skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure "thinking persons" would have considered this, but just in case:

"Never forget".

Godwin's Law wants you to. Worse still his "law" encourages the mocking of those who want say if they think something is getting a bit Nazi. Which you have done by implying a disconnect between his comment, thinking persons, seriousness and understanding.

Why?

Perhaps so no one dares point it out if it looks like its happening again? Or something else? Who would want that, and why?

I'd prefer to be wrong, than get caught short. Citing this nonsense "law" is like getting people to shut up on so called "patriotic" grounds. It circumvents logic, reason and debate. Its silences people.

Look at it, it is Nazi in its self. Do and think as you are told.

Have to wonder, if we get more suicides of this type and people cite this case as a parallel too much, will that get a law too? Will people be told to shut up?
> As Lessig reported, the plea bargain would have meant pleading guilty to a felony

Felonies can be expunged. See Randall Schwartz's case, for example.
In cases like that I'd use the short url that Google provides (http://goo.gl/maps/4y1Xg). If Google is down then you can't view the map anyway.

Sites providing their own short urls isn't much of a problem as far as I can see.
A large part of my day to day job involves summarizing political careers from thousands of pages of news articles.

As a general rule, I find that for every thousand pages of news copy, one can usually distill about thirty pages of useful facts (the rest being redundant, speculative, filler, or otherwise unimportant).
Previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839301
Did you not see the quotes around it? Some people do turn to suicide because they perceive it to be a solution to their problems. Painting suicide victims is heros and martyrs as doing no one a service.
This. So much of this.

If people stopped thinking of most bottom tier blackhats as wizards and more as thieves who've figured out how to copy a banking sites web page, the world would be a better place.
I only clicked the link to see if there were any boobs. So, in my case.......
Jacques, I hear you, and I'm sorry. But can we ask her questions? There's so much I want to know about how this happened.
>There is justice, and there is mob justice.

Which one is this?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/harveysilverglate/2013/01/03/bla...

Coincidentally the Whitey's case was by the same Carmen Ortiz, according to news sources.
> per capita, the US is still like 3x China from the look of it.

For now. Check the relative growth of both countries.
Digitally democratize policy creation
So you got to the end of the article that suggested none of these things and said to yourself "well he didn't say it but I bet he was thinking it"?
Tricky, at the very least.

First, you have the problem that legislators have to outdo themselves in their "tough on crime" poses, leading to ever more draconian laws and potential sentences. Don't see a trivial way out of that apart from changing the political climate, but it's probably the biggest factor. Without the risk of completely out-of-whack penalties, the leverage of prosecutors diminishes.

'"We now have an incredible concentration of power in the hands of prosecutors," said Richard E. Myers II, a former assistant United States attorney who is now an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina. He said that so much influence now resides with prosecutors that "in the wrong hands, the criminal justice system can be held hostage."'

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/us/tough-sentences-help-pr...

Of course, the media could help by not hyping "ever increasing" criminality, which isn't true. Crime levels have been dropping not just in recent times, but pretty much throughout history, and are at historically unprecedented lows. Civic activism/awareness?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-an...

Reduce or eliminate plea bargains. Justice should be justice, not a grimy barter deal. The ratio of guilty pleas to verdicts is now 30:1(!)

http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

Adjust the incentives for prosecutors. Make these sorts of convictions and/or pleas less positive and/or drastically increase the disincentives for shenanigans that are found out.

EDIT: Have prosecutors, as public servants, be responsible for finding the truth, not for getting convictions. It is in the public's interest to get to the truth, not to convict or force guilty pleas of innocents.
That was a decision made by authorities on campus

Which authorities? That does not seem to be clear. From what I've seen so far, that decision could have been made at a pretty low level. Also, when that decision was made, it seems clear that MIT had no idea what was actually going on; it wasn't until much later that the reason behind the anomalous network traffic was known, after the feds were already involved and it was too late to un-involve them.
HP's Meg Whitman may get paid $15 million for her first year as CEO
That quote is referring to the theoretical 7Gbps speed, not it's standard one.
That's what actually gets proposed (and sometimes even passed) as laws each time.
Do you know much about how prosecutions like this work?

What do you think the logic might have been behind "doubling down" on the felony charges last September?
Then he should have gone to trial.
"Who would commit suicide in order to get attention? You can't get attention when you're dead."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi
You are wrong and it is intentionally designed in the system. Why then have the verdict of a jury be final, with impossibility of re-trial, even in the eyes of Congress, if not to defend the Constitutional Right of Jury nullification?

