skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Aaron Swartz.
I've heard that the 3-year term is a check on the unicameral legislature and parliamentary system. Essentially, the government has license to "ram through" all the laws they want to, but if it turns out to be a bunch of ridiculous nonsense that the public hates then they get kicked out relatively quickly. Contrast this with the American system, in which the executive branch, the house of reps and the senate are all decided upon independently, often leading to political gridlock.
That's an interesting idea on the custom error handler, I wasn't aware that those trigger regardless of @s.

I guess a lot of the trouble with @ is that it affects everything that happens temporally-within the expression, but people often use it as if it only affects everything syntactically-within it... for instance, recently I came across something like:

// suppress warning for <2 results
@list ($foo, $bar) = returns_a_list(...);

... which would also hide any warnings that occur in the body of returns_a_list(), despite that being neither intended nor wanted.

It's a shame the only @-free solutions to many popular uses of @ (like that one) are so hideously ugly. Also that I suspect that changing @ so it only affected syntactically-contained errors would be... impractical for the PHP team, for a number of reasons.
(shameless plug) that's how it look for me - http://i.imagebanana.com/img/vnuwcz24/Selection_044.png . Thanks to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-tldr/meanhkdlij... =)
I eschew aliases, using them only when necessary, e.g. when changing directory. There's many places in Unix where a knowledgeable user can kick off a command and in many aliases won't work. This gets annoying and is solved by having ~/bin/... wherever possible. The overhead is minimal, many being one-line of code starting with exec.
The problem with writings like this is that they murky the waters between curiosity , creativity and doing stuff that is actually illegal.

Nobody is going to arrest you for "curiosity" but they might arrest you for bank tampering because somebody might you know have their life savings in there.
Node.js exceptions
> They were incorrect on a side detail (...)

Doesn't cover it at all. OP gives a mechanistic account of how the construct of "porn addiction" works and how it affects people; there isn't much to his post other than that. His mechanistic account happens to be incorrect, or at the very least sufficiently misguided to be worthless, and people call him out on that.
I didn't want to use the European union in my example because it get's even more complicated with it. (e.g. directives that have to be implemented as laws by its members)
It depends on how large the code base is. Rewriting a 10k LOC project isn't a big deal, compared to a 10 mln one. And a rewrite doesn't have to target performance only, but ease of maintenance too.
The problem with Guantanamo is that it exists at all as an extra-judiciary area specifically designed to deny inmates certain rights.
I thought title text improved accessibility. I was wrong.
Sort of like the "Life of David Gale":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_David_Gale
I'd suggest if that is your attitude towards github projects, perhaps any development involving open source projects isn't for you...?
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992)
How to create enum class in Java
I have not tried Node (or in fact JS as a whole) yet. But it seems very hard to avoid JS in these days. I am going to learn it in a few months. Can anyone give me a rough idea how bad it is? (I know some Obj-C so is JS worse than that?)
Not necessarily: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053466 (from the same guy)
That sounds like liquid democracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy

There is an implementation of it: http://liquidfeedback.org/ and it is used by many Pirate Parties (mostly informally but - I've heard the Italian Pirate Party uses it as the sole governing body).
The Federal government has no right to criminalize intrastate medical marijuana operations. Their constitutional argument is that it falls under their power to 'regulate interstate commerce'. Even if the flowers never leave California. Weak. [0]

On top of that, marijuana is incorrectly scheduled as having "no currently accepted medical use in treatment" [1], which is like spitting in our faces and telling us it's raining.

[0] https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=interstate+commerce+me...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_cannabis_from_Sched...
It's also used to enable serving cross-origin web fonts.

In the case of the author, he wants to use Flickr images in an HTML5 canvas element. I would set up a server-side proxy for that (didn't see this mentioned either).
Saying it's a staple of Western society is not saying it's not a staple of other societies.
The problem is the amateur diagnosis, incorrect explanation of brain chemistry and the psychology of addiction, and the ridiculous conclusion. If he just told a story, fine. But that was but a tiny portion of the comment. The rest was hearsay and pseudoscience.
Couldn't agree more. Well done for stating this. I'm not sure where some of these aggressive comments are coming from, but despite claiming to want to improve the quality of the discussion they achieve precisely the opposite. Compassion/tolerance/understanding and accuracy are not mutually exclusive.
One thing worthy of notice are the "combo" nature of these penalties. For example, he says Computer Fraud is pretty much the same as Wire Fraud. Yet that's a separate count, with more years/fines/numbers, which gives the prosecution a larger Sword of Damocles to hold over someone's head. Why have a separate crime if you are always going to charge both?

