skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indie artists listed on iTunes (for example) make more than 60% on each song/album sale. It's way higher since there are no middle men involved. And it's easy to get listed through services like cdbaby.com. So "stealing" music from indies does hurt more in those terms.

But even with being a musician, I lean on the side of piracy myself because it's a virtual loss not an actual one, and it's natural for people to want to share the music and things they appreciate. Any long-term successful solution will have to account for and will likely encourage that. Copyright is becoming less and less relevant, and artists (including software developers) will continue to forge an existence in a post-copyright world too.

Funny story, I was playing a show the other day and some kids came up after to tell me they liked the show. One of them bought a CD and the others said they'd "totally buy one" but had no cash. So I told the first kid to just rip it for his friends, and the look on their faces was priceless. They were like "wow, awesome!" but you know he was probably going to do it anyway so why not acknowledge it? :)
They don't already?
I moved to Italy for other reasons, I noticed this only after having been there a while and becoming fluent in the language.
If hell is segfault, then Heaven must be a memory leak?
Truly sad, esp. the stories of small children sleeping on the street with no food. It's also frightening to me. You've all read recently about major knowledge workers (significant people with Flickr/Yahoo!) who have been pink slipped. I'm sure the supremely skilled will find other offers of employment, but the bottom line is that it can happen to anyone.

I want to do something to help, and have volunteered at the soup kitchen-type ministries, but I just keep wishing it could be more than just a meal. I want a long-term solution that would end with capable people becoming productive, paid, and employed again. It's a staggering problem, and I don't know how to get there.

My parents visited San Francisco for the first time around 2000. When I asked them how they liked the place, expecting to hear stories of beautiful weather, Golden Gate park, Alcatraz, the cable cars, or the scenic vistas, all they could talk about was how many homeless people there were. Literally, when I tried to change the subject, it went like this:

Me: So did you go to Lombard Street?

Mom: Yes, but we didn't stay long because there were so many homeless people.

And so on.
I've always wanted to write a simple and (for me) stupid lisp machine. How does one do it? Do I use a lisp compiler that generates native executables? Do I write a VM? So confused... :(
"or the documentation I learnt from..."

Because of course, whoever teaches you owns all the ideas you build thereafter.
"11) ... While investments in technology will continue, the really smart VCs will realize there is a much better and more certain way to make a ton of money in the short term: start a bank. ..."

I think he's right, in a way. I don't think we're talking about traditional banks, but more like a federally sanctioned micro-loan enterprise. These smaller lending facilities can be much more specialized. When I worked to get a _secured_ loan in 1995 to start a multi-media business the bank officer "didn't get it". And for that bank, it was the right choice. Mostly, I'd really just like to see something replace credit cards as my loan device. When money is near 0% and credit cards are nearing 30% (amortized daily accrual) - these "banks" would have my interest.... err, I mean, business.
to me the future isn't about some new variation of the decrepit systems that already exist (capitalism, socialism, democratic republics, ...).

when you think about it, those systems are just hacks meant to maximize the good parts of humanity (cooperation, innovation, ...) and minimize the bad parts (corruption, ...). imho what we have now is the acme of those systems

I feel that if humanity can survive long enough (with our scientists and current infrastructure intact), eventually we can make those systems obsolete by fixing the root of the problem: basic human nature - specifically the part where sub-systems try to maximize their efficiency at the expense of the system as a whole. bureaucratic systems (no matter how large or small) can limit it (temporarily), but they can never eliminate it in the long term...

to me the answer is human evolution through artificial means.... a shared consciousness (aka the borg); though i'm sure it'd have its own set of problems...
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Yeah, I don't know much about this person, but flying a guy (edit: oops, sorry, girl! that's what I get for writing first thing in the morning) around the world to talk about "the commons project" sounds like lots of money that could be better spent elsewhere. That said, if she's bright and a good worker, why not at least give her the chance to do something else in the company?
Tip when laying off your blogger/evangelist: be civil. Otherwise, you look like a bunch of assholes. Bad Yahoo, bad.
Or Disqus.

Or Wordpress.
The GPL: because what use is freedom if you can't control what people do with it.
"like throwing out the projector because...they have the image on the wall, who needs it".

You just made my day. Thank you.
Well, we can try to help them :).

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
You're right, but that's the exception not the rule. Unfortunately, most artists that people want music from (or know about) are still with the big record labels.

That's a great story. How do you feel about sites like favtape.com?
I love Rails and will agree that it boosts productivity tremendously, but if you cut out the 80% of your time you spend on gruntwork, you'll find that 80% of your remaining time is spent on gruntwork relative to your increased capabilities.

Which means the economics of "OK, outsource the gruntwork!" still make sense.

