skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, having used HAML for a while, I got really annoyed with it and switched back to HTML. I like the prime stack + plain old ERB.
Using the "Significant economic or community impact" clause, one could easily have enlisted the secret services into that investigation, saying the downloaded material represents thousands of man-years of work from the nation's top researchers. That statement is entirely true, however it has nothing to do with the zero-sum game it leads the uneducated eye to believe.

The secret services should have been apt enough to figure out from the start that the reported "crime" was no worse than having a kid loose in the library of Congress taking pictures of every public documents. They should never have equated it to stealing - removing - the material.
What information? I'd legitimately appreciate links/sources of the situation's severity other than hindsight.
So people told it as they saw it.

That's the way hackers work and speak - and that sort of frankness is one of the major reasons that HN remains outstanding in terms of signal vs noise. We don't escape everything with weasel words and second-guess the way it's going to be interpreted. Commenters say what they think. Voters agree or disagree.

Yes, it comes back to haunt people. Yes, people are wrong on here every single day. But that's the nature of the discourse, and it will be a sad day if HNers start to worry about voicing their opinion because it could be taken the wrong way.

And, to pre-empt what I know will come, NO-ONE ever has all the facts. Ever. If we needed all the facts before we formed an opinion then we would have none.
If my idea (and development) turns into a multi-million dollar proposition and I get booted to the curb, I'll give you my phone number for $8000 so you can offer to invest in my next venture. But I don't guarantee I'll return your call, because my phone will be ringing off the hook.

If I fail, I'll get another job after a couple months and do it again.
Another alternative is Hipache:

https://github.com/dotcloud/hipache

It's based on NodeJS, and it's really good. I've been using it in front of three web servers serving around 800 small-to-medium business websites for the last six months and it's been fantastic.

It pull configuration data from Redis so you can easily do things like automating deployments etc.
Tencent’s (China) WeChat App is Censoring Its Users Globally
Wow, thanks CBS! I hadn't really considered DishTV, but this looks so much better than the Comcast crap (something like 5 HD channels via a clunky, user-hostile, and extremely noisy set top box) that I think I'm probably going to switch.

The US needs to reform their regulations so that there's always at least two cable companies, and hopefully many more, in a given area. If that means that the municipality buys the lines and rents them out, then so be it. But vertical integration is killing the market, and we need a market more than we need to be lining the pockets of conglomerates.
Computer Intruder Is Put on Probation And Fined $10,000 (1990)
I dunno...as you say, having a community behind you, especially one you count yourself a respected member of, feels much better than going at it alone. I don't know if I had read his defense fund thread and didn't care enough to register a comment or just missed it...either way, I feel a little guilty of not inquiring more about how his case was actually going. I didn't know him personally but was absolutely crushed to hear the news, more than I had imagined I would be.
A second article and more examples:

Tencent’s WeChat comes under fire for international censorship practices

http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/01/11/tencents-wechat-comes-...
I thought the most interesting item in this story was not about the secret service, but rather the MIT counsel's decision to turn over evidence without a warrant or subpoena, in contravention of its policy. (Though it's possible they had a warrant and court order preventing its disclosure.)

I am sure the truth will come out.
You are fixing the wrong thing. Let's secure world peace first.

See what I did there?
It strikes me that your argument taken to the extreme is that everybody should program in assembly language because you can do anything, anytime, anywhere. Well, at least as far as control flow structures are concerned. Certainly C is preferable to C++ if you want simple and malleable code.

Do you also prefer if-else to switch statements? (I'm not sure.)

Do you like to use goto? (I doubt it.)

Do you eschew the use of classes and inheritance? (I doubt it.)

Do you keep all your code in one file? (I'd be very surprised.)

My point with these semi-facetious questions is that structure is important and regularity in a codebase does wonders for comprehensibility and maintainability. I agree with you for the case in which you do actually have something where the underlying structure is likely to change, in that then it does make sense to write it with malleability in mind.

Consider something like command line options processing. You have 50 options. You might want a 51st option. It makes sense to use the most regular structures you can so that people don't start special-casing stuff in the middle of it all. That, or to use an options library that defines the allowable formats for you.

Part of me thinks you're just having an allergic reaction to ?: simply because it is pretty unusual the first time you see it used seriously. But it can simplify so much:

Compare:

if (a)
{
return b;
}
return c;

to:

return a ? b : c;
Founder of Simple Cyber Security here. Feel free to email/reply if you have any questions.

