skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Neither better nor worse? We the people, already know what we the people want. Writing it down doesn't make much difference. Maybe for the sake of posterity?
The other great protest is that any HS senior (or grad student applicant) who has an offer from MIT and from another comparable school (Stanford, CMU, etc.), tell MIT no, and tell them why you're saying no.

I suspect if 5-10 people who got MIT "yes" did this, MIT admissions and the MIT President would go batshit.

(You can do this even if you were on the fence about MIT, or even if you intended to go somewhere else anyway.)

Anon should promote this plan to HS seniors on the admissions boards and other forums likely to be frequented by top school applying seniors.
He wasn't charged with breaking & entering. The fact of his "breaking in" to the wiring closet was used to establish his intent and understanding that his actions were unauthorized. It's part of a pattern of facts that established the elements required to charge him with fraud.
Words With Friends worldwide outage comes as competitor Ruzzle gains notoriety
Who does the typesetting on these documents? I'm curious - the Supreme Court looks like it uses TeX; here it looks like they're rendering XML.
"88% of graduates say they were happy with the investment they made."

Of course you will rationalize your decision and you will say you are happy after sinking so much money in! Can you imagine answering something else? The minute you were accepted you were 'happy with your decision' and you crafted and told yourself a nice narrative.

I'm sure there is tangible ROI for a lot of MBA graduates, but the question whether they are 'happy' is simply biased.
Pretty good tips. Re: being aware of retain cycles -- this is not just for blocks but really in general. When you start out you should immediately learn the conventions and adhere to them strictly. (Unfortunately the APIs don't always, I'm looking at you NSURLConnection!)

Another tip: try both Xcode and AppCode: http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/. It's a subjective thing but for myself AppCode is far better (it helps that I also use IDEA for Java, including Android).
Dell has been installing crap since at least 2006/07. Thats when I started wondering why all new PCs at a certain company where all infected just few days after purchase. Then I realized this thing (myway?) was being installed by default.

I really didn't think it was ever a Google product though. Correct me if I'm wrong.
How do you "demonstrate one is out of touch reality"?

That's just as difficult to define. My argument is that there's no black or white answer.
I don't know. I think the fact that he killed himself is a very strong message that wouldn't have been attached to movement (by 'us') prior to his death (not that I'm happy it happened).
We'll continue to disagree about this, but I think the plea deal was fair enough. Sure, being a felon is a burden - but realistically, being a hacker felon is much less of a burden than being an ex-crack dealer or something.

Plugging your machine directly into someone's wiring closet without permission and then running scripts to pull down 100x the traffic requests of everyone else on the campus combined (resulting in a multi-day shutdown that affects all the legitimate users of that campus) is pretty abusive. If I was running a business and someone did that I'd be furious, even if they were just using the bandwidth to download all of wikipedia or something equally freely accessible.
iirc, visual studio supports source map debuging too. (at least it does for typescript generated code)
I haven't picked up a copy in years. Do they still print pictures of phone booths on the back of every cover?
Democracy Now full hour on Aaron Swartz
> In 2008 Jonathan James killed himself after being implicated in the largest personal identity hack in history.

Wrong kind of hacker.
I agree, I can't even keep up with the handful of friends I've known in real life, for decades. Like I really want to make faux friends at web scale.

That said, fb has never made sense to me except through the lens of millennial and boomer narcissism. Maybe they'll lap it up. (I am not intentionally exempting our generation but I've never quite gotten the same vibe as from those who came before and after us.)
I think it's possible for the bill to be a good idea even if it would not have helped Aaron, and also possible for it to be suitable memorial even if it would not have helped in his particular case. The fact that it could help prevent some other similar cases would be good enough for me, for instance.

If you have any analyses you think are particularly valuable, feel free to recommend; I'm reading dozens of things per day about this story as it is, at the moment, as so many of us are.
Stackify Updates: Holidays Edition | Stackify
These MBA bashing articles always focus on the same thing: that an MBA no longer guarantees a good job and that it doesn't help you start your own company. I would love to see an article that examines the real value of an MBA: its network. Does the value of the connections you make during an MBA program outweigh the cost, both time and money?
LV2013官方新款目錄
How dare a journalistic organization use or cite sources!
This was a deal-breaker me, when I was evaluating Angular and Ember ~6 months ago. I eventually chose Ember and things worked out pretty well.
So, if we make a permanent "monument" out of his domain name, what's the deciding factor for or against doing it for any other website?

Will the internet become littered with millions of permanent monuments to misguided souls, like the little crosses on side of our highways?
Had Aaron ever been found guilty of any other crime?

Because if not, first time offenders almost always get probation unless they killed someone.

Some drunk drivers who killed people get only a couple years.

