skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I signed, and posted on Facebook the following reason to do so: "Go sign this, if you haven't already. The description fits a lot of prosecutors, but this seems as good a place as any to start cleaning up." The job of a prosecutor is to prosecute, and if they aren't careful, they fall victim to the Iron Law of Bureaucracy (http://www.google.com/search?q=Iron+Law+of+Bureaucracy). Max Weber (1864–1920), a believer in the efficiency of bureaucracies, would also have a agreed with Pournelle; Wikipedia phrases it thusly: "Weber also saw it as a threat to individual freedoms, and the ongoing bureaucratization as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in the aforementioned "iron cage" of bureaucratic, rule-based, rational control. In order to counteract bureaucrats, the system needs entrepreneurs and politicians." That's what this petition is all about. It's a warning to the politicians that the prosecutorial bureaucracy has gone too far.
It's okay to feel sad.

Sadness is not depression.
My definition of a heisenbug is slightly different. For me it is one that disappears when you try to observe it (for example by inserting printf's, logging code or running in the debugger or if it only occurs with particular build setting especially release build only).

Hard to reproduce reliably is a different but closely related category.
> many people in this thread want to name and shame the individual prosecutor in this case. That is seriously misdirected effort that is not going to solve the systemic problems. It may even exasperate them, as it falsely implies that the problem is with individual overstepping prosecutors rather than a system in which it's the norm.

There's a good essay on exactly that point, descriptively entitled "Fix the machine, not the person". Written by... Aaron Swartz.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi

It's perhaps interesting that, in a thread with dozens of HNers calling for everything from naming and shaming to harrassment, no-one so far has linked to his opinion on this.
Is it possible to have a rational discussion on suicide without it offending someone's own will to live?

Is there a natural law that suicide breaches, is this why it upsets and offends so many at the thought?

I'm personally of the deep belief that suicide is an option. And it's also something I think of at times. I think of suicide when I'm up, when I'm down... but generally never when I have a struggle and something to fight for. I think of suicide semi-frequently and always have.

I view suicide as an option because I don't believe in afterlife, or that life is a gift (from whom? we're supposed to be thankful how?)... life and personal existence is a bizarre improbable thing, we are here but nothing follows and nothing will remain of us in the grand scheme of things.

When you know life is fundamentally irrelevant, that we are but a speck of dust... what's the difference between a span of 40 years and a span of 80 years?

I like to think that life should be qualitatively lived, struggles endured in a constant hope of experiencing a high-quality of living.

Is there anything so deeply flawed with viewing my life as being mine to do with as I please, and also acknowledging that if I come to some point that a remainder of my life would be lived in misery that I might choose to exercise a right over my life to end it on a qualitative high?

I don't find that these arguments differ greatly from those in terminal illness (whom most would sympathise with), but like many things that are unseen (mental illness, emotional state, state of happiness or sadness)... the unseen seem to be accepted as being unreal, fixable, unacceptable.

Yet there are times that suicide can almost be thought of as noble. When a lover dies and the lone lover pines so greatly and finds that they cannot continue to have any quality of life without the other person.

I don't believe that I've ever been clinically depressed, and am a very optimistic and hopeful person. Yet my reasoning isn't offended or appalled when I see reports of suicide, and nor could I make a claim that I would never consider it. It is, for me, part of living... as death is for everyone... and as we ponder death beyond our control, I also ponder death within our control.

I find it hard to comprehend the reaction of others to stories of suicide that seem to follow misconceptions about someone having to be depressed, or the time of year... I don't think suicide is the product of a person with a fault in some way, I find it to be a rational thing.
Maybe we should all make such a pilgrimage during our lifetimes. It's bound to be an amazing eye-opener.
The same internet that propelled Howard Dean and Ron Paul into the oval office?
The plant will be fine. The workers might not be so fine.

