skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A university officially providing a pirated archive of JSTOR would be opening itself up to legal liability itself worth more than 50k. Add to that the cost of maintaining a digital archive comparable to JSTOR, the cost of training, and the cost of keeping it up to date, and you have to be absolutely insane or intellectually dishonest if you claim even a struggling school with limited resources would go with that.

> I know that every university, there are multiple servers where students share terabytes of pirated movies, TV shows and music.

You are being delusional if you think such a system is at all comparable to what it would take to replace JSTOR for all but a fraction of university JSTOR users.

I was a technically inclined CS guy with far to much free time while in university and I would be royally pissed if my university had dropped JSTOR for some sort of ghetto fileshare with an aging torrent. Anyone a less ideal user than I would be crippled by that.
Something about what you're saying here intuitively seems wrong. I'm sure W3C finds issues like these important.
It is a fallacy to assume that just because some lynch mobs took part in an effort with ultimately positive outcome (it took much more than a mob to establish democracy or justice systems), all, or even most, of them are positive.

A vendetta against a prosecutor, carried by hugely one-sided, unreflected and self-reinforcing blog-posts does not even come close.
Hey I was thinking of doing something similar for my app [0].

Allowing users to modify recipes is an awesome direction. Everyone has their own spin on a recipe and being able to share that back is cool. You should also end up with useful normalisations, this is how many people it _really_ serves, for eg.

You are also using markdown.. I went with slim (http://slim-lang.com/ - "a pretty xml" in this case) for the source, but ultimately I'd like to create something markdownish but with extensions, for dinner/meal planning, unit considerations, ingredient variations, specialised tagging, etc. Something people can read and type without hassle, but is much easier to parse.

Cool work, there is a lot of fun things to do in this area.

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cookingpot/id586052832?ls=1&...
I think maybe Kim is a little smarter this time by not having his servers easily accessible by the US authorities, exactly where those servers are remains to be seen.

For me, mega.co.nz is at 154.53.224.166, which is Africa allocated, administered by afrinic.net who seem to be on a small island off the coast of Madagascar.
I'm 100% behind changing the laws and punishing the overzealous prosecutor. Don't get me wrong.

But I'd like to see the millions of poor black kids whose lives are destroyed by the justice system every day get this kind of response, and not just when it's a handsome rich white kid like Aaron.
Rails For Charity
@salemh You may not have noticed this, but all of this is incredibly relevant and spins off of the OP. I had that intuition shortly after posting, and it was confirm'd by the other poster who merely quoted the OP as a response to me.

I dig your suggestion, but your criticism I feel lacks sufficient observation.
Mysteries of Delta Airlines
In late December, my girlfriend and I booked a flight to Maui for April. After booking a few other Delta flights, my girlfriend noticed that her Maui flight was not listed as one of her "Upcoming Flights" on Delta.com or in the App. Being a frequent flyer of Delta, she found this to be quite odd.

At first, she just passed it off as some sort of "technical error" that the website was having. After a few more days she decided to email Delta to see why her flight wasn't showing up on the website/app with her other "Upcoming Trips."

Delta emailed back indicating that the flight had been cancelled and that she should call customer service.

Today, she called Delta's customer service who confirmed that the flight had indeed been cancelled. The customer service representative did not know why the flight had been cancelled either, but thankfully reinstated the flight.

This entire transaction was done electronically. So, what could the possible reasons the flight got cancelled if 1) she did not cancel it, and 2) there was no cancellation email received?

Would really be interested this community's thoughts...thanks.
Pandora finally turns a profit, might not to die of its own popularity after all
From what I've read, it just requires that JS authors do more. We'd see a library to go on top of theirs assuredly.
I have a hard time with the light-hearted tone of reports such as this. In one sense the NK propaganda really is comically weird. But in another sense, if you've read 1984 it's all too grimly familiar.
Even with a small number of movies not having sort by rating is annoying. I recommend you rush the feature in some form.
Not sure what the purpose of that question is as it seems fairly obvious that without Aaron around it would be impossible to prove with 100% certainty that the suicide was due to the prosecution.

