skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an interesting possible future. If all things are built from the same raw substance the supplier of that substance will be incredible wealthy and powerful. A new Carnegie in a global economy.

The next lower level of wealth will be the digital rights owners of commodity items. The rights owner of 'Shovel' will start a dynasty that will last for hundreds of years. They could potentially be powerful enough to extend copyright laws forever so that they continue to collect rent on the shovel.
Regardless of time served, do federal prosecutors not realize what the scarlet letter of a FELONY carved on your chest does to your ability to lead a normal life? Coupled with occasionally absurd bans from using/owning a computer or similar device for years (see: Kevin Mitnick) for anyone seen as a 'hacker', this absolutely destroys a person's life.

I can't imagine how hard finding an apartment in SF (already hard) becomes if you have to disclose that you're a convicted felon with time spent.
This is happening in Memphis (our hometown) in a few weeks. Would love to know who's coming to town!
Just to make sure we're on the same page: I'm talking about the externality of global warming, which at present is completely absent from the oil pricing system.

As a result, I'm not sure it's as simple as a straightforward efficiency calculation, because under a system where the consumer bears the currently externalised costs of burning fossil fuels, both the cost of flaring would go up, and the oil value captured by the drilling company would go down. I have no idea what a sane level for a carbon tax would be, and I'm certainly not economist enough to predict the ramifications for global fuels pricing; like I say, it may well work out that flaring remains cost-effective. But the costs of an action should be borne by the party that benefits, otherwise the incentives are, as I say, totally screwed.
Funny?

That's a little closer to how it should be. I'm so sick of the fear-saturated drivel that dominates much of 'common wisdom' surrounding employment: "dont' do this! don't do that! They may not like you!"

It's disgusting and emasculating to constantly be told that we have to neuter ourselves into this docile, submissive employee because otherwise our boss might decide he doesn't like us.
Are you referring to any high-altitude balloon projects (of which there are many dozens), or is there something specific about this project that you have an issue with?
Other commenters have pointed out that almost every major metro area gets called "the city" by its suburbanites, and that matches my observations of at least Seattle, DC, and Nashville. I've lived outside Seattle for 5.5 years and routinely hear it called "the city" by both locals and transplants.
Half of the Chrome Web Store uses Native Client, which doesn't work on ARM.
What a ridiculous thing to say. I never said it was ok to mug someone because they're rich.

(1) this is an organization, not a person

(2) they're not being 'mugged' (see below), it's us that are being mugged every time we want to read about some piece of research

(3) whether or not they 'need money' isn't a factor

(4) use of the word 'mugging' implies violence, which was not applicable here

The law has long recognized that there is such a thing as 'the public good' as well as 'the public domain'. That didn't stop Disney from getting rich over stories already in the public domain and it won't stop publishers from making money on content.

There is no innate right to wall off a chunk of human heritage and claim ownership, even though lobbying power and money have distorted the balance of power substantially.
If the best tool for the job is associated with an 'extreme philosophy' then what?
Chalk me up as dumbfounded as well. How you build a business model upon something so simple, easy to replicate, and (to me) value-less is a mystery.
You do realize that there are people outside of your little world that aren't leftists/socialists/fascists, right?
Don't worry about how anything compares to frameworks, because they don't matter anymore.

We think traditional frontend frameworks - whether of the rails/django variety or the backbone variety, are generally rubbish in a nearly infinite number of ways. It's a style of programming based on wrapping weak mutation oriented idioms behind monolithic APIs and design patterns. We think default functional style and fine grained composability is the future, and mutation + oo design patterns + frameworks is the past.
By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group.

"Blame" is an interesting concept though. In almost any complicated scenario, there is plenty of "blame" to be spread around and you can reasonably argue that multiple different entities are to "blame" for $WHATEVER.

To use a somewhat tangential example... when Ron Paul talked a lot about "blowback" vis-a-vis US policy in the Middle East a few years ago, people said "Ron Paul is blaming America for 9/11". Well, yes... and no. What Ron was saying, in essence, is that there is culpability in multiple places, which is a more nuanced position than "America is good, terrorists are bad, Team America, Fuck Yeah!" OR "We were responsible for 9/11".

So with that in mind... I don't exactly "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's suicide either. But that doesn't mean I don't think they hold some degree of responsibility, and it doesn't mean I support the status quo, or that I don't want changes made in the law, the sentencing guidelines and the behaviour of prosecutors.

IOW, it's not necessarily the case that either "side" bears 100% of the responsibility for what happened.
I will admit it makes the case that statistics are applicable, but I suppose I'd like to see Manhattan as an exception then rather than all of NYC.

Where are you getting this $28k figure from? BLS[1] more recently stated that the median wage was $758/wk in 2012 Q3 (~$40k/yr).

