skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If a prosecutor offers you a really good plea bargain (i.e., 6 months on a charge that carries a max penalty of 35 years), you always go to trial. A generous plea bargain means that the prosecutor has a weak case.

No kidding. I've been in court before for a victimless crime, and while the max sentence wasn't much compared to 6 months (much less 35 years)--just swallow your pride, plead guilty and move on if you give a shit about your life.
Good catch on the multi-signatures. That would tend to suggest a higher number of signatures per petition, but even in that case, we're talking about an average of ~13,000 people engaged per successful petition.

I totally agree that there needs to be a filter against teh dumb (because the average citizen has an appallingly tenuous grasp of the basics of US civics), but it seems like all that this does is increase incentive to trump up phantom(/spam/falsified) support for a petition, rather than actually improving engagement with constituents and giving them a voice.
Depends if you get rejected. Some of the apps we ship have been bounced back by apple 5+ times for very minor reasons taking up to 8 weeks to get approval in one very worst case.

Though the average is usually 2 weeks.
It's a useful vehicle for starting the process, bringing attention to the issue, clearly explaining what and why, providing a single point of action for people to focus on, and gauging support.

If all that goes well and the petition gets enough signatures and visibility, then that's a good point to segue off into the more difficult organizational problem of getting all those people to actually call their rep.

Additionally, the President has to sign such a law eventually anyway, so starting movements with a plea to the President has some benefit in that regard as well.
Yeah, same old bullshit as always. Why not just say "we want to ignore you?"
"Sometimes a view can be so high-level that you don't see anything meaningful anymore."

High level abstractions are valid tools for building a map of a specific domain. Please understand that having a high level map does not prevent you from exploring deeper if you find the subject interesting, nor does it rob you of the tools to do so... all you need to do is keep on asking 'Why?', 'How?', 'When?', etc... until you're satisfied.

"We don't know how an infant recognizes sounds: Is that some innate ability in humans or is that something that has to be learned as well?"

"How does an infant know the difference between language and other sounds?"

"Why can infants learn language but not arithmetic given the same process you just described?"

I grouped these questions, as I wish to answer them all together. Firstly, I would propose that the recognition of sensory stimuli is innate, which includes sounds. The roots of recognition can be traced back to the sensory stimuli we experience early on. Consider the sound of a baby screaming, which is typically the first sound they make after being born. A baby screaming in pain will typically be physically comforted shortly afterwards. Linking screaming with a subsequent response of comfort could easily be the start of our understanding of language, the senses working in tandem helping our early understanding of the world grow.

Arithmetic is more complex than the relationship between scream and comfort.

"We cannot really start to imagine how association and memory work."

We can 'start to imagine' that though, through neural networks, brain scans, etc....

Please understand, if you are interested in this subject, I appreciate other approaches (such as neuroscience) can help build a fuller picture, but high level approaches are still valid when building up intuition for a subject.
I get your point, I just can't stand seeing people mention him in the same breath as people who don't belong in prison at all. When uninformed people see them all lumped together like that, they are likely to start assuming things about the other guys.

You are correct though, if you aren't important, you are pretty much screwed.
The DUNS number is nothing to do with Apple, it's all handled by a separate company and something used internationally by many companies, not just Apple.

1. Why don't you just register as an individual and then convert the account to a company one once you get your DUNS number?
2. Why is it taking so longer to get the DUNS number? I registered my business with the government then applied for the DUNS number and got it instantly via email[1].

[1]http://www.dnb.co.uk
Especially as you get older, and your friendships diversify.
Can't agree more. Pleading guilty for 6 month for Aaron would have meant publicly admitting that he was nothing but a common thief without a day in court. Despite what Dolan says in his twitter, the threat of 35 years must have been pretty real in order for DOJ to use it as leverage against Aaron.
I don't know the details, but at any institution that large it would be an administrative dean of some kind, or the principal counsel for the university.
> My guess is someone wants to "send a message" to MIT and so they're attacking the most vulnerable, most exploitable part of MIT's infrastructure: a non-critical system run by student volunteers. I doubt it's anything personal against Alex or other MIT students.

But they're not sending a message to MIT, because the systems they are attacking don't matter to the faculty or administration. They're just creating a mess for the student volunteers.
Well now, this is odd. I don't know if it's because of the recent background check done by the US Government, or associating with the Microsoft App Store -- either of which (timing-wise) seemed to prompt Dunn & Bradstreet to call me and sell on their services -- but I started the Apple process to secure a number, and the helpfully found the number I apparently already had and emailed it to me.

