skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are there systems that can't be abused through automation, or where that's much less of a concern?

Let's analyze. One place CAPTCHA has been used a lot is in comment forms. It increases the opportunity cost of posting a comment via automation by introducing a complicated challenge.

Fair enough. But that doesn't solve the underlying problem (abusive comments). You'll still have abuse and spam, it will just come from humans instead of robots. If I'm a blackhat SEO with a budget, I pay people to solve CAPTCHAs all day and spam the internet (that's what happens).

If you design the comment system to fight abuse from the ground up (e.g., markov chain spam filters, user flagging), you don't need to care anymore wether it's a human or a robot behind the POST, because all the spam actually improves your training set. You defeat spammers with their own data.
The 2-step shuffle is yours.

If Swartz's material had been released, J Random Hacker, who simply wouldn't have read any of the JSTOR papers before, would now read them. MIT, on the other hand, would still pay for them. Though I can see how Podunk Community College in ThirdWorldistan might not pay for it.

The same way that you can get pirate Windows now, and some 15 year old kid in Thailand does. But Goldman Sachs still pays for a license. But some dodgy outfit in Beijing might not.

The principle here is not a legal principle, it is an economic principle. It is called loss of earnings. Look it up.

Instead of whinging that Swartz was going to destroy a $50 Million business, admit that the loss of earnings he would have caused would have been ZERO.

More disturbing than your ignorance of Econ101 is how you are fixating on the cost of Swartz's "crime", excluding the wider social aspects including the deadweight loss imposed on society as a result of copyright lobbying.

It's like a hobbit-sized version of somebody complaining about how the cotton industry would shrink - the horrors! - if we were to stop slavery.
> Copying the entire contents of the tweet into the citing seems odd as well.

On the contrary, it builds in redundancy. One of the virtues of Twitter is that this approach is feasible because of their character limit, and it means that should anything happen to Twitter (or the internet) in the future, that anything of cultural importance* is preserved. It also allows the tweet to be read offline or in countries where Twitter might be censored or banned, but where the paper is available. Proper citation is just to enable verification if necessary.

(*though admittedly this is probably a very small subset of all tweets)
Give. I bow out.

With classes like "divOutlineItem" and inline CSS padding, not one of you bothers to note that. It's like I'm wasting by bloody time learning best practices only to bring them back to developers who just do not seem to care. And I'm supposed to yield to claims of "amazing software" and age-authority.

I'm not even sure what to say anymore. You're absolutely right. I, as a Web Developer, for whatever that is worth, have no business being here in the Hacker News community.

Cheers.
In addition to the (relatively freakish) second UI, there are a bunch of minor-but-welcome enhancements that I keep stumbling across. For instance, I right clicked an .iso, and the default OS can finally mount it. Double click a PDF file -- wow! I can see the contents without installing anything.

Several little things like this, that have previously made using Windows so much more painful than OS X, are addressed in Windows 8. I haven't really seen any major improvements over Windows 7, but minor improvements still can make life nicer.
>pushing a button

Why doesn't it auto-fill when the user types a valid zipcode? Seems like cheap satisfaction.
I'm wondering what kind of policy changes a motel could institute that would prevent people using drugs (or dying as a result) in their rooms? Search every guest's person and baggage for drugs? Put video cameras in the rooms? Discriminate against customers who look "shady"? Barge in on their customers in the middle of the night to check for illegal activity? Examine their customers' arms and legs for needle tracks before doing business with them?

Also, how many upscale hotels that cater to people in the entertainment industry (for example) haven't had 15 drug-related crimes in 14 years (about one per year)?
A business owner is not a part of law enforcement. Law enforcement should do their own homework, and if they have proof or indication of wrongdoing at some location they should go after the perpetrators, not after the location.

If you go after the location all you achieve is that the crime will shift a bit down the street, or to another part of town, or will go even deeper underground. If you go after the perpetrators you make a start with plugging the hole, and you should make it painfully obvious that the owners had nothing to do with the busts lest they end up paying the price. Of course, if the owners accept direct payment (instead of simply receiving 'industry standard' compensation for lodging) for turning a blind eye things would change. Similar issues exist with clubs where drug dealers pay a fee to the house in order to be able to work on the premises.

A place where I used to work had a coffeehouse next door that was used by a motorcycle gang for their 'meetings'. I guarantee you that if the owner had called the police the place would have burned to the ground.

Businesses caught in the crossfire between law enforcement and crime are in an extremely tough position, getting the police involved is the fastest way to get into serious trouble or end up dead.

If you think that 'not going to the police' is cowardly then you'll be happy to know that a very large number of crimes ends up unsolved because one day the criminal will walk free again and witness protection only goes so far.

The simplicity with which you assume these things are handled is not reflected in real life, dealing with criminals invading your property is extremely difficult.

