skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You lost me at Westboro Baptist Church, which isn't comparable. WBC is a voluntary group, which I assume you can enter and exit without penalty.

Imagine you're a student, halfway through your 4 year program at MIT... You don't know Aaron, or anything about his situation. Yes, you get an exemption from blame, because it has nothing to do with you and it's not your business. You cannot just exit and go elsewhere without seriously hurting yourself.

When you're enrolled at a University, you are not part of a collectivist institution, you are a customer at a business. If you choose to go elsewhere, that's on you, but who is anyone else to tell you what you should do? You're starting to sound like the WBC...
That is the old threshold for petitions.

Note that 400 is a strict overestimate if votes were evenly divided between petitions. But some petitions get 2x the vote total, and some don't reach the threshold. So the real number is significantly less. But the trend is clear.
Also a great relevant read:

How MOS 6502 Illegal Opcodes really work
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=39

I just finished a 6502 emulator, I recommend doing it for everyone. Lots of fun and very interesting.
We the People - Open Source Project
Bro-gramming - teaching my brother to code
"...this fact"? The only fact here is that the thing you're claiming is a fact actually isn't.

By the way, your celebration of this policy change is especially ironic considering the United States empire is completely buckling under the enormity of its failure as we speak. Right, we're "re-discovering the efficiency of representative democracy" by decreasing accountability...

America's governance system is very complex but it's hardly worth calling democracy in any meaningful use of the term. Money buys political results. Americans overwhelming see this to be the case. The state is made up of only the upper class and exists to serve the interests of the upper class. They run it, not the people in general.
Your word choices are offputting and, honestly, seem borderline misogynist.

Young women do not "wield sickening power over men." Some number of them may get propositioned by strangers a good deal (though, I would suggest, less than you seem to believe). That's not the same thing.

And, in any case, "not getting as many propositions from strangers" does not equate to "becoming invisible to men."

And, finally, your argument, such as it is, seems to be based on the belief that younger women derive most of their romantic partners from that mass of unsolicited propositions by strangers. This isn't particularly true, and it kind of staggers me that you seem to imagine otherwise.

If women 28+ are more interested in online dating, it seems very likely that this is principally because of a decrease in the number of qualified potential mates in their extended social circle, rather than the decrease in the number of unsolicited propositions by strangers.
Many banking features are not. For example, USAA's mobile deposit requires that you either have or be eligible for their insurance.
Wow, that infographic is misleading.

http://cl.ly/image/2n1H2Q0z1919

They quote that "162 responses" number right after saying "petitions must receive 100k signatures", when none of those responded to had to have received 100k signatures.

Additionally, 2.1 million signatures (responded to) divided by 162 petitions (responded to) is an average of 12,963 signatures per petition. The largest petition ever - obviously an outlier - received just over 300k. In fact, only one petition ever has cracked the 100k mark: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions/popular/0/2/0

Not only that, but the top three were related to an exceptionally charged issue that was sparked by an absolutely awful tragedy and then catalyzed by an awful group of people whose entire purpose in life is to cause controversy, which hints that outside of another elementary school rampage, nothing will gain the momentum necessary to meet this new threshold. I'd argue that the GMO petition is the first legitimate "issue" petition on that list, and it's nearly 40k signatures short of this new threshold.

This is more or less a guarantee that almost nothing else will reach the threshold necessary to receive a response.
Better than nothing.
In the short term I would be ok if it only applied commercially and not for private use but in reality we always created regardless of I.P. copyright or patents and i don't think these are tools for betterment of society but just betterment of some.
"I'm really not sure that anyone in this country would
disagree that computer hacking is a problem," says
Washington defense lawyer Jeff Ifrah, who has been
following the case. "Should it be a crime? That's an issue
for Congress. But Congress decided to make it a crime, and
prosecutors have an obligation to enforce those crimes."

This is so absurdly pointless and dumb -- in the context of this case, he's talking about how law is binary.
It was explained the first time they raised the treshold [0]:

"The massive participation on We the People means that in the first week over 30 petitions reached 5,000 signatures, the initial threshold to generate an official response from the White House. At our first internal review meeting Friday, two things were clear:

(a) everyone is thrilled about this new challenge and excited to process the first batch, but

(b) this many petitions challenges our ability to offer timely and meaningful responses to petitions in the long term.

[...] This may not be the last time we change the thresholds, both in terms of signatures and amount of time."

