skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This still side-steps the question of the use of discretionary powers in deciding to prosecute this case in the first place.
You have better ways to ask for explanations. Not the OP but I can give some reasons for Javascript and Node.js to not be the best option for a rewrite if the goal is longterm maintainability:

- js / node.js is very young, it might fade out of fashion, and in 10 years it is not impossible that good coders in js will be hard to find.

- Readability and simplicity are prominent in this context, and js has a syntax that is less than optimal in this regard.

- Maintenance tooling may be lacking.

If I were to choose a language for a project that I new will be big and will need care in 10 or 20 years, I'd hesitate, and maybe choose Java (which I hate) or Python (which I hate less). If in a risk-things mood, I'd give Go a try.
Overtone is a SuperCollider client written in Clojure. SuperCollider itself has a much larger library of useful code relevant to music theory.

The guy who wrote Overtone did so while he was learning music, but he isn't actually a composer. SuperCollider was developed mostly by academic musicians with a deep knowledge of experimental and traditional computer music practice. So it and the Quarks (packages) community have a wealth of code to explore.

http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/
http://quarks.sourceforge.net/
JSTOR, the offended party, sorted it all out with Aaron out of court. It was an issue of copyright infringement, not theft, but Ortiz characterised it as such. She decided to pursue it out of some misguided and rabid attempt at sticking Aaron's head on a pike a a warning to others, and to make her CV look good.

There are fingers to point, and they need to be pointed in the right direction.
Technical introduction to Bitcoin by Brian Warner (2011)
I really don't think that's how it works any more than seeing one's siblings naked is a turn on. With the disclaimer that of course narcissism and incest are some people's thing, but while the former may be more common than the latter I certainly don't think it's an automatic inclusion of homosexuality.
Git Tips And Workflows, Round 2
Well, your claims are largely silly.

While much porn isn't of particularly good quality, lots of porn is designed for couples. And it's great! You should try it with your wife.

Again, you've been watching the wrong porn. Plenty depicts beautiful sexual intimacy.
Very true. I love CoffeeScript very, very much. It's my favorite language - I like it even better than ruby, if you believe me! I like using indentation instead of stupid 'end's that only God knows are ending a loop or a def or something else, I like the use of ... instead of * (for splats), and a few other things.

But, as much as I like CS and hate (really hate) JS, I have to agree with you wholeheartedly. You must know JavaScript well. Variable/function hoisting won't bite you in CS, but other JS idiocies will.

Read Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts" at least twice (and take a lot of notes). It's the best no-bullshit book on JavaScript (the language, not "how to use JavaScript in Node/front-end web design") around.
This was posted here last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046178 (slightly different link, but same text)
Direct democracy is also more plausible in an age where you only have 10k voters (we exclude the women, the poor, foreigners, slaves, the unsound, etc) and the issues of the day are pretty simple to understand and become informed about. The classical Athenians didn't have to worry about smog, so they didn't need chemical, industrial, or environmental specialists that deal with these things to come up with potential plans. It's not to say they didn't have issues, just that the scope is much, much broader now.
A bit of a tautology there: If the expert witness that was on Aaron's side wasn't planning to testify he was not guilty... he wouldn't be the expert witness on Aaron's side.
Explain me how a master password isn't trading security for conveniency

Entering any password is trading security for conveniency. After all, the most secure server is the one that won't allow anybody to log on, or even better, a shut-down machine without a network cable!

Security is always a trade-off, and if you can't understand that, then maybe your mindset is as broken as anyone's.
Unless you are lucky enough to work on only your own code, that it's so easy to write bad code is a massive problem.