Kerr is probably right on the narrow point that if you decided to throw the book at someone you'd hit them with a combo like this (and they later expanded it into a 13-hit combo), and might even be right that this combo is "nothing unusual". We should wait for part two, but the multiplication of an infinite number of federal statutes in combination with prosecutorial discretion looks like the real problem here. We need to trim the sails of these prosecutors in a big way, or at least provide an external check.

For example: they're against jury trials? They want to deny people the right to a jury by depleting their cash? Well, what about a virtual jury? Have a site with all public court documents and filings, like the grand jury indictment. Look at how many years they are pursuing and include bios/faces of the accused, defense, and the prosecutors. Then have people vote up/down as to whether or not they think the punishment fits the crime. Completely non-binding of course, and conceptually separate from the question of innocence/guilt. Include lots of analytics/stats on past convictions and the like. Make money via Amazon affiliate links to books on crime, TV shows, etc. And do SEO so that people found innocent are very clearly marked as such in search result snippets.

Many crimes are salacious so with reasonable graphic design you'd have no problem getting visitors (like the Smoking Gun). The resulting scrutiny of prosecutorial decisions by thousands of people would indeed change the profession, putting a second and more scalable check on them comparable to the press.
Definitely. Apparently, his puritan hangups are also themselves sexualized - no wonder the real world doesn't do it for him. I find both the article itself and the discussion of it here on HN surprisingly weird and alien. I hope I'm not the only one...
Open access:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6256
I didn't say it was cool but that many people may have felt it was relevant for that reason. At times over the weekend the front page was 75% Aaron related so there are clearly large numbers of people with very strong feelings that his case is important. There is also a strong feeling that prosecutorial conduct was a significant factor in his death making this story potentially relevant. I haven't seen anyone suggesting Israeli politics was in any way related to his death.

Personally I neither upvoted this story or downvoted your comment but the fact that this story is on the front page and your comment has been downvoted may indicate that others (shockingly) have different views to yourself and I remind you of the submissions/comments guidelines:

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
people that are like-minded band together and dedicate one person to research all of the issues and present them

That sounds a lot like what FOX News does actually.
That's fine. Did the code become easier to maintain? It's not clear from the article. The "The good" section is relatively weak and the "The not-so-good" has some painful points about memory management and api instability.

It sounds a bit like you guys rewrote it because node.js is hot and you then stuck with the rewrite because of sunk costs. Or am I imagining things?

Thanks for sharing your experiences with us. I'm just asking those questions because I want to learn more about them.
This is the kind of game that would shine as an iOS game. I love the concept and would gladly pay for the game, but the browser is just such a bad gaming platform…
[1] can give you some insight on the dark side of JS. Also, avoiding JS in some way or another is not that hard, esp. since there're a lot of languages which compile to JS, most notably CoffeeScript and ClojureScript.

* [1] http://wtfjs.com
* [2] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-languages-that-compile-to-JS
There are some innovations on dbpatterns
I think it's important to note here that Orin Kerr was a DoJ lawyer before he became a law professor[0]. It is likely that he maintains ties and some degree of loyalty to his former employer (many people do). Many bloggers would include a disclaimer on a blog post defending a former employer in a contentious matter, but Kerr did not.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orin_Kerr
I'd be fine with holding them there for physical security reasons; just ensure that normal US law applies as it would on a US federal military base in the mainland US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_the_Younger#Death
I find it interesting that the recent conversations surrounding the legalization of cannabis in WA and CO have sparked discussions of legalization of synthesized drugs like amphetamines and cocaine. Cannabis is one of the few drugs sourced from nature without any purification or isolating processes. Not only is it naturally occurring, but it also is the safest among today's federally illegal "drugs".

That being said, I have to agree that the best way to get rid of illegal activity is to tax and regulate a product so as to provide a trustworthy, straightforward source. But there's a question as to whether it's advisable to allow citizens to consume drugs that have normally been known to drastically reduce peoples' health and well-being. These drugs actively cause addiction while suppressing other bodily functions, but so do cigarettes. Did you know that nicotine is as addictive as heroine, cocaine, and other alkaloids[1]? The question as to where to draw the line is very sensitive and I often wonder why did Prohibition stop at alcohol? Why didn't it naturally extend itself towards cannabis and then hard drugs? Does anybody know the history/politics behind this?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/29/magazine/nicotine-harder-t...
There's a small bug with the closets, sometimes your in but can't get out because you are the wrong size. That is odd.
Bigger is Better: Galaxy S Series Smartphone sales hit 100M units worldwide
Could you tell me why you think that it is?
Well, we assumed everyone knew about the good... so yes, we're happy with the rewrite and will probably never go back. Also, a 25% saving in servers for us translate in several thousands of dollars saved monthly. Not negligible :)
Aaron Swartz & the Dark Side of Movement Building
Thanks for the explanation! When you put it that way it doesn't sound so intense.