However, I am sure you agree that it is highly-likely due to the aggressive nature of the prosecution and voiced opinions by his family and friends that this was having a very negative affect on his emotional well-being. That might be conjecture but it's better conjecture than believing he committed suicide for no new reason.

edit; I noticed you just down-voted me; I understand it's difficult to deal with being called out online. That said, I would like to point out that your implication that the burden of proof should be on proving Ortiz has some responsibility for his suicide in your insinuation that ”It's now taken as an article of truth that Ortiz drove [Aaron] to suicide” is false. There has been a lot more evidence that there the prosecution was over-reaching and that Swartz was affected negatively by this than there has been otherwise. Obviously your intention by asking that question was to create an easily discredited strawman and perhaps it's a shame I gave you the benefit of doubt when I responded...
Having grown up in New Mexico, I didn't classify Aaron as "white". I don't know if he did.
Wouldn't MIT losing all JSTOR access for several days count as damage done? Given MIT's research focus and its size, it is hard to imagine how that could not have disrupted the work of a lot of researchers.
> if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR

And spoilers: it's not. In order to make it would you would have to recreate everything JSTOR currently does, which would result in a JSTOR not called JSTOR. One with legal liability at that.
Think about what this will do for discriminatory hiring. Searches on who has liked political statements or views that are disapproved of by corporate policy. Again as others have state - big difference between this stuff being discoverable and it being easily searched, sliced and diced.
As I wrote earlier, I don't think universities would ever provide a pirated archive. They wouldn't need to. Grad students talk. They pass around USB drives. And pretty soon, everyone has the archive on their laptop.
It's easier to take on a specific cause than address every systemic ill at once.

"But I'd like to see the millions of poor black kids whose lives are destroyed by the justice system every day get this kind of response"

People are taking on the war on drugs, what else is clear-cut and concise enough to address? "Poverty" and "racism" are wayyyyyyyyyyy too complex for anyone to easily identify around it, and the conditions and systems built around both are evasive enough for politicians and lawmakers to blame the systems on "a few bad eggs".
Can Outrage over the Zealotry of Federal Prosecutors Outlast Swartz Case?
The Javascript for Mega looks very messy; all resources loaded via XHR, loading jQuery but using `document.getElementById` all over the place, using client-side Javascript to validate the integrity of all these XHR-loaded resources...

They say that this is their first Javascript coding; they should really get some talent on board to clean this up.
Such a system would never replace a subscription to JSTOR. You have massive tunnel vision if you honestly think it could.
Do you have any other candidates in mind for that title? The inventor of the Web called Aaron his mentor.
Why is Ortiz "obviously disgusting"?
Ask HN: How To Be More Focused
Hello HN - I am faced with a certain type of "information overload" regarding the learning of programming languages.

I have been trying for the past several years to become proficient in a programming language. The issue is: I sometimes feel like a "kid in the candy store". Here's an example:

I am trying to learn C# at work. Suddenly, an exciting new article comes out on HN regarding, say, Python or Ruby. I switch gears and begin studying those. A few days later, another interesting article about Go.. Then Javascript.

To summarize: My question is - How to maintain the focus on really mastering programming itself rather than jumping from one language to another? I really would love to be a programmer and read about it constantly, but I feel I am taking 2 steps backward and 1 step back each time.

Thanks!
Agreed. Very sloppy code.
I think the broader point is that lionizing Swartz and demonizing Ortiz turns the whole episode into a morality play in which we want to see Ortiz lynched because Jesus was crucified. The issues raised are systemic issues and require systemic solutions, in the long term. Focusing on the individuals involved obscures that. If all that happens is that Ortiz is scapegoated by the DOJ, then we'll have failed to capitalize on the moment to enact real, useful change.
With respect, the fact that he wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto suggests that he did want to destroy JSTOR as a going concern. Now, maybe he didn't think releasing their archive would be enough, but he was clearly gunning for them.

He wanted to provide access to the articles to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR

JSTOR prorates its fees so that poor institutions pay much less than rich institutions. And all of Africa gets JSTOR for free. Now, even individuals can get capped free articles from JSTOR.

If the JSTOR archive was released to the world, why would journal owners continue licensing their content to JSTOR?

Finally, do you understand that most of what JSTOR charges pays for either licensing the journal content (JSTOR doesn't own copyright for the journals it includes) or for scanning/digitizing new content? The costs that JSTOR charges pay for a hell of a lot more than a few web sites pushing PDFs to clients.
On the other hand, if saying "my client is suicidal" got defense attorneys anywhere, the only result would be that suddenly every criminal is suicidal.
> Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree) is 115m.

And the tallest reliably measured australian mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) was 112m, with disputed claims of individuals in the 130m range.
"U.S. Attorney Ortiz said through a spokeswoman last week that the government wanted to send a message by going after the motel .... up the street Walmart and Home Depot have all experienced a similar rate of drug crimes .... attorney Salzman says there’s one good reason Ortiz didn’t go after them .... the U.S. Attorney’s office, looking to make an example, picked on the smallest kid on the block.”

Where have we heard this story before? It seems as if the Judiciary Committee might have more than just the Aaron Swartz case to consider.
Does Cloudflare work? Cloudflare Showdown
The syntax for optional argument and the lack of support of named parameters are limitations of LaTeX, not TeX. For example, see ConTeXt, which is a macro package on top of TeX, that has much more consistent syntax and all macros accept named arguments.
Authoring the RSS spec may be an exaggeration. A history of RSS can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Basically, it seems like the original RSS spec (RSS 0.9) was authored by two guys at Netscape, and released in March 1999, followed by RSS 0.91 in July 1999.

