cduan

I liked it too, and that makes it relevant enough for me.

More like good design practices avoid massive refactoring. The way the article puts it, choosing the wrong legal structure is like writing your webapp in hackish Perl, realizing it's becoming popular, and then scrapping your code and redoing the whole thing using a decent framework.

Interface tries to intelligently rearrange itself, and ends up annoying user? Reminds me of that old MS Office "feature" of hiding unused menu items, which bugged me like crazy.

I've been happily using Gitosis for quite a while now. It's like Github without the web interface (so it manages central repositories and user authentication).

I recall it took a bit of finagling to set it up, but I haven't had a single issue with it since. It's also cool that the configuration files are stored in a Git repository (once you try it, it will be clear how that works).

http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-e...

I really hope they printed the cover on papyrus or something, or else the paper, exposed to UV rays as necessary to degrade the ink, will fall apart first...

I'm always surprised how many people think that the introductory solitary sentence "Wrong" is an appropriate response to a comment. Particularly so when the original comment is hypothesizing about someone's opinion of something (whether Apple will be "upset" by these ads).

Not to say the comment is "Wrong." It seems like a decent hypothesis that Apple's marketing strategy is to broaden its customer base, and that Microsoft's ads are hindering that strategy. I do think, though, that part of the reason behind the incivility of online discussions is the tendency of members to express opinions in the form of terse, unqualified statements of fact.

Many, if not most, of these factors are strongly correlated with wide income disparity and particularly greater poverty levels. Greed, obviously, but also those pertaining to crime rates (envy, wrath), arguably lust, and potentially gluttony.

It would be interesting to see these charts adjusted for wealth levels in some manner.

When you summarize the article this way (and I think this is a correct summary), it's pretty obvious that Declan is misrepresenting Lessig's current position.

Declan is probably right that this was once Lessig's view. Larry saw the frightening possibility that software coders could use their powers to restrict our rights and freedoms, and saw protective legislation as the best remedy.

As Declan points out, it is clear that legislators will not remedy this problem. What Declan omits, however, is that Lessig figured this out too, several years ago.

His current view is that there is another force to counteract this encroachment on consumers' rights: the consumers themselves. Ultimately, like a good lawyer, Lessig still believes that the law is the solution to protecting rights. But rather than hoping for the law to come down from on high, he hopes to harness grassroots power to voice change from below.

This is what prompted his recent shift in academic focus to fighting "corruption" in politics, through his "Change Congress" movement. His argument is that if Congress is too "corrupt" (he has a special definition of "corrupt," I won't get into that), then good laws will never come about.

(Here's a link: http://change-congress.org/ )

A J.D. is considered a terminal degree (there is no further degree beyond a J.D.; the S.J.D. is considered a different track), so technically you do have a doctorate.

But ethical rules are questionable as to whether you can call yourself a "doctor," because it's potentially misleading. So US lawyers are in the strange position of having doctorates, but being unable to say so.

Here's some more info: http://abajournal.com/magazine/lawyers_are_doctors_too/

For those interested, this is basically the theory of law professor Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com. He calls this problem the "daily me," the idea being that content can become too personalized to one's views, resulting in irrationally extreme perspectives on those views and their correctness.

I would recommend the book, and also the numerous criticisms of his theory (that prompted him to partially retract his argument in the second edition), easily found online.

A book? Yes, a book! Go out and stare at a fixed-content display for a while.

The basic error of this article is that it ignores the prisoner's dilemma problem. The basic idea behind that problem, as a reminder, is that parties acting in their best interest for themselves will, in certain situations, select a suboptimal outcome.

Applied to open/closed source software, the prisoner's dilemma suggests that parties acting in their own interest will opt for closed-source software, because of the personal benefits (trade secrets, market power, etc.). Thus, even if open-source software is more efficient as a general matter, everyone will go for closed source, resulting in an inefficient outcome.

The solution to the prisoner's dilemma, of course, is contracts. By binding the hands of the parties, you can force people to choose the more optimal solution. The ideal contract adds a breach penalty that offsets whatever selfish gain may be reaped from defecting, and thereby encourages cooperation.

This is, in effect, what the GPL does: it adds a penalty to closed source software (namely, you can't use open-source with it). If open source is indeed more efficient, then developers will be willing to forego the benefits of closed source in order to take advantage of open source software.

