skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By and large, US law is considered to be stable and has been duplicated precisely for this reason. That's not to say that there aren't areas that couldn't be improved or made simpler. Rather, it's to say that we have a society where laws aren't arbitrarily changed on the whims of whatever party happens to be in charge of Congress.

You can almost think of the law just like you would a complex codebase. Unfortunately, we live in an age where the law has become so complex the average person can't keep it straight. I seriously doubt that this would change no matter how the law were refactored. The good news is that we do have a society where a concerned citizen can learn a lot about the law on their own. Thus, I would argue that the law is complex, but easy to approach if you want to become an expert on a particular module or subsystem.
The IRA weren't religious radicals, they were nationalists.

My grand-uncle was an IRA man starting in the 1920's, and probably supported them in some way into the 1980's. It is difficult to convey the depth of feeling that folks like my uncle felt. His father was imprisoned for writing things unfavorable to the British. His uncle was deported for sedition. His entire community was impoverished by onerous taxation and discrimination.

The Taliban want to embrace a fundamentalist vision of Islamic law and institute a theocratic government. Removing foreign influences is a rallying cry, but not the core objective -- they dominated the country well after the Soviet withdrawal, and were themselves a product of foreign intervention. (Ie. Pakistan)
I'm not terribly familiar with states in different countries, but I wasn't trying to imply America is necessarily unique. What I was trying to get across is that, for all intents and purposes, each state in the union (read union as union of federated states) is semi-independent and can do almost anything they want outside of printing their own currency. Even that law comes with a stipulation that you can print your own currency but still have to accept US dollars as well.

The parent had asked if the US in particular was one country. In actually, it's not quite that simple. Similar reason why people refer to Canadian provinces by their provincial title in some circumstances. British Columbia is only incidentally related to Nunavut. At the same time, Washington state is only incidentally similar to Alabama.
It's always bothered me that laws can be so vague such that, in advance, there's no way for you to know if a particular action of yours would break the law or not. You literally have to do it, wait to see if you're charged, and then wait for a judge/jury to decide which side of the law you fall on. It seems so unfair that law should ever be a gamble.

I've always wished there could be some kind of government agency you could go to, where you would lay out exactly what you would like to do, and they will explicitly decide in advance, and it would even set judicial precedent. Maybe you would have to pay the fees for lawyers on both sides and judge (so it wouldn't be cheap) no matter what the outcome, but if your actions were found to be legal in advance, then that would be binding, and there would be zero risk to your actions.
Fuck you.

I daresay my problems are somewhat worse than those of the OP's CEO. He isn't in a divorce, doesn't have kids, does he? And yeah, even if my problems are worse, they're still distinctly First World. It isn't as if I have trouble finding potable water for my kids, or have to worry about teenager "soldiers" raping my daughter. So maybe I too am Entitled. And perhaps I too should just Shut Up.

But I don't think so. I can tell you for an absolutely fucking fact that my problems have hurt like hell. And I am pretty goddam sure that those of this guy hurt pretty damn hard too. This guy put his ass out there on the line, everything he had, and came up LOSER. That's going to sting for any one with an ounce of pride. Yes, yes, yes, he'll land some VP Biz Dev job and he'll be All Right but the dream of being his own man has kind of taken a turn for the worse, hasn't it? I daresay that he and I both would drop our crying towels and head for the recruiters' office if the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor tomorrow, and our current problems would seem pretty fucking silly when viewed atop some modern day Iwo Jima. Nevertheless we don't at this exact moment have the benefit of all that perspective and holy shit, this hurts.

I have SEEN with my own two eyes people with whom I would not trade places for a single second. I have seen the people with the serious wrist scars, the verticals-along-the-veins of the suicides who mean business. I have talked with men so schizophrenic I almost cried to see a human mind so shattered before me. I have slept with a woman for no other purpose than to hear her rise "to go to the bathroom" so I could follow her and ensure she wasn't going to the kitchen to do the serious wrist thing. I have heard a mother wailing at the death of her only child.

So I know what Pain looks like and I know I am damn sight removed from how fucking Bad It Can Get. Okay? And I still know that were I have been hurt like hell, and it made no sense to me. And the last goddam thing I needed was some asshole sneering about how much worse it could be. I mean, no shit, Sherlock.

See thing about perspective is, it's _rational_. It's detached from a moment and a circumstance. The thing about pain is, it is _not_ rational. It is emotional and is about you and your moment. And no one who ever cared enough about anything to accomplish something did it without emotion.

Someone put their ass out on the line. They Failed. It hurts. First World problem? Absolutely. Guess what, here in the first world, we're people too, and we hurt too. We will get over it, we will move on, we will acquire the perspective you so generously commend to us.

