skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Surprisingly false, and that's the key.

Have you any references for that? (I'm interested, not disputing it)

> it was an observation that most terrorism is in one form or another about hostages.

Ah, now that is a slightly different matter I feel. I was more discussing the idea of indiscriminate killing or direct murder of the "offendor".

> But by definition, you've created a set of people that are unincitable, they're already permanently incited to the max.

How are terrorists made? For the most part the "foot soldiers" are incited by the more calculating leaders. Handing those leaders material that is offensive is ammunition for them to convert foot soldiers to the cause.

Your right - it wont affect the leadership, but it removes some of their ammunition to brainwash others with.

> If there is an extremist that attacks us no matter what, then frankly our policy doesn't matter for that extremist. We need to be concerned about the ones that are calculating though, because there are far more of them.

No, we clearly need to respond - and respond in a cohesive way. What I'm suggesting is that avoiding inciteful actions might make it easier to combat extremism.

> It is the production of a situation where attacking the civilization is advantageous that produces chaos and death!

Bear in mind that I'm not suggesting we make a big thing of "we are not going to incite you". Just that, perhaps, a more careful personal set of actions is justified. Every time a big thing (in media terms) like this happens the death threats come in, more people are scared and there is added potential for people to die. If it hadn't have happened there would be less fear now than a few weeks ago :)

> you invoke extremists so extreme that it doesn't matter what we do

To be fair that was what you invoked - I was trying to sync it into my arguments.

Incidentally a strong argument for my idea is that modern terrorist leaders have realised they don't have to actually bomb anyone significant or even actually respond to a threat. They just have to get it into the news to propagate fear.
I'm curious: who downvoted this without comment, and why?

EDIT: removed inflammatory derogation of said downvoters.
Wow, that's a great idea! Thanks!
You are correct that a decision such as that in New Jersey involves completely different statutes and otherwise has no binding effect on California courts. Its effect, if any, would be strictly that its reasoning might be persuasive for a court in California interpreting an analogous statute.

I referred to the New Jersey just to illustrate how courts that are carefully considering such issues might rule on them (this takes the discussion at least a step deeper from that of "don't bloggers and reporters do the same thing" by showing the factors a court will look at in making such a determination).

If, on the other hand, what we have here is a true online media organization (as noted by nailer), then point well taken and the issue must be analyzed on that basis as opposed to standards that might apply if only a blogger were involved.
The police confiscated them as evidence. I'm sure they ultimately just threw them away. Towards the end when I started to accept they were never going to pursue the case, I started to ask if I could at least get the DVDs back. No dice.
My small contribution to the discussion: Spain has one of the biggest problems with the youth drug use, I read somewhere that more 20-year people were consuming cocaine than 21-25 combined. I share that generation and I see the same problem here in Portugal.

My experience tells me that things were worst some years ago, I remember lots of people were on hard drugs on my home town, sadly most of them died. Also the big drug ghettos in Lisbon almost disappeared. The thing is Portugal as a peripheric country is in a very peculiar situation and the regulation problem should be seen in that context. It is normal for Portugal to lead drug aprehensions every other year because it's one of the main drug gateways from Africa (Marrocos) and from South America and it's close relationship with Brasil.

But the spirit of the law doesn't convince me at all, there are lots of people living from selling drugs and from the stats like 50% arrested were in the 16-20 years range, mostly everybody consumes marijuana. The problem may not be the law, but the environment around the schools doesn't benefit from this law, this should be somehow compensated.

Nice to meet Portuguese people here! Would you bother to fill your details? Or contact me: jracabadoemgmail.com would be wonderfull to talk to you guys!
A professional editor can have a substantial impact on the clarity and impact of what you write. Good professional editors are rare and fairly costly. I work regularly with a a writer/editor who has been a great help. Contact me off list (drallison@gmail.com) and I will be happy to provide a referral.
Because there's:

- a news organization

- matters of public interest

involved?
Of course, if you yammer about the tests after writing them, that's just not acceptable. Yammering must drive your practise.
A lot of trademarked terms (e.g. "visa") might not be available as adsense words. So people bid on the misspellings.
Editing is but a small part of programming.
This can only happen to protect corporate rights (just try getting that kind of police response for your own problems).

