skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>at least with the inhumane conditions in American prisons

Should we, as people who are not currently in prison, not try to make prison living conditions better instead? Some things that come to mind are:

1. Nobody should gain monetarily from someone being sentenced to prison.

2. Nobody should gain monetarily from someone being sentenced to prison for a longer time.

3. We should ensure full physical security for prisoners. I am willing to entertain the idea of making common lunch / shower areas optional. A prisoner ought to have the option to not be in physical proximity of other prisoners if necessary.

4. There should be a way to report bad behavior / torture by other prisoners or by guards.

I think the question to ask here is not whether death is better than prison... What can we do to make our prisons better?
May be the case on iOS but with Android I've had apps that stick extra shortcuts on my homescreen and spam notifications every few hours. This makes battery life and usability a lot worse throughout the phone until you can find and kill the offending app.
As a malware researcher, and the person who writes anti-virus definitions, I can proudly say that I wrote some rules to deal with Adware.InstallMonetizer just yesterday. Most other vendors seem to be detecting it as well.
> They also have deals with download.com/softopedia/softonic

The problem here is that those sites still rank very high in search results.
Six months is still a long time for an innocent man.
I guess its this http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dolan
The most compact book on design is only 46 pages, called "Notes on Graphic Design And Visual Communication." It's IMHO the best book on design even though it's a compact overview of the concepts and terminology... It's handwritten and probably the only handwritten book you'll ever read. It's worth buying just to own it.

I have met AIGA award designers and Internet design celebrities who don't know some of the basics laid out in this short book.

http://www.amazon.com/Crisp-Graphic-Design-Visual-Communicat....
Yep. And it seems he doesn't get the point.

He claims everyone is on the 35 years federal prison maximum sentence train and that he sees no mention of the 6 months plea offer. Besides the fact that if you are not guilty (I'm not american) I would simply not plea guilty I think that the persecutor scare tactics is enough to be asking for her resignation as it is the very definition of bullying which too often heads people into suicide, by leaving them a worst alternative (i.e. costing family and friends lots of money). Offer or no offer.

Bullying: Use superior strength or influence to intimidate (someone), typically to force him or her to do what one wants.

Basically going to federal prison 6 months, ruining you financially and having a criminal record for breaking some TOS/EULA for freeing _state_funded_ research which should have been free in first place is the fabulous offer ? How about thank you but no thank you ?

If he is guilty, i.e. trespassing, I would say the sentence should maybe be something like a month worth of social works. Or just see the context and give him a medal, he has done more _social_ work than most people already.
Unless it's HA-NFS, which is very difficult, I'd say S3-like.

I'm about to sign up for the 2GB box since my 512MB VPS at Linode isn't enough memory to really make Play framework fly and upgrading gets very expensive fast.
I know how you feel. I think it's kind of a combinations of things. I can MAKE things. I can do it quickly and make pretty cool products. Unfortunately, I do a lot of it by searching online. Even if I'm writing my own code and not copying from other sources, it's kind of in one ear and out the other. I used a PHP function yesterday to remove HTML entities. I'm sure its something like stripHtmlEntities or something (ah, it's "html_entity_decode"). That's exactly my point though... I needed to use it ONCE for some side project. Should I have that on my interview tomorrow, I would fuck it up, even though I know exactly how and when to use it.

Anyhow, I relate it to GPS in the car. I can drive somewhere 10 times following my GPS and not be able to get there the 11th time without it. However, if I wing it once and figure it out myself then I always remember it. The internet is that kind of safety net that stops me from retaining the information.
Live free or die trying
I agree with you, it's sad, and I'm disappointed as well. Depression and mental illness are misunderstood and it's a shame no good will come from this. Instead of awareness, it's now a political cause. Yet another reason why I seldom read comments.
"Light someone on fire and if they die, they are innocent."

Silence is neither an acknowledgment guilt or innocence, But the absence of speech.
I have never been so fearful of a verdict to such a question involving the admission of guilt since the Salem witch trials. It's the sense of the justices I question not so much the grounds of the case.
This whole Aaron Swartz episode, has really shown how un-objective this community is. The last few days I've never seen such hyperbole and sensationalism plague a community. It's the exact same you'd expect from the comments section from any mainstream media comment section.

Even within this submission, the comments here still talk and insinuate Aaron was facing life imprisonment, danger to being raped daily, and suicide was his only option.

The more I sift through the crap most of the community is posting, and actually find more objective facts (why is Orin Kerr's objective analysis of the law no where to be found after a day?! Does this not speak volumes of the community?).

I actually feel sorry the Tom Dolan, and his wife and everyone else involved (isn't it weird how you can empathise with multiple polarizing parties??).

I don't actually think from the facts I've observed that 6 months (his lawyer actually suspected a suspended sentence), is actually a bad deal in this case, given all the facts, but this is my personal objective opinion.

