skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A possible impediment to company support for this would be the rise in sponsored / promoted posts used by apps such as Twitter and Facebook. Users might want to be muting things that appear in these advertisements and if a company makes these un-mutable then you have user satisfaction going down.

Of course this a concession users might have to make in order to reap the benefits of such a system. It is a good idea, though dubious it is the 'future' of the internet especially since it exists in a self-contained platform that is opt-in by its nature.
Do you think authorities at the state level would be more receptive than at the county level?

Because I've been trying at the county and city level and after sending many victims to ring up the investigators, little has come out of it.

I always thought at the state level my chances are even bleaker of getting their attention.
Ditto.

> ...to the point where the administration has to respond

I think the idea of them having to respond makes this enough of a worthwile endevour.

Would love to see what such as reponse would entail.
SOPA much?
has to respond has been met with "No Comment" in the past. I signed, but I'm not holding my breath.
There is something about this case that makes me feel an injustice has been done. Not by Aaron Swartz, but by the apparatus investigating and prosecuting this case.

Sadly, I wonder how frequent these witch hunts are in the USA. The Larsgard story is another, prime example of how misconstrued the narratives of prosecuting attorneys can get - without any risk to their own career.

(Edit:) This is just one out of a few, key reasons that I do not want to visit nor work in the USA. The risk that one may get to pay for some a..hole's political aspirations.
ewillbefull - he wasn't just charged with hacking, do some research: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/aaron-swartz-felony...

Again, it doesn't matter if it's extremely easy to run someone over with a car or whether it's easy for a computer programmer to bypass download limits and sneak a laptop into a closet at MIT with a spoofed MAC. Simplicity has nothing to do with it.
It is certainly insulting and inappropriate, but I am surprised that the racist connotation has managed to endure eight years of "Bush is a chimp" jokes.

(Yes, I know chimps are apes and not monkeys.)
Actually, wireless docking, Bluetooth keyboard, and using the phone for a touchpad would work. Still need Emacs, IntelliJ, good terminal, GNU utilities, etc.
Here is the killer quote:

"I’ve no information on the likelihood if an Android OS will ever have an official desktop version, but then neither does Microsoft."

Pumping up Android into a desktop OS, although it is theoretically possible, makes as much sense as dragging a bulky decades-old desktop OS into tablets and handsets.

The article also lacks technical depth: The speculation might have even been fascinating, though still baseless, if it compared, for example, what it took to make Android multi-user versus a hypothetical desktop multi-window UI with all the attendant lifecycle modifications.
The worst part of Academia.edu: you must log in to download the PDFs.
He used the Internet as it was meant to be used. MIT had no security, JSTOR had no security. Issuing a GET request to a web server is not, and should not be a crime.

http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartz...
This seems a relatively common modus operandi. The history reminds me a lot to the Nancy Black case.

http://www.nancyblacklegaldefense.org/
Hack instgram accounts
I want to hack a famous person's instagram
This is currently the top story on Hacker News. Instead of dealing with the fact that someone's depression caused them to commit suicide, they are casting about for blame.

That's not a very healthy way to deal with this situation. But I realize what you are all doing: you are trying to use his horrible death as a political statement to further your causes (something about making academic papers free and accessible, nothing to die over, especially if you have to deal with the cops).

If you can't do the time, or deal with the repercussions without killing yourself, don't do the crime. Also I find the reaction on Hacker News disgustingly trying to use this to further their narrow agenda.

So to respond to the title of this top thread: who cares if he was chided?? No reason to kill yourself! Give me a break! Show the man some respect.
Tony Fadell and the Nest thermostat: An iPod designer turns to the home
Wouldn't recommend it...
I can see that happen, but on the other hand: if data is in the cloud and computing hardware is dirt cheap, how would taking CPU+RAM out of a desktop setup make much of a difference? A raspberry PI in your 40" monitor shouldn't cost that much.

If data is not in the cloud, I would not want to have it only in my smartphone.

Also, I would hope that we will find a need for having desktop setups that are more powerful than what can realistically be put in a smartphone. 'Super ultra-extra-HD plus' or even holographic displays, good real-time speech and video recognition, whatever.

So, I can see using a smartphone as access token or as data store for not-yet-synced-to-the-cloud data, but I would hope it will not get used as a general computing device.
Facebook is dying
Moving onwards from ArcticStartup
I mostly agree and believe that before another abomination loosely based on Perl is written in Scala, people should learn Scala. However, Scala's syntax is also quite complicated, Scala code is often hard to read (far too much TIMTOWTDI there as well), so personally I favour Go as a modern alternative to Perl.
Does my employer have intellectual property rights to stuff I do in my own time?
Reading that headline I feared someone ported Microsoft Frontpage to Android :).
I think there definitely is a market for better filters. But i do think it's a bit weird that we seem to need more technology to save us from technology. Instead of muting users you follow the more obvious fix is simple; unfollow some of those people, unsubscribe from those newsletters, mailing lists and RSS feeds and basically close the tap instead of corking the firehose.
Dangerous Digital Tunnelvision
He didn't kill someone with a knife, he put butter on his toast with a knife. There was literally no crime committed, certainly no crime worthy of federal prosecutors and decades of potential incarceration.

