say, Books-as-a-Service look like?
I ended up purchasing a Symbolic MacIvory because of this blog post. They aren't cheap!

I wrote about my experiences learning to use Genera here: http://genera.posterous.com/ - which reminds me, I need to spend more time with Genera.
The Emacs setup steps are somewhat behind the times. These days it's easier to use packages to install new modes and themes, and Technomancy's Emacs Starter Kit should be mentioned for those who are new to Emacs and want sensible defaults.

It's even easier with Emacs 24, as the starter kit can be installed via a package as well. Current best practise is to put all the packages you need in your init.el file, then when you start Emacs, it'll download and install any packages you're missing.

You have a section "Other Libraries" and a section "Finding the Libraries You Want", which cover essentially the same ground, but are strangely split up. So the former mentions the Clojure wiki page, and the latter mentions clojure-toolbox and other third-party library lists. Maybe they should all be in one section?

Other things... "lein deps" isn't really necessary anymore, as Leiningen checks for dependencies before running each command.

I think you also need to mention that you can effectively forgo the group-id and have [foo "1.0"] (which is the same as [foo/foo "1.0"]).

Pushing to Clojars is easier with the "lein-clojars" plugin. Then it's just a "lein push" away.
> these crimes can't be suppressed by legalizing, and in fact may be exacerbated by them.

Since we're all pro-legalization, then this is a little funny thing to be arguing about but I have a straight forward counter argument to the above.

There is a certain percentage of people who are straight up ruined by addiction. But they're a) a very small percentage of the population and b) since almost everyone has access to drugs (and at least in some of my social circles consuming drugs is totally normative) almost everyone who can be ruined by addiction already is.

This is bourne out by the experience of Portugal, which has decriminalized all drugs, etc etc yadda yadda.
Not without a time machine, since he said that in 1996.
You don't think "many people" build machines by shopping at retailers like TigerDirect? It might not be the vast minority, but it's still "many people".

I use this http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...

The reason I believe that is because unless every keyboard has that key, then a major operating system that has traditionally been fine without it shouldn't suddenly expect it unless there is some major advantage to requiring it.

*edit:
According to wikipedia, this key became a standard key on PC keyboards. Obviously I'm of the opinion that this should not have happened. But at this point it's ridiculous for me to complain about it.
What's wrong with the monetary system?
Ask HN: What would make you switch from jsFiddle to Plunker?
they are in the ./t/ directory in the repository.

Look for more information in the README file: ./t/README
I'm all about apps that promote early learning (pre-school) type of content.

I built one of such apps (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toddler-trainer-hd/id49632353...) and took extra care to tuck away all menus and settings in a triple-clicked menu, so toddlers can't access it.

Interesting article and suggestions. I'll have to incorporate a few of the ideas.
Is there a remotely modern video codec that isn't encumbered? Just because it is offered up as free software or open source doesn't mean that someone else's patent doesn't already cover it.

I have no faith that WebM is non-encumbered. The real issue is our patent system, not codecs.
Better terms: preaching to the choir, speaking in an echo chamber.
I had said the same for bringing high quality education to rural/3rd world places like africa via KA and was voted down because people were balking at the idea that they would have the ability to get quality inet access to consume this education.

I still think this is the future.

I already have my 7 year old doing Kahn Academy classes - and my 8 month old will have her first experience with Maths via KA.
While Larry Smith isn't necessarily the best presenter, I think this article misses or doesn't address any of the points he makes on a good vs. great job in the first few minutes of his TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_smith_why_you_will_fail_to_ha...). I would argue that none of the 10 points Alex makes in his article matter if you don't care about what your company does. People still seem to have a hard time understanding that the size of a company has nothing to do with the company's mission, and forget that proximity to that mission becomes more difficult as the company grows and the mission is diluted.
No doubt. How any VC thinks this type of company would sell for $1-2mm+ is beyond me. This is a profit type of company run out of a basement, not a VC investment. Yet somehow they got some top tier angels... Sometimes it's more about who you know.
Email's effectiveness is erroding (as seen with data)
More context is needed, and preferably one without a racial component. (For instance, the racial rules on Rosa parks bus were put in place by the local government, not a private bus company.)

Do you think that a gay couple should be forced to rent out the room they listed on craigslit to an adamant and vocal bigot who hates gays?

Freedom of association is a basic human right, correct? I don't have the right to force some woman I like to associate with me if she thinks I'm disgusting.

That doesn't change if the reason she thinks I'm disgusting is because I'm black.

In the former, I'm just a creep, in the later, she's the bigot. It doesn't really matter.

Racism and other bigotry goes away the more free and open an economy is. The companies run by bigots will underperform, and freedom of association goes both ways- you can refuse to do business with them, and a racist business will lose customers from all races.

