skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
4 million, 40 million - it's just bytes on a wire. I web scraped 35,000 articles from the AJCN recently, about 11 Gigabytes worth. I didn't ask permission - I just checked to see if my $10 temporary AJCN account could do it and set up an awk script generate the appropriate curl requests, so I have a lot of empathy for Aaron here.

Understand that Aaron's entire purpose was to Liberate Information that should have been free in the first place, so what he was doing was the exact opposite of abuse.

To the best of my knowledge, and from what I can recall in the case, the real issue was the Physical Break and Enter - which should have resulted in all of 40 hours of community service and an apology to MIT.
I had no idea it was that high. What does it apply to? If I'm falsely accused of robbery, should I expect to pay 1.5 million to defend myself?
White House rejects Death Star petition
Usain Bolt vs 116 years of Olympic sprinters
Ubuntu - New OS to replace Android
A really good talk on Major Depression, what it is (a terrible, paralyzing biological attack on the mind) and what it is not:

Robert Sapolsky (Stanford) : http://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc
I haven't followed Givewell recently, but they were involved in a fiasco over at metafilter where they were sockpuppeting to promote themselves and bad-mouth competitors. Unethical behavior of the founders aside, the devil is in the details and you should do your homework before falling in love with their elevator pitch.

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/15547/GiveWell-or-Give-em-Hel... is the main thread, but search metatalk for several follow-up threads.
I think we should start lobbying for a bill that makes copyright infringement a civil matter, not criminal. The Aaron Swartz bill.
None of these sorts of problems will ever get fixed unless society decides to get back to basics and back to reason and principles. I don't see any evidence of that happening.

The problem isn't with government per se, it's with the typical intellectual.
We need a website to coordinate open sharing of all research papers and books.

If Napster and Bittorrent could do it for music and movies, we can do it for research.

Various technologies are possible, but the key point is to spread these publications as easily as possible.

And regardless of what you think of "piracy," justice is all
the more on our side with these government-funded, unremunerated publications which are part of humanity's drive to push forward the frontiers of knowledge.
Web archive has it at Jan 2003, so it seems to be awfully close.
The trouble is, if Obama hasn't shut down Guantanomo, let Bradley Manning be held in conditions amounting to torture, et bloody cetera, what in hell makes you think he's going to fire and shame one of his best US Attorneys over a tragic death that she contributed to? It's probably more likely (though not very) that she will resign of her own volition.
Professional GTD project management
First Alfred v2 Beta Now Available for Mega Supporters
Yeah I see it now actually.
:( I'm so sorry for your loss. Aaron was a great man.
I think we need to start lobbying for a bill that decriminalizes copyright infringement and makes it purely a civil matter.
Probably has run up against API limits?
ASP.NET Web API Tracing and IDependencyScope Dispose Issue
Quite frequently, you will be blocked from using your assets to defend from such suits (your assets will be frozen), so good luck attempting to spend your $1.5 million anyway.

The book Three Felonies a Day talks about this (the main focus is how the government's tactics for working its way up the food chain to the apex criminal, which is not related to Aaron's story, but the author's exposition of costs and property restrictions are relevant). http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
Up indeed. It was "only" 84% in 1990.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargaining_in_the_United_S... and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044358930457763...
And over here in a socialist northern european country record numbers of small companies are going bankrupt, going into business for yourself is seen as a crazy risk, everyone is looking for a reliable j-o-b type job, retirement plans are still a healthy choice, and the middle class is holding steady. Are we really in such an antithetical situation from the U.S., or is this article part fabrication?
This whole case really makes me wonder. A lot of people are blaming the DOJ for leveling so many charges against him. Yet when you read the case, it would seem the only entity who wanted to punish him was the government.

Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but with the sum total of evidence, I would have thought he had a better than 70-80% chance of winning outright. The other possibility is he would get a lighter sentence, or simply cop a plea for lesser time. The fact he may or may not felt compelled to take his own life based on what he perceived was going to happen to him is shocking. Instead of playing the hand he was dealt, he simply folded and ended the game.

It makes me wonder what advice people were giving him where he truly believed he was going to jail for the rest of his life. His case could've been a huge landmark case against this sort of unlawful litigation. Sad, really sad.
No problem. You go on being not heated about this.
I was wondering about the same thing right now, it's EVERYWHERE but there.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/16fob6/why_are_al...
A big advantage for most people is that it is an automatic savings plan. Although you have more options investing on your own, many people would either spend it or forget to invest it.
Or, you know, you could just call your local Congressperson and complain. This is far more likely to have a direct impact on her job (performance of, or continued employment) than some random internet "naming and shaming." It is also far more likely to bring about the structural changes necessary to prevent this from happening again.

