skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, and if you looked carefully you'll notice that he didn't actually do anything until he was threatened with spending a life in jail and being bankrupted, without the option to get off without pleading guilty.

And all that for trying to do something good.

You describe yourself as a 'public interest lawyer'. I suggest you try to live up to that title and have the public interest at heart. The subject of your little rant definitely had the public interest at heart. At least go and read up a bit more about what actually happened, it's not as if there is a shortage of information.
So you think 20-30 years in prison for downloading digital content is a just punishment?
There are a few Chrome extensions for browser history visualization mentioned at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-cool-chrome-browser-extension...

There's also the Eyebrowse project http://www.creativeapplications.net/webapp/eyebrowse-webapp/
I've heard that PC stores are seeing plenty of people interested in windows 8 but walking away when they learn that current laptops don't have touch screens.

I think microsoft underestimated the incompetence of the PC vendors. They sort of assumed that the surface would set the bar for touch devices, and that this meant PC buyers this holiday season would be getting a good touch experience. I don't think they considered it a possibility that the PC vendors largely wouldn't bother with touch (aside from some token devices at the luxury end of the price range). It's like the PC vendors collectively gave up and decided they didn't much care for selling new PC's.

Anyway, we'll see what happens this year. Once the majority of PC's for sale are touch-enabled you could see a turnaround for windows 8, but that really hinges on ability to execute from the PC manufacturers.
MIT has a sad history with regards to suicide. As a result, the administration is usually much more sensitive and self-aware when it comes to suicide-related incidents.
I occasionally walk a few blocks when I'm mentally stuck on something. Usually that's all it takes. I find that going for a walk minimizes external demands and maximizes the mental resources that can be turned inward. It also provides a nominal purpose that allows my mind to abandon its direction and wander out of whatever cul-de-sac it was stuck in.

When I was in high school and college, though, I used to drive to think. It was partly to do with growing up in Texas (a big, spread-out state with lots of straight, empty highways) and also partly to do with privacy. If I wanted privacy, I would go out on the highway and drive. Living with parents, and later with roommates, a car was the only place where I knew that I wouldn't be bothered. In a small town, walking means making yourself conspicuous, which isn't conducive to contemplation. You have to be in a dense city or a rural area to achieve solitude through walking.

Given that driving used to serve the same purpose for me, I wonder if the physical effects of walking are important. For me, the most important factor was suspending the constant vigilance of being around other people. Always knowing you could be interrupted, knowing you might need to put on a mask at a moment's notice, how can you really think? Walking and driving require a very low level of engagement with the outside world, but some engagement, which intermittently rises and falls as you encounter interesting sights or an occasional challenge such as a puddle to walk around, another car on the road that must be paid attention to, or a choice of going right or left. (Driving in the city usually doesn't work. Safety demands too much attention.) If I were to name the most important factors, I would include solitude, freedom from vigilance, and occasional non-threatening interruptions of one's train of thought.
- Hacking Cisco Phones - http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5400-en-hackin...

- Writing a Thumbdrive from Scratch - http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5327-en-writin...
While it's clearly true that he suffered from depression of some sort, you can't separate that from the fact that he was actively being persecuted. What the DOJ and MIT did was wrong, and it would be wrong even if Aaron was still alive today.
It is worth perhaps pointing out that suicide is, unfortunately, something that MIT and its' peers have to deal on a regular basis. It is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that MIT has appointed a faculty member to independently investigate whether their actions were appropriate.
I am fully aware of the differences between weak typing and dynamic languages.

The issue I have with dynamic languages with types is that the type is usually inferred based on the operation. It's very easy to make mistakes and for those mistakes not to be apparent until the shit hits the fan.

Fully statically typed languages put these concerns right in your face and make you think about them.
Why We Should Remember Aaron Swartz
I didn't find any.
I wish there was a list of algorithms like this for solving any problem. I jumped right into genetic algorithms (for solving problems in a large search space) but many problems are much easier than they seem.
Show HN: Official Aaron Swartz remembrance site is now CC-licensed, open source
"Aaron Swartz was mentally ill and committed suicide as a direct result of his mental illness. He comtemplated suicide in 2007 long before any of this DOJ stuff happened."

But he didn't do it then, did he? It's absurd to think that these things are completely unconnected. (Look at the timing, for one thing.) A severely depressed person is perhaps more likely to commit suicide than a person who is not severely depressed, but that's no reason to think that the actions of a severely depressed person (in relation to suicide or, for that matter, anything else) are independent of what else is going on in his or her life.