I would like to see people be more objective, and communicate with less emotion and more reason, but it's something I've observed happening over the past few years, and I think this just highlights what type of community it's mutated into.
Unfortunately while they may be rare, they do exist. My company has a hundred or so. We're a Java shop, and most of our stuff is home-grown (so it might not be on the list of sales for corporate Java packages). I'm not sure if we had any fallout from this or not.
I think you can just dd the CD ISO into the USB. That's what I do, and it's supported:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Installat...

I'm sure you can find the same info for Ubuntu.
Irrelevant here -- the 6-month deal has been made public by other sources.
My space new design: horizontal scroll bars
Thanks for sharing. Cloud is very popular these days.
> Storing data in XML for long-term interoperability is an acceptable use of XML.

What?
>As for the point re: editing, this is just not true. Academic journal submissions are by highly educated PhDs at the best universities; the editors on the other side just aren't as well trained. Post-submission copy editing is minimal; most of the effort by journal editors is on formatting.

This is not true. Most editors are PhD-trained people (after all, they have to select the reviewers of a paper, which requires knowing the relevant people in a field who are capable of evaluating a paper). In some of the smaller, field-specific journals, editors are themselves volunteers from academia (go to your local university, find some lesser known journal and check the inside cover, which usually lists the editorial board of the journal. You'll see that most of them are university faculty).
I think it's the height of arrogance to tell someone they are a fool for having a different perspective of heroism from yours.

I read that article and see some very worthwhile beliefs and endeavors, though beyond contributions to fighting SOPA, I'm not sure what I didn't "know about".

So yes, I'll stand by my belief that I don't see anything particularly 'heroic' there. Which isn't to say he didn't make many valuable contributions to things.
Ubuntu iso's can be dd'd onto a usb stick as well as fedora.
There's a meme with a character called "Dolan" (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dolan) which is pretty popular for reasons that probably no one can explain.
I highly doubt he would have been stuck in general population at a Federal Prison. I would have expected he would have been at one of the "Club Fed" institutions.
I like Brass Eye's version of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgnuxd0tiHk
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We can add another explanation: capitalism.

Company ran prisons are still rare in Germany. If a private company runs a prison (or several) it likes to see it filled...
VAMOISE
Vamoise is a bohemian electro-pop band from Montreal, led by singer-songwriter & composer Najah Zaoudé. Her songwriting & voice reach human emotions at their deepest manifestation, reflect personal experiences and depict honesty and growth.
>Does he have any idea what even 6 months in jail would have been like for a 20-something?

Still a huge difference between 30 years and 6 months (which was probably 3 months in reality).

OTOH, a felony conviction on your record is a lot more damaging than 6 months in jail.
Just my 2 cents: I certainly wish no one ever felt depressed, so I definitely support prevention. (If someone's depressed: 1, eat well, 2, sleep well, 3, do things you love, even small ones, and 4, don't isolate yourself!) At the same time, the right to choose how to use your body has to be atomic. If there is such a thing as human dignity, my ultimate end must be left to me. My arms are mine. My legs are mine. My life is mine. If I don't have my body, I don't have anything.
That's the system that some of the newer Public Library of Science journals are aiming for.
It would have been nice to have it link to the framework instead of a techcrunch article. First hand sources are always preferred if they're available.

EDIT: forgot to include the link instead of just commenting: http://www.pixate.com/
Techcrunch blocked by Chrome due to malware from ad company
I grew up in two very different places; Bethesda, MD and Winthrop, ME. The former is a fairly wealthy suburb of DC. The latter is an extremely rural mill-town in Maine.

I know that the funding the schools get is blamed for a lot of their problems, and I understand where people who talk about how hard it is to teach kids with behavioral issues and histories of abuse are coming from.

I sympathize, but I also think that's a cop-out. I had bad teachers in both places. In Winthrop, I had horrible teachers. They took away advanced classes because an outside contractor thought it created elitist attitudes and putting smart kids in the regular classes would boost overall performance.

I had science teachers that just had us play with legos all day and gave A's to all the basketball players. I had math teachers that would lose assignments and blame the students. These were not well-meaning teachers that just had it hard trying to teach these poor kids. These were people that shouldn't have been teaching at all, but could not be replaced.

My parents actually went up to the school a few times to try and talk to the administration and teachers about what was going on. A lot of people did. They got push-back and were asked not to meddle.

There were 2 great teachers there and that's why I didn't completely screw up my life at that point. I've spoken to a lot of people with similar experiences; 1 great teacher that pushed them to be successful. That's why it's so maddening to me when people say that it's not the teacher's fault, that they can't do anything about it. I know that's not entirely what your intent with your post was, but focusing on external environmental issues and bemoaning the poverty of the student body can come across that way.

