skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That might be true if it wasn't for the fact that every. single. set. of charges files gets a similarly-worded press release. "So and so was charged with violations of foo, bar, and baz today, if convicted on these charges he faces a fine of up to $X00,000 and Y years in prison".
POP- its a paper based wireframming app, no desktop functionality unfortunately
don't get me wrong, i love linux, but this is seriously dishonest, especially the "Forget about drivers" section http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net/items/drivers/index.php?lang...
Interesting that you believe FB can magically track 100% of your browsing history even if you are not logged into facebook and not on a site with FB integration. However, this is something google does for sure. Thanks to chrome and search integrations in other browsers.
You could walk through the security check without an knives, and sneak a bit of glass out of an airport bar on the other side. Why bother with knives, when you can make a prison shiv using things you can buy just before boarding a plane?

The real answers to hijacking are (1) locking the cabin door from the inside and (2) passengers understanding that they are not just going to be flown to Cuba. The security checkpoints are almost entirely useless.
- optional gc

- thread local gc vs Go's global gc

- memory protection: Go has shareable mutable state

- better functional programming support
If I have it right, the idea is to do gene therapy on the person so that their cells produce proteins that block the reproduction of the virus.
For the 30 y assumption they cite:

Fenner JN (2005) Cross-cultural estimation of the human generation interval for use in genetics-based population divergence studies. Am J Phys Anthropol 128(2):415–423.
And i 've seen people with amazon crapware on their ubuntu
Does cable TV rip off people who don't watch sports?
So a few people like it, a lot of people don't.

This has made HN front page. Regardless of whether it's suppose to be serious, funny, or facetious, I think it's working [by causing us to discuss it]. Look this discussion is actually a great thing we are having... some folks think this is a great idea while others don't. Many may have gone on never thinking that others might disagree. For those that despise it as passive/aggressive... this is your chance to let those who like this idea know it's not as cool as they may think.
Back to the facts: Carmen Ortiz thought she could make multiple counts of wire fraud, unauthorized access to computer systems and some other charges stick. Each of those charges carries by law a maximum sentence. The 35 years that get handed around is the sum of all those maximum sentences. I so far haven't seen a public statement that says "I, Carmen Ortiz think that the appropriate sentence for the case at hand is 35 years." There is no contradiction here.
it's amusing that a yc member doesn't (or, at least, didn't) understand exponential growth ;o)

[i assume there's more technical details somewhere than given in that article - anyone have them?]
They really only know if you like porn if you like a page that has the word porn in it. The statement in this post is a little broad.
I wish for a future in which I can just sit down and my computer uses all sorts of heuristics to determine whether it's me or not, and authenticate.

* Checks my posture.

* Checks the sounds I make while sitting neutrally.

* Checks the positions of my hands.

* Checks my overall frame.

* Checks my eye and shape of face.

---

Hopefully, all of these little things add up and in the end it can determine quite easily whether it's "me" or not.

I hate typing in passwords, it's a pain in the ass.
New book about Aaron Swartz's causes (free today)
You know, now that you mention it; I have done hiring at a couple of small startups where we had to share a little-bitty bathroom. When you're adding people to the team one person at a time, it's really easy to tell at which point you introduced the one who can't lift the seat when taking a whizz and leaves splatter on the seat for the next person to deal with.

Your proposal could help weed out trouble makers.
> Tangentially, it really bothers me that there is even such a job as Government Prosecutor.

Ignoring the personal attacks and hyperbole in your post: In a system without government prosecutors who do you think should prosecute for crimes? Should a murder victims family have to hire a private attorney to file a civil lawsuit? If they can't afford it, will the murderer go free? Please think your argument through to the end before taking cheap shots against the government in general.
Dr. Lessig knew it too. In fact he knew that Aaron had been offered a plea, and knew that the jail time must not have been too extensive because he knew that the reason Aaron would not take the deal is that it would involve pleading guilty to a felony.

