dasht

Employers turning a blind-eye to intra-company dealing / distribution is not at all a new thing but I don't think that was the poster's question. I think the poster was talking about open-ness and public face. Again, for VCs and such -- and although that crowd will sometimes deny this -- founders are supposed to be cookie cutter stereotypes.

An openly pot-head founder risks offending or scaring customers or buyers or later investors. It also indicates some who doesn't get the "performative" aspect of being a commodity founder: the expected degree of conformative role playing.

I think it is still taboo among most VC's and angels. Founders are supposed to be cookie-cutter stereotypes who fit a pre-established program. Your personality / public face can be "challenging" but not challenging, if you know what I mean.

Neat. Here's some inspiration. (Note, Don Hopkins has been at this for a while.)

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/CAM6/

Via huffingtonpost, here is a link to the IRS document which is the source of this report about "Open Source" firms being targeted.

What is released here is a "Be On the LOokout" (aka "BOLO") list - instructions to examiners. It talks not about specific companies but about criterea for evaluating applications for not-for-profit status. Regarding Open Source organizations, it notes that applicants may be the for-profit developers or for-profit support providers for the software. The advice given to examiners is to take it to their manager, since no more specific guidance is or was then yet available.

http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/sites/democrats.ways...

Bah. I call BS. You sound like a San Francisco real estate speculator or developer. "High density infill" projects are loved by the people who make money off the development of the property but no matter how much you weaken zoning protections to get there they somehow never manage to swing prices when demand, like it is now, is just so much greater. What you do accomplish with these projects, typically, is building very high-end price units, often of compromised quality (cheap materials, absurd square footage, etc.) Of course this does have the effect of reducing gentrification. On the contrary it steps up the pace while simultaneously leaving the city with a less desirable housing stock in the long run.

I think PG is asking the wrong questions. None of merely plausible hypotheses as to the motive of an imagined government actor creating bitcoin is testable.

Perhaps more importantly, we've skipped entirely past the question -- a question we might actually be able to begin to answer with evidence -- what what bitcoin is actually doing in the real world beyond the obvious and superficial details that make headlines.

Setting aside whether the two groups you name are likely suspects, the fact that both public identities and open institutional affiliations does not contradict the hypothesis that a government did it.

For historic precedents, see for example Wikipedia on "Project MKUltra", or the book "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power" by Seth Rosenfeld.

PG remarks that there were probably peer reviewers but none has stepped forward. Either of the two examples I gave illustrates how long and how tightly private-sector collaborators with secret government projects can keep their mouths shut.

The reasoning in this short message has been a consistent part of RMS' talk and actions since the very beginning of the GNU project. Earlier than Ogg Vorbis, the very existence of the LGPL is an example of similar reasoning, applied.

You wrote: "I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges"

I think you might have been conditioned to expect RMS to be that kind of self-defeating extremist because many people who are opposed to him, including some who pretend otherwise, describe him that way.

The poor sap made an off-hand remark from the dais during public comment on the Council's plan to send a letter to the USPS asking them to delay the sale of our historic downtown post office. He was, in effect, making idle chit-chat, not a real proposal, and he was apparently drawing on some half-remembered pop article about fighting spam. A local "news" web site made hay out of it, trolling for clicks.

It measures a skill very different from ordinary typing, so, no.

A lot of people read this and this kind of story and they want to talk about the morality or value systems of these kids, themselves, and so forth.

I propose that there is a much more important reading:

Youth unemployment is extraordinarily high (effecting minorities even worse than these mostly-white kids, of course). Youth incarceration rate / engagement with the justice system is very high.

The numbers of people "dropping out" of legitimate society altogether look to be high and growing.

People's personal feelings about all this aside, it pays to notice when society starts to fray so badly as this.

This quote is one of those intuitively plausible things that turns out not to be true: "the more important point to analyze is: when you add it all up and average over all businesses, is it a wash? After all, those dollars must be going somewhere, and I would think that they're making some communities somewhere pretty happy."

It doesn't work that way. Think of the "lifespan" of a typical book-buying dollar:

(a) A dollar in circulation is created along side a corresponding dollar of debt. Banks are not getting dollars out of their vaults when they make loans. They are typing some numbers into a computer and creating entirely new dollars.

(b) The dollar passes from hand to hand in various transactions, eventually reaching our book-buying consumer.

(c) Someday, the dollar will likely cease to exist when it is used to retire debt. Even before then, the dollar can wind up "parked" (noncirculating) in large accounts that are held in reserve (e.g., in cash or in constantly rolled over treasuries).

A dollar spent at a big corporation like Borders is much more likely to reach state (c) sooner. This missing spending doesn't move to some other community, it just never takes place.

The Linux kernel has not been a project of "love" since at least the time that Linus was hired by Transmeta in 1996. The bulk of the heavy lifting that keeps it going is paid labor.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, work on Perl was funded by revenue from books, employers, and conferences. Apache by financial donations to an NPO.

In the 1990s, the "community value" of helping others by offering free support in on-line forums was promoted by industry as a way to gain reputation enough to get a job. It was promoted by some investors as a way for commercial efforts to gain users and obtain free labor without paying the full cost of support.