I bet the police waited until they saw him leave the house.

Good luck if you think that hardware is coming back to you this decade, even if charges are dropped, or if you think you'll get the door paid for.
For vim users, particularly newer ones, I think the cheat sheet at http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...
is great. Happy Hacking Lite keyboards are also great - they have the old layout with Ctrl where Caps Lock usually is and Esc not too far away.
They seem to have got it right this time, would have been better for them if they had gotten it right the first time. I feel very sorry for them, it was a somewhat minor slip (albeit, a complete pain for the users involved), but could potentially ruin them.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that Gray Powell's life is "wrecked"? He still has a job and if he were fired he'd get a new job really quickly. He's now the most well known iPhone engineer and only known sin was something that could happen to anyone and I have a hard time believing would close future career doors. In reality it will probably help him get interviews in the future.
Dyson Sphere FAQ
Not only they said they had the phone, but also disclosed that they have paid for it and even knew who was the engineer that lost it. ISTM that they've shot themselves in the foot.
> As a Muslim, myself, I don't understand the stances these fringe groups take.

The key is that they are "fringe groups". There is no belief so wacky, stupid or nasty that someone, somewhere won't believe it. And with the internet, they can broadcast their nonsense to the whole world.
What makes you think they don't?

I have a good friend who was smart enough not to get into the drunk guy's car (leaving a fraternity party) and followed on his own. Thus, he was the first person on the scene after the accident. He wound up being a witness against the driver in a homicide trial.

So at least in the State of New York, you can be tried for manslaughter when your drunk driving results in someone's death.
Huh-wha?

I mean I'm with you and everyone here as far as the censorship..

But in the United States that I'm living in, saying anything bad about "all Christians" is a consistent political death sentence.

And in the United States that I lived in from 2001 to 2006 or so when people cooled off, ripping on "all arabs" or "all muslims" was practically de rigeur.

EDIT: I mean, maybe if you were hanging in the most liberal of circles then the way you put it would be the case -- but definitely not in most circles in America.
I'm glad.

Around this whole thing, there seemed to be this aura of "teehee, it's ok, we're on the internet!"

It seems like they don't believe they could have possibly done anything wrong.

It's not that I can't imagine the glee they'd feel when they were offered the opportunity to buy the prototype. But since that glee was not followed up by any second thoughts -- for exmaple, about receiving stolen property, or trade secrets, or hey, ethics -- then they deserve what they get, legally speaking.

Anybody who thinks about it for a minute would realize that buying a prototype device that "got found at a bar" ("fell off the back of a truck"), made by a company with notoriously tight seals, and a huge legal team, and then explaining to the world that you bought it off some dude… well, that's gonna have consequences.

If bloggers aspire to be journalists, they're going to have to learn to have those second thoughts.

And learn that "checkbook journalism" just flat-out doesn't count. Even when they're paying people for interviews, instead of buying hot goods.
How to write bad blog posts: Make your readers understand 4 levels of double negatives.
Yup, for sure. I was joking hence my comment about it making a great topic for a SouthPark. I guess I'll lay my sarcasm on thicker next time, people are awfully jumpy on this topic apparently.
Which is crazy, because doing things neatly and methodically would find potential evidence that haphazard whirlwind searching would never find. (Compare NYPD Blue serving warrants to CSI Las Vegas serving warrants)
Hackers target Windows-using iPad owners with bogus update
I fully agree with you kloncks, these fanatics just prove that the correctness of what everybody thinks about them by acting this way. However, there's a common perception in the West that these "fanatics" or "fringe groups" are a tiny minority. I don't think so. Try doing such a gravely offensive thing is Pakistan or Saudi Arabia and you will go to prison or worse. Those are unstable or backward countries you say? How about Egypt or Malaysia?