Saying that gays can't get married violates freedom of association, but so does saying that you have to have a minimum wage (its dictating terms of a private relationship.)

The passing of such laws, I consider, an initiation of force.

PS- I up voted both of your posts. Not sure why you were down voted. I much prefer your attempts to challenge my position on the merits to the ad hominem I've gotten from others.
> But the fact remains: people who invest a nonzero sum of money in the creation of content would probably like some way to recoup their investment. Or else they need to have deep enough pockets, or deep-pocketed patrons, to be able to abide simply giving it away outright.

There's a chance that some people may just enjoy creating art without requiring compensation.
But then you have to write the data N times, and writes are expensive too, especially to flash, as someone else pointed out in this thread.
I haven't bothered to verify the claim but the article states:

"a law called the Stored Communications Act allows authorities to seek data like this without a search warrant"
These stories are popular. What is not is the grind. There are few poster children for Android, lots for iOS. The truth is some Android software does fine, and so does some iOS software. Once 100x more Androids are going to be sold, all of a sudden "developers dumping Apple due to lengthy approval process". It's just press at times.
This is going to make me look like a pg fanboy:

I don't see where he outright dismisses other people's opinions. In fact, he's repeatedly said to people who disagree with him to "point to a sentence which you think is false". You will have to be more specific than that.

It's impossible to speak for someone else, but I believe pg would very much welcome someone DH-sixing him.

Another thing to keep in mind that this is not some long lasting argument that pg has with the RIAA, it's an essay on property.
I imagine things like going to concerts or buying merchandise would work.

It's impractical to completely bypass the middle-men because they hold a monopoly on that artist's output, but there are plenty of ways compensate an artist without buying his MP3s.
Capitalism and liberty are a requisite for entrepreneurship -- which is what this forum is about. Just like this community opposes regulation that is harmful to entrepreneurship, I think we should recognize philosophies that oppose entrepreneurship (socialism, fascism, communism, etc). I personally enjoy hearing the pro-liberty view point that is commonly dismissed as nutty or juvenile.
1) Go to a concert. (The traditional way musicians make money and pay-off their CD distribution costs.)
2) Purchase a la Louis CK model.
3) Share your enjoyment of the music with others. (Build the artist's fanbase.)
4) Watch the artist's YouTube videos and click on an advert.
> I see the act of creating software and creating a song or a movie as being very analogous.

Of course they're analogous. I think pg is fine with disposing of the traditional model of "selling software." As he pointed out in his recent Pycon keynote, Amazon AWS is a spectacular example of profitable commercial software, but it doesn't follow that model of "selling software."
Those artists dont have to be artists. If they realize that their audience is not voluntarily paying them for their art, they can change jobs and do something where customers voluntarily pay for the work done.
>Sorry, but just I can't accept that the vast majority of computer users are morons who can't understand it at all when interfaces change and have to start at square one every time.

You're right, they tend not to change. Hence, Windows XP.

Your company's problem isn't that people will use XP forever, its that when they do buy a new computer, they may not buy a Windows PC, since they understand that they have nothing to relate to from Windows XP.
The compiler market is interesting, when I look back thirty years to when I started programming there were dozens of small companies providing various languages and tools. There are a few now but not on the same scale.

This probably is a good thing, it is possible to get started now with no expenditure beyond the hardware whereas when I started I was limited by what I could afford.
Chrome Extension to open Hacker News Links in New Tab
Hey HN, dave from Minefold here. Would love any feedback and happy to answer any questions about our service you might have.
I found it a little ironic that on a site dedicated to user experience reviewing and criticism it took a good deal of work to figure out how to buy the product. No buy now button, no pricing info link, etc... I see now that its hidden in the learn more link, but nothing about that link says thats where buying is going to be...
(Rare Video) Google Search Quality Meeting: Spelling for Long Queries
Associated blog post: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-meeting-uncut.html
If somebody creates files with carriage return in source tree because kernel doesn't stop him, problem is social, not technological.

Your position boggles and dismays me. I have seen so many heinous bugs that appear only intermittently, and are nigh impossible to track down, due to this kind of issue. The problem absolutely positively is not social. It is technical. The only social thing about it is that people persist on taking the wrong side on this issue.

As to having different rules for filenames in different places, that is just nuts. Programs should not be fragile, and shouldn't have subtle edge cases. Having software work that way has all sorts of downsides and hidden costs. E.g., people need to remember a lot more. More documentation is needed. Things go wrong when they didn't have to. All of this costs time and money and helps to sap enthusiasm as people track down chimeras they shouldn't have had to.

Furthermore, one of the prime use cases for scripting is by system administrators, and such scripts need to handle all files. The stories of sysadmin scripts that have run afoul of files with strange filenames is legendary.

