skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt they were "just following orders".

Nobody selects into public legal work for the money.

They would have been doing what they think is the right thing to do: prosecute suspects aggressively.

That you have a different criteria for what cases to prosecute doesn't make them evil.
Not the place for this argument.
Biggest military computer hack of all time
There's probably some copyright/ip crime which does have victims, but it's usually civil victims, and in this case, I don't think even that.

(If you hacked in or bribed an employee and a trade secret and started making something in competition after someone spent 30 years researching, there's probably a civil case there)
No they're not. Checkboxes are fine for boolean on/offs. But from the OP: "often the choice is not between turning a specific feature on or off, but between two different view, modes or whatever."

Here i think the Quija sliders really are a smart, intuitive solution
Whenever your depression (or anything similar) symptoms are relieved and another person is helping you, that is enough to get you at least 'just a bit' further away from suicide. And, really, this cannot be easily accounted for.

The problem with human interactions and ease of anxiety is that you will probably never be able to get a proper and useful metric.

I'd say most depressive people would not fill a form after calling any help hotline.
Even if the assumption were wrong in this particular case, it is a worthwhile discussion to have. Intelligent people doing something relatively harmless being threatened with the possibility of decades in prison means something is very wrong.
My condolences to everyone who knew Aaron. This is really sad.
Concerning the API: (On page https://www.dextrorobotics.com/api)

* The documentation is pretty weak.

* I am not sure what a classID is, and I don't see any links to where the numbers come from.

* The example request is posting to an insecure http address, but the secret api key is required?

* The example request doesn't fit on one line? It took me a while to see it was in the "GET / HTTP/1.1" style.

* How do errors work? Having clearly specified error responses would be really useful.

If you trying to sell me on your API, show it to me.
Ya, not counting any legacy systems, or poorly tested feature...
Ask HN: Can you set up Semi-Conductor manufacturing plant? Investment & Risks.
Can any one guide on these parameters Investment, Risks and Opportunities?
I think it may be counter-productive to mention this, because it is difficult to prove. It is trivial to show that there are dead-weight costs incurred when computer systems need to deal with DST across political boundaries. Those costs alone should be sufficient to convince anyone to abandon DST (or just as well, adopt it full-time, as Russia recently did). The fact that "normal" people do not know these costs exist is, I think, the main reason they are sympathetic to emotional arguments such as "DST will save children's lives on Halloween" or equally your "DST kills drivers once or twice a year."
There is a difference between language codes and country codes. "ja" is the language code for japanese (ISO 639-1), "jp" is the country code for japan (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2).
Aaron Swartz: What Happens in The Dark Knight
Different formatted, cached version: http://thequeue.org/cr?id=https%3A%2F%2Faaronsw.jottit.com%2...
As odd as it sounds, I'm happy with the status quo. Frequently miserable, but content with that misery, as I've learned to use it productively.

My madness is both my undoing, and my doing. I would not have quit a highly paid job to strike out on my own and grow a successful business, were I not terminally malcontent. I would not strive as I do to improve both my lot and that of others, were it not for the fact that I always have a gnawing sense of "this could be better".

Either way, don't worry for my sake - while I may ideate suicide, I also ideate being an old man with crazy eyebrows. I don't think I'd class myself as clinically depressed, rather overly empathic and terminally frustrated at the human condition.

Glad you found the help you needed, and that it works for you.
> The real issue here I would say is that you seem to have worked yourself up into a bit of a soul-saving frenzy,

It's graceless of me. Oh noes, I might seem like a wanker who wants to help people.

> but your efforts are misplaced and frankly not appreciated.

By you.

> I would suggest you shift your efforts to a forum where people are actually starkly discussing hopelessness and self-destruction, rather than just briefly mentioning completely normal moments of weakness, and might even appreciate your help.

Honestly?

I'm not strong enough to do that. I'm just not. Soul-saving frenzies are as good as it gets for me.
I hope this comes up in Congress. The United States never should have been a party to this -- it should have been a civil issue between JSTOR, MIT, and Aaron. (or criminal misdemeanor trespassing if they really wanted that.)

Carmen M. Ortiz, US Attorney, should be called before Congress to account for this.
> They guy actively broke many laws over a long period of time. The government is neither acting without reason nor intimidating someone for lawful behavior.

I am arguing a massively disproportionate response occurred. Not that he was innocent, or that he deserved no punishment at all.

> Comparing this to beating a child? Seriously?

Decades of prison and 13 felony charges were in play. A man is dead. All for what? A little trespassing, a fake email, and a bunch of downloads? It is going to take more than your mock shock to convince me the comparison is anything other than generous. I am holding back here.
I didn't notice this "put thinkers to sleep" side-effect you're talking about.
> Nobody is directly responsible for Swartz's suicide but Swartz.