My big beef with js is that there's no 'right' way to lay out your code. Trying to figure out how a js module works is always a unnecessarily massive pita.
Link seems incorrect - Pasting it here didn't work either (HN eats the ' in don't)
Written on the year Aaron Swartz was born. Very poignant.
Apollo Robbins, professional pickpocket
My father was in AA for nearly forty years and I had the opportunity to attend several meetings with him. I too thought the meetings and people were, at times, weird, and for similar reasons as you. Some people always referred to the H.P. as Jesus, and others as simply God or something less specific. But the one thing to keep in mind is that you and I were merely observers. We didn't feel in danger of being totally destroyed by alcohol. If we viewed AA as a program that could save our lives, our experience and opinions would be different.
Just one little anecdote for old times' sake. I used a sequential dialer to scan for interesting numbers in the country capital. After hitting one particular number the phone to which the modem was connected rang. This was before the days of anr indicating that whoever backtracked that number in less than a minute had quite a bit of pull. The guy on the other side asked me what we were doing calling that particular number. The phone actually felt hot in my hand and I realized: Busted. So on the spur of the moment I said I was trying to connect to a bbs and he said 'don't call this number again' and hung up. I was still shaking an hour later.
And yet the Open Access petition [1], almost a year old with nearly twice as many signatures, hasn't been addressed at all. Not even a "we're working on it."

This whole thing makes me very cynical about the white house petition site - it seems like they're using it to score political points on easy topics, or in this case make jokes, but I don't see any real progress. Has anything significant ever happened as a response to one of these petitions?

[1] https://wh.gov/6TH
Those First Steps
Jx9: An Embeddable Scripting Language based on JSON with an API similar to LUA
You would hope that, if it's true that this business was compliant with letter and spirit of the State law, the California States Attorney would make a polite request to their Federal counterpart asking that the case be dropped as not in the public interest. If they don't, it seems like the State is hanging him out to dry.
Good suggestion. I just added it to the full page view and will consider adding it throughout the site in the next sprint.
Doesn't matter. Just require that peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly funded research also be posted on the arXiv. This is how it's done anyways in physics.
Remember that PACER is not intended as a site to research cases, which tends to be how many lawyers use it. It's meant as a site to organize electronically submitted court documents for the judges and the lawyers for a single case, instead of a paper file. The people involved in a case are going to be looking at all the documents for one case, and that is all nicely organized on one docket page. "Following a case from court to court" is not the intent of the system.
Microchipping kids: Nice for parents, not for privacy
The original thesis concerned 10 years term; however I'd agree the number doesn't change much in principle.

I can totally understand offing yourself in despair, but let's not pretend it's a rational choice. Nobody has missed their death yet, there are sometimes good reasons to rush it but this is not one of them.
When Do We Code?
How Japanese Kids Learn To Multiply
Will a "while True" not lock up an Erlang thread?
Granted these petitions are placebos (and have been from the start) for average Joe to think they're somehow influencing White House policy, childish crap like this doesn't help the platform in any way.
this seems like a good service, but they seem to mainly provide cutesy and modern names whereas I'm looking for something more traditional, similar to what I put in my origin al post.
I can tell already this won't be a popular sentiment around here. Also, I want to preface this by saying I wasn't around in bbs era, and maybe my reaction would be different if I had been.

But this kind of irks me: "...ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?"

Did the author ever take a look behind the eyes of the people whose systems he was breaking into and wonder why they didn't react well to having their privacy violated?

Perhaps I'm being unfair, but what I get out of it is "I'm smarter than you, so I'm entitled to do whatever I want." And I get that the author was treated poorly in school, and he has my sympathy for that (I was too). But that attitude of entitled superiority is dangerous. It can and has been used to justify really awful things. I don't think this manifesto should be lionized.
Comments already exist. You can comment while logged in and viewing an alias. You can use them to post alternatives for now. This is something that will be considered as a new feature though in our next sprint.
I agree. After getting detected and stopped the first couple times, I would have preferred him to be a bit more clever.

And certainly when it gets to the point you're worried about being identified via video surveillance, it is time to take a radically different approach.
7 years, for downloading articles that should probably be in the public domain? Well, that's not prosecutorial overreach at all.
> I'm not sure what is more disturbing; the fact that someone is capable of disparaging a human being who has passed away and is incapable of self-defence, or the fact that some people apparently agree with the diatribe as witnessed by the upvotes.

