skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps I've gone soft-European after living in Denmark for a bit now, but putting people in jail for double-digit numbers of years as the reduced sentences for nonviolent crimes seems bizarrely harsh. IIRC, studies don't find that particularly long sentences really increase the deterrent effect, either.
Robert Morris created the first worm on the Internet and was the first person prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was convicted and sentenced to probation. He's now a tenured MIT professor and was a co-founder of Y Combinator.

For someone of Aaron's talent and reputation there is no reason that he could not have gotten past a felony conviction and lived a successful life.

I can only interpret Lessig's post:

"...the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept..."

I don't know what the government actually offered, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that Aaron would have been able to get a deal with a relatively light sentence, maybe just probation. It sounds from Lessig's post like his hangup was that he wasn't willing to accept a felony conviction. I hope that's not the case because even with a felony record he most likely would have lived a long and successful life.
Another U.S. Attorney out of control. Eric Holder needs to have a serious come to constitutionality talk with all the U.S. attorneys, after he gets rid of this one.
I don't know how much more simply to state this:

As a consequence of prosecutorial "discretion" exercised during the jim crow days of the segregated South, federal prosecutors do not have discretion about which laws to prosecute. Once they have been presented a case, they are required to prosecute if the presentation of evidence is sufficient to suggest that a crime has been committed.

Only upper management of the DOJ (i.e., above Ms. Ortiz) or the president can issue orders not to enforce certain laws.

Thus, this does excuse Ms. Ortiz. She's just doing her job. If you don't like that, change the scope of her job by getting her superiors to end enforcement of the laws at issue.
I like Viktor Frankl's solution to this apparent conundrum: the purpose of life is to find a purpose.

If you haven't read his book, I would highly suggest it. It's called "Man's search for meaning". He was a holocaust survivor, suffering through perhaps the most pointless of tortures, and he developed a philosophy that not only brought him through the situation, but has touched millions of lives sense then. I've never known a prominent motivational speaker/life coach/happiness expert who hasn't read this book.

If life doesn't seem to have a purpose, it's because you haven't created one.
Flash is why I disabled plugins.
"MIT sold out Drink or Die, too"

What did they do?
Is reddit censoring posts or something? I don't understand why I don't see a single post about Aaron on my front page.
By all means let us know what we can do to keep life interesting!
Do you want them shut down or something? They can't legally do that. They've taken measures to try and get more articles out there in recent years for free:

- Alumni are soon going to be able to freely access all articles.

- Registered researches can access all articles for free.

- Anyone can now read three articles every two weeks for free.

Doing what you say would immediately shut down JSTOR and they couldn't continue to process new articles, provide full-text search and so on.
Following your hypothesis, it's impossible to have a rational conversation about anything. Look at solipsism for goodness sake. We can't even know that anything outside our own mind really exists.

If someone chooses to define a purpose for their life, then can be perfectly rational in doing so. Inasmuch as we accept that there is a reality (which we can't definitely prove btw), we can accept any number of truths based on our experience in that reality.
What exactly would Aaron have done in North Korea if he chose to seek asylum there?
Can anyone find details about how he suicided?
He might be faking is own death..
Obligatory: https://supporters.eff.org/donate
"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."

Tax dollars in every country I know of go to pay professors and researchers salaries ie. the contributors to to all these journals, so why all the articles aren't fully available public access has never been clear to me. Frankly, it makes me angry to be double ripped by a system where a few big players benefit and progress and the furtherment of human knowledge are impeeded. The spirit behind fighting against this kind of thing is one of the reasons why we're mourning Aaron so much.
Aaron Swartz explains his first public suicide note, written six years ago.
>I think it's highly detestable that someone of his passion and skill gets less followers than an early-cut-contestant from American Idol.

Every week reddit gives me the latest talking point jerks like Kim Dotcom or Ron/Rand Paul, yet its own guy was ignored by it until his death. PR is everything now. Social media is reputation media. Working on your image is just as important as your work, which sounds like something out of The Prince, but its truer in the age of instant communication. Christ, what a sorry world we live in where our actions are meaningless and we are nothing without good PR.
A bootstrapped start up is one that starts small and without taking funding works its way up to profitability. If your product is near launch get it launched and get selling it to customers. If that works then talk to VCs if you think the funding will help take you to the next level or just recycle the profits to grow organically.
The United States are broken beyond repair, this is just the beginning of the shitstorm of corruption that has been building up since the end of the 19th century.
Ask HN: No reply to job application. What should I do?
Hi HN. I'd like your advice please.

