skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is this on the front page? This is barely even about Aaron Schwartz -- he wasn't disabled, friendless, or prone to drooling for example. Less of these kinds of posts, please.

That said, I'm glad it was here if only to read jamesagilar's pointing out that "aaronsw turned down a slap on the wrist plea bargain". Thanks James!
pardon my ignorance, should one be a US citizen to sign this petition or is it open to anybody?
But IRC is a single type of service. The point is not that muting has not existed for a long time - it has, in many variations. The point is that we're reaching a point where the information flow is so great that managing muting across services is a massive time drain in itself.

If I don't want to hear about sports, I can filter out all kinds of stuff about sport in many services, but I need to do it manually in each one. I chose that as an example, because it is real for me: I don't care much about sport. Yet "every" news aggregator service etc. I might care to sign up for automatically assumes that I will care. So when I downloaded Google Currents to my phone, for example, it automatically pulls down a bunch of sports news I don't want.

Muting in this context is "filtering as a service". The ability to pay someone (whether with my eyeballs or cash) to keep track of what I like and what I don't like and ensure that when I sign up to new services I don't have to configure each and every one to exclude the information I have no interest in (or more positively, to tell them what I do care about deeply so they prioritize that).
I would assume any brand with an ounce of wits would not choose to spend time and money trying to reach users who have explicitly stated that they have no interest in the topic. Especially when there always is a whole bunch out there how are clamoring for said topic.

Still, I must confess there are many brands who have yet to reach this level of understanding, but that doesn't mean services would necessarily choose to enable those types.
I am of course in the minority, but it's not the minority who's created these major systemic problems. We try to point them out and are ignored (and here, downvoted), and you bumbling fools keep doing things that wreck civilization. Inadvertently of course. But good intentions count for zero, you still bear partial responsibility for widespread injustice.
Muting … can only be the first step.

I don't want to mute Aaron Swartz because I'm sick of hearing about him but I want to tell my computer that I know of the fact that he died. I also read his wikipedia article.

My computer now should know what facts I know to not bother me with them or even better gray out paragraphs in longer articles when these paragraphs only contain stuff I know.

To teach a computer about what I know, I guess, some TLDR-interface would be needed, where users can tag paragraphs and whole articles (or videos?) with facts discussed in that article. Interested users could have edit wars about the appropriate facts but I would just have to confirm if I read and understood an article with some minimum interaction (slowly scrolling to the end of the article or not clicking a headline link for example).

Better than with some temporary hype like CES, such a system could help to dig deep into some more complex topic. I follow every news about my favorite subject but it gets so annoying to read the same introductions to my subject over and over again. I want to skip that part without missing the news. I want to skip the old news without missing the twist they found on that old news. A tool that could help with that would save the majority of users a lot of time. Of course people that profit from such a system would also have a high incentive to tag paragraphs, too, which should not cost too much time neither. Some day hopefully computers can do the tagging part.
My guess, from the houses I went into, is their construction. I have to emphasize these are not houses like any first-world person would think of, as soon as you leave the big city there is very little that is modern about China - they're hapharzardly made with found objects, mud that has been packed and dried, thick layers of grasses woven and turned into sheets of ceiling tiles. Everything is handmade, and I have to imagine they are constantly searching for sources of heat loss and patching them. A lot of people also were burning dried animal waste, which was the worst smelling thing I can imagine enduring 24/7. I would be willing to bet if you are really poor you are also getting third rate coal, with lots of fillers that reduce its caloric output of heat (and it is cheaper).
It's a big deal in that it hasn't been corrected yet. It looks like a diss.
Heh, I just replied to this tweet from @stackexchange. I think the coolest surprise was having the current pi record holder reply to the question. That made me smile
I really wasn't clear about what I wanted to say, sorry. birthtime is different from ctime on those systems. Ctime is last change on the inode as parent said.

I just wanted to note that some Unix systems really store the creation time. See http://www.daemon-systems.org/man/fstat.2.html for an example.
I think a Muting API is just demonstrative but probably over-kill. Needing a muting API across apps is a clear symptom of over-using technology for the sake of it.

Sure, it makes your "life" "easier", but really, how hard are our lives right now? The best way to be "productive" with technology is to choose it selectively.

In my own experience, I found I can be 10X more productive than my peers if I choose to be. Its easier to choose to be with the less distractions / follows / whatever you have in your life.

I've been writing code for 16 years, butter my bread from the technology industry. But really, I use VIM for my coding, read Hacker News, browse Reddit as a guilty pleasure, use Amazon for shopping.... and thats it. Thats really it. No Facebook, Twitter, iphone/android apps, feed readers, chat roulettes, literally nothing. Its all superfluous.