At this point, it looks like Netscape lost interest in RSS, and the project was forked into two competing versions, one lead by Dave Winer, and the other by the RSS-DEV Working Group. Dave Winer published the specs RSS 0.91 (different to Netscape's), 0.92, 0.93, .94 and then 2.0 between 2000-2002.

In August 2000, a competing fork was started by Rael Dornfest, who posted a draft of RSS 1.0, which appears to have been written by himself. He asked for interested parties to join a working group, of which Aaron became a member. This group became known as the RSS-DEV Working Group, and 1.0 was published in December 2000.

It's hard to say how much involvement Aaron had in this working group (I haven't read through the archives), but RSS had certainly existed for some time before Aaron became involved.
If even an tenth of the attention that's been paid to Aaron and his case over the last week could be shined on the heinous violation of Due Process that is Civil Forfeiture, I'd consider that, alone, a victory.
Dyslite is a software product. This is an impromptu conversation on a message board.

If that's what you mean by your concluding comments. Yes, I should be working on software for these issues, and I am; -- but in my morning reading time, my crutch was kicked out from under me. If you want to say that you disagree with my style, that's fine. I disagree with yours. Most people, most of the time, disagree when it comes to details, and certainly, even further, on opinions of style. I'm not going to lose sleep over people disagreeing with my diction. If I did that, then I'd never get any sleep. (That is, I have not, and I will not change my style. I'm being myself, and using my own voice.)

And it still isn't even clear why this is the case, that my Stylish "!important" overrides are not overriding the inline styles of that Web page. I've provided a link to my post which contains my Stylish snippet. You can see it for yourself, that this should not be happening, given the rules of CSS Specificity.
How Google 'Ad Cops' Police Web for Bad Ads
With the advent of Deep Belief Nets, which can learn from lots of unlabeled data, it seems reasonable to believe you could duplicate or exceed the human ability to quickly understand a player's behavior based on past humans played.

If only we had access to the backend histories of an online poker site!
Swartz's actions would have been an "attack" on a research archive, which the article classifies as having "little" commercial value (and Swartz wasn't profiting, it was civil disobedience).

The Reuters news for yesterday lists the LIBOR scandal, which was an "attack" on financial data. The fine alone, for UBS alone, was $1.5Billion. Now that's what I call "serious commercial value". JSTOR, not so much.

Do you want to keep arguing the point or do you feel silly enough already?
In international relations, there's a whole literature devoted to signalling: looking at how states send signals to other states. There's a huge amount of evidence showing that the signals received are very often different from the ones transmitted.
Carmen Ortiz's Cases
Carmen Ortiz sounds like nothing more than a state-sponsored terrorist.
Now take it a step further and think one if the problems I ran into when working on MeNomNom about the hours of operation for bars/night clubs. They might list their hours as Mon-Thur 6pm-1am, Fri-Sat 6pm-3am. That's also how people expect to view the hours, but the fact is that it is incorrect. The actual hours (That I had to store in the DB) were more like Monday 6pm-11:59:59pm, Tuesday 0:00:00am to 3am, Tuesday 6pm-11:59:59pm. Human representations of time are so wonky! People seem to have an intrinsic sense that another day doesn't start until they sleep.
He was responding to a comment making the argument that something cannot be a crime if no damage is done and no one is hurt. He even quoted the as much of the comment he was replying to.

Please, please, please, pay attention to context before accusing someone of ignoring context. It makes it very difficult for people to have nuanced debates about complex events if nobody is allowed to isolate a part of the problem independent of others.
Prosecutors in general are professional conspiracy theorists.
A lot of the information this searches can't actually be locked down by privacy settings anymore, as far as I can tell. Facebook made most profile information public for everyone whether they wanted that or not.
One of the working group members did an in depth look at the proposal that I thought was fairly even-handed: http://www.educatedguesswork.org/2012/08/initial_notes_on_mi...

> WebRTC itself is so young that a complete rewrite shouldn't be out of consideration if needed. Nobody wants to carry bad decisions over the years anymore.

That's partly true, but also one of the traps of discussing these things outside of the working groups in which they originate. You get new eyes on proposals, from people not caught up in the baggage of past discussions and maybe not as tired of discussing this topic ad nauseam so aren't as ready to settle for the first thing that comes along, but you also lose all the context of ongoing discussions and proposals.

