skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great story, and suggests lots of terrific ideas for gaming the dating field. Where is the service that has collected and modeled a lot of profiles from a given service, and then rates your profile for success? Or rewrites your profile for you? There are certainly machine learning models on the dating service side working "against" you to tantalize you but keep you in the service for a longer period.

I have a friend who likes Latin women, reasonably good looking, speaks flawless Spanish, and lived in Mexico and Spain for years. He discovered Colombia a while ago, joined the premier online dating site, and started collecting "favorites" all over the country. I wrote some scraping scripts to capture all his favorites. He wrote a two line generic message "Coming to Colombia <date>. Send me your cell and I'll call when I'm in town." I picked out the Bogota women, for example, and did a "bulk IM" to his list. He converted at about 20% from a cold IM into cell number in hand.

Another way to hack the system is run your own Adsense ads. A few years ago I accidentally got more than a thousand one cent clicks in Colombia from a dating ad test. I was only testing how closely one can geo-target, and I forgot to turn off my one cent bids and $1/day budget.
Each download isn't a copy of some files, it's a statement that Aaron's cause was the right one, even if I disagreed with his methods.
But the people who want that don't contribute millions of dollars of campaign donations.
After reading a few of his blog posts from previous years, it almost seemed like he saw it coming years ago. Depression is a terrible thing. Most experience it in mild states. Only unlucky few contemplate suicide on daily basis. Some succumb to it within weeks. Others suffer years. Regardless, it's very sad to see someone so bright take their own life. Before you pull the trigger, tighten that rope around your neck or take those pills think of your loved once. Think of your parents. How miserable their life is going to be without the only being they cared for their entire lives. Then think twice about your life. When you kill yourself you kill others around you. This had stopped me once before and i hope it will help others. We all have a purpose here.

Rest in peace, Aaron.
If we can petition the White House for a Death Star, we can petition for Ortiz' removal.
Perhaps it is the system's fault because it is not set to find the truth, but rather as a sports event between the defender and the prosecutor. Each one does their job and at the end, the winner takes all, whether for right or for wrong.

I have a friend who is a prosecutor and I had heard him talk about his work before. Everything he said was focused on winning. He was proud that he was able to dig out cases from the past where people went free, and then send them to jail. He was proud how good he was at prosecuting people. For all I know, he kept a score.

Is being so driven by the end goal a good thing? Sure it is, when you are prosecuting an actual bad guy. But, as it was my impression from my friend, it didn't really matter to him how bad the guy; all that matters is whether he can win. In that case, the system is at fault for allowing this kind of competition with human lives, but the individuals are at fault for playing the game.
A Tangential Lesson From Aaron Swartz' Death
Aaron's death has left an indelible sadness across the world, and although I barely knew him, I am also shocked and saddened by his sudden departure. A lot of emphasis has been placed on how young Aaron was and how much he had accomplished in such a short time. There has also been a lot of speculation about why Aaron chose to end his life, and unfortunately I don't think we'll ever have a complete answer.

However, this is a good time to discuss the pressures of achieving success early in life. In Silicon Valley, we see companies pushing engineers harder, hiring them younger, and encouraging teenagers to skip college altogether to create the next big startup. Although some adolescents can handle the excitement and pressure, we hear of many child prodigies that suffer from depression and end up taking the same path as Aaron. As an industry, we need to be aware of the fact that achieving success as an adolescent can create pressure that leads to serious mental issues, and if we promote the ideal of "start younger, work harder" we need to also work to create a safety net for those who cannot cope with the stress.
We talked about this on previous threads (when he was still alive). Distributing static content is a very much solved problem. Even then, if you don't want someone to download 4 million articles, don't enable them to do so. Every time I ask JSTOR for an article, their servers vet the request and then fulfill it (or not).
How to Properly Use Dictation in iOS 6
Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office
Right. Someone released the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (originally held only by JSTOR), which is a start:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789709

> This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
> 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
> and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most
> have previously only been made available at high prices through
> paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosop...

Btw, the court documents from 2011-2012 show that aaronsw transferred his collection to an unidentified server in China. Maybe he has a deadman's switch? Or maybe it's time I go on a modern-day pirate treasure hunt.. yarr.
Not sure why, but the reddit admins keep deleting all posts related to this.

edit: Seems that more are staying up now. This morning they were being deleted.
JSTOR Register & Read
I don't think that would really do it here. The problem is not (just, or even primarily) the laws against criminal copyright infringement. The problem is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Wire Act, RICO and the complete set of federal laws passed during the heyday of organized crime that are so broad and with such disproportionately insane penalties that they can be used to put just about any arbitrary subject of Her Majesty the Queen Prosecutor in prison for the rest of their natural lives.

