skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two different law systems, two different legal philosophies. In the Nordic model, prison is largely rehabilitative. I don't think they even give life sentences. In America, prison is decidedly punitive, with little thought to rehabilitation, and the death penalty is commonplace.
1) It's very likely the $1.5 million figure is heavily inflated so as to help the prosecution with their case. I would like to see people really investigate where this $1.5 million is coming from? Was that how much JSTOR was really making off those documents, or were they using RIAA-style accounting to come up with its "value"? Considering JSTOR hasn't exactly been forthcoming in their public statements, many believe they don't see anything criminal with A.S.' actions. They would prefer he simply go through 'proper channels'.

2) If Schwartz is smart, he will not comment on his intentions no matter what. Simply maintain his denial that he intended to upload them anonymously to BitTorrent. Make the case entirely about the facts on hand. "Is it hacking to violate a site's TOS"?

3. MIT and DOJ could assume that there are other ways to stop whatever illegal actions they're assuming besides criminal prosecution. Already someone has leaked 30 million scientific papers from JSTOR simply because they assumed this is what MIT and DOJ were trying to stop.
For what it's worth, I would (and have!) absolutely call someone out for being a curmudgeon face to face. I even called myself out on it the other day after trying to explain to a friend why I was turned off by Spotify.
What does Windows have to do with it? Couldn't you achieve "Chromebook-level-functionality" with a Linux model (since you'd be living out of the browser)?
What I meant was "We know there's tons of things we can still optimize, but we're just gonna release now anyways."
> Google can delete my Facebook account? My Office Web Apps account? How do they manage this?

You don't use your Facebook account to log into a Chromebook.
Why I probably won't sign your NDA
Simply a 'company', or perhaps 'new business'.

I think Blank's distinction is helpful, in emphasizing that the term 'start-up' implies more model uncertainty and innovation.

(Sure, sometimes 'start-up' is used to describe things like a new laundromat or small consultancy, but the word is more useful when its connotations of novelty and discovery are prominent.)
When the kid created his Gmail account he must have lied about his birthday (or they wouldn't have let him signup).

No. When the kid was identified as being from the Netherlands, they didn't bother asking his age because he doesn't live in a country where it is a legal issue.

Then they asked him for Google+, and once they discovered his age they banned him due to the US law.
And numerous modern mobile phones actually cost more than a Chromebook (especially unsubsidized by cell phone contract).
I didn't say I knew better than "the scientific community" (whomever they are, since there is not a huge amount of consensus around gravitons), I just said I have a lot of doubts. I could be wrong.
I'll be completely honest. Prior to this I disliked patent trolls in a sort of abstract way, but now, I have a visceral feeling of disgust just thinking about patent trolls.

Lodsys in particular seems to have no shame.

I wonder if a few more of these higher profile lawsuits might pull the general public's attention from whatever the latest reality TV show is. Maybe then the political system could do something useful to stop the patent lawsuit insanity.
Geekatoo
Well said. Thanks for the link!
Ask HN: Which OSS projects needs help?
I'd like to start contributing code/bugfixes to a small to medium sized Python project with an active user base, but am not sure where to start. I know I've come across them, but like a sales drone at Best Buy, when you're actually looking for them, you can't find them.

Ultimately I've found that I use a lot more than I give, and little pet Github projects that only I use aren't really suitable for giving back, as much fun as they are to work on. I'd like to start working _with_ people instead of on my own.

Do you help with or have a project that needs devs?
Monad transformers in Scala
Netbooks are priced what they are because of their component parts. The 2 Chromebooks released so far are the size of a normal notebook/laptop. The parts are similar (except for the processor) to that of a notebook, which explains the price. The Series 5 cost $334.32 to make.[1]

[1]http://www.thechromesource.com/with-what-it-costs-to-make-is...
They don't really need to skimp on hardware. They just need to use the inexpensive ARM chips over the expensive Intel chips. That should cut at least $100 from the retail price. I can't believe they did the same mistake as with Google TV.
shouldn't that be United States v. Aaron Swartz because the US is bringing charges against him? Aaron Swartz v. United States makes it sound like he is suing the government, but there's nothing on that page that says he is.
> it's freaking 2011, we are not supposed to be dependent on other' people's irresponsibility.

I cannot think of any implementation of society where this could possibly be true. If you really feel this way you need to find yourself a deserted island and become completely self-sufficient.
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JSTOR's particular collection of documents is protected by copyright and has been valued, by virtually every one of the most learned and respected educational institutions in the country, at millions of dollars annually.

