skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that every project claims to be buying off the shelf software with some 'minor tweaks'. If it truly is off the shelf, and you're guaranteed that it will be your last sale because after that your work will be in the public domain, then you'd have to send the government one hell of a bill. Things like windows, office, ERP systems, BI and reporting systems, accounting and HR, logistics.. it's more tax effective to buy them as a normal customer.
Note how people in the pro-gun community almost always prefix the phrase "assault weapon" with the disclaimer "so-called". Why? Because precision in language is important.

Seems a little hypocritical to demand precision from one side and embrace fluidity of the language on the other.
>Would you be surprised if someone pulled four million videos off of YouTube (or books off of Google Books) and torrented them, and then was prosecuted and asked to serve six months?

You're using the six months as though it wasn't the "coercive" part of a coercive plea bargain. When six months in prison and a felony record is supposed to be the carrot in a case of noncommercial copyright infringement, something malevolent is going on with the stick.
Petitioning to get answers from your government on all kinds of subjects is a ridiculous idea in the first place. It assumes that the Government is like your Mom or Dad and should have an answer to anything as long as enough of the kids ask the same thing. It is a sign that people are willing to delegate their responsibility to someone else making decisions (or answers, if you prefer, but that is the very same thing in the end) for them.

You do not need this. This is garbage site to entertain people in thinking they have a say in Power, while they clearly do not.
Auto Layout is pretty much the only reason nowadays I'd use nibs at all. Unfortunately, they are iOS6 only. If you want to support the previous major version you'll have to wait until iOS7 before you can really use that.
It seems reasonable under Kerr's standards and interpretation that action against USA Ortiz, MIT Pres. Reif, and AUSA Heymann, special deterrence can be used to take their jobs, disbar them, or otherwise affect their career prospects in their current disciplines.

The problem with legalistic interpretations is that they presume validity of the current laws as they stand, and that any change amounts only to a chipping away at overreach. Frankly, I'd prefer a repeal of the CFAA until they can get it right, citizens are not well-served when authoritarian lawmakers ask for twice what they'll settle for and receive 150%.
Allow non-immigrants to launch startups in the US
Really it's the programmER that writes the memory leaks, too.
If you must use a door analogy, your sign would actually read "Party inside. Please join us!" with a bowl full of keys sitting beside the door.

Now imagine if each key is valid for only five openings of the door. When someone comes back to your place for a sixth time and their key doesn't work anymore, is it really reasonable to be upset if they choose another key from the bowl?
For the record, I do not consider myself anti-democratic. I consider myself pro-democratic. However I do not see that we have a democratic process.

As a concrete example, consider the last election. More than 50% of voters voted for Democrats in Congress (even when you discard seats where there was only one party on the ballot, still over 50% voted that way), and a large majority in polls want Congress to become less partisan. Yet Republicans won Congress by a significant margin, and most members of Congress are in seats where their only realistic political challenges will come from the radical wing of their own political party.

In short, the population wanted moderates with a slight preference for Democrats, yet overwhelmingly we got extremists and a significant Republican majority. This does not reflect the desires of the American people, nor will the actions of our elected officials reflect our aspirations.

I could multiply with examples of how the governance of our society results in things not desired by the population, or not supported by my understanding of how the Constitution was meant to be read. But my point is simple. If you like sausage, you shouldn't learn how it is made. I want to like our legal system, but I've learned just enough about how it works and came to be that I cannot trust it.
I agree, though I'm not especially fired up about the death star question. If the site were taken more seriously it would have been nice to see a lighter side. Instead that seems to be the only side.

One sad thing is that this is one of the few petitions I've seen that actually should be addressed to the White House.
Bread & Circuses.

You've finally realized this is yet another circus, what are you going to do differently?

(And remember, this was from the hope & change guy in favor of transparency who now "personally signs off" (his words) on drone strikes on American citizens, extended & expanded the PATRIOT Act, and made indefinite detention an actual law.)
Did not know that. Thanks for pointing that out. I seem to remember this as a design feature of other weapons, but I am not an expert.
Maybe. It's the administrative system we've got, though, and we should be talking about how to reform the whole thing.

Note how much Orin Kerr recently agreed with the points I made days ago here on this subject.
I get a

TypeError: Cannot call method 'getValue' of undefined

on the last example. Running Chrome on OS X.
Warning Graphic Crime Scene Photo: Is Charles Manson Innocent?
meritocracy my @ss, it's good to be the husband of sheryl sandberg
Interesting factoid. In many states, the important thing about signatures is the intent of the signatory. Did they intend for said mark, whatever it may be, to be their signature?? If yes, then it is just that.

