skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The defendant is charged in [Count _______ of] the indictment with
computer fraud in violation of Section 1030(a)(4) of Title 18 of the
United States Code. In order for the defendant to be found guilty of
that charge, *the government must prove each of the following elements*
beyond a reasonable doubt:

First, the defendant knowingly [accessed without authorization]
[exceeded authorized access to] a computer [that was exclusively for
the use of a financial institution or the United States government]
[that was not exclusively for the use of a financial institution or
the United States government, but the defendant’s access affected the
computer’s use by or for the financial institution or the United
States government] [used in or affecting interstate or foreign
commerce or communication] [located outside the United States but
using it in a manner that affected interstate or foreign commerce or
communication of the United States];

Second, the defendant did so with the intent to defraud;

Third, by [accessing the computer without authorization] [exceeding
authorized access to the computer], the defendant furthered the
intended fraud; [and]

Fourth, the defendant by [accessing the computer without
authorization] [exceeding authorized access to the computer] obtained
anything of value[.] [; and]

[Fifth, the total value of the defendant’s computer use exceeded
$5,000 during [specify applicable period.]

The last clause applies when the object of the fraud is access to the computer itself; for instance, if your fraud was "gain free wireless access".
What are some Social news sites for startups?
The entire U.S. legal system is based on a principle of "acting in good faith" and interpreting laws from the point of view of a "reasonable observer." If you choose to ignore these two principles, every single sentence of every single law can be convoluted to have an enormous range of meanings. That's not what the law is about -- it's not just about the letter, it's also about the spirit.

Sometimes judges and juries screw up -- maliciously, or otherwise. Most of the time they don't. It sucks, but it's the best system we've got.

That's not to say that the legislators shouldn't try to make laws clear and unambiguous, but they have a lot on their plates and patching a hole in a 1986 legislation that doesn't seem to actually harm anyone isn't high on their priority list.
I'd expect the there would be a search cost, a removal cost and making safe cost. That the search cost would be lower than the removal cost (less skilled, less dangerous).

I'd be extremely surprised to find that a commercial clearing of mines for an area with 40 mines was the same cost as clearing that same area with 400 mines. Equally that clearing a double-sized area with 40 mines was the same cost.

Either way you'd reduce costs - reducing search area or reducing removal+disposals needed. [fwiw _djo_ intimated that the increased cost to the process of debris removed any utility such devices might have but also suggested that similar devices are in current commercial use].

With a sandy area I'm wondering how well a dragged scarifier like implement would fair.
Ask HN: What are your plans to deal with the bus factor?
Note: For those not sure what I'm talking about in the title, I'm referring to this bus factor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

I brought this up with another developer recently and they didn't have an answer, so I thought I'd pose this to HN and see how it goes. Do you have plans for your work if you get hit by a bus and, if so, what are they (if you can say)? In other words, if you can no longer work on and provide what you work on, what happens to that work? What do you think should happen to that work?

This seems like something we ought to prepare for, seeing as most of probably aren't permanently on one job for our lives (aside from living, I suppose). Not necessarily planning for what happens after you die (though you probably want to do that some day), but just what happens when the software or what have you isn't something you'll return to or can return to, but you still retain control of it.

So, what do you want to do? Open source it? Stick it on a disk or server and leave it be for someone else to find and decipher? Destroy it and let that be the end of it? I'd like to hear your plans if you have any right now.
You know, I think we as programmers have a tendency to want everything to be well-defined, and that can sometimes turn tedious. In this particular case, that's what the OP is doing. Congress simply isn't capable of writing these laws fast enough to keep up with the technology, nor do I think it's preferable ("The citizens of Utah will not stand for oauth2-based authentication! Only SOAP will do!").

This is what we have courts and an executive branch for: the law can really only provide broad guidelines. It's up to the other branches to apply these principles in practice.
Northrop YB-49: Innovation lost to bureaucracy
Errata Security: You are committing a crime right now
They need to do a Breaking Bad format show with John McAfee.
Ran a course. Sold a screencast. (Over $10k within 2 months for both.) A little busy to go into details right now but there have been lots of posts with similar case studies on HN - one of the better ones was http://sachagreif.com/lessons-learned-from-an-ebook-launch/
I'd recommend away from doing this … not because it's a bad idea, but basically because he's in a pinch and he doesn't know the space.

Plugins or themes could require a lot of trial and error before finding success, and buyers may not come until later. He needs the cash now, so he should go the sure thing and try to find paying customers directly rather than put things up for sale and wait for results that may never come.
I followed the entire thing and was trying to use the site, too... my impression is that there was an equal mixture of legitimate challenge met well, and incompetence/bad decisions.
Sell your shit, or pawn it.