While poverty is a major issue, and teaching is hard, I don't think you can solve the problems by just changing the student's home environment. You have to change the teachers as well.

Lots of jobs are hard. Doctors have to deal with unruly patients who refuse to change their diet or exercise. Don't they get blamed when their patients don't improve?
What are the particularly bad bits?

Gnome 3.4 feels OK to me - it happens to be a good fit for the "large number of low-resolution monitors" setup I'm currently enduring, as each monitor can have a separate full-screen app, which seems to be how Gnome wants you to do things. That said, I'm going to be trying Cinnamon shortly.
I had the exact same idea, right down to using ratings to improve the random match, so this is pretty awesome in that I get to see how this will play out for free.

The main idea here is that it's a behaviorial approach to optimizing mate-matching. The way it works now (e.g., on okcupid) is that you fill out a profile and answer some questions. You expose some signals in your profile which you think are correlated with what makes you a good mate (interests, income, etc.), and go about finding such signals in other people's profiles. The match % is also such a signal. However,

1. People lie, or at least exaggerate the truth/selectively filter

2. They might not lie but simply be wrong: they think they want x but actually want y

3. The match % is a completely made up algorithm. I mean, it kind of makes sense that people who agree on things they care the most about would make good couples, but unless you measure this in a scientific way (i.e., controlled experiments), you have no idea.

4. Even assuming that you can actually get a good signal from the profile, it is drowned out by the noise. Suppose that some girl and dude are perfect for each other. What are the chances that he will find her profile and that she will read his message?

The solution to 1-3 is to measure the thing you want to optimize, instead of optimizing based on intuition. The solution to 4 is to set people using the thing that you measured. So, after each blind date, you ask the participants, "would you go on a date with this person again?" Imagine being okcupid and being able to say, here is a person I think you'd be interested in dating, and I can say with 95% confidence that you will have a good time. If they can get to that stage, they'd be able to make good money.

There are some issues with this, of course. You could argue that the thing they should measure is whether the date leads to a happy long-term relationship, but that's pretty much infeasible for various reasons. Also, as a dating website, they'd be perversely incentivized to keep you single forever. Anyway, I am super interested to see how this does.
Overview of Reflection in Scala 2.10
It looks like you use it when you refill the account. Just used it to add $5 to the account and it worked. I'm impressed.
The analogy is apt enough. There's something you want whether it be 100 free wallpapers or a blowjob.

Providing you with such a thing required a certain level of "access" which can be used for evil.
Darpa Program Bears Eerie Resemblance to a Summer SciFi Blockbuster | Betabeat
I'm not sure what you mean by "decent technical documentation describing things". IBM is very open about publishing their documentation. For instance "Introduction to the New Mainframe: z/OS Basics" is available here:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg...

I'm not saying that this makes it easy to get access to, which is still a real problem.
And here's the release announcement: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F18_release_announcement

> Heck, we'd even say that getting this release to you has been a mooving experience.

Heh.
I found it funny that the covers in Amazon for UK and US are different. Seems like the author/publisher wants to capitalize on the popularity of Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch one) series in UK.
What makes you say this? How is this determined? I know of someone who committed suicide after being raped in prision. Which is one of the reasons its such a scary prospect for many young men.
Good. XML for data-storage was always a bad idea and I (and others http://www.dbdebunk.com/) have been ranting about it since the beginning. XML is verbose, hard to parse, and enforces a ridged hierarchy, even if your data model didn't need it.

Presumably XML is good for "interchange" but I've never found that to be the case. JSON seems to do just fine. :)
This is where I have an issue with this discussion. You're throwing up anecdotal data in the face of an actual study. Why is that okay in a community like this that understands the Scientific Method and should have a basic understanding of statistics.
They're sending customers to Amazon's affiliates because it gets them SEO results and they likely get a kickback.

Coming from my searches that've turned up the affiliate spam, these are generally items that have nothing to do with Sears's main product lines or that Sears is well sold out of.
Six months is not really a mitigating factor for her overreach when he should not have spent a minute in jail in the first place.

I feel like this case feels strangely reminiscent of the extortion of patent trolls, where they levy exorbitant risk over a company in exchange for a payout. Except, of course, this time the price was a significant portion of a talented young man's life. I have no grace for sympathy here.
I remember using an AS/400 mainframe as a kid (I have fond memories of essentially IM'ing back and forth with my father when I was 4 in his office).

I used one helping him with some database migration/upgrade at the same office when I was in my teens. So I've touched mainframes at least, but now all of that is in the fog of time and memory.

Now, I'm a Ruby developer and I honestly don't know what I'd use a mainframe for. I don't know when I'd deploy one, what an appropriate task is for them, etc.