Also while I'm sure there would be no problems with the nuclear part, there are things in and around a power plant that being struck by bullets might be... inconvenient.
Sorry, but I must be missing what's so interesting.

Great, you wrote a Brainfuck (why do people insist in censoring themselves?!) in Scala. You didn't even implement dynamic memory resizing.

Again, not sure why this is here.
Zuckerberg has always strongly denied the facebook phone idea: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9537880/Mark-...

It does appear to be the story the aussie media is running with though
That has little to do with majority readers if I had to guess. I suspect most HNers are not affiliated with YC and even though HN and YC are clearly connected, I view HN more like a better startup subreddit. To me, at least, the link matters little to back the reason. Any and all reason of why Aaron is on the front page, bears minor influence because of his association with HN. The part that does, is merely a reflection of being associated with anything people deem an accomplishment
How to manage multiple iPhoto libraries
“It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan,” Graham wrote. “In those countries, people color inside the lines.”

It's all right to be proud of your country, although of course it's neither very original nor very elaborate thinking. But why denigrate others? For your information, there are a lot of activists who fight for freedom of information, human rights and net neutrality in those countries as well.
Exactly. It's not that interesting. But why should I care if others don't care either? Anyhow, I decided for 2013 that I'll submit anything I write related to programming on HN.
I think I'd like to get as far from US federal law as soon as reasonably possible. Unfortunately doing a tech startup in the US is still vastly better than doing a tech startup anywhere else in the world, and a sufficiently successful company is going to be exposed to US jurisdiction regardless, although principals may not be (and definitely not for personal stuff), e.g. Mega.

Not sure where is really that much better, except that common law jurisdictions other than the US probably don't have the more recent utter rejections of the common law tradition (RICO, Patriot, etc.).
Well, it looks solid. Canonical’s vision of the new Ubuntu UI certainly seems to work well with touch displays, which was probably the idea all along. My first impression is definitely that Canonical is working toward a better cross-device experience than the one currently on offer from Microsoft. Whether I actually care about cross-device experiences is another issue entirely.
Anime Makes Me Sleepy
As any other Brainfuck interpreter, it shows that Brainfuck is a nice, simple, small language. Things become mildly more interesting when you write a transpiler, lets say to Scala.

See here for a sketch of a "Brainfuck IDE" that compiles to JavaScript (just click "load", then "compile"): http://rolux.org/brainfuck/
Hopefully he'll be more lucky with the russian visa than Karl Bushby [1], who's been hiking in the other direction. Unfortunately most information on his site has been removed.

[1] http://www.odysseyxxi.com/
> Swartz returned the data

This... sounds super fishy.
Let's hope they know that he's Canadian.
Looks pretty cool, I think I'll try doing something like that!
I read the article just because I thought someone will explain why I should learn BASIC.

I gave up on BASIC in the 1980s. Maybe something cool has happened and I'm missing out?
None of my Haskell programs have any space leaks.

While go makes a lot of correctness bugs really easy to accidentally make, Haskell does make a certain class of leak easier to maker. I'd personally take a correct program that leaks in some scenario over an incorrect one that does the wrong thing.
Agreed, more or less. Brainfuck implementations are not generally interesting, except as proofs of Turing-completeness for other esoteric languages. And there are many more esolangs out there with much wilder and more beautiful semantics than Brainfuck. Implementing those can be a really valuable learning experience.

Also, if we’re bringing Scala into it, I would be more interested to see a type-level implementation.
Damn, I just had to zoom to 150% to read this.
I've encountered it once with a form, although it was a while ago and if I saw the code again I might be able to identify what was wrong. In that case it was probably a poor choice of element to attach to that caused the callback to be fired independently multiple times on one click, and stopping the bubbling had no effect.

The other time was in a Rails app, where a script was added to a partial for a layout, and then added again later on (by a different developer) to the layout itself. That caused a particularly nasty bug since it used 'toggle', and thus the second callback negated the first.
I wonder, if there was a law that all funds spent on your side in a trial, had to be matched by funds given to the other side to fund his side as well -- would that work?