From the same article[1] I quoted in another reply:

Theophilus Parsons, first Chief Justice of Massachusetts, explained:

The people themselves have it in their power to resist usurpation, without an appeal to arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance. Let him be considered a criminal by the general government, yet only his fellow citizens can convict him; they are his jury, and if they pronounce him innocent, not all the powers of Congress can hurt him; and innocent they certainly will pronounce him, if the supposed law he resisted was an act of usurpation.

Or, as Patrick Henry put it:

Why do we love this trial by jury? Because it prevents the hand of oppression from cutting you off. This gives me comfort ” that as long as I have existence, my neighbors will protect me.

[1]: http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/02/05/a-guide-to-surviving-...
While I agree entirely with you, another point the author of the article is making is that his problems may be typical in kids growing up with the world wide web at their fingertips.

That perspective brings us to a different question: What can we do to ensure safe and positive sexual development in children without censoring the web and imposing our generation's morals on the next?
Why Do Entrepreneurs Innovate Better Than Managers?
Doesn't exist. Spam filter learns.
Go for it, I don't think anybody ever stopped you from doing anything you wanted to do.

My biggest question is this: was there any link at all between the PACER case and the way Aaron was hit over the JSTOR issue?

And if there wasn't what was the reason that Aaron was prosecuted when the aggrieved party was already satisfied that no harm had been done?

I'm pretty sure that with Hal Abelson as the head of the MIT internal investigation that we'll get a very clear picture of what happened at MIT but I'm not so sure that the Justice department will come clean (in fact I'm pretty sure they'll just put the blame squarely on Aaron, just like ms. Lee did here).

And I highly doubt ms. Lee has any of the answers here that would truly give us insight in where this whole thing went off the rails.
Heymann probably thinks he's Javert.
Oh yeah, I guess a felony is no big deal then. How foolish of Aaron.
How about option (c), both of the above? (and potentially Scott Garland; unclear what his role was aside from being involved in early filings)
Most likely, and I share the sentiment. I wouldn't mind having, say, the first thread on this story pinned for a week as the top post to let everyone grieve, protest, vent, ramble and whatnot. Filling up the HN front page for two days in a row though is just too much though and may lead to desensitization.
Also in Beijing. Just in case readers don't know, the Chinese ratings are produced as a daily average, based on equipment outside the city center (i.e. near the airport), while the US ratings are produced hourly from right downtown.

So sometimes the figures are the same, but that usually only happens when coming down from the peak of a particularly bad day, when the average from the previous day's readings are pulling up the official Chinese numbers while the US figures have already fallen to reflect current conditions.
Any serious company should learn as much about its competition as it can by operating within legal boundaries. You should absolutely use competing products -- deep understanding of the other options available to your potential customers allows you to differentiate your service.

With my current project, we've learned about every product out there that even touches on a portion of what it is that we're trying to do. We have and will continue to learn the competition. If the existence of a feature is a competitor's entire advantage, then they either will have IP protection or they'll be out of business soon.

Use the site according to their TOS and use your real name. If you aren't abusing their service, there's nothing to fear.

Information on the web is public. I see nothing immoral about using information that your grandma could find.
Even a not-guilty plea would have left him ruined.
Unwanted and Unwarranted Innovation?
I realize it's an apples and oranges comparison, but the number of Y Combinator founders who have committed suicide is now greater than the number of Y Combinator companies that have achieved billion dollar valuations.
I'd tweak the default colours a bit. The blue is very hard to read on the black bg and the red is burning my eyebs.

For example, look at the Solarized theme[0], Wombat-256[1], or the default for Sublime Text[2]. They all have an off-black bg and reduced saturation in their colours.

[0]: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/img/screen-pandoc-dark....

[1]: http://ninjanichols.com/wp-content/uploads/vim-wombat256.png

[2]: http://www.sublimetext.com/
Why is there no chmod joke in here? I wish I had the understanding of unix permissions to come up with one myself =(
It is the USA, Canada, the European Union and all of Latin America combined.
I am glad to see more attention paid to Heymann's role in this affair. His career and professional history deserves far more scrutiny than has been paid thus far.
Not very surprising that there is still a market for inexpensive phones. I imagine Samsung sells far more cheap Android phones like the Galaxy Y than they do high end phones.
I find it hard to imagine how such a comment could be written having read the article.

The whole point of the article was that it was not "just his problem", and beyond missing that point, the poster responds to a straw man not even hinted at in the article.

His inability to "deal with it" was the purpose of the article!
I don't see anyone asking this question sadly.

