It is interesting to see the different reactions to this article. Byrne is clearly sympathetic to Aaron’s cause, and to the fact that civil disobedience and other sometimes subversive methods can be effective in dealing with injustice.
There seem to be many comments attacking him for various minor gripes, choice of language, his incomplete understanding of the situation, etc. But that seems to miss the point. He’s ultimately asking how did this end up so wrong, and what can we learn from this tragic situation. How far should someone need to be prepared to go when taking a stand? How might more effective publicity/messaging have furthered the cause or helped prevent the judicial process from spiraling out of hand.
Technical advancement and the proliferation of data create scenarios that are clearly not intuitive to the average person. There seems to be a tendency to sometimes attack/lecture less technically proficient observers, rather than try to more meaningfully communicate and get to the heart of the issue.
Byrne connects the JSTOR situation to the very different realms of wikileaks, manning, music publishing, etc. For those who care about the rules governing information sharing, IP, etc, this begs the critical question of “how do we differentiate among these ideas, so they are not all muddled together in the public’s eye.”
He definitely makes many great connections to the larger picture. The problem is that he gets many of the ideological details wrong, which is really unfortunate as it leads to potential misjudgments of Swaartz's cause.
Specifically,
1. Swaartz did have legal access to all of these files. There was no "theft" involved (Byrne's statement, "Swartz stole the material, pure and simple", is a hefty misunderstanding). He was, however, exploiting a loophole. He also violated the website's terms of service and trespassed at MIT.
2. Byrne seems to be implying that Swaartz should have admitted he was wrong and accepted jail time or being a martyr. But at no time was Swaartz ever offerred a punishment within three orders of magnitude of any that fit the crime. Should Rosa Parks have plead guilty to carjacking?
3. Byrne seems to think that all of the articles in repositories like JSTOR are "proprietary". In fact, a huge number are not. They have expired copyrights and are public domain; this was a large part of Swaartz's cause. To JSTOR's great credit, they have been expanding access to these articles since Swaartz's arrest, so in that respect his civil disobedience got the message across.
4. Byrne treats academic research somewhat as a monetizable commodity, like music. But not only do academics not see a penny on publications, but more importantly, members of subscribing institutions already have free and unlimited access to read any of these articles. It is just individuals not connected to big universities who have to pay large amounts (and this hurts the authors, who want people to read their work). The justification for charging for access to papers is not to monetize them, but that it costs upkeep to host and organize them. But of course, a P2P distribution of torrents would go a long way toward solving this problem for free, making both the authors and readers happier (but not the middleman).
I believe he's referring more to the fact that the real world price per unit of game currency is not a round number. If dragon eggs were worth exactly $1 each, people would be slightly more careful about the value/cost of in-game purchases.
I agree with you, and more generally I find the "life isn't fair/no excuses" mindset to be a strange phenomenon. The idea that being prepared for adversity, planning ahead, etc. is a good thing is totally sensible. And sometimes you get some bad breaks, and you have to take your lumps and move on. But I can't help but feel that sometimes those that take the "no matter what" position are doing so less in response to the specific situation, and more because they have been conditioned/hardened against the many people that do look for shortcuts or are too quick to make excuses.
It seems like many in the no-excuses camp often frame the hard line as teaching a lesson for "the real world." But I would argue that a main reason deadlines are important in the real world is because other stakeholders need to have clear expectations to use for their own planning. It's unreasonable to expect them to adjust their plans do to one party's shifting schedule, and it's generally a bad idea to treat deadlines lightly.
But if there's a sensible reason and it doesn't cause a big problem for anyone, I don't see why the "principle" of a deadline should trump empathy and business judgement.
Especially since YC can always use the timing and circumstances of the application as additional pieces of information in their process.
Creative thinking, but I'd have to disagree with your conclusion. The present value of the additional years of copyright would be very low, especially taking into account 1. the probability that the work will still be a source of value 100 years (not the exact number, but for the sake of argument) in the future and 2.The possibility of changes in the local jurisdiction or US law over that time.
Your idea would mean paying 100k for the possibility of receiving some additional value 100 years in the future. The first 100 years of value are already protected under US law.
I search HN a lot, so am excited by this native implementation. I would be curious to know more about how the "relevance" sorting algorithm works though. When I did a test search for "domain registrar," for example, the top result was a comment with a score of -4. It seems like there are many ways to implement that feature, so would would be quite interested to hear more if the creators were able to share some thoughts on the general "relevance" problem.
