skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their 3 points seem fairly clear to me. I'd assume assistance would be some kind of technical help? Being in communication with Assange is also pretty clear, and the third point is necessarily vague.

Did you want to see the commits and email logs?

I think the point they're making is that if Wikileaks were aware of these (possible) facts then other actors could be too.
Two points:

1) "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - Feynman

Most smart scientists and engineers I know (not just web programmers) work on their problems due to some combination of: they enjoy the problem, they're scratching their own itch, they get prestige from doing the problem, and they make good money doing it. Even the ones that are working on "important" problems.

2) Sometimes it's hard to see the downstream effects of what we do. By improving ad targeting, maybe Google has enough cash to reinvest in something like self-driving cars, which ends up saving untold numbers of real lives in the future.

By spending time on planetary motion (seems pretty useless) in addition to alchemy (eternal youth and unbounded riches? clear winner), Newton has helped solve more "important problems" than anyone could dream to.

Summary: The incentives of people that work in science and engineering are generally far from altruistic. We don't really know enough about the impact of the stuff we do to be able to say what's important.
The timeline asserted by the Wikileaks's #2 statement, "Aaron Swartz was in communication with Julian Assange, including during 2010 and 2011," implies that Aaron tried to collaborate with someone who was in massive legal trouble himself at a time when, by all accounts, Aaron was freaked out about the impending charges he faced.

That would seem especially reckless of Aaron.
Instead of partying they should have been monitoring bandwidth, load and user experience.

2 hours to upload a 5k file and after 12 hours on a 2gb file it stuck at 12% and never moved again.

I give up on using it for now maybe I’ll try next week.
I'd like to know some of those as well...
It isn't the argument's validity, but the source's trustworthiness. These are related but not the same; the source's trustworthiness is a contributing factor to whether or not I want to spend (waste?) the time verifying the validity.
you're a pretty big crybaby.
I would say that is incorrect. A well versed attacker is going to have absolutely no issue finding your 'new' SSH port. Why do you think this is a security measure? As for shared keys... they also have their drawbacks. Someone can forget their shared key in the wrong place and suddenly you have an extremely easy entry-point into perhaps EVERY single server in an environment.

Use shared keys like you would salt, sparingly and with lots of care and knowledge of how to use it.
I can only speak from my perspective, but the main reason I'd only click on ones that are near me is because I live in NZ, and there is little point me seeing a bunch of jobs in the valley, unless they're big fans of people working from home in vastly differing timezones.

(move to the states you say? I'm not a fan of your bread. Sorry.)
Agile & DevOps at Scale at Gap
It should be noted that "What Do You Care ..." is comparatively more serious than "Sure You're Joking ...". Two of the longest sections involve the death of his wife during Feynman's days at Los Alamos, and the investigation of the Challenger crash.
...wow, this turn my mind into believing Arial looks better than Helvetica most of the time! Blasphemy!!!
I think the point is that there are many people who work on the clicking ads part, arguable moreso than the search part.

I understand that the NYT needs a paywall and ad networks to survive, I just hope that most of the staff spends their time on the journalism, not on the ad network.
... and in general, type-checking is simply not something that slows compilers down.

[C++ is something of a red-herring, I think: although it's one of the most famous statically-typed languages, and has a reputation for slow compilation, that has much more to do with its include-based model than it does with static typing.]
Hope that you guys like it!
To me the suggestion that his targeting for prosecution was as a result of his alleged involvement with Wikileaks.

Mashable may be leaving the 'not suicide' conspiracy theory open but I don't think that is what Wikileaks are suggesting.
As would I.

I don't assume they _are_ tightly integrated - all the article claims is 'eight people'.

These could be crack coders. Or they could be '1 guy who kinda knows VB and 7 people learning OJT'.
Any tips for compilation on Mac OS X?