I don't want to accuse Dr. Lessig of bad PR though, as much as using the same wording the prosecution uses (although it's no secret how Dr. Lessig feels about this case).
Everyone has heard of the cloud, but few know what it is
What is literacy these days...? ;)
Its a simple catch-22 - a "like" has no downside cost to me, so I will happily trade it in for 10% of my bill (Hell I wish more UK restaurants did this!)

However in the new graph search world (and indeed before this really) the downside cost was that I am seen as a like-whore trading my affections.

The more facebook becomes real the more the cost of like will increase.

There will be a virtual rate of exchange - as indeed there is today. Some of my friends tell everyone everything, some play their cards close to their chest. I judge their recommendations accordingly. Somehow social graphs need to do the same - and frankly that is pretty easy weighting really.
The article makes a point that impactful change tends to come from trial-and-error over a longer period of time. I think in startups it's possible but its a lot harsher environment where only the strong/successful ones survive early to mature and spread their innovation. Maybe at a larger company the same experiment would have had more time to incubate, perhaps because (at e.g. Bell Labs) the parent could afford to invest in basic research for a long time. Or maybe a startup founder would see a problem in a very different light and attack it in a way that a big company (perhaps AT&T today) would never OK in the first place.
Nah, it's been steadily growing through various discovery paths over the last 2-3 years.

Personally I caught on once I saw the feature list of 9.0. And 9.1... then 9.2... they just keep adding cool stuff that's made well. It becomes difficult to ignore.
> Assumptions:

> - You can earn 5% investment returns after inflation during your saving years
> That means that if someone steals your card or your smart-ring, you’d better report it stolen pretty quickly.

Well, yes. But you'd hopefully have a master passphrase to open the "smart-ring" device, making theft less of a problem.
Off topic, but that jumpy, sticky page title is really really annoying. It jumps over the point I like to scroll the top of the paragraph I'm currently reading to.
I am happy that soon the hardcore gamer part will change too =D
Stock prices falling....rofl. Go weep over your iPhone.
This is an interesting story. I remember when the worm happened, and never followed up with, "Whatever happened to him?"
Knuth's up-arrow notation
Years ago I joked about starting a service that sold fake kid packages after seeing so many co-workers that were able to leave early, work from home, not work over the weekend, etc. because of their kids. For $20 a year you'd get a frame with a couple photos of the kid, some child-created artwork, and a life outside of work.
Well after the end of the Western Roman Empire - the Eastern Empire even had Vikings and Saxons fighting for it in the form of the Varangian Guard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard
China is both the coolest and worst place you will ever go
MrMoneyMustache (MMM) has a sound philosophy of life based on his experience and on Stoic literature.

After reading his blog (and I mean all his articles from 2011) I've stopped buying myself a new computer every six months or so.
Actually with whiskey I am more than willing to take a one sided opinion. :-)
as a rule of thumb triple the salary to get an idea of the total cost - this is for bog standard jobs.

Very technical organizations (Bell Labs JPL, F1 Teams) can have OH rates of 600%+ like the ranked 1 RnD organization I worked at it costs to have those very expensive shops, master level craftsmen and engineers on staff.
I would really love for you to prove that FB or any other website for that matter can sniff the site traffic of any other window or tab that you have open, when you are logged into facebook on another window/tab. Cookies and history are locked by domain, plain and simple. Unless you have a conspiracy that FB is planting spyware on peoples computers.
Wow, the marketing department and designers really went to town on this one! </sarc>

Who exactly is this aimed at? Because if it's for anyone with any technical inclination then tell me something I don't know. If it for 'Joe Average' then see above.
The alternative to plea bargaining is generally that everyone convicted gets sentences in line with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. No one ever seems to believe this but the intention is for there to be a better result for both sides.

