skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure about that. PG leans a lot on whether or not the new law "warps society", which could comport with a natural law view, but is more naturally interpreted as something more empiricist or pragmatic.

---

EDIT (in response to parent's edit #1): Everyone -- utilitarians, legal positivists, conventionalists, etc. -- thinks that the law should adjust to certain realities. Likewise, the parent's definition of "rules that humans...would voluntarily adopt" is orthogonal to questions about the source and authority of the law.

I am very sympathetic to natural law but PG's piece doesn't really strike me as falling one way or the other on this issue.

See also this comment and PG's response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694703 -- nothing to do with scarcity or technology, there.
NEC develops 0.3mm thick organic battery
Interesting. My slight megalophobia sometimes gets aggravated in games, but never predictably. I still remember flying through the desert in GTA: San Andreas and having to veer away from approaching the giant radar telescope lest it cover too much of my field of view, or feeling on edge as the flying gryphon took me over the sparkling purple dome of Dalaran in World of Warcraft back when I played. Yet last year's Portal 2, full of massive domes, spheres, and doors, never came close to causing a problem.
Wow, I remember actually going back to check that and I still got it wrong. Must have been distracted by something shiny. Criticism still applies, though. Part of the cost of buying the coffee is his terms. He's giving you an option that you didn't have before, but if the cost is too high, there's always Starbucks.
In fact, HN consists of Chinese, Russian and Arabic populace along with more traditional US/UK.

Reading comments to any submission I sometimes play "spot the Russian" and more often than not I find one.

HN perhaps have less interaction with Yahoo populace than they have with Russian populace. In internet, you have another axis orthogonal to citizenship - the services you're on.
No, the Windows key sets MOD4, same as the Meta key did/does on the original MIT keyboards.
Just saw this posted here. If anyone wants to comment on the presentation, I'll monitor this thread to discuss :-)

There's also a screencast of the talk up on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/38321427
The history of copyright law is quite interesting, especially its origins. This quote from Thomas Jefferson is particularly interesting:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive
property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an
individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the
moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and
the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
...
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the
moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to
have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them,
like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any
point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being,
incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in
nature, be a subject of property.

That said, Jefferson was one of the framers of the Constitution, which gave Congress the power to create copyright and patent laws in the first place. It's important to note the language used in the Constitution, though: "To promote the progress of the arts and sciences..."

It wasn't about giving property rights to creators -- it was about incentivizing them. The framers saw this as a tradeoff. The public would endure the "evil" of letting creators monopolize profits on their ideas. But in return, there would be more ideas created, and these ideas would become public property after a short time, anyway. Jefferson continued:

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an
encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or
may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without
claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am
informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth
which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an
idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a
special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought
that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and
it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are
as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
It's a very unique 'um', too. You could tell he was pretty nervous. But as someone who has had my 'um's during speeches ruthlessly pointed out to me, I'm basically trained to notice when someone says 'um.' PG's speech was tough to listen to.
Is this Android market spam or am I being too cynical?
Look at this app's download graph and comments. You can't see developers email on the web but it is freeappsseo@....
Smartphone Battery Dead Again? Find Geoloqi
Only reason this shows up as princeton.edu is that this text is used for several Math for CS classes at Princeton. Good text, I learned a lot!
This is true. Only most people aren't aware, and if they are, it's very hard to remember the format.

Also, MailBliss allows you to create "anonymous" emails - so you don't have to give away your cell phone number.
Hacker exposes 40,000 Credit Cards from Digital Playground
A Julia version of the multinomial sampler
There's a case to be made here, perhaps, but Mr. Cox sure isn't making it. I recommend against paying him any more attention than he's already getting.
While I agree with you in principle on not "fiddling with very old environments", I had to try out Genera after hearing from two separate people that Lisp Machines were the best computers they ever used. One guy was a VP at Yahoo. The other guy is a core contributor to the Java VM.

Both of these guys are hardcore Emacs users, running Mac OS X, and have in-depth knowledge of POSIX. It was hard for me to write them off as people who just didn't understand how modern computers work.

Fiddling with Genera has been a very worthwhile endeavor because of how much I've learned from it.

What have I learned? Well, so far I've learned that Genera is basically a case study showing that Richard Stallman's fears were actually well founded. I also learned a tremendous amount about an important but obscure part of the history of computing, a history that I think is actually a vision of what our future is.