Some clarifications on the "portrayal issue": (1) Muhammad has been portrayed in many Islamic miniature paintings, always with a veil, though. (2) The tradition in Islam that no likeness of him can be created is coming from his words reported by ahadith, not from the Koran (e.g. see here http://www.answering-islam.org/Muhammad/pictures.html). This was most probably a reaction to Greek-Orthodox Christianity with their heavy use of icons. (3) The fact that Islam forbids pictures is not totally correct, Shia muslims usually have the picture of Ali displayed at a prominent place in their homes.
We don’t pay you to work here (2009)
Your analogy has flaws:

- your robbers didn't tresspass or coerce you to give them anything

- your 'robbers' didn't state they called repeatedly offering to give it back and being ignored
Five best Apple iPad apps so far
The difference is that the majority in USA are Christians. Incidentally, Christians killed people, like John Lennon.
Well, those are pushed up by one or two cases that took (to my recollection) the best part of 6 months to unpick. Also a reasonable number are charged on an unrelated matter (for example they are stopped for drugs possession and carrying cash (profits from crime) and have a laptop confiscated because most of them are money laundering the cash too. In those cases if you con't find money laundering it goes down as "not charged").

Of the rest; the vast majority were legitimately suspected of a crime (I can count on my fingers the number who were not - to my mind anyway). Proving it either way is, I feel, reasonable.
What will happen is that in some time there will nothing left to be said.

Mind you, I'm drawing a line between incitement (flat out saying "go and do something wrong") and saying something knowing others, in reaction, will do something wrong.

You're opening the opportunity for every type of speech to be silenced. Example?

If you disagree with me, I will kill every poney in the world.

Now you see, we can't even discuss the chance of having a discussion.

Also, one last point to be made: How do you "tone down" against a belief that EVERY visual representation of a person is wrong?
I'm not a very religious person, but I've done some light research and here is what I came up with as being the difference between violence in the Koran versus Bible. This an extreme paraphrasation and may be wrong, but this is how I understand it as of now:

According to tradition, if the Koran/Mohammad contradicts itself, what ever happened later is to be taken as the accepted rule, however the Koran is not organized in chronological order so it can be hard to tell at first blush what is the "correct" interpretation. In the early days of Islam, when Mohammad had very few followers, it was necessary to gain more followers to espouse peace, rainbows and sunshine. As he grew more politically powerful, his rhetoric changed and "kill the infidels" was the way to go. Since it happened later chronologically this is the "official" stance of the Koran.

Contrasted with the Bible wherein most of the violence is contained in the old testament. Then Jesus came along and essentially said "forget all this old stuff, I'm the new covenant, love thy neighbor, yay rainbows, sunshine and lollipops".

That being said, that doesn't mean a lot of people haven't been killed in the name of Jesus, but in current times I'd guestimate 99.9999% of Christians are peace loving people who don't want violence brought upon someone because they are non-Christian. But I'd also guess that worldwide 97% of Muslims are the same way. Unfortunately the other 3% is still a large number of people who want to bomb markets, fly planes in to buildings or throw acid on girls who insist on going to school.

You're absolutely right, the 97% needs to stand the hell up and drown out this nonsense.
This series of events is why "real" news outlets have legal council. You can, thankfully for society, get away with a lot of stuff as a journalist, but some things are illegal. Particularly, when we are talking about commerce and not politics / public safety.
>IOW: Running a blog or being a journalist doesn't protect your computers from being impounded when you break the law and happen to also blog about doing so.

Well said. I'm surprised Gizmodo people are making 'I'm a news organization' noises at the moment - it's a flaky excuse, and has little to do with the charges.
Chen is an employee of a media organization.

