skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plea bargains are voluntary. People enter into plea bargains most frequently because they are actually guilty. They're not looking to avoid jail or prison; they're merely hoping to minimize the time they do have to spend locked up.

It seems like in the US you can simply avoid jail by not making a plea bargain. Seriously, with those rates I bet prosecutors just bail the second the plea bargain isn't signed.

Well, yes. That's actually a strategy that many criminal defense attorneys use. I was lucky enough to be working for a public defender's office when they used it against the local d.a.'s office, after the D.A. decided his reelection chances would be improved if he was even harsher on defendants than he already was. Long story short: for a brief period of time, the waiting period for courtrooms shot up to 2-3 years for criminal cases and 10 years for civil cases. Nothing can happen in court, so everything hits the fan, and the prosecution side of the criminal system breaks down. (The defense side is mostly unaffected.)

The whole point of judicial system is that if you get people fighting for both sides, you should get a socially appropriate punishment for what really happened. This doesn't happen with plea bargains any time.

No, that's not it at all. The point of having opposing parties is that a vigorous presentation of the facts by opposing parties tends to reveal (in theory) most of the facts necessary to discern what happened (or as close as you can get without actually being there).

Innocent people make pleas from fear of getting nailed with something worse

No, they don't. This is a fiction created by media. Innocent people fight like hell. They mortgage their homes, raid their retirement funds, max out their credit cards. The risk of insolvency is worth if if you're innocent, since pleading guilty can be an economic death sentence if they plead to felony-level crimes.
> As another poster said it seems the only real cure for Greece is going to be inflation

i.e. stimulus, in Keynesian terms.

(Thinking about economics in terms of common sense and morality is generally unhelpful.)
Other people have said it better but the basic gist seems to be that austerity is wealth transfer from the poor and medium class to the wealthy.

"The result is ever greater levels of social inequality, as wealth is funnelled from the bottom to the top.

Big business, the banks and the super rich are being increasingly relieved of paying taxes.

The resulting deficits in state budgets, exacerbated by the hundreds of billions awarded to the banks in government rescue packages, are now being addressed through a combination of increased consumption taxes, which fall most heavily on the working class, and savage cuts in social programs and public sector jobs and wages."
6 Common Reasons Why Women Stay In a Job They Don’t Like
Can't they merge with the Super Wi-fi project, too?
Iceland is a blip, it's irrelevant to the global economy. If it were a city in Europe it would be something like the 92nd largest city. As a country it's even smaller and less relevant than Luxembourg.

When a country of 320,000 people defaults on their debt it doesn't have significant global consequences. When you start defaulting on debt on behalf of 50, 100, or 150 million people then it starts having very serious consequences on the creditors, on financial markets, and so forth.
Ask HN: Generate commerical license key for web service
A number of web sites offer software as a service for various APIs. A good example is Google's Custom Search API. The process to use web services typically resembles:

1. Account. User creates an account.

2. Server. User defines the IP address(es) of the server(s) that will make API requests.

3. Key. User receives a public API key for the desired API(s).

4. Guide. User is given documentation that shows how to use the API key to make a request.

5. Test. User can make test requests to verify integration functionality.

6. Billing. User pays to activate the account.

7. Production. User integrates the web service into their applications.

8. Deactivation. System deactivates accounts when expired, exceeds request limit, etc.

That is a lot of work for a small business.

What off-the-shelf, open source projects address this problem?

If there are no such projects, what would you do to architect a viable, low-cost solution (ideally, a percentage of each license)? That is, what software or existing commercial services would you use for a small business (having little to no income) that seeks to license web-based services?
Fair. I think the analogy goes this far: in gambling, there's "beginner's luck", which is actually selection bias in favor of people who have early luck. (Beginners with shitty luck stop playing and therefore don't "begin".) In software, there's the tyranny of past success: the tendency to fight the last war.
Fell in love with the .3 mm lead drafting pencils and the blue books from college -- the notebooks are so small that the traditional resistance to wasting a notebook are negligible, and the pencil is so fine that I can write and doodle without worrying about varying intensities.
How I didn't get $3500 Facebook Bug Bounty but got 25GB free storage on Box.net
Adrian Lamo on Bradley Manning: 'I knew my actions might cost him his life'
I've been using CurveCP for over a year privately and love it. I'll probably expand to production, starting with CurveHTTP, with the next release of NaCl. Not sure if that makes me the chicken or the egg.
I strongly, strongly disagree with the idea that you should only build products where you're the end user.

I as well. Most software sucks because the people building it aren't motivated. Building for oneself is one source of motivation, but it's myopic to assume that it's the only source of motivation that works.
I think one good thing to come out of this is that the public worldview of banking and finance, at least from the perspective of young adults, is that bankers are greedy, lying, POS.