So, yes, by all means, hack on and learn on one of the modern setups that Mark suggests above. Once you've done that, look me up and I'd be more than happy to give you a tour of Genera on my MacIvory.
We are a looooonng way from post-scarcity. In the same way that home printing didn't kill books.
Ha - funny, this is the first thing I noticed when watching the video of this presentation, and it drove me so crazy I only made it through the first 3 minutes before I had to stop watching. Wish it wasn't the case, would have loved to watch the whole thing, but it was maddening....
That may be true, but since we're talking about attorneys requesting information (as opposed to police seizing data), what's needed is a subpoena rather than a warrant so I doubt that detail is as relevant as the article's author may have thought it is.
No, it just struck me that when I saw the link I already knew you would be right in there with a huge comment and sure enough there it was.

As for hacker news not being what it could be, it is what it is and it is pretty good. Much as I try to kick the habit I keep coming back and reading.

I apologize for any offense I caused. I really like most of your stuff but the libertarian rants can get a bit much at times.

As for the vote counts, I could not care less. I'm happy they're no longer on public display since they were a great distraction.
Seems ok to me!
http://www.downforeveryone.com/minefold.com

We're keeping a close eye on it ;)
My passport is my GnuPG public key.
This is not a legitimate counterargument. Of course if the economics are not working, we can just decide "oh well, I guess nobody should create music anymore." But obviously the goal should be how to structure the economy so we can enjoy music and musicians can live comfortably.
Look at this app's download graph and comments. You can't see developers email on the web but it is freeappsseo@....
Sorry, I don't see where PG said that songs weren't property at all.

He's saying the definition of that particular property is changing, but that doesn't mean it is non-existent.

With software, music, movies and books, what's changing is the notion that the copying of a piece of work is the creation of new property, hence deserving of the unit cost of all the work that went into the creation of the original material.

It's not that a new song belongs to everyone by default, it's that the math is skewed.

Software developers have figured this out already - which is why you can buy an app for $.99 instantly.

The producers of other material haven't adjusted. Although unlike pg I don't think it has anything to do with bonuses, and everything to do with the fact that the entire production-enabling industry has become obsolete; especially for music, but soon enough for movies as well and books as well.

The content producer doesn't need a gatekeeper to help create physical copies his book or song, then distribute these to selected merchants around the world.

He needs an editor and a marketing firm to get the word out, and that's it.
Nope. Read the Open Source Definition as defined by the Open Source Initiative. To be Open Source (tm), you need to not discriminate against any "fields of endeavor".

http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd#fields-of-endeavor
TripAdvisor for a modern generation: Wanderfly
The other side of AppEngine
Yes, SaaS is an end-run around the GPL, Google were the first to really exploit this on a grand scale.
The only people this matters to is people who count how many times the speaker says "um". Toastmasters types. The rest of us can see the forest for the trees.
Ok, but does it matter?
One thing that strikes me as unnatural about copyright is how difficult it would be to enforce effectively. With a traditional crime like robbery, the victim suffers a direct loss. The victim or a relative can report the event to the authorities. With copyright, the victim suffers no damage. Most of the time, the victim of infringement doesn't even know that the event occurred. To enforce copyright effectively, all private communications would have to be monitored at all times. After all, any data transfer between two people is a potential violation of the copyright of a third party. Even private chatter inside your home would have to be recorded and analysed. Otherwise, you'd be allowing kids to sing "Happy Birthday" without a license.
> What have I learned? Well, so far I've learned that Genera is basically a case study showing what Richard Stallman's fears were actually well founded.

Could you expand on that?
I am failing to understand how NAP can be applied to the initial gain of property rights.

A business man makes space ship goes to asteroid belt mines resources and sells them on earth. Does he own what he mined? Who owned it before he mined the asteroid?

Another example which emphasize the problem differently. Lets pretend N libertarians one day wake up in a rather large box. At the center, bottom floor of the box is a food dispenser that can dispense a near infinite amount of food.

Bob is the first person to wake up and discovers the food dispenser. Knowing the value of this natural resource he claims it as his property. He later trades food from the food dispenser for favors from everyone else in the box. The other libertarians have to do what Bob asks otherwise they will not get food since they are not willing to break the NAP.

It is not clear to me that when Bob claims the food dispenser as his property and then trades the food it dispenses for favors weather he is breaking NAP or not.

Does NAP solve these type of problems or do libertarians use a secondary guiding principle to solve them?
Looks pretty cool!

