skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I want a world where the scientific enterprise grows beyond academia. I want a world where the collective intelligence of humanity can be brought to bear on humanity's most important problems. I want a world where the conversation of science is conducted in indexible, searchable, linkable, accessible, and modifiable public media.

As lovely of an idea as that is, someone has to write the backend, design the front-end, scan tens of thousands of documents and provide full-text search for them. Prior to JSTOR, these documents were trapped in university libraries, and you would have no feasible way to access them. I think they share your goals, and any problems you have with their operation is due to external factors (publishers, licensing, etc.).

Simply publishing everything for free is an absolutely sure-fire way to see no new content from JSTOR and a huge setback for the digitization of physical articles. Your proposal is a ridiculous over-simplification.

>Is JSTOR a friend or an enemy of my vision? Three articles every two weeks - sounds like an enemy.

How often do you read JSTOR articles? Personally, I don't power through a math paper in a single day, but maybe you're brilliant.

This limitation is not their fault. You're angry at the wrong people.
Is JSTOR a friend or an enemy of my vision? Three articles every two weeks - sounds like an enemy.

That's better than 0 articles per week that you get with most other academic publishers; and also what you'll get if JSTOR shuts down. In conclusion, JSTOR is not an enemy of your "vision".
Wow I liked that decription of the movie better than the movie! Its a huge loss to society that he is gone; if the subject matter was not so grave I'd point to the staged suicide reference.... But it is, sadly.

I just want to say the desire to kill oneself does not have to do with outside circumstances. Its the faulure to realize who you really are, it requires a complete living inside the mind, and into believing that your thoughts actually are reality.

Some emerge from wanting to kill themselves enlightened - they realize the true nature of reality before they go through with it. Some of the most potent spiritual leaders today went throught this - Byron Katie, eckhart tolle both wanted to kill themselves.

Others, dont. There is no blame, it does not make it any less sad for those left behind, especially family members; Aaron lives on in all of us who were touched by him. I looked up to him as a hacker, brave hacktivist, and generally kick-ass guy. RIP Aaron.
Testing ideas before we build them
MIT undergrads and at least one sysadmin were allegedly involved in the software releasing group DoD (who did some stuff related to DeCSS, as well as commercial scene piracy).

Course 14 (economics) machines got raided during Operation Buccaneer.

http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N68/68piracy.68n.html

It wasn't handled particularly badly, but the 1994 La Macchia case was worse (which I followed more closely)
The flu shot is excellent this year; a near perfect match [0]. In other words, the vaccine is very reliable for protecting immunocompetent individuals capable of producing antibodies.

Re: the vaccine not protecting the immunocompromised. It's important for caregivers of young children, the elderly, etc. to get vaccinated to reduce the probability of transmitting the virus to susceptible people in their care. You can interrupt the chain of transmission.

And an open letter to the three people I heard yesterday claim that they once got the flu after getting vaccinated: no, you didn't. The flu shot is a killed vaccine, which means it is incapable of causing infection. After getting vaccinated it takes two weeks for your body to finish producing antibodies, so it's possible you were infected with the virus from a regular, environmental source. Basically, it was a fluke that you got sick, and that experience should not dissuade you from getting vaccinated. The intranasal vaccine is live attenuated, which means the virus is hypothetically capable of reproducing, but according to the CDC, it does not cause the flu [2].

Please get vaccinated. Check http://flushot.healthmap.org/ for providers in your area.

[0] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/ (see Antigenic Characterization)

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/keyfacts.htm

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/nasalspray.htm#give-you-the-...
Fortunately or not, there are whole sections of Reddit devoted more or less to quickmeme.com. Some subreddits auto-ban quickmeme which I highly encourage, but a sitewide ban is unreasonable because of how engrained it is in the culture.

Image captioning is, in our opinion, a bit worthless, but this is what we actually find objectionable not just one site of many which provides this.

Blogging itself is not what is objectionable just the general quality of the content from Tumblr, so comparing quickmeme to tumblr is unfair.
I do regret the ad hom, and I don't have time right now for a proper rebuttal with links to far better programmers than I who have come down on the side of spaces and no lines longer than column 80, but I'll give you this: your basic premise (the one on the end of the title and the article) are true, and is a point I fully emphasize with. To be honest, I don't really care too much what formatting is used (and I can configure my editor of choice for anything you can think of, natch), but I insist that it be consistent.

Unfortunately, we don't all get to choose who we work with or that they use a decent editor, and either one or the other are usually lacking, therefore: no tabs, only spaces. Also, if you have a line of code longer than 80 characters, consider that that's an indication that it's too complex, and not so much that it's breaking some arbitrary line length rule. Does a function really need more than three arguments? Why not put them each on a line for better readability? Do you really need to put 15 operations on one line, when the compiler can inline them for you, and you can give more meaningful names to constant temporary variables?

