skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always wondered why suicide is so common among us young programmers. (Ilya, Bill Zeller, etc)

As programmers we're able to control how our code behaves, but life on the other hand has too many variables, most of which are beyond one's control - and the only thing one can control is their lives. The will to live can do amazing wonders, but when that will fades -- life doesn't make sense, its just a waste of time and resources.
I'm very sad. A piece of my hope is gone.
The Mixtape Lost at Antikythera
The article is mostly scaremongering, but the reason I posted it was mostly the 401k comments.

Any "old timers" (meaning those that put money away into 401k through out at least 2 recent market crashes, dotcom and the financial one) here willing to comment as to how their 401k fared?
The biggest advantage I see(especially working for the company that does the matching) is that

a) Its a saving account that you cant take money out on a whim

b) Employee matching is free money

c) Youre not paying taxes untill youre ready to take it out and when you do take it out, your tax liability will be lower due to lower income

So you have all these financial advantages in 401k, the disadvantage is that you have to invest these funds wisely.
Followup: Got a response from Name.com... it looks like the only thing they can do in this situation is transfer the domain to next of kin (rather then letting someone else be the billing contact)

Hopefully the Swartz estate understands how much his works mean to people and decide to keep the domain and hosting running.

Thank you all for your offers to donate, hopefully his estate will let us donate directly to them.
I can really relate to a lot of this. I'm a graduate student with ~10 distinct projects/ideas on my todo list and at any point in time I feel more or less inclined to work on each of them. And strangely, the most important ones are rarely on top, maybe because they are both assigned and daunting.

My work life comes down to a mental battle and trying to induce motivation in myself because I know that when I am in my motivated state working on something I can be significantly more efficient than when I'm not, perhaps even by an order of magnitude. I've sat down to work on a paper one day having decided it is fun after explaining it to a friend and did a weeks worth of work that evening until 2am.

I have to figure out what induces these mysterious states.
This is awful news.

I haven't been in touch with Aaron for several years, but I had a brief encounter with him in 2008. I was between jobs and decided to help out with his watchdog.net project of the time. He was always incredibly kinda and once tracked down my number and called to check that I was OK after I was unexpectedly offline for a several days.

Great guy; will be missed.
Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26
> it's a systemic problem with elected officials

Federal prosecutors are appointed, not elected, which makes the effort to name and shame them even more tenuous. Trying to fight the culture of overzealous prosecution as a whole would make it more likely that the elected official who appoints them (the president) does a better job.
The piece opens with "People read TechCrunch because they want to create something..."

These people are most certainly Doing It Wrong.
From my reading of Lessig's words, it seems MIT just let the proc do its thing, which allowed said prosecutor to invoke the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984 (MIT's computer resources were the ones Aaron abused when he downloaded the articles from JSTOR)

Although since procs do their own thing and the feds were probably out for his blood after his previous PACER stunt, I'm not sure even an express assertion from MIT that they wanted to let it go would have changed anything.
Is there any place we can read more about their culture, or its something you have to pick from the tidbits that leak on blog posts and the way they act publicly?
The Item Collection Puzzle
You're correct; I misread the article as her being an elected Attorney General, not a US attorney.

I still support undermining any effort of hers to get elected to higher office, though.
JSTOR torrent
Good post, don't let any news affect your judgement of what you need to do in life.

At the same time, the general attitude towards suicide makes me even more uncomfortable being alive. I don't feel ill and it seems really condescending to say that I haven't been in my right mind much in years. I find it really consoling that some time I'll happen to die or get around to killing myself.

To me, suicide would bring immediate advantages. I'd never feel bad again. I'd never be happy again too, but that doesn't bother me and I wish it wouldn't bother you either. It's fine to say you feel uncomfortable with others killing themselves and it's definitely important to consider that prior to committing suicide, but please don't claim that not killing myself would benefit me. Maybe you think that's an example of my inability to make considered decisions/judgements. To me it just resembles any other moral or political argument where calling either side mentally ill doesn't help.

Suicide is wrong, usually. It just affects the people around you way to much. But for me and many other people it would also be really awesome.
Actually I do mean guilty, as I was under the impression that you have to accept your guilt before you could get a pardon.
She was considered someone in the running for Mass. governor and may continue a political career later in life.
I'd also suggest anyone that has ever faced depression or currently is facing it checks out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGp25fn25Cs
I quite like the simplicity of it. Personally, I'd move the "Submit" button next to the textbox for the resolution or directly underneath it (to the right of the checkbox's label).