Numerous courts around the world have put responsibility on third parties pressuring victims into suicide. Cult gurus pressuring people into (possibly mass) suicides, companies and managers for their employees suicides, and individuals pushing their own parents to commit suicide for will benefits.
Do quit it with the high and mighty attitude. I've made it very clear I'm not attempting to slander anybody, just clearing up a misconception. When you allow misinformation it will spread, and that shouldn't be acceptable.
Yes, it was Carmen M. Ortiz.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/meetattorney.html
Carmen M. Ortiz, US Attorney

http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/meetattorney.html
I asked this (more or less) a few months ago, and apparently a fair amount of the world's online banking websites still use Java.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4454036
Wow, thanks for that. I knew about ISO 3166 but not 639 (and somehow just assumed Japanese would match Japan). This leads to the rather surprising result that TLDs use .jp for Japan yet subdomains use .ja for Japanese, e.g. ja.example.co.jp. I imagine most laypeople would not well understand the distinction and think "Oh why can't those IT people ever make things easy?"

Well, never mind anyway, because it's google.co.jp, but google.com.sg. IT people really are annoying! ;-)
Prosecutors could focus on trying to imprison some real criminals rather than bullying someone who is making positive contributions to society for doing something relatively harmless.
> That you have a different criteria for what cases to prosecute doesn't make them evil.

You're about 1/10th of a mm away from Godwinning this thread so I'll let it lie, it isn't worth it to me to continue this line.

Let's just agree to disagree. You're a good man and we simply will not see eye to eye on this one.
R.I.P. Aaron! We miss you!
I doubt that requests are that evenly distributed on a second by second basis so peak response rates might be a few times that for some seconds.
Thanks.

I can definitely relate to some of this. Depression so profoundly altered the course of my life that I basically can't imagine what would have happened without it. Some of those consequences are really good and they make me happy.

I wish you every good fortune.
we need to start a whitehouse petition on looking into DOJ abuse..
If anyone is still in doubt about how the DOJ impacted Aaron's life, it may be interesting to have a look at his last published blog post (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk, discussion on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047421).

Aaron makes a parallel between the Batman movie and his own struggles, highlighting the corruption of the system and how the Joker was actually the only "sane" person in an insane world. Sadly, he decided to pursue the same path as Heath Ledger.
Independent anonymous opinion poll for Indian IT professionals
That is very true and something that I hadn't given thought to. Still, consider how much greater the confusion would be if, for example, you had to remember to get up at midnight, eat lunch at 5am, go to bed at 4pm and so on.
The other fucked up thing about this is that if he'd done this at Stanford, Berkeley, or anywhere else in the 9th Circuit (which is the best circuit!), or the 4th circuit, he wouldn't have been charged under CFAA. It's only the backward backwaters of the 5th, 7th, and 11th who would charge under CFAA. He was in the 1st, which hadn't yet ruled. SCOTUS would have been very likely to side with the 9th, since the 9th is the best in general, and was correct in this case.

So, yet another reason to be angry -- this case was perfect for removing ToS violations from CFAA.
That's a very mean thing to say and not at all appropriate in this thread.
Rant inspired by seeing her for the 5th time this week:

It's like every time I hear about Grace Hopper, it's got to do with a piece of wire. Or tube. And any comments on it are usually strangely excited, almost awestruck. What's up, people? She did some other stuff too. Like, no big deal back then, writing a god damn compiler.

It's like people treat her like a dancing bear. Look, woman! Look, uniform! Look, she said "nano"! Take a step back and a deep breath. Chill out.

"Bike shed" comes to mind, in a weird way.
I don't think we will.
Oh, no you do not understand at all. Depression cannot be dealt with just with an 'ordinary and structured life': it is an illness. It has existed always.

The fact that there are specialists means that today, we have accepted is as what it its: a disease whose symptoms, professionals can, at least, try to decrease or even eliminate.

Do not mistake 'tiredness', 'a season of bad temper', 'the normal stress during a crisis' with a real permanent disorder. Because you may make more harm than good.

Really.
.

This guy was definitely making a positive impact in the world.
It looks like Oracle's failure to properly patch a security hole discovered in August led to the current mess.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/11/latest-java-vulnera...
Is there something wrong with the content negotiation header "Accept-Language"? My understanding was most browsers set it to the system language?

HTTP provides a mechanism, why does nobody use it?
I think Outlook does this already?
On the interntet nobody knows you are a human. No need to die for that. Also, there is a huge variety of human communities. Perhaps check Jared Diamond, I think his latest book describes tribes in New Guinea.
This is a great reply. "On the fly" is definitely my experience too. Needing to do something. Doing things slowly, inefficiently, with googling until you find or get told the more efficient way of doing things.