It's furthermore frankly insulting to think that (a) anyone is glorifying his suicide (or did you miss the many suicide hotline links, links to posts saying "don't do what Aaron did", etc., on the front page yesterday?), or that (b) someone who is already depressed/suicidal hasn't already engaged in some suicidal ideation.

(Who would commit suicide in order to get attention? You can't get attention when you're dead.)
Prosecutors and politicians would respond the same way if a group so critical to their existence became enraged at their actions (think reporters or donors). MIT wouldn't be MIT without their stature in the tech community - precisely the people (and perhaps the only people) who care passionately about this.
Hetzner introduces new managed server models
I doubt they have central heating in hand made houses. It's usually limited to apartment blocks in cities.
Nokia's Low-End Asha Is Outselling Lumia Two to One
Saw this in Singapore a month ago. Clever and interesting, though I thought the commentary alongside the work wasn't very deep. Worth checking out if it's easy and affordably priced.
Yea, when you step off the plane and get that first taste (yes, taste) and smell of Beijing air, ick.

I dodged this one by a single day, ha. Literally the day after I left it went from a week of sun (unheard of) to <30m visibility. Can't really be too happy, because I'm still sick with a sinus infection right now.
Yes but conversion and over the wire, it becomes a pain in the arse as a language extension.
Lab - A stupid testing framework for PHP
Yes and they are cumbersome.
>"he was threatened with spending a life in jail and being bankrupted, without the option to get off without pleading guilty."

...I don't quite understand this. Surely he did have an option to "get off without pleading guilty" - to be found not guilty by a jury of his peers.
On the heels of my post yesterday regarding Parody (http://www.github.com/dotink/parody), I am releasing Lab.
Many people are discussing the future of research sharing right now. As one of the largest platforms on the web for sharing research, and since someone submitted this link (not me), it seems appropriate to give our view on how we think about the future of science.

We are working tirelessly on achieving this mission, and appreciate the interest and the feedback.
Social care doesn't require custody.

See http://www.mind.org.uk/mental_health_a-z/8042_mental_health_... for an explanation of (in the UK, at least) the rights for those with mental health issues in prosecutorial circumstances.
While it's painful that this is happening now and not a year ago, I'm heartened that Hal is heading the internal investigation. I can't imagine anyone better.

He was a major supporter of Star Simpson when most of the MIT administration hung her out to dry. He has as good a chance as anyone at understanding Aaron's goals in liberating JSTOR's archive: he's a founding director of the FSF, Creative Commons, and Public Knowledge. He led the creation of MIT's OpenCourseWare and the class Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier.

He's also just a deeply good guy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Knowledge
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/
"...with the downside of using frequencies that are easily blocked by walls. Even thin cubicle walls may block signals, Wilocity acknowledged. "
I have to disagree with that. We've got largely the same story and the same discussion happening ten times over, but I would feel bad about flagging them under the circumstances. I wish HN would get back to normal - and social conventions make me feel bad about thinking that, even though I never knew the guy, he was one of thousands of strangers to die that day.
Say that to Aaron's family, who themselves blamed MIT and the prosecutors.
Are you being satirical?
I've found myself feeling the same way since 2008 about the news. After 9/11, I was consumed by talk radio, talking heads, blogs of varying opinions, but ultimately found that I wasn't being more useful and informed...I was becoming angry, quick to judge, and worst of all, less intelligent and analytical with my decisions.

Being in the tech field, we're trained daily to evaluate competing, languages, and technologies not only on their own merits, but how closely they relate to our way of thinking. Most importantly, we tend to be willing to accept this change.

Since no longer being immersed in news, I spend time reading thins of value that either make me feel good, or something that I can apply for the betterment of myself or others. When elections come about, I do my research, cast a vote, and perhaps contact the office of the elected when news trickles down to me about a bill I want input on.
Been burned by this myself, because while the person that created the ID knew it was a string, the person using it down the line thought it looked like a number and treated it like one.

My advice is to store those ID's with a leading "$" character or something similar. Removes the temptation to treat them like numbers.
I'm impressed with this response. Two quick notes:

1) President Reif is brand new in the role -- the majority of events would have happened under Susan Hockfield, the previous president. It makes sense that he would want a report of what happened previously since he wasn't here yet.

2) Professor Abelson is a very well respected member of the MIT community, and the fact that he is heading up the investigation leaves me comforted. He's helped me before in the past and is so incredibly smart and kind hearted I can't think of a better guy for the job.
Hi everyone. You can find the link to the code here: https://github.com/rememberaaronsw/rememberaaronsw. You can read more about our reasoning here: http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/about/.