Can I ask what framework you used (if any)? Also, it seems like you're repeating a lot of in-line css, you would really benefit of adding another CSS file.
Alfred 2 beta released
[video] Agile Program Management in 15 Minutes
I think it's incredible that he had the foresight to consider the morbid possibility of death at such a young age and take appropriate actions to manage his responsibilities even beyond the grave.
As the comedian Doug Stanhope says : "I'm kinda out of shit. Not in this set, I mean I have some stuff I put on paper. But in the long term, I think I'm outta shit. [I'm] fucking cannibalizing my own— seventeen years, how much more do you have to say? If I die soon, don't ever say I died too young. [...] Every time an artist dies young- Kurt Cobain, or whatever, there's always the people "It's so sad, he had so much more to give." — How do you know? Maybe he was out of shit. How do you know? He's done. He got all the money, he did all the drugs, he fucked all your holes. And that's the American Dream, and when you're done with that you go "Oh, that's why they call it a dream. — It's bullshit, I'm still empty." And he cashed out. How do you know what any artist had left? How do you know if Jimi Hendrix hadn't had died he wouldn't have wound up doing Superbowl half-time duets with Elton John right now?"
Thank you! Olark seems to be exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately I couldn't see them in my Google results
Same here Denzil. :(
People in power need to take responsibility for what they do. Claiming they're "just doing their job" is how the worst stuff that ever happens to humanity by other humans goes down.

For more, check out The Lucifer Effect. Doing evil in the name of your "job" is a bug in the human psyche.

We need to do everything we can to mitigate its effects, and that starts by not staying stupid shit like "Hate the game, not the player" that's intended to absolve people of the guilt and shame they should be feeling for acting immorally.
I never met Aaron but I admired his work and his spirit.

I'm a little sad there's nothing on the front page of Reddit about Aaron yet.
It does not follow that the destruction of the academic publishing industry will destroy the scientific community.
Really, you think so? Please expand. Do you mean perhaps that might make it more difficult to deal with things you can't control?
It's Twitter Bootstrap.
I felt suspicious about it so I opened http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/ : "/2002 is a home for random things I want to publish." So it doesn't seem to be the publication year.
Very eloquently put. RIP Aaron.

.
Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig and the Technocommunist Menace
It was the top item 11 hours ago:
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/16ffph/reddit_cofounde...
Every year is the right year to quit your job. The real questions are:

- do you have conviction in what you are doing?

- have you taken every step possible to advance the idea or development in your current position (noncompetes obviously restrict what can be done)?

- do you have sufficient money to survive six months if you aren't showing any revenue?

If so any time is the right time.
I feel exactly the same- let users use and require sing-up for saving data etc.

But for young applications, it is important to get in touch with the users, and try to engage them-

There are some start-ups dedicated only to automatically send users email after some conditions, and most of the service I use do it manually too (like sending you "we noticed that after you built your form you didn't publish it for a month, care to tell us why?")

If you don't know who your users are, how can you get the negative feedback?

Getting feedback only from the people who sign up is going to be skewed to the positive side, and you'll have a problem realying on analythics for guest users (because some "guest users" are can be the same user- from different machine, or after cookie clean)
Naming and shaming Carmen M. Ortiz for destroying the life of a young man is exactly what is necessary. She brought 13 felony counts against him for downloading articles that should be freely available, after JSTOR itself had dropped the charges. Destroying her career and seeing her fired in disgrace will send a message to all other overzealous prosecutors, in the same way that she surely thought her prosecution of Swartz would have a "deterrent" effect.

Seeing her dismissed and disgraced is in fact the only thing that will send such a message to such Javerts, as they have disabled the voice of the people by routing around jury trials and they are appointed rather than subject to elections. Carmen M. Ortiz is running for higher office on the backs of high profile prosecutions, and now on the body of Aaron Swartz. It is incumbent upon us to see that she does not get there, that this behavior is NOT rewarded.

Example:
http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/December/EremianVer...

Lyons is the first defendant in the U.S. to be charged and
convicted of violating the Unlawful Internet Gambling
Enforcement Act (UIGEA). The statute was enacted by
Congress in 2006 to deter the use of the U.S. banking
system to pay Internet gambling debts incurred by U.S.
citizens.

Unites [sic] States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said,
“Today’s convictions should serve as a message to those
involved with illegal gambling schemes that the government
will apply the full weight of its resources to identify,
investigate and prosecute individuals who seek to profit
from offshore gambling.”

...

The defendants face up to 20 years in prison on the RICO
charges; five years in prison on the illegal gambling
charges; and two years in prison on the wire act charges.
Lyons also faces three years in prison on the tax charges,
five years in prison on the interstate travel in aid of
racketeering and UIGEA charges and 20 years in prison on
the money laundering charges.Additionally each count also
carries three to five years of supervised release and
fines up to $250,000.

