skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, it is a lowercase shortening of the acronym for Ideas From the Deep, which is what they called themselves before id. Ideas From the Deep becomes IFD becomes ID.
> cannot be a crime

I don't think I said that! I did say that if I had to chose between "federal crime" or prank that I'd chose prank. But if you extended the list to include misdemeanour or somesuch I guess I could see that.
I don't think they have access to that, and you are right, there's a big difference between getting search results with actual people links, and getting your ad anonymously delivered to people matching a given criteria.

By the way, you can click through the "create an ad" process quite far on facebook before you have to actually pay for it, so for those curious, why not give it a go and see for yourself what the process looks like? :)
He had no warning of the civil asset forfeiture suit, until the suit was served on him. But he had numerous warnings about the problems with his property, from local business owners first, and then by the Tewksbury Police Department, and then in response to multiple major criminal incidents at his hotel (a meth lab was discovered; the government contends no policy changes resulted; multiple people died in rooms the hotel; the government contends no policy changes resulted; multiple retail drug operations were found in the hotel; the government contends no policy changes resulted). It's disingenuous in the extreme for this guy to pretend he's taken by surprise here.

It's possible to simultaneously believe that we should be concerned about the lack of restrictions on the use of civil asset forfeiture and and at the same time believe that the state should have some recourse in court for properties operated in the fashion of this motel.
It is in fact how this case worked!

Do you honestly think this case is a good model for the problems with civil asset forfeiture?
The system didn't just allow her to do it, it encouraged her to do it. And not just her, but probably many others in positions like hers.
Show HN: Affinity.js, A javascript affine fit transformation library
It went to trial because the local police department wants to net about $800K from seizing the land.

It went to federal trial because the feds have worked out a system where they'll take on all the legwork and trial expense for the local police, in exchange for 20% of the take ($200K in this case).

It's 100% about money, and 0% about reducing crime or prostitution (other properties nearby have identical crime rates, but aren't worth as much, so they're not targeted). Police departments use the money from civil forfeiture to pad their budgets. In some cities, the amount of money received each year from civil forfeiture is 3-5x that provided by taxpayers!

If you want to go wild with rage, spend some time reading up on the civil forfeiture laws and abuses. IMO there is no greater example of bad law and bad government today than civil forfeiture. I'm not alone in thinking so, either. It's that evil.

The US has enacted some truly bad laws in the last decade or so, but civil forfeiture is so far out in front as "worst law in widespread use" that is has no real competitors for the title.
The issue is not a finding of cause for seizure, but the decision to choose this property versus the other properties that showed the same rate of crime and disregard for what was happening.

I edited my response above to include this section:

Furthermore, to your contention that this one property is the source and cause of the issues:

"It belies this notion that the area's great and there's this one problem property, the Motel Caswell," said attorney Scott Bullock from the Institute for Justice, the Arlington, Va.-based libertarian law firm representing motel owner Russ Caswell. "That's not the case at all.

Bullock said that when the Institute for Justice first took on the Motel Caswell case in 2011, the team examined police logs and found the rate of arrests at the motel comparable to that of its neighbors. He said more recent statistics obtained by The Sun seem in line with those initial findings.

The numbers raise the question of why this one business was targeted under the seizure laws, Bullock said.
Because of the leap seconds -- the unix time would show the same time for those two seconds (before/after the leap).
You might want to look into how civil forfeiture laws are used in the U.S. Furthermore, if you have such a problem with this property why don't you make an offer to the property owner and buy it? Shutting down someone's business & stealing their property because you don't like it is deeply immoral.
Don't have to respect him (I would have a lot of questions for someone who did) to mostly take his side in the whole mega upload situation.
A relative of mine embezzled money from her family business, to the tune of high five-figures. If you don't take motivation into account, how should she be sentenced? She was found guilty and sentenced, but before reading further, what do you think should have happened to her?

If we take motivation into account (as the court did), does it change how you think she should have been treated by the court to know that she didn't keep a cent of the money herself, but spent it on giving food and clothes to homeless people, organising it herself rather than through a charity? She wasn't preying on the weak, she was misguided and trying to help society rather than get stuff for herself - and the law is supposed to be about protecting society.

Motivation is an important aspect of any crime, and prosecutors should be looking for appropriate sentences, not the harshest one they can make stick. Besides, his case is a focus point that gives an excellent chance to start looking for reform rather than sweep it under the carpet as 'business as usual' - because prison sentences in the US have exploded ridiculously in the past 20 years.
Here's the government's evidence in the case:

http://forfeiturereform.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/124-U...

If other motels are operating in the same manner as this one, they should be treated consistently.