20:23:46 $ gcc piwm.c -o piwm -lX11 -lXrandr
ld: library not found for -lX11
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
How To Fake Being A Nerd
Definitely signed up for this. Should be really interesting.
I think this is cheap and tacky on the part of Wikileaks. Regardless of whether Aaron was or wasn't a source for them, they're trying to take some of the widespread positive public sentiment towards Aaron for their own cause.
This is a good use of types; one of my favorites, perhaps.

It's also one I implemented with relative ease in Python. The error is deferred, but other than that the implementation works equally well. Once again the question is whether up-front errors are worth static typing, and once again the answer is a preference.
"'M.I.T. had to identify the hacker and assist with his apprehension in order to prevent further abuse,' the government argued in court."

Or they could have just tried talking to him and giving him a verbal warning.
1) "Smart" and "educated" are not the same.

2) Your successes are commendable, but they do not prove that any John Doe can solve the "Big Problems" your parent spoke of. Historically speaking, at least in physics the "Big Problems" have been solved by extremely smart people. Not just people who refuse to quit.

We may be talking about different "Big Problems" though. I'm thinking of DNA, e=mc^2, the cure for cancer, etc. I don't want to be rude, but I don't think the "Big Problems" of our day will be solved by apps.
This was created for comments like that: https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says
I wonder what "activity from China" was.

Also, looks like this went all the way up to the Chancellor, so it's not as if it was just the libraries or someone pushing for this.
No, but the likelihood of the argument having any value is greatly reduced if the person themself doesn't believe in it enough to actually follow the argument.

I doubt there is a high likelihood of a meaningful conversation from someone who is screaming "Why doesn't Google stop working on stupid problems and fix this, while I continue working on my own stupid problems".
Yes, submissions with text will be caught by the 'ask' filter.
Good System, Bad System (2008)
You're obviously a smart dude.

Nothing more annoying than a good person who wants to claim how bad they have it.
fantastic! thanks
The greatest minds aren't necessarily selling ads, either. This came up in a comment thread about 6 months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4347948
So totally agree. Especially when I learned of how many young type 1s have eating disorders because they think they must be fat :(
That was my first reaction: -if- this were true, it would 'help' the DoJ 'explain' why the prosecution was so vigorous. (Tying Swartz to something they've spent years bad-jacketing.) A similar move is the claim he FOIA'd tapes of Manning in custody. Looks like the Big FUD Machine's running.
I think you totally missed the point: geography generated higher clicks on this ad because people were overwhelmingly more interested in the location of a job than what it was for.

Because Diabetes AutoMeters Inc™ that Raganwald thinks should get the engineering energy isn't located in the valley, it won't attract engineers from the valley. Similarly, because so many ad-driven companies are in the valley, many of the engineers that want to be (or already are) in the valley tend to end up working on advertising stuff.
Bread? Really?
So MIT installed a security camera and pressed charges because they knew that when their unwanted network guest was finally unmasked, that it would be someone who had secretly been in touch with Julian Assange?
> especially as his supporters attempt to portray his work as benign and altruistic.

Are you implying some kind of contrast?
She is silenced in my back pocket (divorce poem)
"The war became total, and patriotic citizenry in belted uniforms provided the fodder for cannons. In this sense, the belted trousers were inevitable. They are the very essence of modernity, crowning 300 years of advanced political thought."

Love it.
Let me guess - you're a male in your mid-twenties or maybe early thirties? (me too!) Once you start having a family, kids, house, etc., you're going to be far less inclined to bounce around the country or world for your job, even if those factors you mention would mean a subjectively better job.
The people visiting only see staged theatrics, it doesn't do a whole lot of good.
This is a problem I have wrestled with on several occasions and the solution I choose is the lein-localrepo plugin.
Actually solving diabetes would make you a lot of money. This is almost certainly accurate. But-

Let me put it this way. How many people do you know that have made it big selling out to a MegaCorp? Not many, I'm sure, but now how many people do you know that have cured diabetes?