"Today's convictions should serve as a message" over online gambling, which was just made illegal by fiat in 2006 in a rider tacked on to the Dubai Ports World Bill! This woman is routinely involved in travesties of justice related to online activities and thinks this means sending "a message". The Internet needs to send a message back, and force her resignation in disgrace.
Let me get this straight: you want to contact a group of judges and prosecutors and "let them know you don't approve of her actions."

What exactly do you hope to accomplish by this? Federal judges and prosecutors already get this every day from people who do this for a living. And you know what? It doesn't work.

Who cares if you don't approve of what they're doing? They don't measure themselves based on your approval. They measure themselves based on their record of convictions, however they are earned. They are not directly accountable to you.

If you want to change something, let your local Congressional representative know you disapprove of how this prosecutor conducted herself. Your Congressperson is accountable to you, and he/she is the one in the best position to make change happen in this context.
Magnetar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar_Capital
I agree naming and shaming is a good idea. It puts a name and a face to the story... not just some nebulous "the system is broken." People need a narrative to humanize the situation and it can serve as a warning to other prosecutors.
I fail at being amazed over a government mandating things.

And what makes you think this happened in the absence of lobbying? For all we know, this could have come after one of the CEOs of China's ISPs invited the right officials out for dinner.

I get a bit scared when I see people who seem to view this as progress.
> such David vs Goliath cases spark people and give them purpose, or at least a schedule of milestones to reach

Up to a point, yes, but "inevitable doom" can also have a walls-closing-in kind of effect. In particular, it's not that uncommon for people facing long prison sentences to kill themselves.
Largest structure challenges Einstein's smooth cosmos
I've always loved that shade of orange (or is it closer to salmon?)
UCLan team discover largest structure in the universe
Awesome, seems like it is working well for you.

How did you get feedback/nisights about users that started to use your product, but fall of the funnel before entering the email address from some reason?
Is Blurring the Lines Between Business and Creativity Acceptable?
Make no mistake, this means she will always be facing serious opposition should she choose to run for public office.

And since she was appointed by President Obama, it is entirely appropriate for those of us who feel strongly that she misused her position; to ask him to remove her from office for failing to exercise her discretion appropriately.
Approximately 97% of indicted federal defendants plead guilty before trial because of three aspects of our system:

1) US Attorneys routinely routinely overcharge defendants to an almost absurd degree;

2) The most commonly used federal statutes, such as the Wire Fraud statute, are so broadly written that people with no criminal intent could reasonably be found guilty; and

3) The maximum sentences for convictions under these broad statutes are so absurdly high that no one in their right mind would dare risk a trial.

These factors, combined with often merciless prosecutors, add up to a recipe for a potential disaster such as the one we have seen here. The system is very much geared to send to prison anyone that is charged with a crime, based on the system's trust in the concept of prosecutorial discretion. Unfortunately, many prosecutors abuse their discretion, and there is no way to inject uniform sanity into our system as it currently exists. Sadly, the prosecutor in this case likely won't even offer as much as an apology to Aaron's family, as most of them seem to feel justified in their behavior.
"don't hate the player" is a satirical half assed defense used to justify irresonsible actions. even if the entirety of our hate should be directed at the game, that doesn't mean the player holds no responsibility.
> The world is big and time is long. Things will work out.

The best advice and totally true!
He didn't just co-author RSS, he used it extensively. Not only did he maintain a powerful blog, he made an RSS feed for Paul Graham's site. I hope he felt proud of this achievement.
Aaron Swartz's Book Reviews
>I think it may be counter-productive to mention this, because it is difficult to prove.

Why would you think this is difficult to prove?
I think this is the stage where the religion or faith come to rescue. We in life faces things where you find no logical way out other than looking for someone who we believe is superior than us. We surrender to that force and try get calm as much as we can.
>If they didn't exist, most libraries wouldn't have access to the journals JSTOR archives.

This isn't true. Something else would be in its place. The only question is whether it would be better. I believe that society has already paid a number of times for the benefit of most of the knowledge in this archive. This should be freely available to anyone with access to the internet.
I have decided the year i quit day job is 2013, not after reading this article, but i have been planning it for the past 2 years.

2 years might seem like a lot of time but i started from absolute 0. Now i have few mobile apps in market through which i earn 50% of my sal every month.

Making lists really helps, but even if you loose the list your passion will find a way to get you back to the list.

Keeping this as wallpaper helps too
http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/5536250_700b.jpg

Edit: And the only reason i want to quit is freedom
A lot of prisoners have no access to the outside world, including the internet. Many prisons lack even a basic library. Inmates working with The Last Mile (http://thelastmile.org/) tweet by passing their tweets written on paper to volunteers who actually enter them.
Please, please save those IRC logs.
Building Your Legacy
OK but before we all get on the public shaming bandwagon, I ask whether you know for sure that Ortiz is the primary target of Lessig's (rightful) criticism here? I know Ortiz was involved, but Lessig doesn't explicitly name Ortiz in this article and he refers to the prosecutor as a "he".