I mean, I can't imagine being in finance and bragging about it to other types of people. Every article related to this stuff always has one line, and I quote:

"Should more bankers be in prison?"

Hopefully this will sort itself out in 20 years, but I'm curious if any of you think bankers SHOULDN'T have more liability when it comes to unlawful, or even legally gray practices. I mean, as tech people, don't we all mostly adhere to a code of ethics?
"As you are probably aware, this web site was recently hacked into illegally numerous times by a terrorist group."

Wow, really? If this guy turns out to be guilty of possession, this is a glaring example of how meaningless the term "terrorist" has become in the USA.
Who is proposing massive stimulus for Greece? Obviously they can't do it themselves because their credit rating is shot and they don't have the resources to do it without borrowing hugely. That doesn't mean their economy could not have been helped by stimulus, just that it wasn't feasible. It also certainly doesn't mean that austerity was the answer.

You're correct about inflation but unfortunately their in the Euro so they either have to leave it or suffer a very long and painful internal deflation.
The unsavory advertising from the fringe
I'm curious who KnightSec is. This seems to be their first attack and they are using this name quite liberally.

I'm curious if they'll turn into another LuzSec.
It does not encourage you to do more of it when it is solely an obligation. I think eating is a bad example because people eat for pleasure, whereas people only write for utility. People rarely if ever write simply because they enjoy writing. They write to convey or record information, If you remove the utilitarian obligation from writing, and make it solely an exercise in enjoyment, you have to disassociate the obligatory aspect of writing, as well as the functional result. I don't know about you, but I don't really see people transcribing the alphabet 1000 in a notebook for pleasure (or other such trivial applications of writing). When people write, they do it because they have to achieve some end. This is different from fine dining, where there is no end. You don't eat because you need nutrion, but because the meal brings pleasure.

My second assertion was not dismissing the pleasure found in using an expensive pen and feeling good, but merely an explanation of why I think it's silly. If one cares about having profligate writing instruments, more power to them. I, however, just want something that works well. In a pen, that is usually determined by the insert, which is why a $60 shell isn't important.
The paper also looks at taxation in a crisis, and has this interesting part:

"For example, based on U.S. data, Romer and Romer (2010) find that, in response to a tax increase, GDP, investment and consumption all decline, but investment growth falls by about four times more than consumption growth does."

The reference is to this paper:
http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~dromer/papers/RomerandRomerAERJun...
That is part of it, but I think there's another piece to the puzzle.

The private sector in general is in crisis because the banks won't lend. They won't do that because of the problems on their financial sheets - they know they hold toxic assets and they know everyone else does, so they cannot trust anyone to pay off their debt, including other banks. This means that private investment has decreased severely, which puts enormous downward pressure on the economy.

Since the private sector won't invest, the only source of investment big enough to fill the hole (which might be as big as $8 trillion), is government. Austerity is a problem because it limits the governments ability to invest, which means that you have a shrinking economy trying to make up ground, which is a losing battle, especially for the poor as you point out, since they do not have the assets to absorb the economic hit.

I should say none of this is my opinion, I'm merely summarizing Krugman, Stiglitz, and Baker, who are the three economists whose work I've followed on the matter.
What is amazing is that the adults in this whole tragedy are acting irresponsible and like kids. These adults also hold position of power like police officers and prosecutors.
The problems aren't identical. They may appear so because some of the symptoms are the same, but the root causes in Ireland, for instance, are far different than in Greece.

Spain is closer to Ireland in terms of housing market effects on economic downturn, but ultimately each economy functions on a different system, so it's not entirely wrong to attribute economic problems to separate causes. There is some overlap, of course, but it's definitely not identical.
I don't think the four are all the same, although there are obviously some common elements. Chief among them the easy money from the center during the boom years. But I think Greece's inefficiencies and mismanagement made a bad problem worse.
Virgin Galactic: Commercial trips to space by 2014
Okcupidgirl.py - TCP server that accepts connection and never replies
They need to perform better oversight to their marketing departments!
How is the assumption behind your statement any less offensive? You're assuming that because there isn't "diversity" the organizers must be racist or biased.

Give it a rest.
If somebody had broken the lock on his mailbox and read his letters instead of his email, would that have been considered terrorism?

The word has become meaningless, but they can get away with using it when it's paired with something people don't understand (They HACKED my email!). Hopefully once these things become more understood, more people will realise how silly it is deeming this as terrorism.
I have to say, I disagree a bit. The author seems to throw a fit at the organizer and says "really? you couldnt find any qualified (insert non white male description here)?" It is a complete strawman. The organizer thought "hey let me invite the best people in the field, who are all very qualified" and the author assigned him the mindset of "I only want white males". This is what they came up with. If they sprinkle in a few women and minorities to appease people like the author, it is vastly more offensive imo.
Politically viable, sure – but it’s also the wrong way to go. It’s not sustainable since it won’t lead to forward progress. It only delays the catastrophe, while at the same time options do exist (as outlined in your first paragraph) – but the European leadership cowardly refuses to fight for them.

