starkness

I mean http://comma.ai is the self-driving car company. (Reactions was a hackathon project, not a real co.)

He has a company: http://comma.ai.

Sure, but a lot of the people taking classes at the Extension School don't want a degree. For example, I had students whose employers were paying for them to take a single course to give them some background knowledge or insight into their jobs. They're not looking to graduate; just to take a class or two that will help them with their careers.

As a grad student at Harvard I was involved in teaching several courses at Harvard Extension School. While the students were generally motivated and enthusiastic about the course material, it was a very different academic environment, one that was not as intellectually rigorous.

You are right about grade inflation, but the difference in the level of rigor between the two schools means that not all As are equal.

Policy is always about tradeoffs. Is it your stance that the creator of Reddit tip bots should have to register fingerprints with the FBI, hand over personal financial info, send quarterly reports with to the Superintendent with audited financial statements, collect the real identities and physical addresses of all senders and recipients, assign a compliance officer, hire an outside firm to do pentesting, get permission before releasing a new product, service, or features, and have an undisclosed amount of USD funds bonded to NY State along with an undisclosed amount on hand just to operate a simple app? What about open source projects that are not corporations?

Or tell that to Linus Torvalds, as it's his law.

And one of the key questions is, does this make sense for, say 1000 abandoned dogecoin (current value $0.24) on tipdoge.info? This is why we proposed de minimis exceptions.

We're in the process right now of writing up a more in-depth policy proposal, but you're spot on in terms of different levels of risk management. And we're not at all against security testing, which is also one of the great benefits of FOSS. ("Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.")

And the audits comprise financial audits as well, which surely make sense for bitcoin exchanges and companies holding funds, but not so much for open source projects or technologies that are built around bitcoin but where no funds are held.

That said, the actual regulatory proposal has many more requirements than even mentioned in the article (including quarterly reports to the NY State Superintendent, collecting of user data, and the possibility of being denied a license without a system for due process in place), and things that the creator of a Reddit tip bot surely couldn't comply with.

Part of the problem is that the regulations aren't just seeking to cover companies that hold peoples' funds (aka private keys), but instead any technology touching the ecosystem. New York doesn't have to and shouldn't conflate the two.

It makes sense to regulate and, for example, require escrow for companies that are holding user funds in order to avoid the exact situation you point out. It doesn't make sense for a web wallet where the user is storing her own keys client-side.

Indeed he's attempting to apply an existing regulatory framework to new technology, which rarely works well.

The point of the article was not to focus on the consumer protection issues, but instead to point out how it could kill startups in the name of consumer protection. We are both in favor of avoiding another Mt. Gox, and the numerous other cases where user funds were lost, which includes escrow of the funds held for users. I'd be curious to get your thoughts as to what you consider the most pressing consumer protection issues, as we're working on another piece that will focus more on these.

It certainly is an "ask for the moon" type proposal, which is how regulators often like to start. Part of the problem, though, is that it's so far skewed to one side that getting it back to even somewhat reasonable is going to take a lot of work.

You're missing the point here—we're grateful that people in the jailbreak community release things as FOSS, but the majority of jailbreaks as you yourself mention are not FOSS themselves, which is part of what motivated Chris, who proposed the prize, and myself.

It seems to me that that opensn0w campaign may have been fake (there are a lot of those on IndieGoGo).

And to be clear, in talking to friends in the security space, the auditing the code aspect was a huge concern, so I'm glad we can at least agree on something. :)

We're also planning on helping to fund many open hardware projects, and I'll actually be speaking at the SF Hardware Startup meetup tonight to solicit ideas from the community.

To our knowledge, no one was working on an open source jailbreak, and given that the site I'm building is designed to incentivize things like free and open source software, this was a huge component. I've also been told there are a good number of people that have jailbreaks, and it's possible that they might be motivated to release it as FOSS if enough funds are raised.

And it's not like anything is keeping evad3rs from getting donations if they release a closed source jailbreak, or even if they or anyone else releases a FOSS one and claims the prize (in fact with other related campaigns, lots of donations came in after the fact).