We wanted something that would be open-source, easy to hack on, leveraged the technologies Aaron worked on, and Creative Commons-licensed. If you'd like to submit a memory of Aaron or a general improvement to the site, please do so via pull request. In particular, if anyone can think of a clever way to make it easier to contribute to, perhaps via pull requests generated in Javascript using Github's CORS support or something similar, we'd love your support.

I apologize that it doesn't use web.py; I'm just not a Python hacker, and we wanted to get something out there quickly. If you'd like to help pull it in somehow, that'd be great.
Aaron Swartz Died Innocent — Here Is the Evidence
I completely disagree with Aaron, but I respect his opinion. Reading the news is incredibly important, and it shapes your understanding of culture and circumstances outside your social bubble, which in turn affects your future social interactions.
Nice job here. Any way to direct link the pdfs or get people to submit their URL to Google for indexing?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url
Note that Hal Abelson, the professor being tasked with investigating, used to run a class called Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier. He's also the coauthor of SICP.
Nature VS Nurture.

Both play a part.

Aaron's high expectations for himself sure made it hard for him to live up to them and be satisfied with whatever he was doing but....

Nurture plays a role in suicide. In this case, the Feds were definitely trying to stop this beautiful flower from growing.

It was having trouble on his own.

What they should have done, the "appropriate" thing to do, as Larry put it was to cut the weeds nearby and any sick branches he may have had. JSTOR apparently death with it pretty well and tied to cut off the sick branches that Aaron had on him.

No one has gloried the suicide either. He will just truly be missed. AND it is especially sad that he was put in a situation that was blown out of proportion and tried to crush him. It could happen to you.

Say you're in Cancun and some people find you having sex in public and then throw some cocaine at you, trying to accuse you of drug smuggling but it just so happens you don't have the money or the connections to ward them off. (This is everyday life in Latin America)
MIT involved the feds in the first place. That was a decision made by authorities on campus, one which was not inevitable. So yes, they do decide prosecution strategy, by deciding when there should be prosecution at all.
> I am a state level prosecutor who specializes in domestic violence. I prosecute individuals for crimes and see myself as an advocate for victims, particularly victims of domestic violence. Public interest as it relates to the legal field includes prosecutors, public defenders, ACLU lawyers, and lawyers for causes similar to Aaron's.

So, how do you feel about a prosecutor that throws the book at a guy that wants nothing more than to improve the world and does what he can with the skills that he's given?

Does 35 years in prison and a ridiculous amount of money to defend yourself against a federal suit of which the aggrieved party wants no part make sense to you?

Do you feel that the prosecutor had 'no options' here or do you believe there was an element of discretion involved?

It would be really convenient if we could just say 'oh, Aaron killed himself because he was mentally ill', especially for all those in positions similar to yours. But as a person that is a lot more stable than Aaron I have to admit that I have no idea how I would react to being pushed by the system to this extent.

What should surprise us is that there are people that the system can waltz over like this that do not start to consider extreme options.
Better in what way? Less caring? More apathetic?

I think we should have been better than this too... I think we should have been up in arms while Aaron was still alive. It was wrong then too, but easier to dismiss because it was someone else' fight.
Thoreau: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
This is about JS having a non existent numerical stack. A statically typed language which only had floats would have the same issues.
Except he was guilty, and didn't stand a chance in an actual trial. This part's not even controversial - Aaron was evidently fighting laws that he believed were unjust. The fact that he violated them is not in question.

And a court would have no choice but to find him guilty, as that is the purpose of the judiciary. A court cannot let someone walk after a crime simply because the law itself is unjust.
It went to the 'allmit' list (http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/allmit) which goes to "all current students (including incoming freshman and graduate students, special and cross-registered students) and all employees listed in the MIT directory or with SAP status=active" which is upwards of 22,000 people.
> Surely he did have an option to "get off without pleading guilty" - to be found not guilty by a jury of his peers.

1. That would have bankrupted him anyway.

2. He was guilty, as far as the law book is concerned.
most probably

Which means "maybe." The government should have to fight for these things, not have them handed a victory through sheer intimidation in the form of a plea bargain.
It’s up on the MIT website too: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/letter-on-death-of-aaron-...
nope. the outpouring is motivating places like MIT to look into their actions, and others to look into the actions of the US Attorney. that's not 'nothing.'

looking the other way in order not to encourage copycats doesn't sound right.

a Chinese official would say media attention just encourages people to set themselves on fire in Tienanmen Square, so we should pay no heed to them or to root causes.

fair warning to would-be suicides, if you're not an Internet / tech leader HN isn't going to front-page you.

the media circus surrounding mass killers is more problematic.
So from what I've read, he had the option to plead guilty to some charges and I'm sure spend very little time in jail, but he didn't want to plead guilty at all. He had options.
Thanks. The twitter API gives t.co links, so next step will be to crawl the sites/documents and get a little more data from them as well as purge the blogs which got past the filter. From there we can use 'do follow' links to let search engines find the documents.
I agree with you. It feels this defense is akin to saying, "Why bother reading history, it has nothing to do with me"
Well objectively MIT did play a role, but whether the role was ethically right or wrong is a separate question. So the letter by itself does not admit anything, and we'll have to wait for the results of the investigation.
It's nothing personal, the sheer thinness of this apology calls the whole incident into question.
Woww this is strong.

