skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh. Thanks, I didn't know this. Curious choice.
If her career ends in a clean and legal way, that will send the important message. So if individuals are in the position to send messages which will contribute to that, it would be a good thing.
Which is still curious, because it's common knowledge at this point that the numbers are fudged. Why even display it at this point? It serves nothing but to cause confusion.
"...an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man."
Science is one of the greatest achievements of mankind. In fact, it's right up there next to the internet and the concept of the library. or books. I can't help but feel like an alien to this world when I can't access papers. I think we can do better for ourselves.
Of course, I assume nobody wants Ms. Ortiz to spin into deep guilt-driven depression for doing what she believed was right. This kind of emotional blackmail is probably not helping anyone or anything, at least not this soon after the events when emotions are still looming high and, more importantly, nobody actually understands the exact circumstances of a person's... well... personal predicament that lead to certain actions....
You don't care what the equivalent of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM are where they live, because that's not actually what you're interested in knowing. You want to know when you can schedule meetings with them.

The easy way would be to just keep a list of the other party's available hours in UTC. If you had to deal with a lot of people in a lot of different places, you could keep a list by major city the same way you do with time zones. The fact that you need to apply an "algorithm" to something that's inherently static should tell you the situation as it stands is inefficient.
But this is the point: he made something freely available that is supposed to be freely available. The individuals publishing do publish because they want their papers to be read and cited by others. Unfortunately there is hardly an established free peer reviewing system available, so most research results are only available to a small elite. Being no student anymore, I cannot afford reading most papers because $30 to read one paper is too much. (JSTOR seems to have more easy conditions, but when you google papers you sometimes get pointed to this site and sometimes to some other site...)
Parody – a PHP testing library
Sounds like a lot of people tried to help him and that this wasn't a full surprise.
Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. A career ending for one overzealous prosecutor would signal an important feature of the incentive structure. Wars are won one battle at a time.
I hate that I can't even access to `open access manifesto` in my country for some stupid reason without manipulating my dns.

http://imgur.com/gjNR4
I think so, and that is not just me being curious. Some data he kept private on a site seems about the same as his own hard drives. Some good might come of it, who knows.
Which Django?

It took a moment for me to realize that you probably didn't mean the Python one.
It's that the U.S. got their asses handed to them in a previous case involving PACER, and were out for blood.

Sadly, that's what they got.
> If someone is formally charged with a federal felony, that means they have been indicted by a federal Grand Jury; i.e., a majority of the 23 Grand Jurors felt that there is probable cause for charging the defendant(s) with the alleged offense(s). People indicted by Grand Juries should end up getting convicted the vast majority of time

This is profoundly ignorant. As a Grand Juror, you will have a mountain of documents dumped on you, alleging or suggesting various crimes. The validity, accuracy, or even meaning of those documents, isn't debated or even examined.

A Grand Jury will indict anyone where the law enforcement officers have done a minimal amount of investigation and have gathered something. The process is there to prevent mass prosecution, in other words, to make sure the government does some minimal amount of work at least.

It does not, in any way, suggest guilt of any sort.

They could present a Grand Jury with documents from another case and not a single Grand Juror would be the wiser. Obviously that would be illegal and grossly inappropriate, but the fact that this could easily be done suggests that the process isn't there to determine any realistic "probable cause" ... just to make sure a minimal amount of work was completed.
If anybody ever decide to do that to you, just play dumb and arrogant. The jury won't believe you and your enemy will lose.
No. Thousands of others did not fight in the way he did. (And did not, as a result, were indicted with their financials ruined and a good chance of 35 years in prison)
Interest in "software consulting" down by 80% since 2004 in Google Trends
Carmen Ortiz is not a building full of civilians, including children in a daycare. And a civil ending to a career for inappropriate and unjust use of power is not a murder or bombing.

It's appalling that your criticism of Timothy McVeigh is that he wasn't enough like Osama bin Laden. Do you really think either one of these should serve as a model?
One giant flash based advert, apparently.
Only a person of science or other black/white thinker would assume that law and procedure was an "essentially mechanical process." I once imagined it that way too. The very first thing a law student is taught is that everything is a grey area: laws are left vague deliberately in order to be interpreted by judges; evidence and procedure are negotiable; everything is subjective. The legal framework is only that, a framework. The legal machine is far, far from deterministic. It is designed from the top down to be discretionary.

Otherwise you'd more often run into situations where you couldn't prosecute someone because a statute didn't spell out their exact actions even though in spirit they had violated it.
Tell HN: SVSummit - tech/entertainment conference -- looking for co-organizers
Hey guys,

I'm organizing a two-day tech/entertainment conference called Silicon Valley Summit. Currently, I'm the only one putting the show together, but wanted to reach out to HN and see if anyone else would be interested in helping out.

