skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
wait, did the grandparent originally say something about MP3?

h264's last patent will expire in november 2027 (or september 2028, but I think there's some technicality that makes that one not count) according to http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_pat...

That's a really long time from now.
Yes - as I've noted in other posts, I'm a partner at a VC firm. Your suggestion is a good one - I've already started putting something together. There have been some pretty good tutorials on the web in the last few years, so I'm a little worried the work is redundant, but I'll see if I can put something together that is reasonably comprehensive but concise. We're also a large firm, so I can't get everyone here to agree to share any of our data publicly, which I would like to do, since it would make it easier to use real numbers.
You shifted the problem to the network and disk storage. Distributing compiles, objects, executables, debug images, packages, etc can take longer than a compile on a single machine unless you are quite careful.
It's interesting to look at the history of patents to get a sense of perspective on the fluidity of property rights. Before the reign of James I, for instance, all kinds of things received patents, not just inventions. Even commodities as common as salt or pepper were patented. The king would grant these patents, implicitly getting the political support and backing from the recipient. It took an act of Parliament (itself a power grab) to end this practice, which is where a new version of patents--applicable only to a new discovery or invention--was legislated.

These patents of yore were pretty alien to us--they represent something more like a government appointment to a role than anything else.
Definitely expected to get rick-rolled on this one.
PG is articulating the philosophy of natural law applied to present circumstances. Natural law is one of those tenured ideas that we always rediscover or reinvent when our statute laws start going too far astray. Many bright thinkers have explored the idea, and you'd do well to explore it yourself if you haven't yet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

The basic idea is that good laws are things we discover rather than create. Their form is dictated by the form of our being and intellect and the shape of our world. Any enforced law that contradicts this natural law will create the sort of friction and injustice that we would have seen with SOPA.

--

Edit #1.1: As others have pointed out on this thread, the idea of owning non-scarce and easily-spread things is unnatural. So if technology makes a previously containable and scarce thing non-containable and non-scarce, then our ideas about what exactly can be property will change without having to believe that natural law itself had to change. This is the essence of Paul's argument, and why it fits with natural law theory. Technology changes the shape of our world.

Edit #2: All modern natural law thinkers I know of would assert that slavery always violated natural law in perhaps the worst way possible, so I don't see how Paul's concurrence that ending slavery was a good change in property law distances his position from natural law theory. It was always unnatural, and eventually we discovered and corrected that in our statute laws, prompted largely by the growing friction our divergence from natural law was creating.

Edit #3: There are various schools of natural law. My definition of it goes along the lines of, "the rules that humans living in a particular environment, starting with no preconceived notions, would voluntarily and near-universally adopt for their mutual benefit." If you're from a school that believes natural law exists without any reference to our environment, then you may disagree with my premise and everything that extends from it.
NASA shows off Angry Birds in space
I don't think anyone who calls themselves libertarian could approve of any kind of government.

But some obviously do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minarchism
Looking for a new job? Tell Github.
>Think of the scope of modifications one can and cannot make to a car to keep it "street legal"

I don't think that's a good example. You have full property rights to your car, and you can do whatever you want with it; there are only limitations if you want to use your car on property that doen't belong (exclusively) to you.
I totally agree regarding the decline of universities. In particular I think the research side will be the first to shift away from universities; at least with education you are essentially paying for a brand name which has inherent value. With research, the principle investigator writes the grant to pay their own salary, the salaries of their graduate students and postdocs, and their equipment. The university then takes almost all the scientists IP and charges "indirect costs" equivalent to more than 50% of the grant to supply "Facilities and Administration" - which is what exactly? Lights, building space, and a whole lot of bureaucracy.

Already, some really innovative initiatives are getting around this problem. The Pasadena Bioscience Collaborative offers lab space and equipment for ~$1,000 per month (no contract required!) and the EMBARK program administers scientists grants and encourages them to outsource experiments to core facility specialists (while providing access to a basic shared lab for those experiments that can't be easily outsourced). Both initiatives offer ways for scientists to avoid high indirect costs and burdensome admin - and importantly the scientists retain 100% of their IP!

These initiatives are the way of the future - it's hard to see how big, inefficient universities will be able to attract the top talent for much longer.
> she's considered a libertarian

Ayn Rand was quite vocal about her contempt for libertarianism, though the actual distinctions she made are not entirely clear to me.
The artists were getting screwed by the middlemen just as badly before there was such a thing as "MP3". Screwing the middlemen out of their $.9895 (out of $.99) per track affects the artist not a whit.
Do We Need a New Richard Stallman?
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that the publishers are not only trying to keep the old definition, but to constrain it even more. They're reactionaries rather than conservatives.