[1]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
Are we really not discussing this?
As for the high cost of living, try looking at it from a different angle. Instead of thinking about how much more you can get for your money elsewhere, ask why are all those other places worth so much less.

I'm not saying the math adds up to you needing to move to SF, NY, Boston, or other city. But this post helps explain why SF is valued so highly by the many people who choose to live in here.
The question was: "how does someone making $250k benefit more from government than someone making $30k living on welfare?" My point is that how you calculate how much you benefit from "government" (not bigger or smaller government, just government in general) is not just a function of direct services received, but the incremental gain in wealth going from no government to the government you have. Ergo, the fact that the guy making $250k in NYC would lose a lot more than the guy making $30k if there was no "government" he benefits more from the existence of "government."

This is not an argument about the desirability or optimality of bigger or smaller government or higher or lower taxes. That should be an empirical fight.
I am co-founder of a startup that have some products with kinda average traction (but no profit), and not enough money to finish our flagship product (but I think we can make a the rewrite of the demo... the first demo is on Google Play).

How I would convince a angel investor like you to help?
How to clip your fingernails in space without inhaling them
Sounds pretty awesome. I've used Runkeeper, but this realtime social aspect is really cool. Getting into their app marketplace would probably make for a nice spike in usage.
Learn Basic Programming So You Aren't At the Mercy of Programmers - Slashdot
Willie Horton is an inapt comparison for every scenario in which Ortiz would try to capitalize on her record that I can think of. Willie Horton was a spoiler, not a feather.
I think this article speaks to why the case is getting so much attention. Lets presume for the sake of argument the trial didn't contribute to the suicide in the slightest. But it did cause us to look at the case, and you can't just un-see the fact that maybe you're not entirely comfortable with the way justice is being carried out in your name.

We tend to trust in our legal system, one way or another. Even if that way is by ignoring it and assuming everything will sort itself out. Events like Aaron's suicide put it on your radar in a way that makes some of the public sit up and reexamine whether or not the power we have entrusted in others, to carry out our buisness, is being exercised as we would like it to be.

Something smells like bullshit about the case, and just because a prosecutor with political ambition can issue a cover-your-ass statement isn't entirely comforting when faced with the convoluted web that extends beyond her to the entire nature of justice in the country.

Welcome to being a citizen in a democracy, please stay engaged beyond this single case.

edited: speeling
I don't think I have head-nodded as much on any other article. Thanks for writing this up!
I thought most of the article was pretty spot on, except for the PBR being the drink of SF.

PBR is all over hipster bars in the Mission, but there are plenty of places where you can't get it (most bars in the rest of the city). The true drink of SF in my opinion is Fernet, which is heavily consumed by long time San Franciscans. Fernet has a long history in the Bay Area (SF is even listed in the Wikipedia page on Fernet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernet), and surprisingly it is stocked in almost every bar. I've personally had it in everywhere from the Kabuki movie theatre to bars in North Beach to the Mission.

TLDR: Fernet is the drink of SF.
To me interviews are like weddings. High expectations and not enough practice - a great setup for some memorable mishaps.

I'd just offer the following from lots of experience on both sides.

- Make sure to write down a sample input and output. Sounds simple, but is often not done and the cause of a lot of wasted time.

- After you're on the same page about the input and output, allow for a minute to think. Silence should be perfectly okay here.

- Always discuss the strategy and various options before implementing the solution.
We added a Github ribbon on the top right corner so hopefully now it is much easier to find the source code.
What falls into the riddle vs. "acceptable" role? In my mind, it's perfectly valid to ask, for instance, "Given a binary search tree, write a program to return all elements between a low and high." or "Write a program to return whether or not a given string matches a regular expression." Are these "riddles," as espoused by the article? Sort of: they do take some element of an "aha!" moment to solve, whereas the "recommended" questions were mainly just domain-knowledge questions. But if you solve these problems using convoluted coding techniques, then I as an interviewer would be really worried that you'd muddy our codebase unnecessarily, and if you can't see how to solve them, I may discover that you have a problem thinking recursively, or logicing through complex issues. Or, I may find that you tend to dive into a problem before thinking about it and designing your solution. All of these seem fairly relevant to any job, and I've actually turned down employers that asked me too many "domain-knowledge" questions and not enough "how do you think about things" questions, because I don't want to be somewhere where I'm just expected to "know" the answer.
I didn't like the sound of that when I first heard about it. Now I am dead set against it. Politics and the justice system have no business being connected like this in any way.

The system is so horribly compromised in the US it's hard to see how it can be meaningfully fixed. What a mess.
God forbid, the mom might actually have to skip one luxury D&G bag this year! OH THE HUMANITY!

But seriously, though, $260k single mom? What alternate universe do the editors live in?
If you really want to know what the maker revolution will look like, visit https://tindie.com, the site I started. Tindie is the marketplace for the 'makers' the author references. We have robots, custom chips, amps, synths - all at the highest quality made by single makers.