The mission of the conference is to educate attendees on the future of music and tech collaboration. We are seeing more and more celebrities investing in tech start-ups, SVSummit's aim is to bridge the gap between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. We are bringing some of the biggest talent managers, music managers, VC's, founders, and more to SVSummit.

If you believe this conference is up right up your alley and want to give a hand, please feel free to email me: shahedkhan30 at gmail dot com

Thanks!
Then go tell that to the murder. I hope the prosecutor burns in hell. Fuck that monkey and all she has ever done.
Ortiz is Heymann's boss.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR....
How do you 'fight the culture of overzealous prosecution as a whole' without ever making reference to individuals or individual cases? You can't.
There is a wide, legally significant, valley between an executive showing humility and his board saying this is your fault. Without the actual report it is difficult to go further than that.

Additionally, this bit triggered a "whoah, whoah, whoah" (in a WALL•E clean-up robot voice) for me: "at one point, as much as $51 billion in shareholder value was wiped out".
How much would it cost to run a full-page ad near the front of The New York Times and Boston Globe, and some local tv ads in Boston? A targeted media campaign and the resulting echoes could easily put a stop to any political aspirations (I'm thinking 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper, and the like).
Well at least you can also upload your paper on arxive.org. But I agree, the closed journal is required for the reputation because they are peer reviewed.

(Not sure if they have some policy forbidding to disclose the paper on arxive etc. But I don't think so, the department I did my thesis, most papers were also available on arxive.org)
The Boy Who Cried Facebook Phone
He contributed to the RSS spec, Markdown, Creative Commons, fought SOPA, founded Reddit, and stuck it to the man. I challenge you to name ten people with comparable track records :)
I've been thinking that perhaps some sort of mass downloading could be organized, to be distributed among current college students with access to JSTOR.

If it is thousands of students all doing a small part of the downloading, what could be done to stop it? The trick would be distributing the tasks, and collecting all the results.

This is all assuming there is no dead-man's switch, but since he went out on his own terms I assume that would be triggered already.
I have recently read a lot of blogs on this exact issue. After all the points of view and insight, what I would suggest is show a link to your new feature, but make it an active link do not grey it out. The key with the active link, you can measure how many of your users actually click the link and would be interested in your new feature without having actually spending the time/money/effort creating it. However, as you mentioned the draw back is by activating the link to a feature that is not there you will have to post an under construction page or the mm/dd/yyyy the feature will go live.
Yes, this.

I'm really angry that bankers get to walk away from billion-dollar crimes against clients and homewoners while a prosecutor goes after easy wins on victimless crimes like this.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not but I'll bite.

If just to say that describing mental illness as "weakness" is abhorrent. You wouldn't say someone with a malfunction of the kidneys, heart or lungs was "weak" would you? Then why is it okay to say it about someone whose brain is not functioning as it should? What's the difference?
War for the Web
> to be distributed among current college students

I've been thinking about a mobile proxy app that students run on their phones, and a server that distributes tasks. The app would HTTP itself to the server and ask for a task, then HTTP the results back. Metadata (and the pdf url) would be extracted with zotero/translation-server, and a second request would be sent to phones to finally grab the actual file. Let me know if you're interested, contact deets in profile.

proof of concept of the zotero/translation-server doing its job: https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot
Wall Street's side bets on the mortgage market dwarfed the actual value of the real estate in question.

"And why did synthetic C.D.O.’s become popular? One reason was that the subprime companies were starting to run out of risky borrowers to make bad loans to."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/business/17nocera.html?hp

Everyone shares responsibility, sure: but culpability is proportionate with the harm. Individual mortgage holders are a rounding error in this analysis.
Yes. I'm perfectly happy to hate the player and the game.
A classmate's memories of Aaron Swartz
Best And Cheapest On The Internet
Cheapest games,music,softwares,films
Prosecuting downloading information in violation of terms of service as an abuse under CFAA.

The 9th Circuit (the best circuit!) ruled this was bullshit in US vs. Nosal.
My tribute is to stop using twitter and other walled gardens so much and to start publishing my content to the open web again. Even for smaller things. I started by sharing my thoughts about Aaron's passing on my own website: http://benatkin.com/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz/

I noticed that since he does the old style of blog comments, that if you ever left a comment on his blog, you can type a search like this into google:

"Ben Atkin" site:aaronsw.com

...you'll get a list of the comments you made on his site.

I don't think he ever wrote code just for the sake of code. I think he wrote it for a larger purpose.
I've engaged in suicidal ideation for many years. I'm not at risk of suicide, but if I thought that there was help available I would certainly seek it out.

My question is: what are the forms of help that are available? I know of A) therapy and B) medication.