An example would be books. In the past, a book I owned could be resold or given away. With digital documents however, my copy is only a "license" which forbids any and all transfers. In the past, if I owned a document, I owned it forever. But now, I must pay for a new "license" each time I upgrade the format. Such as buying an mp3 when I already own the CD, or paying extra for the "digital" version of a DVD or book I already own.
lining up the colons to make life easier for block editors ... le sigh. i just cant take anything else seriously after that.
The problem isn't any specific thing. Rather it's the fact that Microsoft is (once again) trying to make a single UI fit both the desktop and tablet use cases. It makes no sense. It's like trying to fit the same set of controls onto a car and a motorcycle.

All of these specific UI issues result from this impedance mismatch between tablet and desktop UIs. So yes, Microsoft may iron out the specific bugs we bring up. It won't matter, though, because UI issues of this nature will crop up at every seam between the desktop and tablet interfaces. What will happen is that Microsoft will patch these piecemeal and we'll end up with layers and layers of band-aids trying to compensate for a fundamentally broken design.
The only thing that changed the crazy sales of PCs to something a bit more normal is that a four year old PC is now still fast enough to do most of the stuff that you could do with one you bought today.

And it will remain that way until applications will be able to make more effective use of multiple cores.
I hope that one day comments like mine aren't needed anymore because people on Hacker News have RESPECT for each other's comments and don't down vote reasonably valid perspectives like yours until they are hard for me to see.

Also, I don't know if its wise or not, but there's a middle ground between Pirace not being a crime at all ,and Piracy being a crime like murder or theft. Piracy shouldn't be a criminal offense, but it could still be a civil offense.

Would things be really bad if the punishment for pirating a movie was 4 times the ticket price? "Ok, you got me, I'll pay my $28 to disney."
A Small Operating System
Part 2: http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue9/047_1_A_SMALL_O...

Part 3: http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/049_1_THE_OSI_...
In college I spent too much time playing around with the (newly created) World Wide Web instead of studying for my degree. I didn't exactly graduate with honors, but it doesn't matter since I ended up working on the web. So for me, there was a great career at the end of that particular rabbit hole.
It is really easy to shoot yourself in the foot when you add ids to the mix, and there's nothing CSS-wise you can do with ids that you can't do with classes.

For an example of where ids can trip people up, start at slide 66 of this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/stubbornella/our-best-practices-ar...
Fast 3D printing with nanoscale precision
This reminds me of Cory Doctorows excellent talk at 28C3, The coming war on general computation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

Basically, Cory is saying that the fight againt RIAA/MPAA is just the first battle of a long war.
This is less of a hard line than http://everythingisaremix.info

PG's argument is that the world is changing and the definition of property should change to match. But Everything is a Remix argues that ownership of ideas has always been problematic, because it's never been possible to cleanly separate an idea from its antecedents.
'Software Manager' on Mint queues installs so that you can choose and set things to install with it while it is installing stuff. A few of the simplified package managers do this now. Not sure if any do intelligent chunking or integrate particularly well with the standard update utility yet.

It needs improvement, sure, but I still don't see it as a UX killer, especially when compared to most commercial install and update systems.
I agree that Microsoft isn't receiving entirely fair treatment here. As noted in the comments on the link's page, I'm sure a simple tutorial at install will do just fine for many, many typical users.

However, with regard to my personal experience, I picked up the iPhone 4S as my first smart phone. I've never seen an iPhone or iPod touch in action before and this was my first experience with an iOS device. It took me very little time to figure out how to navigate it, close and uninstall apps, etc. I never googled how to do something, and even had fun trying out my new toy.

I think comparing something like the simple iOS and the should-be simple Windows 8 is a very complicated act. The basic nature of a single Home Button and a touch screen simplified my learning of the iPhone. I imagine, without an introductory tutorial, Windows 8, with such complications as an external mouse and full keyboard and no touch-screen monitor, may be a very hectic experience (as seen in the video).
In the US (where pg lives and the MPAA/RIAA are based), the only reason that anyone is allowed any intellectual property protection is to advance society:

> 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.

The obvious way that this works is that authors are motivated to create because they have the exclusive right to sell their creation (and thus make a profit). That seems pretty OK to me.

However, no amount of money is going to be able convince Mr. Lennon and Mr. Harrison to get the band back together. So, why are we still paying for that content? How is that advancing the arts? Would giving current creators the ability to use the entire back catalog of the Beatles without any cost or legal hassle advance the arts more? I would argue yes.