So, for example, you could just write or type a letter "x" and you would be fine.
I think I'm a cranky old man, because here's how I read most of the complaints about this website: "I care a lot about our democracy, but not enough to leave the house, do anything, or spend any money. Why doesn't anyone respect my opinion?"

There are a lot of ways to get involved in our democracy, but most of them are harder than tweeting.
> It is a sign that people are willing to delegate their responsibility to someone else making decisions (or answers, if you prefer, but that is the very same thing in the end) for them.

This is basically the entire premise behind a representative democracy, is it not?
Yes, and bringing on a non-technical cofounder who can do marketing for you. What's better, 50% interest with a big market share or 100% of none? How are you ever going to be on the front page of TechCrunch?

Seriously, this is an open-source project. Why in the world would he use a professional voice over? That's just weird.
If anything, the home page is too polished. People seem to be mistaking it for a well-funded commercial endeavor.
How do you handle distributed joins with group by's? Are there certain SQL syntaxes which aren't handled well by queries? What are the 90th percentile response times?
Agreed, generally. I am not familiar with how the calculation is currently done for calculating the damages, and so am not sure if the latter is any easier. Most probably, tracking the cost of development would have to be made a legal requirement just like other things that companies need to track (for taxes, immigration, etc.)

Another complication comes from the number of patents involved in a single product. How to tell how much revenue maps to each patent?

On the other hand, this does capture the intent of the patent system well -- Encourage research and development investment while avoiding frivolous cases.
Is this really necessary for Hacker News to stoop to this level (politics)? Come on. The only relation the petitions site has to Hacker News is that it's on the internet. And, frankly, it's a childish gesture.

We can do better than this.
Internet 2012 in numbers
Well, it's not true either way. But that too is very rare. There's just too much risk with it, and it's not how most nontechies think. Look what actually happened in this case: Ortiz's husband issued an ill-thought-out, insensitive statement in frustration on Twitter, and then eventually there was a calm, rational press release from the office.

Then they'll move on. They've got thousands of other cases, many of which have made other communities similarly angry. That we get 35,000 signatures for an online petition mostly speaks to the fact that we're online.
Can someone explain to me why I should use dispatch_once at all when a simple check whether the static variable is nil would suffice? It always seems so cluttered.

Compare this:

+ (MyClass *)sharedClass {
static MyClass *_shared = nil;
static dispatch_once_t onceToken;
dispatch_once(&onceToken, ^{
_shared = [[MyClass alloc] init];
});
return _shared;
}

...to this:

+ (MyClass *)sharedClass {
static MyClass *_shared = nil;
if (!_shared)
_shared = [[MyClass alloc] init];
return _shared;
}

Is there any difference regarding performance?
My understanding is that the articles Aaron downloaded and intended to distribute were in the public domain. I suppose one could make a case that the scans of those articles that JSTOR had prepared at its own expense were not in the public domain, but even if copyright law supports such a distinction, which I'm not sure it does, it seems to me that the worst crime Aaron would have commmitted would have been copyright violation -- a civil matter, and not one, AFAIK, that the US Secret Service routinely gets involved in.

In short, if Aaron had scanned the same articles and made them available on his own server, he would have been in the clear. Here's an interesting analysis from well before Aaron's death: http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/was-aaron-swartz-stealing
What exactly do you mean? Macros seem like a good way to solve many of JavaScript's syntactic shortcomings while maintaining backwards-compatibility.

Now, macros do have some shortcomings. I've used Racket (a variant of Scheme) a fair bit, and I'm now very wary of using macros too much. However, when they are useful, I've found they're very useful: writing the same program in a language without macros would often be extremely awkward.

Of course, if you're willing to entertain radical changes to your language, you can get many of the benefits of macros with a minimalist syntax, laziness and a simple mechanism for controlling how statements get evaluated. Which ultimately just amounts to Haskell. And I've even found good use cases for macros in Haskell, albeit far less than in any other language.
Because you are comparing two very different situations and saying "the same kind that is driving the alternative energy market". The dot-com era investment was born out of the anticipation that the Internet was somehow going to revolutionize everything and that investing now would be rewarded at a later date, even if the business did not even any idea how to make money then. The energy market is not driven by the same investors, not the same companies. Energy groups are multi-national companies generations dozens of billions of revenues, and they are the ones funding the future initiatives, and I seriously doubt anyone could kickstart their way in the energy market because of the investments required to start anything from scratch.

There is nothing that could be as remote as these two markets.
> Introverts are not all autistic and autists are not all introverts.

I never said that they were.

Whether there is a medically significant difference between introverted neurotypicals and "actual" autistic people is irrelevant to the point that I was trying to make. Since a lot of people who work in IT seem to be either unwilling or unable (it doesn't matter which) to engage effectively in non-verbal communication, the loss of non-verbal communication will have a smaller impact on productivity than the author claims it does.