This also means I have a pretty good eye for great software, as if I can see getting value out of it I know its a winner because my bar for "value" is pretty high. I was speaking with a local Austin start-up because I saw the value instantaneously and wanted to be a part of it. They were acquired before I could get an interview. In fact, I could probably use this intuition to make angel investments and just live doing that.

The "muting" concept should be reserved for cleaning up the experience from Trolls, my whole point is if thats the problem you are facing - you have over subscribed. This is true for software, why do you need an app for each and every task in your life? Its crazy.
not exactly. closures close over scope. functions alone simply create a new scope. these concepts are not synonymous.

if your function doesn't return another function, the references from that function are deallocated once the function has executed.

when your function returns a function (a "closure"), the inner function closes over the variables of the outer function, maintaining references to it's context as long as you maintain a reference to the closure.
I think danah boyd has the best take on this. Can we say that prosecution caused Aaron's suicide, in the same sense as one billiard ball sets another in motion? Of course not.

But what should disturb us is that the business and government elites of our society are very alarmed at what is going on with the internet. And they're used to crushing people in their path. The War on Drugs has completely normalized these tactics: insane sentences, extrajudicial harassment, you name it.

Someone like Aaron, who had no time for the concerns of business or government when believed an issue of justice was at stake, put himself right in their crosshairs.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/01/13/aaron-s...
Anyone who uses the term "easy way out" when discussing suicide really has no idea about the complex psychology involved.
Lenovo CEO Prefers the Term “PC Plus” to “Post-PC”
Tell it to the jury. Sounds like a slam dunk acquittal.
Wait a minute? your telling me the system built to protect Americans are bullies who just force you to admit your guilty? say it ain't so.

It's unfortunate that no one talks about how normal. Speaking as someone who has small dealings with our system I can honestly say they are not your friend. They will lie to your parents, lie to your spouse and lie to your neighbors in hopes of making you sign a guilty plea. They Press will spin it's own story to make a buck or two. Now you ask where's the truth? (I don't have the answer to that)

I really doubt that much will change over this, as the (cynical) reason that the US Attorney General went after Swartz is because he wanted to make American's quite clear that he won't tolerate this behavior.

Keep in mind that part of our Judicial system does is create fear so you won't commit the same crime. Sadly that's all he was after here, fear. :(

Unfortunately it will take thousands more deaths before our leaders start listening. It's too Bad America isn't 'We The People' any longer... :(
a tribute to the world. an inspiration for all.
Some of Americans read those things called books. You know, on their own volition, without being forced to do it by unionized government workers. Some of them also read magazines, newspapers and such, containing plenty of information. There's also this newfasioned thing called the internets, where they say you can read about stuff too. Of course, I'm not sure how "average" your American has to be - maybe for you, average one is one that only can be taught by a teacher in a coercive mass-production setting and forgets everything he had been taught very soon. I see how you want to increase a number of such people among the electorate - if you other ideas are as harebrained as this one, you need a big supply of short-attention-spanned, never learning, reading averse, infantile electorate to gain any acceptance.
I'm not sure why you would have a test function in the main app as opposed to separate testing - but yes, it would.

The intention of the AGPL is clear in my opinion and not really up for author interpretation. If someone is accessing code on a server (binary or interpreted), they have a right to obtain and modify that source code.

Aside from SaaS testing suites, I do not know of any examples where test code is accessed by users over a network.

It is, thus, 100% OK to use this source code to test a closed source project.

If the GPL had the same added clause as the AGPL, then there would be a serious number of infringing web apps.

The first sentence of the wikipedia page explains it best:
"Both versions of the AGPL were designed to close a perceived application service provider "loophole" (the "ASP loophole") in the ordinary GPL, where by using but not distributing the software, the copyleft provisions are not triggered."

No use == no copyleft requirement, and I would hope it's pretty clear that simply by having a piece of AGPL software in the same directory as another piece of software that it is not inherently using it.
Dynamically typed languages are not the same as weak typed languages. Dynamically-typed languages, like Ruby, still have data types like String, Float, etc. I've seen people use floats in statically typed languages before and end up with rounding errors simply because they chose Float instead of Decimal.
Valve Fends off Hollywood, Files Patents Hoping to Improve on Gamepad Design
Nginx: Nested Locations and Pagination
I agree with you, and so does Google image search for UI+slider. This is what a "slider" UI widget is in my book:

http://jqueryui.com/slider/

BTW, real sliders can suck, too, if they don't offer a textbox where you can type in the value.
About how much time do you spend maintaining these sites vs. making new ones?
Agreed. With him in jail for decades, this was probably the biggest action he could have ever done for the rest of his live. This man had devoted his life to progress and may have very well sacrificed himself for it, given the date of his suicide. If only more of us had a fraction of this courage to stand against the enemies of progress and freedom.
I have a very basic Haskell understanding, where I still struggle to understand Monads. I read through every slide and I the only thing that I understood, is that Haskell programs can be made faster by forcing strict evaluation and value unpackign. But I have to admit that I still do not understand how this works under the hood and it makes me sad. As well it seems as if lazy-by-default is actually an obstacle for fast programs.