People who take the banned of protecting children from porn usually do this not from the safety & positivity point of view but from church & "morals" one. That's the most putrid, patronizing and hypicritical kind of people available; moreover, they don't see (or care) the relation of law and its effect (those two rarely match perfectly, sometimes not at all) and naturally they push for the measures I listed.

People who could ask this question never get any saying.
I think this a great point. If you're in the habit of writing a TLDR for articles, maybe you can try writing the TLDR and then afterwards removing the 4 letters "TLDR" and leaving the sentence there. It's great to summarize in the first sentence.
I'm not sure but weren't all the charges he was accused of require mens rea?
>But we should be better than this.

I am ashamed to be a part of the same community that you claim to embody.

>calling for the head of everyone and anyone related to the prosecution

Not everyone. I think Lawrence clearly named ONE name. An appointed office. Not an elected representative. Her superior can politely ask her if she'd like to step down.

This is not supposed to be the most difficult part, people.
But how does the reader know you are one of the authors that summarise succinctly at the beginning of every article? Especially as they reader may read many articles of differing quality a day. tl;dr to me, is like statically typed English, it improves readability if you know to look for it.
I haven't watched television for like 10 years now and I only spend time on news sites. But recently I realised how much time I just waste on the news instead and how little I gain.

I could have learned more about python or read a good book about an important subject. News is like junkfood for the mind. Very short topics that are not relevant to my life.

Sometimes I read articles about rape or other injustice and those topics just infuriate me, but I'm totally powerless. News exhaust me.

It has no value for me whatsoever. I can't recall that I ever made any important decision based on it.

This article is so true. When journalist write about a topic you know a lot about, there are often so many errors, that you wonder how many errors there are in topics you don't know about.

If you read the news as a hobby, sure, be my guest. But that's something else.
How much testing would you want to do as part of 'build'?
Stuffed Aubergines gratin with Manchego Cheese
I've never seen anyone rallying to help me with my problems, some of which I might not be able to deal with, too.
What article did you read?

He does not condemn porn. He questions what it means to have a natural sexuality when "Sexiness is always constructed — it used to be normatively hot to be fat and pale! "
His problem is not that he has "demons", but that "I feel estranged from my sexuality, like it’s somebody else’s."

The piece comes across to me as very self reflective, asking '(why) is this a problem?' 'What would I be like in not for Y (porn)', and so forth.

I do not see any clear path to a police state (and I like to think of myself as (relativly) extremely biased to seeing a police state).
Ask HN: Could we crowdfund a therapist who is available to depressed hackers?
The news about Aaron has saddened us all. I am saddened and alarmed at the Wikipedia entries for other people who have left our community the same way. I am even more troubled by the idea that less prominent members of the community will have committed suicide but no-one has been there to tell us - their accounts are simply dormant.

So I've been thinking for the last couple of days about what I could do. My first feeling was that perhaps people could post their contact details to a thread and welcome any contact from people needing to talk to someone. But do I know what to say if someone called/emailed? Perhaps I'd make things worse - I just don't know. (me@alexmuir.com / Skype: alex.muir.uk the offer stands to anyone who wants to be heard.)

So with that idea binned, I want to ask whether it's feasible for us to put some money in a fund to pay for a professional (I've no idea what profession? counsellor? therapist? psychologist?) who has knowledge of the hacker mentality and whose number is available for people who might want to talk. They can invoice the fund for their hourly rate and we can monitor whether it's being used. If not, we just gift the money to the national helplines. We are also exceptionally fortunate that a number of us have the money to pay for help - we just don't know where to get it.

Perhaps telephone calls wouldn't work for this sort of thing? Maybe it's best left to the national helplines? Perhaps the money would just be burned by timewasters? I don't know - but there are far more knowledgeable people here and I wanted to float the idea and see if it's even possible.

Note: I've hesitated to post this because it seems much more vocal that asking for comments on a new site. If it's a terrible idea that's fine - don't feel in any way obliged to sugar-coat your responses because it's a 'well-meaning' thought.
What about the post today where it was revealed that the US Attorney chided Aaron on the day of his death? In the memorandum, it stated that they were ready to take his laptop and peripheral devices.
I'd like to know if there was a link between PACER and this, too. Other people seem to suggest that there's some kind of grudge between the MA US Attorney's office and the Cambridge hacker community. I'm not familiar with either, but the PACER case wasn't managed by Heymann or Ortiz.

Other people seem to suggest that the prosecution in this case was driven by gamesmanship and an urge to "make their numbers". But Heymann is a nationally acknowledged authority on the prosecution of electronic crimes and a deputy chief. Is by-the-numbers quota- style prosecution so endemic to the US Attorney's office that it reaches that level?

