skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea of "law as program" vs "law as guideline" is certainly a dangerous one, and has become far too common lately. However, I don't think that we should rely on discretion too heavily. It should be the exception not the rule. Today it is the rule, and that means that for all intents and purposes it is de facto "the law", regardless of what's on the books. Which means takes away a lot of the checks and balances we have in place to keep the law reasonable and to ensure it works toward advancing liberty rather than fighting against it.
Google made a complete hash out of the Usenet archives that they bought from DejaNews; you could literally issue the same search month after month and watch yourself getting progressively fewer and fewer results.
Huh? The IBM-PC and clones, and the Apple II, Lisa, and Mac, were certainly not "hobbyist" computers. They were used by businesses to do spreadsheets and accounting, by artists to do graphics, and by all kinds of people to do the same sorts of basic tasks we use computers for today. (I did so myself; I had a PC clone, and my college roommate had an Apple II, and they certainly weren't "hobbyist" computers; we used them for serious work.) Even if Congress was only considering "corporate use" of computers in 1986, which is arguable, PCs and Macs were already part of "corporate use".

If you want to say that Congress was too technically ignorant in 1986 to recognize that PCs and Macs counted as "real computers", that I would agree with. :-)
Web Activist's Suicide Highlights Tech Law
There is a Streisand effect-like phenomenon when notorious publicity-seekers become famous due to widespread criticism. The attention, negative or not, is exactly what they want. The biggest example is probably the Westboro Baptist Church.
Windows Phone 8 Theme in Sencha Touch 2.2
Google Cache: The Atlantic suspends the Scientology advertorial
Except that this problem exists in English-based programming languages as well. Attempting to make grammatically correct code that mimics a human language is a futile effort. The next Twitter doesn't care about "is", "was" and "are" in the code.
Yeah, gray font on the white background is not pleasant. For a page which talks about books like "The Design of Everyday Things" it's kind of a fail ;)
The study on addiction linked to covers addiction to injections of MPH. It goes on to say that injected MPH and oral MPH have completely different effects. It follows that none of this generalizes to viewing pornography, seeing how the delivery mechanism is a factor in addiction and the study does not cover viewed material in any manner.

And that's from only reading the first couple sentences.
You can still see the meat of the article via skeletonjelly's google cache link, but I gather the fun was in the comments. The 'article' reads like a typical cult/church promotional flyer...
Businesses such as the Atlantic are not obliged to take advertising from all comers. Showing up with your $50 or whatever does not guarantee you equal time in anybody's magazine. In fact, even if it did it would be ill-advised, if the brands are contradictory; you don't expect to see a Walmart ad in the New Yorker yet I'm sure Walmart can afford to run them there, likewise you don't see Louis Vuitton ads in PC Magazine. Both parties in the advertising relationship are free to choose and refuse each other, like any other contractual arrangement between people or corporations. This isn't a first-amendment issue.
This is a fascinating glimpse of the way Aaron affected most of those who came into contact with him. It's unfortunate that we could not share these stories while he was still with us.

The petition to the President to remove Ms. Ortiz from office currently has more than 24,500 signatures and looks to be on pace to reach its goal, triggering a response.

Thank you for your help.
I am also building up a team right now as well. I do not think its enough to say that you are the CEO/Founder. Leading by example, and having skin in the game is critical. The CEO needs to have enough technical skills to be able to build a MVP and relate to his CTO and engineers.

There are literally thousands of idea people needing developers/CTOs in the valley now. Pick a challenging problem that you're solving in a unique enough way and never look back.

Good luck.
pulling the advertorial shows that the editors are still in charge

What kind of editing is it that would allow this crap to appear for a few hours? This shows that they didn't expect and couldn't handle the backlash, but nothing more. Well, maybe that the Disqus censorship hamster wheels were overheating, too. But unless they come clean and distance themselves from this in no unclear terms, and ask for forgiveness, they can just go play in traffic (pun wasn't on purpose but I'm keeping it).
Dread Cthulhu Leads His Cult to Milestone Year
Can either of those solution do dynamic secure web sockets? I want to terminate SSL to various dynamic backend web socket servers. I'm spinning up additional web socket servers per user for user privilege separation.
We are all Aaron Swartz. Let's not let our generation down. Stick together people.
I thought the entire (pin board) thing was a joke. IF your product is legit, good luck to you bro. I really like the idea and your design tells exactly what the service is without the need of text.

Good luck
The C Preprocessor in Javascript?
They don't cover just visual design, but design in general. While visual interfaces are most commonly associated with design, design is actually related to many other areas as well.
comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5057835
I have never finished an issue of the New Yorker before another issue comes out, but the two or three articles I do read tend to be amazing. It's definitely worth the steep price of admission.