So they're admitting that simply throwing more people at the problem won't work in the long run, since petitioners expect meaningful responses from people who are knowledgeable. See Mythical Man-Month [1] and PG's decision to limit the size of the YC W13 class [2].

[0] http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/10/03/good-problem-have-...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_myth...

[2] http://ycombinator.com/w13smaller.html
I don't think so. It's a really tenous connection. It's like saying me getting on the freeway contributed to an accident which happens 10 minutes behind me. Sure, maybe if I had not gotten on the freeway that would have caused a different pattern of traffic on the freeway so that the accident would not have happened, but in no way would I be a direct contributor.
Looks like even clicking on "Decline" does still made you prone to tracking from them. The excuse given in the answer is also pretty poor: http://i.imgur.com/FpjFp.png (permalink: http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/installmonetizer.com/comme...)
Vim plugin to support writing user-defined text objects
Maybe it's not that you're failing the technical part of the interview, but the cultural and interpersonal parts.

In your cited scenario, it's up to you to ask, "do you mean it generally, at the computer science, theoretical level, or specifically in language X, Y or Z?"

There's nothing wrong with asking for clarification. There's no game to win. There's just basic, professional, communication skills.

Talking and interviewing are skills. They are skills you can learn and practice. Getting defensive when someone is trying to help you is not going to help you.

You will be communicating in many, many different scenarios and with many, many different people who are at different levels of technical knowledge and interpersonal engagement, for the rest of your natural life. Being able to do so well is the most important skill in your professional existence. That's the whole thing. There isn't anything else if you don't have that.

Working on a team is very different from working alone specifically because there are other people involved. The social aspects of a professional relationship outweigh the technical ones by tonnes.
Westboro Baptist Church planned a protest of the Sandy Hook funerals. The petitions to denounce or strip the tax exempt status of the group got well over half a million signatures in December.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. All the tweets from that twitter account come from comments made by HN users.
It's likely that Ms. Ortiz would choose to fight such charges, i.e., go to trial, and would triumph before a jury. This is generally the outcome when the government tries to pursue outlandish charges -- it loses in court.

Thus, the desired effect of putting a senior prosecutor in jail for a ridiculously long time would not occur. Note however, that prosecutors have lost their jobs where clear misconduct took place (see, for example, the former Alaska federal prosecutors who took down former Sen. Stevens). Misconduct in this sense means something unconstiutional, i.e., hiding or destroying evidence. Playing rough in plea negotiations is not misconduct, since the other party does not have to play along and has the constitutional right to go to trial.

Note that there is no constitutional right to a plea bargain; that is an administrative convenience offered by the prosecutors to avoid going to trial. 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. (This is part of the reason so many lawyers on HN having been defending Ms. Ortiz--based on the charges and evidence publicly known, nobody would have expected Swartz to commit suicide because he would likely have prevailed at trial and should have been advised of this by his lawyer.)
But that doesn't mean republics can't have more direct democracy elements in them. For example I love the idea of citizens being able to create a referendum (in a certain state, I believe) in Germany. You still have a threshold, so people don't start creating one for all sorts of crazy ideas, but this is a great example of how citizens can help improve the laws in their countries. I think this referendum is usually added to the next election.

Such system obviously need to be fined-tuned to avoid having the population "abuse" them, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be pursued. I think they can be great additions to any democratic republic.
> 10,000,000 / 25,000 = 400 responses/yr

Based on the last few months of growth the response rate won't remain static. It's reasonable to assume there will be continued growth, so they need to set the barrier to entry at a practical height.
Your description of this "mathematician" intrigues me. And, since I happen to speak Romanian, I would love to have a link to one of his lectures. Thanks! However, I agree with "mtraven" that you should not be leveling this kind of accusation until you have read Chomsky's work.
Why would the DoJ require that MIT "sign off" on the plea deal? As this was a criminal matter, I thought it would have just been between the government and Aaron.

Or does the DoJ have to get approval from victims before offering a plea deal? I can't imagine the victim of an assault or rape being terribly happy "signing off" on a plea for their attacker.

From a bit of reading it appears that victims have to be informed of any plea bargain and that their needs must be "taken into consideration", but I cannot find anything that states that the plea must be "signed off" by the victim.

If this is the case, then this story seems rather flawed.
It's incredible, because it's people like yourself who drive people away from the causes you're trying to promote. But somehow you can't see that.

Any cause would do well to distance itself from people who compare MIT to the Nazi Youth[1]. Extremes don't help.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5050412
This (decision by the White House, not your idea) is ridiculous, I'll definitely sign a petition to bring it back down to 25,000. It took an average of 18 days for petitions to reach the 25,000 threshold before it spiked after the election (because of all the secession petitions and Newtown and joke petitions like the Death Star).