If the DA's budget per trial is $1 million, then lawyers of the defense must also be given $1 million. If a corporate sues anyone, they have to give them the same budget their lawyers get for their own defense.

Sure, figuring out the budget used is tricky, but even if it is not accurate, it could help balance the situation.
I hope you can restrain yourself and that you won't be asking for their passports and birth certificates:

http://rememberaaronsw.tumblr.com/post/40372208044/official-...
As you can see in the example above, there are a few features that can make a Brainfuck developer's life less miserable, like source formatting, error handling or logging.
Saying Office is irrelevant because bloggers don't need it is like saying Eclipse is irrelevant because painters don't need it.

I'm more surprised by the fact that Microsoft would push for selling Office on iOS. Wouldn't they give up a significant part of the attract of Windows and of their vendor lock-in by doing so ? Office is one of the big reasons why I still have windows around, but maybe that's just me.
Carmen Ortiz has set back this country's ability to compete in the global marketplace by relentless pursuing one of the great innovator and job creators to the point that he took his own life.

She has not served her country, she has harmed it, and you have a duty to remove her from office so that she does not ruin more lives.

Her pursuit of this case shows that she has no understanding of the the roll technology and information play in the transformation of our economy, and it also shows that she lacks compassion.

The world will feel the loss of Aaron Swartz for many years as his talent was not easily replaced. If you fire Carmen Ortiz tomorrow, I can assure you, she will not be missed.

Someone who is this abusive as a prosecutor is probably equally abusive as a supervisor. From now until her term as prosecutor ends, I will get up every morning and ask myself: "What have I done to help get Carmen Ortiz removed from office today?"
Sadly, it will never happen. Obama will have to face a revolt from other US Attorneys that use similar tactics...or around 99% of them.
Or a seven-year tour through a library (before they are all gone).
It is not "after playing a violent video game, 90% of the time the consumer will commit a violent act within 24 hours" yet people act like that and want to have video games banned...
The Best Fillings For Cupcakes Recipes
Exactly. sopooneo's claim is just as ridiculous, unfounded and manipulative because it puts the blame on the video game industry instead of applying "in dubio PRO reo".
The article should be titled : fixing javascript flaws yourself.
“It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan,” Graham wrote. “In those countries, people color inside the lines.”

That may be true. But those countries also don't torture people, inprison people without charge, or start senseless wars. The US may make people richer, but it also has the highest proportion of its population in jail, compared to all other countries in the world. The US has a lot to learn from Europe.
She should be disbarred.

My guess is she is just as vituperative and mean to people who work in in her office. She has done far more harm to this country in her mistreatment of Aaron Swartz than she can ever atone for.
View HTML DOM in 3D
"In the last 15 years, Microsoft Office has gone from a must-have product to largely irrelevant to the success of the biggest product category in technology: mobile computing"

Yeah, since Android and iPhone came businesses no longer need Word or Excel. /sarcasm
Look to the future with optimism Synvisc
Synvisc is an elastoviscous solution that contains the sterile mixture of 3 substances; hylan A fluid, hylan B gel and salt water. The first two components are natural substance derived from rooster combs, chemically referred to as hyaluronan.
...not to be mean, but if you reuse passwords without at least having 2 of them (one for secure, money related stuff and another for everything else), you deserve having your account cleaned and identity stolen.