And Maciej, thanks so much for the support!
Hindsight is not merely 20-20 but prevents us from seeing the past as it truly appeared. Because we cannot unknow what we now know, the mind's eye is an unreliable witness.
I am not defending the words, I'm defending the person.
Any style of programming can look like a mistake if you take it to crazy extremes. I find header/template C++ programming works very well provided you do it in moderation and keep things simple.

Remember the STL is complicated because it tries to be super generic, and it tries to be super generic because it's a library so it tries to cater for all possible uses. If you're writing a program instead of a library, you can make things orders of magnitude simpler because you only have to provide what you need, not everything any programmer on Earth might need.
I really respect Ed Weissman's contributions and knowledge, so this is not meant as any type of personal attack. But I was thinking back when I read this comment four months ago that it seemed unusually harsh for someone who was facing 35 years in prison for something that _might_ deserve a slap on the wrist. So it's not all hindsight.

I was also surprised that it was the most-upvoted comment of the thread. And it also wasn't the only harsh comment in that thread. So if anyone deserves criticism, it's the Hacker News community for not showing a more compassionate side. I'd rather say it was the responsibility of the community as a whole rather than a single person.

It makes no sense to discuss if anything would be different if the HN community had responded differently to this story, but in general, giving an unsupportive collective response to someone who is down is probably not the best idea.
I'm not affiliated with TC.

Admittedly, I did decide to submit quickly so that I (might) reap the upvotes--HN has been transfixed by Aaron Swartz, and reasonably so, and I thought that people might like a reminder of how the community reacted a few months ago.
> I am a woman. I go around telling women to "woman up".

Well, the difference between "woman up" and "man up" is that, for men, showing emotion is a sign of weakness, so "man up" means "don't show emotion". That's a very dangerous thing to tell people who have serious emotional problems.
Please forgive me; I do not think that hacker culture is a bad thing. I think that hackers are, for the most part, wonderful people. I think that the aspects of hacker culture you mentioned are good, positive, and praiseworthy things. I just believe that SOME ASPECTS of hacker culture are problematic. I didn't mean to dismiss the entirety of it, or disparage hackers in general, and I'm sorry it came out that way. I just felt like this might be a good opportunity to ask people to try to, for lack of a better phrase, be excellent to each other.

We should be like this, all the time: "Hacker culture positively celebrates failure... Its overriding ethos is working together and helping each other out..."
I don't think disk, flash or RAM are huge concerns for anything but huge files, to be honest.

Client-server communication software can improve over time, or be replaced by better software. Picking a style based on technical limitations that will be superseded anyway is surely what you're arguing against?

As a more general point, using spaces instead of tabs can still be handled easily by IDEs. It's possible to recognise that something is supposed to be an "indent", and then space it according to what your preferences are. Whether any current IDEs do that, I don't know.
Discussion last time around http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924537
The first thing that the chapter regarding Performance and Organization takes up is establishing a structure for your CSS.
Whilst I'm well aware that the approach made towards separation of similar classes into multiple files is a good one, I've seen it argued that the usage of @import or linking multiple stylesheets has a significant impact on performance.
The guide even mentions the important practice of combining all styles into one stylesheet in order to avoid multiple http requests, but only later on, in a different section.
I don't think the first section does a good job at stressing this. It ought to at least mention that some form of preprocessing should be present here, if only to minify and combine the files.
To me, it seems a bit counter-intuitive that this first section of the guide could be interpreted incorrectly by a newcommer (''I should separate everything and include it all in a nice, fancy list of link tags!'')

Just some feedback. I must say that I feel like the guide so far is representative of most of the gems I came across whilst trying to improve my webdev, doing small-company websites on the side whilst studying, starting with some basic HTML3/4 and CSS2 knowledge and working on 3-4 projects over the course of 2 years.
It's what I now wish I had known before diving into my first project.
Jacques, incidentally, I think you deserve some praise for being a real stand-up guy here. Aside from being generally a heck of a decent person, you're one of the few here who seems to have taken some actual action throughout this -- reaching out to Aaron to offer assistance, and, later, contacting Lessig to follow up on the EFF's involvement.
So are programs compiled into that rendered tile format? Is this using some existing standard for transcribing algorithms into this calligraphy?