As another actual Asperger's person, I am pissed off that you took the discussion off-topic on a technicality.
Good point. I generally don't care about the whole 'we must have women too' perspective but considering the number of people involved it seems surprising that not a single one is included?
I've been working on distributed teams for over 2 years now. I very much prefer it and I find that personally I am more productive. I've also started a business with a parter who is remote. In 2 years we've only met twice. It helps that we are in the same timezone but any level of stagnation has not been a result of our location. When we eventually hire developers I would like to hire local so I can have in person social meetings with my team, but I would not want to have an office as I feel the trust and flexibility of working from your own environment can have a massive impact on a mature professionals creative output.
Oh come on, the whole thing was worth it for that Death Star petition response.

;)
I've been trying to get off the ground with a few Android apps myself [1]. A few suggestions:

1. As others have noted, test screenshots and icon. People looking for a sudoku app probably want to see a board playing sudoku.

2. SEO. There aren't keywords on Android like there are on iPhone so everything goes on the description. I think you might be better off with a bit longer description with more keywords.

3. Keep working on outside promotion. You picked a really crowded niche. When I search for Sudoku on the play store it tells me there are over 1k results. That is not going to be an easy thing to crack so you really need to get an outside feature and get word of mouth working for you. The multiplayer aspect should help with that.

4. Look at more aggressive monetization strategies. I haven't tested it yet (my device is currently dead and charging), but it sounds (and from the screenshots looks) like you might be being too passive. You have to ask people for their money before they will give it to you. Don't give away too much of the game and make it obvious how to upgrade. You have to provide lots of value or they won't want to obviously, but you can't give away so much that people think the free version is "good enough"

[1] - http://www.entrelife.com/2013/01/case-study-of-android-vs-ip...
> I would argue that respect for engineering practices/stability comes after that blistering innovation that builds the system in the first place.

I quite disagree. The Internet, for example, wasn't the brainchild of rule breakers. It was a defense project, built by people quite thoroughly entrenched in the establishment. The telephone network, that made the whole country smaller, was built by the AT&T monopoly in a very civilized, orderly manner. A thoroughly beauracratic, top down, government agency working with huge, stodgy defense contractors put a man on the moon. For all it's daring, Space X started with a rocket design that was nearly half a century old. Most of the technology of the 20th century is the product of armies of engineers working orderly in top-down organizations. Pyramids.
I'll leave this here.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/14/167280430/episode-...

Planet Money talks about HSBC and well worth a listen. The problem really is why haven't any individuals been indicted from HSBC or any Wall Streeters (from the whole mortgage mess)?

On a side note, Planet Money is IMO an outstanding podcast.
I think that the current laws are right.

I wish he that didn't take his own life. But remember that it was his choice to break into that building and those networks in the first place.
Nope, I never want to.
If you two-finger click the application, it will give you the option to assign it to a specific desktop.
Markup APIs and API Scripting Platforms
An interview with Miron Livny: Bosco, HTCondor and more
The general population doesn't have to be aware. The opposition will make sure they know.

Regardless, I don't believe her career is over today. The thing that was interesting to me about the article is that it is the first item in a mainstream publication that has gone as far as to say this case was a career ender (and advocating for it in the process). She hasn't been fired, but if these kinds of articles/opinion pieces continue to show up, she won't be moving up.
Re-print of this one from circa a year ago: http://swizec.com/blog/why-programmers-work-at-night/swizec/...

I've been thinking on and off about this since I read it then; and I mostly agree with it.

Except for the 'bright screens' cause. In my case, the same work pattern happens if I'm reading a deep (but not too abstract) book, writing on paper, or doing some hardware work.

Which I found quite interesting, as the book case kind of matches the 'sleepy brain' cause, and the hardware part happens more when I already have a plan and I'm just building with almost no stop (maker-type activity?).
> In a system where a law could be passed in a few days, wouldn't it also be able to be repealed in a few days?

The fear is that it might NOT be repealed in a few days--again, see the patriot act.

But, for a more obvious example, consider a bill that enables martial law.... much more difficult to revert and something that our country might have passed in some of its more heated moments.

But, this is all just speculation. I have no idea if our slow government is actually the reason why it's been so stable as a "democracy"; it could be for myriad other reasons, but it's always made sense to me.
How do you determine the reward for a given invention? You can put the patents in the market for the purpose, which can happen today itself. Alternatively, you may see the damages as the said reward.
How is this different from saying that communication via Switft messages is really only one line of code at the end that's important?
Yes, and I do not, personally, condone the current state of representation. There are several ways on how to manage decision-making in large communities and this is not the only one possible, especially in the 21st century with the communication tools we now possess. If the internet changes the way we shop, we travel, we connect with our friends, the way we entertain ourselves, why do we keep doing politics the same 18th century way ? (rhetorical question)
This won't change until we get rid of first past the post and gerrymandering.