I never went to D&B to get one, so... anyone know why I have one already?
Please let me read relevant discussion without having to scroll through a two page meta-debate. If you have an issue with the blog's presentation, kindly send it to the author directly.
Well, that was interesting...
"..coming from people who never met the guy"

They clearly show that the statement from vor_ which I quoted is incorrect.
Explain these funky ethics? 'Beyond a reasonable doubt' is a different standard than 'preponderance of the evidence'. I would think if you have a 25% chance of being able to win on a 'beyond a reasonable doubt standard' against someone accused of, say, murder, it would be unethical not to prosecute.
Hasn't been updated since 2007... math doesn't really change that often but that does not look promising...
> blame-shifting on the part of parents

That is too harsh. They just lost their son. What can they be but blind with pain?
Ghost in the wires is a reallly interesting autobiography by Kevin himself
“It's absurd that he was made a scapegoat. I would hope that this doesn't happen to anyone else.”

This type of shit happens every day. This is how prosecutors in this country operate.
There is one important number missing from the infographics in this blog post.

Difference Made: 0
The process described only works in the US. Internationally, you need to contact DNB and go through the multi-week horror. Eduardo appears to be in Brazil.
The 24 hour clock is still not universally adopted in the UK. No English speaker says says "thirteen O'Clock" the way one might say "treize heures". English speakers might say "thirteen hundred hours", but only in restricted circumstances (e.g. in the military).
This is seriously cool. I'm simultaneously excited about this possibly being a standard browser API, and worried that Google has an absurd advantage due to their control over data.

I wonder how Mozilla would implement this: provide basic recognition and let users choose a third party service to provide recognition, or perhaps strike a deal with a third party themselves? Or am I underestimating their ability to provide services like this?
Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EGh4ld_...
You don't think Congress agreeing with us on this can have any practical effect? You realize they are the ones who make the laws and confirm judicial appointments, right?

I know it's cool to hate on the government and criticize everything they ever do and assume they are all idiots - and most of the time they deserve it - but if they are on our side on this that should be welcomed and they should be given credit for it.
First of all, let me point out that I agree that sentencing is a total cluster f--k.

That being said, the fact that you didn't win on a count doesn't mean that you were "falsely accused." The standard for winning on a count is "beyond a reasonable doubt" or say 95%. The standard for actions being considered in sentencing is "more likely than not" or 50%.

Say the trial proves a 75% probability that you did counts 1-12, and a 98% probability that you did count 13. That means you can't be convicted on 1-12, but because it's more likely than not you really did it, the judge is allowed to consider those counts in determining your sentence, but only up to the maximum for the single count.

The rationale behind this is that the judge is also allowed to consider, in your benefit, things like other peoples' opinions of your character, etc. You don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that, e.g. you're a good husband and father. This cuts both ways--the prosecutor also doesn't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you beat your wife.

Not saying I agree with it, but it has a certain symmetry.

The real problem is that the maximum sentences for any given count are totally ridiculous.
Have you ever taken a look at H1B Visa salary data from the Department of Labor? It's pretty fascinating. On average in 2012, Facebook paid its H1B employees $116,203.23 whereas Google paid $124,436.59.
Raw data: http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/quarterlydata.cfm
In principle R language is equally potent than Mathematica's one (functional+self-modifying), so Mathematica clone can be done in R (and in fact there is a built-in function "D" which calculates derivatives of native expressions symbolically).

Of course this won't ever happen because of the paradigm -- R is for data crunching and does this way better than Mathematica.
Well, for example, Albertans pay less tax (federal and provincial combined) than Californians, but more than Washingtonians (who pay no tax, but also have to pay for their own healthcare). Keep in mind, raw salaries tend to be higher in Canada, as is cost of living. It'd be pretty complicated to actually sit down and puzzle out real take-home wages as compared to PPP, but I doubt there'd be a massive difference.
That article strikes me as absurdly biased. To take just one example, the argument is made that Swartz did nothing to cover his tracks, but if this is the case why buy a new laptop for this purpose instead of using his everyday one? What is so wrong about the comparison between spoofing one's MAC address and changing the VIN on a car, when the purpose of both is to identify a specific piece of hardware? Why cover one's face with a cycling helmet if one does not care about being identified? Why place one's computer in a wiring closet if one could have just downloaded freely from anywhere on campus?

Look, I don't want to bash the poor guy for his idea that such material should be free. But plugging into other peoples' networks without permission and so on are criminal offences, and Swartz was educated enough to know this. If you look through the indictment (http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/09/swartz...) it's very clear about which statutes were being broken. Boingboing is presenting it as if Swartz was some wide-eyed ingenue that didn't realize that anyone would consider his downloading a problem.
How do you know that MIT students aren't the ones leading the charge? I wouldn't be surprised to learn it.
Hats of if you can do http://blog.wolfram.com/2012/10/23/calculating-the-energy-be... in R or, for that matter, about half of the other examples given in that blog.
I too can attest to the extensive abilities of the Sage package. It's extremely powerful and easy to use given that it's based in Python. Even if you don't want to download it, give the notebook a try: http://www.sagenb.org/.
A psychiatric hospital would probably have helped, but being in jail does not stop people from committing suicide, and it's silly for you to suggest that it does.

