skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If your willingness to persevere exceeds the willingness of society to punish you

This is exactly the situation that I don't think Kerr's article addresses. He appears to assume that it will always be possible to deter civil disobedience with some punishment that is within reasonable bounds. The question by gnosis that started this whole subthread was basically, what if that assumption is not true? There are only two options at that point:

(1) The punishment goes beyond reasonable bounds, because deterrence is given priority over being reasonable; or

(2) The punishment remains reasonable, so it doesn't deter, so the issue keeps coming up; and at some point, as you note, it will end up having to be addressed politically.

Judges need to stay within the limits set by maximum sentences and sentencing guidelines, even if the judges believe that this punishment is not enough to deter the unwelcome action.

You are basically trying to say that #1 should not be pursued, and I agree with you. However, note that staying within the maximum sentencing limits is different from staying within "reasonable" limits on punishment. In the Aaron Swartz case, the maximum sentence allowed by the law and the sentencing guidelines was way beyond reasonable by almost anybody's estimation.
Instagram is heavily sharded, so they've pretty much already given up a snapshot view of all their data anyways.
Thanks a lot. I do consider pull to save the primary action. Double tap or shake gives you the menu, but I agree this can be simpler. It would pain me to put instructions in the app though...
Things users don’t care about
Or, what's more likely for most people: Kids with AP Credits Will Now Have Slightly More Debt After Graduating From Dartmouth.
But I really want it to stop. I hate not being able to just "copy link address" off of the results page
This list would be a lot more helpful with some description of why he thinks these are mistakes.
I really have no stance on this (in that I don't side with Aaron or the prosecutors in the case), because I don't have all the facts. Some of you may say that that is a stance, but I just don't see it that way. I am aware, however, that what I'm about to say may be considered controversial given the nature of how this case is being reported--and how it's being responded to.

Whenever we have shootings like the one in Newtown, we talk about gun control and mental health care. There is always that talk about mental health care. But when someone commits suicide, regardless of cause, those same mental health advocates are nowhere to be found. Why?

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who have it worse than Aaron Swartz did, but they don't go killing themselves. Some people lose their spouses and children in house fires, along with all of their belongings. They spiral into depression, lose their jobs, go back to living with friends or family, see nothing but bleak prospects and they ultimately pull out of it. Others lose their fortunes and things they've spent their lives working for, a few of them do commit suicide, like the ones after the 2008 financial collapse, but some don't. There are people who commit crimes and know they face stiff prison sentences, like life sentences or death penalties, but they don't kill themselves.

I could go on and on about how much worse it is for people in third-world countries, for those who don't know where their food and clean water are going to come from day in and day out. I could go on about the people who are brutally bullied, day in and day out.

Many of these people, some in arguably worse condition than Aaron Swartz was in prior to his death, don't kill themselves. So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame?

Yes, prosecutors were overreaching and giving him hell, but they didn't kill him. He killed himself. Hell, there are people who are currently serving long or life sentences in prison who are innocent of the crimes brought against them, but they're fighting and hoping from within their cells. Many of them are not committing suicide.

All I'm trying to say is it takes a lot more than a prison sentence, 6 months or 50 years, to get most people to kill themselves. And yet hardly anyone is talking about mental health care.
Terrible, how?
Pricing wise, it is nice to give people some money. Perhaps 30% for the first 3000 dollars? It is just nice for beginners to get hooked, and get some money, even if it is just a token.
Should we redirect them to Girls?
A closely related thing is happening in the Western Australian desert: http://www.quora.com/Australia/What-is-going-on-in-the-Weste...

Mining companies operate 24hrs a day with huge lighting rigs illuminating the pits. One of the motivating reasons for the automation work I did for Rio Tinto was that autonomous trucks can drive perfectly happily in the dark, saving a fortune in energy bills.
I took an exam where the median score is typically zero

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathemati...
But they went public with it on May 2011 and made their decisions based on that. You're ignoring the fact that they are a well funded startup with industry ties to large chip manufactures.
I feel for you bro! VirtualBox may unfortunately also be an especially tough case if you are the developer of a 3-party extension, because it gets updated so often. It is tough to keep up.

I run a 3-party extension ( http://www.vbox.me/ ) my self, and we frequently get left behind in the update cycle. When a new release of VirtualBox is made all users of the old version gets an error messages when starting it, asking them to update. Then we have to work as hell to get our code updated before all the users come nocking.
From the linked Associated Press article:

Rather than award credit for an introductory course to incoming students who got the highest score on the AP test, the department gave those students a condensed version of the Dartmouth course's final exam. Ninety percent failed, Tell said. And when those students went on to take the introductory class, they performed no better than those who did not have the high AP test scores.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1696110...
I think hardcore OOP is highly overrated outside of a few use cases where it does seem to work well: graphical user interfaces and certain kinds of business logic.