This looks very neat but I'm afraid I don't entirely understand it.
I wonder if that's what Aaron felt when he asked for help: that HN had formed a mob against him. That's certainly the impression I get from reading the original HN thread (that HN turned into a mob against Aaron), yet there's not a single comment directing HN's attention to the fact that they were behaving like a mob.
That Edmund Burke quote just spurred me to donate $X (where X=a substantial amount relative to my income) to Demand Progress in Aaron's memory. Thanks.
There should also be a push for better use of discretion and 'common sense' from the US judiciary. Most (all?) laws are, by their nature, crude sticks that have to be wielded carefully.

I'm not sure that in this case, the law is 'wrong'. As has been outlined elsewhere, by a reasonable reading of the applicable law Aaron's actions were criminal and (in my opinion) the law itself, in spirit, is not unreasonable.

What is unreasonable in this case, appears to be the application of the law, and more generally, the cost in time and money that is required to mount an adequate defence.

It should never take two years and millions of dollars to have a case like this settled, one way or the other. It seems a basic violation of human rights that it could happen. This is the general problem that needs to be solved in the US.

To end with a favourite quote that feels timely:

"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.

Let's hope that's not entirely true.
A great introduction to Angular and MVW for new users or skeptics
I think that's an interesting take, even if not meant by hmexx. Startup ideas as publishing. $5000 advance, $3000 guaranteed marketing (of unknown value), and 50% royalties. I'd write a book for that rate. Why not an app?
I have a few objections:

1. It wastes my time. Sure, I could probably set up my editor to fix this, but I shouldn't have to do so to satisfy someone else's pointless indentation fetish. I've personally never worked on a team where this was an accepted, general guideline. It was always just one guy who wanted this, and did it to every function he touched, adding maintenance headaches for everyone else (until/unless other people finally told him to stop).

2. It messes up diffs. Now instead of one line showing up in the diff, the entire block is often different. And yes, most diff tools have options to hide whitespace differences. Again, though, this adds overhead to everyone who doesn't want this block style. I'd rather not hide whitespace differences, because if someone has added a bunch of inappropriate whitespace (or mangled the block while trying to reformat it to include their new variable), I want to know about it during the code review so I can tell them to fix it then rather than finding it later when I'm editing the file.

3. It doesn't actually help anything. Yes, you get a nice column that shows you all the variable names. What good is that, though? Unless you're putting everything at the top of the function (which has its own set of problems), you're not really getting anything useful from this except maybe prettier code (arguable), because at a glance you still don't really get know all the in-scope variables (not to mention file-scope variables). Moreover, you actually lose something valuable with this style, because now it's harder to determine a variable's type. You're trying to scan left from the name across some indeterminate amount of whitespace to match with the type. This is not typically easy to do, which is why column-oriented data is typically displayed with alternating background colors on each row.
You know it's the end of the road when your (other) founder leaves for Live Nation Labs.
Classic. Anyone interested in this era should check out "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling.
I guess that's fair. I honestly hadn't considered that; I've had enough dealings with the justice system to know that it's impossible to overestimate the damage they're willing to do to someone's life when it suits them.
Aaron Swartz, America’s Mohamed Bouazizi (Arab Spring igniter)
Let's imagine MIT was working on some kind of defense-related project ala Whirlwind. Could it be possible that the Secret Service gets called in on any possible suspicious activity on any network connected to such a thing?
This article is no more than a summary of consensus among game developers, publishers, and media.
I'm excited about ruby not having to allocate a hash for every bloody method call ever.
I'm not entirely certain that Aaron knew he was doing something wrong, or, for that matter, whether he was in fact doing something wrong. It seems he made little effort to cover his tracks and pretty much acted out in the open. And from what I've heard from friends who've met him in person - Aaron was brilliant, idealistic, a nice guy, and hopelessly naive about how the world actually works.
Even more humbling to be in my forties, still not having done so much.
OMG! Capital vs. labor, what a discovery. Someone alert the Nobel economic prize committee.
The importance of writing (for programmers)
Shouldn't the package be called "segment.io"? I'd hate to see every startup with an API trying to grab generic names on package repositories.

That said, it looks like someone else beat you to getting "analytics" for a README.

