> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.
Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?
I don't think anyone has ever asserted copyright on the bible. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about? As for pamphlets, copyright can never prevent you from printing something that you created.
I'll have to brush up on my history of the protestant reformation, but I'm under the impression that for a very long time the church had a monopoly on people with enough dedication and support to sit around copying books by hand. There was no need for copyright law because it was totally legal to kick the rabble rousers out of the monastery for any old reason.
In this way, the church had been asserting copyright on the Bible for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the invention of the printing press that they needed a law for it.
It's easy to find legal text today that says it's for one thing but if you're in the know it's clear that its purpose--the side effect without which it wouldn't exist--is unstated or hidden. I'm skeptical that our picture of the 1700's is good enough to solve the same puzzle that far in retrospect, but my hypothesis is that if it was, we'd find things were a bit less about protecting authors economically than a surface-level read would lead us to believe.
This is especially infuriating as a European visiting the US, where a bunch of services are geo-fenced to American IPs. In several towns, I couldn't pay for parking or buy a bus ticket because the online service is geo-fenced and there's no brick-and-mortar alternative anymore. They also restrict apps in the play store or whatever to US accounts. I had to buy a cheap SIM card to get around all that. It's insane.
Let me get this straight. OP searched for an entry in a sorted list using dichotomic search. Okay... Any CS undergrad can do that. Is there something that I'm missing?
CS solved this problem, but not in such a way yet that we don't have to think about it anymore. If Python's dict implemented all of this under the hood then it could be called a solved problem.
Tailscale are _the_ company pushing the state of the art in VPN's, and they write great, detailed technical articles and whitepapers about it. As someone who has worked on a different, more traditional, enterprise VPN product, this is extremely interesting to me. Most other companies have neither the cool tech (most haven't even switched from IPsec), nor the ability to put out anything other than marketing fluff, nor the focus to actually keep working on the core VPN tech instead of trying to check all boxes (monitoring/firewalling/device management/...) but not innovating anywhere. Tailscale also scales down to individual, private users, has a free plan, some open source code and an open source reimplementation, all of which appeals to the HN audience.
This article in particular is interesting because Tailscale inserting malicious nodes is the #1 concern I had around their product, and their solution (tailnet locks) is interesting and probably better than the solution I would have come up with (using Wireguard's support for additional symmetric secrets).
Obviously "every single day" is hyperbole, but I agree with you that a much higher proportion of Tailscale blog posts end up on the front page than most corporate blogs.
Finally I think it comes down to this: Tailscale is full of the same kind of people who tend to hang out on Hackernews. HN loves Tailscale because Tailscale is HN's ingroup.
Fly.io is in a similar situation, and similarly sees a higher-than-average fraction of their blog posts getting traction on HN.
For an interesting counterexample, look at warp.dev. They have a lot of the same markers - tackling an interesting problem that affects many HNers daily (the limitations of the terminal), building things from the ground up in Rust, and writing highly technical blog posts about it - but at the same time, it's clear that as an organization, they don't quite get it. They can't understand, for instance, why putting telemetry in their terminal emulator is absolute suicide as far as HN is concerned, or why "moving the terminal to the cloud" is a phrase that will never make HN happy. Unlike Tailscale and Fly, they are not "of the race that knows Joseph", as it were.
That's not to say that there aren't individuals at Warp who are members of the HN ingroup. But at the organizational level, Warp just isn't quite it.
Excellent counterexample. I think they made a huge mistake by not only sticking to their guns on telemetry, but also building a terminal client that you need to log in to even to use it.
I remember opening it, seeing a GitHub login page and instantly closing it.
As a (typical?) HNer, there are many reasons. (a) TailScale was founded and is populated by people I followed online before, during, and after my and their tenures at Google, or just followed online already if they're not Xooglers (b) their product is extremely useful, and almost every non-enterprisey new feature they add is immediately or potentially useful to me, and I'm only running a couple of Raspberry Pis and a Minecraft server (c) I like Go, and they use Go extensively, often improving Go in the process, or at least documenting interesting performance characteristics and application design architectures (d) they have managed to find an interesting and rare balance point, to applying commercially viable product funding to a whole host of open source improvements and contributions, and (e) the basic components of their product (Wireguard, networking details, Kernel integration, etc.) are extremely in my areas of interest even independent of the product itself.