I subscribed to the Atlantic recently (and won't be canceling, since they retracted the Scientology ad) and have to say that I get as much or more from their web articles as I do the print edition. I guess there's less guilt now though.
Dell used to represent quality. IMO, Dell lost when they started playing the "race to the bottom" game and making unreliable computers to keep prices low. Differentiating your product solely on price is a losing proposition because there will always be someone cheaper. When the market shifted to Apple laptops, consumers had lost all confidence that Dell could make a suitable alternative. Consumers had no confidence that Dell could build an iPod or iPhone alternative. As a result, in the consumer market, Dell and HP were left competing for low margin scraps while Apple raked in all the profits from their high margin products.
I agree.

The hypocrisy on this topic has been truly something to behold. So many people calling for prosecutors to explain themselves, but whenever a question is asked of a local, it is "time to grieve, not ask questions."
> I don't understand the "sponsored" content gambit, but I do recall reading various print magazines that had bundled content inside of them that looked very much like "real" articles but were basically sponsored ads. But I don't understand it. I would think that any ad that looks like your material fundamentally is misleading your readers by conflating your brand, your mission, your reputation with its own.

Personally, I don't mind the print ads too much, although they are annoying. There are some physical mitigations that make them obvious - they are typeset differently, have a "special advertisement section" footer, and are sometimes printed on a different stock than the regular magazine. It is easy to detect where they begin and end.

The Atlantic's article has almost none of these features. The only way I knew that it was sponsored was because of HN, and I had to go back and see the "Sponsored" banner near the top. Still, "Sponsored" doesn't really mean much either.

The closest thing to being an magazine ad would be those full-screen things that sites like Forbes have, with a "continue to site" link at the top.
Thats 6 months plus a felony on his record right? For downloading a few files. Its disgusting.
You should consider that instead an attenuation of due process rights, which is what you perceive, we have instead a consistent level of access to justice through the court system, which seems otherwise because technology has given us more insight into the workings of our criminal justice system than we've ever had before.

If you were screwed over by federal prosecutors in 1952 as a result of an anti-Communist prosecution under the Smith act, to which message board would you have appealed?

If you find my observation credible, you are of course in no way prohibited from making the case that our system is unjust or ineffective or capricious. Progress maybe be slow; progress towards greater justice can always use acceleration.

It is possible for you and 'rprasad to be right simultaneously. Nobody has to be "negligent".
> sorry, but I agree. wholeheartedly immoral.

Google also mixes sponsored results in their search results. Is that immoral?
where is "don't make me think"?
http://chronicle.com/article/Massive-Excitement-About/135302...

Development looks like a boys club from the outside. Changing that perception will require active effort from the inside. No one puts in the effort because "We aren't sexists! We love women! (We love women so much! [Please, women, come talk to us!])" Apparently liking women forgives being completely incapable of creating an inviting environ.

None of this comes as a big surprise to anyone who knows developers. Right leaning people who are overwhelmingly from privileged backgrounds and spend most of their time absorbed in a subculture that places pride in technical accomplishment above manners. This is not a group to expect a warm welcome from, especially if it means that they might have to tell less crude jokes, or take down some objectifying imagery.

But sure, it could be a natural aversion. That's a studied hypothesis with thousands of hours of research behind it showing...something, somewhere...right? The truth must be somewhere in the middle, I guess.
I also feel revel not idiomatic Go. I'm checking out beego (https://github.com/astaxie/beego).
Prosecutor Dismisses Charges Against Aaron Swartz
In general, the sentences for different crimes/offenses have blown out of proportion. Usually an outragous case of <mumble> goes around the media, and politicians respond by increasing the punishment. Or Lobbyists push for it.

The whole thing (and not just in the US, in most states I know of) would need a new assessment, and not just one section at a time, but some kind of unified assessment.

It's a bit like a huge, sprawling code base that has never seen a major refactoring, and is in dire need of one.
His actions were not harmless, and seem to satisfy the elements of several real crimes [1].

[1] http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
try it now. how is that on your screen./
When I got an Android device, I discovered they are trying an alternative distribution model. This company Next Issue sells a subscription for $10/month that basically entitles you to read any of some ~50 magazines on your tablet. The thing that really rubbed me the wrong way is that I theoretically get the New Yorker electronic edition for free since I'm a full subscriber, but I'd still have to pay an extra $10/month to use the Next Issue app (unlike the New Yorker app for iPad). They also sell a "premium" subscription for $15/month that includes the New Yorker and some other "premium" magazines (like Sports Illustrated). Then I discovered the New Yorker restricts people to devices with particular resolutions, which my tablet didn't have.

So they're trying to figure it out, in fits and starts, but they seem to be aiming for Hulu, which doesn't strike me as the best model of success.
Spoiler: title is sarcastic.