Fixing one statute isn't going to cut it; they'll just keep on at it with the ones remaining. The fix has to be systemic or it's nothing but a band aid on a gunshot wound.
I am very happy those words changed your life.

But personally, I would rather be death than institutionalized.
Cartoon about Stress
You're attacking a bit of a straw man there. Clearly the prosecutors are guilty of overzealous prosecution, and the law itself is overzealous. It simply doesn't follow, however, that these people are responsible for Aaron Swartz's decision to commit suicide. Only Aaron Swartz is responsible for that.
From the video:

"Will these computers we have around us be an amazing tool for human liberty, or the most powerful set of tools for social control? We have a unique opportunity, it's like being at the writing of the Constitution. Right now, they're deciding the ground rules for the next hundred years of our society. This bill would be a huge loss. If we couldn't freely communicate over the internet, what would that mean for the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the freedoms that our country has been built on, the rights we've always taken for granted would suddenly be deleted."
This archive is not directly related to Aaron Swartz's prosecution, it's something different. "The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data."
http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/Statistics/JudicialBusiness...

No, it actually isn't. You have to look at convictions, acquittals, and dismissals to form an accurate assessment of the outcome of criminal prosecutions. When you factor in dismissals, the conviction rate, whether by a plea of guilty or no contest, or as a result of a trial, drops to 90-91%.
I understand the approach, but I wouldn't us IE for the "nose holding". (Although I guess 9 and 10 are better than their predecessors.)
You don't get to make up the law as you go along. If its possible to serve 35 years in prison for what Aaron Swartz did, that's absurd and needs to change, but the prosecutors aren't the ones who made that law.
Not quite, it's just the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It's a good start, I guess.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789709 (lots of comments)

> This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
> 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
> and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most
> have previously only been made available at high prices through
> paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Btw, the court documents from 2011-2012 show that aaronsw transferred his collection to an unidentified server in China. Maybe he has a deadman's switch? Or maybe it's time I go on a modern-day pirate treasure hunt.. yarr.
The main thing to realize is that it can be a long process but it WILL pass. To be honest, I'm not sure when it disappeared from my every day life, but after one of my therapy sessions I looked back at the last six months and realized it had gone and I was actually happy. Previously, I had become convinced that it would never leave me, and that it was just a part of who I was. In fact, I was even at the time attached to it and didn't want it to leave as I was convinced that it was where all my creativity came from. Looking back I realize that it now only hindered it.

Things do get better - just make sure you get help as no one should do it alone!
> Make no mistake, this means she will always be facing serious opposition should she choose to run for public office.

Beware, given the people's love of tough-on-crime politicians, drawing any attention to her career as a prosecutor, even if negative, might only help her. Most people outside of HN probably see Aaron Swartz as a criminal and this tragedy isn't going to have serious sway. Consider that factually innocent people get convicted because of prosecutorial aggression and there are no public scandals.

The public's attitude towards crime needs to change before naming and shaming prosecutors will be effective. We should try to change it - quote figures to show that people needn't fear being victims of serious crime, appeal to the American founding and the ideals of innocent until proven guilty, make economic arguments that locking people up for disproportionate amounts of time is costly and pointless. This approach will move the needle on the public's attitude and will slowly fix the system which did this to Aaron Swartz. It's more nebulous and less satisfying than trying to destroy the career of a bad prosecutor, but it won't be wasted effort.
Even as it goes sad on Aaron, this goes on elsewhere in a different setting http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/house-divided/post/wikil...

I am so sad that the world has come to this. It's a similar painful story in almost every country that I read about. People are constantly under duress of some kind due to their Government.
Actually, I think you can do quite a lot from prison. Blaise Pascal famously stated that all of man's problems stems from the inability to sit in a room, alone, quietly. Indeed, many important actions have been taken from prison. But even if activism isn't your taste, but rather self-improvement, it seems like prison is a good opportunity to work on meditation. Indeed, meditation cells in the east are substantially smaller than a prison cell.

Personally, I wish Aaron (and Lessig, and everyone) had made more of a stink. I wish he would have threatened suicide, and then not gone through with it. Maybe swallowed some pills and then rushed to the hospital. That would have gotten attention, and it would have saved a brilliant mind.
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The Time Suck Economy
Suicide is extremely common among males (compared to women, men end up killing them at self at something like a 10:1 ratio, even though more women than men try to kill them self), particularily young males.