I agree that the Abelson appointment is a heartening development.
Pedantic, but: tldr existed well before reddit.
> But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off?

Get more schools to do it. Get as many schools as possible to do it. How many schools would Elsevier be willing to cut off just to stop a few technically proficient users without university affiliations from accessing their stuff for free?
Does it make sense to teach this to children? Just like "Smoking isn't good for your health."(which I believe worked for me) you could teach "Porn isn't good for you, if you want to enjoy sex."
> While I agree entirely with you, another point the author of the article is making is that his problems may be typical in kids growing up with the world wide web at their fingertips.

what the web has to do with it? as a teenager I could buy hardcore porn magazines without any problems.
> What you mean "no longer beholden to the people"? If nobody votes for them, how they get into the office?

Have you noticed how few people actually vote? When there are only two parties and neither is particularly appealing, people just don't vote.

> I do not blame abstract "the wealthy" for it, I blame specific people of California being stupid.

Then you would be wrong. The wealthy support marijuana being illegal. It results in increased revenue for the alcohol and tobacco industries, increased revenue for the for-profit privatized prison industry, and it results in more money for government contractors that get funneled money via DEA contracts.

The wealthy are in better placed to get their policies in place than the poor, because they can influence politicians even when there aren't elections coming up. The only chance the poor have of influencing politics is when there's an election coming up, and those elections aren't structured such that they're very effective.

> But try to think why it is profitable - who gives the politicians the power that they are selling and lobbyists are buying? The answer is - you do.

No, they do not. You still fail to understand the basic problems with our current electoral system, which limits us to two parties. When there is no competition in the electoral system, politicians can be influenced in other ways.
Let me get this straight: You blame MIT for notifying the Federal Government that federal laws may have been broken by someone using MIT's computer network?

Is that what you're saying?
Does the news actually do that though? Does regularly and generally consuming the news do more than provide new topics for water cooler chat? I can understand the argument for being informed through selective reading/viewing (which the article makes), but not so much for being generally informed.
Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
I see my above comment is still getting upvotes. If anyone is interested, I did end up writing a blog post as well:

http://www.novemberwest.com/blog/2013/01/13/suicide-social-a...

I did submit it to HN earlier. It hasn't inspired discussion, which is no surprise.
"p.s." is kind of unnecessary too these days but you can still use it. I like "TL;DR". I think of it as a sub-headline.
I couldn't finish the article because I found the examples too disturbing. Just a warning for those of you who aren't very familiar with online porn.

Could someone give me a summary of the article?
Think of parseInt() as what it says- parsing out the number value. Number() can be considered as a cast.

parseInt('12', 10); => 12
Number('12'); => 12
parseInt('12x', 10); => 12
Number('12x'); => NaN
It's the same basic principle as newspaper articles, or the essay format you were taught in school: summary first, details later. Or make your points up front, then prove them.

That only solves a part of the problem, though. Highly upvoted long comments on Reddit are particularly frustrating because so many of them have content that's weak or just plain wrong. I'm convinced that only a small fraction of voters actually read them.
Great point, although tl;dr works for short comments, whereas the "trick" of putting the summary in the beginning of a text needs some actual "body" before it works - otherwise it is just confusing.
This one[1][2] is the only one that I remember seeing his name, but it's a very good one. In his answer he explains branch prediction, and ended up receiving more than 5000 upvotes for it.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4637196

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/a/11227902/240905 (direct link to his answer)
Terminal Crash Course and Reference Sheet (that I wish someone had given me)
I don't really blame anything on the author.

But it seems to me that winter is coming and we all might be heading to a police state. And I don't see how his article can't be used as a brick in the wall constructed by people not really caring about us (but only about "demons" in their heads") between us and free speech, freedom of expression and sometimes physical freedom.

That's what I'm fearing.
I disagree. While something that is well written shouldn't need a tldr, it does service as a device for people who consume a lot of text. Its a standard shorthand indicating the author did in fact write a summary
Ask HN: Any need for a better embedded development solution?
I've got a plan for a different approach to software development on embedded platforms. One that doesn't required the typical edit/compile/flash/restart cycle. Instead it allows direct modification of a running system on the device itself. Just trying to gauge interest in something like this.
TLDR is just a warning to the reader that the rest of the text might not be worth his time. It also helps to make explicit that the paragraph following it is a summary of the post.
Events typically don't become book material until several years after they occur. You might say that by the time you read about an event in a book, it is already history.

News coverage is more immediate. And while 95% of all news is useless bullshit, there is still stuff in there that is useful and relevant for shaping one's understanding of the current times.