Let's say I come into possession of a trove of public domain documents from the 1800s, and I take the time to scan every one of them painstakingly and from those scans to assemble an academically useful database, for which I charge $100/person/year for access. Your contention is that because the underlying documents are public domain, you are entitled to unfettered access to my work product, despite the fact that I took steps to gate access to my work product.

The law isn't going to see it that way, I don't think. But maybe you're right. I'm not a lawyer.

Like everyone else on HN, I wish all these documents were freely available too.
I think that's the same one.
US Courts need a script:
if(plaintiff == Lodsys){
dismiss;
}

Lodsys cases are the most BS cases I've ever seen. Unlike large evil corporations who are at least contributing some sort of innovation, all Lodsys manages to do is stifle innovation, and screw over the entire public.

Too bad we can't file a class-action suit against Lodsys for emotional damages.
Macbook Air also doesn't have 3G, does it?
It's time to have mandatory computer controlled cars.

Driving manually should be illegal unless done in a race track.

I guarantee there are just as many incompetent programmers as there are incompetent drivers out there. The difference is: I can't control the other drivers; nor who wrote their car's controller code.

When it comes to my own two hands, at least I get a say in deciding that the roads are are a bit slippery today, and that I'm consequently going to reduce the total kinetic energy involved.
Take a look at MailStore Home for offline backup. The personal version is free. http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home.aspx

It can work with a variety of mail sources, including gmail. It also builds a full text index so that you can search offline.

I have no affiliation with the company but I am using it to backup my gmail.
Again, that's just how software goes. I'm sure anyone who has released software could give you a laundry list of things he would have liked to have done, but didn't have time. Should they slide the release a year or two so they have time to feel better about how well it's optimized for speed? Generally, no.

At any rate, unless the software has been around for many decades and the best minds in computer science have failed to improve upon it, you can generally feel confident that there are tons of things you can still optimize.
Reporting a DoS attack to the CIA website on the frontpage of a newspaper is like reporting the egging of a bank as armed robbery.
What a stupid comparison, cars can still transport you from a to b. I don't give a damn about some peoples enjoyment when people die all day on the streets.

Replace driving with terrorism when you talk about casualties and personal freedom. I don't want to live in that world, but i have to unless i get hit by a drunken driver.
I was mostly just trying to do an apples-to-apples comparison based on price. I couldn't find any Acer linux laptops that ship with linux in a quick search.

Functionality-wise, yes there's no reason you couldn't get linux on par with Chrome from a leanness standpoint by just stripping out services and booting into the browser.
And what about the culture where drinking and driving is, in many states, acceptable? Why isn't there a dramatic and meaningful campaign to demonstrate that there is really only zero-tolerance to drink-driving that is acceptable?

States have been cracking down on drunk driving for the past decade or two. If there ever was a culture where drinking and driving was "acceptable" on a state level it has long since disappeared.

If you don't mind me asking, where do you currently live (you're clearly from the Queen's domain) and, if it isn't in the US, how did you get this idea that the US doesn't take drinking and driving seriously?
I've had good luck using MySQL as the data source of record (setup in a NoSQL style InnoDB table) and then having a Membase cluster which supports replication between different servers. I will probably start using the MySQL/memcache features to play around with them but I don't really see a compelling reason to do so considering that I probably execute less than 10 queries a day against the MySQL version of our caches. I use deflate to decrease the size of my caches so they only really use maybe 2 GB of memory.
As practical matter, many of these patents are so incredibly broad that you can't actually create a modern piece of software without winding up in the grey area of possibly infringing on one patent or another.

As a legal matter, if you have a policy/history of proactively searching for patents, when (almost inevitably) someone alleges infringement, they can assert that because of your policy you must have seen their patent and thus infringed willfully, opening yourself up to treble damages and putting you in the position of having to prove a negative. Any IP lawyer will advise that inventors should never look.
What is wrong with "It just works"? I have found that there are very few pieces of software out there (especially operating systems) that truly "just work" out of the box. Most software requires at least some setup, customization, and a period of futzing-around before a user becomes proficient at its use. Chrome OS does one thing, and it claims to do it very well. Until most software is incredibly easy to use, I think "it just works" is a very appropriate advertisement.

Every modern operating system that I'm aware of gains performance increases through software updates. That does not mean that every company that creates operating systems purposely makes their operating system slower to gain favor over time.
The real standing up would be if Amazon had refused to remove the link and let Apple reject and/or pull the Kindle app. Then the ire of people unable to read their Kindle books would be directed at Apple.