I'll admit that dropping the option of plea bargains would less to lower conviction rates (though this is not necessarily a good thing, depending on your mindset). However should Aaron's case have gone to trial it's very likely IMO that it would have lead to a conviction and you really would be talking about anywhere between 1-7 years in prison instead of 4-8 months. That sword cuts both ways.
> I expect that any criminal defendant, including Aaron, would read her initial statement as "they're going to put me in prison for 35 years".

Absolutely not. I've been shocked to see how many geeks - including Linus, do not seem to understand the concept of maximum penalties.
This is not an obscure lawyer technicality, this something you see in the papers every day. Journalists like to quote the "up to" numbers because they sound dramatic, and as a functioning member of society you need to know what that means and doesn't mean.

Maximum penalties set an upper bound on sentencing based on the crimes you are charged with, to prevent abuses. The high maximum penalties in this case probably means the laws are overly broad, but say very little about what the actual sentence will be. Moreover, I do not think the items he was charged have a minimum sentence - he could have been found guilty, and still gotten off with a slap on the wrist.
RIP Daniel Torreblanca, a Toronto Hacker
The Serif Readability Myth
Gas in Western SD (where I live) is a $2.66/Gallon.

That's not very high.
I'm excited about it too but I don't think it's going to be "soon", There is basically one AAA title on Steam right now and about 20-30 indie titles (and a bunch of DLC to pad out the list.) It's a great start but I think it's going to be a few more years yet before there will be enough of a library to lure away the PC gamers full time.
You're right, it's old news, but I do think the more we hear of this, the more it's likely to start a movement rather than be a novelty.
Most Talked About Pages Of The Week #3 - Religion, Science And Fun
There's a kind of emotional economy that nerds don't tune into. To those who aren't strong enough to resist participating in this collective exchange, it seems like the nerd is cheating. And he's perpetually anxious, so he must be in the wrong, right?

>everyone - including the teacher - had laughed

Yes. 'Socialization' --a purportedly legitimate function of schooling-- exists on the same continuum as teasing and bullying.
That`s exactly what I thought of when reading the article and I expected it to be mentioned at the end. But I only could find your comment here. Well done.
I think the author is showing a bias common in technology circles: assuming that the limiting factor is technological knowledge.

But history is full of examples of people who had all the necessary knowledge and yet didn't execute. The ancient Greeks actually built toy steam engines. So why didn't they launch an industrial revolution?

The limiting factors have much more to do with availability of capital than raw scientific and engineering knowledge. You need the vast web of people with specialized knowledge and tools that keep any technology running. Technology as simple as a pencil has a mind-boggling array of underlying capital requirements (see Leonard Read's classic essay "I, Pencil": http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html)

Remember that even a skill like "reading & writing" made you an unusually valuable specialist in a pre-Gutenberg world.

The true capital costs of a Roman semaphore internet are almost impossible to guess. Given the myriad other demands on their capital, it's not at all surprising they didn't try it.
Like "Don't pay $100 for your operating system", it's not entirely true. It's quite difficult to find laptops without OS.
Anyone saying he's wrong about the intent and effect of the press release statement, do you think reading a statement like that about yourself isn't going to influence your thinking? Their press releases were intended to drum up public support and paint him in a certain light. That most definitely has an effect on a defendant, and it is most certainly intentional. Linus is right.

Further, when you're in the wrong (even partly), the only appropriate thing to do is to apologize. Not defend or justify or half-apologize with an explanation to try to gain sympathy, but to man up and say you're sorry. Anything less from this prosecution team is pathetic and sickening.
Take home quotation:

Mustachians will remain a rare breed, is because this
article will never appear in USA Today. (Or if it does,
people will be too busy complaining about how it can’t
be done, rather than figuring out how to do it)
<off topic>
I really can't stand it when websites like Wired usurp my back button. They even do it in a way where:

- Clicking back twice in rapid succession doesn't bring me back;

- Clicking and holding back button and selecting HN doesn't take me back;

which is a feat few other websites manage to pull off. I wonder if they had a team put together just for this purpose. Would have loved to be a fly on the wall in one of those meetings.