Destroy the economy = no jail time, free information that was already technically free = mandatory minimums?
Until action takes place, there's no distinction between political opportunism (i.e. blowing a lot of hot-air at the press to look good and maybe win a few votes) and genuine concern about the state of the law.
You are. You're skipping the most important part of the criminal process: the trial.

* don't bet on a fair trial, even if you're completely innocent. *

Hyperbole, and dangerous exaggeration. The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard is a very high standard. I've won jury trials where the evidence all supported the prosecution's case (seriously, I had no evidence) but was not sufficient to reach this standard. Federal judges are even stricter at forcing federal prosecutors to satisfy this standard--they'll frequently dismiss the case without even letting the jury deliberate.

If you think jury trials are patently unfair, you need to actually go down to a courtroom and watch the jury trials. You'll learn a lot, and you'll discover that the justice system is not even remotely as lopsided as you think it is...once you get to the trial stage. (But yes, it's definitely lopsided in favor of the prosecution at every stage before trial.
> The prosecutor claimed to be planning to press for about 12-14x the plea offer.

Is that better? There comes a point where it doesn't make a difference anymore.

Ever see a sale like that? Where one day something costs 10 bucks and then the next day it's 170? Me neither. That's not a deal. It's blackmail. Do what we want or we'll do our best to destroy your whole life. Justice, eh?
Give up and use tables - behind an Internet meme (2008)
California became a one-party state in 2012. Prior to 2012, it was very much a two-party state, and the problems date as far back as the 1990s, when it was still considered a swing state.
Ask HN: Why is Democracy Now banned?
They did an hour program on Aaron yesterday, but the link can't be submitted without immediately becoming dead.

This isn't the first time I've noticed; I'm guessing a lot of their content has resulted in off-topic political debates in the past, but they have had some good coverage of Assange, Greenwald on Bradley Manning, etc. over the last few years, which, while political, has been relavent to HN.
State lawmaker wants tax on violent video games
> 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?

It depends what you are trying to do: punish defendant for his crimes, or give an example for the public. Of course the (mental) health of defendant should be taken under consideration when sentencing.
AppFabric Private Caching: What to Watch Out For | Stackify
Facebook Announces A Social Networking Search Engine-Graph Search
Except for loop counters. Being able to do:

for (int i = 0; i < len; ++i) { ... }

vs.

int i;
// Half a dozen lines
for (i = 0; i < len; ++i) { ... }

makes a big difference to me.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-...
So cute. It's like you guys have no idea when you're repeating the same arguments your arch enemies used to use, and for the same reasons to boot!
Well somehow the press and everyone started reporting that Aaron "broke in" to the closet where the wires were gathered and I figured they were using a legal term of art.

If we can s/broke in/entered/ without changing the meaning, then this "breaking" use sounds like pure spin.
Even back in 2007 I knew pretty well that books are no better than any other stuff.

But it does not end there. Pure information (stored in the cloud or wherever) is also "stuff" and should be constantly cleaned. Keeping pure information does not cost as much as physical stuff, but it still has quite some overhead: you have to index it, back it up, remember how to access it etc.
> There is no federal law against cyber-bullying, so the prosecution in that case used these same computer and wire fraud laws to go after Drew for her role in Megan's suicide.

This is the thing that's strange to me. Seems as though existing laws against harassment would apply. What is so different about this activity online than offline?
Wow. I got mine in 2 minutes.
I'm envisioning a course of events where this bill gains support and gets passed (fixing one problem, yes), but nothing is done to address the real causes of what happened. It's then reported on in the media as if this longstanding severe criminalization of acts-with-technology has been fixed, when the reality is that people like Aaron are extremely rare and we're unlikely to see a similar case in the next decade (/me knocks on wood).

Sorry to jump at you a bit. Most of the comments on reddit seem to be unthinking sycophantic praise, and don't really consider if this is the appropriate response.
Heh. I used to leave my bag in one of those closets when I went to the bathroom if I was in a computer lab.
"If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment because of establishing that idea or goal as being congruent with their self-image."
Obama's Justice Department painted as Needlessly Cruel and Capricious
>not to mention the ridiculousness of criminal sentences

Perhaps if we didn't use incarceration as punishment for non-violent crimes, things would be a bit more civilized.
Don't think twice if devil has horns or tail; here is the photo: http://www.inquisitr.com/wp-content/2013/01/Stephen-Heymann....
Lawrence Lessig interviewed on Aaron Swartz
Unexpected Javascript: That Doesn't Do What You Think
Ooooh. Now to get my message mode to recognize and highlight those as well in Emacs.
If you've got suggestions for additions, leave them here or in the comments.
So if he entered a supply closet at the library to borrow a pen, and then he evaded taxes with that pen, he "broke in" even if the library allowed people to borrow pens from that unlocked closet?
"self-fulfilling role" is another term for "blaming the victim." You know, that guy in a wheelchair could totally walk--he just doesn't want it enough.
It seems likely that you are an imbecile. Thanks for letting everyone know that you agree with everything the review says about Chomsky despite the fact that you haven't actually read Chomsky.
Sure (though I recommend just updating your code instead...)