This action by Amazon seems to be capitulation since there was no way that the in app purchasing system would support so many hundred thousands of books anyway.
I don't think just closing bugs without a solution is ever acceptable. The end-goal is increasing user satisfaction with your software. If you close a bug without resolution, you're not satisfying users. Closing this bug they way they did only improves some QA benchmarks, it doesn't actually satisfy any users.
To me, it looks shiny, new, and somewhat useless. Screw those DHTML menus.

The best parts of this redesign are the search bar in the top right and the bottom link area. Everything else looks like Fisher Price Theme (tm). Still, it's miles better than the old one, which looked like the chaos of a mailroom itself.
We have umpteen checks to ensure drivers are as safe as they can be. Deaths in the US from driving have come down from around 120 a day in 2000 to around 90 a day now.

In the UK, it's about 8 deaths a day from driving. The road network is now eight times safer per mile travelled than it was in 1966.

Just for comparison, around 400+ people die each day in the UK from cancer.

Instead of wasting a ton of money making robotic driverless cars because it sounds good, I'd invest that money straight into cancer research.
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How are they different from photons? Or gluons?

Anyways, I saw a Freeman Dyson talk once where he explained that if you were to set up a detector with the cross-sectional area of the Earth, and point it at the sun for the age of the Earth, you would be expected to detect 4(!) gravitons, due to their weak interactions with matter. He was convinced we would run into our inability to continue to test predictions long before we hammered out a decent unification theory.
Hopefully Rovio is big and well-connected enought to fight back, and maybe make a legal dent in this problem.

This weekend's This American Life was an hour long feature on the software patent mess. It's a good intro to the situation, especially to the non-tech public. Share with your friends (and send donations as a thank-you!).

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...
If you don't want to be an example, avoid felonies.

This is the point where, on reddit, someone would post the image captioned "civil disobedience is still disobedience". And they'd be right -- activists who campaign for big changes often end up in jail (multiple times, or for a long time, or both) along the way. It's not nice and it's not pretty, but it's reality.
It seems close to the second one.

It's like a lose-lose situation, isn't it?

Like I am being paid right now (less than the market-rate, less than my current wage) and I get less equity too so if we succeed I'll get a pretty low-share from the total equation.
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I'm not surprised they went with memcached since PHP and most other languages have the client code written.
Hacked together tool to find your Twitter peeps on G+
Bottom-eating scum...
I came late; what used to be there?
It depends on whether you want a keyboard, too, or not. A keyboard costs extra money for iPad, and it's not a very elegant solution either. I'd much prefer an Asus Transformer if I were to choose a tablet over a Chromebook.
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me too! did you notice what looked like a "viewing ring" at the top of the tower in the video? i wonder what all the wind sounds like up there, and if birds will circle it all day, etc.
But what did they do that infringed?

Everybody always replies the same way, "it's broad", "there's prior art", etc, but does anybody ACTUALLY know how a game like Angry Birds specifically infringed on these patents in such a way that they will have to pay royalties?
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I bought the refurbished iPad 1 I'm typing this on for $370 from the Apple website.
I can't see them... but then, I don't have iTunes on any of the computers I own (not even on the Mac).

Are they within iTunes and the iStore? Or is there a web link I'm failing to spot that will let me read them?

Alternatively, could you cut and paste a couple of examples here so we could see what's being said?
What are Forever Stamps?

https://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/forever_stamp_f... is broken. First result on Bing and Google. Google gave me the option to Block all www.usps.com results.
> At the same time, there is no sign yet of gravitons particles that transmit gravity and are essential...

I never understood how you can explain gravity as 1) a bending of space-time caused by mass and then 2) pretend it's a force transmited by "gravitons".

If 1) is true then it's an effect (phenomena), not a cause (force). If 2) is true than it's a cause (force), not an effect (phenomena).
Unfortunately the other common case for Apple is that your bug just gets marked as a duplicate, and since you only have visibility to the bugs you opened, you lose all tracking.
I expect there'll be options for this, but I also expect they won't become very popular for a number of reasons.

The biggest that springs to mind is that this puts a lot more strain on the battery of the phone, the device that you most want to stay charged. No doubt this will be mitigated by lower-power electronics and better battery technology, but I think we're still many years from people having tons of battery capacity to spare on their phones.

Anyway, I hope systems like this will be built, in part because I like to see all the evolutionary options explored! But I don't see anything functionality-wise that appeals to me personally from systems like the Atrix, while the disadvantages seems pretty clear.

EDIT: I should say that there is one clear benefit of an "all-in-one" system: having all your data with you all the time. But cloud-storage with automatic push of documents and media allows a similar benefit.
Agreed. Instead the ire will be directed at Amazon as users will be confused on how to buy books. I guess they figured it was a better move than allow the app to be pulled (implementing IAP was probably economically untenable).
I think analogies are important too. They require the students to consider meanings on multiple levels and establish common connections. More than that too, they require students build up a semi-decent vocabulary.