I get the sense they are good for when you have "big data" stuff to deal with, but it feels more like a 1980's definition of "big data" (MILLIONS of rows, omg!) than datasets in the billions/trillions of rows (or huge datasets like a human genome sequence).

I assume on a technical level, being turing complete machines, that I can do 'anything' with them, but realistically what can I do? Can I run a web server? Do data analysis using Hadoop across a huge dataset? Can I easily setup background tasks and queues? Do they do 64 bit instructions? What are the limitations? Can I run Lisp on them? What is the toolset like? Do they support Unicode? What is their database, and what is it capable of?

And what's the best place to learn about this stuff? I can go to Barnes and Noble and get a book on C, Ruby, Java or PHP... but finding good modern documentation on mainframes? I dunno where to look, or what would be considered 'too old' for documentation. Anything about Ruby from 2002 is ancient, but perhaps that's the new hip stuff when it comes to COBOL?
Money and Funding Don't Make Good Engineers
the 6 month offer hasn't been widely discussed by the mob

It's been discussed. It's just that it's been dismissed as irrelevant. What is relevant is that the process itself has bankrupted a brilliant man, distracted and stressed him for two years of his life, and required that he declare himself a felon, abdicating his right to vote, among many other rights, for a fucking TOS violation, that the "victim" did not even want to pursue. Additionally, it's quite likely the bargain would have included some degree of probation during which a man whose passions run deep in computing, would be banned from touching a computing device of any kind.

How you government sycophants sleep at night is beyond me. Is there nothing the agents of the Almighty State can do that would make you stop defending them?
I am not surprised this guy is doing this, the coverage has been almost universally favoring Aaron's story and positioning the prosecutor as the bad guy (or gal). Stories like this sort of take on their own narrative once they get going, and a lot of folks are using this as an exemplar to curb abusive prosecution.

I am surprised however that the husband thinks anyone cares what was offered. That suggests he really missed the root of the anger completely (which is as far as I can ascertain egregious prosecution by copyright interests and their lapdogs regardless of human cost or mandate) The only thing that would make people sit back and go "Huh?" was if we found out the Justice Department had dropped the charges weeks before Aaron's suicide.
Never mind the fact that it was a plea bargain, which means he would have had to plead guilty to a crime he didn't believe he committed. What a bastardized thought process: "Just admit that you were wrong, we were right, and sit in jail for 6 months! How could anyone refuse that? What an unreasonable person."
Wikipedia’s travel site Wikivoyage launches today amidst big hopes
Any style that encourages errors is a bad style. Yes, it's possible to make the code correct and still use up-front declarations. It's also possible to make the code correct while using a 10k-line main() littered with gotos. It's still a very poor programming style.

People make mistakes. Practices should be built around this fact, not built assuming people could be perfect if they just tried a little harder.
Just wanted to add that this advice will necessarily change with the times. Something sounds trite and cliche if you've heard it (or something like it) too much. Most of the things that sound trite and cliche now sounded great the first time you heard them. That's how they got repeated enough to become trite and cliche in the first place.

If everyone followed the advice in this article, the advice would be terrible. Most people don't, so it's probably pretty safe for now. The general advice though, is to pay attention to what feels overdone and then don't do that. And don't stop paying attention, because it will definitely change.
Not sure I'd go as far as saying TC is bad but couldn't agree more with this line:

> "It’s bad form as a person and even worse form as a journalist to equivocate an accused hacker reaching out for help with a suicidal person reaching out for help."
Thread: Aaron Swartz was curious
Or an alternative could be a blind date game show if an in person meeting with a stranger is a bit much. We just launched a dating game show that solves many of the shortfalls of online dating. HN thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5060477 (disclaimer, co-founder)
He is saying that like "it was just six months so it's no big deal"... but I feel it's not just about months or years in prison - it's more about human dignity.

Face 35 years in prison or plead guilty and get only six months - how many innocent people would confess guilt just out of fear? And those confessions are as valuable as those that inquisition got... and that's sickening.

System that creates strong incentive for innocent people to plead guilty belongs to middle ages and not to a supposedly civilized country. How many Americans had to go through something like this and now have to live the rest of their lives with this horrible injustice, labelled as criminals just because they were afraid to take their chances and risk spending years or even decades in prison?
I've often wondered whether they should let people sentenced to life without possibility of parole the option of voluntary euthanasia.

Probably not necessary for the threat of 6 months at Club Fed. Martha Stewart managed five months.
The Rise Of Anti-Intellectualism And The End Of Progress
OK, I stand corrected! I should've done my homework...
I think it would be done fairly frequently with HTML5 games or stand alone tools like he was talking about. If it had zero back end then it would cost nothing for someone to just rip and host on their own site. People do it with flash games all of the time. Throw ads on the page and get some better SEO and you're golden.