skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many people already feel this way. The addition of a little emotion can be the difference between doing something and letting it slide another day.

If these laws were not a core piece of the issues surrounding Aaron's suicide, I would be disgusted. As it is, saner laws would have pushed the prosecution to take a more reasonable stance, so if we can push for change, great.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is anything we can do to actually impact such change.
I was being sarcastic, to highlight what i viewed as the absurdity of the parent comment. I'm sorry if that didn't come through. Unless YOU were being sarcastic and -I- failed to get it...

Oh god I don't know what's real anymore. Help, I'm trapped in a sarcasm factory.
The High Price of Being Single in America
Please an HTML5 Mobile OS with WebGL in 2013
In fact, Carmen Ortiz, who prosecuted Aaron Swartz, was an Obama appointee (2009).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz
Hey. We've finally launched this, which is part of what we've been working on as a YC company for about 18 months.

VPNs aren't anything new, but we're an easy to set up VPN service, and aimed at business/group use, vs. either the "privacy VPN" market or the "national firewall evasion" VPN market.

The idea is that we make it easier to use something like Amazon VPC to put your sensitive internal services behind a firewall, then only allow access to those services (or to admin features of your public-facing service) from a VPN.

We're adding other cool stuff to the VPN -- basically we want to be to your internal users and services what CloudFlare is to your public external users.
This entire thing seemed absurd. What actual value does Maciej provide beyond a trivial amount of cash given in a facetious manner?

The Co-Prosperity Cloud may have been a parody of the the current incubator trend, but the companies joining appear to be real entities with genuine goals? What do they have to gain by taking part in some tongue-in-cheek publicity stunt?

There are better ways to pursue both $37 and the small amount of notoriety that this may bring.
I will contribute an idea if anyone wants to use it: somebody should make a website for people to arrange adhoc day-trips with strangers. Sometimes at the weekend I think I would like to catch a train to some city in Britain that i've never been to - say Bath, or Durham. But I don't really have anyone to go with, and traveling on your own is a bit dull. If you could sign up to a weekend 'away party' online and head off to the destination with some basic itenary, it would be cool. If everyone is in the same boat then it's not awkward going with strangers. Call it DayTripper.com or something.
I have 31 years of programming experience. I am not detecting from your argument that you have anywhere near this level of experience, so I am inclined not to get into this discussion.

This is shitty.
1. Definitions:

"relevant period" , in relation to an election, means the period that commences at the end of the Wednesday before the polling day for the election and ends at the close of the poll on that polling day.

3A (2), (3) and (4) all include this language:

the broadcaster must not broadcast under the licence an election advertisement in relation to the election during the relevant period.

They vary only to cover different sorts of broadcasters.
Citation needed. Your statement is purely speculative otherwise.

In fact, a search for "rape vs porn" suggests that it reduces rape:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2006/1...

http://www.toddkendall.net/internetcrime.pdf
EQ is that important. Simply because you don't live in a vacuum. You live and communicate with other people. You can be as technically capable as you can, but if you keep pissing people off, you won't go anywhere. Now in addition to this, if you are mentally fragile, sooner or later you will be shocked by what society has for you.

It is not the right time to analyze Aaron Swartz, but if you look at what is publicly written about his tenure at Stanford, Reddit, etc., you will see what I am talking about. Is it that important? You bet.
The Four Horsemen of the Netpocalypse
Severe duress often cannot be clearly distinguished from "mental illness"

I 100% agree with this in terms of its accuracy in describing the symptoms. And I do not think mental illness should be stigmatized any more than other illnesses should be (which is not at all).

The key though is that once mental illness occurs, rationality goes out the window. To a large extent causality goes out the window. You can't persuade a clinically depressed person to cheer up using a rational argument, the brain chemistry is going to overrule your rationality.

So my intent in my initial comment was to draw a distinction between Aaron's explainable behavior (that which was derived from his rational process) and his unexplainable behavior (that which was derived from his brain chemistry getting out of whack and his conclusion that taking his own life was a good decision).

I realize my sentiment ignores the possibility that the suicide was a direct and rational response to the prosecutors' tactics.
I agree, if only because I've seen it tried, and because you're essentially having to write a computer program for the legal system to execute. It's hard enough to do this right for machines that will do essentially anything you ask of it the same way every time, I can barely imagine how disastrous this would end up in the hands of elected legislators.
So I wasn't super clear - it was about a thousand a year tuition after grants, before the rest kicked in. I did wind up taking a few thousand a year in loans for rent and food since I couldn't work enough to cover NY living expenses. I didn't count that since I would have had to pay that anyway.
One thing to start promising is acurate and open investigation into such events.

Just look at this event and how many errors, omissions and down right weird pieces of information have come out.