Even though making it big in the startup world is not a sure thing, curing diabetes is even less of a sure thing.
That last portrait really nails home the point that artistic ability isn't something innate, it requires work and dedication just like anything else. I think a lot of engineering-minded people (myself included) have this view of art as something that is inaccessible because they lack talent, but Feynman shows that that isn't really the case.
What Is Middle Class in Manhattan?
Yes! https://github.com/saltstack/salt
While Ohloh[1] says we have had 240 unique contributors over the past 12 months, we are always looking for new ways to use and extend the project. Feel free to hop on #salt on irc.freenode.net and ask questions, ask on the salt-users google group, or just fork the projects and sling us a pull request.

Disclaimer, I am a part time coma obtained of salt. My IRC nick is the same as my HN username. Feel free to ping me with questions!

[1] http://www.ohloh.net/p/salt/factoids
Almost thirty years ago, I wrote a bulletin board for my Commodore Vic-20. It had public and private rooms (message areas), private mail and an online game. Users could create a room and make it public or private. The room topics ranged from string theory to general messages. The board was very popular with each user spending an average of 65 minutes on it.

One of my users said "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic-20 can program!" and hired me as a programmer.

I went on, much later, to write safety-critical software for medical equipment and an air traffic control system. The guy who hired me is now working at Google.
Show HN: Hubtime - Personal Github Graphs
what you are describing is exactly what happened.
I can think of at least a one time when the Wikileaks lied to serve its own purpose:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/30/tech/web/fake-nyt-editorial/in...

And before you say, "Well, the New York Times deserved it"...that's not what the argument is about. The argument is: will Wikileaks publish a lie if it believes that the ends justify the means? The answer is "yes". So until they show actual evidence in this case, I don't think they should be given the benefit of the doubt just because they're Wikileaks. I'm curious to what more harm could be done to Aaron besides, well, him already being dead, and also, the innuendo generated by Wikileaks' teaser tweets.
Terrible writing style.
> ...their waistcoats became to be seen as the integral part of the folly of the ruling classes, and so they went into steady decline.

Man, I'd love for waist coats to come back into style. Modern business attire presents a basic problem: where the hell do you keep your cell phone? Do you keep it in your jacket pocket? No, it's silly to keep your jacket on all day. Do you keep it in your trouser pocket? No, not only does it not look nice but because belts are actually a shitty way to keep pants up the weight causes your pants to fall down slightly with every step you take.

A waist coat gives you a perfectly serviceable pocket in which to keep your phone, and allows the wearing of suspenders which are far superior to belts for holding pants up. They also eliminate in one fell swoop the problem of "shirt muffin top" which is where after repeated getting up and sitting down your shirt comes partially untucked and bunches up around your waist.
"the claim he FOIA'd tapes of Manning"

Is this true or not? I honestly have no idea.

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/bri...
s/coma obtained/co-maintainer/ #damnyouautocorrect
A better argument would be:

* Applying Bastiat's arguments against govt-funded arts to science: http://mises.org/daily/3806

* Terence Kealey's talks on govt vs private science: http://archive.mises.org/13017/terence-kealey-science-is-a-p...

* Rothbard's paper on Sci/Tech/Govt: http://mises.org/rothbard/science.asp

* Govt tech outdone by high school students: http://www.wlwt.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/Students...

* NASA inventions actually came from private institutions: http://mises.org/daily/2434

However, no matter your argument the chance of influencing people on HN is quite low. There is a reason why terrorist groups seek out engineers (via Rory Sutherland): http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/200... Very few of them would put their trust on the free market. What if the market chooses to develop food/shelter technologies instead of space exploration? We can't have that! (sarcasm)
The most religious people refuse personal profit and earnestly and honestly believe they are doing it for the "betterment of society".

This is the logic that was used to colonize (er, "civilize") the "savages" of Africa and the Pacific.

So no, I refuse to subscribe to the idea that because he felt that it was better for everybody that it was his job to force it on everyone else.