Clay claims that it was "something new" when Linus could post about the kernel in its earliest days and get a "global network of collaborators". That's a remarkable claim that ignores not only the entirety of the GNU project effort that preceded it but decades of (quite often commercially motivated) software sharing the preceded that.

Clay has confused a difference in the modality of economic collaboration that becomes possible when source code is shared, with "love".

On the topic of motivation he is also too glib. He asserts that Linus' collaborators asked for nothing other than the chance to come together and do something interesting. That it was suddenly possible to do big things for love.

He ignores that it took all of 23 months before the founding of VA Research (as evidence that commercial interest was already, by then, a major factor).

This kind of talk bothers me because it takes what I think of as a high value (love) and misrepresents it and misrepresents history. He encourages a vaseline-coated rose-colored rememberance of industry history. It's not a kind of talk that leaves credulous listeners more informed -- pretty much the opposite. And worse, it leaves them in that state feeling all warm and fuzzy that somehow this must be love.

Paul Graham, or anyone "in the know", may we please hear a bit about what the equivalent of a term sheet looks like for a Y Combinator non-profit investment? Is Y Combinator giving a grant? Is Watsi issuing debt to Y Combinator? What's the financing model here?

Riddles, logic puzzles, "write some code on the whiteboard" ....

It took me years to realize that these are not tests of technical ability, they are tests of submissiveness.

For example, if you are being interviewed by someone at the same level as you for some position -- and they pull such crap -- now you know how low their expectations of the employer are.

And if you are being interviewed by someone fairly senior relative to the position -- and they ask you such BS interview questions -- you can be damn sure that they themselves would laugh at and walk away from any interviewer that did that to them.

So when you give the clever answer and wait for your gold star... you've established your place in the order of things.

It's very harsh but I find fault with some of the adults who made him a "celebrity" in the first place. Here's a link to the (yes, harsh) piece I wrote about that.

It's significant, in my view, that Swartz "came to fame" right as the first "dot com" bubble was cresting. Hype was ridiculously excessive, back then. Looking back at what his celebrity "friends" were saying about him back then, it's painfully obvious that even back then his achievements (which were quite respectable) were greatly exaggerated and that the story he was a new prodigy was a myth self-servingly spread by a few powerful people trading in on the caché of having access to him. To the young boy.

It's horrifying to me, at least, to contemplate what that roller coaster ride did to his sense of self and his own understanding of his identity.

http://www.basiscraft.com/misc/2013/01/using-aaron-swartz.ht...

A focus on the prosecutor helps distract attention from the question of whether and how Swartz was mistreated by being made a (somewhat artificial) "tech celebrity" at a very young age only to become a kind of semi-outcast in some tech circles just a few years later.

I wish someone had given me advice along these lines, long ago:

(a) Make sure you have a really strong grip on your finances. (You sound like you probably do but I'm mentioning it anyway.) Include worst-case planning like the scenario where you are pulling part-time shifts flipping burgers or whatever -- the more savings you can accumulate early, I'd bet the happier you'll be. This industry most definitely does have its "bust" periods when even many of the "best" can't find work.

(b) As long as you've got work.... nothing says that you have to be a full time student, or complete in four years, or go deeply into debt. Consider working on a BA or BS or higher part-time on a pay-as-you-go basis while still accumulating savings. And, especially if you'll be paying out of pocket -- even though you are only part-time -- be a really f'ing good student and really nail everything along the way. Dig in and enjoy it all. Shine.

(c) avoid the trap where you think you'll get started on that "part time student" thing next year (or the year after, or the year after).

With this path you'll be managing your money conservatively, dedicating a substantial amount of your life to guided learning, gaining a diversity of real-world experience at the same time, minimizing your dependency on some all-or-nothing guess about what future employers you care about will want.

I think that RH and Canonical are very problematic for the community. They are a mixed bag containing a lot of good, but also containing some critical problems (for the cause of freedom). So I like to speak frankly about those problems, when I can.

Their users are, de facto, locked into a few vendors who, because of this arrangement, can charge excessive rent. In part this is because of a tiny number of critical components that do not have libre licenses; in part it is because these vendors provide technical leadership to the larger community in forms that actively prevent organizing a truly libre OS.

For a time I too was the maintainer for GNU sed. Part of that time I was paid by the FSF for that work (this was a long time ago, when the FSF had a small staff working directly on the Hurd and GNU). When I started, GNU sed was very incompatible with the relatively new Posix standard for sed. When I finished, it was less incompatible. It was during this same time that I started work on a new regexp engine for sed but that was not done by the time I stopped work on sed.

From that position I was able to observe fairly closely how the GNU project was being led, technically, in the days before the Linux kernel had had any real impact.

RMS's technical leadership was, I think, not very skilled. Let me explain what I mean:

If you were working on a program and sought his advice, he was very good at zeroing in on the issues and giving excellent advice. And sometimes if you were working on a program and he noticed something he didn't like about your approach, his criticisms were very good. People used to tell stories about how good a programmer he was and those stories were basically all true. He was sharp and I assume that, in spite of his age, he still is.