If it wasn't then this motel would be the only one, instead it is one of a series, and they all have the same issues.
I just want to warn you gold diggers that scientists tend to be very underpaid given their high levels of education.
Same here. A one column standard blog format would have been fine. Easy to scale down to mobile, easy to read on the desktop.
Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
I'm going to guess he means "Jewish." Some people don't consider that white.
Anyone looking to actually verify the source (this is at least partially why they're cited, right?) is going to have difficulty locating the original tweet without the permalink. The original tweet, along with the link, can be deleted - but that's true for any web resource.

Ultimately, I wonder why tweets are cited any differently than any other web resource. I'd find the following more useful:

https://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/292799867372310529

than MLA's recommended tweet style:

news.yc popular (newsycombinator). "How do I cite a tweet? http://j.mp/ygeHyP" 19 Jan 2013, 5:05 p.m. Tweet.

I guess it's handy to have the full body of the tweet right in the citation, but that would be true for any short quote from any resource - both on and offline.
EDIT: Oh yeah, the desktop pictures! For so many years MS exhibited horrible taste, by default slopping a huge, ugly Windows ad all over the user's desktop (Win 7). In XP, they had that crappy picture of a field near the Microsoft campus that some random employee shot. In Windows 8, I get a steady rotation of beautiful, professionally done photographs that rotate periodically, and really blow away the (previously bar-setting) default desktop pics that Apple ships. Not that desktop pics are a huge deal, but again it is one less thing I have to change about the default installation (can't stand looking at the ugly Windows ad from Win 7).

EDIT: oops, that wasn't actually an edit...
I personally know of a great out of the ordinary freelancing site that is in the works -- can't disclose any specifics though.

But the thing is, it will have a niche audience. It is not where the big money is.

On the other hand, I'd hire programmers from Odesk and freelancer.com only for throwaway projects. Each to their own, I guess.
My point was that the law is out-of-sync with the needs of society, and has come to serve only the interests of an anachronistic industry that has long been obsolete. Breaking bad laws to bring attention to them -- and hopefully to get our representatives to fix things -- is a civic duty, a form of civil disobedience without which we would never move forward.
ASK HN: What do you think of our new promotional video?
In my case, that level of precision isn't the consideration. I'm just expressing Rails' created_at and updated_at fields as integers instead of ISOs.
I absolutely detest MLA style citation. It's overly complex and needlessly adds information where it is not readily useful in context.
Interestingly, I think my science/engineer friends are behind the curve when it comes to online dating. I guess they're over sensitive about the stigma, but I think it's misplaced. A lot of my single female friends have OKcupid accounts and use them. It's a great alternative to the bar scene for women. No sweaty drunk guys harassing you.

Also: shared interest forums are a great place to meet people. My wife and I posted on the same law forum before we ran into each other in person.

Also, and this is unrelated but I have to share since I'm too married for it to be useful to me: if you're in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art on their gallery nights.
Hi Peter, yes - it does work!

But just to elaborate further, I don't want to make it sound like if you cough out $4,000 and with just a bare-bones booth, you'll get the kind of attention we did at CES. I do think this $4,000 booth at CES is a good way to amplify existing "success" (loosely defined on purpose). There are definitely knock-off and undifferentiated products that didn't see as much success as we did.

Imho, it's a coin-toss if you don't already have some evidence to suggest that there is some "success" to amplify. CES wasn't a causation of success. But the right product compensated for a cheap bare booth.
Ah, but what good is concern trolling if you can't find a way to cram race into the discussion too? If you aren't going to do it properly, you may as well not even bother!

/s
Beyond that, I'm not sure HN is a great place to debate it.

Then why did you write a long comment rather than just flagging the article and moving on?
They do real time privacy checking. They wrote about it in their engineering blog.

So for a query like "All Oracle employees who like sailboats and tennis", they check to see that the person has shared each of these facts with you, and only shows up if everything checks out. It's possible for you to be friends with someone who is an Oracle employee but they have only shared their employer information with a select group of people which doesn't include you. So they would not show up in that query you make.
Why would one ever cite a tweet? You can't write a useful secondary source in 140 characters; surely a tweet is only ever going to be a primary source, like an interview or experiment that you've conducted yourself? While we might include transcripts or raw data in an appendix, we don't really cite such things per se.
MySQL vs Postgres (vs MongoDB)
I think building a tier 1 (or even tier 2) from scratch has gotten a well deserved reputation for being borderline impossible.

Just consider how many great efforts have crashed in the last 20 years: AmigaOS, GemOS (Atari), OS/2, BeOS, MacOS9, Palm, Symbian, WinCE and others. The ones that are still hanging on don't paint a much brighter picture.

I'm sure there are a few teams out there that would have a good shot, but the daunting task+access to good/free that your staff already has experience with... well.