I can't find an article for this, so sorry, maybe someone can, but I believe that the majority of books go out of print rather quickly. However, we're not allowed to copy them freely. When those books go out of print, we're taking society backwards. They're impossible to acquire legally. That's really bad.

We need a balance. I think five to ten years would be fine. Opening up access to a new generation of small creators is better than providing further income to the JK Rowlings and Paul McCartneys of the world. They're already rich by that time anyways.
Why not use Kickstarter for this? Is there something about Kickstarter that makes it necessary to have a separate site for science? It seems that the audience that uses Kickstarter is the one you want for Petridish.
No. Intensive addiction to cigarettes doesn't destroy your career or your family --- at least, not until later in your life, when you contract lung cancer. In fact, from experience: smoking can improve your earning potential, by creating the additional networking opportunity of being a member of the community of smokers. The cost of smoking is mostly constant and manageable.

Intensive addiction to heroin is virtually guaranteed to destroy both your family and your career, leaving you and your dependents with neither an income nor a support system.
I'm taking the class too, and feel like I've picked up some pretty interesting algorithms. What sort of things did you learn from your reading? And what did you read?
Maybe MS thinks that the computer in a future is actually your phone. Then you have different accesories for it. At office you have display, keyboard and mouse. The phone automatically senses their presense and atarts to wirelesly communicate with them, i.e. bringing metroless desktop to those peripheals. Then you might have tablet like dummy screen that communicates wirelessly with the phone bringing metrolook to the screen. And you could also use the phone as is with metro. It could easily hook to your home entertainment too. Yes, this is fuuristic, and it is not going to happen soon.
Exactly.

Unlike physical representations of function which make sense to be patentable due to the risk of being copied, stolen and possibly improved upon before use or distribution, and unlike software licences which add or enable function into mechanical form, any form of creative art derives its value in the public domain from the public itself.

Therefore, it makes little sense to treat art as property or to put patents and software licences under the same umbrella as copyright.

If copyright for creative arts did not exist, art would very much exist, and if anything would thrive even more. For example, why would anyone go to someone other than J.K. Rowling for a Harry Potter book? Even if it were "better" by some people's measure than her books, it still would not be J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. There is no ability to add a strict/objective improvement on creative works - this is a critical difference between form and function.
Smells dissipate.
You're oversimplifying things. Copyright is about way more than requiring people to pay to listen to music or watch movies. There are other interests that need to be balanced, such as the ability to create new works based off existing works, and the ability to preserve works for posterity. Copyright has to be a compromise between the artist's interests and the public interest. You can't just create a legal framework that absolutely enforces the artist's wishes.
Let's take his example of whites-only and blacks-only drinking fountains. Would a black person drinking from a whites-only fountain have constituted "initiation of force"? And similarly, was Rosa Parks' refusal to vacate her seat an "initiation of force"?
Example: You need to search some folder and it's subdirectories for files.

In WinXP you might do: Start->Find folders and files. Write search terms. Location Dropdown->"Browse..."->Find folder. Press search.

Vista: Find the folder in Explorer, write your search terms in the search box in the upper right corner .

This workflow wasn't changed for a long time, as far as I remember.
Oh, OK. I mentioned her because Kinsella uses her position as an example of pro-IP libertarians. I wasn't aware she didn't consider herself libertarian.
I really wish the Clojure-in-Clojure project was further along; it seems like it would really help these efforts.

From the number of "Clojure in X" projects I've seen lately, people seem to really want multiple backends, without giving up algorithmic compatibility between versions.
Wait, I thought Twitter was going to change the world by allowing open communications channels to circumvent tyranny? Kind of a useless tool in that regard if it documents all your information and the company is willing to hand it all over at a moment's notice.

Does Twitter have an official stance on this anywhere?
If so, would that make it illegal to redistribute code with a license like this?
When you click Start and see a textbox which is labeled search, do you not think, what if I type "add remove". Google has taught me this, so when I see search I expect to enter keywords or search criteria and that expected results are returned.

Guess what it works.

Classic what? Click what? Where's what?

Just search for it.

Implying the rest just seems archaic, especially from a user perspective.
More like an "artifact" :) You can actually find the poker apps by using these weird keywords, but I doubt they appear in the keyword list.

In case of the apps with in-apps our system cannot distinguish between a keyword from the in-app, and a keyword from the keyword list. Also, Apple uses fuzzy matching, so if a poker app has an in-app like "Stack of 22,000 chips", our system may try to guess that one of the keywords is "22ch".