"How can we keep people on our site longer?"

"Sir, I know! Lets not let them leave!"

"Brilliant! Someone make this guy CEO stat!"

Utterly frustrating and inexcusable for a technology website.

</sorry>
Link to the original publication: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/09/1211927110

(I'm sorry that it is behind a paywall.)

Irina Pugach, Frederick Delfin, Ellen Gunnarsdóttir, Manfred Kayser, and Mark Stoneking. Genome-wide data substantiate Holocene gene flow from India to Australia. PNAS 2013; published ahead of print January 14, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1211927110
The names I already knew of have not chimed in. I know for a fact some women actively hide or downplay their gender. I tried that briefly when I first showed up. I was not comfortable with it so I fairly quickly dropped it. I tried it on the theory that if posting in a gender neutral style did not work, it would be relatively easy to "come out of the closet" and just being more open about my gender but if being openly female was a problem, it's a lot harder to downplay after the fact.
The article states "...not a cure..." for HIV. Rather it may cause HIV to become latent and not develop into Aids.
The IM section was egregious too. How can they tout "Pidgin, the instant messenger for Linux (it exists for Windows as well, and for Mac OS X)" as an advantage of Linux?
Find Your System
Actually, I think passwords are a brilliant authentication mechanism that will continue to have a place in computer security for many years to come. When used correctly, a password implies the presence of the correct brain. Not a device that can be lost or stolen, not even a fingerprint that can be lifted. Authentication based on information stored in your neural network might not be suitable for everyone, but at least among competent professionals, I don't see mobile phones or USB dongles replacing the passphrase on my PGP key anytime soon.
She identified the maximum the same way a protection racket says "It'd be a shame if anything happened to this nice business you've got here".

They never actually say they're going to make 'something' happen if you don't deal. But everyone knows that is exactly what they mean.

It's no different for the prosecutors. Stating the maximums in a case that clearly does not compel the maximums is an intentional negotiating tactic that amounts to intimidation. It quite clearly and obviously means "I will use the threat of the worst-case-scenario, in negotiations, to wring every last month of term and dollar of penalty out of you." And that implicitly indicates the prosecutors were gunning for Swartz.
Their information site on exporting your data:
http://www.dataliberation.org/

The tool to export data from some of their services:
https://www.google.com/takeout/

You can set up an IMAP/POP connection to GMail and copy your emails out. gmvault (a third party tool) uses that to make backups.
Yes, it does depend on the situation. If you depend on your job and you think your boss is looking for an excuse to fire you, I wouldn't blame you for keeping your head down. But that should be a somewhat exceptional circumstance. For typical work situations, that shouldn't be the default mode. Society is what we make of it and we should push back against repression. Naturally, this means tolerating views we disagree with.
Gates, Jobs and Wozniak were all criminals too, they just did it before anyone could catch them or the laws set them up for felonies.

To be objective, they also did things back when the damage you could do was fairly limited because of our lack of reliance on computer infrastructure.

The growth in punishment for computer crimes has grown with the importance of computers to modern society.
what does wearing two headphones even means?
Er, yes. Canonical's design people could have made this look really nice. It is difficult to work out who this is aimed at.
Seriously dishonest and outdated as well. I love linux but I spend much more time installing things and tweaking my linux boxes than I do my Mac. Linux is awesome for the geek community but it's never going to compete with osx/windows for the casual user, nor should it.
My rand.Intn() was always returning the same value. Seem like you have to to seed it manually (once, in main() for example): rand.Seed( time.Now().UTC().UnixNano())

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12321133/golang-random-nu...

Edit: It's in the documentation, but you have to look for it.

"Seed uses the provided seed value to initialize the generator to a deterministic state. If Seed is not called, the generator behaves as if seeded by Seed(1)"
Which pharma cases?