The importance of copyediting a scientific paper
D. J. Bernstein
2005.05.04

http://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt
Improving Checked Exceptions
Even six months in prison is no walk in the park.

The article has is completely right. If the nominal penalty is 100 years and somebody gets 12 years after a plea bargain, that person is still locked away for a long time and the prosecutor can say "See, we're not so bad, we granted an 78% reduction of the sentence".

Pathetic.

As I said before, in most other civilized countries the maximum penalty is between 10 and 20 years prison (and that is for 1st degree murder).
If I was going to level a complaint about anti-JSTOR activism, it would be that the demise of fee-encumbered academic publishing is inevitable, and that it will most effectively be brought about by researchers like Matt Blaze who have pledged never to publish in closed journals and never to review for closed journals. That in the meantime, efforts to overtly disrupt JSTOR are a sideshow that will ultimately detract from that effort.
Too little? Were you hoping for a refund of your $0?

Too late? It was online for all of three hours.

You're going to have to lower that bar if you expect anyone to get over it.
Looks better now, but I'd still make the font a bit larger.

That's how it looks in my browser:

http://freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/cyqjo.png

(Firefox 18 / KDE 4.8).
Show HN: Rezhound - Availability alerts for OpenTable (my first webapp)
Although I may be depriving you of the humor value of reading a press release that I swear to God reads for all the world like the product of a markov generator I- kid- you- not, I flagged this post, because the WBC is trolling you; that's what they are, a troll church.
How do you justify the change from "this guy deserves what was coming to him" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484) to "OMG this is so sad" (mostly every thread since then, but also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047846)?

It's so unapologetically hypocritical. We don't need to pretend like every tragedy affects us so deeply.
This sounds as good an idea as hiring Hell's Angels as security for a concert.
Melancholia and Cognition
Government should not be in the business of influencing behaviour at all, except for preventing direct harm by one person to another. Any thing else is just nanny state visit bullshit
Constness of parameters has zero effect on optimisation. Const declarations may provide a small benefit.

Go ahead and apply const as you see fit, but don't expect better code out of it.
It's much less than 35, and less than death... and it and probably indicates that in Aaron Swartz's case, the accused never entertained the idea of pleading guilty.
Yeah. I'm still gonna use 2 spaces. It looks better to me.
as is the case in india - everybody files taxes individually (and not as a family unit). Having moved to the US recently, it was quite a surprise to me that I was paying more in taxes per year than if I my wife and I were filing taxes individually as single people.
I don't understand why? I mean, other than WBC being a bunch of trolls.
Robin Williams devotes a chapter of her book, "The PC is not a Typewriter", on the subject. She concurs.

http://www.amazon.com/Pc-Not-Typewriter-Robin-Williams/dp/09...
Scientology the orginisation is not a protected class even if there followers are so the Atlantic is free to avoid doing business with them for any reason just like GE.

As to rejecting content advertisements are often blocked for all sorts of reasons. YouTube has a lot of funny adds that where pulled for bing in poor taste among other things. 'Sponged content' often faces strictor hurtles as people are far more likely to notice and be offended by it.
As an Indian, and asking purely from a cultural perspective how is the family system in America?

This might very well be stereotyping but the impression we have about US is that divorces are very common and marriage rates are low. And the family system is pretty disintegrated. There was a article posted here few days back on how a guy was sleeping on the streets while he could stay with his sister. That sort of thing is not imaginable here in India.

Also being married has its own advantages. Regardless of whatever the feminist movement believes. Married women do get a great deal of financial security, physical security and comfort by the very virtue of the way marriage is structured.

Something that is seen to be happening here in India is increased rates of Alimony claims, false dowry cases and super powerful laws in favor on women(which seem to be abused currently) may lead to problems like these.

This article makes a nice read.
ha. yep. Tufte came in at number 6. I love that Envisioning Information one: http://www.amazon.com/Envisioning-Information-Edward-R-Tufte....
> The contention that JSTOR is acting as a faithful steward of public domain works -- having established any sort of restriction or barrier to prevent the public from accessing those works -- truly examines the widths and depths and bounds of intellectual dishonesty.

As I see it, they've removed the majority of the barrier (i.e. actually tracking down a copy of the periodical or whatever). So you have to log in and deal with a watermark- calling that 'intellectual dishonesty' is stretching the term to its limits.
Wouldn't you use external string tables to load RTL strings?
Also, there might be an opportunity to carve a market out of the Bitcoin community. Many sites have and will continue to spring up that deal with Bitcoin in non-trivial ways (i.e., where using a payment processor isn't appropriate). Those people will feel better knowing they can start off on the right foot. Sell them their pickaxes and shovels.
I'm pretty sure Google imposes the same limitations JSTOR does for public domain stuff. Google and JSTOR are both the status quo for digital copies of public domain stuff.
Many here would disagree with you, provided the person being singled out is a prosecutor.
We do not exist for the benefit of the state, the state exists for the benefit of the people. Stop using tax resources to discriminate based on lifestyle choices.
This happens all the time with weapons. For example, during the Bruce Lee craze a lot of states passed laws against nunchucks which are still on the books. It's a continuing pattern. Moral panic -> SOMETHING must be done -> useless, unhelpful laws get put on the books. The same sort of security theater that we see today with the TSA and whatnot.
Edit: I don't to sound like a contrarian or prove anyone wrong or something. I'm certainly not the person to do that. I just read some of the comments here that seem to overestimate the distance between the two stacks in the article.