I think that this generally summarizes what everyone else is saying ("nothing would deter an unscrupulous company from stealing open source code," "economic principle of free riders"). My own comment is offered as a general thought, not a precise cost-benefit analysis. There is much more careful thinking on this subject, much of it in the law review articles I read while in law school.

The case is not about clickwrap agreements. Footnote 8 reads:

> In light of our "fair use" analysis, we decline to address the question of whether the terms of the Clickwrap Agreement created an enforceable contract between plaintiffs and iParadigms.

In other words: the court ignored the clickwrap agreement issue, because the fair use analysis was decisive.

They can't, really. This case focused at times on the fact that you could never actually see the papers on the website. Google wants to display content of books, so this case is inapposite.

I'm actually kind of torn over the result in this case. On the one hand, it's great that the court adopted an expansive view of fair use. In particular, I'm glad that the court strongly approved Pierre Leval's transformativeness test, which is a great standard for internet services that use copyrighted works in innovative ways.

On the other hand, you have to admit that it's weird for the students, who are forced to submit their personal works to this third-party service.

Consider an analogy: your startup got a great valuation from a VC, you're signing the papers, and suddenly the lead partner says to you, "Oh, one more thing. You have to submit copies of all of your software to Microsoft for archive purposes. But don't worry, they promised not to do anything with it!"

Sure, Microsoft will probably just leave your source code on an archive disk and never look at it. But still, it's a weird feeling.

A great example of a readable and effective contract I've found is the terms of use to the Patently-O blog:

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2006/01/patentlyo_blog_.html

It does a nice job of using the formal legal language but also introducing each section with a human readable explanation.

The contract terms in the article are good in that they are human readable, but they lack legal precision. Consider the copyright assignment: "you own the graphics and visual elements" but "we own the XHTML markup, CSS and other code." There are plenty of ambiguities (if someone copies the layout, whose copyright is infringed? are the licenses exclusive? are they revocable?). Two judges could read this contract to mean substantially different things.

So...if he had gotten the code right, he would have taken this job and his current job? Because that's the only way his five lines of code are worth $20,000 apiece.

I actually attribute much of my writing skill to a college philosophy class.

The reason was that our class paper assignments were not about arguing philosophical points. Our assignments were to summarize the arguments of philosophers. No personal opinions. Just summaries.

Regardless of the substance of the course, the skill of digesting, analyzing, and summarizing the position of another is surprisingly valuable. It is also surprisingly difficult.

Summarizing is difficult because it is too easy to mix up personal ideas with those of others. This tends to result in a mish-mash of words and ideas that don't fit together, resulting in the incomprehensible academic-speak complained of in the article.

Summarizing is important because it is persuasive. If you can rephrase your opponents' views without bias or argument, and then build on those views to reach your conclusions, your opponents are much more likely to entertain and accept your conclusions, because they feel like their views have been fully heard.

It is unfortunate that so much of writing focuses on making arguments, to the detriment of the equally important skill of understanding the arguments of others.

Though they did measure wrinkles around the eyes as well, which is generally a sign of a genuine smile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile#Duchenne_smile

(Yes, you can fake that as well, but I doubt enough people know about that part to do it.)

Contrary to the article's suggestion, retaining copyright does "prevent bastardization of the standard by someone else who tries to publish a different version of it." One of the exclusive rights of copyright is the right to make derivative works (and to foreclose others from doing so).

The article claims that copyright is "designed to defeat" wide dissemination of standards. The author would be well-advised to reconsider this in light of open-source licenses such as the GPL, which rely on copyright protection to ensure wide dissemination of works through their viral mechanisms.

Perhaps we are forgetting that Amazon is a victim as well. If Amazon is unable to seek punishment against malicious users of its site, it is forced to spend its time and money patching security holes and preventing future attacks, in addition to repairing lost good will from customers and authors.

It always surprises me how quick people are to jump to the conclusion that the website operator is at fault for these sorts of malicious uses. It flies in the face of simple economics. The burden on Amazon to protect its site probably ranges in the thousands or millions of dollars; the benefit to the malicious user is a couple of laughs and a funny blog post. It would seem economically inefficient to say that the burden lies on Amazon, in this situation, to protect itself.

(Indeed, I don't believe anyone would analogously say that a thief is not responsible for acts of theft, because they provide a "free lesson in home security" to the victim. Why the difference when we move to the online realm?)

The thesis of this article would seem to be that instilling a sense of approachability toward a subject is a key component to learning the subject. The two stories presented comport with this thesis. Mr. Condom breaks the taboo about sex talk by inflating prophylactics, helping people to become more comfortable with them and thus more willing to use them. The computer program helps break down the student's fear of fractions, and subsequently her math scores improve.