Source: My brother who killed himself while residing in the "second best place" for a suicidal person to be.
(AFAIK the Objective-C++ compiler doesn't have this limitation, as the struct can be given an implicit copy constructor and a deconstructor.)
Are you able to disclose whether the $50 a month is a result of nab's involvement somewhere in your end-to-end setup? To me, that's the most unfair part of payments in Australia. I can understand charging if an account is dormant but not just because everyone else is doing it. That's the problem with banks today- they all just copy each other.
Just to play devil's advocate here though, how many people in the US wrote their congressperson over this? Zoe Lofgren was mine at the time Swartz' case went public in the media, and I didn't write.

I guess that makes me partially guilty, too.
So you don’t wake up with your data in Eastern Europe
In the UK I used this[1] and got the number instantly.

[1]http://salesmarketing.dnb.co.uk/find_my_company/
This article may actually be doing Myspace a favor. I for one actually checked out Myspace because of it, and I probably wouldn't had the headline said something more positive but mundane, "New Myspace Better than Old Myspace".

Same with the recent CES trainwreck, I would have completely ignored it otherwise, but instead it was a sight to behold, and now I know Qualcomm took over sponsorship from Microsoft for the first time in many years.

Never underestimate the power of rubbernecking news.
But methods matter, unless you want to argue that the ends justify the means. Which would be a bit of a stretch in this case, by the way, since the most likely ends range somewhere between nothing and causing a bunch of problems for people who have had nothing to do with this whole story.
You can still release it to the app store later if things come around! Hopefully sharing the code will improve the quality of the app as well as inspire others.
I disagree.

Unless he is specifically on suicide watch, suicides in jail do happen.

Also, and more importantly, even if they did send him for a 72-hour hold, it is quite possible that they wouldn't hold him for the full 72 hours, or ONLY 72 hours, and then release him.
The second to last paragraph especially highlight federal cases being blown out of proportion, even ten years ago.
Duly noted!
The lecture is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-30t8pSd7s0.
>Does anyone under the age of 30 remember television static?

I do. In fact I've seen it in the past 24 hours. I want to at some point hook up a microcontroller to an old TV with a coax cable and subtly manipulate the static until a shadow person emerges from the spotty mist. I figure it would make a cool demo. [0]

>Will anyone in Gibson's future?

Probably not.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_people
I'm not saying it would have effect on it - but rather, an important step in quashing such actions in the future.

"Oh shit! look how easy that 25K for Ortiz was! We learned our lesson! let's up it to make it 4X as difficult to force us to issue a statement informing the populous that they have no voice!"

Thanks Waqf
What about the OP's point are you trying to contradict?

I know you're really busy with all these other threads that might not have your opinion in them yet, but what exactly is so clear about this complicated situation?

Your comment is the equivalent of spraying a plant with a hose while not actually looking at it.

Can you leave a single thread alone, or do you need to toss out random inconsistent opinions at every single opportunity?
My point is that I don't think Congress actually agrees on this. Zoe Lofgren represents Silicon Valley. Making statements like this could just as easily be trawling for votes as it could be genuine outrage over the issue.

No Congressperson ever said these things while Swartz was still alive, and his prosecution was just as ridiculous then, but saying so wouldn't have netted you nearly the positive media coverage in the tech press that it will now.
People who disagree with Chomsky usually characterize his views as this review does, as blind, wholesale demonization of the United States.

Chomsky's views are in fact the ultimate form of patriotism. he expects more of our nation and isn't sentimentally attached to the kind of hero and "good guy" stories that so many people need in order to be able to sleep at night.

Anyone who truly cares about America will read as much Chomsky as they can and will take action to make the US live by the values that supposedly guide its existence. There are some very inspiring things about the US, but also a very ugly side that much effort is undertaken to hide from view.

So please watch Manufacturing Consent with an open mind and observe the incredible patriot Chomsky for a while before you have the knee-jerk reaction that the reviewer would like you to have.
Of course not, MIT administration's alleged behavior was terrible even in absence of Swartz's suicide.
In every country they have a branch, each with different prices and delivery times. In Brazil I was asked 60 working days for the free service.
You keep on referring back to your purported legal background. And then in threads like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5049530 it becomes abundantly clear that the rules do not actually work like you claim that they do.

Please stop trying to argue from personal authority. Say your piece. Cite claims that could benefit from that.

