skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The top reply to pg in that thread is dcurtis, and should maybe give everyone concerned a bit of a pause.

EDIT- dcurtis says Aaron is egotistical in his blog posts, as a comment on a post that asks what Aaron has ever done. The parallel to recent threads about dcurtis is eerie, to be honest. It's jarring enough that it should make everyone on all sides of that issue take a step back and get some perspective.

As pg says in that thread, egotism is a common flaw in bright youths. Perhaps some...not tolerance exactly, as guidance away from the flaw is a reasonable response, but maybe a realization that it's to be expected. And in the big picture, maybe it shouldn't really count much against them anyway.
What sort of project is yours?
The Strange Math of Apple’s Purported Massive iPhone 5 Component Cuts
Indeed - I'd opine that the meteor in question was probably terrestrial in origin, as diatom genetics demonstrate that evolution is live and kicking in diatom populations. That said, it doesn't exclude the possibility of diatoms having perhaps taken a lengthy space trip at some point in their evolutionary history. It would certainly go some way to explaining why a marine species would have developed to be radiation and vacuum resistant.

As to siliceous rocks - possibly, although I don't believe there's been anything found to suggest diatoms in great antiquity as yet. Funnily enough the most prevalent siliceous rock is... diatomite. Your toothpaste is made out of it. Chert (flint, etc.) is probably a better candidate substrate, but again, diatoms of that age would be indistinguishable from the substrate itself. Molecular clocks could indicate a biogenic origin, but as yet there's no way to demonstrate what variety of biogenic origin.

There's evidence in terms of carbonaceous inclusions in ancient rocks that suggests the existence of life on earth before previously assumed - http://courses.washington.edu/bangblue/Mojzsis-3.85Ga_Akilia..., but nothing to suggest it was diatomic in nature.

Anyway. If their evidence isn't falsified, even if this isn't extrasolar panspermia, it's a demonstration that panspermia is possible.
"but were pampered enough to get another four years of school dayz, got a law degree,"

What does your class warrior attitude have to do with anything? I'm not sure what country you are from but in the states law school is three years and the majority of students graduate with mountains of student debt. Its hardly what I would call "pampered school dayz[sic]."
The state is not a person, and ergo cannot be your friend. However, the state is a collection of persons, both elected, appointed, and hired, and many of those persons can be your friend. Indeed, I count a number of such persons among my friends.

In a democracy, the state is what you make of it--it is your family, friends, and neigbhors. It is not some monolithic evil construct.
They didn't take it over 2 days before his death, they took it over 2 YEARS before his death.
There's a button to express that feeling.
It was hastily written for a 24hr hackathon so yea it can be improved. It finds the largest block of text on the page and assumes that's the important content. If the comments section is larger than the article text, the extension incorrectly uses the comments.

If you find it helps your reading please email me and I'll take time to improve and fix it.
The Secret Service also has jurisdiction over various types fraud - including telecommunications fraud and computer fraud. Given that the primary charge against Swartz was for Wire Fraud, it would certainly seem like something that could fall under their jurisdiction, or at the very least something that they'd be interested in enough to check if it should fall under them or should be left to another branch of law enforcement.
> It's the engineer in my that admires the division of responsibilities inherent in our system.

I don't know. I suppose I am just naturally suspicious of anything that allows someone to witness an injustice, take part in it, then wash their hands and declare that it wasn't their problem. Something about that just seems wrong to me.
The problem is that some Dell's are great, and some are shoddy. But unless you do lots of research you don't know which is which. Part of the success of the Mac is that consumers (particularly time poor, non-techie consumers) can just buy one without worrying that they chose a bad model.
Please, don't replace your dashboard
Thank you for explaining my immediate visceral discomfort on being introduced to rspec and cucumber more eloquently than I could.
Completely agreed. And as someone who strongly supported what Aaron did at the time (and thus disagreed with you, Ed, et al), this techcrunch "article" is still disgusting.