Only reason it's tricky is because there are two different forms of attributes that can be passed to set. Something like this should work:

var oldSet = Backbone.Model.prototype.set;
Backbone.Model.prototype.set = function(key, val, options) {
if (key == null) return this;
if (typeof key === 'object') {
options = val;
}
options || (options = {});
options.validate = true;
oldSet.call(this, key, val, options);
};
I think you over-estimate how well the NSA pays, among other things.
Machinery of Life [book]
$8.3B Was Invested In 3,267 VC Deals In 2012; Seed Funding Hits Record Levels
Your argument might hold more water if your example actually vertically centered anything.

It's 2013 and it's still in many ways easier to do pixel-perfect, scalable layouts using tables than it is with CSS. It's so bad a common CSS 'layout technique' is to force elements to be laid out like table cells! I find that incredibly depressing.

Many of those so-called 'idiomatic conventions' that you blame developers for not devising are avoided because they're needlessly complex, easy to get wrong, and hard to maintain. Nobody likes having to wrap every piece of content in 3-5 nested divs/spans with complex style rules applied to them.
Ask HN: Is it worth getting a job at Google?
I am a pretty good software engineer and have implemented many impressive softwares during last 12 years from implementing parts of JVM to distributed systems. However I am not good with memorizing language syntaxes and algorithms. To prepare for interviews at Google or similar companies means significant training in becoming a great "interview programmer".
Is it all worth the trouble of learning something that I never directly use day to day in my life ?
Help me, I can't find "freedom of information" in either RFC 791 or RFC 793.
The alt-tab thing I think they copied directly from Apple (not necessarily a good thing).

The thing that really hurts about the new alt-tab is that it breaks my mental stack. On Windows, in KDE etc I can switch back and forth between two browser windows easily. On Mac and Unity you either have to decide of your last app change was an app change or a instance change.
But in Aaron's case, MIT explicitly did want to pursue the charges against him.

I do see that if you were confused about that, they would seem similar in that respect. Thanks.

As for the Polanski case, that's a tough call: should the state prosecute crimes against children when the child (or parent, or both) doesn't want the perpetrator punished? I can see arguments for and against both options. I lean towards going with the wishes of the victims when they are adults, but the fact that the victim is a child brings other considerations into play. Anyway...
I bet no one locks those closets. I know for a fact there are a few comm closets with actual servers controlling the PLC of the building at my university that are often left unlocked, door wide open. No one gives a crap at these institutes. If a real malicious hacker got into one of those, he could easily wreak havoc.
I'd have it up on a staging URL and show them that.
I've heard this story before. The only difference is that the third party didn't access the company systems and that Bob was truly an expert.

In my version Bob got permission from his employer to go overseas for a year where he would work remotely.

Instead he spent a year on the beach in Bali shipping change requests to India and doing code reviews of the work coming back. He still understood the code and everything about it. He explained and interpreted requirement from his employer to his Indian developer(s).

So instead of 8 hours at a desk, he spent 2 hours at a desk providing the expertise he was paid for (to both his Indian developer and to company meetings) and spent 6 hours on the beach.

The only thing he didn't provide was the actual keypresses.

The only problem I see with this is that the company's IP (the source code) was given to someone they company wasn't aware of (which isn't a trivial thing).

The company paid an expert to provide them with his expertise and to complete particular requirements. He did both.
yeah. someone might go crazy downloading shit
Administration and faculty should care about students and they should listen to their students. If a service outage occurs and effects thousands of students I have no doubt faculty is going to be made aware of it - regardless of who is responsible for maintaining the service.

Maybe we are giving the attackers too much credit. They may not be sophisticated enough to understand the relationship between the system they're attacking and the rest of MIT's infrastructure. More likely this was low-hanging fruit, an easy to attack, ergo it was attacked.
How many "constituents" of Issa's do you think actually care about Aaron Swartz? Do you think the San Diego/Orange County population have been running major protests for Swartz?
Part of a one-hour special from Monday (the full video is on democracynow.org).
You've got your examples labeled by number per group and your explanations labeled by number for the total. This makes it a chore to look up an explanation.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your use of "cold-lead", I don't think MailChimp TOS allows these types of emails.

Last time I used them (over a year ago), you could only email people who had double-opted in to your emailing list, kind of making them not "cold-lead".
As noted elsewhere, CFAA has suped up mega penalties, so it's the hatchet of choice when the public demands blood.
Take this sentiment and jump forward 100 years. What's left?