I have a RoR website which is probably pushing 1,000 lines these days. (1,000 lines in Java will, maybe, get a single page mostly done at the day job.) It blows away my day job in terms of functionality. You want to know what about 800 of those lines look like? Grunt work. (Validation that a user has a name and email address? Takes 1 line... 1 line of grunt work. Verifying that anyone using these 27 actions is an administration? 1 line... of grunt work. Implementing a search function for lost registration keys? Four lines... of grunt work. etc)
I think websites should start popping up a similar message when adblock is detected.

I realise this is an unpopular view around these parts, but it's a bit of a "jerk" thing to do.
if we need to put constraints on it, then that's a business that needs to fail.

Exactly! That's kind of what I was meaning to say... :)
Tumblr's CEO brainstorms microblog monetization
George is a girl
http://www.flickr.com/people/george/
The Art of Customer Service
Theoretically some piracy replaces sales. A pirated CD is not one less you'll sell, but it's more than 0.

But yeah, might as well except reality and just use the extra exposure to sell more concert tickets. If you can't beat em...
It makes me very sad to read this. Especially the thought of a child in this situation, when I have a child at the same age.

Some people chose the street, I've seen it in places where the government provides for everyone. And many are mentally ill, often schizophrenics off medication. Sad enough that it is hard to help them. But to see families hit by the economic crisis to be pushed to the street is appalling.

How about we raise taxes a little bit for everyone, so that people who have fallen on hard times can be caught by a 'social net'?
I've lived in SF for three years. Whenever I visit other cities (Seattle, Austin, New York) I'm always surprised by how few homeless there are.
Does anyone else think it would be helpful if Google integrated options like this into their search?
It's dangerous, but not to society as a whole.

I.e. Paris Hilton has the money that she uses for hedonistic purposes, but she won't be put into a position of power.
Successful iPhone app acquired by Mac developer
I don't endorse pirating software and I don't use one myself, but I never agreed with the notion that using pirated software is stealing money. Because in most cases, the people using pirated software would not pay for it if it would be not be possible to use it without buying. Maybe a few would, but this amount is compensated by the marketing value the pirating provides. To sum it up, the company would not make more money if pirating would not be possible.

Again, I am against pirating, but don't agree fully with the text in that popup dialog.
Those of us at WebMynd do not. :)
Awesome. I merged your code into the latest version of the page and pushed it online.
10 Inventors Killed By Their Inventions
"Thats exactly why projects involving heavy C++, Java, Perl, and even PHP have been at the forefront of outsourcing. Those languages do not have a framework for rapid web development."

Translation: "I am wearing blinders."
Yeah, the new site makes it easier to navigate, and emphasizes the top stories much more (which seems to be the goal of most news sites).

(btw, clear your cookies if you want to get out of the beta -- it's "sticky" in that once you visit the beta site you're in the beta)
I'm chiming in a bit late here, but I would probably go to medical school.
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You can't be fired without some sort of severance pay or package, correct? Or am I just crazy.
It could be less than 0, as a pirated CD can be seen as a form of advertising, and could potentially gain customers who would not have discovered you without it. I'm not saying this is always the case, but it's a possibility that makes it even more difficult to calculate the economic harm of piracy.
Much more than personal information, what facebook can monetize is identity & relationships.

For example, with Facebook Connect, it's much harder to be an anonymous troll commenter on a blog. And maybe using Facebook Connect as a login for eCommerce sites would reduce the amount of fraud those sites have to deal with. That is definitely monetizeable.
Funny. Up until your second to last sentence, I really thought you were giving reasons in support of harvesting.

If you're worried about the frost thawing and releasing the methane into the atmosphere (especially with a positive feedback), it seems prudent to burn it into water and CO2 (which already has to be dealt with) while it's still concentrated.
TFA doesn't explain what prevents outsourcing django and ruby on rails.

I think the answer may be... nothing.

Personally my approach is to do the bulk of the webev yourself and outsource stuff like graphic design, research, maybe some simple press release writing.
Flickr's interesting because it's a Web 2.0 darling. There was an article I read that stated that Photobucket got 7x the traffic of Flickr but Flickr got 40x the press mentions of Photobucket. Facebook now owns the online photo-hosting market. The big weakness of Flickr is that its main interaction model is between photographers - Facebook's is between photographers and people in photos.

Flickr may be a cool technology but in a business sense it's an also-ran.
"In humanities, while the questions are interesting, they have no answers."

Certainly not true for all humanities, and only somewhat true for a few.

"Furthermore, the study of humanities does not advance, the fashions and trends simply change."

That's ridiculous, and more importantly, unsubstantiated.

"I have never been exposed to an idea in a humanities class that I could not have understood as a 15 year old."