In my view, this points to the thought that education requires two components: first, the presentation of materials by a teacher; and second, willingness to receive those materials by the student. In some places, such as Japan and South Korea, the latter is accomplished by fostering intense competition. This article presents an alternative. Perhaps the merits of these and other alternatives for creating a willingness to learn are debatable, but it seems rather dismissive to suggest, as the initial comment does, that more teaching is the whole answer.

I do sympathize with the initial's commenter's complaint that teaching has too much moved to what are essentially therapy sessions for children. The problem does seem to be a lack of balance, with a focus too strong on making children willing to open their minds, without providing anything to put inside.

Perhaps it's just me, but I've always found the that/which distinction fairly clear and relevant. Consider the following two sentences:

1. Don't eat the apples, which are rotten.

2. Don't eat the apples that are rotten.

To me, the first one indicates that all the apples are rotten, whereas the second only suggests that some are bad and directs me to be choosy.

Of course, I know better than to assume that everyone follows this rule to the letter, but I do make an effort to get it right myself (like a good protocol implementor: liberal with input, strict with output).

Note that the opinion considers this exact analogy, on page 13. The question in this case is whether Google's product placements on search result pages cause "consumer confusion." The distinction between this case and the shop is that, with product placement, according to the court, everyone knows what's going on, so there is no "consumer confusion." In contrast, does everyone know that a Google ad resulting from a search may be unrelated to the search? Maybe we HN readers do, but the question is whether the "average consumer" would.

Nevertheless, the court did not go nearly so far as the above commenter suggested. All it said was that Google's product placements were potentially more confusing than the prior 1-800 case. The product placements might not be confusing nonetheless.

Oh dear. From the one lecture of his that I attended, I knew that Charlie Nesson had some unconventional ideas, but this is a bit excessive. (You know you should be worried when Lawrence Lessig dismisses your fair use argument.)

The student he is representing should be worried that all this showmanship is angering the judge, who would then give less credence to legitimate arguments.

I'd say that it is less than "terrifying" to plot the national debt on a log scale. Most numbers in economics (and in nature) vary in an exponential manner. Consider, for example, inflation, interest rates, and population growth. Nature deals in ratios; it is only human afterthought that adds units to measurements.

One incidental result of the fact that numbers tend to vary exponentially is that the first digit of a measured number is most likely 1 and least likely 9. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law .

Thanks for pointing this out--this is either a new feature since I wrote the tutorial, or I didn't get it right the first time around. I think it is correct now.

I appreciate the comment. To be fair, this was intended to be an introductory tutorial--it was written to teach Git to a friend of mine. Its purpose was to introduce Git in terms of underlying concepts rather than as recipes of commands, as most tutorials only provide. I'm not particularly of the view that "understanding" is the province of experts; novices are perfectly capable of grokking a system, given proper instruction.

My undergrad thesis, written four years ago, was a taxonomy of anti-spam systems. Since then, every anti-spam system that I've seen both (1) falls neatly within one of my categories and (2) fails to account for the problems I identified in that category.

This idea is an authentication-based system, because it relies on identifying the message sender in order to prevent spam. Among other things, it fails to account for identity theft.

For reference, here is my thesis: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/download/?file=thesis.pdf

I think your hypothesis is correct, but that doesn't make Git any less of an achievement. Certainly it is the product of technologies that existed, but it is the manner in which Git packages those features that is innovative. Indeed, much of the brilliance of Git is how _simple_ it is conceptually compared to other systems--it is the concepts that Git leaves out, not what it uses, that count.

Isn't the probability still 2/3 even in the proposed alternative? The fact that we "arbitrarily announce the gender of one of the children" provides new information for calculating the probability, which is ignored if you assume that the original 50/50 distribution is unchanged by the announcement.

In an extreme example, consider this algorithm, analogous to the one in the article:

1. Choose a random parent that has exactly two children

2. Announce the gender of _both_ children

3. Ask about the odds that the parent has both a boy and a girl

In this situation, it would be ridiculous to say that the odds calculated at step 3 are still 50/50. Because of step 2, it is either certainly true (100%) or not true (0%) that the parent had both a boy and a girl. Granted, on average with repeated trials, half the time the step-3 value will be 100% and the other half 0%. But still, the step 2 information changes the value at step 3.