Also, talking with/demanding explanations/debating with geekier than thou friends has been really helpful with the bigger concepts.
> What I was trying to say above is that a prosecutor's goal is to prosecute as many cases as fully as possible. They do not consider whether it is meritorious to pursue a case according to some outside moral standard, that's not their job.

I have no idea what the situation is in the US. But here in England that's just not true.

The CPS (Crown Prosecution Service)'s job is not to bring all the prosecutions that it believes it can win. It's to bring all prosecutions that it believes it can win that it's in the public interest to be brought. (http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/code_for_crown_prosecutor...)

The result is that CPS discretion is an important part of the system. And has the side-effect that the legislature has less incentive to narrow the scope of offences, since they believe (rightly or wrongly) they can rely on the CPS to not bring prosecutions where it wouldn't make sense to do so.

(Hence e.g. there's little pressure to amend the Sexual Offences Act with US-style 'romeo and juliet' laws to protect teenage couples who are technically both sexually assaulting each other, since the CPS guidelines (http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/rape_and_sexual_offences/...) in practice have the same effect).

Whether this system is better or worse than one where the prosecutor doesn't use discretion, but offences are defined more strictly, is an interesting discussion.
PDF is coming! And thanks for linking to catonmat, that stuff gets into some serious yummy detail.
CREATING WEALTH THROUGH HEALTH
Office hours are not consistent in local time either - there are cultural variations. If you want to know what (UTC) times the Chinese guy will be in his office, you need to ask him, not try to predict using offsets from UTC.
What do you want to achive in 2013? Record your pledge...
If you don't mention anything about the compensation package -- salary range, equity, benefits, etc. -- I have no idea whether it's even worth my while sending you an e-mail.
Not at all, because we will always have to endure the costs of having a crappy time zone based time system, especially when we start moving into space, those time systems become absurdly antiquated.

The idea of changing time to match the sun is just completely obsolete. If every country just agreed to use UTC, besides some errant systems not easily recognized as depending on time zone based timekeeping, we could probably all be "over" the switch in a week, just like it takes a week for DST clock switchers to adjust to an hourly time change. I would propose that changing by more than an hour for various parts of the world won't have a larger effect than changing hours twice a year for DST, because the adjustment effect isn't because of the severity of the time change but because the change happened at all.
ARE YOU %100 SURE that he committed suicide????? Wnat is that?
And 24 hours once you are above/below the Arctic/Antarctic circles.
It's called activism. Sometimes bad laws must be resisted, by breaking them deliberately.

The best among us do it in public, under their own names, daring the state to make good on their threats.

The law is not a unitary piece. Were Aaron's case to proceed to its natural conclusion, the courts might have found that higher principles override the civil agreements that he was charged with breaking.

And even when the courts are of no avail - when the basic procedures and principles of the state are corrupt - then it is up to activists to fight that corruption, and one way is through the theatre of breaking the law in public.
I just communicate with people across time zones in UTC already. And once I do it, a lot of my colleagues start doing it too, because it makes sense.
I think Korea (I'm assuming RoK) has less to fear from Japan than from DPRK. The presence of US troops in both RoK and Japan pretty much prevents any kind of escalation of violence (if there is any to begin with). Besides, Japan's constitution explicitly forbids it from declaring war or maintaining a large offensive military[1].

After looking back to what happened from military expansion of Japanese imperialism back in WWII,

Except that Japan is now a democracy instead of a military-governed totalitarian state

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_9_of_the_Japanese_Const...
You seem pretty upset. I think you should try and relax. Take a break from the computer. Go get some fresh air. I'm sorry if I pushed your buttons but I do think you are over-reacting. Nobody on Hackernews is going to hurt themselves any time soon, okay?
That was awfully a lot like hearing my parents say to me "you don't need the Brickbeard's Bounty LEGO set, you already have the Castaway's Raft, son".
You still have to ask for times they are available. That never changes. With UTC as the global time standard, you don't have to try to figure out time offsets. You just say "I'm available from 8 to 12" and they say "I'm available 5 to 9" and you make the call at 8. The alternative is "I'm available 3 - 7 London time", the other guy is available 12 - 4 Pacific Time, and you have to get out a calculator to figure out what those times actually are in relation to one another.
Rails vulnerabilities are not Rails'
It's an essential part of the rule of law that prosecutors prosecute the law as it is, not as they, or we, wish it should be. They aren't the ones to blame for this. To whatever extent they are, we all are.
Let's black bar HN
Even though he may not be as notable as some of the others, Aaron Swartz's legacy is a very big part of HN in every way.
The most effective immediate suicide prevention available is a surprising one. It's Ketamine. It takes effect very rapidly and the anti-depressant effects persist for months from a single dose. It's a wonder how SSRI's are in wide use when there are far more effective treatments which have been around since the 60's. Marketing and business are to blame for that, I suppose.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/251220.php