But hopefully we'll retain enough knowledge of the pain to have a little sympathy for those going through it.
am i the only one who finds the article only marginally related to "being a junior/senior/antique developer"?

i would summarize it as:
be smart
constantly learn
find people that are better than you.

but then again, most "seniors" probably never did any of the aforementioned. i met an ex oxford(or cambridge) cs prof who's now doing his own startup a while back.

The main thing that struck me was that how willing he was to accept advice, even though he tought one of the first cs courses in the uk.
> it's about perspective

Is it fair to expect someone in his position to have perspective?

I think if you ask him about the failure six months or a year later, a resilient person would be able to put it in perspective, but not while it's happening.
There are an infinite number of ways to succeed and an infinite number of ways to fail.

Think of the raven paradox (look it up on wikipedia). Finding something that isn't black and isn't a raven should be evidence that all ravens are black.

Why isn't it? Because there are an infinite number of things that aren't black, and a finite number of ravens. You could actually count all of the ravens in the world but you can't count all of the things in the world that aren't black.

Startups are not like this. Failures compare to successes at a rate of, say, 8 out of 10. Both classes are of the same order of magnitude. You need to examine both to find discriminating variables.
I fear only a quantum computer will be able to match and exceed a human brain, although these projects should help us better understand the brain and what type of "software" we'll need to emulate the brain until we get to that point.
> I have to access the site with the intent to commit fraud. And my access to your site has to further that fraud.

Did you read the post? That's not the case, which is exactly the problem. If you access a web site that is publicly available, not behind any login system, but happen to embarrass a large company by doing so (like they mistakenly made it public) then you go to jail. That's why it's so unbelievably stupid and has to be fixed, hence his post.
That's simply not true.

The law is here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

EFF's analysis of the law is here: http://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act_(C...

The Ninth Circuit's model jury instructions are here: http://www3.ce9.uscourts.gov/web/sdocuments.nsf/0/71dd91317b...
Rob's post is wrong.
What's it like to go insane? One young woman tells her story
Agreed.

I think the same arguments that establish that humans have rights would still hold, even for the aliens. I also think that they would apply to the aliens, so that we should recognize that they have rights. But all that is just "possibly," because it's hard to speculate about a case like that.
I worked on one of those myself. The truly ass-backwards thing about it is that MS sales won't tell you what licenses you should buy in advance... but they'll sure as hell tell you what you should have bought during the audit.
Coming soon this week. We already have it though. Email support@mixpanel.com for more info if you're interested.
Gamble. Just don't lose.
Before you get too excited, (from the IBM article):

It is important to clarify that we have not built a biologically
realistic simulation of the complete human brain. Rather, we
have simulated a novel modular, scalable, non-von Neumann,
ultra-low power, cognitive computing architecture at the DARPA
SyNAPSE metric of 10^14 synapses that itself is inspired by the
number of synapses in the human brain.
Again: it's not that there are people in the world who are worse off. There are always people in the world that are worse off. Most people in the world are much worse off than most Americans.

It's that most Americans are worse off than this person.

This is startup exceptionalism. It is the intersection between nerd exceptionalism and the myth of the heroic entrepreneur, both of which are virulent memes in our culture right now. And how I think I know that is, I imagine the kinds of comments that would be on HN if we were writing about an investment banker's dashed dreams. They'd start with "fuck you", too, but they'd be aimed at the author of the article.

I'm sorry that the way I articulated this perspective offends you. I probably wrote it carelessly and offensively. But it is the right perspective.
Yep, imagine the horrors that would have fallen upon us if a terrist had gotten through with some nail clippers.

Many security experts think it is trivial to get weaponry past them. They aren't extensively trained, you know, they are cheap rental guards following a procedure.

So in fact I would say the TSA has stopped nothing, the only prevention has come from the FBI and CIA, locking the cockpit door, and putting air marshals on the plane.
It's a really hard problem to solve. I wish Facebook would let me choose certain people and say "Put everything this person/band/page posts into my newsfeed".
Given that they had the cash, Akamai's iPhone streaming service or they rolled their own. It's fairly well documented, search for HTTP Live Streaming. The kicker is building it out to manage thousands of connections without dropping quality, and getting low-delay if you want a genuine 'live' experience. There's also OpenTok.
I don't know, because we're not talking about a specific person. But the entity that I know only from reading this article, the one sitting on a desk picking at his company's vanity sticker and thinking that nobody in the world can know how he feels, I think he could use a little perspective.