The parent article post is dead - it's been clearly demonstrated that this man has a great deal of people on the internet capable of defending him after death.
SimpleAI: Artificial Intelligence with Python
Low risk. Sheep obey, sheep buy, sheep don't think, sheep don't ask questions. Governments like sheep. Thinkers are dangerous.

My favorite Designers Republic poster sums this up rather nicely: http://i.imgur.com/W1Egh.jpg
Well-picked, I missed that altogether. Publicly-visible voting is very bad for a fair system. On a re-read, I notice another fundamental flaw: "voting on every issue is too onerous, so voters will assign their votes to someone, a 'politician' to vote for them" -> "a single bad vote will scupper that politician's support". If the voters don't have the time to inform themselves and vote on every issue, then how on earth are they going to have the time to analyse each of their selected politician's choices? There's no real offload here.
The FBI Needs Hackers, Not Backdoors
Maybe it's similar for you to how many people were surprised by their level of grief, when Princess Diana died. Girls growing up in the 80s grew up on the fantasy of being like her, chosen and given wealth and fame and becoming a queen. And then she didn't buckle up and the entire childhood fantasy died right there with her in the tunnels of Paris. This trauma has changed England's emotional landscape for good - no more stiff upper lip.

So you saying 'Aaron is what I wish I was' is the correct analysis - Aaron had everything that we here strive for - he was recognized for his potential when he was a teenager, he had been accepted by YC, was part of a successful exit, was a highly respected and idealistic Internet activist and intellectual... These are the goals people strive for when they tell themselves 'if I only could achieve XYZ, then I will be happy - I will put all my energy into XYZ, because it will eventually be worth it'.
The reality is more complex. Even with all these achievements, the highest potential that we can strive for can be destroyed. In his case by the beast of depression when driven by senseless persecution through the political apparatus.
"The traditional Tory voter are viewed as having little to no care for the working class too"

Not really - working class people in the UK have been voting for the Conservatives in large numbers since at least 1979.

Edit: Some numbers to justify this from the last general election:

"In the C2 class 37% voted Conservative compared to 29% for Labour, and in the DE group 31% voted Conservative and 40% Labour."

NB C2 is defined as "lower working class", DE as "temporarily or long-term unemployed".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/higher/modern/uk_gov_politics/...
"allegedly hacking into [...] without paying the required fees

"Crime against 'intellectual property', goddammit! Let him rot in prison, I say! That content was paid-for by tax dollars, and nobody lost a dime because he never redistributed it, but so what? It's the principle: if you break property laws, you should always go to prison."
No: Erlang has an internal scheduler that makes sure that no process can lock the whole thing up.

It's not impossible to wedge Erlang, of course, it's just not quite so easy.
Its an addictive personality expression action. People who are/have been addicted will find themselves something to addict to. coke, ethanol ... incoming texts and facebook ... tv, sports, etc ... hacker news, etc ...

You get to watch three groups, addicts who like being addicted loving more and more who make fun of group2, addicts who consider inanimate and amoral (amoral as in no moral, not bad moral) tools to be worthy of preaching against, and the majority being nonaddicts who find both the interruptions annoying, the touts annoying, and the preachers annoying. A pox on all their houses. The insight is all three groups like to pretend they're the only group that exists.

I would advise that people with addictive personalities probably have a much higher quality of life if they stick to watching TV, pro sports, facebook, and texting, than meth heroin or alcohol. Addicts becoming addicted to texting is not a bug, its a feature... In that way I don't really see a problem. I would advise people with electronic addictions to recognize its a personality bug and shy away from temptations like alcohol ... if you're going to go thru life as an uncontrollable addict, better twitter than meth or better facebook than fortified wine.
There are no reasons to use busy waiting in Erlang. Ever.
Well, again, most of the dependencies we used in Ruby did not see any update in the 3 years we've been using them. We also reported several bugs in those libraries/dependencies which were never fixed. This led us overtime to use our own branch of all the significant dependencies we had (including the MySQL gem for EM, the redis gem... and several other key ones).

