skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up in the back of a junkyard and watched my father collect "stuff" my entire life. It's a minor mental disorder, irrationally rooted in a fear of having nothing. To my father it was his security blanket. He would look out across the junkyard and see money. Everyone else would just see junk. As long as my father had something in the yard, he felt financially safe. Junk can't fire you and no one was going to steal it. (Only tweekers steal junk) Try stealing a broken down steam roller or a 1 ton gold smelting machine or a 10mb hard drive so big it had wheels. It's pointless. To my father, everything had value, but to everyone else it was just junk. The only people who ever purchased anything were other junk collectors.

Watching this as a child and eventually as an adult, I've put the collection of "stuff" on a 10 point scale. 1 being a pure minimalist and 10 being an extreme horder. We all fit somewhere on that scale. I'm probably a 3 or 4. My father is a 10. Understanding where you are on this scale is important to de-cluttering your life.

Sometimes value gets set by factors other than price. Value & price are not equally correlated. Value can be translated as functionality, prestige, vanity, security, companionship, etc. People get value of things beyond price and each person sees a different value for each product based on their psychological needs.

All PG seems to be saying is to question an objects value before you purchase it. Otherwise, you could end up with a house full of junk that you and no one else will ever use again. In other words...Question everything, including value.
I think my definition of privilege and yours are at very different levels.

> - Rent a furnished apartment.

You have your own place to sleep at night, with (nice) furniture.

> - Use car sharing services

You have access to cars!?

> - Buy ebooks instead of physical books

> - Use Netflix/Hulu instead of owning a tv

> - Use pdf digital signing software instead of owning a printer/scanner/fax

You have access to high speed internet, and advanced electronic devices, and live in a society that supports them.

Most of the people in the world, don't have these things. It's easy for us to sit in 1st world countries and talk about how we aren't privileged because we didn't go to private school, or we buy cheap ebooks on our iPad... but even these things are out of reach for most of the world... that is what I define as "privilege".
This isn't looking good for MIT--in fact, it looks outright schizophrenic. How can you give a professorship to the architect of the Morris worm but not even sign off on a plea bargain with someone who just downloaded a bunch of JSTOR papers? Maybe some of the powers that be at MIT are in too deep with the academic publishing industry, if not apparently JSTOR in particular.
Granick strongly disagrees with you. Beating this drum again: as Granick explains it, had Swartz gone to trial and been acquitted of twelve of the thirteen charges he faced --- disproving 92% of the prosecution's case --- not only would the prosecution not lose credibility at sentencing for bringing an overwhelmingly spurious case to trial, but because unproven "relevant behavior" is material during sentencing, the damages alleged in the 12 disproven charges could still be used to ratchet up the sentence!
Cool! I have an idea to create door intercom using raspberrypie, webcam, speaker and mic. When somebody presses the door bell a SMS is sent to the owner. User can launch the mobile app to see who is at the door and communicate with the person.
I doubt that anyone in MIT's library system would have the authority to determine the university's actions in a legal case. These kinds of decisions are probably made at the highest levels: by the president, the board of trustees, and their lawyers.
I've noticed several people in this thread asking for Simple invites. I have three available. Message me with an email if you'd like one.
http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your...

"The figure of $145k for individual articles is definitely interesting – only 0.35% of JSTOR’s revenue came from pay-per-view cases? This is vastly lower than I expected; quite possibly the prices are so high (and JSTOR access so common, academically) that very few people are willing to pay and unable to circumvent it via a friend. The estimate quoted is $19/article as an average – so perhaps only seven and a half thousand articles over the year?"
IANAL, but plea bargaining is complicated, and it's much more likely for a judge to accept a plea bargain if the victims are also behind it.
I think it's less the case that science conflicts with religion (since as science grows, religion can continue to shrink; there's no clear point at which we will say, “Welp, looks like the religion is all gone now”), but rather that maintaining a scientific worldview conflicts with religion.

This worldview is what allows us to temporarily reject, for instance, premises which are brought up in poor faith, or premises for which there is no clear need. For instance, if in the course of a lie, a lier accidentally says something true, we still reserve our credence for when someone else more likely to be telling the truth says so.

Or, if you have a mathematical theory which is not disproved by anything, we wait until it appears to be implied by some other believed-in theory before accepting it a “fact”. If a theory does not appear to have arisen as a result of other true things, than it may still be true, but we don't need to accept it as such until it seems necessary.

So: The pragmatic worldview necessitated for getting anything done in science tends to lead to atheism.
What "everybody doesn't contest" is different from the 13 felony charges, including wire fraud (!), the government indicted him on.