It is exactly clear to me how unhappy this sentiment makes startup people on HN, and that's fine. I take no offense.
Put up a profile on Elance or ODesk, explain your situation clearly that you are willing to work for lower rates than your normal market rates for a short period and ask for people to help you.
Moving Mount Fuji
How to Monitor MySQL Replication?
Except perhaps there isn't a whole lot of mystery about how to make a porn site, or that such sites make a lot of money, or that law enforcement and the legislative bodies will attempt to shut them down.
This is actually a pretty interesting story. AW well and truly disrupted the online porn industry decades before "disrupt" was a buzzword. They valued transparancy, connected with customers, had a web style that was vastly different than the competition, and managed to get into a crowded market. Heck, the way they openly showed behind-the-scenes stuff and posted about what gear they used gave them an almost Open Source feel.

What's really interesting is what's come out about how the "founder"'s story was actually a fraud, and how puritans in the government eventually drove them to the other side of the world.

Think what you will about the appropriateness of their product, but I guarantee you that their website has seen more pageviews per day for the last decade than any project to which 95% of us have ever contributed.
For civil actions, you can seek a declaratory judgment.
My emotions were driving on that one. My mistake.
Quantum computing was the first thing that popped in my mind during this article's opening paragraphs - had to forcibly block it out to stay on track.
§1030(a)(1) through §1030(a)(7) are seven separate crimes. A person can commit one or two or all seven of them. They are separate.

Read the government manual:

http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/docs/ccmanual.pdf

You're filling this whole thread with disinformation. Stop it.
The post is a fantasy that has no relationship to reality.
One option is for-pay medical studies, especially if you live near the right kind of clinic or university. Googling "medical research for pay" might give you some starting points. I have never done it myself but it is a real thing.
(EDIT: http://brokelyn.com/human-guinea-pig/)

In particular sleep studies can pay thousands of dollars (in exchange for living in a lab for a week or two) but the lead time might be too long for you, eg
https://sleep.med.harvard.edu/research/recruitment

Also, you might try being a provider on services like Exec, Lyft, or Taskrabbit.
but some sort of structure that would allow profit sharing, without requiring a path to IPO or acquisition, would be great

Wouldn't that structure be a corporation? Shareholders can take profits out of corporations as dividends thus allowing profit sharing without requiring an IPO or acquisition.

If Treehouse makes $10m profit per year then that can be issued as a dividend and if a VC owns, say, 30% of the company, that's $3m for them. Do that each year and you have a great, steady return (it could also be arranged that equity can convert into a loan in case the business doesn't reach its targets, thus protecting the investor.)
> there's a good argument to be made that parts of (even of all of) Django is too complex.

As long as those complex parts are encapsulated well enough that I don't have to peek 99% of the time, I don't think it matters. I am more concerned about how complex the code I write has to be. If by making the framework complex you can simplify the code I have to write, I am all for it.
I listed all seven of them downthread before you wrote this comment. Which of them applies to a blog post? Please be specific.

You can feel free to point to the part of the DOJ manual that rebuts me, too.
Nobody really knows, but I think the informed consensus is that consciousness would probably happen long before we "replicate the human brain and its interactions all the way down to the nano/quantum level".
GrexIt’s InboxWhiz Keeps You From Obsessively Checking Your Gmail
This kind of BS is why I jumped off the SQL ship as soon as I could. I use mongo primarily now, and postgres when SQL is necessary.
A big reason for why things are so screwed up is corrupt politicians who use their power as a fund raising mechanism. For example there were several taxes added temporarily to see if they worked well. They did, but congress doesn't make them permanent. Instead they wait to be paid each time to renew them temporarily again. (This started in the Reagan administration.)

See this excellent talk by Lessig: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc The whole tax provisions as fund raising is covered at 7m30s.

I congress were actually honourable and I was president I'd mandate that the tax code shrinks by 10% each year. If the politicians can't find 10% then at the end of year every 10th provision is automatically deleted.
If I break your jaw -- funny how that's the example that springs to mind -- are you going to sit in the ambulance celebrating the outstanding First World medical care you're about to receive?

Or are you going to be saying Jesus Christ this fucking hurts? How effective an anesthetic will Perspective be?

You can be right and Wrong at the same time. Figure it out.
Haha, yeah I was just going to read it for once, and boom found it.
In this case, the defendant is charged with 1030(a)(4), which is fraud, and the government therefore has to prove fraud.

The defendant could also have been charged - in some other case - with 1030(a)(2), which is obtaining information from any protected computer without access. In that case, the government would not have to prove fraud.
> Why does everyone really want to reform/abolish our patent system? I mean, really.

The current state of software patents is such that a company can stock up, lawyer up, then sue out of existence any attempt at competition. They were invented to promote innovation, not stifle it. I honestly have a hard-time imagining any competent programmer standing behind half the garbage that passes for 'innovative' patents. It would be one thing if it were just patents that were not being used, but its taken to court, succesful cases that prove the point. One-click purchasing? One-box multiple search? Companies are patenting anything they can think of - the most obvious and minor of innovations - and succesfully pushing others out. That's anti-competitive in its aboslute purest.