And, of course, you can always rewrite to try to get the perfect spec, but at some point the rest of the world has settled on the thing that was only meant to be a temporary solution, and it's now so entrenched that it's not going anywhere. The real danger looming over any standards body is the perfect (or as he really said, le mieux -- just "the better") as the enemy of the good enough.
are there alternatives for client side encryption?
That is just... My god... New levels of cool! There aren't even words, I hope your wife appreciates all the hard work you've obviously put in to this, I wish my girlfriend would make things this cool for me.
Hasn't been resolved yet. Trial was in November, no verdict yet - http://www.lowellsun.com/todaysheadlines/ci_22253534/caswell...
Of course.... but who pays (and for what, exactly) is somewhat immaterial. You're able to post public links to files and get (effectively) unlimited downloads via Dropbox too. It was a counter-example to your Google.com/yourdesiredfile
Thanks for the comments and reviews!
Isn't it true that ANY web storage and file-sharing company could be raided and shut-down tomorrow?

I think the most accurate thing you could say is that the odds vary considerably based on the intentions and actions of the operators with respect to criminal activity, and the extent to which they can be inferred by reputation.

Framed as practical advice, I'd say: Your data is probably much safer with services that don't have a reputation for being used mostly for piracy.
Thanks for the suggestions. We'll add links to Netflix.
Putting the trailer above the fold is something we can consider if many people will want that.
Sure. I agree, it's a hard problem. Doesn't mean it shouldn't get attention.
Mother Theresa let people die slow, horrible and unnecessary deaths. You should never use that person as a good example for anything really. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa#Criticism
From what I have read today, the current poker bot programs do a lot of work in advance, and just follow decision trees when to raise, call and fold along that tree. They already know how they will bet with J10 suited before the flop when they are the first to act before the game starts.

The real challenge is the number of permutations of that, which raise memory requirements into the petabytes range. Not to mention multi-player games, and the no-limit version where betting gets more complex.

Not sure if having high-cpu instances at your disposal helps during game play.
Swartz wasn't profiting, it was civil disobedience

As I've explained above, I don't think Swartz was trying to profit from this scheme. But I do think he was trying to destroy significant financial value (yes $50million/year is significant for me). And from a legal perspective, that's extremely serious.

Now that's what I call "serious commercial value". JSTOR, not so much.

So if I rob a bank and steal $30 million, that's not a crime with serious commercial value? Interesting.

Of course JSTOR was small potatoes compared to LIBOR. So what? 99% of all crimes are small potatoes compared to LIBOR. That argument proves way, way too much.
Friends of mine used to work in a building that also contained the help desk for external customers. One day when a customer delegation was visiting the help desk, they were all brought in and told to sit at the empty desks and pretend to take calls.

Their headsets weren't even plugged in.
I remember learning this in my high school biology class a few years ago. I recall the limit as being 120 meters because of the force of gravity.

Xylum and phloem... memories.
The actual docket is here:

http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/case.html?id=1823970

You can help shine a light on what the DOJ and USAO are up to (and continue what Aaron Swartz started by downloading PACER) using this tool:

http://www.plainsite.org/asymptote/

If you follow the directions, it doesn't cost anything.
Right, and as the poster above is saying, if he actually wanted to help, he would contact Boeing. If he wanted publicity, he would make a tweet offering help.
In the 'other media' category I can highly recommend 'Pyongyang: A Journey In North Korea' by Guy Delisle[1] which is a graphic novel detailing his few months working in North Korea for a more serious look and into the lives of those who actually live/have lived in North Korea is 'Nothing to Envy' by Barbara Demick[2] which is a detailed, if not somewhat harrowing insight.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pyongyang-A-Journey-North-Korea/dp/0...
[2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nothing-Envy-Lives-North-Korea/dp/18...
Fully agreed on the server compromise risk. Fortunately this attack vector would compromise only users who log in after the attack. Users who don't are still safe.

Improving this situation could involve keeping a browser extension that takes care of the hashing algorithm and makes sure the real hash is sent. As long as the extension is not updated, the hashing would be safer.
Seriously.

As this case shows, it's an injustice that almost entirely hits the lower classes.

It's not a conspiracy. There is even a certain logic to it: if drug dealers keep using a particular place as a meet up spot, you have to wonder if the owner isn't turning a blind eye to keep the business. But: this is a cheap motel. Of course it's going to be a hotbed for shady things. If you're up to something shady, where do you go, the Ritz?

But the forfeiture laws are completely insensitive to these facts. All they do is to work the taking of property from the poor just because by virtue of being poor (or serving the poor) crime happens in their midst.
To the author of the post: I really respect how you are addressing a specific threat to nature (balloon releases) and taking action in a polite and positive manner.

I'm going to forward this to my daughter) who is very ecologically conscious but overwhelmed at the immensity of the issue) as an excellent example of how they can make a positive change.

Thanks again.