Finally - usually the big players don't use keywords for promotion, but the more traditional PR techniques. It's interesting to watch their keywords, but it's far more interesting to see how the little players (i.e. your competition) perform.
Like I hypothesized: some (maybe most) of the crimes involved in drug trafficking can be mitigated by legalization. But many of the crimes that knock-on from drug use are simply endemic from drug use. That intensive use of hard drugs destroys families and employability isn't simply a result of illegality.
The Mythical Team-Month
Literally having to re-learn the OS is almost certainly an over-statement with pre-win8 versions, as you are correct base functionality in previous versions is in many ways consistent.

However, how I interpret that statement is that it is ill-advised to over-estimate the general computer user's ability to adapt to changes, or the way 'little' changes end up disrupting the way they interact with the OS.

I might be interpreting OP's statement with my own bias, or reading into it too much, and we could probably go back and forth on semantics all day.

Regarding the control panel, I think the search functionality, which again a lot of non-techies may not even realize is an option, is the main redeeming quality and makes it much less aggravating to work with.
That sounds like a straw man. Who is advocating for getting rid of copyright on music AND software?

And just because it costs money to make certain properties, like the smells coming from a restaurant, should we make laws that twist common sense and decency to protect profits derived from these properties?
Workers slacking off? It must be March
In terms of being intuitive for a new user? Yes, the Linux CLI is a total failure. Can you imagine sitting an absolute newbie in front of a Linux (or any Unix) TTY and telling them, "Go at it"?
One of the biggest issues I see is that per-pixel manipulation is incredibly slow. Also, information on the best double buffering techniques would be nice too.
The Future Of Education Is Online
"Artists should be able to dictate whatever terms they want" is by no means a reasonably valid perspective. It's a selfish, naive perspective, the dismissal of which is literally the first step in creating a reasonable copyright system.
What cost; freedom
Got $5000 to spare? Get an ant species named in your honor.

http://www.petridish.org/projects/new-species-of-ants-in-mad...
Why would you have your finger pressed to the screen for 5 minutes?

Asuming that the number of notebook style PCs continues to rise, your fingers, when on the keyboard are actually pretty close to the screen, often closer than they are to the mouse. So you would just move your have foreward some 10 or 20 cm and every once in a while.

To touch on a cell in Excel or mark a couple of words in a text processor. Maybe use two fingers when in Photoshop or AutoCAD. Well, for the later maybe a mouse is necessary, but that's what W7 will be around for for quite a while.
Yep

http://support.twitter.com/articles/41949-guidelines-for-law...
If we don't respect songs as property, but we do think of our own software creations as property, is that not hypocrisy?

Who said that software is property? Not me.

http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-th...
You make a valid point, but the value in software is most often personalized to the user. Music and movies don't have that same limitation. If the movie were a 'choose your own adventure', and the user had to use a specific platform, then the software is no longer a smell that anybody can smell, it is a specific targeted smell.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately as I'm working with a generic product which is freely available in mass, how do you charge for that? By making it more valuable to the user at the time of use is the best that I've come up with so far.
While I would never advocate developers not thinking for themselves, I think it's shallow to say that seeking out and following best practices is an excuse to not think.

In fact, some languages, like Rails, are considered opinionated by imposing certain practices and standards in order to streamline the repetitive implementations that most applications need. This frees the developer to focus and think more about the more complex and less repetitive tasks.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/12182/what-do...
"I'm sorry to find that you're no more serious about your politics that all the other libertarians I've encountered. I had hoped you'd be willing to engage with the content of my argument instead of its dressings. I am disappointed to find that you are not."

The entirety of both of your responses consists of either inaccurate characterizations of what I've said, of history, or of me. You have, on more than one occasion made derogatory characterizations of me, and you close with the above ad hominem. This is a form of anti-intellectualism which I will not indulge further. I shouldn't have given you the benefit of the doubt, but unlike you, I am generous that way.
I don't write margin:0; but use margin: 0;

The reason is because of shorthand: margin: 20px auto 10px; === works | margin:20pxauto10px; === fails

Therefore, putting the space after the colon is pure habit for spacing reasons.

Yes, I understand that margin:20px auto 50px; works. It's just habit and preference.
> * Chrome was supposed to drop H264 support a >1 year ago in favor of WebM. It never happened.

This is pivotal. A big part of why WebM looked like it could win was Chrome's announced support for it and the dropping of H.264. It looks like Chrome has backtracked on that - over a year passed, no follow through on Chrome's promise to remove H.264 - so it is forcing Mozilla to reconsider it's position.

Does anyone know more about Chrome's current stance?