Most of node modules are still in active development. As I've stated in the blog post, that's a pro and con, but we estimated that the pro was greater than the con :)
While I applaud the work OP put into this, it makes no sense to me. Why?

The first thing is that why do this instead of using Google to find out the most popular niche sites? If I type in "restaurant forum" in Google, surely the first 4-5 pages will contain useful information, no?

Secondly, people have to remember that this list exists when they are thinking of ideas. First thought in anyone's mind is to Google "restaurant forum". You aren't going to overcome that line of thinking in this community - you just aren't. The only hope you have is to augment it by providing information that Google doesn't offer. What's the chance of that?

Third - let's assume that you get a lot of interest on this thread and people submit 500+ links. Awesome :) Who will take it upon themselves to categorize these and present them in a helpful way? Surely you wouldn't expect anyone to visit a page with 500+ links on it and search one by one through the links to see if one meets his/her needs, would you? If you did a page search for "restaurant" on this page, a site like http://www.fohboh.com/ would not show up b/c it doesn't have a descriptive URL or tagline next to it. So someone has to take this list and make it usable. Who will do that?

Fourth - who will curate this list to ensure that only the "right" sites are added (rather than someone submitting their own site for SEO purposes)? It would have to be a mod b/c OP cannot edit others' submissions. Can you get a mod to agree?

Lastly, who will curate this list over time by adding, removing, and editing it? New sites are always on the horizon and thus will need to be added over time. Current sites will die or fade in popularity. Someone will have to be on top of it. HN doesn't have "sticky threads". Even if it gets voted to the front page, it will eventually/soon fade to the 2nd, 3rd, etc. Only a certain number of stories are maintained in perpetuity (at least in the "More" button). How will you ensure that it stays alive?

Sorry - the "actual benefits received" vs. "how much work will be required" just makes it untenable to me.
imho the american mentality is a hysterical and one can observe this in esp. in media induced reactions.

A friend pointed out Aaron Swartz is our Lady Di of the hacker culture and it fits nicely.

The US (loony) laws and the US "justice system" is fueled by that blinding hysteria in which commensurability is just a muted voice of reason far away.

I wish Bradley Manning would receive this fierce reaction of an actual influential lobby like us. And he didn't take the easy way out.
Thank you for writing this piece.

I've read it (at least) annually for the past 10 or so years.
There are no reasons to use busy waiting anywhere. This isn't what we're discussing, though.
Firstly, thank you for talking about it - I do not mean to argue with you about your own thoughts. But I think differently.

When I said life has no purpose, I didn't mean it was futile or nihilist or anything else. I mean that words like "purpose" simply do not apply. Purpose is an anthropological term and is meaningless in this context. To what "purpose" do mountains rise, volcanoes erupt, meteors explode in the sky? It is inappropriate to try to find purpose in these things. Purpose is a human concept.

This applies to life too. We are here because we, by whatever crazy turns of chance and happenstance, are here. There is no other answer; indeed that is not even one. We may be wiped out by a meteor tomorrow and the universe cares not one whit.

Why, you ask? Who on earth are you asking? There is no "why". Why did the coin come up heads or tails? Why does someone live and someone else die in an automobile accident? Why is that rock here, and not over there? There is no "why". For there to be a reason, someone needs to have thought about it, and there is no someone. There are causes and effects, yes, but no "why".