As for putting all code in one function (or even one file), I thought it was fairly obvious: you can make things hard to read by using too long a line of code, just as you can make things hard to read by dumping them all in one unbroken file (line after line with no reuse and no compartmentalization of functionality).
>Seriously if you are going to die you might as well die fighting...
PLOS is a journal that's trying to improve the publishing space. Every article they publish is open access.

http://www.plos.org/
No offense, but that answer was wrong in every respect. There's a law that allows the Treasury to mint platinum coins of any denomination. It only mentions platinum.
It wouldn't print the way out of the debt crisis. It's just an accounting trick that also wouldn't cause inflation.
To people wondering if prosecutors have a choice, they absolutely do. I was recipient of an NSF check of over $10,000 from a guy with a history of writing bad checks(a criminal offense). It is a clear cut case with ample proof and victims. Yet the DA's office in neither NYC or San Francisco has taken action against him for over a year.

Meanwhile the guy continues to scam more and more people, pushing one woman to brink of shutting down her business. I know because I made a site(http://cliffkaplanfraud.com) and the stories that trickle in are gut wrenching and infuriating.

So yes, the DA's office seems to have a lot of power to pursue someone unlike what some people here suggest.
It's kind of just a formal apology from the government. It's not worth a lot, but it does have some meaning.
I am most familiar with the three I mentioned, but check with your state government. Hearing is critical and seemed to be the most common and costly if not caught. When I get into the office I will see if I can find some of my old files. Search "Denver Developmental Screening" and "Early Learning Accomplishment Profile" to get a flavor of what I mean.
New Service Makes Tor Anonymized Content Available to All
You shouldn't learn everything solely from media.

America has a whole range of prisons see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison#United_States

The lower levels have plenty of reading material and even internet access. There is little risk of abuse from the other prisoners since they too are there for non violent offenses.
Can anyone learn to code?
Hey HN, do you believe everyone can learn to code or are some people just not cut out to be programmers?

I would appreciate your thoughts.
None of the default subreddits are really suitable. Adviceanimals? Pics? Funny? Awww?

Reddit just does not have the capacity to cover breaking news for non-logged-in users anymore. Too bad.
Aaron Swartz, American hero
Please keep in mind that JSTOR paid almost $100,000 to digitize these files[1]. I think a lot of people don't realize that they're a non-profit organization with similar goals to many of you.

I don't think it's such a bad idea to give them money to continue digitizing works that no one would have had access to otherwise. They provide full-text search of all of their documents and undoubtedly employ programmers and designers much like yourself.

[1]http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/10/royal_society_frees_up_...
To many people to call someone a monkey is to say that the race they belong to is less evolved; biologically closer to monkeys.
What made this one different from their perspective?

He was downloading millions of articles, well more than the rest of the campus all put together. That caught their attention.

And they kept on stopping him, by locking out his MAC addresses. And he kept on working around the ways they were stopping him.

and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong

When you are going into a wiring closet wearing a mask over your face to hide your identity, you pretty much know you are "doing something wrong." Probably not something that necessarily warrants Federal prosecution, of course, but he was under no illusion his actions were approved.

For an entirely different case, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia
Have one of the computers run a 3d simulation of a body in a somewhat interesting environment that has windows pointing to cameras + screens (+mics +loudspeakers) in several public spots. It needs to have eyes connecting to nerves, ears doing a fourier analysis on sounds, the results going in to the network as pulses (do 50 fourier analyses on slightly phase shifted sound channels, coming from 2 points, like real ears do (real ears do about 20000 shifts each, but let's get real, even with a supercomputer)).

Have the rest of the computers run a pulse-based neural network controlling that body, communicate the pulses over udp/the network and actually let it run for 2-3 months.

Make sure that that body can see (and be seen and heard preferably, interaction would be great) from almost all locations in the environment.

We know that in the very short term such a network should try to imitate whatever it sees. It should start moving and try to duplicate whatever it sees through the screens (it may take a while though). Verify that does indeed happen with a big, complex network (preferably with the same architecture : big, central nerve connecting to the whole body, with offshoots at it's end going nowhere, only used for processing). See if you can get it to interact with people, and generally see how far you can drive this.
Some people just don't make the cut, I believe the number isn't small of who can, but it isn't that large either
From what little I know about "herd immunity" it would seem a bare minimum requires 75% efficacy of the vaccine with 100% vaccination.