He downloaded a bunch of files using a publicly accessible computer network, from a web site that was available without authentication from that network. He didn't crack any passwords or encryption schemes, he didn't access any material he was supposed to pay for without paying, he simply didn't do anything to warrant the type of prosecution that was launched against him.

The article below explains a lot. What Aaron Swartz did was rude, not illegal.

http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartz...
Hello Mars. Goodbye sci-fi
Ortiz and Heymann are just Pharisees for strict observance, bullying and abusing of the written law with a huge disconnect with the society and technology.
And the filter bubble continues...
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...
Ilya and Aaron's situations are very different.

Aaron was harassed and harangued by an overzealous attorney. His suicide is, in a sense, a direct consequence of another's actions. The actions that led to his trial also are laced with strong moral beliefs that seem to conflict with the law, leading me to believe that perhaps he knew his actions would cause him to become a martyr.

Ilya on the other hand, is a textbook suicide case. That's not to diminish the significance of his death, but to point to the fact that there are two factors at play here. One is the tragedy of young aspiring minds who take their own lives. The other, of an uncalibrated and overreaching legal system.

I believe Aaron would wish his legacy and his death to help impact and reform the latter.
>Wasn't she just doing her job?

Absolutely not. There is a reason that prosecutors have prosecutorial discretion and this case is it. The prosecutor's job is not to zealously convict anyone they encounter with everything they can convict them with, it is to represent the interests of the people. There is no fathomable way that sending Aaron Swartz to prison for 35 years could possibly do that.

But let's not put all of the blame on the prosecutors. The prosecutors did wrong here, but we allowed it to happen by giving them the authority to do wrong. We are, as we speak, allowing laws to remain on the books that make "crimes" that should be a minor misdemeanor at worst (and not illegal at all at best) into felonies punishable by a sentence of imprisonment longer than the sentences received by many unrepentant criminals who have committed premeditated murder.

These outrageously disproportionate laws are what allowed these prosecutors to abuse their discretion. Get rid of the laws, or cut the penalties by a factor of a thousand, and you get rid of the problem. That should be the goal here. Making an example of these prosecutors is not a bad first step, but actually prohibiting what they did by removing their ability to levy outrageous charges at minor offenders has to be the long-term solution.
An influenza primer, updated for 2012/13
I completely agree. Self-restraint is a huge piece and something I don't talk about in the post.

I'm more talking about muting topics from sources you like. I want to subscribe to you on Twitter but I don't want your SXSW tweets, for example.
Excellent post! I'll be adding a RasPi to my collection soon, and I've been wrestling with an I2C 20x4 LCD. I'll definitely be rereading your blog when it arrives.

Speaking of the LCD, do you have any suggestions for finding the address of an I2C device? Is there a way to query or scan it to see at which address it responds? I just got the Sainsmart LCD2004 as a gift. Google searches about the device result in forum posts, where people have got it to work with addresses from 0x20 to 0x27 to 0x40 -- one guy had to work it out with a multimeter. Do you know of a more elegant solution than brute-forcing it?
This is not the only area in JS where it pays to be careful with numbers.

For example, the parseInt function mentioned in the article actually does magic base determination. Your string will be parsed into a base-10 number, unless it begins with '0x' in which case base-16 is used, or if it begins with a leading '0' then it is treated as base-8.

This last case has stung me on several occasions when parsing user input into numbers: User puts a leading-zero, and you magically end up with octal conversions. (I believe this whole octal thing has been deprecated in recent JS implementations).

In any case it's sensible to specify the 'radix' whenever using the parseInt function, as in parseInt(numberString, 10);
Remember, studies show that even people not suffering from depression significantly overestimate how much specific severe future events will affect their life satisfaction, good or bad. (Winning a lottery, losing a limb, achieving a life goal, being imprisoned, etc.) It'd be a shame to take an irreversible final step, because of a relatively simple and well-understood short-term bias.
But it's not "Politics" that I want to show him. It's Judge Phelan's character. Poking through the wikis, I think I actually meant Season 1. It's been two years since I saw it; I need to do a re-watch.
I never thought about that but it does make sense: the prosecutors get professional advancement based on numbers, not the quality of cases.

We had a dinner party last night and everyone at the table thought that the US has serious citizen rights, etc. problems and the situation is getting worse.
Chain of Fools: Upgrading through every version of windows (up to Windows 7)
I got hit by JavaScript rounding on a project once. Funny thing is, IE8 was okay with it and Chrome was the one that caused issues.