...as they have disabled the voice of the people by routing around jury trials.

Aaron had the option of going to trial. It was his constitutional right. He chose to kill himself instead.

...and they are appointed rather than subject to elections

The history of the South should provide enough justification for why federal prosecutors are never elected. You do not want enforcement of federal crimes subject to popular whims or to political pressures. Too often, political pressure leads to overzealous enforcement of criminal statutes, not reasoned enforcement (see, e.g., Maricopa County).
>Most of us who have to deal in multiple time zones have a Web Page/Dashboard/App of clocks with all the time zones that we deal with. 45' away from me I actually have a physical wall of clocks with cities noted above them.

... which you could dispense with if everyone went on the same time base.
You mean this http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/16fgi6/cofounder_of_red... ?

It was on top of the front page last night, a couple of hours after the news. I think they've moved on to more pressing matters. /srcsm
> Edited to add: many people in this thread want to name and shame the individual prosecutor in this case. That is seriously misdirected effort that is not going to solve the systemic problems

Disagree. Ostracizing and shaming everyone who supports such tactics is the reasonable way to mitigate this crap. Ostracizing and shaming worked for the civil rights movement, it can work here too.
Series A Crunch: Real vs. Pseudo Entrepreneurs
But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar.

Elsevier, Springer, Pearson et al. beg to differ. Which is probably the basis for the overdiligent prosecution.
Oracle Says Java Fix Coming Shortly
If you make such a stiff dough then knead by hand. I did the same thing to my Kitchenaid a few years ago when kneading a too-large batch of challah. I have not damaged the replacement sacrificial plastic gear again (it's designed so just that cheap component will fail without causing more damage). I have taken apart lots of machinery and the inside of that Kitchenaid was beautifully made. I hope you repacked the grease when you reassembled it.

For pastamaking, I have an Atlas hand cranked pasta roller/cutter with various size attachments I bought over 20 years ago. It' all steel construction and will probably work for another 20 years.
I was actually thinking about Rosa Parks when I made that comment. The reason that Rosa Parks became a well known civil rights figure was because she was well known and liked, not because she was the first... Just like Aaron
The research might be paid for by tax-payers money but journals aren't, they cost significant amounts of money to run (it typically takes a decade before a journal builds enough of a reputation to break even).

You could argue publicly funded researchers shouldn't submit to non-open journals, but that's not an argument for depriving publishers renumeration for the work they've done. The profit margin for both closed and open-access journals is typically around 20% (for some of the top-tier journals it goes upto 30%) - except with open-access journals it really is the taxpayer who is paying for the publication as the author's institution typically picks up the cost (as opposed to non-open journal where the cost is distributed among customers of the journal).
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Needs upload support.
> Naming and shaming Carmen M. Ortiz for destroying the life of a young man is exactly what is necessary

Agreed. She should lose her friends and family too, if they are good people. They should drop her out of their lives.
Very sad to hear this, RIP Aaron.
With all the sharing of movies and music -- aren't these articles being shared somewhere else on the internet?
Related on HN: "Should you TDD a MVP?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4986665

I'd answer this question pretty much the same way I answered the MVP question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4986852
>I'm on the east coast, and when working with people on the west coast I often just imagine them as working 12pm-9pm.

This is a good point. When you work with people in other time zones on a regular basis you tend to do the conversion to your time zone once and treat them like they were local people working odd hours.
> Or, you know, you could just call your local Congressperson and complain.

Almost certainly zero impact for this. Easily ignored. The prosecutor in this case, however, probably could not easily ignore her friends and family dumping her.
> Or anyone who is a patron of a university library system,
> which in this day and age means anyone who has been given
> access to a university network.

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. The current majority of people who read papers are, of course, going to be in colleges because they are the ones who have access in the first place.

I challenge you (in a very light-hearted, positive way) to demonstrate how to access papers as a member of the public. Most universities seem to require you to show up in person to use the library computers. You can subscribe to classes and get a student id to access literature, but then you no longer count as the public, do you?

Also, DeepDyve and ReadCube are scams. Anyone who reads a healthy amount gets charged out the wazoo. I didn't even know I had a wazoo!
The line I'll miss you all said everything.
I am ashamed. I am ashamed that I didn't do more to help aaron when he was alive. I am ashamed that I didn't reach out to him, donate money, donate time. I am ashamed that I've allowed this to go on, to go on in my name as an American.