This public singling out of one of us for ad impressions should be taken personally by every commenter here. I know it's the 3072nd time someone has said this, but techcrunch.com should just really be added to the spam blacklist.

Unfortunately, flagging kills any ongoing discussion. Someone with the ability should just take it upon themselves to edit the url of this topic to be self-referential or point to the old topic.
Ask HN: How would you invest 1K, 2K and 5K?
Imagine you receive an envelope with 3 checks and a letter that says that you must invest all the money and try to get as much return as you can. The first check is 1k, the second 2 and the last of 5k (US$). The only thing is each investment need to be independent from each other.
Apple has an incredibly long and prominent history of having its stock manipulated by traders around the timing of new product events and quarterly earnings statements.

When "today" is near one of those events, you probably don't want to anchor your evaluations of the company to a short-window snapshot of stock performance.
As others have mentioned, simple pulse oximeters are much cheaper ($20-50).

But pulse oximeters w/ connectivity are generally more expensive. The Nonin 9560 Onyx 2 is probably the best known (BT 2.0) - the best price I could find online for that was $340. The MedChoice MD300C318T (BT) I found online for €199 (~$267). These are the two models that are compatible w/ apps like <a href="http://simpleeye.com/platforms/android/bluetooth-pulse-oxime... Android app</a>.

However, there is a cheaper alternative - the Contec CMS-50E (USB) and apparently a new CMS50EW that also has Bluetooth, can be bought for around $85. I haven't tried the wireless version, but the USB version works well, w/ good community support (<a href="http://ian.ahands.org/progs/pulseox/>reverse engineered protocol</a>) and can be run continuously.

For those interested in actually having/using this type of data, I'd really recommend this over the Tinke, since it doesn't give you access to your data at all (and of course, is limited to connecting to older iOS devices) and generally looks to be just gimmicky.

Lastly, I recommend taking a look at the Wikipedia article to learn more about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_oximetry>pulse oximetry</a>. While Tinke is using it as some sort of overall health diagnosis, it's really most useful for diagnosis of things like sleep disorders (like OSA) or other types of hypoxia (or monitoring for that). I'm pretty doubtful about it's usefulness for monitoring overall health, although it's fun to play with (watch your SpO2 drop as you hold you're breath, wee!)
I do that, and I don't find it to be that much of an issue, myself. In my experience, it's rare that I add a new variable to a funtion, so I guess your mileage may vary.
> - Looks like I need to shell out 1000 dollars on a macbook air because there's no way to even try it out on my laptop without spending days making a "hackintosh"

To be fair, setting up a "hackintosh" install isn't really any harder than setting up Gentoo or Arch. It's not a very relevant comparison though; Unlike with Windows or Linux, the makers of OS X explicitly do not want people installing their OS on "PC" hardware.
We already do know his real name: Ed Weissman.
CNET reporter quits over parent company CBS interfering with editorial.
Are you suggesting that this is what people should do, which might be a nice sentiment, but not particularly relevant to the issue at hand.

Or are you suggesting this is what people actually do, to the point of upvoting a comment past all others to the number 1 position. In this second case, I think you have a long way to go to prove your point.
Well then you should work in Piet (http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html)
:P
I want to change the focus here from all the negativity that was existent in HN to some positive stuff -- andrewljohnson's defense of Aaron, which now shows his incredible insight.

1) I don't think Aaron made more than six figures from Reddit. Soon after acquisition, he went on walkabout, and then he got canned. He probably got some money, but did not vest most of his share.
So, don't worry - he's poor enough for your pity and support.

2) As to your second line of thought, that we should punish him because he consciously broke the law... I disagree with anyone on this forum who says that Aaron didn't know the potential consequences of his actions, and therefore should not be punished. But I also disagree with you.

This was a victimless crime, and the only ones pursuing it are some relentless G-men. Where is the corporation or person that has been wronged? Who, in the public, wants to pillory Aaron? What did Aaron gain? Do we really need to make an example of him, so this doesn't happen again? Is this really good a use of taxes?