In those two cases, OOP works because it correctly models the underlying problem.

For GUIs for instance: A window is an object, a button is an object contained within a panel that is an object contained within a window... and so on. All of these are "drawable," and can receive mouse clicks, etc. OOP models that well.
Nothing is 'ideal' when it comes to scalability -- but if you're looking for adequate, PostgreSQL is the best tool out there right now.

Instagram seems to agree.

You don't need to worry about solving for scalability until you actually have scaling problems, which most startups will never face. Yet, weirdly, I've seen many companies sink massive amounts of time and money into solving future scaling issues that never materialize.

Solve the demand problem first, and use that to pay to fix the supply problem.

Especially, when you get Facebook-big, you hit a new wall of scaling challenges, and this wall will be very specific to your company. Solving those challenges is tough and expensive, which is just fine, because Instagram-level growth brings with it the money to pay for solving those problems.
The last three months on Foursquare
"smart programmers using this language are doing things people thought were impossible."

I think the fact that a great number of new, hip, who'd-have-thought-it-was-possible languages are written in C answers this one rather nicely. Not to mention hip new databases, hip new web servers . . .

"the language features make you more productive"

I think it's precisely this claim that is being called into question. I daily see new language features that strike me as literally marvelous. But when it comes to those features actually leading to increased productivity -- well, "ls /usr/bin" tells a different story about the productivity of people working in this language.
It's been like this for a while. A Twitter friend of mine created a simple bookmarklet that you can click which will remove the extra data and allow you to right-click and copy the URL alone. You can drag the bookmarklet from here to your bookmark bar http://techkp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/copy-pasting-googles-se...

Click the bookmarklet before copying the link to get the actual URL.
I guess that's just the Google Drive web interface - ChomeOS is designed to use webapps exclusively. Linux users can also access Google Drive on the web.
Why take any classes that aren't required? I get the impression that "education" is now a luxury and most kids today need to get to a degree as fast as possible so they're merely saddled with debt instead of totally crippled. In that mindset, the only purpose of high school is to either get into college or get into some vocational training as soon as possible.

Maybe only rich people are applying to Dartmouth, though.
Some of the more cynical responses to this article ignore the fact that AP credits at Dartmouth were already strictly limited by departments on a case-by-case basis. I went in with 11 AP credits and was able to graduate at most a term early.

Here are some more concrete numbers on how this change affects early graduation:

- Students arrive with an average of three credits;

- Nonetheless 80% of students take 4 years;

- 20% of students will be required to enroll for an extra term.

The net result is $4 million in extra income. [1] As a point of reference, Dartmouth's endowment is over $3.4 billion.

I also want to point out that this discussion ignores reasons against AP at the high school level, which has caused some high schools to stop offering them.

[1] http://www.dartblog.com/data/2013/01/010556.php
I don't know, but I just read that on his "howtoget" and I'm eager to see if anyone else does know.
I think that's a reasonable process, and probably the best you can do with current tools. But even though it's reasonable given your software stack, it's still much more involved than just using gdb on C code.

(Note that I'm not arguing that it's never worthwhile to use a higher level language to drive C code, just that I think Katz has a valid point regarding debugging.)
LiberTweet is out: Let's Free Twitter once for all
The western European model seems great if you want a life safely doing what has always been done.

And the American model seems great if you're part of the small percentage who are not merely differently but excellently different. Further problem: if everyone's special, no-one is.
No problem. In that case, does the "ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save" setting not do what you want?
There are other women here. I know of a few names but will not list them. If they don't want to call attention to it, that's their choice. A lot of the women here downplay their gender, and with good reason.
$X * 2 paychecks/month * 12 months > mortgage payment
In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be ultra-capable because they had to pick up anyone's slack at any time

It's important to note that in this sense, "polyglot" refers to the collective group -- ie, the Obama campaign had numerous talented people with a huge variety of skills in-house -- vs the individual sense of the word.

Not to say that there weren't incredibly talented generalists, but when you have a team of this size (dozens of designers and front-end developers, engineers focused on the back-end APIs, a team dedicated to data integration, a handful of dedicated ops and DBAs) the ability of individuals to specialize in an area could be a strength.
Probably these dudes: http://www.yesworld.com/
Oh, I trust they understand what they're up to. It's just not advice everybody should follow blindly.
Top Business Tips For Young Entrepreneurs Before Launching Your Start-up
I don't see how that's relevant to my main point: Important People can purchase immunity. The laws simply don't apply to them. The telecoms broke the law, then purchased retroactive immunity after the fact.
Yes... when they went public they were surprised by the demand and changed their plans.

I really have no idea what in the world you think you are getting at.

edit: Ah, nice comment history. Not all there in the head I take it.
I live in Minot, ND, and previously worked at the Menards here in town.

