Comment by keeda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keeda | Hacker News Reader

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> None of us are allowed to express outrage at the bulk export of GitHub repos with zero regard for their copyleft status because some members of the software engineering community are large-scale pirates?

I don't think that is an accurate representation of the tech community. On the other hand, I do think TFA is making a reasonable statistical representation of the tech community (rather than a "guilt-by-association" play) which could be rephrased as:

The overriding ethos in HN and tech communities has clearly been on the "information wants to be free" side. See: the widespread support of open source and, as your comment itself mentions, copyleft. Copyleft, in particular, is famously based on a subversion of intellectual property (cf "judo throw") to achieve an "information wants to be free" philosophy.

Unsurprisingly, this has also manifested countless times as condoning media piracy. Even today a very common sentiment is, "oh there are too many streaming services, where's my pirate hat yarrrr!"

Conversely, comments opposing media piracy are a vanishingly tiny, often downvoted, minority. As such, statistically speaking, TFA's evaluation of our communities seems to be spot on.

And, now the same communities are in an uproar when their information "wants to be free". The irony is definitely rich.

First, I don't agree that what you just said is at all reflective of what TFA actually wrote. Yours makes it about statistics not individuals. Statistical groups don't have an ass to shove anything up, so TFA pretty clearly was imagining specific people who hold a conflicting belief.

And for that reason, I think your version exposes the flaw even more thoroughly: you can't reasonably merge a data set of stats on people's opinions on AI with a data set of stats on people's opinions on IP in the way that you're proposing.

To throw out random numbers as an example of the flaw: If 55% of people on HN believe that IP protection for media should not exist and 55% believe that GitHub stole code, it's entirely possible that TFA's condemnation only applies to 10% of the total HN population that holds the supposedly conflicting belief even though HN "statistically" believes both things.

And that's before we get into the question of whether there's actually a conflict (there's not) and the question of whether anyone is accurately measuring the sentiment of the median HN user by dropping into various threads populated by what are often totally disjoint sets of users.

Of course, it's not possible to strictly represent a large population with a single characteristic. But then it is also absolutely accurate to call the USA a capitalistic country even though there is a very diverse slate of political and economic beliefs represented in the population.

Now, you could say the capitalism is a function of the policies enacted by the country, which aren't a thing for online forums. But these policies are a reflection of the majority votes of the population, and votes are a thing on forums. Even a casual observation, starting from the earliest Slashdot days to modern social media, shows that the most highly upvoted and least contested opinions align with the "information wants to be free" philosophy.

To get a bit meta, you can think of this rhetoric along the lines of the following pattern which is common on social media:

Hacker News: "All software is glorified CRUD boilerplate! You are not a special snowflake! Stop cosplaying Google!"

Also Hacker News: "AI is only good for mindless boilerplate! It's absolutely useless for any novel software! AI boosters are only out to scam you!"

The sentiment is obviously not uniform and is shifting over time, even in this very thread... but it does ring true!

It rings true but as with many things that seem intuitive it's an illusion.

Hacker News doesn't have opinions. Individuals on Hacker News have opinions. Different sets of individuals comment and vote on different threads. There's zero reason to suppose that it's the same people expressing both ideas or even that it's the same people voting on those ideas. To the contrary, I've spent enough time on this forum (way too much time) to know that there are whole sub-communities on HN that overlap very imperfectly. We self-select based on titles, topics, and even on time of day.

The only thing this kind of logic is good for is producing fallacious arguments dismissing someone's opinion because someone else holds a contradicting opinion.

Totally agreed that any large community must contain multiple diverse opinions. But when making a point it's impossible to address all relevant combinations, and so it's fine to generalize. Using the US as an example again, many Americans opposed the Iraq war but it is perfectly accurate to say that "the US invaded Iraq."

Now, generalizations can be faulty, but whether they ring true is a good proxy for their usefulness. And this point in TFA rings very true. Beyond just Hacker News or other social media, look at the blogosphere, industry "thought leaders", VCs, organizations like the EFF, startups, tech companies and their executives (and if you look closely, their lobbyists) on any matter involving intellectual property rights. The average reality that emerges is pretty stark and can be summarized as "what's mine is mine, what's yours is everybody's." Sure, many of us would disagree with that, but that is what the ultimate outcome is.

As such, I read that point not as singling out a specific set of people, but as an indictment of the tech community, and indeed, the industry as a whole.

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