The problem was that he showed no effective capacity to really lead the larger meta project of pulling together a complete OS. He tried -- with projects like autoconf and documents like the GNU coding standards. And he kept a list of programs that, once we had those (he reckoned) along with a kernel -- GNU would be "done". That was about the extent of his "big picture" for project management.

Mainly, he concentrated on advocating for the idea of software freedom. I think the gambit was that if enough people demand their freedom, the project of organizing a GNU project would become easier. I don't think this gambit worked.

That was never a clear enough, coherent enough, or informed enough vision of the complete GNU project and, consequently, GNU has never really successfully gelled. You can grab some "100% libre" distributions, these days, but only barely. There is no sustainable culture and technical organization there ("yet", I hope).

The RMS failure I see is a failure at being a community organizer of GNU programmers. A lot of people got the vague idea of a GNU project. Many of us were happily recruited to the goal. But everyone I worked with at the FSF, including me, kind of went off in various incoherent directions -- doing what we guessed would help and that seemed interesting to us. We never "pulled together as a team" and, in the GNU project, that still doesn't happen.

The GNU project gradually accumulated a heck of a lot of very good "parts" but could never gel. The first three world-changing releases (GDB, GCC, and Emacs) really startled people. The various shell/text utilities in those early days spread because they were often usefully a little bit better than the proprietary "native" equivalents shipped by Sun, Dec, AT&T, etc. People sat up and took notice but behind the scenes the project of setting up a lasting "complete OS" project that would promote software freedom for all users ... never quite came together.

The "open source" people -- who I also later worked for, because I made a mistake in trusting them at their personal word to me -- seemed at first like they might help bring resources to the problem. In fact, what they mostly concentrated on was creating proprietary products using the free software "parts" from the incomplete GNU project. In the early days they sought to monopolize some of the key labor for the GNU project (and they succeeded, because they paid much better than RMS and many of those particular hackers didn't really give a shit about the freedom of users). As the "open source" industry matured it perfected its model of a perpetually incomplete / inadequate free software OS as a source of inspiration to enthusiastic youngsters, realized in practioce as a perpetually freedom-denying set of proprietary OS products. Companies like Red Hat and Canonical realized that they could exploit the deficit of community organizing to charge high rents for libre software, so long as they don't care seriously about the freedom of users. That's what they did and what they do.

So in my view, RMS was not good (and still is not good) at leading the GNU project -- but the real tragedy is brought on by the glad-handing, deep-pocketed, "open source" rentiers who place concern for their own profit above the freedom of the community.

There are no such companies.

The problem is that you said "monetize later" rather than "become profitable later".

For example, someone else suggested that Google was an example of a company that had no way of monetizing their original product. That's false. In the earliest days of Google it was obvious that there were tons and tons of ways to monetize the product -- hence the very early-stage investment -- though there was uncertainty of which ways of monetizing were best for growth and profit.

Amazon's main strategy is to broker transactions between its users and the vendors that supply those users. Amazon is aiming to be everyone's primary retail store for everything.

Facebook's strategy is to own everyone's on-line "sharing". Google's strategy is to own everyone's "search" (broadly defined). Amazon wants to own everyone's retail experiences.

Amazon would love it if slick devices were cheap enough to just give away -- they'd know instantly how to make huge money off that. Google and Facebook? Not so much.

I hope people vote this up (the topic comment, not mine here). It's a really remarkable bit of incoherence (that matters because of its role in law).

Well, organize.

Suppose you hit the deadline with almost but not quite enough signatures. Now, if all those signatures are disorganized -- just random individuals who happened to sign -- that's the end of the game. But if many of those signatures are a coordinated action by organized groups of people, then there is less problem re-introducing the petition, starting off with a lot of votes right of the bat, and then closing the gap before the next deadline.

This looks a fantastic concept. Details matter and there are plenty to get right there ... but it looks very nice.

(The video script could use some work. The repetition of "what if you could ...." is too heavy, for me.)

"A system which relies on DNS, but in which anyone can setup a node seems better than a system that relies on DNS but only has one centralized node (Twitter), no?"

The concern here is that whoever is currently leasing the domain name has authority over users' identities. A better system would let users own their identities outright.

"In a truly decentralized system, you're not going to be able to have readable unique names without collisions. Why? [....]"

This is a well explored topic. A good place to start might be to look up "Zooko's Triangle" and then go forward from there towards various ways people have figured out to deal with such problems. (Zooko's wasn't the last word.)

"Why can't the usernames be like email addresses?" [in the sense of querying DNS to find them].

In this context we're talking about what it takes to avoid relying on DNS (because DNS is a centralized, highly politicized system). Your solution would still rely on DNS.

I agree that "emulate the user==feed simplicity of twitter" is the best counter-argument to "make the user name distinct from the feed name for greater flexibility" position.

But here:

In twitter APIs, can't you get something like, say, a user's avatar image by keying off the user name?

So, even on twitter, a user name maps to multiple different things -- not just a single feed.

To avoid building in a dependency on DNS does not require that the identity system problem be fully solved, first. It only requires ensuring a good abstraction barrier before too much code propagates that depends directly on DNS. For example, perhaps, URIs.