Right now, they're flying people in from parts of Michigan, and I believe there are others that are being flown in from a store in Minnesota that's currently being rebuilt.

A Taco Johns here in town is starting people at $13/hr. McDonalds is at $10/hr and a $500+ hiring bonus. One of our nicer Italian restaurants in town just closed down as they couldn't find enough people to work. Kohls just built in town (the building has been done since November), but they won't open up until mid-March, as they still haven't found enough workers.

There's a lot of potential for businesses here, but the lack of workers and reasonably priced housing really hurts. The housing isn't hurting only because of the influx of oil workers. It's hurting worse since the largest city close to the oil had 1/3 of it flooded in June of 2011. Not everyone has rebuilt.
Yes, I understand. I don't mean that all such remote workers are bad. What I mean is, that kind of thing is a filter that removes good people who wouldn't do that kind of thing. Developers do much better work when there isn't anybody spying on their shoulder. It is the customers who get worse results when they don't understand that (except for programmers who won't work unless somebody is looking at their shoulder... but then you really don't want to hire those).
Of course the C language and compilers are so simple, and C sits at such a low level (right above assembly) that few things can go wrong in it (compiler bug) or under it (cpu bug). As people jokingly say, C is just a high level assembly language. If one tried to re-invent a language with C's properties, one would come up with C, again.

For these reasons, I too expect C to remain the most performant and reliable high-level language baring any major change in computer architectures.

Debating this fact would be the same as debating whether assembly is the most performant and reliable low-level language or not. Of course it is. (Preemptive reply to the doubter: as an example my 64-bit assembly implementation of MD5 is 75% faster that a 64-bit C implementation: http://www.zorinaq.com/papers/md5-amd64.html )

And of course, performance and reliability don't always need to be #1 priorities, therefore, as the author says, "most every popular language has uses where it's a better choice."
Ah, I did notice you were talking about fast reactors, then hastily slid back to thermal ones! Sorry. I guess my error reflects the fact that I think the thermal LFTR is more important.

Re passive cooling in sodium breeder reactors: that's certainly interesting. I'd not heard about this.
I just can reiterate its an exceptional product and helps a lot to manage VirtualBox everything in unfriendly, self-hosted environments.
That was a great talk, and an impressive demo of feature generation.
Why do I want to post a longer Tweet? And if I do, why don't I just post somewhere else and link it on Twitter?
Then you use it?
>I don't know a lot of what's out there on the horizon, and there are some efforts to create a better C.

Are there any efforts to extend C to add very simple/light objects, and perhaps string handling?
That doesn't tell you anything (it could be hard to get 56), and your numbers appear to be wrong[1]. Site below says ~70/108 is the general threshold for a 5 on both calc exams.

[1] http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ap-tests-preparation/499...
The issue is USD is losing its status as the reserve currency and declining exchange rate with BRIC countries are making consumer goods more expensive. Chinese RMB used to be 8:1 in the late 90's, now it's 6:1 and declining.

Also due to several rounds of quantitative easing, the Fed injected a lot of money into the money supply. However, banks are not lending as much money to stimulate the economy which doesn't trickle down to ordinary folks; part of the reason being big banks such as BoA and Citi needed to bolster their capital reserve against their illiquid toxic assets from the real estate speculation bubble. As a result, QE1/2/3 caused real inflation to money supply while the stock market and personal savings account returns have remained anemic.

I remember I was excited when I got a six-figure job, then I realized that 80K in 1998 amounted to 110K in 2011 and realized that inflation was real.
Wait, why will they have more debt than non-AP credited kids?
I ordered a raspi and made an android controlled toy car. Now my company has ordered 6 and we will be giving them away at PyCon this year.

Gauging by how badly I wanted one before they came out I could have told you they'd sell significantly more than 10,000
In the UK you issue a NOTAM, theres lots of information on http://ukhas.org.uk/guides:faq
Aaron Swartz and the Freedom to Connect
Twist ending: Dartmouth reconsiders decision to drop AP credits
Crowdfunding perhaps?? Maybe contact frequent users and ask for some donations. Get the word out people!
I agree that the hyper-parameter selection is a huge pain, personally though, I am more familiar with the work of Snoek et al. [1] from NIPS in December last year. He even distributes a neat Python package that will perform Bayesian optimisation combined with MCMC [2] so that even people, like me, that are not yet familiar with Gaussian Processes can deploy it easily.