Now if a petition doesn't cross the 100,000 threshold in 30 days they ignore it. Assuming the the number of petition signings falls back closer to what it was before the election, it will take an average of about 60 days to reach the 100,000 threshold, meaning most petitions will be ignored.
Well yeah, it's also in article here on HN.
They wanted him to have jail time
How Facebook’s Graph Search Works
Dear Apple: I give up, WireframeApp will become open source
The Death Star petition and the Piers Morgan petition were the straws that broke the camel's back, according to a friend in the WH PR dept.
The fact that the boy is dead is grim proof that he was "unable to mentally process his potential punishment".
Yes, if that turns out to be accurate I will be very angry with MIT. While I would like to trust the defense lawyers (including Lessig, who I look up to a lot) on this, they are admittedly not the most unbiased parties, and out of a desire for fairness I'm withholding judgment until more facts come out.

I am absolutely looking forward to Abelson's report.
My analysis of HTML color parsing based on the Netscape classic source
The first thing I thought when I saw this post was that it was a response to the success of the Carmen Ortiz petition. I understand the change doesn't apply retroactively, but it would help future officials face less public scrutiny from these petitions.

The growth over the last two months were clearly due to the election and I doubt that that type of growth will continue. We will likely see a drop back down to previous levels, resulting in it being more difficult to achieve the requisite number of signatures overall.
What? Everyone starts out an atheist. There can't be a wrong reason to be an atheist because its the default setting on the human.
How did it work out for him? For Aaron's causes, his constructive rather than destructive approach worked fairly well, creating change and earning wide awareness and respect.

I wish he'd stuck it out; had there been a trial (and possibly sentencing), the public would have learned many of the same lessons about overzealous prosecution, the JSTOR project, the CFAA, the obsolescence of copyright, and importance of open access. Plus, he'd still be with us.

I also believe Aaron's causes with regard to copyright and censorship will succeed in coming decades, easily within his natural lifespan, and he would have helped them succeed faster, so I'm sad he'll miss it.

DDoS is destructive (unlike any amount of copying) because it disables access and functionality and effectively censors content by blocking individual learning and communication. It causes more resources to be be wasted on paranoia and layers-of-defense. It causes a hardening of positions and growth of suspicion. It is much easier to portray Aaron's supporters as 'vandals' if they help by actually committing vandalism. (I'd guess that as an 'applied sociologist', Aaron understood this well.)

That these DoS effects are often temporary is no defense: it's destroying people's freedom-to-communicate for a time... and the early death of a young person should remind you that ultimately all we have is time.
Share and record your Markdown
I'd just mention, just because you've experienced depression, doesn't give you ultimate insight into how others experience it. There are different kinds, and their interactions with different personalities causes different things.

With that in mind, making broad reaching statements "that suicide is always a selfish act" is just out-right incorrect. You are projecting your own feelings, based on your own experience. No one knows any suicide victim's state of mind, so how can we make statements about that state of mind?
I agree: plenty of people here have been bullied and came out relatively unscathed. Often the bullying survived was worse than what drives others to suicide. It's messy, because you can't tell in advance the likelihood of your "being a dick" turning into "instigated a suicide," because something minor for some people--nasty rumors on Facebook or a felony charge--might be life-rending for others.

But just because something is uncertain doesn't mean you have to treat the worst case as equivalent to the typical or median case. We treat drunk driving much more leniently than vehicular manslaughter while drunk. That's the lens I view the government's role through.
This is a nice interactive visualization of the top 50 White House Petitions in tabular, map, and graph form. You can sort by most popular, greatest average signature gain, and male/female ratio.

http://roadtolarissa.com/whitehouse/

The top 5 have sharp spikes in Nov / Dec 2012. Here is some analysis of the Texas Secession Petition: http://www.unc.edu/~ncaren/secessionists/daybyday.html and
For conflicting evidence, I would point to the California initiative process, which is the reason California's government is nonfunctional and almost bankrupt right now.
Well that's a new one: the evidence he cites is so voluminous and wide-ranging, there must be something wrong with him.
> Civil disobedience according to Thoreau, according to Gandhi, and according to Martin Luther King, Jr. is all about being willing to do the time after intentionally breaking a law

The issue I am seeing here is that this take on civil disobedience is only worth it if your incarceration does one or more of the following: threatens to clog the system, infuriates the masses, draws attention to the absurdity of the system, provides an opportunity to set legal precedent, or is just in general noticed and cared about. If it does none of those things, then the only thing getting caught/locked up accomplishes is the silencing of another voice.