The author is missing is actual knowledge of how the manufacturing process works for maker products. Because of that, he or she is left making an assumption that the majority of products will be poor quality - when Tindie actually proves the opposite. The majority of our products are at the highest quality, and that is because of the accessibility of modern manufacturing.

That is why the maker revolution is powerful. One maker can make a product, design it, manufacture it, and sell it all from their garage.
Most (all?) TVs being sold today support HDMI, so I think the thought is that children don't have to buy a monitor too and can just plug these into their parents TV.
I interviewed a candidate that had quite an alphabet soup and buzzword compliant resume. He was pretty much convinced he was the world's greatest programmer.

I asked him if he could talk through how he would write a function that showed if an unsorted-array contained consecutive integers with no gaps and no duplicates. He said he never claimed he was a math major and that such a problem was unfair to ask. In other words, he had no idea what to do.

But what was interesting was that this same guy could answer questions about the O(n) complexity of algorithms and explain how to write quicksort. Apparently, his pre-interview preparation involved memorizing that in hopes we would be dumb enough to mistake that for competence.

If you are hiring a baseball player, you don't hire someone that that can rattle off baseball statistics or that talks about how they read about baseball for 4 years at college, you hire someone that can play baseball. Well, I am hiring a programmer. I don't care if memorized the names of design patterns; I care whether you can you actually use them.
No, only in your little fantasy world
Nice! Will add it to the portuguese Python compendium i'm working on in my spare time https://gist.github.com/32d09bb884b3428c8fa7
As long as they spent, gave away or hid their ill gotten gains, it would still be out of reach of law suits.
I grew up in the South West. I don't miss hundred-plus degree summers, burning my hands on steering wheels and the backs of my legs on car seats. I don't miss the asphalt being tacky because of the heat, or the sandy, sticky, salt-encrusted feeling after spending a day running errands, alternating between air conditioned interiors and sun-baked exteriors.

I certainly understand why other people might not enjoy the perpetual cold, damp, and fog of San Francsico. But every time I need to add another blanket at night, or put on a jacket during the day, or close the window against a chilly July evening, I give a happy, contented, slightly chilly sigh.
All I want is a whole lot of excess
Two million dollars to design an open-source GPU on Kickstarter? Seems like an obviously great idea, assuming that the people behind it are competent enough GPU design, and that a mere $2m is actually enough. And that the project wouldn't be patent-litigated into the ground, of course.
> Set up a time to Skype call me, cancel hours before the call, send an email 2 days later saying the job was filled before my interview. Black listed

> Tell me on the phone interview that I will be called in for the face to face, send me an email 2 weeks later saying the job was filled. Black listed

I don't really see what's wrong with this.
Consider this from the companies perspective...

They've got an interview scheduled but decide they've found their candidate. They cancel your interview out of curtosy to you.

They then wait for the candidate to accept the offer and then tell you that the job was filled.

That sounds like the company was actually acting like a good citizen here.

What's your major beef with this?
Hope I'm not repeating something already mentioned in this large discussion, but here's another thing to add to that list:

Once you live in San Francisco for a few years, it will become difficult to move elsewhere. You get used to all the cons mentioned. You will start loving running in the 6pm chill, the cultural diversity and the intellectual similarity, the feeling of living in slightly in the future compared to the rest of the world...
>But defending principle was not [his lawyer's job]. It was to provide Swartz with the best legal advice, given the charges and the government’s refusal to back down.

...
Hah, I thought exactly the same. Even out here in Sacramento people call it "The City" (fair enough, Sacramento is just a big-ass, boring suburban sprawl)
Ruby 1.9.3-p374 is released
Interesting glimpse of the nuances of the Broadcom/Raspberry Pi Foundation relationship.
I figure won't be sending your resume. Your loss ;)
You are correct. There are regulations you must follow. To the best of my knowledge, I was in line with them.

NOAA has been doing this for years and launches ~75,000 per year. (According to another statistic I saw, 800 of them are released worldwide very day. That's nearly 300,000 per year.)

I'm glad you are aware of the Big Sky theory, as that is what I would have pointed you to.

If someone does intend to do this, a call to the FAA letting them know beforehand would not harm anyone. I didn't, but should have.
I will give it to you that those special days where it remains 75 throughout the entirety of the day are pretty awesome. However, in 18 months here, I can count those on two hands, and the days where it was comfortable in shorts/tshirt until 8-10 at night number at probably 2.
Yeah, they totally knew what they were doing. Hence the smooth scaling up to filling the demand for 100,000 on the first day. I remember my personal smooth shopping experience.
The fact that it's HTTP slows this down a bunch too. With a normal client you'd have the TCP connection already made.
Google buys new home at London's Kings Cross
I think it's because most people don't really consider the metropolitan area to have anything to do with the city itself. For New York, parts of Jersey and Connecticut count as the metropolitan area, but you'd never say New York and mean New Haven.