Good things to sell are things that hold value - bikes, rolexes, tools, things like that. Imagine you were burgling your own apartment/house, take the things they would take and sell them.

It's entirely possible to purchase a used mercedes, take decent care of it for 2-3 years, and turn around and resell it for virtually the same price. Ditto many luxury goods - a used rolex can sometimes be turned around for a profit.
Or banks
9pi - Plan 9 for Raspberry Pi (9pi.img.gz)
I salute you for posting while intoxicated. It works well for me too. It's not that the author of this post is unhappy that his startup failed. It's that he's lost perspective; that you could plausibly write a post thanking the universe for having been in a position to take a shot on the kind of company that makes vanity stickers for itself (note: founder of company w/ vanity stickers, posters, and refrigerator magnets), and for being able to do that with the kinds of employees who can surely leave their posts at that company for an even higher-paid job.

It's hard for me to unpack my comment more than that. I wrote what I thought after I read the post. I make no claim to that comment being unassailable; in fact, I made the opposite claim in the comment!

Maybe it's the question that's most important to me. Take a swipe at it? What's so bad about a tech startup failing in 2012?
This is probably not the answer that your looking for but honestly if you absolutely need 1-2k over the next month find some stuff to sell.

You might have to get a little bit more crazy with it than you want to, but I think most people would be suprised how much stuff they don't actually "need".
Please don't encourage the government to try to update legislation for the world as we currently know it, because that will be woefully out of date in just a few years, and same for something enacted a few years from now, etc. By pointing out what needs to change, they won't remove the law- they will try to update it. The best thing to do is to know how to defend yourself against the existing law so that you can fight it if and when you it affects you. It seems currently that the most obvious defense is that it is unclear. I'm not sure how well that would work, but odds are good that you won't have to defend yourself anyway.
There are an infinite number of ways to fail and only a few ways to succeed. If you learn from failure, you have learned one way that doesn't work out of an infinite number. If you learn from success, you have learned one way that does work out of a small finite number.

Obviously there are some ways to fail that are much more common than others, but those tend to be based on lack of action, e.g. failure to actually ask users if they want to use your product before building it. There is plenty of material on those common sorts of failures, it's just usually phrased constructively, i.e. "how to do SEO" rather than "we died because we posted duplicate content on every page of our site."
Have you read his entire blog post?
From the HN Guidelines[0]: "If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Richard Miller posted his release email over on the 9fans list: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.os....

It includes an important setup tip. Have fun!
same reason we like heroes so much, even though most heroes didn't do things on their own.
This is a bit unfair to the public. With any science, in my experience there are naturally different levels of disclosure. It is natural to share first with current collaborators, then with friendly recent collaborators, then with colleagues in related areas, then in informal seminar discussions, and so on.

One of the reasons for this is trustworthiness, as you say, but there is much more to it. Trustworthiness isn't the main parameter at all. A larger part of it is how much you trust the results. At each level of disclosure, by social convention there is a rough level of implied confidence that can also be spelled out more carefully. It is embarrassing to be wrong, and the higher your implied confidence was the more embarrassing it is! The rationale behind this social convention might once have been trust, but it is now free-standing.

Some incentives for layered disclosure are obvious; for example, for PR it might be useful to build a buzz within your research community. Other incentives are less obvious. For example, you might disclose early results to a colleague to hopefully get them interested and involved in the research. But if you disclose the results too broadly, too soon, then they will probably be less enthusiastic. They want the inside track on a cool problem, so that there is some time and freedom to explore it, and it isn't a race. (Races for results are stressful and also unfulfilling and wasteful; there's usually no point having multiple teams competing to do the same stuff, just trying to beat the others out for priority.)
In some ways, this disgusts me. In other ways, I can undersand it's a necessity.
Got to love the pace of feature rollout at mixpanel. The design seems miles ahead of other analytics tools as well, or any webapp for that matter. tripl's ui also comes to mind.
Nice. For those who don't already know, heroku's is similar.

https://status.heroku.com/
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/8/6/design_of_the_statu...
Lupsale Pricing - Need your input
We'd love to have your feedback on your experience dealing with email clients.
So your feedback is crucial in determining how we continue to work together.
Jury convicts NY man accused of AT&T-iPad hacking
To kick this off with my own plans, which are fairly simple, I aim to release all software I cease selling and developing (assuming I do both) as open source. Likely under licenses of varying permissiveness. I figure some might contain code I consider very useful and I'd want to see used elsewhere, but others I might feel better about licensing under something like the GPL 2 or 3 for learning purposes.