And with the way things are going, I don't think there is a good chance of that happening.
Because one good usage for having all that gold would be to back an independent currency (if they decide to pull out of the Euro). Although I'm not sure if investors care whether the gold is actually in Germany or not, it does send a signal.
For the record, that was not my thrust. (Can't speak for dlitz.)

I was just surprised at your suggestion that better laws would reduce your workload at Matasano.
IIRC, they had a lot of problems with engine failures, as the 747 really pushed engine technology and size at the time. Joe Sutter's book [1] is an interesting look at the history of the 747 design (he was the lead designer).

There was also an issue with the wing resonating, which they fixed by putting trim weights in the wing of the 747-100 made of depleted uranium.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/747-Creating-Worlds-Adventures-Aviatio...
If Ortiz or Heymann are fired or resign under pressure, the only signal that really sends to other prosecutors is that mob justice is effective for those with a mob at their backs. And against the idea of being over zealous, you have the mentality cultivated in the legal field that one cannot be "over" zealous in playing one's role within an adversarial system.

If you want to see change, not just for people like Swartz but for all defendants, you need to remove the incentives for prosecutors to rack up the highest number of kills, and you need to make a trial something that isn't going to ruin the defendant if they choose not to plea out.
I don't see him as inconsistent. I just think that he didn't state his full position in a single place.

My understanding is that his full position follows from two principles:

1. The only point of punishing Aaron is to deter him, so there is no reason to punish him more than what would deter him.

2. There is a reasonable limit to what is a fair punishment for Aaron's actions, by no means should Aaron be punished more than that.

The result is that the appropriate punishment is the minimum of the two. Given that Aaron could have been deterred by punishment that is far less than #2 provides, the limiting consideration in his case is #1. But even for a much more difficult to deter person, by no means is decades acceptable for #2.
I imagine I will get a good bit of downvotes for this but I would not mind if the Government took away all the guns.
Of all the things on that chart, aren't Windows and Office still the primary money makers?
It is their network, but does changing a MAC address to resolve, presumably, flaky network problems count as circumvention? I don't think Access was meant to imply Authentication in the naming of MAC.

If my telephone at home suddenly and inexplicably stopped working and I walked up the pay phone down the street to get another phone number, am I running the risk of legal consequences because my own phone number may have been cut off on purpose?

If he was explicitly told why his MAC addresses were being blocked, you may have a point. However, if he was explicitly talked to about what was going on, how was it able to escalate to the level it did?
Agreed, this looks horrible.
Stoked on this release guys! Cheers from North Van.
Lets take a language that is already marginalized, and remove one of it's best loved features! That'll get 'em excited.
Looks awesome. but signing Excel files is broken. It generates PDF file but extension is still Xls, so Excel won't open it after signing. hopefully you are aware of this bug :) good luck
Just buy a raspberry pi and ship it here: https://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi.... Supposedly free.
No, no. Some of the articles were in the public domain, but not all of them. (The precise ratio could have been a relevant fact at sentencing for some of the charges, because it would speak to the monetary value of what his actions threatened to publicize in violation of copyright law.) Copyright violation is routinely both a civil and a criminal manner.

He would not have been in the clear if he scanned and publicized the articles himself.
I agree with you. I consider using GoGo's internet connection without paying for it to be stealing.

However, the article intrigues me because connecting to the outside internet is like a giant puzzle looking for a solution, which would provide plenty of in-flight entertainment. I don't consider that immoral (since you're not actually using the resulting connection), but I suppose if you get caught trying to hack through their system you'll get in some kind of legal trouble.
Evernote, you need to make a legit solution for iOS Safari users
How do you keep your desktops separate? It seems that any change made in one is automatically made in the others. I have found that you can limit an application to one desktop, but if that is true, then how do you use two separate Chrome tabs in two different desktops?
Dang good
I'm a big fan of understanding motivations. Prosecutors try to go hard on people so that they "look tough".

Think about how disgusting it is to build your career on how many wins you have and fuck the collateral damage (pardon my French) which in this case was Aaron.

Until prosecutors are not motivated to act this way, we will continue to see excessive behavior from them.
Developer fired after he outsourced his work and spent ALL DAY surfing the web
to be fair, of all the different petition.whitehouse.gov links that have popped up in the past couple of weeks, this is the only one i care about.
You don't base it solely on that, either. Price is determined by the imbalance of buy and sell orders. Investors might decide to buy or sell based on a multitude of factors, including but not limited to earnings and growth potential.