I've been working at a company where their forums have trouble keeping up with 300 concurrent users in a single forum thread, even when CDN and caching was being deployed and I'm trying to figure out how to improve that.
I hate that the majority (I assume) here on HN didn't get to cut their teeth in the BBS era, you really missed out.

I see comments below mentioning "breaking into computer systems" -- you have to realize this was an era pre-Google, pre-www, in a lot of people's cases, pre-Usenet even. We were often limited to 60 minutes of access daily to a BBS, fighting busy signals to even get a node. Using every minute of that time to download textfiles, download cool stuff from the demo scene (sometimes with the pleasure of compiling them with TASM). We didn't have Linux boxes piled up in the back, to learn and explore Unix, many, like myself, had to fire up a war dialer, find a system, and use those crazy textfiles we read from our local BBS to work our way around. It wasn't, in most cases, for nefarious means -- it was our only option.

It was a great, great era. Hard to understand if you weren't there. Do yourself a favor and check out a few old boards that are still available through telnet. It's not the same, but you'll get an idea.

(I guess this response officially puts me in the "get off my lawn" club!)
Discoveries in math by Donald Cohen's students
How much development time did this cost though, when you could have been adding new features and improving the user experience?
Same problem here, I like the concept though.

If it helps, got this in Firefox's Error Console:
Error: Permission denied to access property 'toString'
Followed by:
Warning: Error in parsing value for 'image-rendering'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://www.krisjet.com/littlebigmansion/
Line: 0
The original "Omit needless words" seems to have mutated in the wild:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-11-08/news/091107024...

'A reader of "The Elements of Style" once sent E. B. White a clipping of a book review that misquoted William Strunk as having advised writers to "Use less words!" White wrote back: "I often wish Strunk could come alive so that I might hear the gnashing of his teeth."'
> The people responsible are representatives (in one way or another) of the United States of America. Land of the free. Home of the brave.

I don't get this at all... Harvard fellow uses MIT's network surreptitiously to violate the terms of service to download a nonprofit's entire database and then give it away for free, putting them out of business. Gets busted and charged with crimes. Where's the problem here?

Ok the prosecutor may have been overzealous, but we do have an adversarial system and it was Swartz's bad decisions that brought the hammer down. They didn't plant drugs on him. He wasn't doing it to feed his family. Sorry to all the people here that knew him personally, and to whom this is a personal tragedy, but this is not the kind of travesty of justice that you are making it out to be.
Facebook’s Baffling Stock Spike Could Be Explained This Week
Per $ of GDP and per capita GDP, China is far worse. That's a far more important forward looking measure.
Nero throwing Aaron Swartz to the lions
HTTP Load testing with JMeter
You got me there :p. But to be honest I dont have a lot of expiernce with clojure and kotlin. More experience with Scala. However I just found out about Kotlin. Purely functional is cool... But i'm not sure if the next gen language is purely functional.
Years ago I saw Ray Bradbury give a talk at our city library, and he spent some of his time saying the same thing.
Flushing Nemo? Pet fish pose ocean threat
I partially agree. I remember reading about his arrest thinking "uh-oh, this time he messed up" and kinda forgot about it, but I never realised he was facing the threat of 35+ years to life.
My guess is that those upvoting the article and downvoting me are people for whom the issue is very important. Similar people might vote for articles about gay rights, euthanasia, immigration, and so on and so forth. They're all very important topics - probably more important than most of what we discuss here, if you think about it. That's what makes them so good at getting 'airplay'. Keeping them out has to be a conscious decision and effort.

There's nothing about this article that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." and it might well be considered a "classic flamewar topic", although I suspect mostly a one-sided flamewar here. Still though, it's a charged, political subject.

If no one calls out stuff that's off-topic, it's going to continue to be propagated.
The US Attorney prosecuting the case is Benjamin Wagner, appointed by Obama, as stated in the article.
I think the concern is not that people called him out when he was wrong, but that one person phrased it very rudely.
I read this to my 10th grade English class back in 1999, people loved it.
Sorry was not meant as a troll post. Indeed you are right. I got confused by the syntax. My fault.

However consistency in its syntax is something I value in a language. Scala is too much influenced by Java, imho.

B.t.w apart from these kind of things in the language, the biggest thing I really hate about it, is builtin support for XML.. WTF Really?

I would recommend anyone trying to learn functional style of programming to pick up lisp :-)
I'll tell you why you're upset. You're upset because you are precocious. And decided. And certain. And dare I say sometimes morally certain!

Aaron was an absurd hero who chose not to revolt. He just didn't imagine himself happy, so he agonised about the futility of living with every breath he took. He remained a stranger in his own life even with each new career summit he topped. Ultimately he chose to check out thinking that was the only way from the inevitable. Tragic. It needn't have been.