If there is one thing I am sure of with respect to this event, it is that I have NO idea what really occurred and I do not feel I can trust any single figure to tell me the truth.
Lets face it, HN and similar discussion sites bring out the worst in some people, including me.

I'm not going to comment on Ed's unfortunate statements because I've been an asshat to people in the past too.

It's a terrible thing when you don't have the opportunity to apologise later.

I'm sorry for all parties involved.
Really. We're doing this. It's now 2013 and we're really gonna do this. We're going to have a Linux vs. Windows flame war right here, right now?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE4fz8cwL9c

It's OVER
Why its not right to left and aligned to left ?

https://github.com/nasser/---/blob/master/public/lib/amthila...
I have a better idea: a political party. The Internet Party.
HN never used to focus on people and shallow politics
From the comment policy, linked near the top of every page:

"The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting. Gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter."

Seems like an appropriate reminder these days.
They do log password resets. Change your password and try using the old password soon after. You will notice that it might say "This is an old password that was changed 1 day ago" or something to that extent.
Are you the benjy from the site? Thanks for the help.
I am very sorry to hear that is your position concerning your daughters.
Ever heard of Piet?

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_%28programming_language%29
I don't see how anyone can read that phrase in that thread as referring to Aaron's _depression_. It was entirely in the context of taking responsibility for his _activism_, and under a presumption that he had considerable resources.
Check out Orrick law offices in Seattle. Ours was base in Silicon Valley but we dealt with a partner from the Seattle division during M&A talks.
The value is that it's Hacker News linkbait. I certainly learned about six ideas that I wouldn't have otherwise, and I would _never_ have clicked on "Show HN: mysillyidea.com".
This is because github does not yet support right-to-left (RTL) programming languages ;-)
To display the text RTL, you need to specify the direction attribute ("dir") in HTML.
Connected people have a better ability, being rich does not guarantee you protection from Federal prosecutors. The Feds act with near impunity and only someone connected with the press or government officials really stand a chance against them.

A relatively unknown internet person, regardless of money, is an easy mark to them.

The issue I take with the case is the piling on by the prosecutors. There needs to be some limit to the number of charges one can apply and total time applied for cases where no life is lost. The current rules simply allow prosecutors to intimidate people into accepting punishment, even when those accused are not guilty of a crime; see the many false imprisonment stories around the net.

People cheer on these laws when applied to people they don't like, financial fraud cases are very similar and involve the same strategy, bury them in charges so they have to accept something.
I think caching/memoization is one of the most typical cases of this.
That comment was in reply to

> If the feds get their way you'll know exactly where to find him for the next 35 years.

I'm asking if people actually knew facts, not some tin-foil hat speculation (even if the tin-foil hat was right on the money).
A little off topic, but I am really curious about this: the number of signatures cast on the petition https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat... has been drastically falling over the last 24 hours.

Anyone know how this appends? Only 1/3 the signatures as yesterday.

Thanks in advance to anyone who explains this.
New qubit control bodes well for future of quantum computing
How do we make sure we remember all the lessons in this? Are these just growing pains of the internet as a whole, or are we fated to relapse the next time it happens again?
>My point is this: of necessity, most laws are broad and vague, and it relies on judges to build the necessary case law to interpret it.

I don't think that is a necessity at all. What it is is a trade off. Compare tax law with antitrust law. There is relatively little vagueness in tax law, which is why the statutes are so verbose (or vice versa). Antitrust is technically "statutory" in that Congress passed the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts etc., but the statutes are very short and very broad and their meaning has been defined almost entirely by the courts.

Each has advantages and disadvantages, but going too far in either direction is disastrous. (Which is why both tax and antitrust are a huge mess.) And that's where we are with the CFAA. The statute doesn't designate any particular harm you have to be aiming to cause, it just says "access without authorization -> felony conviction" regardless of whether you stole anything or hurt anyone or intended anything malicious, etc. It encourages courts and juries to think in terms of whether you violated the letter of the statute rather than whether you did anything specifically objectionable, and assume that any such violation must be a terrible crime worthy of that level of penalty without requiring any evidence that the circumstances of the specific case justify that outcome.

I honestly think we could repeal it entirely without any negative consequences following, because the actually objectionable things that people can do after they access a computer without authorization would still be separately illegal.

>'computer law' will always be 10 steps behind the technology.

I'm not at all sure that this is true. Most "computer law" is redundant garbage: There are laws against fraud, espionage, copyright infringement, etc. Those laws don't inherently become obsolete just because you add "on a computer" to it. Perhaps they need to be adjusted in certain ways -- often as a result of economic changes brought about by technology -- but that is no excuse for having a duplicate set of expansive, poorly drafted laws with extraordinary penalties that aim to serve substantially the same purposes as those that have been time tested over hundreds of years.
The closest I've seen is legislation that is worded to the effect "notwithstanding any other provisions of this section, this does not give the Department of Foo the authority to prosecute crimes covered under (b) above where the estimated damage is less than $5,000".