A media organization with a legal staff, I might add.
What crime? The gent who found the phone called Apple repeatedly to give it back and was ignored.
I completely agree. I implemented this on a site a few months ago, but ended up removing it because while it did in fact add a cool factor, it hindered readability (shocking coming from a designer, I know).

That being said, I'm sure there are use-cases where Masonry would add value; just not sure what those are.
This seems to basically be:

Paul Graham: X, Y and Z are generally true, except under conditions A and B.

These guys: But X, Y, and Z aren't true all the time! And they aren't even true most of the time, given conditions A and B!

The only substantial part of this appears to be "nerdiness is becoming cooler", and I find that highly questionable.
If you mean just vim and not vim + omnicompletion + whatever, then more power to you I guess.

I try to keep my vim pretty vanilla outside of font and color preferences because I spent most of college jumping from one computer to the next and I didn't want to get used to relying on anything that wouldn't be there next week.

That said vim + screen kinda translates to vim + 'my entire computer' which doesn't prove my point really but also doesn't say much about the completeness of vim as an environment.
The Killing Star by Charles R. Pellegrino makes a very compelling argument that if aliens do exist, we are probably royally screwed.

Can we honestly say that evaluated from the outside as a species, we are not pretty close to a threatening, violent, virulent plague? I think our only hope is that the ET's are both extremely benevolent and too powerful to consider us anything approaching a credible threat. But the scenario outlined in the book about relativistic kinetic kill weapons being a great equaliser speaks to a dark future in the event that we ever attain the necessary technology to be such a threat.

Hopefully by then our historical track record won't look quite so psychotic.
Imagine them being included in calculations of penal fines, while you're at it. If a conviction ensues the value of Gawker's increased traffic and ad revenue will surely be scrutinized to determine the extent of their economic benefit.
Hey I just tweeted this the other day!

http://twitter.com/bunsen/status/12555413021
They're in California, not New Jersey, where the only precedent is in favor of bloggers: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7322507115485901...

Not surprisingly, Apple was involved that time too.
The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 is a federal law. If that was what triggered the search he'd have FBI agents at his door not San Mateo PD.

This is clearly about finding the person who stole the phone.
Probably. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283312
Ugh, I just watched this happen to one of my friends. Actual quote: "I know we discussed that you like to come in at 11 and stay late at the interview, but the adjustment period is over now. I don't care how good your work is, I care that you're at the office by 8:30."

Luckily he got the hell out of there. I'd fear for his sanity.
I believe this is only true for civil cases, as indicated in your last sentence regarding the divorce. I found this definition on criminal contempt:

In a criminal contempt charge, which is aimed at punishing bad behavior, a defendant is afforded the due-process safeguards of the criminal system, including a possible jury trial.

I'm not a lawyer, but I would suspect that if Chen is under suspicion for a felony, the above definition might apply.
Depending on your OS you could create a VM and restore to that.
Sync.js now available on github under the MIT License
That's why I like continuous checksum (ie, rsync) type backups.
> If you disagree with me, I will kill every poney in the world.

The only real point there is that is an unlikely threat. I can ignore it. If a substantial number of people developed a long history of killing ponies and then made that threat I might reconsider.

One of two things has to happen in my mind. Either we have to ignore the terrorists - which is my preferred solution, but I highly doubt the media will let us. Or we avoid inciting them for a bit as best we can whilst eradicating the problem.
Not sure what MVP stands for... but I just hope you prove me wrong... Don't want to see a publictivity repeat.
lesson for next time: "we received these pictures and all this information from an anonymous source"
Why didn't he do something reasonable, like turn it into the bartender or the police?
I was really hoping this was a joke.