Hi Saurik, I'd love to hear your response to the substantive aspects of my email as opposed to an ad hominem attack. I didn't send it until this morning because I was sick and traveling for the holidays.

That text is referring to section 512(f) of the DMCA, which states that any person that knowingly misrepresents a claim of infringement is liable for any damages including costs and attorneys' fees of the alleged infringer.

Basically it's just restating what's already in the law.

CodeHS is well on its way to that, providing help from live tutors and feedback on coding projects -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4835649.

Let's replace "code" with "write." Please don't learn how to write. Only writers do this, and we really don't need more of them anyway. There was a time when this wouldn't have sounded crazy.

Learning to code teaches problem solving, new ways of breaking down complex scenarios, and a means to actually build something. It's true that not everyone needs to be a software engineer, but not everyone needs to be a mathematician either, and we don't use that as a basis to tell people not to learn math. Much like math, coding can be abstracted to a form of thinking in a way that plumbing cannot.

I have a friend right now that is using CodeHS to teach 10 year olds, and they're absorbing it like sponges. And I have met so many people that, in retrospect, have wished they had learned to code at a younger age. Maybe if people had told them to learn how to code, they would have.

There was a bad link from the front page before, and now the story is down altogether. Looks like they're trying to fix the problem.

Down for me as well--looks like TC is having some issues. Clearly they could use some coding help too.

Your experience sums up the research in this article to a tee: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

"Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts."

tl;dr: Praise kids for their hard work, not for being smart.

How should we send in updates/corrections? Seems that the doc is read only.

There's a significant price differentiation between living in Manhattan and in other boroughs. One really can't lump them all together.

I have friends that pay $6-700/mo for rooms in reasonable apartments in convenient locations in Brooklyn (e.g. off the Lorimer L stop, less than 10 mins from Union Square). Rents have also significantly gone down in NYC in the past two years. I had mine decreased by 12% last year and it hasn't gone up since.

A good example of perfect being the enemy of the good (or at least less bad).

What strikes me as ridiculous is that you can't fill out a form online and pay electronically. But then again this is the US government. There should be some kind of amnesty for those that do pay the fee now, so as to avoid this kind of trolling.

The funny thing is that this law is on the whole favorable to innovators, in that if you do abide by the requirements, you'll have the safe harbor from getting sued. If Viacom had its way, the law either wouldn't exist (thereby exposing hosts to all sorts of potential liability for the infringements of users) or it would require things like proactive filtering using fingerprinting technology. Thankfully, they have not prevailed in their lawsuit against YouTube.

Exactly. That's what this is all about -- an issue of a technicality where people did not pay the fee and register an agent with the copyright office, even if they did have a link in the footer.

Different countries have different laws regarding safe harbors for secondary copyright liability. But if you're operating overseas, it would be hard to pin you down with this DMCA issue unless you have employees, an office, etc. in the US.

There is actually a debate as to whether photographs of paintings in the public domain can be copyrighted. The current consensus in the US appears to be no. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_....

If it was a print of the painting, it would depend upon whether a court would construe that it had sufficient originality to be a derivative work. But that wouldn't stop Getty from trying to assert copyright.

Copyrightability isn't really what's at issue here, as this is all written text, which is clearly a form of copyrightable expression.

There is the issue, though, of a copyright on a compilation of public domain works, or on the edits on top of a public domain work that create a derivative work. These copyrights don't subsist in the PD works themselves, though.

Ultimately it depends upon whether parts of the autobiography were published after 1923. Those parts that were not published after 1923 would be in the public domain. And those that were published after 1980 would be as well (he died in 1910 + 70).

That said, publishers slap copyright notices all the time on works in the public domain. They cover things like the foreward, introduction, cover, etc.

See this complex chart if you'd like, uh, more clarity: http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

But this is once again one of those "copyright law is a mess" scenarios.

Hmm given all the discussion about friendship being of utmost importance for cofounders (particularly in the case of YC), do people think this would work?