For instance, the trespassing charges, supported by the surveillance video of him opening an unlocked closet used by the homeless to store their personal effects, were dropped. [1]

[1] http://boingboing.net/2013/01/13/expert-witness-describes-aa...
'entire motivating ideology of all terrorism', hello strawman!

I find it helpful to cut through the BS in these cases to consider what would be the case if the roles were reversed. American citizens would be the first to form 'freedom fighter' guerilla armies to fight off an occupying nation.

For me it what OBL claims on the matter is not the most important; Chomsky's proposal for the likely underlying motivations for attacking the US are just far more credible than yours. The fact that he said it just strengthens the case. It's worth noting that OBL doesn't have electoral motivation to lie, too.
Most petitions should be ignored. It turns out that it's absurdly easy to gin up a 25,000-strong flash mob on the internet. I don't think things like secession petitions deserve a serious response. Things like petitions to deport some guy on CNN for expressing his low opinion of the second amendment are uncomfortable reminiscent of lynching.
This petition is guranteed to fail. The domain of writing, passing, and modifying laws is the domain of Congress, not the President. You can pester the President all you want, but it is not within his Constitutional powers to do anything about the law. (Indeed, even announcing that the DOJ should not enforce the law is a potentially impeachable offense depending on the political environment.)

If you want the CFAA reformed, call, write, and/or meet with your Congressional Rep and Senator and tell them what you think of the law.
This idea that "the law" is a fixed and unambiguous thing that can only be objectively enforced, however lamentable a given case may be, is totally at odds with how the legal system really works. There's a good reason why we've been hearing the phrase "prosecutorial discretion" over and over again in the last few days — that is what was driving this case. Not some dispassionate sorry-but-our-hands-are-tied legal code.

p.s. Invoking Breivik in this context is really inappropriate.
> I’ve been building this application for longer than I would like to admit. It looks nice. It is incredibly fast. It’s useful (I’ve been using it a LOT). I learned Objective-C while building it. It will never be a hit but some people would definitely pay the 2,99 USD I was planning to sell it for.

The roadblocks you faced are just silly...but at least you got something out of it (learning Objective-C, the respect of other hackers)...I always try to have a Plan B for any mini-project I work on.... Plan A is that people like and use it. Plan B is I learned a technology/library that I hadn't used before. (sometimes I switch the priority of those two things around).

Hopefully your continued tinkering and exploring gets you a more satisfying job.
Thanks for at least acknowledging the concerns raised here. That's all we can reasonably expect a responsible investor to say/do at this point.
Interesting. Did you know that's precisely the same reasoning Islam has for calling everyone else an infidel?
That's clearly not what happened in this case.

Sorry, caught a call

This case didn't get picked up by or delegated to a loser; it was run by one of the most senior computer crimes prosecutors in the country.
Wrong country. If they had pulled those stunts in America, 2 of them wouldn't be sitting in a prison cell right now.
Allow H1B approved cases to be stamped in US
OkCupid Finally Comes Up With Worst Idea Ever
Science of Stylometry a Weapon Against Hackers, Trolls, Malware
MIT is doing an investigation (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/letter-on-death-of-aaron-...). Presumably the outcome of that will be these kinds of details.

It's looking to be a hard time for those responsible, to be honest. If the HN crowd is up in arms, there are probably many at MIT wanting to see retribution, and likely have the clout to see it happen.
You didn't write this, so why repost it unless you wanted to appear 'concerned' about the topic? Worst HN comment in a while, at least just link to it and provide your analysis.

So much of this is bullshit, and I notice that the author doesn't give any references at all. Which is very different from Chomsky's approach.
Oprah interview won't reduce sanctions against Armstrong, officials say
Except the black protesters of Greensboro went and tried to order food so they could eat it and pay for it as they correctly claimed they were at liberty to do. They did not turn off the lights of the restaurant and block the door to the kitchen to deny the other patrons from being able to eat.
umm, is there anybody here who doesn't know who Mitnick is? well, in that case, his 'the art of deception' is an interesting book on social engineering.
> These kinds of decisions are probably made at the highest levels: by the president, the board of trustees

Not a place like MIT. The vast majority of their time is spent in money-land. Usually, they are on the fundraising side, lots of grip and grin. Some policy. Not minutiae, and some kid wiring up a closet is under minutiae.

> their lawyers.

Never seen a situation there where the lawyers did anything unless being told. So that is my question: Who told them?
Dating Schmating.

What a myopic view. Lets take myself, and 90% of the people I know - as real friends. They are all in relationships.

You know what could be "Huge" - creating ad-hoc groups around interests.

Imagine searching for people around you, within a definable degree of separation, that have the same interests where you can do activities.