Of course you could also say that protesters should accept arrests even if there is nothing to be gained by it just to adhere to some sort of socratic social contract mentality, but not everyone buys into that mentality. I know I certainly do not.

If you are confident that you can secure convictions, and are confident that the system can handle the load, and are confident that the masses don't really give a shit about anything unless a celebrity is involved, then telling activists to go get arrested becomes an effective tool of suppression.

Had Swartz been convicted and served his sentence, would the HN community at large care? We were dismissive when he was alive and it looked like he was hosed, would that have really changed when the jury came back with their verdict?
I learned this the hard way just the other day - installed an app from them and ended up with half a dozen adware installs as a side effect of their installer. I used to think that cnet was above board, but apparently they're not anymore.
I'm of the opinion that this is in direct response to how quickly 25,000 signatures were raised to fire Ortiz.

How would they like it if the citizens of the US took the same tact: "Hey Obama administration, I'd like to inform you that I am choosing a different tax bracket arbitrarily with the same level of authority as you show me respect as a citizen."
Your Password Isn’t Safe: 90% Are Vulnerable to Hacking, Says Repor
It doesn't appear that this article contains any original reporting. It just contains a headline which oversimplifies a statement in another article. Since his lawyer didn't elaborate they should use something close to the words that his lawyer used.
Would you change your mind if you were warned that by getting on the freeway there stood a serious above average risk of causing a accident?
What? Are you generalizing to an entire gender?
But if he would 'likely have prevailed at trial' why would a prosecutor waste state resources pursuing the case?

Serious question.
Congress should have a similar system, perhaps one for each representative and each senator. They could get a better sense for what the people they represent want. Rather now that's only done through e-mails (which probably never get read by the politicians themselves), phone calls (same thing, and a bit inefficient considering most people won't bother to call), and visiting in person (probably done by very few people).

They could even be done in a sort of Google Moderator/Reddit way, although perhaps more fine-tuned and with certain thresholds (but not too high, especially initially).
Tube Physics and Tree Size
Positive Procrastination
How to make design and engineering work together effectively
I can help here, just call it government granted monopoly, because that is what it is.
I don't have a reference for this, but I always got the impression that CSS was intentionally limited to help browsers implementers write efficient layout engines with as few pathological cases as possible. For instance, if you could specify the value of object attributes using arbitrary expressions with other objects' attributes as input, it would be very easy to have circular dependencies, unexpectedly high computational costs, contradictions, and so on. Just defining how to solve a contradiction would have made the standard much more complex, and error reporting would have been a nightmare.
>This is part of the reason so many lawyers on HN having been defending Ms. Ortiz--based on the charges and evidence publicly known, nobody would have expected Swartz to commit suicide because he would likely have prevailed at trial and should have been advised of this by his lawyer.

Having to win at trial still means you have to go to trial. Which means you commit to spending years of your life in a state of terror because you can't be sure of the outcome, you bankrupt yourself and then your friends and family paying for it, and if you win... you don't get back any of your time or money and there is no penalty for the prosecutors.

I have to say, that sounds pretty darn stressful, and that's if you assume you can win.
Reminds me of this Foxtrot comic: (second comic on the page) http://books.google.com/books?id=SEbwki1N0goC&pg=PA103
trespassing maybe. Not any serious bulling plus 13 counts.
Are you not the troll from early today ? How many accounts is that ?
I've posted this elsewhere: Who exactly refused?

MIT is a collection of many people. I spent 14 years as undergrad/working/grad there, and I'm wondering how this went down. (I knew both Vest and Rief, not Hockfield, but I find it hard to believe this issue made it anywhere near their desks. I would have guessed some clown in the library system, but frankly that doesn't make sense either.)

Any insiders know?
in your example, look how difficult it is for a company like netflix that has just about every movie you've seen and rated along with everyone else's. Along with friends lists. Now take Facebook who is trying to apply this generalization along multiple categories. Its going to be very difficult to get right.
This solution seems ideal. And if your petition gets screwed because it happens to be created at the same time as X other super popular ones you could always re-create it for the next cycle.
It seems like you're arguing for a 60 billion year old Earth, but a SUN that was created no more than 10,000 years ago.

"Let there be light" pretty clearly suggests that light didn't exist before that.