We're using the HN hotness algorithm with some points boosts to surface older items. For a full explanation of the ranking algorithm check out the API docs:
The article's bullet points are great, but I would emphasize one thing:
Don't be afraid to ask, but only AFTER YOU'VE DONE YOUR HOMEWORK. People can be surprisingly helpful, but especially if it's clear you're working hard to make each request count. They're much less likely to think you're wasting their time if it's clear you've been hustling and see their help as a catalyst for you working EVEN HARDER.
That reminds me a lot of ESR's "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way". Two variations of a general rule, I think: if you want someone's help, make it as easy and hassle-free as possible for them to provide it.
It seems from many of the other comments is that people recognize that performing exact mental-arithmetic calculations is rarely necessary; however, the more intuitive understanding of how numbers relate in magnitude etc. is critically important. Estimation is something that I think many of us take for granted, but that has some significant mental pre-requisites.
Interestingly, a growing branch of mathematics education has been working to explore whether the traditional rote memorization is the most effective way of instilling this more hollistic understanding of numbers. If people were interested, I could ask some educator friends for more up-to-date links/citations on this topic.
As a starting point, I think there is not much downside in showing full integer comment scores for comments over n (n=2?) days old.
In addition, I think there are a variety of ways of improving the "ease of consumption" (ie scanning for good comments) without re-introducing the gaming-type issues with integer comment scores. For example:
1. Use a log(karma) function or some other simple obfuscation method
2. Highlight/mark comments by a small number of point thresholds or quantiles
3. Highlight/mark only the top x% of comments on a thread
I do think there is value in seeing some signals of comment quality, but I don't think these need to be particularly granular at all (even just one or two "good comment tiers" could be sufficient).
I think your assertion about the "rhetorical sleight of hand" is pretty far off-base, and is an (admittedly subtle) strawman. The main points of the article, from my perspective were 1. The issues with education in the US are complex, and blanket vilification of teachers is neither warranted nor productive. 2. The pool of high-quality new teaching candidates seems limited (and quite possibly shrinking); current compensation levels for teachers, relative to other job opportunities, is almost certainly a contributing factor.
Your argument is effectively responding to the idea that "we don't find that pay package attractive enough to make us want to be teachers" by saying "but you're using the wrong word- you should look at compensation." Okay, then "we don't find that compensation package attractive enough."
I certainly don't think that just paying teachers more is going to fix anything. But the vilification of the profession, which the article laments and you effectively condone, is in my opinion a big distraction. I agree that tenure is not a perfect system, but neither is it entirely without its benefits. Until more progress is made on a more comprehensive response to education reform, attacking the teachers for not giving up their long-held rights seems a bit unrealistic.
But the policy point is that what happens now is that people are attracted into teaching who value job security far more than most start-up-founding hackers value job security, and who value being accountable for demonstrable results far less than most other people in professional occupations. What you call "their long-held rights" (tenure and other job protections granted by state statute) is precisely what makes the occupation of teaching so different from most other occupations.
That is a reasonable possibility, and I think we probably agree on many aspects of the problem. The general observation still holds though, that the current compensation reality does not attract a broad enough pool.
The challenges of professional recognition, accountability and performance measurement which you aptly highlight are very real. I may be interpreting you incorrectly, but you seem to blame teachers for those issues. My thought is that teachers recognize that the broad challenges facing the industry, and recognize that a comprehensive solution will probably require some significant reforms. But I imagine they also believe that just giving up some of their current rights will not be a sufficient solution without more comprehensive reform. So in the meantime their better off with the status quo.
There seem to be many comments attacking him for various minor gripes, choice of language, his incomplete understanding of the situation, etc. But that seems to miss the point. He’s ultimately asking how did this end up so wrong, and what can we learn from this tragic situation. How far should someone need to be prepared to go when taking a stand? How might more effective publicity/messaging have furthered the cause or helped prevent the judicial process from spiraling out of hand.
Technical advancement and the proliferation of data create scenarios that are clearly not intuitive to the average person. There seems to be a tendency to sometimes attack/lecture less technically proficient observers, rather than try to more meaningfully communicate and get to the heart of the issue.
Byrne connects the JSTOR situation to the very different realms of wikileaks, manning, music publishing, etc. For those who care about the rules governing information sharing, IP, etc, this begs the critical question of “how do we differentiate among these ideas, so they are not all muddled together in the public’s eye.”