Since this flu vaccine is only 62% effective, I come to the conclusion that there is no herd immunity effect for flu, even if somehow everyone got the flu shot.

(am willing to be corrected if I am wrong)
1000memories (http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/life-everlasting...) used to do that, but I think they pivoted somewhat into lifetime photo archives.
This must be wrong, it doesn't agree with Dave Winer's magically rewritten history/timeline of RSS.

It's not like Dave Winer would ever do something like revise history to make it look good to Dave Winer.
Its not surprising that it depresses me. You say "choose the purpose for ourselves" but how can one be absolutely confident they are making the right choice? If they are not absolutely confident -- then why would they let the guiding principles of their entire life be something they're unsure of?

Should they simply do what makes them happiest? No, most people agree that doing what makes you happiest is not an answer for everyone. Some people like to murder, and as a society we agree thats not acceptable. Everyone would feel good taking heroin, but that wouldn't be good either. Also, simply striving for happiness is messy - when do you go for immediate gratification and when do you strive for long term happiness?

Should people's purpose be helping others? Maybe, but there are problems with that too. Mostly, when do you help others and when do you help yourself? Perhaps if you helped yourself just a little more you could help a lot more people. But if you help yourself you stop helping others...so the advice of "helping others" really isn't a complete thought/advice. (Though, I do agree I like to help others.)

Honestly I don't know how anyone can place any value on anything without a purpose for themselves, and while many people have assigned purposes for themselves, I'm curious how they came to the conclusion that that purpose was the right one. So many people base decisions on what others do, or what feels good...and not many people sit down and think through the logic of it, I think.

So, back to my point about not being surprised that it depressed me: without valuing anything, nothing feels good. Art is seen, understood, and neither liked nor disliked. Comedy is seen, comprehended, but not fulfilling. Physical rushes are felt, experienced, and let pass. There is nothing to base happiness on because nothing matters. That is, until a purpose is understood. Its the most important thing of all and so any time you take a step that supports it, you can give yourself a pat on the back for doing whats right. The purpose I understand is to discover a purpose. Every time you exercise so that you can think more clearly and live longer, every time you build something or accumulate wealth so that you can better yourself and put yourself in a better position to make life a little longer and promote research a little more, or even every time you relax you can actually relax because you know all these things will help you in the long run. Its a deep confidence in knowing that I'm doing as best I can because nobody knows the purpose, if there even is one, and so the only way we can have piece of mind that we haven't wasted the little time we have here is by doing as best we can to figure it out.
They kept telling me I was a horrible person for violating the "honor code" and "computer use policy" and I had no recourse but to write a lengthy letter of apology before they allowed me to register again. fun times.

I bet it would've been fun if you'd automated that, too, using a Markov chain.
They usually move pretty slowly. Like a few months... I'd keep applying elsewhere.
Especially considering JSTOR is a non-profit that has to employ many people with similar occupations to those of HN. They digitize documents that wouldn't have otherwise been available at all before.

It's incredible how if they hadn't digitized the works, no one would be outraged. But when they ask for a fee to cover the costs of such things, everyone paints them as villains who try and lock information away from the masses.
I wonder if it's worse to be awake when first news of something like this hits, watching it in "realtime", vs. waking up to hours of discussion about it. I was asleep during 9/11 and woke up about a minute after the second plane hit.
I agree that that seemed a poor choice of word, but the term doesn't seem deliberately pejorative to me.
@rogerthis, please get yourself some help, be it a priest, counsoler, therapist, anybody! Alot of us have been where you are and have come out the other side much better, please get some help.
I'd say "too bad" for slow researchers. If someone can reproduce your results and publish a quality paper before you, that is better for society.

Nobody gets to "own" an idea. This possessiveness and reputational greed is what is causing all of these problems.
"These situations seem to arise when there is a fundamental disconnect between what "the people" think and what "the system" thinks"

The system serves the people; the system's thinking should be subordinate to what the people think. Anything less is a sign that the system is broken and is immediate and desperate need of an overhaul (but that is pretty obvious at this point).
ReDigi fights for right to sell used digital music
This was prosecutorial overreach. It was probably not in their short list of major issues, and thus I don't think they would have devoted huge resources to it.

Which makes this whole thing even sadder. It's entirely possible his (great) IP law firm could have gotten him off, or at least ended up with a brief or suspended sentence. Even though worst case he was facing 50 years, it would have almost certainly been far less. But I am sure he was depressed and so involved in it that he wasn't thinking about it rationally.
In the comments...