I've spoken to 5 therapist for a couple sessions each, and my impression was that they are just normal people who you can talk to. They're not people who have answers, nor do they conduct their sessions with an overarching strategic plan. Rather, they're just people who you can talk to, and they will try their best to listen, even if they don't necessarily understand what you say. I know a lot of people benefit from this, but when I tried option A I didn't get anything out of it.

In my case, my mental suffering derives from loneliness. I follow John Cacioppo's work on the subject, and he claims that loneliness is a biological signal (just like hunger) that requires a response. I believe in his explanation, and so to me applying medication to ease loneliness would be similar to giving someone a pill to end their feeling of being hungry. To me that's not really a solution: in the case of hunger, food is the solution, and in the case of loneliness, connection is the solution.

Neither forms of help seem to me like they will help in my particular case. However when you say there's easy help available, you sound very confident. What am I missing?
Jay Lake v. PayPal
I agree, we should be careful not to confuse justice with vengeance and focus on the root cause by improving the framework so that this kind of behavior by prosecutors is simply not possible. “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.” MG.
What will we say if this prosecutor commits suicide next week?
Even though people know it's fake, I am sure it still plays an important role in gamification.
I propose an Aaron Swartz act.
I lost most of my faith in the MIT administration in the 1990s when I was a student; they're basically a bunch of BU/small liberal arts college grad professional administrators of colleges running the institute into the ground. That's the biggest failure of the MIT model vs. a place like Stanford; there's not much chance MIT grads will eventually want to be university administrators.
I object to the characterization of the government's prosecution as "overcharging". The correct punishment for Aaron's actions is not a smaller prison sentence, but a medal.
Somone sent me this when I asked about a programming problem,
"The 0th step to solve any problem is to make sure you really understand the problem statement. If you are unable to understand what you read, seek help, you really need it."
It triggered suicidal thoughts and I've had many in the past but those times a very kind person got me on better thoughts. But I don't want to waste his time anymore, and I don't want these thoughts either. Is there anyway to stop them?
How I use Vagrant with chef-solo
I most definitely do not despise Aaron. I think it's highly detestable that someone of his passion and skill gets less followers than an early-cut-contestant from American Idol.

We can argue that maybe he would've been less productive if he really got into tweeting or whatever. But he was hardly shy from talking about himself, and he shouldn't have been. It's a shame that didn't result in the kind of deserved following that would have gotten more public sentiment on his side.

His SOPA/PIPA campaign is a prime example. The reason why it succeeded when at first legislators ignored it was not because the merits of its argument became better over time, but because more people, beyond the choir, had joined the cause.
are you sure about that 10:1 figure?

Looking at the available UE data from eurostat[0] the ratio would seem more 4:1, which obviously still confirms your point, I am just curious about your source.

[0] http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/refreshTableAction.do?t...
Larry's saying that we should fight against unjust laws in court and ride in the back of the bus on the way to the court house.
In that case, Ford pardoned Nixon to prevent a trial, where a conviction was still possible. In this case, there will never be a trial, and hence, no possibility of a conviction. It's a well-meaning sentiment, but a pardon is not applicable here. Better to lobby against the laws Swartz was accused of violating.
So very sorry that Aaron was in so much pain. He was truly an amazing person and in such a short life had a significant impact. The world is diminished without him.
http://www.scoop.it/t/grief-and-loss
The digital signature was created with GnuPG 1.2.1, released in October 2002. GnuPG 1.2.2 was released in May 2003.
That sounds more like legal ignorance than technological ignorance -- which is probably worse.
Yes, as the file description says, this was released by Gregory Maxwell rather than Swartz, though it's tangentially related. Maxwell had assembled this collection of public-domain articles earlier, but hadn't decided whether to release it yet. After the Swartz/JSTOR case broke, he was spurred to release this torrent (the linked file description contains a statement from Maxwell explaining his motives).

I don't think Swartz's famous JSTOR collection has surfaced.
Great "Company History" page
You might look at the Archive Team for examples of distributed mirroring.
thanks for the copy/paste. I had the same reaction as you when I first saw pastebin is blocked. (about a year ago)

I still don't know why it's blocked and they don't even care to give a reason or explain what's going on.

we have seen worse things than pastebin. even `youtube` stayed blocked for months.
I think that when you're young and really smart you think you can reason your way through tough problems because for a lot of problems other people find difficult it's been true. Eventually you'll learn that for many of the toughest problems in life, no clever algebraic trick exists to sort it all out, and you either learn something or you go down the rabbit hole. My first rabbit hole was mortality (I lost sleep for months trying to reason my way around mortality), and my second was simple financial transactions. Relationships, kids, politics, justice -- anything involving other people -- tend to be intractable problems.