There are also some novel NMDA antagonists (same mechanism as Ketamine) in the works, which come with less perception alterations, the names of which escape me, which will change things for the better for a lot of people.
Classically speaking, it's hard to get linear scaling for a large number of cores. Eg, on a small, 128 core machine, one algorithm I did recently gives maximum throughput with 15 cores, and that only gives a 10x speedup. To make effective use of all 128 cores I would have to pay a lot more attention to how the data flow maps to the architecture. That's hard. For example, one of the older pieces of hardware used a ring-based topology, which was more appropriate for a force decomposition, while another network architecture made a spatial decomposition easier. And on that old ring-based topology system, the previous developers could program the network chip to handle I/O while the CPU was doing the dynamics, in order to eek out even more performance.

In general, if you scale by more than one or two orders of magnitude then you're going to run into new, unexpected problems.

In one project I worked on, the code was fast on all of the test sets, but when scaled up to the entire data set it was unexpectedly slow. We traced that down to a logger which we hadn't realized was enabled. In your code you might find that a minor piece of code used order n-squared time but because of data partitioning, it has minimal impact.

Or you might find that you have a barrier, where everything is supposed to be synchronized. (Eg, once every 1,000 time steps you rebalance the system load.) A few stragglers might not affect small system sizes, but cause 50% slowdowns with large numbers of CPUs. You might even have to rewrite the code to remove the barrier and come up with another way to do dynamic load balancing.

Bram Cohen, in his Stanford EE380/2005 talk on BitTorrent (linked from http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/11025.html?nojs=1 , at 8:45) mentioned how TCP's checksum isn't good enough once you start swapping terabytes of data over the Internet, so BitTorrent has to work around that.

On the topic of flakiness, Google's own Big Table/MapReduce, etc. is designed to be able to handle machine faults, which can happen with large numbers of cores. How well does your code handle those sorts of rare failures?

In another project I worked on, there was a bug in the code. It didn't conserve energy as well as we thought it should. That was eventually tracked down to a trigonometry error where we didn't compute one of the energy terms correctly when the angle was exactly 0.0. This doesn't happen that frequently, which is why we only saw it with large simulations run for a long time.
You are just moving complexity though, and transitioning to UTC globally eliminates broad classes of unneeded communication overhead. Right now, while you can assume at 11:30 AM public transportation is available, you have to look up what actual time zone wherever you are going is in and do math to figure out when that is for you. If everything were UTC, you would just look up the average operating hours of the day in whatever region you were looking at, and would just get a number like "This city operates from 4:00 to 16:00" or from 12:00 to 24:00."

I'm also going to argue that we are rapidly adapting our schedules to more broadly match regions around us rather than just following the sun. Business hours and school hours have been shifting later in the day in the US, and I have a feeling a large part of that is due to more constant contact with Europe being hours ahead. The majority of people don't know or feel the subtle tug of the global community towards a unified activity time block, but I think it is happening.
In the actual UK, the "public interest" is the decider of whether the state prosecutes when it has enough evidence. The way you phrase it, you make it sound like the only criterion is likelyhood of conviction (i.e. strength of evidence).
The problem is that something like time standards requires collective initiatives to move towards them, because in all honestly 95% of people don't even know what UTC is. It is in the same class as an American (like myself) who does measurements in the metric system and pisses everyone else off because I don't use a system of measurements based off the length of a kings foot.
There's no space or page down on my tablet, and i do most of my web reading on a tablet.
Here here. Charities that work with people struggling with suicide and mental health problems consistently ask the media to not attribute a suicide to one particular cause.

Often things are more complicated than that.
Those apps and google docs are all so waste of time!
You should use http://www.trello.com it has also apps for ios and android but normally runs in locked chrome tab.
Trello is like power boosting ur todo when u have many projects and goals.
I do most of my reading on a tablet, how do i use the hotkeys?
That is only for the transitional period. What you would want to do is have a point in time where everyone internationally switches their date, hour, and second to match UTC at once. It might take a week for people to adjust, but really after that everything is so much smoother. I don't see it making much sense to try to use local time zones and UTC in tandem, which is the main reason it isn't catching on now, even though it makes more sense.
May be you want to direct this to UserVoice support. How does this belong here? Just curious as to why this was posted on HN in the first place.