I suspect this will happen to any namespace after long enough. Domain names, Twitter handles, Facebook URLs, whatever. Once enough real estate is taken up with immobile monuments to the dead, the living will have to move on to something else.

I also think this will happen well before 100% utilization. After some point, the number of collisions you hit when trying to get a memorable name becomes too much of a burden and you just go somewhere else, as previously described here: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/11/28/namespace/
Tangential note, not relevant to Bob / China / Verizon /etc:

Since many people on HN will eventually find themselves having to care about the distinction between an "employee" and an "independent contractor", because hiring the first costs you extra taxes: if a person isn't allowed to outsource themselves, that is strong-but-not-dispositive evidence that they are an employee. If you sign a contract with a consultant, it is highly likely that the consultant has the right to direct fulfillment by anyone he thinks capable of giving you what was agreed upon. He has wide discretion in picking subcontractors, just like he also has wide discretion in picking what hours he works, how he performs the work for you, what tools he uses to perform the work, what other employers he works for, how he comports his professional affairs, etc etc.

I've seen a boilerplate contract or two for consultants which forbid them to do this. If your boilerplate has that, you might want to ask your competent legal representative on whether there is a risk of a contractor being retroactively reclassified as an employee by the IRS. (You profoundly don't want that. Grellas has a magnum opus on it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1137930 )

Similarly, as a consultant, it is probably to your advantage to assist your clients in meeting their legal obligations by e.g. preserving their lack of apparent or actual control over you.
It might be fully programmed but it isn't fully developed. Development includes more than just code.
The updater always prompts you for it, though, because it always uses the stub installer. Shameful.
Kyle interesting, so it appeared in the Register for a while without issue but lands on HN and blammo! :-)

The problem with looking at logs is that you always find something!
Show HN: How We've Raised $5,690 for Charity By Giving Away Our Java Tool
They're footnotes, the link to the answer is at the end of every statement, the return link is at the end of the footnote. Sorry if the numbering confuses the issue though
No, of course not. But if they've created this platform to make our voices heard, I expect them to listen. Just like writing my elected officials, every White House petition I've signed has gotten me either no response or a tactfully-worded "fuck you, go away"
> The thing that bugs me about the military and this is something that I really don't understand is the blind obedience expected of the soldiers

There is a level in which it is expected; and at that level, the soldiers are basically pawns in a game, and the only reason they have not been replaced by robots is that we're not sufficiently advanced technologically.

At a higher level (how much higher depends on country and branch), you're actually expected to think, although not to disagree often.

As a corporal, I routinely told my (several level up in the chain of command) lieutenant colonel that, (respectfully and less respectfully), he is talking nonsense, and as long as I was able to substantiate it (I was), it was accepted as criticism. It didn't work as well with his superior (a colonel) - I got listened to once, and basically told to not do that again. Yes, I got to talk to these people often -- as in daily and at least monthly respectively.

But that depends on the culture of the army and branch you end up with - in many places, any individual thinking before you reach captain is reprimanded. I was lucky to be somewhere where it was usually merit that was judged, rather than seniority.
It's spin (the closet was quite unmaintained given its dual use as a homeless shelter), but it's also legally meaningful when talking about the network access he obtained in there.
Perhaps you're missing something. XIBs are arguably among the most powerful features of Cocoa. I built an app with a really complex, dynamic layout using them (look up "Panna" in the App Store). Working with an evolving design and changing team, with layout elements often changing and getting tweaked in tiny ways... Well, if I did the entire layout in code, I would have needed a full-time developer just for the ongoing GUI changes. I agree that dynamic layout support was weak pre-constraints, but it was still a much better development experience, and now you can do really complicated things without any code at all.

If you're just talking about some buttons in a toolbar, go nuts, but otherwise it's worth the time investment to learn.
I've had occasion to examine "any one piece" a few times and found Chomsky's citations to hold up quite well. This sort of criticism has been around as long as he's been publishing on politics and is almost invariably completely determined by pre-existing ideology.
I think weev's case is a lot more similar to Aaronsw than Kevin Mitnick's. weev is accused of more or less the same thing as Aaronsw: downloading files off a server, except unlike Aaronsw in weev's case the files were accessible to anyone on the Internet.

Kevin Mitnick, on the other hand, was accused of things like wire fraud and tapping people's phones.

Unlike Aaronsw, both of these guys are kind of assholes.
Yeah, that's how democracy works. Actions that are forward progress eventually become politically advantageous. That's pretty much the single principle that makes democracy as functional as it is.
Not if you went to grade school in America!

/wishes I was joking.
It proceded with MIT's expressed consent: MIT wanted Aaron punished with jail time and a felony, and explicitly refused lesser sentences.
This article makes that point indirectly.
If the primary value of an MBA is the network, you should only go to a school where the network has meaningful impact on your career prospects: a top 5 school.