Considering the world we leave in, I think that "basic personal informational security", like not reusing passwords, not executing email attachments and not falling for basic social engineering scams should be mandatory thought in schools starting from 10 year olds, and have something like "medium personal information security" (with knowledge of what a secued connection - green browser bar is, what a digital signature and key based authentication or multi-factor auth are) mandatory for all people handling other's personal information, even for the lowest public functionaries. These things should be drilled down into peoples' heads not matter they want to learn it or not, just as you don't ask your 7 year old whether he wants to learn to read and write, you just tell him he has to. It shouldn't matter whether you're a literature major or maybe you haven't even graduated high school, but if you have anything to do with handling others information - and 90% of people do have - you should know basic infosec just as you need to know to read and write! It's ugly, but we're living in an ugly world and in the middle of a war, even if it's invisible, and we should adapt to it!
If I only had a dime for the number of blog posts explaining what "this" means in Javascript...
Am I the only one who realizes that HE CLEARLY BROKE THE LAW. He knew exactly what he was doing, the fault is his own.
> unwilling to learn how to do the things they want to do

Translating what you just said: they just don't really want to learn it! (yeah, they feel good when they say they want to lean it, but they don't really want that - they want just some of the benefits of knowing a certain thing - like coding - but they are not willing to invest the required effort to reap those benefits)
Elections are won by convincing the "right" people to get out and vote and the "wrong" people to stay home. Disenfranchisement is already happening.

I would also argue that concern for one's offspring is not sufficient to know what's best for them, let alone the offspring of others.
I didn't give up on BASIC in the 1980s. Nothing wrong with BASIC per se. Back then I wrote an assembler in BASIC for this processor http://www.cpushack.com/tag/8x305/ We were imbedding an 8X305 in a communications adapter and needed to extend it with some special instructions.
So where can I get my Aaron Swartz t-shirt?
What makes you think that? I have seen very little animosity toward JSTOR, most of it seems to be aimed at the government prosecutors.
It looks to me increasingly that Mr. Schmidt is aiming at a political office. I'm wondering which one... in the US or international, e.g. United Nations?
Based on Karl's progress, I would say 20 years is more likely.

If I was a betting man, I would bet that neither will finish.
I really don't like this argument. Being a delicate genius.
, or head of a startup, doesn't mean you get a "get out of jail free" card. It should be completely irrelevant.

Now, I don't think the laws Swartz broke are fair. But you seem to be implying he should of hot special treatment because he was special. That is not how the law should work.
They've sold Office for Mac for a long time so it's not entirely married to Windows, it's really means "a computer" although that usually means Windows.

I think they have a very legitimate shot at becoming the #1 app developer for iOS and Android, which could easily become their only significant position in the phone/tablet market.
The law is not interested in how easy a crime is technically to perform. Lots of crimes are serious and really easy. (This crime should still not have been charged, but do not say easy to commit crimes should have low penalties)
This article does not mention that the real J.J. in the TJX case could have been '7 foot tall' Stephen Watt, a former Morgan Stanley employee with the aliases 'Jim Jones' and 'Unix Terrorist'

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/watt/
Bit.ly is down
Ask HN: Native mobile dev with HTML5/JS/CSS frameworks?
I totally buy into the idea that if you have the resource available you should do native development. But if I decide that I don't have the resource but absolutely must have my app in native form on ios and android ASAP, does anyone have any insight to share on tools like phonegap, sencha touch etc?
His route takes him through hundreds of miles of Arctic tundra. As someone who has spent time in the far north:

Walking on tundra is like walking on a head of cabbage that is sitting on a four-inch sponge that is floating in four inches of water. The cabbage heads are all about eight inches apart. When you step on them, they are going to twist in some unknown direction and slide your foot onto the sponge, or into the four inches of water. The really bad tundra, known as bottom, is about eight inches deep and is sitting on top of sucking mud. --http://whiterick.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/dalton-highway-car...

Stepping on a tussock is like stepping on a toothbrush, Toolik scientists like to say. You try to avoid it. So tundra walking is like treading on the jostling shoulders of a million people --http://discovermagazine.com/1996/jun/runningontundra787

Tundra comes in three exciting flavors: bog tundra, high alpine tundra, and original tundra. They say walking on tundra is like walking on bowling balls covered in something squishy --http://mattylite.blogspot.com/2010/07/alaska-fact-or-fiction...

hiking on tundra forces you into a gait that is not like walking on pavement (straight up and down)... tundra is more liking walking on a waterbed... you are using lots of the accessory muscles just to keep upright --http://forums.outdoorsdirectory.com/showthread.php/72728-Boo...