One of my "great insights" was figuring out that I didn't understand how I made decisions -- that when I consciously made a decision wasn't when I decided but more like when I became aware that some kind of unconscious tipping point had already been reached. When I have mentioned this to other people I have never ended up in an argument -- they either nod at me as though it's about time I figured this out, or they stop and think about it and agree.

This insight is almost a cliche in matters such as romance, but really it applies to almost everything. When you realize how little we know about our own consciousness, how our rational minds are constantly fooled into thinking they're in charge, the idea we can truly just reason our way out of every kind of problem quickly becomes laughable.

I'm very sad that such a brilliant guy killed himself, but looking at all his blog posts with dewy eyed admiration is morbid, silly, and perhaps even dangerous. Suicide is stupid and -- worse -- selfish. It's not cool or tragic or deep — just sad.

How to be productive, achieve great things, etc.? Hint: do not kill yourself.
Does Your Company Really Need a Custom Mobile App?
The short answer to this question is, “No.”
"Obama" aka Barry Soetoro aka Harrison J Bounel will not fix things. And he probably won't read your comment.. the best way to get things fixed is by trying to fix them yourself.

Talk to people, call your local congressman. Dicsuss these things with other intellectuals and let's all come to a solution which we can implement. Why are we waiting for the president to do something? He is not our Great Leader Führer.

I really wish people would stop acting like Obama is going to do anything different. He had 4 years, going into 5, still nothing has changed. If anything copyright infringement attacks are higher than ever. Unfortunately it's up to us if we want these problems fixed.
I'm no expert on the US way of things, but wasn't this prosecutor just doing her job according to the law, or as directed by government policy? She not a vigilante, or is that effectively the case in the US? Surely you guys need to got after the law or government in some way, not harass this woman who was doing what she was paid to do.

Ok, so you win, she gets fired. Another will simply replace her. You need to get the laws sorted out.

Get the laws changed. Or get laws to protect people. Do it in his name. I cant think of a better legacy. (Well, unless I am completely and utterly wrong about how US law stuff works. In which case, I hold up my ignorant hands)
I'll explain my spite. The following happened during this week. New DVD purchased by my wife, I knew the remote was going to have flat batteries (last used about 2 years ago) so I stuck the DVD in the Mac to use airplay to get it on TV. Grey checker board appears over the screen. I google it and find this is some kind of feature relating to DRM. So then spent time configuring a workaround via VLC and screen mirroring. An irritating use of 30 mins that reinforced my hatred to DVDs.
Not on my Android phone. When I click on the link, I get taken to a page where I am asked to create a Google+ Profile by entering my first and last name. There is no "skip" button or any other way to bypass this screen. If it wasn't clear, I dont want to create a Google Profile, let alone a G+ account.

I could try and logout, but this has certain implication on my Android phone I don't want, like possibly disconnecting Sync and Gmail etc.

Also, saying "you can, but..." is a weasely way to describe things. I think that having to do anything beyond clicking on a link in order to read a public webpage is an unacceptable barrier.
I built this to learn to use the YiiFramework. Let me know what you think!
True. I'd add: stop thinking the brain doesn't need help. It may be linked to a chemical imbalance. I have got to help my serotonin circuit or it will just get bad. Diet is really having a huge effect on emotions as far as I am involved. When I reached 40+, it went downhill and I needed serious supplementation to keep up. Aaron has serious diet related challenges. It didn't helped for sure.
It is sad that we live in an age where basically all freedoms are stripped from the people except for the upper-elite. All the lies, deceit, corruption, it is just wrong on so many levels.
I would vote against exposing his goal because we don't know why he had marked it private, unless there's some explicit indication that he would also like all of his online accounts made public.

You could contact Sean B. Palmer, as specified on the linked page: "For other stuff, email Sean. I'm sure he'll do something reasonable."

Regardless of whether you open his goal, you should freeze his account in some way to prevent someone from logging in.

If the contents of his hard drive are made publicly available, that will expose his login cookies (and potentially passwords), which means members of the general public would be able to access his Beeminder account. They might also gain access to email, which could be used to do a password reset and thus gain access.
eulogy from John Gruber : http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/01/12/aaronsw
I took from it that the suicidal person's time horizon got shorter and shorter until a moment before dying they're focussed on the most minute of details (literally crumbs) and unable to look further ahead.

There may also have been a sort of parallel between stomach pains and mental/emotional pain.
Most of the major publishers do now allow that kind of "self-archiving" on personal homepages and preprint repositories like arXiv. At least, IEEE, ACM, Springer, and Elsevier do, some of them as of fairly recently.

I've also self-archived some stuff that didn't formally permit it, and haven't heard a complaint. Given publishers' current political interests, I think it's pretty low-risk: I don't think publishers want the publicity that would come from suing an academic for posting a version of his own paper.