And please pardon my skepticism if it is in fact Carmen Ortiz, but I'm not familiar with the case and I think a healthy dose of skepticism is a good idea whenever "internet justice" is called upon.

Anyway, rest in peace Aaron.
In general I would agree. But if I were facing prison, it's tougher to say what the rational course of action is. It might be the decision I'd make if I were starkly given the option of suicide or decades in prison. The biggest question would be determining whether that's really the stark decision, or if there's a possibility of finding a way out of it. If acquittal is a possibility, making a decision too early would be tragic (but I'd also be afraid that making a decision too late may be tragic in a different way).

It's true that it's important to make sure that depression is not coloring your assessment of that: it's quite common for depressed people to have a view that things are hopeless when they aren't. But on the other hand, sometimes the world sucks, and not every situation has a good way out of it. For most people, things get better and what seemed like insurmountable obstacles will pass. But I don't think you can honestly tell someone that a major felony criminal case is a temporary setback, something that will pass, and only their depression is making it seem more hopeless than it is. In a large percentage of cases it doesn't pass, and the person isn't able to continue their life as a free person. A situation I hope never to be in, but I don't think the correct decision, if you're actually facing a choice of whether to go to prison for a long time or not, is obvious.

I can't say whether that was Aaron's own motivation, though, or how rational his thinking on the subject was.
Can you imagine how does it look like with PM2.5; 800+? Feel this photo
Also, people use many machines (desktop, laptop, tablets)
I've thought it but never taken any action. In real life I set up my relevant payments (life insurance) and made a will. Everyone should make a will because of the consequences/issues that happen as a result of a lack of a will
For any given idea (even in your own city), there might be 10 teams working on it. Of those ten teams that had a bright idea, 5 will never do anything with it. 5 will try to do something, and 3 will make it to market - one will have a great product. In my experience if a lot of teams are looking at a problem that's market validation (but not sufficient for success.)

So someone's already stealing your big idea - they just don't know it yet. Your job is to get to market first and/or to treat customers better.
Why is there nothing about Aaron on Reddit?
How do we go about getting this message across to her and other key people (legally)? I'm interested in helping.
Yes...as much as hacker-minded people want to think that it's about the data (which I won't argue that it isn't), things happen because of individual stories.

Rosa Parks was not the first person to be denied a seat on a bus. The mishandling of rape cases has been a problem in India for a long time and it took the tragic case of the (so far, anonymous) woman who was brutally gang-raped to spur international furor. And think of the numerous laws named after victims...Megan, and so forth
"after JSTOR itself had dropped the charges"

From a practical matter a prosecutor might decline to prosecute if they can't get the cooperation of someone (needed to testify or provide evidence) but this should have no bearing on whether to prosecute or not.

You could have a crime committed and the crime is worthy of prosection. The fact that someone believes (as an extreme example) that a person who committed assault against them shouldn't be prosecuted doesn't and shouldn't really matter (keeping in mind of course the practical nature of prosecuting without cooperation). Unless of course they say "no assault occured" which is different then "assault occurred but I don't want anything done".
"Stealing" in the sense of depriving you access to the documents should be prohibited, but I see no problem if someone requested you immediately copy all of your research.

In fact this is exactly the case with anyone working directly for the federal government, doing research or otherwise. You're told in no uncertain terms that at any moment information on your work laptop can be FOIA'd in which case you will have to immediately hand over the contents of your hard drive (if it has been determined there is a reasonable likelihood that it contains the FOIA'd information). Obviously if you're working on classified state secrets the process is different (also personal information is redacted from the documents). There's no reason research can't be accomplished successfully given the condition that the public has a right to that information at any given moment.
Wow, do you have a source for the 94%?
I was wondering if this sentence was a typo. I thought he almost certainly meant the reverse:

And if not morally wrong, then at least legally wrong.
It's actually 97%, at least as of 2010:

http://www.ussc.gov/Data_and_Statistics/Annual_Reports_and_S...

Unfortunately that's down at the moment but you can use the Google Cache:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:WCmq1ybmBqAJ:...
I was very saddened to hear this news. I posted my thoughts to my blog. http://benatkin.com/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz/ He accomplished a lot, and taught us a lot, and I think most of us can still learn from him. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/archive
Hamburguer with Iberico ham and Manchego Cheese
> Many fields (mine included) are so arcane that very few would be interested in making an open publishing venue with the editorial quality we have now.

What is your field? And why don't the members of this field just create their own on-line publishing venue?
Solving ITA Software's Two-Time Pad Puzzle
Corrected, thanks. The 94% figure was from 2001 I believe. Apparently it's gone up.
Larry Page ignored Steve Jobs’s deathbed advice: Google doing great