Regarding your example with "process $FOO": that's completely a red herring. You might as well assert, "We can't solve everything, so we should solve nothing." In this particular case, we were talking about the problems caused by filenames that are hard to deal with in a scripting environment, not about programs directed by user input. The first problem is easily solvable once and for all, while the second problem is less so and will always require care. Just because some things require great care does not mean that we should make all things require great care.

I just can't fathom that there are still people who actually argue for a world that fosters subtle bugs and lack of robustness. It is downright wrong, and it may someday be our undoing. Quite literally.
State by state stats are available here...

http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_statera...

Table 4. Minnesota has the 6th lowest white incarceration rate, 0.212%
Why more people don't stick 'emacsclient -t -a ""' in there, I'll never understand.
"U.S. activists who thought Twitter was a secure way to communicate during demonstrations may" ... be delusional?

Twitter has to comply with US law, whatever it's possible for them to reconstruct and release about activists they can be compelled to release. They, so far, have done a decent job of being transparent, in the US, when they are allowed to be (things like national security letters with gag orders mean their, and everyone else's, claims to transparency have to be taken with a grain of salt).

How much Twitter is pushing back or not is besides the point. It's just stupid to expect more out of Twitter than it is legally possible for them to do.
Pagination in Java web applications with JSPs and Hibernate
Raganwald made his post either after or during a Twitter discussion with me. I'm pretty sure his post was more a response to the Hacker News discussion you linked to than to my own tweet or two, but it looked like an ongoing discussion to me, so I continued it from where it had left off.
Haha, that is brilliant.

It is like when the MPAA says they lost $200,000,000 or some ridiculous number to piracy, where if those pirates could not have downloaded that content they believe that each and every one of them would have translated to a full retail sale; obviously this is not true.

Instead we should grant them karma on IMDB or something :)
:)

Super valuable feedback. We're in a model at the moment where we want the buying experience to be via the designers. That said, the idea of a 'marketplace' can be found here: http://onceovers.com/providers
I am adocating for getting rid of copyroght on music AND software.

That's because I am intellectually consistent... which was the original point.

pg's intellectual inconsistency gives him power in the world of hucksters and thieves, but no one who takes these issues seriously simulataneously takes his self-serving screeds seriously.
I used a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine from about 1982 through 1989 - a great developer experience, and not a bad platform to sell software products on.

That said, I encourage people who want to hack/learn Lisp to stick with one of the modern setups like: Common Lisp (with Emacs or a complete free IDE setup like ClozureCL), Clojure (with Emacs or other IDE), Racket, or, ...., etc.

I would much rather see people spend time learning a Lisp language rather than fiddling with very old environments.
[1] If you want to learn more about hunter gatherers I strongly recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People and The Old Way.

For an intersting philosphical treatment of hunter gatherers vs agricultural societies, see Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
Have a look at this game made in JS (be warned that the framework is closed source):

http://playbiolab.com/
Ask HN: Ideas/Advice for a sole 18 year old hacker?
Hi HN. I read what goes on on this incredible site almost every day. I'm 17 years old and a modestly competent hacker. Last year I published an app to the Apple app store, but is has since been removed because I haven't renewed my license with the big A. This is in part owing to my pedestrian mac dev box (2010 mac mini; 2Gb RAM; Lion; Slow) and because a new mac and $99 are not trivial expenses to an 17 year old guy from South Africa. And I still prefer Linux ;)

Do you, accomplished hackers of HN, have any suggestions for how a sole 17 year old with programming skills can make something that presents its users with value. I don't come from excess wealth and privilege, so making profit is a goal for me. Specifically, I'd like to ask about the kind-of-forum (i.e. app store / PAAS hosted web app etc.) for software publication that is both accessible and possible for a single person with limited funds but tremendous drive. Even if you just have words of inspiration, any positive feedback is appreciated.

Being an autodidact, I have spent copious hours reading about "software construction" - considerably more than the mechanics of programming. Stuff like RB-trees and Big-Oh don't scare me (that much)

Any and all feedback welcome.

Much love from S.A.

Daniel
Intel: Thunderbolt optical cabling coming this year
You can get 1 free Kindle download a month with Amazon prime. However, I think Porn is leading the way on that one. There are plenty of sites that give you access to a growing collection of stories for a monthly price, and one that allows free access to it's collection but charges for a better search and bookmarking system.

Which I guess boils down to either the patronage system, where you can sponsors people to write (ex: epic poetry) or the organizational system where you can distribute free content and then give kickback to the most popular authors like many blogging systems do.

PS: Batoto.com is an odd mix as it returns money to people who translate works but not the original authors. Sort of like a pirates auction house. The advantage for users being a nice interface and rapid updates.