Making something that is not politically viable is a politician’s job – and they refuse to do it.
"Stuart says authorities specifically told him that they would not use the backdoor themselves but that he would be expected to access the servers of online casinos and others who used his software overseas in order to retrieve the information of gamblers and bookmakers on their behalf."

Big Brother can't even be bothered to do the legwork any longer.
You used the term "guys"! That's blatant cissexism! You should reflect on your life and check your privilege. Your existence offends me.

(parody, in case anyone is wondering...)
I agree with your overall point, but public defenders get paid low to mid five figures. In fact, many lawyers do not make six figures. The median attorney salary in most areas is much lower than you'd think.
Thank you; this helped clarify things quite a bit.
* I would explicitly not be satisfied with a process that resulted in 100% male speakers. I would have stopped once we’d reached, say, 17 male out of 22 possible speakers (being pretty conservative, I think) and insisted that the remaining five (a cool 22% female representation) would have to be women.
*

Nobody is saying "Nominate less qualified speakers" but what this seems to be saying essentially is "Nominate women because they are women". And nobody is saying Don't overlook qualified speakers who happen to be brown, beige, female, and/or fifty years old they're saying look at your speaker lineup and balance it out based on race/gender and age. They're advocating a purely aesthetic exercise which unfortunately just further stigmatizes those it's trying to help (i.e. "She's here because they just needed some women to balance out the lineup").
I don't believe you.

Quite sincerely. I don't believe you.
No one cares what color or age you are raganwald. That's the entire point. If you identify yourself by your skin color, then you are in fact racist.
would you like facebook if it looked like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud96cWPBTws
> The Greek crisis, more than anything, is the result of massive tax evasion.

[Greek/US dual citizen here]

Having lived in Greece for upwards of a decade, during the particularly transitional time from ~1988-2004, this is not in line with my experience. Hear me out before writing me off as an apologist :)

Greece has a large problem with collecting the taxes they claim citizens owe but not a large problem with collecting a large fraction of GDP. According to the World Bank, they are right in line with Sweden and France (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS). These numbers are corroborated by the OECD (PDF warning http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/41498733.pdf). [Edit: I wrote Sweden and France when I meant to write Spain and France; I apologize for the error but I have left it lest someone think I am trying to whitewash :-)]

Greece has collected plenty of money; we overspent, and we spent stupidly i.e. in ways that obtained either votes or kickbacks, and not in ways that improved the economy or the life of the common person. As just one example, look at the paltry investment of the Greek government in its only competitive advantage, the tourism business. The cast and crew of "Mamma Mia" did a better job promoting tourism in Greece than any Ministry of Tourism effort. Spain, Italy, and Turkey are eating our lunch.

We also got used to almost five decades of "free" foreign money through the Marshall plan, post-communist hysteria leading to US military aid and military bases, EEC/EU growth funds, and having our debt priced as if it were of German quality.

In my opinion, the tax evasion is a serious social justice problem, but it is not a serious budgetary problem. The bulk of Greece's public budget is supplied by ordinary people making ordinary incomes, and it is a travesty that the wealthiest manage to dodge contributing proportionately. But that does not mean the government does not have enough money to do a good job.

I would love to believe that the government has failed due to being starved of resources; at least then a solution like taking on more debt would be plausible. With the situation as it stands, I can only respond with our poet laureate Seferis' exasperated lament, "Everywhere I go, Greece wounds me".
Art0030 – The Effect of Culture and Environment on Entrepreneurship
It encourages you to shift from other modes of recording information.

Taking pleasure in writing using a pen presumably moves you away from taking notes on your laptop, tablet or mobile phone. Thus it does encourage you to write more, even though in aggregate you are probably storing the same amount of information.
I dont think Krugman's analyses are foregone conclusions, as Greg Mankiw very reasonably proves here:

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-krugman-puzzler.htm...
How to disable Mac OS X Dashboard
For me, Dashboard is one of the worst features of Mac OS X. If Apple were to release it today, there would be all kinds of comments on how they are losing it and that it's just not the same since Steve left. But, it can be removed.
Monte Carlo Tree Search applied to Tic-Tac-Toe
It makes me extremely sad - and somewhat angry - that a lot of people just
associate Tor with CP and criminals. Tor enabled and helped carry out fucking revolutions.
Hundreds, if not thousands of (not only) chinese dissidents use it to
communicate safely. It protects lives. Tor is a blessing upon humanity, and
a big, fat, thorn in the side of every oppressive government on this planet.

The fact that some individuals use Tor for accessing child pornography is sad,
but that constitutes a miniscule amount of its entire traffic. Stop looking
at the few bad apples and look at the big picture.