They're not. It's just roughly when the post a new blog entry, which is... usually about once a week? Sometimes it's about new features, sometimes it's about internals which might be helpful for other people to know about (like the previous entry was about internals of the TUN/TAP, and how they managed to speed it up a bunch).
Because someone submits them, and others upvote them. It's really not complicated. There's no deep conspiracy to promote Tailscale here. They're not even a YC company.
That's a nice saying, but it does not really hold true. Sure, banks aren't going to repossess Musk's house or anything like that. But they will recover what they're owed, in some form or the other. That's pretty much all that they do, all day, every day.
Is he asking for nothing? Half of the post is about how Mojang got millions then billions and he got nothing. If he's not asking for what he considers to be his share of the pie, then I don't know what the whole post is about.
It's emblematic for his entire inability to talk about money. He didn't want to talk about money, but he also didn't want his agent to do it for him. He has some highly idealistic beliefs about how money is not important, but he struggles to pay rent.
I love his story, I sympathise, and I want Microsoft, or Notch, or Mojang, to just give him a million dollars. But I can also see that his financial struggles are mostly his own doing. And probably his own choice. He wants to live in a world that's not about money, but he also wants to be able to pay rent.
This is what does it for me. This was entirely of his own doing. He didn't want to negotiate, didn't want to get his agent involved for either no reason or a reason that he's not explaining, he managed to annoy the CEO of a three person company so much over email that Mojang's Carl lost his patience and told him to either take the deal or go away.
You're trying to ship a game. This writer keeps hitting your inbox with prose that I assume that is about as annoying to read as the original article. He's wasting your time and not getting to the point. You don't know what the guy's deal is and you stopped trying to figure out two emails ago. Compared to all the other things that you need to be doing to actually ship the game, this is incredibly minor and taking up your time daily. You finally tell him, "look, it's 20k or we go look elsewhere".
From that story, the only thing Mojang did wrong is that they didn't send him the contract straight away. We all know he would have signed whatever was on it back then, as he clearly didn't know what he wanted. Looks like someone regretted behaving completely irrationally when closing a deal, then regretted it some more than he never attempted to get more compensation even after the fact (he could have easily gotten something a couple of years later if he had tried, and once more the article completely omits as to why he didn't try to reach out through his agent or anyone that can behave as an adult after the launch) and is now screaming at the universe that he's not being showered with riches and glory when all of this was his own doing, even after he had multiple opportunities to come out winning.
Originally, they were just trying to release the official release version of the game. Stakes weren't so high then, and he already had trouble discussing their contract.
Of course when the Microsoft deal came along, stakes were much higher and patience for his reluctance a lot less.
To me the post is about how he wrote a story for a friend, that friend didn't treat him like a friend, and how he was hurt by that. It sounds like the post was about letting him vent his pain and frustration and reach some level of emotional catharsis, as well as officially releasing the story to the public domain.
I find some people don't draw strong distinctions between friends and acquaintances; they treat acquaintances like friends. After going through a collaborative purely creative journey, I could almost see that boundary being broken down further.
So yeah, they weren't friends. But he thought they were, between whatever interaction they had before the poem and the collaborative effort of creating the poem. So does that really make it a Flawed premise?
No, that's what he says. But someone who genuinely grew to understand he was wrong doesn't write blog posts like this, explaining how he was wrong, like that's a question in everyone's mind (honestly until now I'd never known there was an end to Minecraft)
No, this is a person who's burning with envy and finds telling yourself stories an outlet.
Or it's a person who burned with envy, is introspective enough to recall that feeling and write from that perspective in order for his readers to learn from his own shortcomings.
Or, it's a writer, who writes for a living, spinning a story to draw the reader in. He pitches his product at the end: he want's subscriptions to pay his rent and buy his socks.
I have no ire towards the author. I thoroughly enjoyed the post and found several aspects of it that helped me find some introspection to something I was talking about with my wife just the other day (regarding capitalism, career, compensation).
I think in the end that's what he's doing. It's an overly long winded way to say he wrote the poem. He's trying to wrestle that recognition for his work he thought Mojang was going to provide him and he's sharing a tale of one artist who wants to live above Intellectual Property law and create beautiful things while recognizing he has to eat and put a roof over his head.
I pass no judgment on the author. I might slip him a few bucks in the paypal link he gave because I acquired Minecraft during beta and continue to play it off and on today and consider his contribution to be a nice addition to the game. Perhaps I will buy his novel. I think he did a great job trying to market himself here.
Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?