The stacks in the article aren't very different and few of the comments here seem to reflect that.

Erb vs Haml? Not much of a switching cost, especially since they can be used in the same project without sweat. One is HTML with <% %> tags, the other is a less familiar nested syntax to generate markup.

Mysql vs Postgres? For most CRUD, the same Active Record queries pretty much work, and the shortcomings are due to Active Record being underwhelming compared to its alternatives. Someone that cargo cults Mysql vs Postgres probably isn't locking their schema/queries into one or the other because staying close to Active Record doesn't really let you do that.

Minitest vs Rspec? Tests would be annoying to rewrite, but testing layer differences don't really distinguish a Rails app. Especially since you can write almost line for line equivalent code in Minitest and Rspec.

Fat models & skinny controllers vs skinny models&controllers + service layer? Here's the first real difference on the list because it actually changes the design of the system, not some ancillary component.

So,

> How many parts of Rails can you swap out before it stops being Rails?

I think we can stow this question away until there are more divergent, popular alternatives to the default stack which I'm looking forward to in time.

For instance, I think we will start seeing more deliberate functional designs that decouple models from Rails (to make testing not suck, for one). And I wish Active Record alternatives were far more popular in the Rails community.
"Universal Design" :)
AND THEY'RE CENSORING THE COMMENTS. I posted mine with the CSS code for a color from outer space that I intended would make the comments grow unnaturally quickly and they typeset it in black!
Yes, it's quite a misstep by the Atlantic.

All that said, please do be civil in your comments. (And I'm addressing that to the community, not just to jerrya.)
"In my experience, any mention of the idea that men can be raped by women, for example, gets shouted down by 'feminists'"

Like I said, there's no need to craft Straw Feminists from whole cloth. Make your points without these fabrications.
For those following the numbers, it would appear that traffic from HN is worth more to The Atlantic than however much Scientology paid.
Getting kicked in the shins is better than a bat to the skull. Would you be surprised when people start looking for alternatives when offered that "choice"?
Thank you for the detailed reply.

When you say my example is incorrect, do you mean that it's incorrect in clojure, or only in scheme? I tried my examples in clojure and they appear to work and appear to demonstrate a lack of referential transparency. I assume that clojure is a valid lisp to make a point about metaprogramming and macros.

Also, it looks like it's fairly easy in scheme to show the same thing, which it looks like you started to do (I'm not sure whether you agree with me about that or not):

(define-syntax swapargs
(syntax-rules ()
((_ ls) (list (list-ref ls 0) (list-ref ls 2)
(list-ref ls 1)))))

(define a 7)
(define b 5)
(eval (swapargs '(modulo a b))) => 5
(define a 10)
(define b 8)
(eval (swapargs '(modulo a b))) => 8

The two calls to "eval" are identical, yet return different results. That breaks referential transparency.

"showing the particular merit of Scheme"

From what I know, I like lisps of various flavors. I just said that they didn't really speak to the kinds of problems that I deal with. Maybe if I wrote more lisp I would see why it does so, but currently I do not.
The study referenced is very worthwhile reading:

The dominant version of American plea bargaining makes simi
lar demands [to the Inquisition]: it requires the prosecutor to usurp the determinative and sentencing functions, hence to make himself judge in his own cause. I cannot emphasize too strongly how dangerous this concentration of prosecutorial power can be. The modern public prosecutor commands the vast resources of the state for gathering and generating accusing evidence. We allowed him this power in large part because the criminal trial interposed the safeguard of adjudication against the danger that he might bring those resources to bear against an innocent citizen-whether on account of honest error, arbitrariness, or worse. But the plea bargaining system has largely dissolved that safeguard.

Direct link:

http://www.judicialstudies.unr.edu/JS_Summer09/JSP_Week_4/JS...
They just traded the Scientology article back in for HN traffic.
Sorry for the resubmit. Just surprised this didn't garner any previous discussion.

The part that resonated most with me was: "What bone you were meant to have, no dog will drag away." It made me think that it's worth considering which bones are yours and which you only think you'd like to have and improve on. Maybe it's worth re-evaluating what you do spend time on versus what you never feel bad spending time on?