Study finds hardcore music fans 10 times more likely to pirate music.

The reason the code's not broken - because the CIA don't need it broken. This is what happens when the CIA needs a code broken: http://xkcd.com/538/

Hi! A bit of time ago, a guy asked for a listing of everyone's startup on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=568951

So here it is! On Sunday I spent a few hours hacking together a wiki thing in Rails from scratch. A few things that need to be fixed, but otherwise, hope it's useful for you.

* Not restricted to YC. Any HN people can submit/edit.

(this comment used to be about how our VPS exploded and started OOMing.)

I frequent typophile.com, which is the online community of font designers, and the topic of online font distribution and "alternative licensing" surfaces every single month.

My takeaway from these conversations that the designers are (a) technically clueless (b) conservative (c) and, pardon my French, scared sh*tless of losing control over their fonts.

Latter is especially ironic, because they have no control to begin with. So the general sentiments are exactly what is described in that quoted interview - they expect someone to develop a magic bit and a DRM to enforce it and then suddenly things will get much better.

Also just to illustrate the level of conservatism - someone who decides to offer 1 font from a family of 10 for free is viewed as a revolutionary dude with the balls of steel. Everyone enthusiastically cheers for him, but noone follows.

In the end, it is really sad to see them burying their heads in the sand next to the music industry.

Nice work. Would love a location field. Use case: I live in Seattle. I would be interested to see other HN startups in Seattle. It'd also be academically interesting to see distribution.

Several misconceptions in this articles, quite typical ones actually:

1) "I can’t imagine what led all of us to believe that we could regularly expect double-digit annual returns on our money, for doing no work"

You did work. You worked, exchanged your product for money, and saved it. But other people did work too. So you took your money, in effect lowered the capital cost of other people's enterprises (unless you bought in the primary market), and in return have a chance of participating in their venture's success (if). Those who are more discerning in their allocations earn higher average returns on their capital. It's not alchemy, it's capitalism! Whether the assets are fairly valued or not is a totally different question.

2) " Let’s say you own a Procter & Gamble in your portfolio and the stock price goes down by half. Do you like it better? [...] If you don’t, you’re not an investor, you’re a speculator"

Quoted like this, wrong! THe crucial condition is that you did an independent valuation of the asset and came up with a higher value. The price itself doesn't tell you anything other than what other people think or feel.

3) "An out-of-print guide to value investing, it sells for as much as $2,500 per copy on the Web."

Just for the record, these are collector's editions. If anyone is simply interested in the material (which is not all that original, btw) it floats as free PDF, just google it.

In general, I find it fascinating that people like to think that there is someone out there with their best interests at heart. Where does this come from? Where is their independence and responsibility? Balthasar Gracian, a Jesuit priest from the 18th (?) century, put it thus: You don't count on the kindness or gratitude of people but on their self-interest.