So what do we do next? We do what we are programmed to do, after thousands of generations of trial and error - we love one another, treat each other with kindness, some of us screw up, but mostly we try to pull together to improve our world and the lives of the people we love. Because that is all we are, animals with organic computers for brains and this is the program we are running, and there's no "why" for that, either.
Don't forget "Ghost in the Wires" ... the story of Kevin Mitnick's hacking (and eventual capture).
That is completely true, you can't treat CoffeeScript as a replacement for learning Javascript in fact I'd say you need to have a pretty strong understanding of JavaScript to really use CoffeeScript well. That said CoffeeScript does some nice things to prevent typical small js errors for newer devs.
It's great to see progress on this. Both PyPy and Py3000 have been just curiosities for me; a combination of the two is a very compelling case for making the move away from Python2.7.
Art0032 – How Does Creativity Matter?
The Endless Frontier: U.S. Science and National Industrial Policy (part 1)
Ah, so it uses preemptive rather than cooperative multitasking. I find that locking the whole thread is usually an error, so preemptive multitasking wouldn't help much there, and I like how cooperative multitasking lets me reason about the program, but I can see the benefits in both approaches.
If you think the President is a robotic extension of Congressional will and obliged to enforce all laws as written, they you have failed to grasp the fundamental principle of divided government. As a matter of very explicit design, executive discretion is the primary check on wayward legislative power.
I disagree. I think suicide is a very rational choice in many situations. In fact, there are too many situations where it is a rational choice to even come close to listing them all. A few off the top of my head would be:

1. If a person is dying of cancer with no known cure and medical costs are hurting the dying's family's future, that's a helluva rational choice in my opinion.

2. If a man is facing an imminent and lengthy jail sentence and is claustrophobic, suicide is perfectly rational.

If a man is in a situation where he foresees no way out for a lengthy period and chooses not to be in that situation, suicide is a perfectly rational choice.
The "Red October" Campaign
This is crazy! WHY? JSTOR dropped everything, why is the Secret Service even involved?
"Write everyday" is bad advice
Scala Liftweb : Use Forgot Password Inbuilt Functionality to send Email
Google prepares Search 2.0
I don't see how finding JavaScript programmers is going to be a problem in 10 years... even if they started now it would take, at least, that long to fully deprecate the language out of the browser. NodeJS may go away but I think betting on JavaScript going away are some pretty long odds.
Why LinkedIn should acquire AngelList
You're right Kliment. I was too harsh, only due to my anger. It's also a sore point to me and quite a few of my friends.

I'm sorry, cmsmith.
A friend of mine sells building-scale air purification systems in Asia and this is definitely the case. The nicest new buildings in wealthier Chinese cities have seriously heavy duty air filtration systems and are built with heavy duty windown and door seals.

The urban middle class buys portable air filtration systems, it's a huge market.
while(true) would be pretty bad form in a Node program too, and doesn't actually seem to be a big problem in practice for people.
It's asking me to log into their site to read the article.
We don't know whether these children will do better or worse in an unhappy married family. And certainly we don't have reasons to think that marriage (the piece of paper) is the casuation for the gap, not merely a correlation.
While the untimely death Aaron is tragic, the constant fawning over celebrities on Hacker News is frequently depressing. Both in the sense that we, as a community, are not able to rise above it and, rather more selfishly, that I am not one of them.

While, to a large extent, I already knew everything that you'd written, I'd like to thank you for reiterating it.
gte910h would I be summarizing you correctly into something like: you and I are the boss of our phones, rather than the other way around?

Or some folks do what their phone tells them, in contrast we tell our phone what to do.

This has a HUGE user interface impact. Active vs passive is probably the biggest UI issue in computing today. Even more important than the conversion from WIMP to touch. Whos the boss and whos the servant, exactly?

"I shall bend this tool to serve my will, and my will only, or it shall be broken" said in DnD wizard voice, err, I mean old time unix wizard voice. Same thing many times.
Drones are more effective at empire expansion.
Cool stuff, I' think we need more direct concurrent to LUA in the field of embedded scripting languages.
Show HN: Why I left Facebook (for good)
Deploying Oracle ADF Applications on the Oracle Java/Database Cloud
That's pretty much what I thought.