It's unfortunate that you've never been taught a proper humanities class. Seems like you are letting poor teachers get in the way of valuable subjects.

"Studying CS requires constant intellectual growth and expansion as you enable your brain to understand more and more complex topics."

So do the humanities. Indeed, it appears that a lack of intellectual growth on your part is preventing you from gaining value out of the humanities. Just because it is a different type of growth than what is required for Computer Science doesn't mean it's not intellectual.

For reference, I'm a Computer Science major with an English minor.
Varies wildly from state to state, let alone country to country.
Steve Jobs keynote footage from 1983 and 1984
All I can read from this article is US developers are skilled and expensive, while non-US developers are non-skilled and inexpensive..

I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others? On what grounds, study, statistics can anyone claim that?
You cannot advertise equity investments to the general public in the USA without registering with the SEC. Do you plan to do this?
I started to use it, it's pretty cool.
But I noticed the download page wasn't updated since 2007. Is it really a living project or what?
No, not correct. If it's in your employment agreement then yes (rare). If the company is nice, or feels bad for you then yes. But otherwise they have no obligation to do so.

PS. This is US.

Other countries especially france have different rules.
Ask HC: How to Avoid S3?
I'm using S3 to backup data from other services. The trouble is.. what if the other service uses S3?
Yeah the auto playing is a killer. especially when I go there to listen to a podcast and their sports news at the top starts to play making both sounds clash.
Not to defend piracy, but if you shell out 20$ for every small desktop enhancement application, it adds up very quickly.
How to purchase an iPhone app
So will we see a "getting the band back together" effort from Ludicorp alumni? :)
i'm having difficulty imagining a bug tracking? software having viral growth ... so i guess the 'interest rate' is steadily low; therefore, initial capital is important
I suppose I could backup to two services (e.g. +mosso), but that doubles my cost and effort.

And of course, I could manage the storage myself, but I could grow my own rice too. I'd rather let capitalism do its job, so I can focus on mine.
Because in most cases, the people using pirated software would not pay for it if it

That is a fallacy. If it were not of some value to them, why would they even want it? It's more a case that they simply feel entitled to it.
How exactly does it work though? Yesterday I logged into a web site using OpenID, and noticed something very bad: they referred me to my OpenID provider (yahoo in that case), where I logged in, and then I was referred back.

This is BAD because it is a paradise for phishing. How can I be sure that a random website really forwards me to my openID provider, and not to a phishing site that looks exactly the same?

To be fair, most users might be logged into their OpenID site (or Facebook connect - isn't that essentially the same thing?) all the time, so they wouldn't need to enter login credentials on their "openId site". But overall, it made me think the only solution would be a browser plugin for handling the login stuff.
Well, there are other services: Google's Big Table, among others. But the title begs a different, better question: What about a local version of S3?

What would be great is a small engine that would run on my hosted server (and locally) that would imitate both S3 and SimpleDB services.

In your case, you could use it as an additional backup for S3. In my case, S3 would be the backup. Plus the performance (especially of SimpleDB) is killing me. It fails regularly. So this would be much faster and simpler.
Companies could definitely be smarter about non-commercial licenses.
I don't know about other openid providers, but myopenid uses those crazy ssl certificates that are very pronounced in your url bar, pretty hard to phish imo
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It does seem pretty inefficient!
There are two ways to speed up antiscamming that I can think of. It could become automated, AI-controlled, with a machine capable of pulling the trigger at computer-speed. Or, it could become distributed, one-on-one. The latter seems to me to have better scaling characteristics.

How about this as an idea: suppose somebody starts a financial market which from day one has a system of guarantors. You have to be introduced by a member, who thereby takes full personal responsibility for your bankrupt losses.
Ha! I just finished reading your essay and earlier today I was thinking about the the current and future opportunity for the youth. ( I am 32 ) Seeing some high school kids acting silly and waiting the bus, while I was driving by made me think about what opportunities there are for them when they graduate high school. 3 thoughts came to mind as I made my way to the hardware store:

a) Youth are generally cynical towards the older generation because we won't let them have as much fun as they would like to have.

b) Older generations generally hold on to their wealth and could potentially stifle innovation by keeping much of the up and coming generation in the ranks of those living paycheck to paycheck.

c) How can a society let the youth innovate more efficiently ( and safely ).

College may not be the panacea for innovation and personal happiness but:
attending college helps to put an individual's impact on the world in perspective and can perhaps demonstrate that people do cool things that affect the world. College is also a good way to show people how to learn effectively.

