This is nothing to do with ideas. Schmidhuber is complaining that his published work was plagiarised. In machine learning research, in order to publish your work you have to show that your proposed approach works and to do that you have to beat some benchmarks and establish a new state of the art, otherwise there's no publication. That takes work and that's the work that Schmidhuber claims was inappropriately left uncited. In fact that's exactly the kind of work that Hinton, LeCun and Bengio have always done. That's what machine learning researchers do.
This ... idea that Schmidhuber is an ideas man who's never done any real work is Hinton's allegation, and it's clearly designed to misrepresent both Schmidhuber and his work in order to discredit his complaints. And I'm sorry to say that people on HN have fallen for it hook, line and sinker, I guess because that's what social media says.
Btw, the point I make, that you don't get published in machine learning without beating some benchmarks and establishing a new state of the art, I can attribute that to none other than Hinton himself, in an interview with Wired, whence I quote, by the by:
>> What we should be going for, particularly in the basic science conferences, is radically new ideas. Because we know a radically new idea in the long run is going to be much more influential than a tiny improvement.
https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...
So that's the guy accusing the other guy of being nothing but an ideas man and that you don't need to cite someone who first came up with an idea, saying that "new ideas" are important.
But that's just Hinton presenting things just the way he likes. Now ideas are important, now they're not, as he pleases.