My reaction is just shame and disgust... I mean, really? This brilliant kid is going to jail because of civil disobedience? Just so we can show there is still a book than can be thrown?

The prosecution's perspective is warped by incentives - we should never care about how prosecutors feel or think - they are just tools of the people. Prosecutors need convictions, promotions, and press to succeed at their jobs. At this point, it's not JSTOR who wants this case prosecuted, it's just government agents. And they are just going through the motions.

It may be up to a jury to do the right thing - they stand a better change of being unbiased, thankfully for Aaron.
So he discourages Getters/Setters and instead says that declaring the variable as Public is better?

I mean, isn't that like not giving a sh-- about encapsulation principles ?
What programming language do you use? Your website seems to use ASP, and that is not the best (IMHO) for MVPing my ideas, for example.
Yeah. It's also interesting to watch this posthumous deification happening in real time, especially since so many people (who mostly didn't know him) considered him to be kind of a dabbler and a fuckup while he was still alive. Not saying all the praise is a bad thing or unwarranted by any means, just an observation. I never actually met him, but we shared a small footnote in history together: literally we were both cited in the same footnote of a book on the history of Wikipedia.
It should be pretty obvious that something is amiss here.

Erlang is usually not the fastest language for (purely) CPU-bound tasks, of which this is the case. But being 34 times slower than a Javascript engine tells you that something is not done right. In fact, there is an interesting alternative program which is only a factor of 2 slower. I would expect it to be slower since regular expression handling is something you rarely do in Erlang on critical paths. But 34 times slower is way above target - and that tells me something is going wrong in a deep way in that code. Also in the real world you are allowed to cheat on heavyweight computation, luckily. Write it in C, Ocaml, OpenCL, CUDA, GHC+DPH+REPA or what have you. Then use Erlang to manage the data as payload and move it around.

I have no knowledge of HiPE. At least not enough to write a blog post on how it works right now. I would have to study it a bit before I can do that. There are plans for an alternative JIT'ed backend for Erlang though. That said, I don't think Erlang will ever be "fast" since the language isn't statically typed, and there is currently no provision for type annotations.

The main reason for having a JIT for Erlang would be that more of the runtime can be written in Erlang, which makes the system more portable. This is almost always a win.
This post is a parody; The author explains this in a brightly-colored box on the page that's hard to miss. Perhaps your beef is with the article being parodied?
If trivial whitespace difference causes wrath fill conflicts then I think you have a deeper issue. I can't think of a situation where this would be even a minor issue.
Nope -- see the comment below my own, panther2k saw it and did it. Which is exactly what I was hoping would happen when I threw the idea (rephrasing your idea) out there--I have enough startups on my plate already :)
No blood sugar readings :(
I don't think this post should be here-- it's turning a tragedy into a witch hunt. I don't think this level of negativity and mob mentality is appropriate for HN.
For the curious, Qlb means "Heart" in Arabic.

Here's Conway's Game of Life:
http://twitpic.com/bv2cra
He certainly seemed to support the outrageous, overreaching prosecution that Aaron was facing.

"Aaron should man up, take responsibility for his actions, and pay his own bills."

This sounds a lot like "screw you, what you did is wrong, and you should quit whining about it."

"man up" clearly implies that Ed Weissman feels that going up against the massive US justice system to allow people without university affiliation or piles of cash to read publicly funded scientific research is an immature act.

As someone who has been blocked in the past from doing research because of lack of funds to pay the journals, this attitude disgusts me.

EDIT: Let me be absolutely clear that I am not implying that Ed had any blame in what happened or anything ridiculous like that. What I find objectionable in his commentary is his cavalier attitude towards the heavyhanded prosecution of those trying to make publicly funded research publicly available. This suggests a very elitist attitude towards the distribution of valuable public research.
Ed Weissman should "man up"... and apologize.
Confessions of a Startup Seagull ("dive in… shit all over… fly away")
I totally forgot about it. You are right, I might give some of the more hardcore ones after I'm done playing with this one. Thanks!
I would agree that they wouldn't have had the level of success they now enjoy if they had remained only a computer company - but way before the iPod was introduced in late 2001, don't forget that Jobs had already turned the product line around with the hugely successful candy colored iMac, the transition to OSX, and a return to quality and vision within the traditional computer market. With Jobs at the helm, I think that Apple would have been going places selling rice cookers. To write Apple off as "doomed" in that market seems naive.
Not terribly long ago I had someone on hn tell me to "lighten up". Up until that point, I appreciated his sincere effort at respectful two way communication. At that moment, I decided he was being a dick and not worth talking to further.