"Walking on tundra is like, is like,--tell him what it's like, Magee." "It's like walking over slippery footballs half-sunk in slime," said the Irishman promptly. --http://www.freefictionbooks.org/books/b/23082-the-boy-with-t...

For those of you who haven't walked across the tundra it is a giant sponge. When you walk your foot sinks and you have to lift it really high to get the next step, as some put it..walking on tundra is like walking on a giant stair stepper. --http://nicholiepoki03.blogspot.com/2011/09/week-to-remember....

walking on the tundra can be a miserable experience. extremely uneven (kinda like walking on basketballs), wet, and full of holes. make sure you have good waterproof footwear with good ankle support rolling an ankle is very easy on this stuff. --http://forums.outdoorsdirectory.com/showthread.php/115323-Tr...
Bit.ly was down
Assert_raise in Rails integration tests
Status link: http://status.bit.ly.

EDIT: This link is much better: http://status.bit.ly/10527/137769/bit.ly.
> There is no hyperbole here.

> I choose, as a matter of personal morality, going forward to have nothing but disgust towards them and will not cooperate or affiliate with them anymore than I would with Neo-Nazi Skinheads.
This unfortunately shows a certain weakness of the HN approach to covering news to me:

While it is completely understandable that the community mourns the death of someone it values greatly, this event has completely drowned out any other news. The (understandable) upvoting of anything related to Aaron Swartz made it nigh impossible to discover any other "hacker news" here for a day or more (it's slowly trailing of and other stories begin to appear again). Similarly the ensuing discussion is spread over a multitude of threads.

Slashdot's approach of covering news seems more resistant to a single event blacking out anything else: There is one story with a number of links and a unified discussion.
"In the last 15 years, Microsoft Office has gone from a must-have product to largely irrelevant to the success of the biggest product category in technology: mobile computing"

"Office has gone ... to largely irrelevant to the success of ... mobile computing"

Since it hasn't been on any of the "mobile computing" devices, I'm not sure why the sarcasm is needed. It's not like this sentence is saying "Office is now irrelevant", just that it hasn't contributed to this particular area.
>Yes, Swartz did something illegal,

The government has yet to prove that. Many with better access to the facts than I have said that Aaron acted within the letter of the law but was being inconsiderate: like hogging all the free shrimp at a cocktail party.
Kim Dotcom on ending piracy
I would prefer such a phone above all others currently in the market and I doubt I'm alone.

A very large fraction of this community would probably want a linux phone that allows you to basically carry your desktop around.

I hope they find a manufacturer soon.
I don't know much about him until today,as i read more and more about him. I feel very sad. I couldn't believe some 16 yr guy writing

"Source Code
Copyright for my GPLed source code should revert to the Free Software Foundation. They seem to have a reasonable policy about letting people use the code."

So far, i thought only Indian judiciary system is so stupid compared to US judiciary system. Now I don't see a difference between them.
RIP.
Signed. It'll hit 25k before the day's out, I bet.

But it needs to hit 311 million.
a basic explanation is that by preceding a variable declaration with var creates a property on the nearest containing function

This is not true, the var hoist the variable and scopes it to the function, but does not create it as a property of the function. A function is defined in its outer function scope, an it's properties will persist across calls.

function foo() {
var bar = 1;
foo.baz = 2;
}

foo();

foo.bar; // is undefined
foo.baz; // is 2

Adding properties to functions is useful for memoization, but is different than what the var statement does.

Your summary of that section is a better explanation:

all variables are scoped to a function (which is itself an object), and where you declare those variables with var determines the function they are scoped to.

You might add, if you never declare the variable with var it is implicitly declared global.