You know what else the American colonists did to the English, right? They tarred and feathered them, burned down their houses, and many other forms of not-quite "civil" protest. And they did this in response to far worse transgressions than "those JSTOR assholes make me go to a public library to read this peer-reviewed literature I wouldn't know what to do with".
It means all your graphics have to be in dimensions divisible by 2, or you have to change how you lay things out if not (and do more work to scale odd dimensions). Even when everything is, graphics can look terrible when you resize naively, depending. Sometimes you have to recreate graphics manually at different dimensions to get better antialiasing and things.
I think Wikileaks would see its work as altruistic. I would say that they do not see their work as "benign" (nor should they, necessarily).

But the problem with anonymity is that you never know what the leakers' motives are...and that is a tradeoff Wikileaks has to make. In Aaron's case, though, I don't think he ever obfuscated his motives (even as he tried to do the downloading in secret) in his actions.
When I mean big I am referring to problems that will help lots of people when solved. Things of a much more practical nature than Physics.

The Diet Crisis, Diabetes (which he mentioned directly) etc... are not Physics problems.

Not to be rude but your type of thinking is where part of the problem lies. A mother that wants her child to be healthy or a person that has diabetes does not give a damn about the God Particle or any other big physics issue. The statement that started this whole thread was directly related to diabetes, so with all due respect I believe that my "Apps and software" are a lot more applicable here than Physics research. If we were speaking about energy then you may have a point but we aren't.

BTW: w/ Hacking Crohn's a user can upload their 23 and Me data and generate a meal plan that helps them combat any genetic predispositions they may have to one or more illnesses (not cancer yet but give me time, i'll get there).

[edit] I see your point, but i think that you assume all "big problems" will be solved with a pill or a shot and i disagree. I think that we need a fundamentally different approach to solve some of these issues but I do understand and respect your position.
Oh boy, there's a couple of good points in here but so much that is wrong.

Off to bat, don't edit iptables manually anymore. Use ufw.

I just setup a new Ubuntu server (12.10) this weekend and while I'm still tweaking it, I've been documenting my process.

I'll make it available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J2o6Lmq00Lk3k3HPUVKnOvSK...
They could be, but human tendency makes me cautious in my optimism. For example, as cars get more fuel efficient, rather than saving their money, people tend to simply drive further. As cars get safer, people tend to take more risk.

What, I cannot help but wonder, will be the proverbial fly in the ointment when self-driving cars take over the market?
Give Duke a Break
Yes, really. In a lot of places in the US what passes for bread is like processed cheese - possibly tasty, but a pale facsimile of the real thing.

"Real" bread does exist in the US, though usually only in wealthy communities, and even in those places is considered relatively boutique. Middle America's definition of bread would shock anyone coming from a bread-heavy culture.
So... you are implying a contrast or not?
it's open?
where's the code?
A lot of things he did could be seen as reckless, or brave depending on your viewpoint.
"Solving" diabetes implies acting on the biological root of the problem. This makes it a biology/chemistry problem, which is certainly not physics, but also not really the sort of thing apps are good at solving.

Now, an app might be able to help guide people to avoid or handle diabetes, but that is not "solve".

I'm not blowing off diabetes in the slightest, in fact I am saying it belongs with the other "Big Problems" which is why I discussed physics.
These three facts don't add up to anything concrete.

> 1. Aaron Swartz assisted WikiLeaks.

Could be a donation, could be a code improvement suggestion, could be anything.

> 2. Aaron Swartz was in communication with Julian Assange, including during 2010 and 2011.

Who wasn't Aaron Swartz in communication with whom he thought was involved in something interesting/worthwhile? After all, he was a teenager when he cold emailed Lawrence Lessig arguing for Creative Commons to use RDF.

> 3. We have strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove, that Aaron Swartz was a WikiLeaks source.

Empty statement.

---

So if this "announcement" by WikiLeaks is basically baseless, what is the true motive?
yeah. just (and then deriving useful conclusions from all the data.)