Can someone enlighten me?
Are you only interested in this one company?
Python has a decimal module, so this is not exclusive to statically typed languages.

http://docs.python.org/2/library/decimal.html
Opening up research is a critical part of Academia.edu's mission. There are four things we are trying to achieve with Academia.edu - ways in which we want to re-shape science.

- Instant distribution. Right now there is a 12 month time-lag between submitting a paper to a journal, and the paper being published. We need to remove that time-lag and introduce instant distribution of scientific ideas.

- Better peer review. Right now the peer review process takes 12 months to complete, and only surfaces the opinions of two academics - academics who may be biased, uninformed about the subject area, or just in a bad mood when writing the review. 2 people is too small a sample size. We need a faster and more robust peer review system, one that surfaces the opinions of the entire scientific community, and in real-time.

- Multi-media. Right now, scientists only share papers in PDF form. We need to bring about a science where scientists are incentivized to share data-sets, code, videos, blog posts, and comments on all these media. Right now a lot of the world’s scientific output does not get shared, because the system of credibility metrics only rewards one kind of format, the paper. We need to change this.

- Open access. We need to bring about a world where a villager in India has the same access to the world’s scientific output as a professor in Harvard. When you open up access to the world’s scientific literature to the 2.5 billion people who are online right now, magical things may happen.

Critical to achieving change in science is understanding how the reputation system works. Competition for funding is intense, and scientists optimize for the kinds of reputation metrics that the funding bodies and hiring committees check for. To achieve instant distribution, better peer review, multi-media sharing, and open sharing, one has to build reputation metrics that encourage that kind of activity.

Historically the main reputation metric in science has been the journal title. But over the last 4-5 years, new reputation metrics have emerged in science. Google Scholar pioneered the citation count: it released the count of how many inbound citations your work has received, and scientists started to take that metric and say to their funding committees 'this metric reflects well on me; I would like you to take it into account when evaluating my work'.

Academia.edu has been pioneering the introduction of usage metrics: page view counts for your papers. Our users regularly take screenshots of their Analytics Dashboard on Academia.edu and submit them to their tenure committees and funding bodies. There is a good case of someone including their Academia.edu Analytics in their application for tenure here http://blog.academia.edu/post/23302130233/user-spotlight-tim....

In the future there will be a family of reputation metrics in science, each reflecting a different aspect of impact.

If you are excited about building this future of science, we are looking for passionate people to join us. More about the company is here http://academia.edu/hiring. Send me an email at richard[at]academia.edu if you would like to chat further.
What my toddler taught me about information security
I think it's kind of ridiculous that everyone is pointing fingers at "everyone else" other than the man responsible for the suicide, Aaron Swartz himself.

I know some people are pointing the finger, but not everyone is.

While I wouldn't draw the link between the prosecution and suicide as others do, in reflection after a death it is possible to look at the person's work in the last few years and say "Why yes, there does seem to be some bullshit going on here, lets use this opportunity to draw attention to it."

Just because some people do assign blame, it doesn't mean the rest of us should let those wrongly blamed off the hook for anything other than that which they were wrongly blamed.

While discussing this now, people run the risk of appearing to assign blame even when they're not. But discussing the case a month after now, they'll run the risk of nobody really giving a shit. Next month people will say "He's dead, its over, move on."
Internet prodigy, activist Aaron Swartz commits suicide
Wanted by the FBI
The second editor is always minor edits. That's how you should look at it. You really think people do it to get their name there?

So I guess he's now know for minor edits.

It needs another edit: "An addition step is needed to verify the radix", should probably say "additional".

So here's your opportunity to get your name there.
Pro tip: if someone calls a hypothesis "slightly less sinister", he is probably not trying to justify it as a good thing.