Oh, and if you're at it, watch Jacob and Roger's talk at the 29c3 as soon as it
is available. They explained this awesome piece of software a bit more in
detail there, amongst all the other amazing projects related to the Tor
Project.
John Seely Brown on MOOCs and disruption in the higher education industry
Slight nitpick - David Corn, the DC Bureau Chief broke the 47% video.

But yeah, Kevin Drum does great work.

> And here's a striking critique of the Freakonomics abortion/crime theory, which I suppose most people here have heard of:

I have not heard of this! Thank you for sharing!
So you'e saying this approach wouldn't have worked? Too bad a larger country didn't try. You're also neglecting the fact that, while Iceland is unique, they had unique challenges that other nations wouldn't, like importing a lot of stuff.

I'd like to see some explanation as to why this wouldn't work with a larger nation and not simply, because.
Alligator Eggs: a game that teaches untyped lambda calculus
Consumer electronics are? I guess agriculture, civil engineering, manufacturing, law, etc can now be free to sexy it up when they are less important and have less attention in media echo chambers dedicated to those areas.
Ask PG: Why don’t you open source HN?
I hope it didn’t get asked before, I couldn’t find anything.

There was a question recently, about why you don’t improve the HTML of HN, where you said "When the HTML is the most important thing to work on."(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4927231)

I agree that the markup is relatively unimportant compared to features that I think could really improve the functionality and quality of the site, and I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself.

But between the lines I interpreted that that list might be way longer, than the time that is available to you, allows you to work on it.

So why don’t you open source HN? I get that with a project that is important to someone, it’s hard to give away control. But you can still be the project lead, you could still have the last call and I feel to open up the project will lead to great feature discussions and ultimately a better hn.

Have you ever considered open sourcing it? And what’s the thought process on your decision?
First Round Capital's "people" section always makes me think of this exactly. Note the people, then note the job titles. This might be the most blatant trying to look like you're minority friendly thing possible, short of maybe pasting a black face on a white partner.

Pic:
http://cl.ly/image/0X0r0D090l0X
Why not just use Google Apps/FastMail/any other IMAP provider?
Command line driven media-sharing site
The World's Most Active Twitter City? You Won't Guess It [Jakarta]
Online poker, sure. Any sort of electronic gaming that can be done solo is going to become an issue. But poker in a bar with other people? You're limited by how much cash you can carry with you, not by your credit limit, and by how many people in the immediate area want to play with you.

I'm sure some people still manage to get a dangerous addiction to 'meatspace' poker in bars, but I am going to guess the vast majority of people who would play poker in bars are doing it mostly socially.
Funny, looks like britruby will be held in spirit after all.
Was it really necessary to link through Facebook?

http://gizmodo.com/5972973/the-titanic-aeroscraft-is-finishe...
You're arguing against a straw man. The only one size fits all ills argument actually being widely pursued is tax cuts.

The only thing that would probably help Greece is massive debt foregiveness (bankruptcy if applied to individuals or companies) which isn't a "stimulus" so much as a gift. Again if it worked like a regular bankruptcy they'd agree to pay off part of their debt on a plan, but be forgiven a bunch of it, and their credit would suck for many years to follow.
WRT point 3: Xcode will now allow dot-syntax access to non-property getter methods, however its arguably clearer to use dot syntax only for properties since they're declared and documented separately from old-style getter methods.

There's also a slippery slope argument, since something like myMutableArray.removeAllObjects will compile (albeit with a warning).
Sorry for taking you slightly out of context:

"The US is not comparable to any EZ country. We have our own currency"

Qualitatively, I would see no difference between the US monetizing debt (and devaluing the value thereof) or something like Greece switching to a new currency which they can print (and devaluing the value thereof). Of course, the amount of devaluation (or default) Greece has to do is much greater. But in either case, some debtors are getting stiffed

Strictly, Greece has no money to pay back debtors, let alone fulfill their social obligations. But even the US obligations: debt + social security + medicare/medicaid etc. are now at an unsustainable level.
The REM Fallback with Sass or LESS
For me, Dashboard is one of the worst features of Mac OS X. If Apple were to release it today, there would be all kinds of comments on how they are losing it and that it's just not the same since Steve left. But, it can be removed.
Love the design but its missing a key section... The ads... Without which Facebook would not even consider something like this
I posted this comment below, but I wanted it to respond to yours as well. Which would you feel less offended by:

A group of white males that were picked soley based on their ability and nothing else.

Orrrr....Something like this: http://cl.ly/image/0X0r0D090l0X, recruit a minority female, give her a lower job title and lump her in with the white males to look diversity friendly. Yay!
Why Even Entrepreneurs Should Turn Off Their Email During Family Time
"Is anybody really addicted to sitting in a bar and playing poker until they run broke?"

Yes. Play in some cardrooms for any length of time and you'll see it.