Guess who is most likely to be a programmer?
So 97% is "absurd" but 90-91% is well within reason?

Moreover, in many cases the cause of a dismissal is that the prosecutor requested it, e.g. because the entire charge was a farce meant to intimidate the defendant and it by that point had either failed or (more likely) succeeded to do so and no longer needed to be maintained.
Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Grid(ism) - robust, practical, and easy-to-grok responsive CSS grid.
I do like these tactics and... I am in favor of naming and shaming. I think she should be made the poster child for overzealous prosecution of a outdated law.

However, it is a story that could serve a larger purpose than just ruining this woman's career. I would like to this effort put into something more constructive like the decriminalization of copyright infringement. It could be relegated to a civil issue, especially online (versus manufactured goods).

There will be other overzealous prosecutors to replace her, but if the law is changed. It could serve a greater purpose.
Posthumously pardon Aaron Swartz
Including dismissals, I suppose you are in the ballpark. However, are you saying that a 90-91% conviction rate, in a system that publicly claims to offer so many protections to those within its grasp, is a positive thing? Many of our federal courthouses have inscriptions of Blackstone's formulation ("better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"). That is hardly the case in practice in our courts today.
I can imagine and believe that defending yourself against the US government is costly, what I don't understand is what the breakdown of all expenses would look like.

What services do you need to purchase/hire that you wouldn't get in a normal court case?

Is it because you spend a lot more time in court or in preparation?

Do you need to choose among lawyers with special certification? What type of paperwork do you need to produce?

In the Latin America (where I am) I could easily see the biggest expenses being bribes and it is in general what I think of when you need a problem solved. (Not a good thing at all...)

P.S. Making an infographic about a case like this vs a regular court case would be an interesting project and could help us make the case for Aaron...anyone want to help by looking for data / making one on your own?
Because Obama has shown so much interest in listening to those who voted him in, right? Copyright maximalists are exstatic about this prosecution, and that's the trough Obama feeds from. That slop doesn't smell any better than the Republican's trough.

Also, remember that Swartz was a key player in the SOPA/PIPA campaign. Do you think anybody in the government is sad about this? There will be no support from Obama on this. I doubt you could get an acknowledgement of any kind out of him.
My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved
You don't know what will happen. That said, you're getting angry because those words are dismissive of your current situation. You are being invalidated.

Personally, the thing that gets me is when people say stuff like "God doesn't give you a burden you can't bear." That's survivor bias if I've ever heard one - the people who didn't survive the burden aren't really around to quibble, are they!

Instead of telling you it'll get better, I'd tell you this: learn to stop thinking. It sounds weird, but it's possible. It doesn't mean go catatonic, it just means learning to recognize the thoughts that resonate with your negativity, and moving your focus away from those. Technical detail: there are actually two layers of thoughts, those that resonate, and then a deeper layer that seeks that negative resonance. The default state of the human brain is no-thought. If you can experience that for even a moment, you will feel relief. Then you can see the old thoughts return, like an incoming tide, and you can choose to not focus on them. That's the key: those thoughts that resonate so negatively, so strongly, require your focus to have power. If you acquire control over your focus, then you have denied those thoughts power, and you are free.

What you do with that freedom is a whole 'nother ball of wax. :)

Check out http://dhamma.org for some donation-based intensive meditation training (called vippassana). It requires a tremendous amount of will. The fact that you're still alive probably means that you have that will.
He was not incarcerated he could always buy a bus ticket and head over the border. In his situation that is what I would do, run for it. If they really wanted me they would have to spend a lot more effort getting me.
If imprisonment just meant being confined, but in otherwise reasonably humane conditions, with decent access to reading/writing material, I could see that as a stomachable option. That's what the historical imprisonment conditions for the upper class were in many countries, and from what I've read is how Scandinavian prisons are run. But everything I've read about the conditions in American prisons does not make them sound humane. They are highly overcrowded, often have purposely punitive conditions (limited access to reading materials, forced labor, etc.), and your risk of suffering violence and rape is extraordinarily high. I don't think I would consider it an acceptable option. And the trouble is, you have to decide ahead of time: if you go to prison on a 30-year sentence and realize sometime while there that you'd rather be dead, it's difficult to do much about it at that point. Even the possibility of that feels horrible and claustrophobic: being stuck somewhere with literally no way out, not through any regular means (change of city, change of friends, restart your life), not even suicide as a way out. Just stuck there.
Hi Michael, Have you every tried the Workforce Investment Act? Since this is retraining people for new careers I am pretty sure this qualifies. Local place in Sacramento is http://sacramentoworks.org/event/wia-training-information-or...