I've always hated bullies, even as a kid. In elementary school I would come to the aid of those being abused. And over the years, I still get angry, but I so rarely do anything anymore. It's too big, too complex, too scary.

No more. It is time to shine light into the dark corridors of American power, to get personally involved. The only way for the abuse of power to continue is for us to ignore it.
Managing your professional projects better by using GTD methods.

Our personal spin on GTD using Cashboard.
Good for you for hanging in there. 2 years is not long at all considering it takes the average person at least 6 to 8 years to get an education and build any kind of career.

When I made the decision to switch I planned 3 years but life got in the way and eventually it took me 5 years before I was there. People sometimes comment 5 years is a long time to achieve your goals and I always answer that doing something you don't enjoy for 40 years is a lot longer.
Your problem is much more easily solved: remember to close the blinds.
>I figure in a few centuries, a lot of communities will be massive buildings without any sun exposure anyway.

I would be surprised if that turns out to be the case. People need sunlight to be healthy, and while you could certainly create artificial sunlight it would still cost resources, and there's a big benefit to having most people awake during roughly the same hours.
The prosecutors actually working the case were Scott L. Garland and Stephen P. Heymann. (source: http://ia600504.us.archive.org/29/items/gov.uscourts.mad.137...)
This

The system is supported by people. Someone is responsible.

Not naming the people responsible is only good for them and is probably what they want.
Going through the front page of HN today, it became clear to me how amazing Aaron Swartz was. Co-authoring RSS at age fourteen and then going on to help with the creation Markdown, even without mentioning his contributions to reddit it seems as though Aaron's influence on the web and how we use it will be profound for a long time to come.
Aaron Swartz: How We Stopped SOPA (Video)
Please downvote this. A torrent of the JSTOR content shouldn't be Aaron Swartz's legacy. With JSTOR, Swartz was making a larger point; if all you have is these docs, you missed it.
I had forgotten that Aaron was the 12 year old whom won the ArsDigita prize. Thank you Philip.
You should have one trustworthy cookbook

I'm late to the party, but wholeheartedly agree. My most read cookbooks are:

The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. Had it since graduating college 25 years ago and every page has butter/chocolate/etc stains.

The Dean & Deluca Cookbook David Rosengarten. Simple recipes, good explanations.

Classic Home Desserts Richard Sax. Amazing collection of sweets over the last 200 years.

Rick Bayless' Mexican Kitchen A lot of people think he's a blowhard. Whatever, the food's great.

I have lots more, but those are probably the most thumbed-through.

OK, one more :-)

The Village Baker's Wife too lazy to get up and look up the author, but it's a fair to good pastry book.

The really important thing about the above books is that they build a knowledge base. Once you have that, along with some experience, it's much easier to evaluate online recipes and see if they even have a chance of being good.
loved reading this. thanks for sharing it.
Wow that was intense. I have goosebumps all over...
Right. Given the time to index, it could indeed come from 2002.
I completely agree with the parent, and yes, I think trying (at least trying too hard) to "hack" life makes it much harder to accept the things you just can't change.
People go overboard punishing other people. Nobody wants to fix things. The copyright system is broken. Nobody in power wants to fix it. Lincoln had civil rights, Mr. Obama, please help fix this mess.
>See also California, when the day of the week would change while you were at work in the afternoon.

Bah. I live in California and that already happens.
> I'm trying to decide if you are being sarcastic :)

Bizarrely, no, for some reason I think not having to google "EST to PST" or "AST to MO" or figuring out if someone is in the same day you are is a good thing.

> For people who don't leave their own timezone very often (which is most people), there is thousands of years of background of the concepts of midnight, midday. There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.

Interestingly, I have not been alive on the order of millenia ,but decades. So has most of the currently living human population. A large portion of them have also been exposed to the marvels of electrisity, instant global communication, and the understanding that human beings have walked on another rocky body that is not this one.

Midnight and midday has no problem translating into UTC. My midnight is 6. My midday is 18. Neither are bound to the concept of 12 or 0, or am or pm, but to the times where the sun is highest or "lowest" in the sky. That happens at different times at different points on the globe.

> There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.

People universally wake up at 7am, go to work from 9 to 5, eat lunch at 12, and eat dinner at 6? The "expected" times to do things don't need to shift, and having a common number translated into local time zones for events doesn't matter if you are communicating across time lines because you are already distant. The only time time zone comes into effect is when you communicate or travel across these artificial bounds, and having to reconsolidate the local cycle to what you are used to is nothing compared to the present day overhead of translating times for meetings and communication across artificial bounds.
I have a feeling Anonymous will get on this case. Sadly enough this is not one of those cases where a few messages is going to "send the message."
Are they trying to imply that the non-profit organization JSTOR is comparable in any way to "tyrants and profiteers"?