That said, it's great MS is still at it - heterogenous infrastructure is probably a lot more resistant at a macro scale.
You mean there is no serious projects going on on those websites?
It self-balances, and it's made to recover from nudges, people bumping into it accidentally, the kind of thing you'd imagine in a normal real-life scenario.
Exactly.

Previously mentioned, as though it were damming: "its drug countermeasures consisted of a list of persons not to rent to again."

And exactly what do more reputable hotels do besides that? If I were so inclined, I could get myself a reservation in any hotel in the city and do whatever drugs I wanted. Only after they discovered this could they prevent me from doing it again.
Linked lists in C, with open source ADT
Probably better than EE, where it is +infinity.
It makes me sad how reactionary government is. Oritz was overreaching before Swartz killed himself. Why wasn't something done before someone got the death penalty for downloading a few free journal articles?

I'm happy to see the change and the backlash against Oritz, but I wish this happened sooner.
I think I made it pretty clear. One person gave another person some hardware and asked him to wipe the data off of it, which he doesn't plan to do. The hardware is over a decade old and should be recycled. What part are you confused about?
>You think he doesn't know drug activity when he sees it? He can and should refuse a room and ask offending or suspicious guests to leave.

And this is exactly the point. It's not his place to determine if someone "looks like" a drug user. If he has no specific knowledge of instances of drug use, he has no reason or in my opinion any right to deny someone service. Yes, its obvious when drug use happens in an area. But that is a far cry from identifying individual instances of drug users or other criminals. I do not want society to empower business owners to deny me business because I "look like" a drug user. The fact that you're even suggesting that is absurd.
is the current problem (or earlier ones) complex enough for this to be more than a hardware contest?
...and things started off so well between them

http://scripting.com/2001/02/19.html
A URL is the only way to go and apart from sheer convenience, it conveys that it's coming from Twitter, instead of the solitary "Tweet" at the end of the MLA's citation. Twitter isn't a timeless utility, it's a company running a service that happens to be popular at this time and in certain countries. You can't just say "Tweet" and expect every reader to always get the meaning of it.

I think it's okay to include the actual text too, as the short length makes it possible to do so and given that tweets don't have any title and are probably less likely to be preserved if Twitter went down than most other online references a scholarly article might cite.
Wasn't the example the MLA gave a pretty good one? It was a tweet by a resident of Abbottabad noticing a helicopter, which later turned out to be US Special Forces coming to kill Osama Bin Laden.
This argument is ridiculous. If he's pro-government (which is doubtful), what of it?

Not only is this comment targeting a contributor's person (ad hominem attack), it's uninteresting, unenlightening, ignorant and totally off-topic.

If you have something to say that's on topic or relevant to the article, please feel free to contribute. Otherwise, you're just adding noise.
This is week-one stuff of a CS degree or on the job training. If you don't know this you shouldn't be programming.
Here's a suggestion: exclude scientific articles from copyright restrictions.

Your proposal is unconstitutional. "Takings" must be compensated or you run into 5th amendment issues.

If you want a compromise, how about this: exclude those articles for which the research was paid for with tax dollars from copyright.

At my school, I owned the copyright to anything I published unless I used school resources. Even if I published while being funded by an DARPA grant. Moreover, school funding was split evenly between tuition, federal government grants, and private grants. How can you justify forcing people to give up copyright when the public only paid for one third of the research?

They become the targets of congressional investigations

But that doesn't change the law. In fact, none of the proposals we've seen in response to Swartz's suicide involve copyright changes. Copyright law isn't going to change at all.
Not knowing or profiting from illegal activity is such a nebulous claim that it can't be enforced except in the most extreme situations. All ISPs profit from illegal activity. The problem is identifying individual instances of it is nearly impossible. In the same way this motel owner had an impossible task of identifying drug users or other criminals without having any specific knowledge of criminal activity. I do not want to live in a society where business owners are empowered to deny service because someone "looks like" a drug user. I'll let you imagine all the myriad ways that can be abused.
I think this is the only MLA style that is tied to the offerings of a single commercial entity. That seems weird to me. Does Twitter own the idea of a tweet or has it escaped into the general culture?
Hey! www.themade.org !

I posted on yer link as well.

We're a non-profit videogame museum in downtown Oakland.

Additionally, on the data: If Carmack is amenable, the data could be entrusted to Stanford. Stanford's curator is on our board, and they are able to do something similar to Mark Twain's agreement with UC Berkeley: hold his papers in a locked room for 100 years. Something similar could be worked out between the three of us. Please email me at alex at themade dot org.
Forget catering to the entertainment industry. How many hotels on the Las Vegas Strip don't have a worse record?
Your custom stylesheet doesn't have a rule for span elements.
Sorry, I should have thought to state it.
But I have usually seen it translated as "Faster, Higher, Stronger"
Is computer science science?
> Uh, plea bargains are the #1 way the system is made more "expedient", you can't have your cake and eat it too. Feel free to continue putting words into my mouth about "sanctioning miscarriage of justice" though.