Are the prices missing from the pricing page, https://minefold.com/pricing? Based on the Upgrade to Pro page I think it is $25 for 6 months for unlimited access.

I like the idea, and the distributed pricing mechanism is definitely interesting.

I'll be uploading my latest world shortly after I get off work :)
Looking for a chance to move from the corporate world to the startup world
Hello All,

Apologies if this is slightly off topic but I’ve been a lurker on this
list for a while and thought I’d put myself out there for a change..

I’m a developer working for a large investment bank looking for a
chance to get into the startup world. I have about 7-8 years of
software development experience with very strong
object-oriented/relational database skills but I’d like to break away
from the corporate Microsoft stack (C#, WPF, WCF, SQL Server) and get
into mobile development, specifically iOS development.

I’m quite familiar with the syntax and idioms of Objective-C, having
co-developed a simple anagram game for iPhone called ‘WordSketch’
during my spare time in the evenings and weekends last year. We
managed to get it into the app store, got a few hundred downloads but
nothing spectacular ;) I also gained exposure to the basics of UIKit,
interface builder and CoreData whilst building the app. (We decided to
use cocos2d for the game engine, so I have pretty good exposure to
this library too).

I wouldn’t regard myself an experienced Objective-C developer but I
hope the above shows that I have the drive to learn and pickup new
languages, frameworks and concepts very easily if given the
opportunity.

Basically, I’m looking for someone to take a chance on me. I’d be
happy to work unpaid for a few months whilst I become more proficient.
I’m still a beginner so I doubt I would be able to deliver straight
away on a new project but I’m sure given a few months of on the job
learning I can get up to speed.

I just think after years of working for a large company, I have gotten
to the stage where I feel I would be happier working for a smaller
start-up. I’d like to work somewhere where I don’t feel like just
another cog in the wheel, somewhere where I feel like I am actually
contributing to the companies products and where I can wake up in the
morning and actually feel excited about going to work!

Thanks for reading,
Ankur

PS

The app is currently out of the app store as I chose not to renew my
license for the time being, but here is a short review:
http://thesmartph...

If you are interested in getting in touch, email me off the list, also
- i’m happy to go for coffee.
If you admit that art will always exist regardless. Then why is it important that it is monetized at all?

Personally I believe that not only arts will exist. But it will also be funded. Just look at kickstarter. But I don't understand why some people feel that we must find them better business models. Art will always exist even if we don't. So why does it matter?
> I'd rather enjoy the fruit of a craftsman's labour than I would gorge myself on the cheap, cheerful and unpolished wares of the assembly line.

That's the wrong way 'round, from my perspective. The "few, expensive" games we have are bland blockbuster genre-stuffers created by committee. The "lots of free games" we're heading toward are tiny, polished artifacts of a single indie developer's labor, where the value in them comes from laser-focus on a single innovative gameplay mechanic, rather than a multi-million-dollar art pipeline. The latter sound much more like the "artisans" to me.
If this research on PG, or other speakers, continues please also record the room temperature so we can see if the um rate varies with temperature.
Look, I'm not trying to attack you personally, I'm trying to say that the way you are arguing is detrimental to discussion. This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them, dismissing other peoples' attempts to refer to outside sources ("[wikipedia] is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased...") without providing any of your own, changing your definition of what you are arguing (you say "I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement", and later claim that "I wasn't even talking about socialism")and getting overly defensive and refusing to engage with people because of perceived insults.

Any discussion about something important is going to get a little hot, taking your ball and going home anytime someone says something sharp is not going to be conducive to convincing others of your position or learning something yourself, dorkburlger.
Imagine a florist who sells roses along with a air-tight cardboard box, and stipulates that the buyer sit inside this box every time he wants to smell this rose (so that others who haven't paid for the rose cannot not "steal" the smell).

That would be a good analogy for DRM (at least the way it is implemented today).
Or maybe their governments aren't the giant, half-the-world's-military, country whose laws Twitter has to respect...
I well aware of Courtney Love's article, I personally prefer the one by Janis Ian which was both earlier and more articulate.

The record execs are as dirty as can be. But for now it looks like any money flowing to the 'signed' artists will flow through them (and the various 'rights' organizations, BUMA, GEMA, RIAA etc).
But how can the Javascript Object Notation have a license? It's part of the Javascript language isn't? So we cannot use javascript objects for evil or?
I am not a regular minecraft player, but I tried it because it took me 10 seconds to sign up. I think Minefold could cause a big jump in the number of people playing these online multiplayer games.
You make these suggestions with the assumption that recordings provide an necessary component of the music industry.