"It needn’t be this way, for there is a cure: the joy of life. Sanity can be restored through attempts at music, channeling the fundamental disorder into form and elegance, focusing the energy toward good. Art, especially the art of nature, as Alexander suggested, is likely another cure." —Aaron Swartz
Par for the course: Winer is obsessed by not being recognised for his contributions to the world of angle brackets and highly-politicised markup standards. It borders on (and probably over) the pathological.

Aaron was on his long list of "enemies", so I'm not too surprised by his reaction. I actually expected him to come out saying "well, actually, RSS 1.0 was kind of a dead end, we threw it all out with 2.0" and so on and so forth.
They have operating costs. They're a non-profit but they pay people to digitize the works. It costs a lot of money to access some of these things. It's not prohibitively expensive to access these documents. You can read three articles free every two weeks if you're exceedingly down on your luck.
How about they just get rid of the concept of a "computer crime"? Crimes should be based on the harm they cause, not just the tools used. There's no "shoe crime" committed when someone puts on shoes and walks to a bank robbery.
Aaron wasn't murdered, he chose to kill himself. No need to be sensational. Who do you blame more? Aaron for getting himself in the position or Ortiz who was doing her job?
My point is that "inventing" isn't what I value. What Volvo and Google are doing is what I value. Apple do it too.

Companies like Apple, Google, and Volvo were not the first with tablets or autonomous vehicles, but they were the first to adapt such inventions into products that the market can accept. (I am making the assumption that Volvo & Google will produce autonomous vehicles that the market will accept)

It's almost like the difference between "having an idea" and "achieving product-market fit".
Sequence, Selection, and Iteration: Scala
Here is half the phone conversation from tomorrow morning:

Mr. President, one of your appointees made it to the top of the petition list...

No, sir, it's not good news

Shall we draft a response for your approval?

No you don't know her personally...

Hey, at least she's not Deval's Lt. Gov.
I'm sure you can inquire about the status of your application but keep in mind that companies can often take a long time to process it (several weeks or months even). The best companies will get back to you and let you know one way or another.
Man, it's just really too bad he took his own life. Man. That being said, I would advocate working through the legal system to effect change in this unjust area, not break it.

Do you know of anyone working through the legal system to effect such change?
That morning? Wow, that seems incredibly fast action.
The journey is the purpose.
As an agnostic, I've found that the philosophy of social contract works well to explain where values/morals come from.
Body request: give me back my fitness data
I know it doesn't seem feasible but I do wish we could have an "International Suicide Prevention lifeline". When I lived in Fiji, I would often look on the web for some place to call. I often settled for irc chatrooms. It's sad that my first ever foray into irc was because I was lonely and wanted company. I'm lucky that New Zealand, where I live currently, has great support.
Probably a good call. But "JSTOR killed a dude" will still be the internet's takeaway from this.
"since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge. At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content"

I find this statement to be a lie. I agree with you @jacoblyles. I feel the same 100% and JSTOR is not a friend of science.
This isn't right. She probably were just doing her job. Someone dies doesn't make what he/she is doing absolutely right and others' wrong. Don't let the condolences for Aaron clouds your judgment.
This is the first time I've publicly posted about this, and I'm glad to see that someone (you!) understands it. You're comment is spot on. I'll add a bit:

Venus says life has no purpose. After venus makes that statement, what does venus do next? Lets say it is some action, X. Why did venus do X? Well, because of Y1 (Y1 could be 'to sustain living' or 'to be happy' or 'to help others'). Ok, but why is Y1 important? Because of Y2. Ok, why is Y2 important? Because of Y3. And why is Y3 important? And so on and so on...and eventually there is no answer because venus believes life has no purpose. Any action venus takes, at its core, is illogical without a purpose.

So that is why I am saying that I was depressed: everything I did was meaningless, I had no idea what I should be doing. Then I realized the most important thing I could be doing was figuring out the most important thing I could be doing. If it turns out that venus is right, and there isn't a "most important thing I could be doing" then the fact that I wasn't doing "the optimal thing" doesn't matter because there isn't an optimal thing to be doing and I can be confident that I gave it my best shot.
More Puffery about Epigenetics
"since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge. At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content"

...
Sounds fair, but also kinda like the system we have. For one thing, all the evidence the prosecution pays for is supposed to be provided to the defense. Perhaps not the evidence the defense would like, but ideally the facts are all there and the court case is about telling a story that fits.

I don't want to take the number at face value because it includes the amount spent by guilty people trying to avoid jail at any cost. Kenneth Lay no doubt spent a pretty penny on his defense.
Sure, but what indication is there that the comment is referring to her race?
She is still responsible. There is a chain of command and she is the one getting the pats on the back if a lot of prosecutions go through and crime goes down in the country, but that means she also gets to respond for fuck ups.