Like I said downthread: if you can get me a link to data about comparable incidents in other properties, that would be interesting. It obviously shouldn't be OK for a Motel 6 next door to escape scrutiny just because it has corporate ownership!
Mega uses features from a draft W3C spec called "file-system-api":
http://www.w3.org/TR/file-system-api/

Chrome supports this, Firefox does not. See my comments in the Mozilla bugzilla bug about this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704128#c22
It's not "not nice", I like the design. What I didn't like was the loading and that reminded me the era of full-flash sites. Maybe the loading took much longer because the site is overloaded and it will be OK later.
And.... it's down. And it's not just me.
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mega.co.nz
He doesn't create the products he is selling access to and he doesn't have a license to be a middleman. I agree that the creators have a broken business model, but his business model of exploiting that brokenness is not a replacement for it. In fact, it depends on it.

I don't believe that machines will replace artists either, because I believe art is the expression of personal human experience.
Fuduntu 2013.1 Review: Simple, effective and fast
Minecraft - AETHER CHEST
37signals lets people browse jobs, but not see contact information, until they sign up/pay. A similar workflow might be a possibility here.
I'm curious as to why the conversation about compensation for work done for "non-technical" upstarts is almost always framed as a binary "payment in equity vs cash" issue. Seems like there would be a huge market for MVP development by developers with a hybrid compensation model. (Maybe this is already common?)

For instance, a developer could quote Price X to non-technical co-founders to develop a simple, proof-of-concept MVP with an agreement to would receive Equity Y upon completion if the developer either (1) stays on for Period P or (2) helps the founders successfully land a more suitable, long-term developer to take over the project. The parties could even agree that Equity Y would be larger (e.g. 2Y) if the developer stays on.

Benefits to the non-technical co-founders would be (a) a proof-of-concept (or failure), (b) alignment of incentives with a developer to try hard, and (c) access to an insider to help find a permanent developer upon completion of the MVP if the MVP developer wants to exit (e.g. for a better opportunity).

The benefit to the developer would be (i) guaranteed fees, (ii) potential for equity (even if he exists) and (iii) flexibility.

More, a subsequent developer would have the chance to deal with someone who speaks his own language in the negotiation with the non-technical cofounders, and could avoid and annoying and/or exhausting translation of technical details.

An obvious objection may just be that non-technical co-founders never have money to pay for an MVP. I am far from an expert, but I would think that some do.
> This week, at least, the lawyers' worldview was proven wrong and the hackers' worldview was proven right, in both the empirical and moral senses of the terms. Let's hope that continues.

I've seen more prevaricating (and sometimes outright lying) this week from the hackers than from the lawyers so I, for one, hope that the lynch mob ceases immediately.
I would argue for both fixed UTC based on atomic clocks, and 86400 seconds per day - at the expense of rotation of Earth not being in sync with UTC or calendar boundaries.

It will take 3000 years before leap seconds add up to an hour, but most countries adjust the clocks that much every year for DST. It will take 40000 years before the usual daytime hours turn into night, and by then I hope a single planet's rotation is a historical oddity.
Some friendly, candid feedback: If Legit is not intended for beginners, why not say so on the project page?

"Git Workflow for Humans"
"optimized for workflow simplicity"
"branch workflows are dead simple"
"Nice and simple – the way it should be"

As Legit is now described at www.git-legit.org, what would suggest to beginners that it's anything but the answer to their prayers?
If a p-value of .05 means a study's results are significant, then 20% of studies will arrive at an incorrect conclusion through chance! If counterintuitive conclusions make interesting articles, but negative results are somewhat boring even to professional scientists, is it any real surprise that the end result is a steady stream of dubious advice?

This argument was shamelessly paraphrased from XKCD [1].

[1] http://xkcd.com/882/
> I get that lots of people here agree with him: they think JSTOR is awful and they think they're entitled to do whatever they want to JSTOR, the laws be damned. But why should prosecutors believe that?

They might want to believe it because JSTOR declined to press charges. Isn't that a compelling reason?
So you use the facts as alleged by the prosecution, and I saw the facts as selected by the reported and testified in court?

On the rest of it, if there is ANY truth to the claim in the article that prosecutors do not bother to bring these cases when the property has less than $50k in value after debts, then no matter how much of a problem this hotel may in fact be, there is a fundamental problem with how prosecution is being brought here.
To answer your question, the equivalency is thus:

You ask: "If I slip and fall on your walkway, I can sue you. Why can't the government, here?"

This would imply that there is a single act (slipping and falling on a specific property) and a single remedy for that act (a lawsuit)

But here, the government has a choice of causative acts (drug deals and arrests were prevalent throughout that neighborhood -- they had quite a bit of choice as to which property they wished to "sue") and a choice of remedies ... of which seizure is the most extreme of all possible remedies.