Perhaps you could make it so segment.io isn't the only option, or merge a pull request that does this, and ask SlexAxton to release the name, as suggested by izs? https://npmjs.org/doc/disputes.html

Edit: also npm is increasingly being used for browser packages. I'm not sure what to do when a browser and server component share the same name.
I have a genetic disorder. At the time I attempted suicide, I was undiagnosed. In part for that reason, I ended up with severe low blood sugar while also under severe social duress. The short version is that relatives who knew the man I was arguing with had molested me as a child were telling me to "behave" instead of telling him to stfu. The severe low blood sugar interfered with my plans to slash my wrists. Had I been clearer-headed, I likely would have succeeded. I had a scar from an old accident marking exactly where to cut myself to successfully bleed out. Instead, I ended up with a really insignificant flesh wound. You can read the blog post if you want more details.

I still find your remarks objectionable. Severe duress often cannot be clearly distinguished from "mental illness". I have seen too many stories where someone was dismissed as paranoid, a drama queen, mentally ill, making shit up, etc where it later turned out their "dramatics" were 100% true.
Using Aaron Swartz
It didn't help that the people trying to shed light on the severity of the situation were met with comments like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529716
Derek Khanna, fired Republican staffer: copyright reform is next step after SOPA
Let's instead fix vast overcharging, with 5x-20x pleabargain:max sentence ratios. If something is bad enough to lock someone away for 20 years, 2 years shouldn't be an option just because they made the legal system cost less money. Plea bargains are coercive, undermining our rights to a trial by the jury of our peers, and are likely coercing false testimony/false corroboration of evidence against 3rd parties far more than they should

More trials for actual bad things, fewer arrests for just marginally bad things, and less prosecutorial discretion is what we need here. Computer crime having overly high penalties in most cases is merely a symptom of a general problem we should be solving for all law.
> accept the consequences

Everyone has to accept the consequences. Reality doesn't allow you not to. There's no way to 'log out' of the real world; the most you can do is kill yourself, and then your suicide becomes the consequence.

Whenever someone says "accept the consequences" they mean "accept the consequences in silence", as opposed to accepting them under vocal protest and attempting to challenge them. When the consequences are unjust, accepting them in silence is acquiescing to the injustice, which only serves to perpetuate it.

Merely accepting the consequences is inevitable; accepting the consequences in silence is a choice, and it is not always the best choice.
Aaron (supposedly) did something illegal. Whether his actions were wrong is an entirely different question, and one that is highly subjective.
Why don't you "man up" and acknowledge, the comment was not only very distasteful, but extremely vitriolic and damaging for someone who was asking for help.

He was asking for help, is this the type of rude comment you make when someone ask for it.

Severity wasn't conveyed, what does everything have to be explicitly spelled out for you in order to understand.
I wonder if it might not be better to not award karma for submissions which are upvoted. It's possible/probable that most stories of value would get submitted anyway, and it would discourage the mad rush to submit.
Well, let me state this: John's version is not to my preference 'cause it has { in the same line as if, but I can live with that. But YOUR version uses not only the ? operator, which should be burned with fire but it NESTS two of them together. Please, I want to die now. :(

Conclusion: We have different preferences.
JSTOR liberator
Wirecutter: Best Budget-Friendly Sous Vide Gear
It's funny you mention that, as I'm using the companion program (http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cpplint/cp...) on the code for my current project right now. My only complaints is that much of the cpplint program checks for arbitrary style choice versus possible issues. Sure, most of the style I agree with, but I've actually hacked on that program a bit because the style guidelines are hardcoded in it. I'm halfway tempted to make it more flexible in terms of style, or at least separate the style components from the linting parts.
Defining the gram
Module name is slightly misleading... surely segment-client, node-segment or anything else would have been more appropriate. It's not really THE analytics library, or really an analytics library at all for nodejs.
Also, some companies that developers work for use somewhat similar psychological tactics to pressure their employees into working 100-hour weeks (thus keeping them isolated from the outside world). While they probably don't go as far as beatings and imprisonment, managers have certainly been known to use intense psychological pressure and public humiliation to ensure that employees devote their lives to their jobs. I realize that this analogy between corporations and religious cults isn't precise, but it may still be worth exploring.
Some of the stuff people have been writing in these threads is so unbelievably callous and insensitive that I really wonder what drives us all to do these things.
He uses C# to provide examples of dynamic failure in compiler checked code. Since then, some of his 'what we want to write' pseudo-code examples are now reality in C#.
Webapps for Data Scientists - Build your first CRUD in
First, just to be really clear about this: Ed is pretty much the very last example of bad behavior that I would ever look to on HN. He's a heck of a nice guy, and I wish he wasn't the one being discussed here.

That said, surely you can acknowledge that there's a difference between donating and posting a comment?