Recordings have only existed for barely more than a century. Musical performers survived long before and will survive long after. Profiting from recordings is an aberration rather than the norm. The industry can reorient itself back to live performances.

Movies, as well, make substantial revenue via theaters. Home video is not required to sustain the industry, but they would have you believe the movie industry prior to the VCR could not exist again. (even though at the time they claimed the VCR itself would destroy the movie industry).
So has the pay by the hour model been completely replaced by Minefold PRO? The reason I am asking is that I see https://twitter.com/#!/qrush/status/117244523083595776 on the pricing page and I remember seeing this in the past here on HN and the pricing model was different.
U.S. Army Warns That Social Media Can Kill. Literally.
Mozilla community members around the globe
5-Week-Old App Draw Something Hits 20m Downloads And Generates 6-Figures Per Day
When the odor of the food quits
the food shop and entered the land property (public or private) it might not became the property of the new land owner, but it's not his fault.

Piracy is not that. Piracy is sniffing the smell from the food shop with a tube and taking it to your land (cracking the product) and then diffusing the smell to your neighbors (sharing).
The producer of a good sets the price, it's that simple. You don't have to buy it, especially not with a luxury good like media.

If it were a monopoly on grain that's another matter.
Only to people who freak out when they realize that 1 px = 2 pixels on Retina displays.
I think the important part is that setting something to be 1000px wide does not mean it will take up 1000 pixels on a 1000 pixel wide screen.
Stolen sexy self-portraits by Heather Morris of Glee, here they are
That's the idea of natural law. The concept of "owning" something in nature that is not scarce is not a natural concept.

The notion that property has value is pretty much a universal concept.
It didn't seem like nerves. It appeared that he was thinking through some of these things on stage in more depth than he had previously done so the ums provided the time to collect the thoughts in a coherent manner.
Your pitch @ Demo Day was very good. I'm curious to known if you've found the tech. cofounder you were looking for or not yet?
> rather than fiddling with very old environments.

I worked on Symbolics machines (rms, please forgive me). I even fixed a bunch of the wire-wrapped original LMs from before Symbolics.

I remember it being earth-shattering at the time (self-documenting? whoa) but I confess I'm curious how much was just the transition from TOPS-20 etc to a completely new single-user environment. All stuff from the dark ages really.

I'd probably fire it up out of nostalgia if nothing else.

BTW: Dan Weinreb's post ("Why did symbolics fail?" linked in the OP) has migrated to here: http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-did-symbolics-fail
I've really enjoyed the presentation but I've noticed the 'um' too. hopefully pg will see this thread as constructive criticism and he'll make an effort to get rid of the 'um'.
Agreed. It's pretty clear that PG is actually advocating a pragmatic approach to moral reasoning. Natural Law, as I understand it, advocates a moral order which is evident from the natural order and which exists before any human understanding of right and wrong. If our understanding of property changes with the circumstances of our society, then the right of property doesn't emanate from the natural order but from the human order.

Interestingly, there have been a number of attempts to reduce property rights to first principles. Modern Libertarians often consider property rights to be the first principle, but older classical liberal philosophers such a Locke believed that property was an offshoot of labor. That is, man has a right to product of his own labor and only by labor and continuous use can he claim to properly own something. I think this approach has some merit as it neatly gives voice to one of the reasons we feel that some forms of theft is justified and others are not.
Wow. This is great. You guys make it so easy! The business model itself is quite interesting. Considering that each person pays for hours, are there any features down the line to add features that enhance community features?

I play on a small server with friends (which is cheaper than minefold atm), so at the moment I'm primarily looking at what value you can add by adding onto the ability for you guys to easily connect people, create maps, etc.

A few examples: Make it easier to categorise worlds that I might to join. For example, some servers are just creative, others are PvP, some can be survival, or others flat. Another option could be to be able to 'block' worlds (no more destroying/creation) so that anyone can jump in and run around words that people have created without asking for permission (thinking about the massive lotr one). Or, for example, making it easy to find spleef arenas for the occasional fun.

Being able to tag worlds is a simple start.

Best of luck guys. You guys have got something good going!
There are ways to do in-app purchases for kid apps that aren't unethical. In fact, allowing people to try your app before buying it is a very ethical thing to do. Don't limit yourself unnecessarily, and don't assume kid apps with iAP must be from shady developers.