> We can't just rewrite all patent law or get rid of patents. That's like saying the US needs a new constitution.

Most people aren't anti-patent et al - just anti software patents. A more apt analogy would be wanting to re-write a specific interpretation of a specific clause of the constitution.

> it seems like there are a few trendy startups and companies out there who got burned by the patent system.

Read more. Companies large and small regularly get burned by ridiculous patents. Like Android removing unified search (http://www.zdnet.com/samsung-galaxy-s3-loses-unified-search-...). That's absurd.

If companies were providing actual evidence of specific, long-term, expensive investments that resulted in software innovation, with a compelling case that it would not have been invented otherwise (aka a high school coder couldn't possibly mimic it), then yeah, maybe I coudl see a justification. But the current "just show us that there's not other patents out there that did this alreadY" can only be justified by one means: "I'm a lawyer, and I want to make a good living". Case in point - David Kappos.
Having been in that situation from time to time, I've sold stuff. Most of it fairly current technology: SSD drives, iPads, etc.

I also pickup quick projects: $500-$2000 projects that can be completed on the side in under a week.

Hit up Craigslist. (assuming you're in an area where this is relevant) Not always the highest quality work, but you'll find a lot of quick $$ things there.
Another good reference is:

Cybercrime: A Sketch of 18 U.S.C. 1030 and Related Federal Criminal Laws[1]

It was written by the Congressional Research Service and is well suited for non-lawyers. It is all of 9 pages including cover material and is the tl;dr version of the 97 page:

Cybercrime: An Overview of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Statute and Related Federal Criminal Laws[2]

[1] http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS20830.pdf

[2] http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/97-1025.pdf
If I was down to my last 1000 and lost my job, I'd play poker for a living. I am pretty confident I can consistently make ~200 in a half day in low level tables. But, that is with years of paying tuition. Besides the numbers, it's about psychology (your own, mostly). Gotta be able to keep discipline.
Why a sad face? Did the article not represent his crime correctly? I don't know this person or his back story but if he committed a crime why shouldn't he suffer the consequences?
The side benefit of this is that once you "give up" a bunch of stuff you find you don't really need it around any more. I had a ton of DVDs (this was a few years ago) that I had to get rid of to make short-term cash and once they were gone I didn't even think of it. Same for a bunch of books I was keeping around. The only thing I really miss is the first few seasons of The Simpsons and now that things are better financially I can always buy them again.
I'm not supporting jumping to psychic conclusions, but I don't see anything on that page that specifically refutes it. So while it may be very unlikely (which is just a prior based on my own subjective experiences), psychic phenomenon can indeed be scientifically studied, and is studied as well.

You might be interested in watching a Google tech talk by Dean Randin (also wrote a book): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew

He seems to have been pretty rigorous when investigating possible subconscious psychic activity in regular humans. And it does seem like most people dismiss such things out of hand, which is the very antithesis of scientific thought.

Tangentially, I don't think we can call any brain state "well understood", never mind hypnagogia.
Side trades at the family food cart I ran during summers, like selling drugs.
The Case of the Vanishing Policy Memo
> So in fact I would say

That's the point, right, that you aren't in a position to guess, and it's slimy position to be put in. It's the same way ADT can sell millions of home alarms every year - there's just no way to prove how many events a reactive system stops.
Powerful lobbies are against a working passenger rail system. The auto industry employs something like 1/12 of the US population directly and indirectly.

The airline industry is dear to the hearts of congressmen, who fly back to their districts on the taxpayer dime, and subsidize the industry in all sorts of unique ways. The US Postal Service, for example, is compelled to subsidize air service in Alaska -- random towns of 250 people get 3 flights a day in many cases.

The rail business was put out of business by bitter labor disputes, subsidized highways and air travel in the 1960's. The direct Federal takeover of the industry (ie Amtrak) makes it difficult to function in a rational way, as it is subject to the whims of Congress. Amtrak is compelled, for example, to serve food on trains -- a service that loses millions of dollars annually.
Engineers Consider Barriers to Protect New York From Another Sandy
A blog is not a protected computer, which is a term with a definition in the law --- it's one that used by financial institutions, by the US government, or that affects interstate commerce. Again: not a blog.

Furthermore, regardless of whether the prosecution charges a crime that requires intent to commit fraud --- for instance, in the unlikely event that they tried to spin a yarn about a blog affecting interstate commerce --- CFAA crimes aren't strict liability. They must prove intent to exceed authorization.
Crowdnetworking beta testing, please provide your feedback
Ask HN: Are front-end developers really "developers"?