I noticed the if. It's still a rather bold statement.

"Soandso is an idiot."
"Do you have any proof?"
"If they think this, then they're an idiot. Have you provided evidence to the contrary?"

It's like saying Stephen Hawking is an idiot if he thinks the holocaust never happened. Can you provide me with evidence that Stephen Hawking thinks the holocaust happened? Is it really okay to call someone an idiot on a conditional if you have zero proof?
Covered here: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/06/06/dude-wheres-my-7-i...

Google cache (his server seems not to take HNing well): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UjYtrDk...
Easy way to lose sales
It's passive aggressive if you can't just talk to your coworkers and explain when you need to concentrate and expect them to respect your space when you need it.
Unfortunately, most of this is propaganda unbacked by facts; the correctness of these statements depends on the particular conditions (what machine is being used, under what conditions, etc.) Plus, it omits a whole slew of problems unique to Linux, such as the fragmentation caused by abundance of distributions.
This is a valid point, but in my experience, technical people can't help from criticizing things.

The typical computer science conference review process is single-blind: authors do not know the reviewers, but reviewers know who the authors are. Some CS conferences now are doing double blind: reviewers also do not know who the authors are.

Personally, I would prefer reverse single blind: authors know who the reviewers are, but reviewers do not know who the authors are. Why? I think it's good to try prevent reviewers from being biased (either way) by names or institutions. But I think that reviewer anonymity has lead to some really crummy reviews; people don't read papers carefully (if they read the whole thing at all) and throw out one paragraph or two. I think that if reviewers had to sign their name of the bottom of their review, they would do a better job. I try to adhere to that when I review a paper: would I feel embarrassed if my name was attached to this?
You personally may have destroyed any credibility amongst the general public that this "cause" ever had.

It quickly went from improving the legal system in the wake of the untimely suicide of Aaron Swartz to a frothing Internet lynch mob, complete with Guy Fawkes masks and now "doxxing" Federal prosecutors just like the mafia dons and drug lords of 25 years ago.

If you're trying to relate CFAA reform with kingpins and crime lords in the public mind, you've started off on the right foot!
> As soon as you start saving and investing your money, it starts earning money all by itself.

No, it doesn't. Money cannot earn money, people do. Saving/investing money only allows people (via an arbitrarily complex system of indirections) to become indebted to you so they'll pay you some of the money they earn.

This is vitally important because it means it's impossible for a significant percentage of people to retire early unless the remaining workforce becomes correspondingly more productive. Otherwise, if everyone started following the advice in that blog to try retiring early, what would happen is that average returns would go down across the board, and that "4% safe withdrawal rate" would become 2% or even 1%, making the whole math work out quite differently.

Arguably, that is already happening even without additional early retirees, simply because the increased average life expectancy (and thus the time people spend in retirement). Effectively, everyone is already doing an early retirement, compared to people 50 years ago.
That's an interestingly emotional, defensive response. Most HN readers would simply have found it an cool scientific article. I don't think the Economist science section really has a "propaganda" axe to grind. (And as others have said, they never sign articles.) What's the source of your reaction?
Aaron Swartz: A view from India
That sections states that drivers are built in to the kernel, which is not always true.

There is a section below called "your hardware is not yet supported" under the "cases where you should stick to Windows" section, but that misses the biggest issue which is poorly supported drivers.

There are still many wireless cards, scanners, tablets, and other peripherals that have poorly written proprietary drivers or not-quite-functional open source drivers. The number is decreasing, but it's still a concern when buying new hardware.
"But history is full of examples of people who had all the necessary knowledge and yet didn't execute."

Great point. Future observers might ask why our society doesn't exclusively use self-driving cars, renewable energy, all-electric vehicles, etc.
Maybe a bit high, but I found that dialing that rate down a few points didn't dramatically change my years to retirement.
I Have an Idea for a Killer App, but Where Do I Start?