It's not a hard and fast plan since it depends on what I'm aiming to do with any given source code. That said, I would prefer the source code and resources necessary to work with said code were available to everyone, especially users who might feel like they completely lost something post-mortem, after a project is effectively dead.
Black Friday is coming up. Be the first in line at a popular shop and sell your spot.
Morality is a human concept that should serve human ends--individually and socially. As such, performing experiments on a dog to gain more knowledge is moral.

If life arrives on Earth from elsewhere, and is much more intelligent than us, let us hope they don't consider us to be dogs.
Opencode -- Promote your github repository
No.

They are part of the curriculum in a good SE degree. There is a SWEBOK. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok
Providing tech support to telemarketers for fun and justice
Based on the document located at http://www.nalcbayarea.com/PDF%20Files/Rong%20Arbitration.pd..., it looks like as of 2007 Corey Dunphy was a Special Agent of the United States Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General.
I think you underestimate the pain created due to expectations, Greater the expectation, greater the pain.

Startups are being promoted to every one all over the world as the way to create wealth after mentioning minimally that 90 to 95% startups will fail. If i am 48 year old guy working in a Manufacturing Factory in the US, i can definitely see from far off that i may loose my job. When i can predict my outcome, i can start taking evasive action and i am prepared for any eventuality and this lessens the pain even though it does not eliminate the pain.

Life itself is hard, but managing your expectations ensures that your journey is less pain full or may have more chances of joy.

You can do a small experiment to find the pain or pleasure created, Just promise somebody that you will do anything on a particular date and don't it or do it and you will find their pain is proportional to the expectation which they had on your ability to do the task.
When in college I wrote solution manuals of my text books (as part of assignments) and sold it on eBay. I made over 2k a month for few months. I am not sure if you can apply this but something to think out of the box. You may be already doing something, and someone may be willing to pay for it online. Also, please include your email in the profile. If you are in NYC, I may be able to hire you and pay you some advance payment for web dev services.
Yeah. The same board that spied on itself and executives to find leaks.

They are clearly part of the problem. HP's vaunted culture isn't what they think it is and that's part of the problem too. They are too big for their britches, literally, need to cut some pieces off and get smaller again before they become smaller.
Salesforce Q3 revenue up 35 percent from this time last year
"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas."

That is the best thing I've ever read from PG. But I would say, "Ideas lead to action, and only action builds a startup. Ideas upon ideas lead to ideas, not a startup."
Think of the comment thread that would ensure from someone writing an article about not making it into Harvard or Stanford, and instead having to go to the University of Michigan. That strikes me, literally, as a comparable disappointment.
Making a list of 50 things is almost as useless as not making a list at all. Give me a list of 5 and that's useful. The key value in making a list is curation.
Show HN: I built this Meteor app in a hack night, also for Black Friday
What Rob Graham is saying is very similar to the situation for many years with the Computer Misuse Act 1990 in the UK. It took the conviction of someone for not hacking for the establishment to realise that the law indeed was an ass and needed to be changed, and several years for the amendments in the Police and Justice act to kick in that provided much needed background, sadly at the cost of what are referred to as "dual use tools", such as your web browser.
The USA would need to somehow simultaneously remove sociopaths from office and remove voting privileges from idiots before they can have rational legislation in favor of the people.
Once technology advances to a level at which we succesfully replicate the human brain and its interactions all the way down to the nano/quantum level, would that artificial neural network then gain consciousness?
Definitely. We started with Heroku's status page as the golden standard and made it our own while looking at other examples along the way.
Although I'm not sure how important intent alone is, I don't believe that intent to commit fraud specifically is the only or even primary factor.

The Wikipedia article about web scraping [1] is quite interesting though very much just a start; it becomes pretty complex when you look at some older rulings such as Feist v. Rural [2] or (especially) Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. [3].

Then you start thinking about how some of the more recent "click-wrap" agreements play into things... To me they seem unrealistic and/or unenforceable, but it even more complicated when you factor in that the 'protected contents' might be public domain or otherwise potentially preempted by copyright, etc...

It's definitely an evolving area of law. And an area of law that I really enjoy as a 'hacker'. I just hope for continually positive legal evolution...

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dastar_Corp._v._Twentieth_Centu....
So you're alleging that Andrew Auernheimer had the intent to commit fraud? I don't know much about this case, but so far I see no evidence of that.
That is not what I proposed. That idea is dumb enough to explain the vitriol in your original response.
iPhones have had locking from the start. You are correct about crapware however.