Basically it's a "we told you to do this generic thing, but that doesn't mean this is included in that".
Is approaching our body of laws like a programmer necessarily a bad thing?

I'm being a bit tongue in cheek here, but to use your example - if only our body of laws were properly DRY, changing that precisely-defined 'reasonable person' would only require one tweak.
Well after being frustrated by the lack of any real explanation on the home page, I did manage to fumble around on Google and find their actual "What is this" page. Still pretty vague, but they should definitely put some of this content on their current home page:

http://branch.com/learn-more
I think you have a good marketing video, though it doesnt tell me much of anything about your product's features aside from "social"

I'd much prefer the audio overlaid over at least one user story.

"Top 10 Dinosaurs" is both uncompelling and not a user story.

How is this better than anything? If a user begins to create a list "Top 10 Dinosaurs" will it show me that one is already built and then link me to it?

If so, I can see this as a discouragement to use and adoption.

Anyway - the quality of the video was good, the content is, just to me personally, lacking in information.
TIL reddit is open source
The most important lesson that I have learned from this whole incident is that defending yourself from a federal lawsuit AVERAGES $1.5 million.

I had no idea it was that high. I think few of us did.

If I had seen that conversation (I missed it) and known that fact back then (I didn't), I'd have definitely corrected Ed at that point.

Also shocking is that the purported punishment is so far out of line with what people have gotten in the past. Based on previous examples like Robert Morris (accidentally shut down most of the Internet) and Randal Schwartz (cracked passwords for many accounts at Intel - yes I'm aware of the extenuating circumstances) I would not have expected any jail time to be involved for this "crime".

That shocking discrepancy is why I was so fast to sign the petition to fire this particular prosecutor.
Is that the best Arrington could come up with?
HyperMac's retort about the use of naked women at their CES booth
Assuming a has type int:

int a_val = a;
if (a_val)
printf ("returning b");
return a_val ? b : c;

Anyway, it's not useful for complicated code that needs to do lots of stuff. It's useful for simple code that ends up being more verbose with if-else. It's also useful for enforcing behaviour.
I see you are suggesting us stop sharing with each other what we think.

Thanks, but no thanks.
"There's a perception that showing emotion is a sign of weakness for men."

Which is why berating someone with gendered terms is pretty futile, it encourages people to clam up and compartmentalize unhealthily.
Exactly. While he may have been being put under undue pressure, I disagreed with his actions, his reasoning, and his approach, and so I didn't think his legal defense was worth my money. That doesn't mean I don't regret his death, but his death wouldn't change my action in an analogous situation tomorrow.
git blame -w already does this: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-blame.ht...
We are all partially responsible in a small way. We did not take a stand when that link was posted. Each one of us who did not donate or pass that link around.

Maybe we were swayed by the comments, maybe not. Call ourselves hackers, get influenced by some prick who sounds like an uppity high school headmaster. Think we're principled, refuse to take a stand for what's right.

At the very least, we can learn. To take a stand in what we believe in. Without getting swayed by the fakers.
Among other things, I think you are seriously underestimating the chronic stress that a "prodigy" typically lives with. I walked away from a national merit scholarship and homeschooled my very gifted but also learning disabled sons. Issues like OCD are incredibly common at very high IQs. So are serious social issues. For an introvert, being a social outcast for being too smart may be merely annoying. For an extrovert, it may amount to torture. I think it unlikely you can convince me personally that his depression was entirely due to wonky brain chemistry. What little I know about his life suggests huge confounding factors, well before he was charged with a crime.

Peace. And have an upvote.
Well, it was written at a point that I was feeling pretty damn bitter and resentful... :)
Congrats on the launch Ryan! This looks awesome.
grandalf's comment is inaccurate, but it's also a sort of understatement to say that mental illness "is a factor in some attempted suicides or completed suicides". It's by far the biggest factor.

> More than 90 percent of people who die by suicide have [depression and other mental disorders, or a substance-abuse disorder (often in combination with other mental disorders)]

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-u...
Is it not true that many informative articles start with anecdotes to illustrate the subject at hand? If you have a problem with the science in the article, please explain; it would help me understand the flaws you are talking about.
Collection of data visualization tools
"And this is why I hate the term "patriarchy" in this context: It implies men always get the best of it, there are no downsides for males, and therefore we should be dismissive of male problems."