Incidentally - http://friedisms.tumblr.com/

"We don’t listen to music in the office. We listen to US Army audio transcripts from the front lines of the Vietnam War. The power of these bits of history really help us focus on fixing bugs in Basecamp."
What is your plan for when the judge tells you to supply the decryption key?
I think there's a bit of confusion here. People up to roughly 90th percentile or so intelligence will be able to use their smarts to make more friends, get along better with others, etc. The problem that Paul Graham is talking about is the 10% above the 90th percentile, who are sufficiently different from the average as to make relating to normal people difficult. Not coincidentally, the intelligence of Congressmen averages around 90th percentile.
I'm surprised that nobody's commented on Gawker's legal response to the search, in which they point out that the search warrant (or, at least, the scanned copy on Gizmodo's web site) clearly shows that a "night search" was unauthorized, whereas the search of Chen's home just as clearly took place at night. Does that mean that the search was unlawful?
Steve Jobs' Advice to Nike: Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff
Four linked ballast water tanks (Port Aft, Port Front, Starboard Aft, Starboard front) with pumps between them would probably be sufficient and would be much easier to place and maintain than other moving counterweights.
Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima!
Interesting. I would most definitely disagree with you there. They are most definitely a fringe group. I will maybe assume that the people in the group are either radical believers or brainwashed ignorant people, though.

I'm originally Egyptian myself, and while it's more Muslim-society and religious conservatism is higher, there are a number of freedoms there since it's a very touristy country. Sure, these things are taboo and people will not take them lightly, but you can say them. Just like you can insult the Catholic faith in the Vatican or the Mormon faith in Utah - it's just simply not the place to do it :P

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan I feel are a very special case. Saudi Arabia is such a staunch conservative country and I don't agree with many of their policies so I mostly agree with you there.

--------

Regarding the portrayal. Yea, Muhammad when he was portrayed always either has his face covered by a veil or by light. Things that come from the Hadith can't be taken lightly - it's not as powerful as the Qur'an, yes, but it is the second most powerful Islamic text and all Muslims follow it (with the exception of some Shia).

On 3, I wasn't aware of that and I'm Sunni but it might make sense. Usually, Muslims will also not portray Prophet's companions but the rule is mostly for the Prophets, Angels, and God. Also, keep in mind that Shia muslims are a minority, roughly accounting for about 10-15%.
The last paragraph is stirring: "if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down."

But this bit a couple paragraphs up strikes me as complacent: "Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage." A new one can and will arise. Totalitarians love a vacuum.

xkcd should do a stick figure of prophet mohammed.
Probably an unfair question to you, since you're not one who riots, but if it's strictly prohibited in Islam to draw Jesus and the others you mention, why are there not riots, death threats and killings in response to their portrayals?
Didn't he/she know the engineer's name? And have his facebook profile?
vi is vim on every machine I have used in the past several years. Anytime someone refers to vi, I just assume they mean vim.
Think about it for a minute. It sucks that your stuff got stolen, but it's not shaking an industry, is it?

This is bordering on accidental corporate espionage. It's not just Apple that's pissed off, but think about what it would be like for other Valley companies to look at this case and wonder "What if it were us, next time?" -- if it wasn't pursued swiftly by the police.

That's the engine of the area's economy, theoretically at risk.

Anyway, unfortunately, the people who stole your stuff probably didn't post on a highly trafficked site about the crime. Gizmodo, on the other hand, did talk about how they bought the phone, and then committed possibly other criminal acts by posting the photos and details.
Interesting. What about if Gawker has a house style guide, pays a comprable word rate, requests particular markup in copy for boxouts or artwork, docks pay for late copy, and asks you kindly not to be too aggressive about the big advertisers?
Man there are a lot of [deleted] comments on this thread. Don't do it! Seriously, the discussion is worth having - resist the urge!

Otherwise downvoting becomes an effective censorship tool as well.
Being aware of business reasons behind decisions is very important. I can think of two main reasons.
1. Poor translation of customer intent/business goals can lead to some terrible software because the real purpose of it is obfuscated.
2. Ability to comprehend which urgent deadlines are actually important and which are exaggerated.