That said this conversation is about unsubsidised, unlocked phones. Not phones bought through carrier channels. Apple are breaking new ground by selling an "unlocked" phone, for an unsubsidized price, but still pushing carrier restrictions on it.
All justice above street level is politics.
I am really interested in all of this, John McAfee gave me
my first ultra-light ride at his "Sky Gypsy Ranch" near Rodeo, NM. a few years back. (no I dont know him) he had just opened the "Sky Gypsy Cafe", a good friend of mine lived in Portal,Az. I did get to tell him, how I hated that his anti-virus software, acted like a virus itself on my computer. My limited profile abilities, (seemed like a normal Joe, except very wealthy and Yoga master BTW) that he was some kind of genius. However, reading the papers about all of this, I am very glad I am ME. Thank you God!
You don't know much about the case. I think the case was weak, but "no evidence" is something you can trivially refute. Just look up the two indictments.
One time, me and my friend came across a book that was only sold through a small publisher in Omaha. The book sold for ~$20 and, since we couldn't find it on Amazon, we resold it for $300 a pop.

Every time we received an order on Amazon, we would just take that buyer's information and buy it on the small publisher's website—we essentially took on zero risk and worked a few minutes every time we got an order.

It was a great example of arbitrage. And just like arbitrage, competitors also saw this exploit and the market inefficiency disappeared. Margins were competed away.

Even though it was a temporary window of opportunity, we found an article saying that some people do this kind of work full time (finding obscure books and reselling at a huge markup)!
By finding someone with a problem and solving it for them on the spot.

Quickest 1,000 euros (2500 guilders at the time) I ever made was in a place where they ran a distributed message passing system that had broken down on a busy Monday morning grinding to a halt the shipping brokerages in 50 countries or so.

From walking in to getting the job to walking out again with a for me at the time large sum of money was about 15 minutes. Outsider perspective is worth a lot in times of crisis and if you can spot what the problem is faster than the team that built the thing it certainly won't hurt your reputation.

Of course you could argue that I charged them too little and that I should have made them bleed but I don't like ripping people off. And they did turn into a long term customer after that.
It's important to note that while this simulates approximately the number of synapses in a human brain, it does so 1542 times slower than realtime.
Some theorists say this is the first step to achieving technological singularity. Once it becomes possible to replicate human mind/consciousness in computer memory (by running a brain simulation), the line between man and machine will become very thin. What happens once you upload your consciousness into a computer? Are you creating a new instance of yourself? What happens once such creations are able to harness the power of underlying infrastructure and use high powered processors to perform calculations and do reasoning?

I remember reading somewhere that humans might well become a completely digital species if this ever occurs. Interesting stuff to say the least...
Why is it fishy?

I am sure this agent will testify that he is a personal friend of Nguyen, that he stopped by the Color office to meet with his friend about a personal matter, and that he knows nothing about the company's bizarre office politics.
Not completely unsubstantiated, but I'm not going to sit here and teach philosophy (mainly because nobody would listen and I wouldn't get paid for doing it).

This relies on the unjustified assumption that causing suffering of a non-human is not immoral or amoral.

That's like saying "God must exist, until you prove that he doesn't." In other words, on that particular point, you're the one making a positive claim.
In the general case, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the unauthorized access to the computer system was in furtherance of an actual fraud that produced something of value for the accused.

The additional crimes chargeable under the CFAA are:

* Access to state secrets

* Access to financial records or to "protected systems"

* Access to government computers

* Attempts to intentionally cause damage

* Attempts to commit extortion using the access

None of these apply to blogs.
Nope. You're committing a violation of Federal law if you access any protected computer (a protected computer is one used in interstate commerce, which is to say any computer connected to the internet), you do so without authorization or exceed your authorization, and you obtain any information whatsoever from that computer. Read it yourself.

For the most part he CAN declare his blog off limits and press charges. Except that Federal prosecutor has to decide to press charges, not the individual.

Note tptacek: you should understand there are several different sorts of crimes criminalized by this statute, and fraud is only one of them, and for the other ones, no fraud is required to have occurred. Read carefully.
I feel bad for him. Even the rich have mental issues.
Here is an interesting report on different startup hubs. The top few hubs are Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Seattle, NYC, Boston. NYC is #3 in terms of # of startups, but falls behind on metrics such as talent availability, startup support, and "mindset" (how good the founders are.) Worth a read even if you don't agree with the exact methodology.

http://cdn2.blog.digital.telefonica.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-...
If you need to make $1-$2k in a short period the best way to do this is to sell your things. You should have enough things to make that in enough time and you can always buy replacement things when you have the money later.

Once you've sold enough stuff, work out how much you need that's left. Can you get that doing a couple of evenings or weekends of part time work?
Fair enough. And I guess I don't actually disagree with you, not really... there is nothing tragic about a failed startup. But I'm sure it does suck plenty to have your hopes dashed like that.