In theory, great schools are difficult to do well in and have high standards; this is the reason that particular graduates are selected for the jobs or funding. It is more difficult to graduate from Reed than Sonoma State- it takes more time studying, writing and thinking. I would consider hiring or working with a person who, theoretically, spent more time thinking in college over another applicant who went to one of the greatest party/drinking schools. Credentials from a school with rigorous curricula is
much different than a doing well at a standardized test. What I mean is that some credentials * are * a measurement of performance ( performance, as in study hard and think clearly ). I think the performace VCs and people who hire graduates to work in their factories and cubicles are trying to measure is called 'return on investment'.

Here is a question for you: what would be your standardized test for measuring return on investment.

I'll think of 3.

1) Applicant, write a short essay about how you might generate $200 in total income in a day given only the clothes you are wearing right now, a $50 bill to spend on anthing you might need, having eaten the breakfast of your choice and a wish for good luck. ( you have 30 minutes )

2) Applicant, how do you manage your time when you are trying new ways of solving a problem? Give one or many examples with your reasoning explained in context. ( you have 30 minutes )

3) Applicant, how willing would you be to share your innovative ideas with me if I helped you succeed at
implementing them? ( all my best ideas; most of my greatest thoughts; some cool ideas; not many OK ideas; perhaps one daydream; you'll never know what I am thinking next )
Google have started to add personalization on the left-hand side with SearchWiki. I think a problem with it is the effect is not obvious - sure the ranking might be different for you if you do the same search again, but how will it effect different searches? By doing much more obvious personalization which is applicable for every search you do thereafter, I think WebMynd gives more value for the (small) effort to configure it.

Also, whatever they might like to experiment with, I think Google will be reluctant to try radically different designs or really mess with the right-hand side of the page. As a public company they need to optimize for ad-revenue.
Consider the source...
The problem with taking everyone and keeping just the best is that it takes a lot of resources to do that. A lot more resources than an exam would take. Just imagine YC taking on everybody who applied and working with them even just for a month.

I generally agree with the trend that pg describes, but don't think it can ever be universal (unfortunately). To be rewarded by the market you need access to the market and that's not always as easy as with consumer web apps. I would say consumer web apps are pretty atypical, because you don't need much investment, you don't need any certifications to be allowed in, there is no risk for the customer if you go bust (unlike with enterprise software), etc.
Same for the UK university I attended. The survey is badly design, pretty much designed with the assumption that a graduate would be working for a big company. There's no way of reporting freelancer/self employed for example.
There's an unspoken assumption in the essay that pg-style startups are a very good indicator of quality of a person and their work. I don't think there's any evidence of that:

* Most startups die horrible death after a few years at no obvious fault of founders. Startups simply do risky stuff, and the payoff comes from the risk.
* If startup is successful, it is almost always someone buying you or possibly IPO - in both cases it's about convincing investors to by you, and it's almost never a real market success.
* Startups dilute your specialization - even if you're the most awesome developer on Earth, if you happen to be bad at any one of other things you'll be doing, especially at dealing with investors - your startup can crash. If you're good at development you should be developing, not doing all the other things you suck at.
* You get a very small sample per person - just a few bits, most likely set to FAIL.

I'd love to see research of correlation between startup success and other "quality" metrics of founders - I expect them to be positive but very low and it would surprise me a lot if it turned out otherwise.

It's not even clear to me that startup success is a better proxy for quality than credentials. Credentials might actually be a lot better, as for all kinds of credentials there's plenty of people with them, and even with weakly correlated performance metrics it should be possible to estimate how much any credential is worth based on past employees with such credentials.

Compared to pg-style startups, bootstrapped firms and consulting are much closer to a real market test.
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France too, at least my school. Just had an email from them: "Please let you know if your employement situation changes in any way." Seems like they want to get some good data on the effects of the crisis.
You can link to your portfolio in the resume, if you're a developer to whatever open source apps/websites you've written.
I meant admission to YC, not university.

But on that note, isn't the biggest criterion for university transfer admission is who admitted you in the first place and your consequential success at that school?

It stands to reason if one wanted to predict if a group would be successful creating a successful startup that a good predictor would be if that group had stated a successful startup in the past.

I'd assume there are other criteria, like: is what this group doing within our scope of expertise? Can we add value to this startup? Will admitting this group best add to the quality of this YC class? Will we make money on this investment?
While it might be true that people just want stuff for free, I guess it is more because of the close-to-zero marginal costs. Knowing that it costs almost nothing to make a new copy of a software or music album it is easier to rationalize and have a clear conscience. I guess we haven't met this kind of zero-marginal-cost intellectual property stuff throughout our evolution, and this might not be a bad thing.
"Is YC acting as an anti-cram school hack?"

Isn't a startup itself an "economic cram?"

"Cramming" isn't necessarily "bad" when the most effective preparation is achieving thing itself.
Individuals should just be allowed to borrow directly from the Fed.
http://isstevejobsdead.com/