It would be as if the government was seeking a specific property to slip and fall on, and chose to only pursue the most extreme possible form of response for that action.

They chose not to pursue the other properties, which showed equal rates of crime (this is NOT in the docket report you read), and chose not to pursue other remedies (such as other sanctions and means of remedy). And in this case, their own interests and the interests of the police department are particularly served by the extreme remedy, and the choice of party to pursue chosen by the "ease" of achieving this remedy.
Huh... That seems to have been removed!
Happy GNU Appreciation Day
>then serve it to Mega along with a DMCA takedown notice.

The thing with copyrighted content, though, is that even if the file you're checking might be infringing on copyrights in certain cases, in other cases it might as well be completely legit. I wrote about this on some earlier MU submission[1], so I won't repeat all that here, but all in all, even if you knew that file X existed on Mega's servers, it would be pretty damn haphazard to just outright delete it, because you might be hurting many legitimate users by doing so.

Anyway, I think Mega could secure user's files simply by encrypting the locator keys they have with the user's own key, and this data only gets decrypted and parsed client-side when the user uses Mega with the user's own key. This way you could only prove that a file exists on Mega's servers, but had no way to check which user(s) it belongs to without cracking the individual user data one by one. And of course, if you don't have any exact files to check against Mega, then you wouldn't be able to even figure out whether "content X" is hosted there somewhere, and neither could Mega (since they'd naturally only store locator hashes and encrypted data itself).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4824986
Apple's Double Standard
There booking system could perhaps n amount of flight and your subsequent bookings meant the earliest booking got lost. With that I'd check them again and see if they are all there still and no other flights lost.

I would also push for a explanation as to why it shows as canceled as there will be a audit trail fo some kind digitaly.
Ohh yes good ol' 302 redirect was invented and only supported by Microsoft. I suggest you re-read the article than throw in the M$ bash at the hint of Microsoft. They have legitimate reasons for proposing the alternate. I rather have all the companies heard and come to a common ground to set the standards than one company leading the others.
Al Zimmermann's Programming Contests
This dismissal of technical problems by fellow hackers always confuses me. As a 20-something I'm all too tempted to routinely adopt the "oh, psh, that's easy" bravado, but as I always tell my junior devs, "if you think it's easy, you don't understand the problem yet"
> JSTOR sells access to its archive for $50K/year. That seems pretty damn valuable...I think that if Swartz successfully released the JSTOR archive, their entire business would have withered and died.

JSTOR who declined to press charges is probably in the best position to value the damages Swartz inflicted.
The creatures that we call trees, and the Earth had experimented with a lot of different types of trees, are in fact much higher if we count the roots.
Exactly right; date arithmetic is horrible if you only have seconds to work with.

Even just saying "24 hours from now" -- as your user would see it -- you'll sometimes get the wrong answer if you just add on 24 hours worth of seconds... suppose they have a DST shift tonight?

What if you need to know how many days remain from today to March 1st of this year? ...well, are we in a leap year?

Postgres datetime doesn't solve all of the problems that crop up, but it's certainly better than using unix time.
Seems good, Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check into that!
Well with a quick search I was unable to find the specifics, but the article hints at it, and usually in these cases, the hotel is the thing getting sued. We're not talking about the city or neighboring properties suing this guy in civil court, showing harm, and getting appropriate damages. We're talking a civil case burden of proof of property being associated with a crime, where the penalty has no relation to damages caused, with higher costs of defense as it's a federal case, and no ability retain the specific thing, etc. If you really don't know what I'm talking about, go read into the details of these kinds of cases, and ask yourself whether such legal shenanigans are necessary or just expedient.

It's an acceptable model if one is willing to put aside the conduct of the guy on the receiving end and look at the mechanics of the process. It's not a case to rally around, but it does highlight some of the lurking problems that are primed to destroy the next unlucky innocent.
A few years ago I came across this highly disturbing testimony from a former prisoner. There are no pictures, and no jokes. It gives a glimpse at the dark side of North Korea, and of humanity. It is fucked up and will upset you, so consider yourself warned.

http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=4f...
Neither of us "use" any of the facts. A judge hears the case, like in any civil suit, which is exactly what this is.

The question at stake on this thread is, "is this civil suit abusive?" Obviously, much of the threat thinks civil suits like this are abusive. I don't understand that point of view, because to my eyes, businesses that feed off street crime are the urban equivalent of factories that belch toxic waste into waterways.