I recently graduated and am currently looking for a job. There's a certain large software corporation I would be interested in working for. I applied through their recruiting website, and additionally, a friend of mine handed my resume to a company recruiter. I got an automated "We got your stuff. Thanks." email a few weeks ago, but I have not heard back from them since. Is there a polite way to inquire about the status of my application? I am fairly interested in this company, and I would really like to hear an answer one way or the other.
Common JavaScript Gotchas
PHP was my first programming language, and my initial exposure to JavaScript was through libraries like jQuery. There were things about JavaScript that always seemed to trip me up in the beginning due to how they worked differently than PHP. Heck there are still some things today that are confusing. I want to share some of the things that I struggled when I started working with JavaScript. I am going to cover the global namespace, this, knowing the difference between ECMAScript 3 and ECMAScript 5, asynchronous operations, prototypes, and simple JavaScript inheritance.
Seriously. The use of the word "returned" reeks of the same technological backwardness that has hobbled the music industry. Just as it is nonsensical to say that copying files constitutes "stealing", it is nonsensical to say that one can "return" copied files. You can delete them, and that's about it.

However, I don't think JSTOR is technologically backwards, but their use of that word reveals a very measured, legalistic attitude. You can tell they are being very careful to use a vocabulary that reflects their legal interests.
Gnutella Pioneer Gene Kan Dies at 25 (2002)
The same fate !?

RIP guys :(
Learning the true value of content from Aaron Swartz
This is a massive and largely untrue generalization.
I think it's pretty clear toward that the "off" text paired with the red signifies the current state. Likewise hen turned on.

The reason I've chosen this is that the actual button is changing its state (e.g. other toggles merely slide a box left or right with no color or label updates). This ultimately reflects the design principle of giving the user feedback. Clicking the toggle noticeably shows a change in state.

There's also some affordance in the design because of the coloring. This isn't perfect (as acknowledged in the comment about color blindness below), but it solves enough of the problem to be obvious. No interface is 100% perfect for every user, every test case, or extreme.
> ommageo.com

Doesn't work on an iPad as far as I can tell and can't even tell what it does.
They have to be alive.
It may have been a big case to Aaron, but compared to their normal cases, it was a relative vacation for the prosecutors working on it.

This makes it even sadder then.
Using "Password reset email addresses" for increased protection
Dang. I meant to say that it was loser-style thinking.

Nobody has ever won against Washington, D.C. by scoring a symbolic personal victory against a few minions. Even if you are like McVeigh and willing to accept a certain degree of collateral damage, it has no effect. It turns out that blowing up a Federal building is the political equivalent of putting itching powder in Uncle Sam's shorts.

So if that is the case, sending an outspoken email is a pre-defeated strategy. It is the action of someone who lost before they started, a loser.
>That life has no purpose effectively means that there is freedom. It is very scary, but we have to choose the purpose for ourselves.

I think that this is precisely what drives many people to insanity. We are not brought up to think that we are free. When we experience freedom (either intellectually or actually) we become overwhelmed. We quite literally don't know how to handle it.

We (in most of the West) are taught from birth that we must always subject ourselves to some authority. In the beginning, there was the parent. If we didn't please him/her, we did not survive. Then there was the teacher. If we did not follow his/her instructions, we were punished (regardless of whether or not our undirected pursuits were fruitful). Then there was our boss. If we did not execute tasks handed down from said boss in precisely the proper way, we were terminated. The fact that most of our (this generation's) parents were not entrepreneurial means that entrepreneurship was generally looked down upon. The "get a job, obey your boss" gene was passed down to the vast majority of us.

This all not even considering religious commitments (pastors, imams, rabbis, etc.). Or Government Officials, who we must subject ourselves to if we need social services of any kind. Then there is The Community, who indirectly pressure us to live as they do at risk of shaming and/or shunning. Then there is ... etc.

All of this is an incredible burden to bear for anyone. That is why most people don't explore this line of thought. Religion, workaholism, or familycentrism are all a whole lot easier than actually facing the void. If you've legitimately seen darkness and have decided to let it empower you, damn -- I commend ya. Most of us can't do it. Even Nietzsche -- who was pretty much the first to verbalize our secular freedom -- lost control in the end.
Typical Winer.