As for the math, that may be a product of the No Child Left Behind policy. "If we can't get kids to pass, we'll just make the work easier!" The natural way towards advancement, would be to make education increasingly tougher, to demand higher standards for youth, in this ever-advancing world. How are we getting anywhere by moving backwards?
transloadit appears to fall back to other languages for systems they probably aren't confident enough to use Node.js for (ex. payment processing)
To be honest I expect a chromebook to be priced similar or at the very least $200 for me to be competitive with a more powerful/portable netbook.

His expectations aren't off, the manufacturing limitations just don't meet them.
Here is a post from a Kobo developer outlining their experience with their store. It doesn't sound like there was any room for taking a stand in their case and that they got boxed into not being able to communicate anything about their product. It does sound like there may be a different set of rules for different apps enforced capriciously but I doubt it had much about Amazon taking a stand.

http://quatermain.tumblr.com/post/8045895465/my-review-of-th...
I spent 2.5 years at CERN as a grad student in experimental particle physics in the 1990s. I never experienced anything like the condescending head patting or bad pick-up lines the OP refers to. In fact, those years at CERN were the closest thing to a meritocracy that I've experienced in my adult life. I suspect that being a non-physicist is a far bigger impediment to fitting in at CERN than being female. I spent countless hours talking physics over coffee, skiing down mogul-infested inclines in Chamonix, and drinking beer/yelling at the TV during soccer matches with the guys in my (otherwise all male) research group and never felt like I didn't belong. On the rare occasions that guys said or did things that I found to be in poor taste, I called them out on it in a non-confrontational way. Most of the time they weren't intentionally trying to be misogynist swine, they just needed someone to point out to them that they were being insensitive. I've been in the unique position of existing in male-dominated environments for as long as I can remember and have always wondered why more women don't seem to realize how much male behavior can be explained by a combination of cluelessness and insecurity-- it would save my gender much emotional angst.
It wasn't too many years ago that I heard that they were working on standards for flash storage cards that were smaller than CompactFlash and I thought to myself: "What in the world is the point? CF is really small already!"
Strange, I was able to read them in the main link just a bit earlier but now cannot.

Anyway the reviews were all asking and complaining about Amazon removing the link. The reviewers don't seem know that Apple threatened to pull the Kindle app if the links to the Kindle web store weren't removed.

Looks like Amazon is taking the blame on this one.
I figured Google would try to use their ad-powered business strategy to lower the profit margin to near-zero or negative rather than competing against netbooks. Didn't PS3 sell hardware for much lower than cost to manufacture?

These things would sell like hotcakes for $200 and Google would grow in users and advertising revenue. I was just surprised that they're selling near netbook prices considering they're limited devices and tied so tightly into Google Services. I don't see them disrupting the mobile device industry with Chromebooks unless they decide that # of users is much more important than profit per sale.
You can't expect a 'freedom' to exist in perpetuity for something that can easily result in the deaths of others by the actions of one person.

Sure you can, and many of us do. Freedom trumps damn-near everything as far as I'm concerned. And how many of us are planning on living forever anyway?
1. Post on HN about evil software patents.

2. Receive karma.
This is going to be the case that breaks the USPTO system to bits. Either that, or no new companies are going to release in the US, and instead create shells in other countries, which will only hurt our economy more.
True, but you'll just end up closing real bugs as "didn't submit a test case" if you follow a procedure like MySql. And you'll think you have fewer bugs than you really do.

It's much better to leave them as "unconfirmed" or similar, so that other people can find them and add their own details or test cases. (Of course, I do assume that a project with a lot of "unconfirmed" bugs has no one even looking at the bug database, so it's a double-edged sword.)
The system follows you so that it can DM you when the trial expires, otherwise it would need to ask you your email address since the Twitter API doesn't include that.

As for any mobile tweets you're getting that has nothing to do with FollowTrial.
I don't really think so. Whether they're right or not, the people making these decisions at Apple aren't doing them to make more money (or at least, not just that), but because they believe it's better for users.

In this particular case, that to encourage people as far as possible to use the in-app purchases system is more favourable to the users.

It seems much more likely than "deciding to be evil".
From the article:

Lacey was apparently the victim of road rage, and not the
intended victim, either. An imbecile (that authorities
believe had been drinking) smashed into him in pursuit of
another car.

If I were a journalist, I would not be employing terms like "imbecile"--especially not to refer to someone capable of road rage.
If you want to have fun, go drive on a racing track. Don’t endanger commuters who have no choice but to drive.