What the heck. Forcing plea bargains on 96% percent of accused is just so we can be "expedient" for the other 4%? How does that make sense? Other countries get by just fine without plea bargains. Maybe we could get expedience by, you know, focusing prosecution effort on serious crimes or ones that actually have victims.

> Feel free to continue putting words into my mouth about "sanctioning miscarriage of justice" though.

You might want to read up on how plea bargaining is viewed in other countries. There are some that are of the opinion that plea bargains are "miscarriage of justice", and you seem to be defending it as a perfectly fine practice.

(edit: not sure what I think on plea bargains generally. But in this particular case it seems pretty ridiculous.)
WAT? Inline styles are always a poor development practice (one that I'm kinda guilty of... dang it).

You are supposed to separate the design from the structure from any logic.
Section 1.1 starts out by listing some "principles": availability, reliability, cost, etc. None of these are principles.

At a higher level, the main point of the book, a Service Oriented Architecture composed of independent, separable, small components, doesn't really make sense: many of the critical concerns in distributed systems are cross-cutting. E.g. if you're using Mongo as a storage component, you will be doomed to the morass of eventual consistency throughout your application. Cross cutting concerns require end-to-end thinking.

Now, SOA is a meaningless term and one can redefine it to mean anything, so don't defend the book by redefining critical terms. I am not arguing that componentized designs don't make sense. I am arguing that you cannot componentize in the manner described in the book, without constant concern for the whole. Yes, you can bolt crap together into a bigger pile (of crap), but it'll stink as badly as the weakest, stinkiest component.
>The changes they fought against were demonstrably beneficial immediately, not to future generations, and to a very wide segment of society (particularly the poor, who are most sensitive to the cost of goods).

...

>They were just a special interest group like any other, fighting a losing battle against the market preferences of their entire society

For you or me, people employed creating or maintaining the technology that obsoletes the need for what was previously reasonably-paying jobs, yeah, sure, that is how it looks.

I still think it's important to see and acknowledge the other side of the argument, though; Especially now, a period when the market has not been creating new work roles to replace those obsoleted by automation.

The argument is, of course, that technology is advancing so quickly that it's unreasonable to expect an average human to be able to learn new skills fast enough to remain relevant. Some people project forward, saying that if automation continues as it has been, there will be no jobs left that humans can do better than machines, and we'll be frozen in a situation where those that own the means of production at that point will continue to own the means of production, without any opportunity for people who don't own means of production (other than their own labour) to earn capital, as their labour is now obsolete.

I personally disagree with the latter part of the argument, I personally think we can find new productive things for the unskilled to do, but I can understand where they are coming from. That is, certainly, the current trend.

But, I do think it's important to acknowledge that we do have an imbalance right now. We're making very good progress at automating what was previously done by human labour, and, as a whole, we (the entrepreneurs) are not doing very well at figuring out how to use the resulting idle (and now unskilled, as what they were previously skilled at has gone obsolete) workforce.

Personally, I think this (what business can be created to employ the masses) is the largest problem of the day, and as far as I can tell, nobody is seriously working on it. Plenty of people are working towards the basic income, welfare state model, but personally I think that's a sub-optimal answer to the problem (compared to full employment.)
It's a big money-making scheme. They change it all the time to sell more style guides. Complete bullshit. I hate MLA.
As far as I know you are correct. Mozilla released the Audio Data API and produced a number of demos based on that. A W3C group was formed to work on Web Audio standardisation and in that group Google announced the work on their API.

Mozilla then followed with a "Media Processing" API: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/06/media-processing_15.html

It's possible that person you are responding to is thinking of that.
Your quotes are selective, so I hope this doesn't just devolve into people battling their own predilections through their HuffPo/Drudge filters. There's lots to be said for the entire process.

As for depression, the federal case is the only part that is any of our business, and is the only part (that I know of) that provides some commonality of experience and results, as the feds can come after any of us for whatever three felonies a day they choose to do so. The prosecutors were helped by the PATRIOT act, after all, which covers more of us than Aaron's personal historical details and experiences. Aren't we allowed to talk about whether that's a troublesome umbrella to live under, and how it played out in a specific case?

You can't just say "every case is different" when the techniques can be the same between them. Forest for the trees.
If Raspberry Pi was increasing its price on a certain day then I don't think people would complain.

At least it's honest. Half the blog posts are just SEO for people in tech's businesses.
This is where that second line I wrote comes in.
Maybe once you got enough "valid" users together you can make any topic trend on Twitter by having all the bots tweet about the topic? Might be a one-shot goldmine.
Dataset of 13 Billion Clicks available for research