He posted this today - which I found to be in shockingly poor taste: http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/january/rssHistory

The kid commits suicide, and his first reaction is to post a link to his "official" history of RSS....
"Not everyone is in a university, in fact there are billions of people who aren't in school and who would absolutely benefit from having access to the scientific knowledge contained in these tax-payer-funded documents"

Sure, but that was not my point; my point was that there was no moral issue with him downloading these documents, because he had every right to access them, just like anyone else whose computer is connected to a university's network. The underlying assumption of people who think he did something wrong is a combination of (a) that access is only supposed to be for reading the articles, not archiving them and (b) that there is something suspicious about writing a program that automatically downloads things (unless you are running an operation dedicated to archiving). The assumption is that anyone who thinks about these things differently must be some kind of criminal or public danger, and it is an assumption that has been fueled by years of propaganda from businesses whose profits depend on people not doing such things.

"I challenge you (in a very light-hearted, positive way) to demonstrate how to access papers as a member of the public"

Unfortunately, the only response I have is that the current system is designed to thwart that sort of thing. We live in an anachronistic age when it comes to accessing human knowledge. We continue to assume that we need academic publishing companies to spread that knowledge. We continue to assume that it makes sense for people to physically enter a major library to find the journal articles they are looking for.

A century ago, that did actually make sense. You needed industrial-scale printing equipment to make enough copies of academic publications to satisfy the world's needs. For the most part, only universities had the resources to pay the publishers for that work, and only universities had enough space to archive those publications. In this day and age, that is not even remotely true: a typical desktop computer has enough disk space to store more than many university library systems could store on their shelves. One only needs to walk through the bound journals section of a typical university library to see the reality of this century: the bound journals are just sitting there, collecting dust, because everyone is downloading the articles using a computer.

So in theory, the general public could have access to this knowledge, and to all future research, and they could even help in the dissemination of that knowledge. In practice, only the lucky few (like me!) who happen to be affiliated with a major university can access it without jumping through hoops or traveling great distances. The sickest part about it is this: I would be prosecuted if I dared use the desktop in my office to give other people access to that knowledge. Stated another way, if I were to use my own knowledge and affiliation with a university to spread knowledge to others, I would be a criminal.
The drop in standards has little to do with average education levels.

As the percentage of people going to college increases the average intelligence and education level of incoming freshman has decreased. At the same time the number of colleges has dramatically increased and they all have a few tallent based scholarships which prevents any one school from focusing on top students as they often have free rides.
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.

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

RIP guys :'(
If the purpose of life is to "build as many feeling entities..." then that is what should be done. You see, it is the way that we arrive at our understanding of the purpose that convinces us that it is right. By using the scientific method we can feel confident that we have discovered truth. Science provides us with evidence for why we should believe things and when we have evidence we have two options: we can either be rational and change our beliefs based on evidence, or be irrational and ignore the evidence. The type of "purpose of life" that I'm talking about would only be discoverable by intense scientific activity. It would be like the laws of physics: so undeniably true that you'd be a fool to not believe them. That said, I think your postulated "build as many feeling..." purpose of life is particularly unlikely. However, because no one has ever seen the purpose of life before, we must be careful to not rule out things prematurely, no matter how absurd they seem. I imagine most people of Darwin's time were so set on the idea of creationism that evolution was inconceivable, thankfully Darwin saw through that.
>They're basically a bunch of BU/small liberal arts college grad professional administrators of colleges running the institute into the ground.

Your arrogance is truly breathtaking. I can't believe people shit on other's majors and college choices like this.
Whereas quickmeme.com is edifying?
I find universities valuable because they are basically reincarnated every 4 or 5 years.

Ah ha! That's where we differ.

My university experience made me feel it was a huge cancerously-growing bureaucracy that doesn't really want to change. A huge bureaucracy with draconian rules whose goals were to never inconvenience any employee of the university at the expense of student time and frustration.

[[ At one point, they threatened to suspend my registration privileges because I WWW::Mechanize-automated my registration against their crappy web registration system. 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. ]]
Totally agreed ... horses for courses etc. I also use C# the majority of the time ... but it seems like it will now be sharing the stage with C++ and possibly HTML/JS in terms of the recommended languages by MS.
That made my eyes water.
Read along side: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/141253-15th-annual-muzzle-...
When think about it, what PG's close friend and buddy Robert Tappan Morris did with bringing down a vast number of computer on the internet back then; was incomparably and inexorably worse.

Yet, Robert Morris has had a great life, both as an acclaimed professor at the greatest technological institution that has ever existed (MIT), and of course as a key member of Y Combinator.

