Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

This article mentions CommonMark, and skips lightly over the fact that it was hastily renamed that from Standard Markdown after Gruber threw an enormous hissy fit over users improving something he hadn't touched for twelve years: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

View on HN

I don't want to rehash that whole thing, but I totally agree with Gruber in that case.

The "Standard Markdown" name really implied a degree of canonicity and authority over Markdown, even though it was neither created by or endorsed by Markdown's creator.

CommonMark also only changed the name from "Standard Flavored Markdown" to "Standard Markdown" after sending a copy to Gruber, so I'm sure it at least felt very dishonest.

The new name is clearer, and it's been a settled issue for the last 6 years. I'm not sure why the article would have gone into more detail about it.

What, did Gruber invent the practice of putting asterisks around text? The article made it clear he did not. Did Gruber invent the name "Markdown" from whole cloth? No, it is a pun based on the word "markup". Did the Standard Markdown consortium make changes that broke compatibility with Gruber's users? No, because nobody was using Gruber's perl parser. Were they competing with the standard Gruber wrote? No, because he never wrote a standard.

The article spends a great deal of time explaining how markdown codified existing conventions. It describes, not invents. Gruber didn't create markdown, because it already existed. Should he then hold the privilege to control it in perpetuity?

In that case no-one really invents much these days... just rehashes and or iterates on good ideas and repackages them slightly different.

I've always known Gruber for only two things - suggesting the idea of Markdown and throwing hissy fits!

From the last paragraph of the Coding Horror post you linked -

>> after a long and thoughtful email from John Gruber – which is greatly appreciated – he indicated that no form of the word "Markdown" is acceptable to him in this case.

I really couldn't believe this!!

That’s pretty funny, considering Gruber’s attitude toward other people’s intellectual property: https://lee-phillips.org/music/whoIsTheDick/

I read that and thought to myself, “The only thing this Lee Phillips person is managing to convince me of is that Lee Phillips is a dick”. Then I came back here and realized that’s you.

I guess I’m the dick now.

You lost me.

It's quite the essay, defending a man who purchased a house for a low price and made a piece of art decades ago, and continues to extract value from both without making any additional meaningful contributions as regards either. It's almost... like he's seeking... rent. I wonder if there's an economic term for this behavior or any theory about whether or not it should be rewarded.

Peppered with Amazon referral links, too.

How is he extracting value from the house by living in it? As the market value goes up, it costs him more, as his property taxes will go up. As to the photograph, well, he owns the copyright. Period. You may not think we should have copyright, but that’s another conversation.

> As the market value goes up, it costs him more, as his property taxes will go up.

This is a hilarious way to look at it. Please, will the rich of the world burden me with their wealth so that I may pay the tax for them?

> As to the photograph, well, he owns the copyright. Period.

he owns the copyright to a piece of pixel art created as a tribute to his famous album cover photo?

Noooo....the photographer owns the copyright to his original photograph.

That's not what rent seeking is, though.

If only we'd have bots on here, I could post this comment automatically, as I haven't seen anyone use the term correctly in the say 2/3 years since it became hip to mention it every time someone makes money in a way someone else has an ideological problem with.

Who exactly is he seeking rent from when he is the one living in the house?

Not contributing anything? It says right there in the article that he is cleaning the graffiti and rehabbing the house.

I haven't heard of the cover album before, but thanks for linking it. It doesn't sound the opening track is using actual hardware (such as a Ricoh 2A03 or a Konami VRC6), but the cover of All Blues almost has a Tim Follin feeling to it.

BTW, it's Wendy Carlos, not Walter.

I used the name as it was when he created the thing I was talking about. This is a problem that arises whenever a scholar or artist changes his or her name, say by getting married. If you use the new name, nobody will find the reference. So I’m not sure what’s correct in all cases.

Nitpick: when she created the thing.

That's not unreasonable, but she started transitioning over 50 years ago. I think it's appropriate to refer to her as Wendy now, as Wikipedia and all the online music stores I just peeked at do.

I didn’t know that. (But I just looked it up and you’re right.) At the time, it was a secret, so as far as the world new, “Switched on Bach” was created by a man named Walter Carlos. The public didn’t know about Wendy until many years later. But, from a scholarly point of view, you don’t go back in time and change the names of authors. You generally refer to the author’s name as it was at creation.

The writing style of your article seems more personal and narrative-oriented than scholarly, to be honest. It might be better to reword it if you want your personal blog to have a more academic perspective.

You might find readers more sympathetic to your post if you spent more time on the copyright issues and less on telling us repeatedly that other people's taste in music is wrong

Wendy Carlos transitioned in 1979 and hasn't used her birth name since then, you might wanna fix that in your story.

Oh fuck everything about that article you linked.

as a fan of the fair-use doctrine, pixel art and the whole chiptune genre I agree that article is the worst.

Whatever the merits of the argument, the author of this article sounds pretty judgemental. To quote:

"The photographer happens to be the great Jay Maisel. I feel on fairly safe ground saying that any one of his photographs is worth more than all the “chiptune” ever produced."

Pretty judgemental? Give me some credit. I was extremely judgemental.

I think you missed the opportunity to re-enforce a few more times how much you dislike the genre of music in question. Just so the reader knows.

I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com