Give them a call or go into the location on Sylvan Road.
He hanged himself.
Build something real. Why spend your life doing stuff that's fake? [video]
You have to pay even if you win?
>but this should have no bearing on whether to prosecute or not.

"We were just following orders" and "We were just doing our jobs" and "We were doing what the law told us to do" aren't the indefensible moral positions you seem to think they are. Laws are written by men and enforced by men. Just the idea that all prosecutors are slaves to these laws is so incredibly naive I almost don't know what to say to you, but I'll try to sum it up:

At best, this was a simple copyright issue that the two parties chose to work out. At worst, this was a white collar crime, and with all white collar crimes, your political capital determines what happens to you. Aaron had no political capital. The support of people like Lessig or Doctorow or the EFF is meaningless in DC. Carmen Ortiz understood this. Now here we are.
Don't worry, it will happen in Europe soon too.

The only question is whether you start planning in advance, or if you want to be hurt.

I'm not expecting to see a single cent from the money the government is robbing me under the pretext of "retirement" to fund its massive ponzi scheme dependant on an always growing working population.
Essentially you want to get lucky! :) In my opinion, the success of a start-up is determined by:
1. Co-founder chemistry (how well they know each other, shared vision etc.). With this approach, you'll have no idea what your "so-called" co-founder is like. BIG risk!
2. A vision. Not sure how you can even run a company without having a vision of what you like to do, or what problem you're going to solve. At best, you can be an investor but not a co-founder. And unless you're well networked and bring something valuable to the table, not sure 8k means a lot; and 50% equity for that is too high.
3. Execution - LOT of work. Not sure a startup is as simple as you make it sound. A prototype for 5k + customers for 3k = success? I agree the cost of building a tech. start-up has gone down significantly, but IMO it takes a lot beyond that. Unless you have advantage of owning a groundbreaking idea/IP or something with high barriers of entry it all comes down to execution.
4. The right support and network.
5. And yes, luck!

...having said that, think there is still a chance (however small it is) that it might just work and you might get lucky, but what are the odds?
You can't downvote on HN.
In its original version, 'Alex' used to read 'Aaron'[1].

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cof...
Ask HN:  What happens to unvested equity in an acquisition?
If, for example, shares are vested over 4 years, but in the third year an acquisition occurs. What would happen to those unvested shares?
Make an infographic that attracts attention.

I unfortuantley do not know how I would even start doing one, but some comments have data like "97% of all people plead guilty" we could see what the average number of time in Jail is, pull out some quotes.

I posted abt it here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048729
and the types of question we would need to figure out relating to court costs and things like that.
A quote: I blame not the Department of Justice for Aaron Swartz's death in that sense, but Lawrence Lessig. He's the one who, like Pan, lured this young men into his extremist and delusional cult of Creative Communism as I called it, with the shill that somehow human nature and the earth can be re-made merely by being digitalized and moved online.

The author maintains that she is not trolling in the comments section below the article.
Asset managers wanted exposure to certain credits.

CDOs created a liquid vehicle for those credit exposures.

Because of market inefficiencies the prices of the liquid CDOs went much higher than the underlying mortgages (equivalent to you adding up the constituents of the S&P 500 and finding the index trades much dearer than the stocks because of, say, a financial transactions tax that makes trading the stocks individually difficult).

Arbitrageurs attempted to correct/take advantage of the mis-pricing by turning the underlying assets into CDOs.

Sometimes, due to the difficulty of procuring the underlying assets, synthetic CDOs were created that quacked like regular CDOs but were made of plastic. Synthetic CDOs use swaps to amplify the underlying assets' credit exposures - these swaps need two sides, a long and a short.

In the midst of the housing boom it was difficult to find people willing to bet against the housing market. Issuers decided to let the short side help construct the reference portfolio of the synthetic CDO on the assumption that if houses are safe as houses it's the same as letting a gambler choose which of the casino-provided dice are rolled.

It's easier to say Magnetar was evil, but as usual, the truth is substantially more nuanced (or, banal, from higher up - market inefficiencies and artificially advantaged participants, i.e. federally protected banks, mixed to produce enormous yet fragile superstructures).
I'd rather have one piece of gold than ten turds.
Very much agree. Getting her out of office is the beginning of that conversation.
CSS Layout Properties for Noobies
This post is for people now to CSS and new to creating websites. I am hoping to make your life easier by showing and explain some CSS properties that manipulate layout.
For her misunderstanding of the word theft it nothing else
A reflection on Aaron Swartz (2009)