Yet a petty non-criminal like Aaron is put through something infinitely worse than the "punishment" of community service that was dished out of RTM.

Ha. Some justice system indeed!
MongoDB migration with Node and Monk | Web App Log
> merely

That's some rather selective reading on your part. You ignore the context in his mother's statement on HN that he was "depressed about the case and the upcoming trial" (indicating perhaps that his depression and the pressure brought by the indictment are inseparable), and cherry-pick a particular sentence to support your own view, rather than try to hear the tone and spirit of the statement. The fact that the family chose to come forward with such a clear and bold statement condemning particular institutions on the day of their loss alone is proof enough that they strongly believe MIT and the DA's office played a critical part in what happened.
The prosecution does not say that Aaron was a bad man. They merely alleged he committed acts which fall within the definition of a crime under statutes passed by Congress.

It is irrelevant whether Aaron is bad or good; the law addresses only guilt and leaves morality to others. Legally, what matters is (1) whether he committed the alleged acts and (2) whether those acts (which are currently crimes) should be crimes.

It doesn't matter what they say he did,

You're right, because now he's dead and we do not allow the prosecution of dead men.

* it matters what we say he did. And we say he did good. Which we can get people to believe, because we're right, and there are millions of us.*

You have people on HN, on reddit, and 4chan who agree with you, and the bloggers who work for the NY Times. As I already discussed, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that you will convince other people (i.e., the tecnically illerate supermajority of America) that what he did was "good" once they understand that what he did is considered hacking.

There are a lot of us. We're generally pretty smart. We control a lot of important stuff. We can fix serious problems if we collectively set out to do it.

People in SV keep saying that, and then they churn out yet another social network or photo sharing app. At this point, I'll believe statements like that, even if made on HN, once they are backed by actual action and not just words.

You can say "politics doesn't work that way" a hundred times, but politics works the way that people make it work. And we're people.

Yes, you are people. But you're a small minority of America that generally avoids politics and interacting with the rest of America. Until that changes, and you involve yourself in America beyond just relatively unimportant stuff, like unpaid access to academic journals, you won't have much success changing anything.
I Like Pie
Any nation where computers are used needs talented hackers, and AFAIK this guy was one. NKorea was my last choice if you noticed.
Right the Google Earth plug-in is for PC/Mac only. Again one of the reasons for funding to develop an app so it is compatible on ios and android. Having to pick an initial version to develop I went web based over mobile.

Regarding what it does, it makes a social network out of combining Google Earth and YouTube. Users can search for video content by browsing geotags in Google Earth and filter videos by date, @user, #keyword. Ideal for finding and sharing video from sports stadiums, concerts, outdoor activities (hiking, biking, skiing, surfing, skydiving ect...), news events, political protests, or any event that is intimately tied with time and location like the last shuttle launch.
USA needs to grow a F concience. (sorry for swearing)
Leaves more room for cat videos?
"JSTOR is basically a scam. It pockets the money that it receives and doesn't pay anything back to the authors"

We are not talking about "authors" in the sense of some guy living in a townhouse, smoking a pipe and drinking scotch while writing a novel. We're talking about people who are paid to do scientific research, usually by the government, and who must publish their work in a journal or conference to continue continue or advance their careers.

Really, JSTOR is not even that bad; they are a search service. Look at the journals themselves if you want to talk about a scam: the authors are not paid by the journal publishers, the journal publishers do not fund grants any more than any other tax payer does, and it is often the case that the reviewers of the articles (peer review, the foundation of scientific publishing) are unpaid, and in some cases even the editors of the journal are volunteers. What do the journal publishers do? They print and bind journals, sometimes, or else they charge people (including JSTOR) for access to electronic copies of the articles. Journal publishers are an anachronism that is being kept alive by an out-of-control copyright system; JSTOR is just an outgrowth of the problem, like a little hair growing out of a cancer (and make no mistake, "cancer" is an apt description of journal publishers: they get in the way of scientific research and make it harder for scientists to make their findings available to humanity).
Since I have slightly trollish inclinations, I emailed JSTOR's customer service after they made that weird announcement about wanting files "returned", expressing my worry over which content was "missing", and when they expected it to be returned and available again. I got a short response claiming the media had misreported the situation:

Thank you for your message. Some of the media details about this incident have been a bit misleading. I can confirm that no content is missing from JSTOR as a result of the recent misuse case. Copies of the files were downloaded from the site, no content is unavailable as a result.
> Calling her a monkey is unbearably and unquestionably racist

How so?