Like most of the high achievers of Aaron's age, your generation has achieved so much so quickly that you've missed the barely audible slow burning whisper of your own existential questions. The din of success, of the ceaseless twittering of Twitter, of the vacuous flapping on Facebook and the daily showboating wankery of blogging has made you forget that it's the SILENCE that matters. It's the silence of your thoughts to yourself that will answer your questions. Slowly and with meditated patience.

I'm upset too. I'm upset that his parents have to deal with this tragic loss, that his surviving loved ones are looking for answers to this tragedy. I'm upset that traditional methods of calming, of seeking, of surviving are lost to this generation - a generation addicted to instantaneous Google-fed answers and one that is now gyrating to hokey lyrics like "partying & bullshit", "we're gonna die young"* ... :-(

This generation that obviously knows a great deal about internet startups and computer science, and Batman and world peace knows very little about how to answer their own questions about a meaningless existence. Their parents did it. Same shitty world, shame shitty life - they made it! How??

Finally, I now know what a pointless Sisyphean desk job has to offer to a young person: how to suffer patiently without self-destructing. How to fold, without going all in on the flop.

Much love,

AK

-----

* I like the songs, btw :-)
It's also worth noting that he literally wrote the book on the law of computer crime [1], and served as a pro bono (free) defense attorney _against_ the DOJ in the Lori Drew MySpace case [2], and he was extensively critical of the government in that case [3], and he has testified before Congress to say that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is too broad.[4]

He worked for the DOJ from 1998-2001. If he harbors sympathies for the government, they're pretty well hidden at this point.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Crime-Law-American-Casebook/d...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lori_Drew
[3] http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_05_11-2008_05_17...
[4] http://www.volokh.com/2011/11/14/my-congressional-testimony-...
35+ years in prison for "checking out too many books at once" is not a travesty?
It sounds like you are referring to "Hackers" by Steven Levy. It's a great book and that's a great story. I've posted it here:

http://frammish.org/used_up.html
I use aliases to open frequently used programs with specific configuration files (mutt, for example, to manage multiple email accounts) or with long complex arguments (rdesktop, for example, for connections to multiple hosts). I also use ~/bin/ when I want something in my path that has a purpose local to me, but can be widely deployed to the various platforms I work on. But for one-liners that don't work as aliases (used too infrequently or not portable) I use Makefiles. It's nice to be able to cd into a working directory and type 'make update' on any machine without trying to remember which package manager to use and how to invoke it.
Hard to assess exactly, but we were not adding feature and improving the user experience mostly because maintaining the previous code base and evolving it was so costly.
I missed the BBS era and came in around the point where if you had a Windows machine you had to know some cmd magic to get certain things to work (dodgy shareware Doom floppies is the one I remember best), but it seems like it's a missing skill now.
Instead of worrying about how bad JS is, read JavaScript the Good Parts and Effective JavaScript and focus on how good much of it is. Yes, JavaScript has oddities and there is a quite short list of pitfalls you have to learn to avoid ('==' vs '===' for example), but it also has some very powerful features. Take the time to actually learn actual JavaScript, as opposed to assuming that it's basically a bad Java (or whatever) with slightly different syntax and you'll find a pretty neat and powerful language.
The Greatest Web Site of All Time
I'm swagging a factorization of a reasonable pool of "violent" video game players. In any case, if you just picked Black Ops II, for there to be a 1% correlation, there'd have to be 220 thousand mass shootings from players (without any from non players) to get such a correlation. Of course, even then, we'd probably assume some other co-factor, since the ratio of players to shooters is so low.
Brilliant or Stupid: Photo sharing with Voice?
The landing page, albeit nicely designed, could be slapped onto virtually any online password manager with minimal modifications. While it does a relatively good job explaining what the product does and why it's important, it doesn't do a particularly good job explaining how Yith is different from all the other password managers that are out there. After all, password management with client-side decryption and cross-device sync isn't exactly news these days.

So, what's special about Yith? What problems does it solve that other password managers such as KeePass, LastPass, etc. don't solve? Here's what I can tell from the landing page:

1. Yith is open-source, whereas some of the alternatives are closed-source.

2. Yith doesn't keep the master password in memory any longer than the time it takes to decrypt a single stored password. Most of the alternatives such as LastPass remember the master password (or the private key that it decrypts) for the duration of your browsing session (or for as long as the standalone app is running) unless you explicitly log out. So Yith might be more secure, but it also has the potential to be rather inconvenient.

What else? Is this a web app that you open in another tab while trying to log into a site? Or does Yith come with plug-ins for popular browsers? The "clients" page only lists a web app.