With that in mind, Boston is 600k or so people, which is tiny in city terms.
There is nothing at all suspicious about what has changed. Skepticism has grown to the point where it is now actually somewhat believable. Six months ago a story about collapsing orders would have been laughed away, whereas now it gets a serious reading because it seems actually possible. Share prices are a speculation about the future, and Apple's heights have an inherent growing risk factor with them.
MK808 is really great.. been running it for about a month or so and have had no issues with it.
Texas used to not have a business income tax, but in 2006, a business "margin" tax was enacted that is pretty much the same thing.

http://heartland.org/sites/default/files/03-02-12_drenner-le... (PDF)
Having kids has also changed my perspective on this. I've been taking my kids to a sports field near a playground for the past few years, and so far, the incidence of off leash dogs has been 100%, even though there is a dedicated off leash space right next door. Most of the dogs have been very friendly, but occasionally you do get an unknown very large and powerful off leash dog bounding up to a 3 foot tall kid. This is all next to a well posted sign about leash laws, though I have never seen any enforcement.

I've heard this is frustrating for other dog owners as well. There are a lot of people whose dogs need to be socialized better and they try to keep them on leash, and it's pretty much impossible to go to an open space without off leash dogs.

I'm still 100% in favor of creating a lot of excellent off leash areas, and most dog owners are considerate. But it does frustrate me that enforcement is so lax that there is pretty much nowhere in SF that isn't used as an off leash area.

BTW, if you're moving to SF, "dog wars" are definitely something you'll get used to. Lots of emotion in SF around this one.
Frankly at the moment, we're not using any external clojurescript libraries; we've tried many, but none quite meet our needs or the style we really like. We're internally phasing out jQuery selectors in favor of some code that we'll be releasing once we know it's battle-hardened and ready.

We don't use an MVC or components type framework, but ideas about how to setup those abstractions are percolating.
HDMI and DVI-D are essentially the same minus audio, so assuming your monitor supports DVI-D and not just DVI-A, you can buy an HDMI->DVI cable from monoprice for less than 5 bucks.

Converting to VGA is pricier because of the D->A conversion required.
I've read many of your comments and am glad you've been posting them. They're well-written and well-reasoned, and I hope you stick around in the future and continue to speak your mind with the freedom that your current format seems to be providing. The combination of legal and technical expertise is valuable and rare.

That being said, your comments seem to me to pooh-pooh the impact of what the prosecutors/system did in this case as (a) standard practice and (b) not that big a deal. Most people here (well, I anyway) did not know much about this and, having learned it, feel that it is a big deal. This makes me wonder whether your senses have been dulled by taking too much of that standard practice for granted. Maybe the people here to whom this is new and disturbing are not the only ones experiencing "radical loss of perspective".

It's straightforward to explain why Aaron's story has had such an impact on this and similar communities: he is easy for many of us to identify with, so the shock has a personal effect. This isn't hypocritical, it's human nature: one takes in this kind of information through the emotional medium of a story one can identify with. There's no contradiction between that and learning that a great many less-advantaged people get treated far more abusively still – quite the opposite.

Setting aside the obviously dumb comments as a cost of doing business on a public forum such as this, I am also pretty sure that people here are not nearly as naive about Aaron's personal history as your critique and the GP's suggest. Taste enters into this.
Not only are Seattle rents substantially lower, but state taxes in Washington are ZERO, compared to roughly 10% in California.
Maybe it's just me but it seems to me that it would be more likely that someone would get their hands on an inexpensive used monitor to tinker with instead of using the family TV. An inexpensive monitor would also allow you to set up basically anywhere in the house.

I know when I was growing up I would not have been able to tinker using the TV for very long before someone else in the family would want to use the TV.
Doesn't make much of a difference for the Boston/Bay Area comparison, but I think the combined statistical areas are more indicative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Combined_Statistical_Ar...
I still don't get why folks don't consider living in places just outside of SF that are much more affordable. Places such as South San Francisco, Daly City, Brisbane, Oakland, etc. The proximity to the city is very close (5-10 mins).
New clean infinite energy?
Can anyone with more knowledge of the subject comment on this? Is this feasible as a new energy source or is it a hoax?
Most people weren't on his side because the most harsh details of the case were not easily visible to those not directly involved with the case.

If that had been different I think a lot more people would have support Aaron earlier.
It makes me angry when privileged people don't demonstrate compassion. I have trouble demonstrating compassion for them. You're right, I don't have fun at parties full of such people, and I've been to a few.

But you're also right that I need to lighten up. Attacking people out of the blue like I just did is not good for one's health, and it has little positive effect on the world. I have pretty poor social skills.