Turns out that
1000000 * 8.2 = 8199999.999999999

Sometimes we learn the hard way. The bug was getting written into an XML document and pushed to an embedded device over HTTP which was expecting an int and caused the device to crash. We fixed both bugs.
But i do think it's a bit weird that we seem to need more technology to save us from technology.

When you think about it, that path is extremely well-trodden.
I hope the future looks like there isn't one answer.

Apple's answer has been hugely successful, and so has Google's and they are not the same, even if they contend on the same classes of devices.

It looks like US carriers are going to give a QNX-based OS a chance to keep Blackberry in business.

Being able to carry a full desktop OS in your pocket and dock it to a big screen is something that makes sense for Windows Phone and is a stated goal for Ubuntu.

It looks like B2G will pick up the HTML5 Web runtime in phones torch later this year.
I agree that ultimately Aaron is ultimately responsible for his own suicide. Just as surely as the attorney is responsible for bullying, threatening, and overzealous, selective prosecution.
Hackers or the NRA...Which Group Protects us More from The Government?
You said in many different posts that federal prosecutors in general lack discretion, that their hands are tied. This was a false claim. And you may be the only person in the world who holds this view; I don't think anyone else (Democrat, Republican, prosecutor, or defender) would make this claim.

Now you are arguing that the specific statute at issue did not allow Ortiz and Heymann to decline prosecution. That is a completely different contention, thought it is also false, as it is hard to think of something more subject to prosecutorial discretion than the 1984 CFAA:

http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ninth-circuit-scales-back-c...

The Nosal opinion expresses grave concern that the broad
reading advocated by the government could criminalize much
innocuous activity. In particular, the Court notes that
the phrase "exceeds authorized access" appears in another
section of the CFAA, § 1030(a)(2)(C), which has no
requirement of fraudulent purpose, and requires only that
the person who "exceeds authorized access" has "obtain[ed]
. . . information from any protected computer" (i.e. any
computer that can connect to the Internet). The
government's view, the Court feared, could "make every
violation of a private computer use policy a federal
crime."

Obviously most such cases are not being prosecuted by US Attorneys (discretion!). Yet this is exactly the interpretation that is being relied upon in the Swartz case, that violation of JSTOR's policy was a federal crime. Moreover, general opinion is that CFAA is due for Supreme Court review due to the circuit splits in interpretation. Any federal prosecutor who doesn't want to be overturned by the Supreme Court had plenty of excuses for dropping this prosecution, over and above the obviously unjust nature of the case. Ortiz and Heymann decided nevertheless to take that risk to append a "cybercriminal" conviction to their CVs.

In short, you are just factually wrong here that the federal prosecutors have no discretion in general (your first claim), or that they had no discretion with respects to the statutes at issue here (your second claim).
One can imagine them dictating, if speech recognition software is sufficiently good. This doesn't work for code (or, perhaps, it doesn't work for the programming languages we have now---a programming language with syntax designed to be spoken, not typed, would be very interesting) and it seems it doesn't work for writing fiction, as I think I recall Charlie Stross discovering (can't find the blog posts now, though http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/a-writin... discusses the problem). For day-to-day communication, though, the stylistic differences between dictated and typed prose are probably not important.

Moreover, this might yield a small efficiency win over both text communication as is (email, IM) and the telephone: dictated text would be as fast to produce as spoken communication (I can talk much faster than I can type, and I get the feeling that's true in general), while remaining as fast to read and as easy to edit as text.

I'm not sure this win would be very big, though; for me, at least, the bulk of the time I spend on writing is spent figuring out how to phrase things. Jackalope's comment, though, indicates that people are starting to see noticeable improvements in efficiency---the "how did I ever live without this" feeling. Perhaps they find speech more natural than typing, and spend less time agonizing over how to express themselves?

This scenario depresses me somewhat, as I have an inordinate and perhaps irrational fondness for slower, more considered forms of expression. I find my prose is more dense and pointed when I hand-write than when I type, which I prefer (though my superabundant laziness combined with the ease of editing on a computer mean that I almost always type).
Real World Crypto 2013
One of the users involved in those small-scale, under-the-radar WP deletion proceedings, RightCowLeftCoast, seems to be an active member of WikiProject Conservatism. Can't help wondering whether the stated reason ("subject appears to fail notability") was a smokescreen.
Well consider HN frontpage during the past 24 hours. I like to read stories, and I dislike it when half of the stories cover the topic I've already read about a few times.

I want to ignore the stuff I am not interested in, while being subscribed to the feed.
Why doesn't it heats up much? Is this specific to China?