Now you may think that Ortiz was likely to lose at trial. However Orrin Kerr's analysis did not agree with you. (See http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ if you want to be reminded of that analysis.) As far as anyone here knows, you're a random internet poster who has not proven to be very convincing on the law. By contrast Orrin Kerr is a respected law professor who is commenting on his area of specialty. Therefore he's arguing from much stronger authority than you are. (And he backed up what he said with specifics of the legal charges and relevant precedents.)
"Ghost in the wires", his auto-biography, was also a great read. It was very entertaining, and certainly worth a re-read when I have the time. It reads like a cyberpunk thriller set in the 80's and 90's, except it's not fiction.
ahahah this is awesome :) Needs more brooding photos with tablets and zach morris phones.
No mention of plea bargain reform. That's the real issue.
Hi Rachit - CEO at Two Toasters here. You're absolutely right, we care a lot creating great user experiences and brought our expertise on Android to the table. We built a trusted relationship with the Simple mobile team and worked closely with them to ensure we stayed true to the Simple experience but with appropriate considerations for the Android platform.
>> "There were some horrible situations which prompted the FCC to go, 'Look, you've gotta fix this,' " Levitan said. Cellphone companies came up with a way to locate the phones and instantly transmit their coordinates to dispatchers. Today, as 70 percent of phone calls to 911 are made by cellphones, dispatchers can see where they are calling from. The information must be accurate to within 50 to 300 meters, depending on the type of technology used.

I don't quite follow. Does the 911 operator have a special way to get your phone to perform triangulation on cell towers and send the resulting coordinates?
Thanks for noticing the site is down! I'm working on it now.
Morris took responsibility and did his time.
I guess you may try the news:yc way, open source it and sell it in App Store at the same time.
This blog post is from 2009, I think Wolfram Alpha was pretty new back then. It would be interesting to know what he was looking for and if it still isn't there.

His example of a query that doesn't work seems to return data now, when typed slightly differently:

Not working link taken from blog post:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=graph+u.s.+unemployment...

Working result:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=graph+u.s.+unemployment...

I think it would be great to have a nice open source symbolic math package with a good UI, but for the 3 times a year that I need to know how to factor some equation like (x-1)/(sqrt(x)-1) , wolfram alpha does a pretty good job!

I need to explore sage and mathics more, they both look cool
Why not just team up with a publisher? They submit the app using their Apple ID, they help with marketing, reviews, etc. They get a cut of the profits, but it sounds like it would be worth it in your case.
I'm up in arms about the prosecution and suicide, but Hal is one of the few people I trust wholeheartedly to tell the truth about MIT's involvement. So much so that if he came to a conclusion "It was an oops, a piece of paper got misplaced and no one at MIT's at any fault," I'd accept it without a second thought.
It is also likely that a brief arbitrary taste of jail would increase his fear of prison, thereby making a suicide more likely.

The jail "offer" was clearly meant to be insulting and does not merit consideration as a serious option in this case.
I totally agree, the DUNS number thing is insane, but you can release the app as an individual without a DUNS ID number.
Ah neat!

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/12/02/microsoft-vancouver-is-now...
The most important point here is the proposition that design should be finished before any coding starts.

Thanks to the rise of user experience and interaction design the Waterfall backlash is starting to wear off, and the Agile hype getting more moderated. This is great for Software Engineering.
"Kevin on Demand" is still pretty cool.

http://www.takedown.com/evidence/transcripts/
It's just a mistake in the demo video...
Thoughts about App Store ‘Curation’
I'm very sorry for your loss and for not properly qualifying what I said. I didn't consider that a person who has suffered through this very situation might read what I wrote.

Yes many people do commit suicide in jail. But most of those people are not known to their jailers to be suicidal and thus the proper precautions cannot be taken.

If the jailers know an inmate is suicidal (as Aarons would have if his lawyers told them) they are mandated by law to do everything in their power to prevent it. Right down to them being housed nude in a "rubber room" on 24/7 video surveillance.

Of course, it's extremely difficult to stop a truly determined person from committing suicide but the risk level is certainly much lower if that person is in jail and known to be suicidal than if that person is free in society.
I want to switch to Android, but I fear needing to have constant vigilance over what I install. Like running a Windows install but forced to use Java as well.

However, it's still preferrable to Apple's draconian policies.
Exactly, every country has a D&B branch with its own rates and delivery times.
Robert Morris did not "do time".

He got community service, probation and a $10k fine. There would have been no general outrage, and no suicide, if the prosecutor sought a similar penalty in this case.
I guess if it comes down to that, we're now back to the bad old ways of publishing software, what a bummer.
Why is a gossip blog being listed on Hacker news? Let alone the front page?
Why do you even need a DUNS number? If you're an individual person, just get an individual account and sell it that way.

Honestly, this seems a bit like a publicity stunt to me. Everyone loves hating on Apple these days, and if you can tie it to "look at my new opensource project", then BAM, it hits HN front page.
fuck you MIT!
fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.