If there is evidence that this particular suit is abusive, what is it? I'm open to it!
Not true. The amount of information a modern programmer must keep in mind, be expert at, have hands on experience, or at least be aware of, is ridiculous. Platforms, languages, frameworks, libraries, areas - software architecture, algorithms, data structures, mathematics of any kind, graph theory, programming paradigms, system level programming, hardware level optimizations, OS architecture, networking, web technologies, client, server, Java, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, C/C++, Python, Ruby, AI, speech synthesis/recognition, computer vision, computer graphics, sound processing, GPU computations, asynchronous, lock-free programming, dependency injection, databases, ORM, SQL, no-SQL, UI patterns, MVC, MVVP, compiler/interpreter design, text parsing, regular expressions, .Net, WinAPI, Unix, POSIX, mobile, iOS, Android, enormous amount of libraries often with huge APIs for each language and platform, etc., etc. - just a randomly picked fraction.

Of course, for most programmers it is only feasible to specialize, and even then the amount of data is enormous, e.g. you can study all the nuances of C++ or Java for years, and still not be an expert, and Java has plenty of libraries with a huge API overall, but practically you are required to have experience and deep knowledge of each commonly used one if you want to be hired as a Senior Developer, and that is just an example. It is a general rule that you are required to have deep knowledge of the area and technology you future employer is working with, despite it is one of an insane amount, and most of thar knowledge you will never use again.
Generally you never want to use JFFS2 or other flash file systems on a flash device that has a separate controller. this is because their own wear leveling will usually confuse the hell out of the controller and can sometimes cause it to either slow down or to lower the life because the controller will not level things properly. Whether ext4 or not is better than say XFS for this, no clue though.
He wants someone to tell him what to build to get that.

I didn't read it that way at all. He said:

How can I figure out what to build?

not

Tell me what to build to make 500K / year profit

and he's already taken the initiative of emailing people asking about pain points. It sounds to me like he needs / wants

A. a better process for finding / identifying pain points

and

B. some motivation

I don't see laziness here, just a lack of experience.
> Motivation is an important aspect of any crime, and prosecutors should be looking for appropriate sentences, not the harshest one they can make stick.

I don't think the prosecutors here would disagree. That's why sentences are pushed for (on both sides) based on what the motive behind the crime was.

There was a plea bargain on the table for no jail time, which MIT rejected, and then later some number of months in jail. Given that "Swartz faces up to 50 years in prison if convicted on all charges" was the latest maximum sentence it is very hard indeed to argue that the prosecutors were trying to get the harshest sentence.

The thing they were really trying to do was not have the trial, which is something I would expect them to do given the structure of the legal system.
> They'll have to respond to takedown requests because the contents are known.

And presumably, unless they think they can legally get away with ignoring it, they will.

What they won't be able to do is respond to a request that says "Delete all copies of [Big movie of the year], and continue to delete all of our movies as they pop back up."
> the trip really changed our perceptions of the country

Interesting; can you elaborate a bit?
Your data is safe with rsync.net, or any other provider that does not build a business model around "sharing" or "social" or web links or any other bullshit like that.

It's not file storage that presents the political risk - it's letting idiot kids store things publicly, for free, because you are pursuing some "make it up on volume" business model that we all knew was broken 13 years ago.

/rant
> turning their own customers in

Now that you emphasize customer I see the error of elected governance.
Really not getting the impression that Ortiz was a good soul trappend in a bad system. To the contrary, she seems to be the embodiment of the bad system. To the good souls who are actually trapped alongside her, she's a prime example of the problem they're facing, in that monsters like her are what gets promoted, leaving people who are better than her no choices beyond going along quietly or exiting altogether. I mean, just consider her deputy. When people talk about the bad driving out the good, this is what they mean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_S...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10th_amendment
Crashed, when I clicked on the hompepage URL of this developer: http://railyo.com/developers/53

And btw your app runs in development environment!
Can you get me a link to the information about comparable arrests and incidents in other properties? The record on this particular property is extreme, but you're right that it would be telling if a Motel 6 next door was escaping scrutiny because its ownership was corporate instead of a single guy.
Ahh, my mistake. (I assumed!) This is most certainly something that I, and many people I know would use! I'll look forward to it.
Oh that's easy to solve. Just mandate everyone live at sea level.
I thought I’d weigh in my opinion as a developer-entrepreneur who has worked with various business and technical co-founders.

I wrote a post covering 'Business Product Responsibilities' with a graph here: http://simplyryan.com/2013/01/19/business-product-responsibi....

I have found that I don't want to work with non-technical founders because they often don't take ownership of their responsibilities.
> Furthermore, if you have such a problem with this property why don't you make an offer to the property owner and buy it?

Maybe he pays taxes exactly because he expects that the government would do their job? No one person can buy up every piece-of-shit property and clean it up, that's the whole point of foisting that shit job (and it's certainly a shit job) on the government
Has nothing to do with kim but just want to point out that I personally would describe this as sensationalist.