What the OP is talking about is why prosecutors are the way they are, and suggesting the answer is more complicated than "these specific people are evil". This is worthy of discussion and it's not up to you to kill it by accusing the OP of defending a situation he is clearly not defending.
Aaron Thank You for the work you done.. Rest in Peace. To his Friend and Family I will be praying for you. Blessings.
Did you read TFA? Not making any judgment about the claim: What she suggests is that he was an easy victim for the plea bargain game because of his known problems with depression.
Guide to wordpress on Amazon cloud
Make sure to continue to the next two blog posts which in total give a very handy guide to putting up a wordpress site in Amazon's cloud.
It has been corrected in the content of the post and reddit doesn't let you edit the title of a post.
If I were on that jury, I wouldn't convict.
I find it singificant that you used the word "justice" against the judicial system.

The very concept of law started as a need for order and justice, preventing grave crimes. Now, controlled by the powerful, it stands as a way to reduce justice, and to increase injustice.
Virtualization using HTML5 browser
A truly good call would at least be sincere in an acknowledgement of fault. This call sounds a bit hypocritical. They did drop their "civil case," but they can hardly be said to have made any serious effort to stop the arrogant government prosecutors who, in effect, went on to murder Aaron. The irresponsible academics who stood around shrugging their shoulders in indifference, as well as the various media outlets that casually reported on Aaron's arrest, should think carefully about the lack of proportion in the American criminal justice system, and the devastating impact it can have on real lives.

Authorities in New York have undertaken a similarly disproportionate assault on Internet freedom and academic whistle-blowing, arresting and prosecuting a blogger who sent out “Gmail confessions” in which a well-known New York University department chairman appeared to be eccentrically accusing himself of plagiarism. And again, there appears to be nothing but silence from the relevant communities. For further information on the case, see:

http://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/about/
FlexSlider, Nivo Slider, Basic Slider - all the types of sliders I discuss. The verbage is confusing for sure. I just used what I commonly hear them referred to in the WordPress community.
A worthy lasting legacy would be for Mr. Swartz's story to shed an undeniable and transforming light upon the farce that our "adversarial" justice system has become.

It is all too seldom about "justice" and all too often about "career".

And... these prosecutors are public employees. Our employees. We cannot and should not divorce ourselves from their malicious malfeasance, when and as it occurs.

Nor can we nor should we divorce ourselves from the system that creates it.

Swartz's case gains publicity through his prominence. But similar oppression, often combined with a grinding and defining lack of opportunity, plays out thousands of times every day, on the streets and in the families of this country.

We can't make it perfect. But we should be trying a damned sight more to make it better. If we are sincere about this.
I agree the linked article isn't really about Swartz, but I think it's a reasonable opportunity to look at how U.S. federal prosecution works/fails in general.
I gave my support to this one because it's actually well-written (free from obvious grammatical errors in the first sentence) and targets exactly the right person.
Every language has it's own quirks, some even weirder than JS. The floating point "errors" are common to a hundred programming languages, that's why BigNum classes/extensions exist.
I don't know what they're supposed to be called, but I've looked at more than one source-code and saw it called 'accordian.' Whatever they are called, I think they are a massive eyesore.

This is one of those things where I wish people wouldn't arbitrarily change names. Makes communication more difficult than it needs to be. Seems to be the irritating UI patterns that get refurbed into new names (same shit in a different box). Who would dare rename a button? Buttons are cool. Accordian / slider / moving billboard / whatever is just awful.
Is that actually, causally, the reason for the U.S.'s rather harsh justice system? I mean, postmodernism is not exactly popular in the US. Are law-and-order populist politicians pushing "tough on crime" agendas and long sentences all secretly fans of French philosophers? If anything, the problem is that they are too sure of their own values, and willing to enforce them with imprisonment.
I mean, they're allowed to respond by saying "No comment" or, more likely, a totally white-washed PR report extolling the virtues of a marginally related task force or agency that seems to completely miss the point.

But who knows, maybe we'll get a decent response.
A felony isn't a slap on the wrist. It can have a long lasting affect on your life, closing up whole career opportunities and making travel a pain in the ass.
How to Hire a Programmer when you're not a Programmer
To help Academia.edu grow, of course. Think about it this way:

Sure, at a personal level, it might be slightly annoying to you to have to create an Academia.edu account. But Academia's entire value is in the users, content, and community which have built up around it. If viral hooks like "signup to download" substantially grow the Academia community (and I believe this one does), then the value which they will create for you in having an accessible library of the world's research will far offset the small annoyance of having to sign up.
OWS was an overwhelming success, it got the country talking and many of their ideas were implemented, like increasing taxes on the top 1%.

Aarons death can also be a catalyst for change and I think a cause OWS would be interested in supporting as well.
5 Blunders That Will Doom Your Startup