Feminism benefits men as well. Patriarchy DOES exist to the detriment to men, your anger is misapplied.
This is not completely true. "Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own
personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE..." [1]. They also allow preprints on personal sites. The other major publishing organization in CS, ACM, has a similar policy.

[1] https://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecopyrightform.pdf
Yeah, it's interesting.

I think with a large and less subtle font (perhaps the sort that would be used in an Arabic child's book?) I could learn to read code written like this without necessarily having knowledge of Arabic beyond some fundamentals and the vocab needed for the few keywords. The best bet in the long run, if my career depended on it, would undoubtedly be to buckle down and learn Arabic though, and being mono-lingual that seems like an absolutely insurmountable task.

Input would be a whole other story, I wouldn't even know where to start.
tptacek didn't appear to question Aaron facing 35 years in jail, he was simply stating that actually "spending" that time in jail is unlikely.

See for example another comment from him at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529809

Edit:

There was nothing tinfoil about it. The indictment was publicly available, and a cursory search of news.google.com also brings up articles like this one

http://techland.time.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-aaron-...
>Push anyone far enough and they'll take their own life.

This is ridiculous hindsight bias, people have been charged with far more than Aaron and didn't kill themselves. Aaron had been depressed for a long time leading up to all of this, yet everyone seems to argue that the prosecution is what did it and he would have been completely fine otherwise.

They have nothing to base that off of, but that's still the case that is frequently made here.
It was, evidently, demoralization that killed Aaron. Ed took away moral support. So don't say he doesn't partly bear some responsibility.

Whether you think he deserves a measure of blame or not depends on whether you think his original remark was just or not. Evidently some could not tell ahead of time that the remarks were unjust, and evidently, this sort of person makes up the majority on HN, and it is just this sort who is making excuses for the original remark. They refuse to look in the mirror.
Thats artistic.. how did you overcome RTL support ?
Mere bias does not invalidate an argument. As males we are naturally biased to believing porn is harmless. However it can be a real addiction to some (not all of course).

In my opinion it's important to know the symptoms of any addiction in case you see those patterns in your own or your peer's behaviors.
This is sick. I'm at a loss for words.
Neat. I also wrote a bunch of Arabic Lisps, most toys that went nowhere :-)

My biggest obstacle has so far been language itself: I think I'm too much of an Arabic snob to settle for simple, dictionary translation of some technical terms. I also hate transliterating, so I got distracted by months long process of compiling a dictionary.

To give you an example, Qlb replies with "letter is unexpected" when it really means "symbol". حرف vs رمز. A Lisp evaluator operates on expressions, of which symbols are a subset.

Even within technical English, words like letter and character do NOT mean the same thing, though they are similar.

Most of computational concepts one wants to expound either exist or have strong counterparts in the classical Arabic linguistic, rhetoric and logical traditions. Though not a strict requirement, the Arabic PL designer would benefit greatly from familiarity with the Classical, very abstract and deductive, byt often non-secular, works.

One of my favorite games is to read a passage out, say, a type-theoretic paper and try to translate it to Arabic :-)

[Edit:

It is an excellent hack this, but Arabic side of things could use more polishing. قول is not a verb, but قُل is. قول or مقولة means "utterance", not the very "say" as you might intend. لقوله، قم الليل الا قليلا

]
I'm sorry but which "careless and unfounded words" are you specifically referring to? Set among these events, and with a great many people assigning responsibility all over the place, this kind of thing strikes me as nothing like responsible or precise.

It was a fundraising post for legal defense. Not a plea of mental health distress. People expressed negative opinions of the request, some in light of the presumed financial position of the defendant. Are we seriously discussing review of those remarks simply for their psychological supportiveness?
Very cool, congrats on the launch!

We've been running https://www.getcloak.com/ for about a year now. Let's swap "easy-to-set-up, easy-to-use" VPN war stories sometime if you're interested.
The commit messages are also a bit . . . terse
El Dorado: The truth behind the myth
Megaupload’s Entrapment Claim Is ‘Baseless,’ Feds Say
That is "as close to" as an apple is close to an orange. Yes there are legislative carve outs for a myriad of reasons. I am suggesting that a complete bar against criminal investigations due to civil rights concerns is not one of them.
> Push anyone far enough and they'll take their own life.

Perhaps, but many, many people have been in situations such as Aaron's and not killed themself, so it's warranted to at least ponder if there was something else going on than a mean prosecutor. And here we don't have to wonder, it's been reported already that there was a lot of depression involved.
I think this because I really love geometry and I think the motions that result from this system are beautiful and natural-looking, even if hard to execute on a small touch screen phone.
Ask HN: Where they/you spend $1m for a startup?
Hello HN,

That was always a question for me, where do startups spend $100k or $1M of their funding?
How much money does a web-startup need to be determined it's successful or not?