I don't see where it matters if you can tell if someone will bring drama or not. It is pretty disrespectful to assume that someone making strong/emotional statements is merely a drama queen. They usually have their reasons for feeling strongly.
On the one hand, it is probably unlikely that HN could have done much to prevent Aaron's death. He was facing a terrible situation, one that he could not bear to face, and I doubt anyone here could have substantially changed his situation.

On the other, I can think of few things worse than facing a terrible situation, and feeling like you're doing so completely alone. The amount of speculation and analysis of Aaron's case here on HN was absurd (at one point prompting my only comments on the matter, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4544693), and yet for all that analysis and speculation, there were ever so few comments that came out fully in Aaron's support.

Then he takes his own life, and suddenly it's torches-and-pitchforks for the prosecuting team, it's "why didn't he ask for help", it's "this was unjust", it's "this was unfair", it's "why didn't he have more support". I felt saddened by the news, but I also felt a rising amount of bile for the HN community, and I'm glad that nikcub and Arrington have shone a light on this.
Basically it's a concise way to do a hard-coded table lookup. Tables are better for structurally regular code than if-else precisely because they restrict what that code can do.
Aaron Swartz and the rise of the hacktivist hero
Creating Responsive Websites with Photo Backgrounds
Huge cyber espionage campaign hits European government and diplomatic agencies
>> This assertion used to be thrown around as one of the supporting arguments for using OOCSS.

I've never seen selector performance used as an argument for OOCSS.

>> ...and so it was just making CSS less legible/maintainable for no real reward.

That's a pretty broad sweeping statement that I think you'd be very hard pressed to back up. OOCSS is all about maintainability. Legibility is debatable, but I've seen OOCSS examples that are just as legible, if not more so, than old-school CSS (leaning more on tagname selectors/DOM structure - if that is the opposing stand-point, sometimes it's hard to tell what OOCSS dissenters are really arguing against).
Thanks for the link. The grid is also helpful as a way to visualize things like:

(1 + a)^2 = 1 + 2a + a^2

There is a square with side 1+a, and the grid consists of four pieces, sizes 1, a, a, and a^2.

Thinking about approximations when a << 1, you can motivate why

(1 + a)^2 ~= 1 + 2a

really easily by imagining the grid you refer to.

In other words, keeping this grid picture in mind can be helpful to more mature mathematicians/physicists/engineers...probably more useful than the standard multiplication algorithm is.
119 days ago would have been Sspt. 17, several days before this Sept. 20 Ars Technica piece: "Feds go overboard in prosecuting information activist"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/feds-go-overboard...

(I'm not sure how well known the obstacles Aaron faced were besides this article, this just recently made the front page after his death)

Would reading this piece back then (or before Aaron's HN post) been enough to change people's mind? Honest question. Looking at the donation site that Aaron put together, I don't blame anyone for not immediately taking his side. He may have been intimately aware of what was going on in his case, but his defense fund site was too dependent on people automatically siding with him for who he is*.

edit: by this, I mean that some more narrative of what was going on would've been really helpful for the call-to-action
How To Remember Stuff You Have To Do
Rising open source ecosystem for multiple device categories
5 Reasons Your Emails aren't Getting Opened
forgive my ignorance, and I'm not familiar with ruby or ActiveSupport, but how does that solve the problem? Wouldn't different module's be expecting the method to be implemented in a certain way, and this would would have the method implemented, but not the version they expect?
This strategy has been working very well at DARPA.

http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Personnel/Mr_Peiter_Zatko....
http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Personnel/Mr_Daniel_Roelke...
You're overthinking it.