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.2944v2

[2]: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jasper/software.html
Anecdotal evidence, I tested out of a bunch of courses with AP credits. The only ones I actually went directly to the next level were Economics. I scored 5's on micro and macro and skipped the 100 level of both. I did the intermediate and it went just fine (I got A's). Could I pass the final exam for the previous level with a 90% right when I got there? I am really not sure. Presumably I would have been studying and preparing for that weeks in advance and the content would be fresh in my mind (not after a summer of not studying). I don't feel like I missed anything and saved a lot of time (and money).
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ahmetal...
Getting a "please reload page" with an image of Admiral Ackbar yelling "It's a Trap". Guessing this isn't the help the OP originally needed...
Machine Learning :)
2013 Is Year The Infographic Comes Out of Closet
Nice. I used the original version of Adobe Ideas for exactly this kind of thing (back when it was free + in-app purchase if you wanted layers).

I like the approach of a 'new napkin' rather than an eraser.
I have spent a winter in NY. And about 24 of them in Indiana. The thing with those places is that I expect it to be frigid in the winter. San Francisco is always lauded for it's "amazing" weather, which to most people -- especially tourists who generally come with nothing but shorts + tshirts and end up buying hundreds of dollars of giants/niners/i <3 sf gear to stay warm -- is in the 70-80 range. Even when it is "nice" and in that sweet spot, it's only from about 11am-3pm and then it gets cold and/or foggy and/or crazy windy (depending which parts of the city you're in, of course).
I don't refrain from doing that because someone told me that C is horrible and too low-level. I refrain from doing that because I have tried it in the past, and while it works perfectly fine, it is horribly slow to write. There isn't really any compelling reason why you should spend time ironing the details and memory usage of one lone HTTP request when you could just do 'body = http_get url' and be done with it.

You can do a ton of things in C. But it takes time, a lot of it. And sometimes, it's worth sacrificing a few Kb (well, okay, Mb) of memory usage to save time and do a program that does a little more.

Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of things I would never do with anything else than C (image processing in C is just so absurdly faster than in any other language, even when you're just calling C libraries). But there's room for higher languages, because between libcurl and libxml, there's a ton of glue code that is way simpler to write in Ruby.
A community edited suicide prevention campaign
I first met Aaron at an O'Reilly meetup nearly ten years ago. He was just a kid then, but even then stood out. The tragedy of his suicide is that it could have been prevented.

To this end, I am jump starting a community edited suicide prevention campaign, Why You Shouldn't Commit Suicide, that addresses the subject of suicide in a frank, direct manner, without medicalizing the subject, and offers practical advice toward getting help.

Being old enough to remember the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when there was no treatment, the only thing that worked was prevention. It worked best when it broke taboos and treated the reader like an adult. AIDS prevention campaigns prevented hundreds of thousands of new infections in the US alone.

The project starts with a storyboard/narrative, which can be adapted to many audiences, languages, etc. If you know talented audio/visual artists, please share this with them and encourage them to contribute.

https://github.com/worldwidelexicon/why_you_shouldnt_commit_suicide

Roughly 100 people take their lives every day in the US, worldwide, who knows how many. This needs to stop.

I would also suggest that people in the YC community think about building communication tools that can be used for suicide prevention. IM is less intimidating than a phone call, and allows for location tracking, so there's also an opportunity to develop new tools. Stopping a suicide is simply a matter of getting the person to stop for a moment and then talk to someone. That's all it takes in many cases.

Brian McConnell
How do you enforce non-coercion principle against private coercion without a police and judiciary that is obligated to protect everyone fairly (including those who are unable to pay for police services at one point or another)?

Let's say I go and swing my fists, but manage to hit your nose. Then, I jump into my car and drive home on a (private owned, presumably) road. Now suppose you're in poverty: how do you pay for police to come and investigate what happened, for the prosecutor to start a trial against me. Suppose I am now assigned to pay you restitution and become indigent: how would I pay to ensure that I am not tortured in prison, appeal my case (I had a nervous tick that forced my arm to swing, so I should not have to pay as high of restitution)?

Protecting your rights from (government or individual) transgressions is a categorical imperative: we must be able to provide to everyone, even if they are fully indigent.

Yet it, absolutely, does not come for free. So we need some kind of taxation (or other income scheme) to ensure the bare minimum.

I would agree that it's unwise to spend it on foreign wars and the war on drugs: so let's first stop having foreign wars and the war on drugs!

However, the wealthier an individual is, the more it costs the government to protect their life, liberty, and property. Think of how much money is spent to keep a square foot of Manhattan safe as opposed to a square foot of Modesto.

I agree that in some cases taxes are inhumane: e.g., I think it's wrong to force pay someone who earns no income to either pay a property tax or sell their property. I also think eminent domain gets abused unfairly.

Yet, categorically, "the right to receive income in currency protected and recognized as result of government force" is an important one -- but one that can be curtailed as to allow enforcement of the more fundamental rights.

You're also ignoring the role even a minimal social safety net plays in reducing coercive power of private employers.

You may want to read what these guys have to say: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/, as well as actual classical liberals (see, e.g., Karl Popper's works)