Meeting people yes - dating does NOT have to be the singular vector for such relationships, that will be a natural secondary. And as a secondary - remains less creepy.
There's a good conversation here about dealing with objects inside structs, which is discouraged in ARC: http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/310392-struct-and-...
Do you guys have an OSX version in the works?
Once a given petition crosses the threshold, there is much less pressure to recruit more signatures. Without data on the rate of new signers before and after the threshold, I can't prove it, but I'd bet this will not stop serious petitions.
> and likely have the clout to see it happen.

Hal Abelson is respected enough that even I will be curious to see his result.
Facebook Presents Graph Search and Partners Microsoft Bing Search
"This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist."

So this will have no affect on the Ortiz petition.
California's government is nonfunctional and almost bankrupt right now because California is a One-Party State, and that party likes to buy itself votes with other people's money and then get people like you to blame everything wrong on someone else.

Give the Entitled Party credit: they've destroyed the state's finacial situation, but hey, they've got a total lock on the state. So its all been a big success on the one thing that counts.
"When one former lawyer told prosecutors that Swartz might kill himself, "Their response was, 'Put him in jail. He’ll be safe there.'"

I know this seems heartless and terrible at first glance but it's actually a pretty reasonable response. Prosecutors can't allow themselves to be swayed by emotional pleas like this and how are they to know if it's even true? Are they supposed to be lenient on any defendant whose lawyers say their client is suicidal? Isn't it obvious the end result would be every defendant claiming this?

If anything, this shifts some blame to his lawyers for not taking his threat seriously enough. Somebody who is a danger to themselves is legally supposed to be locked up, typically in a psychiatric hospital. Jail would have been the second best place he could have been. In both he'd have been physically prevented from being able to commit suicide. Even if he would have had to suffer even more emotionally through the ordeal, he'd still be alive today.
Google Fibre Ignites Kansas City Start-Up Scene
This was posted a little while back and outlines the process for getting a DUNS number free, within 5 days: http://blog.metamorphium.com/2012/12/03/apple-duns/
Your statement could be misinterpreted to mean that any rational competent defendant would consider the potential punishment worse than death.

I'm positive that you meant that he understood what 35 years in jail and a felony charge meant and was thus not unfit to stand trial under an insanity claim. That's fair.
The promise of a framework with everything you need, right out of the box, is tempting.

There is always the compromise, however, in that frameworks that have "everything" tend to force you to abide by their view of the world. AngularJS, for instance, offers many arguable advantages for some tasks, but can turn into an enormous impediment whenever you want to go outside of the painted lines. Of course opinions differ, but I prefer that relative simplicity of backbone -- it is more convention than framework, really -- because it scales to full-products with less friction.
how long do we need to wait before apple approves an app? I'm about to ship mine. I heard it used to be 2 weeks, isn't it?
Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]
They're fooling themselves if they imagine 100k will stop annoying petitions that 25k wouldn't stop. That's a blindness to the dynamics of how these things work.
Your links have absolutely no proof in them. A grieving Father's statement on who he blames for his sons death is not proof.
Or maybe it was in response to the petition to build a Death Star =]

petition: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/secure-resources-a...

response: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-resp...
New Myspace is publicly available and doesn’t matter in the slightest
Based on the title, I was really hoping this would be a parody.
Have you ever seen a bug caused by this? I haven't. At least anecdotally, this is purely stylistic, and has no impact outside of personal preference.

With one caveat: Heavy constructor/destructor use requires it.
There are all sorts of unanswered questions but whether or not it affected his mental state is not among them. I'm angry about an unjust prosecution that should never have had the opportunity to cause this damage. I can't know if things would have ended differently but that's not a question we should have to ask.

Unfortunately this is part of deeper systemic problems and bringing up his accomplishments is rather irrelevant and distasteful. If exaggerating his accomplishments helps to spread the story, I have absolutely no problem with that because it has nothing to do with the real issues.
Facebook concept used by 16th century scholars, researchers discover
Here's a better analysis, which concludes that the charges were legally appropriate:

http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

It will be followed by another article that will examine the tactfulness of the prosecution.
Article on Boston.com with the screenshot of Dolan tweeter posts

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/277353-l...
It's interesting to see everybody up in arms about how The Atlantic have "crossed the line" or "gone too far" because they took cash in exchange for a blatant advertorial, as though up until yesterday they were a sterling example of journalistic integrity.

If you do a little googling,
https://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&q=%22theatlantic.com%2F...

you'll see they've been doing it for a while. article after article of complete self-serving bullshit from whoever's willing to pay.