To my mind, the missing piece is a non-proprietary tool to make the collection of the data as easy as possible and integrate with devices from some large number of competing manufacturers.

Not so crazy.. but it doesn't exist as far as I know. I have dreams of trying to make it happen but, you know, the usual excuses.. (http://sanguinediabetes.com/)
This is just yet another thing computers / AI will be better than humans at.
This looks like an extremely expansive menu of topics, pretty much anything on that list could be an entire 10 week course in itself.
Well, it's worth noting that Musk claims that PayPal was also a major move to improve the world, and I think the claim is credible. And before that he did Zip2, which is about as impactful as Google. Which, btw, is fucking impactful.
The train Beijing-Pyongyang is still running indeed. I took it half a year ago.
Huh?

Instead of asking me as if my speculation meant anything, why don't you ask the many publicly available confidantes of Aaron about why they haven't yet tied Aaron's JSTOR cause to Wikileaks?
They want to be professors?
"Raganwald poses an interesting question. Why do some of the best minds in our industry spend time figuring out how to make people click more on ads?"

Your answer is:

"One simple answer to the question is Geography."

There are two problems with your answer:

1. He isn't asking how to get more people to click on ads, he is asking why our best minds are working on that problem.

2. Geography isn't the answer to people clicking on ads, it just happens to be very important if it's a job ad (according to your experience). There are plenty of ads that aren't for jobs and Geography is not the answer.

It is interesting to hear your findings about job ads, but the context of your post and the summary of the results don't seem to fit.
I've worked with a 'felon'. Hacker News was co-founded by a 'felon' convicted under CFAA. The first one convicted, in fact, so if anything aaronsw had the advantage of having it proven before he did what he did that it could possibly result in felony charges. If that's really something he didn't want to have as a possibility, if he would really be so ashamed to be convicted of a "bullshit felony" then it makes you wonder why he went about his business the way that he did. If the law is as stupid as Aaron thought it was then he'd be able to wear the felon tag as a badge of pride.
A Quick Guide to Hadoop Map Reduce Frameworks
Not to mention a certain Private First Class currently undergoing court-martial at Ft. Meade, MD...
Is this the same as http://sourceforge.net/projects/safeclib/ ?

If not, is it new? Where is it hosted ? What license is it under ?
I'd characterise that as a hoax rather than a lie tbh, but your point about being cautious what you trust is still absolutely correct.
I actually think the parent's confusion is twofold.

First, you're comma-splicing some of your sentences, making it harder to read what you're saying. Commas have rhymes and reasons to them; and, it is good to know when to use them and where. It also seems like you are too quick to begin a new paragraph. Concepts that connect to one another should be put into the same paragraph so a person knows where one idea (or sub-idea) ends and another begins.

And second, you're choosing to use words that are larger that, while possibly being more precise, actually make you more difficult to understand in a normal conversation. For example, "I find articulating the conceptual stream to be a challenge." "The conceptual stream" is hard to follow. What conceptual stream? Do you mean you're having trouble articulating what you want to say? Then why not say that? "Conceptual stream" is not something usually said in conversational English and means that people will need to parse everything you said, rather than read it. It's almost like obfuscating code, or at least code-golfing. For the right audience it's great; but in other audiences, or in production code, it's just difficult, and un-necessarily so. Remember that in most instances, people online that you're speaking with are conversing at about the same level as a group of chums in a circle, at a pub.

What you say may very well be important; but, remember that being heard is equally important, and speaking in language too high to be followed in a conversation is too high to be heard, especially since so much is already lost from speaker to listener.

I've read some of your other comments in other posts, and I have noticed that you can and do speak in a more conversational tone, albeit fleetingly so, and often by mistake (if you consider it a mistake. It seems more like passion for a topic seeping through); so, I know you still can.

Long story short, know your audience.

:)
Also, cell phones need fobs.