As many this week-end I have thought about it a lot. I don't know what factor his problems with the DOJ weighed in his decision to commit suicide. But I know few things, when he committed his actions he was very young, moreover what he did is certainly not criminal. The system must be fair must be proportional and balanced. This is a remainder that there is a difference between a citizen taking an action and a system, you can not compare both. The system has an history, has some experience and knows that the decisions it take may affect life of human beings. This is life and deaths decisions. When you represent the justice you can not decide on your own that you want to make an example or that you will seek the harshest penalties possible, you must be fair you must think about the consequences of your decisions, your are responsible, you have duties. I think the persons in charge of this case failed in this regard.
I don't understand the relevance of the link.
The sanest comment I've read regarding HN's reaction to this tragic story.
Megaupload’s Planted Evidence Allegations are Baseless, U.S. Says
Anger is one stage many will go through in the process of coping with such an immense loss.

It may be irrational, but it's only human. Humans aren't logical all the time.

Furthermore, on HN at least, your "we" seems to actually be "a vocal minority of us", and by no means represents the pervasive sentiment. I think overall, we're angry at the machine, not the cogs in it. Certainly I am.

In time those of us who mourn Aaron's passing will hopefully channel that anger into productive change. But until then, judging a community's reasonableness in the wake of a tragedy like this is setting a really, really high bar. Emotions. We've all got 'em, even hackers.
That's really a shame. Similar to that story on how thieves stole only Apple devices from a Microsoft campus. People love to pile on to Microsoft, but it looks like, ever so slowly, since the Xbox launched there's some actual ingenuity and design within the company that's finally pushing through their old image. (If people would let it)
As a diversionary tactic.
As nice as the speed is, I think the real application is docking stations for mobile devices - think iPhone, android, etc. I take my mobile device with me, put it near a wigi router and all of a sudden I have a wireless keyboard mouse monitors etc all hooked up. No wires required. No setup, nothing!! Very cool for portability!! My friend comes over and they just bring their devices to the table and were using another mobile device fully integrated. The mobile device is a portable brain. Very cool!!
There is nothing that indicates that the bid protest has anything to do with open source. It's highly likely the previous contractor would be protesting no matter what the bid winner proposed.
Besides always having something to talk about when meeting with people, reading the news is an exercise in critical thinking and analysis. Distilling a narrative from various sources about remote subjects is a skill that is applicable to yourself. If you can understand the narratives you hear on you may gain the skills to understand your immediate circumstances.

tl;dr Critical thinking is good for you!
I usually listen to slow tempo piano jazz or rainymood.com
The effect of this would be the government would be prosecuting either cheapest cases (read: defendants most likely to be intimidated, confused and railroaded with minimal effort, including weak, mentally unstable, drug addicts, etc.) or very high-profile cases on which careers are made. Other ones would be completely neglected due to high costs and low cost/benefit ratio, or delegated to the cheapest personnel government service can find.

Since pleading out is much less expensive that jury trial, the current trend of forcing defendant to plead out will become overwhelming - basically, a mere fact jury trial would mean complete failure for a prosecutor ("you let that sucker have jury trial and cost our department whole next year budget?! good luck getting promotion anytime this century!"). They would behave accordingly - given that by now we have 5000 federal crimes and more will be inevitably created just for this purpose, standard scenario would be "we got you for 95 counts of federal crimes, summarily you could get 280 years in jail. Even if jury throws out 90% of them, you are still in for 30 years. How about accepting this one 2 year charge on the cheap and we are done here and now?"

Also, government wouldn't usually spend a million. Locking down someone's assets costs nothing do the government. Setting excessive bail and denying him opportunities to defend himself is also very cheap. So this measure would create incentive to concentrate on such methods of winning the case - why bother with expensive forensics if you can bankrupt him with asset forfeiture and he'd have no money to pay for a lawyer that would ask questions requiring expensive forensics?
It's not the question of money, unfortunately. It's the question of vastly asymmetric power.