JSTOR is a non-profit organization that allows digital access to articles that were previously inaccessible to anyone regardless of your will to pay. They allow full-text search across their millions of articles and are undoubtedly employing a number of programmers and designers.

They've just recently started doing the same with books, a process that is undoubtedly costly.

Is it so wild and crazy to expect that they be able to cover operating costs? If no one purchased articles from them, they'd never be able to continue scanning and processing new ones and have branched into books.

Over the last year, JSTOR has tried to slowly provide more free access to individuals. Alumni are soon going to be able to access their articles for free. Registered researches as well. And any individual can access three free articles every two weeks.

Websites such as this say to me: "How dare JSTOR have the audacity to attempt to fund their continued operations?"

Finally, let me point out that I do not think Aaron Schwartz should have been antagonized and potentially sentenced to 50 years. That kind of sentence is absolutely ridiculous.
Why is that? What happened?
To hell with this shit. I don't want what the copyright owners do not want to give. I don't want what they got by arm twisting authors. I don't want what they got for free but now want to make money off. They can die with this in their collective behinds. I will never submit anything to a closed journal, never ever.
I don't know. I've been coping with chronic depression for over a decade and I'm absolutely sick of hearing "oh, you're still young. It will get better". Reading that just pushes me towards the edge.

Even if I was to be "cured" somehow—is living half a life of misery worth living half an enjoyable life? Not to me. No amount of "happiness" can offset the misery.

I know everyone means well but it might not have the intended effect. At least not for me.
Having dealt with suicide of my brother I feel for you. It truly is a horrible thing to deal with... The pain never does go away. I hadn't heard of Aaron but have read some amazing articles about him since this story broke. Depression is terrible... Both dealing with it and watching someone else suffer. The feeling with both is just helplessness. Your son has done some truly amazing things in his life... I pray that these are the things that everyone remembers him for and not just the way he passed. My heart goes out to his family and friends, I see he had many.
We wish it didn't have to be that way. We wish that information, particular academic publications, could be share openly and legally.

Now, it's 1855. You want the slaves to be freed. By law. By right.

So, do you shut down the Underground Railroad?
We need to stop glorifying the prosector by rewarding them with political victories. I don't believe being a good DA equals being a good governor or senator. These two roles are mutually exclusive.

But I fear our citizenry is just too lazy to really understand all the different candidates and vote for the best one for the job. Instead they depend on abstract figures such as conviction rates, aggressive attitudes on crime, etc to determine who gets their vote.

Can be frustrating at times.

Additionally I just read that the prosector in Aaron's case, Carmen Ortiz, is being considered as a candidate for Governor of Massachusetts. It might be something for the hacker community in that state to organize and utilize the web (social media, etc) to make sure she does not go that far.
> TL;DR If Swartz's death is triggering suicidal thoughts, you must understand that this will pass, and life will be worth living.

This is a common refrain but it won't always really pass. Our society is so harsh at times (mainly due to you-know-who type of people), with the damaging effects staying strong until death, that leaving can be a reasonable choice. What I wish Aaron had done is left in a different way, perhaps to a country with no extradition treaty with the US. There are few of those places left however, as the US tightens its depraved grip on the whole world.
Which, for the record, is totally doable.
Why is anybody not fixing it? Nobody even talks about it. A large majority of the tech world supported Obama. But the issue of piracy, prosecution and law never ever came up. Why is nobody bothered? When will this shit end?
Are you an academic? You're right that their arms are being twisted. I can't have an academic career and not publish in closed journals. I hate it and I don't know what I can do about it. If I only publish in open access journals I'm just offering my career up as a meaningless sacrifice.
Petition to Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...

http://wh.gov/E3v1

Needs 25,000 signatures by February 11.

Please help us get it there. Thank you.
Their streaming offer blows for "mainstream", popular content. And.... many items I had queued in the instant/streaming queue -- and not just "big ticket" items -- have been becoming unavailable.

I find this ironic, in that just a year or two ago their emphasis was on streaming, to the point of attempting to spin off the disc-based segment into a separately named/branded company.

If they hadn't kept the discs, my (uninformed, and somewhat pissed off) bet is that the "Netflix" brand would be close to if not contracting, at this point.

It sucks to be the middleman, when either end can find a way around you. (In this case, primarily the content owners, in various fashions.)
The torrent isn't his legacy but rather the spirit of his activism.
Trolling, move along...