>Attribution is important but it's impossible to know all the literature that is out there and even when you've tried your best to seek out prior arts there is always a possibility that you've missed something or not understood the connection with something previously read.
It's not like Schmidhuber's papers are obscure.
>I've always thought that Schmidhuber was toxically uncharitable - what is the point of accusing and blaming
You're engaging in toxic victim-shaming. What, you expect him to just bend over and accept people stealing his ideas without giving him credit? Fundamentally the researchers who stole from him were engaging in unethical behaviour and shouldn't be allowed to get away with that without consequence.
So, ideas can now be stolen after all? I thought the HN consensus was that ideas can't be owned, but implementations can be. Or is it somehow different when we're looking at science?
Yes, it's very different for two reasons: 1) many ideas in science are highly non trivial compared to all sorts of crap that gets patented and 2) as scientists all we usually care about is getting some credit for our ideas. We want them to be known and used by everyone though.
Quite a huge contrast to companies that want their ideas for their own so only they can profit from them.
It's not like Schmidhuber's papers are obscure.
>I've always thought that Schmidhuber was toxically uncharitable - what is the point of accusing and blaming
You're engaging in toxic victim-shaming. What, you expect him to just bend over and accept people stealing his ideas without giving him credit? Fundamentally the researchers who stole from him were engaging in unethical behaviour and shouldn't be allowed to get away with that without consequence.