It's a pro forma activity that takes all of 30 seconds, and doing it now means they can close the case file sooner rather than later.
It's not the comment that makes the votes, it's the voters. I tend to view high "karma" comments as resonating with the geist. If they're pandering to the crowd, they're just giving the crowd what they want to hear. So, sure we can scapegoat the panderers, but the fingers should possibly point elsewhere.
What do you need to spend $10,000 per month on?
Are you referring to moral responsibility or legal responsibility? Let's make the distinction. And how do _you_ know who bears and doesn't bear _absolutely_ no responsibility?

I, for one, do not know what responsibility Ed bears, moral or otherwise. That's for Ed to determine. I do however find it harder and harder to respect people that when someone desperate asks for help, they get up on their high horse and emit absolute statements of the sort "you need to", "man up" and the like. Depression is a sickness and that by definition means you are not functioning normally. I am sure that Aaron would have "manned up" if he had the necessary mental strength.

I also don't have much respect for people that call their fellows, "clowns". So there. Wise up.
How could I miss that after all these years. Thank you.
CBS turned into a tool years ago. They have increasingly trended towards some sort of "Fox-lite".

Thus, I'm not surprised to find business concerns taking on the blatant editorial role described in this instance.
Interestingly, Gerstmann went on to found GiantBomb [1] as part of Shelby Bonnie's (CNET co-founder) Whiskey Media group with a whole bunch of ex-GameSpot people who left in the wake of Gerstmann's dismissal. GiantBomb was recently acquired by CBS and is now part of CBSi, with Gerstmann and the rest of the GiantBomb editorial and production team intact.

Gerstmann and GameSpot's John Davidson spoke quite candidly about the acquisition [2] at the time, including the thorny issue of Gerstman's previous departure from GameSpot. Makes for an interesting watch if you remember when the original scandal broke over the original Kane & Lynch review.

[1] http://www.giantbomb.com

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GagFPnSG0j4
Pick up "Javascript: The good parts" by Douglas Crockford and don't look back.
So, instead of saying nothing, why did he feel compelled to tell Aaron to 'man up'?

I have no idea why you're making excuses for him based on his not understanding the situation. Can't he speak for himself?
I'm willing to consider other view points, can you explain why?
I would think that you'd want to write it in a language such that it could be easily verified as doing what it's supposed to.

What do you mean by “robust enough to be used by a government”?
"Aaron should man up, take responsibility for his actions, and pay his own bills."

~Ed

Sounds like Ed was a bit harsh on someone who was going through allot of trouble. The comment was excessively cruel. Not to mention it was the top comment, which must of added large dosage of salt on an already wounded soul.

So he(Ed) rightfully deserves any criticism thrown at him.

It's such a tool bag comment, Ed should apologize. Your defending such a vitriolic comment, sorry but you sound like scum.
"a desktop computer should have a default state of off"

Different strokes for different folks I suppose... but I haven't turned a computer off except in specific circumstances (like I know a power cut is coming, or I'm not going to touch it in months) for years.

Before anyone says anything about power usage, I actually attached my computer to a power meter and did the math, and leaving a computer on standby instead of switching it off costs you an extra (in NZ) NZD$3.65 a YEAR. This is because "off" computers still use a bunch of power.. if you're really worried about your computer using up power while you're not using it, pull the plug out of the wall. Otherwise, standby is awesome.
USG, having become entirely inconsistent with its founding philosophy, the purported highest law of the land, and the People's will, has ceased being a legitimate government by or for the People.

I suggest you read up on your U.S. history. Despite its problems, the U.S. is the closest to its intended purpose than its ever been in history. Women, minority, and slaves were not citizens when this nation was founded; people did not directly elect their senators for several decades; free speech and freedom of religion was generally regarded as an "ideal," not an absolute right, until the start of the 20th century (or in the case of religion, until nearly WWII).