I live in Russia, we have the same system (coal and gas plants generating not only electricity but heat for homes) and this system is perfectly capable of delivering +28C inside when it's -30C outside. It varies from house to house, but "keeps you from freezing" is not the default.
1. IDs are strings, not numbers. This is the real problem twitter had. The ID size was only vaguely related to the number of tweets.

2. An event counter is not going to reach 2^50.
I think if the license was open enough a the paper could be hosted in multiple locations. Once again, there is already a precedent for this: when you publish anything on a blog you send a "ping" to Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to re-crawl your site since you added new content. Your post ends up in the Google Cache, Coral Cache, etc. I think a system that would proactively tell ArXiv "hey a new paper is published!" or "hey a paper has been peer-reviewed and approved by X via their GPG signature!" could solve the issue you are seeing.

> But of course it differs for each author, and perhaps other fields have different conventions.

I think this is also spot on. The research lab where I worked was a collaboration between the Physics and Chemistry departments. The technology used by the two chief researchers was radically different, despite having worked together for decades. For example, my professor and his sub-group (Physics) used LaTex to typeset all his papers. The Chemistry professor and his sub-group, OTOH used Microsoft Word. From what I understood that was pretty common for the respective fields. So much opportunity here as well as so much resistance in just these types of issues...
i2cdetect?

http://www.lm-sensors.org/wiki/man/i2cdetect

Both the web page and the program itself will inform you that running it could cause Armageddon, but assuming all you have plugged into your i2c bus is an LCD it really shouldn't cause any harm.

On Raspbian, you'll have to apt-get install i2c-tools to install this (and you'll have to modprobe in the i2c drivers as described in my blog post). On the Adafruit distro it comes pre-installed.

Running i2cdetect on my Pi which currently has one of those LED matrix devices I talked about in the blog results in this:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo i2cdetect 1
WARNING! This program can confuse your I2C bus, cause data loss and worse!
I will probe file /dev/i2c-1.
I will probe address range 0x03-0x77.
Continue? [Y/n] y
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f
00: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
20: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
40: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
50: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
70: 70 -- -- -- -- -- -- --

(Telling me it detected a device at 0x70, which is correct for this device). I don't have the LCD you have so I'm not sure if it is properly detected by i2cdetect, but that's what I'd try first.
Hehe fun one!
and also:

9007199254740995 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 1
The Importance of Securing a Linux Web Server
Isn't the majority of the slowness on the Android emulator to do with needing to emulate the VM?

Windows Phone and iOS emulators/simulators/whatevertheyrecallingthemnow are much faster than Android.
Actually, Lessig's response did call out Swartz personally. I'd honestly recommend reading that and then avoiding the rest unless you want to attend his funeral or something.
Essential rule: ALWAYS treat large ID numbers in JSON as strings. Produce them as strings on the server, so the browser treats them as strings during the JSON decoding process.

(Fortunately, if they're ID's where they need to stay exact, then you probably don't need to do any math on them! Although once a coworker of mine had to write a bitwise XOR function in JavaScript that operated on large ID numbers represented as strings. That was fun...)
You don't have a will? I've had one since I had anything worth passing on, including physical and virtual possessions.

I'd equate it's importance with an effective backup strategy - something every diligent person does. So I wouldn't read anything into the existence of this page other than he was a diligent person.
FWIW, this post was written long before the tragic events of Aaron Swartz and is not intended to be about this tragedy.

Thoughts and condolences to his family, friends and peers who loved him so much.
You said the same thing at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5049530 and were corrected there. So I'll just point you back to that.
Where to find a $10 Picasso
Far more likely than private industry coming up with ways to "mute" the Internet is governments placing restrictions on Web site content and routing. Also, muting is not the next big era of anything; it's merely a rolling-back of the huge amount of time-wasting caused by sites like Facebook, Twitter and news aggregators.
United States v. Aaron Swarz Indictment [pdf]
Pijn: koude doeltreffend tegen chronische pijn
If you read Aaron's posts, you'd know that he also dealt with some heavy depression. Typically, depression gets worse as stress increases (like in a matter of you having to go to court, I know mine did when I had to at one point). Also, a lot of people with depression develop thoughts of suicide and the notion that it may be the only escape from the pain. So I wouldn't call Aaron's case "textbook suicide". One might reason that had he not been subject to such stress by our justice system his suicide would be delayed if not prevented, but I wouldn't go as far as saying he died knowing he would be a "martyr". The chemical imbalances in both of these young, energetic minds' heads simply cannot be ignored.
I've used the Web Audio API for my research project. What do you think?
The fall of Empire
"The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity - a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop"

-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation, 1951.
Imagine the surprise of the author(s) of this boot loader that this code would eventually be running on a cell phone.
Woo I didn't know this! When I mention twitter ids it was just an example.

So it can happen to anyone and it's a real issue for any JSON API.