I suppose the difference here is people really love to hate Scientology (with good reason, too.)
Your plan is to just throw this on GitHub and hope for the best? If it is you should definitely consider waiting for the DUNS number, the amount of users you're going to reach in the App Store compared to on GitHub is just enormous, also your app looks great and I would buy it for sure, but I would compile it myself because of the effort it would take.
prosecutors are theoretically ethically obligated not to bring a case to trial if they don't think they have a better than 50% chance of winning

Just curious, are there any ethical obligations not to bring a case to trial if they don't believe that the defendant is guilty? Or it's just the chances of winning that matter?
In addition to the excellent points others have made, the description "bright cold day in April" is filled with strong contrast. April is usually a warm month or, at worst, cool. It isn't typically cold. Similarly, bright days tend to be more warm than not so sunny days. So it strongly evokes unusual weather, which has a long history of being associated with abnormal events of significance to humans.

This is part of why the weather is a popular topic and something modern humans have put substantial effort into predicting, broadcasting, etc. The opening line signals an atmosphere ripe for unusual, important events that you wouldn't typically expect. It is a means to suggest the calm before the storm without admitting directly that a storm is coming. It is the kind of thing which causes one to prick their ears up, a cross between curiosity and threat assessment.

Real life examples: The year Krakatoa exploded, there was enough ash in the air to cause an abnormally cold summer in Europe. (This cold summer led to a story writing club which resulted in the original "Frankenstein". It was too cold for normal outdoor summer activities.) The night of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, people were manic and still up after midnight when the quake finally hit. And stories of historical (pre modern weather prediction) weather disasters typically start with comments on the unusual atmosphere which weirded people out beforehand but failed to tell them exactly what was coming.

So I think the line evokes that sense of being on edge and expectant even though you aren't quite sure why because there is no explicit threat inherent in a bright cold day in April. Still, there is implicit threat of something coming that you can't quite put your finger on. When it was written, people were likely more in touch with the weather than a lot of people in developed countries today, so it would have been more strongly evocative for that audience.
Why would you do that to little Bobby Tables? Think of the children, man
Explanation here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/16njr9/im_rep_zo...
Usually 2 weeks.
Let’s talk about how I’ve failed: Part 1: Hngry v1
The form referenced on that post wasn't working a week or two. I just tried it and it's working again.
How Kraft Uses Patents to Dominate the Mac and Cheese Wars
For the curious:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

and

Call me Ishmael.

and

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
" Now that it is politically advantageous for them to do so, and their actions can have no practical effect, lawmakers slam DOJ prosecution of Swartz as 'ridiculous, absurd' "
If I proposed that perhaps in an age where cyber crime is not only misunderstood but increasingly high (see anon et al), that perhaps the prosecution wanted to deter Aaron who by all accounts was an activist, from committing further more serious crimes.

What would you think of the above? Is it a plausible reality to the alternative one where the prosecutors are merely evil?
I've been trying to stay out of this, but I gotta agree with you hear. For all we know, Aaron got dumped by his girlfriend last week or something.

People are just using his suicide to turn him into a martyr for a cause they believe in, and its disturbing.
Masters of Yelp-Fu
Start-up Bugcrowd kicks off a $5k bug bounty on 18th of January
I wouldn't consider a high-profile federal legal case that could (and probably did) reflect very badly on the university to be "minutiae".

The university's general counsel and other lawyers are paid to give legal advice to the university. Why would it be so strange for MIT's president to have taken their advice?
Don't feel too down. The first time I wrote a major software business project for myself I saved up $50k (To cover rent, living and utilities), resigned from work and spent a year developing it. I ran out of money and it never sold very well and I definitely am yet to recoup anywhere near the costs of development but eventually I realised while I'd not gained any financial benefits I had picked up some very good skills as a web developer which were in great demand on the local jobs market. I started that year knowing no javascript and very little html, css or other web technologies.

With the new skills I was able to land a great job as a web developer and am always working on side projects. Even if Apple have screwed you over, don't get disheartened ... they can't screw you out of the skills you've learnt; they're invaluable. Keep that in mind when you're feeling down.
What the fuck? "For the crime of X and twelve counts of being falsely accused of Y we sentence you to ZZ years of prison." I never thought the legal system was fair, but comments about this case are revealing a whole new level of bullshit beneath the top layer.
Why Steam Box and SHIELD May Cause the Death of Consoles as We Know Them
You have a problem, and so you try to solve it with caching. Now you have two problems.

I think that's how that quote goes.
Zoe Lofgren introducing "Aaron's Law" to change the CFAA
It and IE 9 also lack CORS support.
If the woman is picking the place, and the man is paying, there is a conflict of interest. Also, women much prefer the man to lead interactions up to and through the first date.