skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. They had no duty to report in general or for these specific crimes. The specific crime was "gaining access to MIT's ethernet network in violation of policy" -- if your neighbor cracks your wireless password to get free Internet, it's reasonable to ask him to stop, rather than calling the SS. If your neighbor is using your hacked wireless to host child porn, you call the SS.

In the ideal world, the SS/USAO would be trusted to have some level of discretion in prosecution, but they don't, so as soon as you involve the feds, you've exercised the nuclear option.

I'm personally waiting on the Abelson report before going much deeper into assigning specific blame. For now, Ortiz, Heymann, and Garland are the enemy to be addressed.
There is a subreddit with dozens of thousands of people with the goal of quitting porn/masturbating. http://www.reddit.com/r/nofap

I am concerned about the future. Augmented reality is just around the corner, and virtual sex is almost certainly in our future. How would easy access to an unlimited amount of all types of "sex" imaginable affect society?
Lots of political movements have created real political force, but there are many historical examples of real political forces which were not constructive.
I live in the UK and feel the same way, except now I feel a bit guilty about it...
Porn is an instant pleasure. Enjoying sex in eight years (earlier if you're lucky but don't cross your fingers just yet) does not compare very well to that.

I've never tried to smoke so I can't really compare.
Aren't you just projecting your own fear here? We can deal with it as comes up.
He was only 26! Even in the worst case that he unfortunately spent the maximum of 30 year in prison (probably without a computer) he would be out at 56.

Some people did important thighs after incarceration or unjust persecution:

Nelson Mandela: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela

Galileo Galilei: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
The message and promise to stall any meaningful discussion until after some meaningless 'investigation' expertly designed to exculpate MIT?

MIT used Federal law as a weapon against Aaron Swartz, and all it takes for you to excuse them is an assurance that they will investigate themselves.

But no such thing with respect to the government, of course. This makes it plain to me that you are using the Swartz case as a vehicle for anti-federal politics
> From what I've heard, the main issue with OS X is with Chinese input. MS seems to do a much better job there.

I've never heard of this before. Pinyin input is pretty straightforward, and it works fine on OS X as far as I know. Is the predictive engine worse or something?
Yes, the first and last were the best, I thought. I didn't see the second one.
20-somethings looking to date? Get off your phone, meet IRL
A 'Beautiful Vision' In Science Forgotten
The author is concerned that his sexuality has been irreparably damaged by his adolescent pornographic pursuits, and that youths with similar unfettered access to pornography, lacking guidance or education, are in danger of repeating his experience.
> It is somewhat common everywhere to see people buying a Mac and installing Windows. Not because they don't like OSX but because they need certain Windows only apps.

Do you have any evidence for either of these claims? Of course you don't.

> Unlike of course you have some evidence of China being an outlier. Which of course you don't.

Protip: next time, don't be such an asshole if you don't have the knowledge to back it up.

> In China, most of the Apple user will be installing Windows OS to their Mac machines. This is due to some major restrictions of using non IE browser. China has dramatically different browser usage patterns than developed countries. Most commonly used Chinese websites have been constructed and tested to work with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only, without consideration of other web standard, non-IE browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome), or non-Windows platforms. A lot of Chinese websites will not shown and worked properly in Safari or Firefox browser. One good example is the support of e-banking , which greatly tied-up with the booming e-commerce in China. Almost all Chinese banks accepted only transactions via Internet Explorer, any type of security packet go along will works just on Windows. Given that IE has stopped Mac development for years now, new Chinese user have to look back at Windows when they get started with Mac.[0]

0: http://micgadget.com/15236/apples-latest-macbook-air-set-to-...
I would appreciate it if you would stop misconstruing my position. I said that I had webscraped and didn't think it was wrong. I said as a student I would have stuck a laptop in an unlocked closet on campus with an Ethernet port and not thought that it was criminal. And, at no point, have I tried to characterize Aaron's thought and motives. Honestly - he working for higher principles than I ever have, so I am in no position to comment on his behavior, just mine.
Subtle troll. Who here only clicked through to cry "No! Considered harmful! Considered harmful!"
Note that Swartz was trying to evade MIT as much as possible: they couldn't communicate with him because he was running from them. At that point, they didn't know who they were dealing with. All they know was that their systems had been infiltrated by someone who had managed for months to evade all their efforts to block his access or identify him. I'm not sure you can fault them for bringing in the big guns at that point....Were they supposed to just shrug it off?
Having good defense can also be very expensive in US, right?
There is also a strong bias toward upvoting more visible content. Higher-voted comments appear first on the page, getting more exposure. For that reason I’ve made it a habit to read comments in bottom-to-top order, in order to artificially make my votes more fair.
I thought php was also function scope, not block scope as the author claims...?
related, possibly of interest:

[1]	R. Dobelli. Avoid News. Aug 2010. --> http://dobelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avoid_News_Par...

[2]	C. A. Johnson. The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. O’Reilly, 2012.

i myself am conflicted about the news. i agree with most of the negative points both by OP and the above; but i also feel i actually do learn something from the news, esp. as i have a relatively organized note-taking system, file and reference articles above a certain threshold of interest in bibdesk, etc.

i think the reason i learn something is that i take the 5 secs to take a screenshot or copy-paste the relevant snippets of information in my system. over time, you can see interesting patterns. sometimes, i run across a reference to some other, deeper source of information (presumably the background material the high-level news article was based on), and file a to-do to check it out in my task manager. usually i wouldn't have thought of this source or reference if i hadn't seen it cited in the news. last but not least, just scanning the headlines and summaries can give you a sense of what the hivemind of "the market" (or "the public") is preoccupied with at the moment.

so, at least to me, it's not all bad and yet i agree that it often feels like a waste of time and mental energy. i haven't figured out a solution yet but completely quitting the news is not going to cut it for me.
To be fair it's not the uncommon proposed answer, so if he's not responding to the article specifically, in general he'll probably still have a point for a lot of people who agree with the tone.

I'm about 5 years older than the article poster. I haven't had unfiltered Internet since way before puberty, but I knew where my dad kept the tapes and magazines and I've had the Internet connection by the time I was 15-16. Either I was too young to care or old enough to know where to find it.

I don't think my parents would have added anything to either of our lives by filtering the Internet connection. They spent enough time trying to push me away from computers, which in hindsight I think they'd admit was folly since it was this "addiction" which I used to dig myself out of a childhood of poverty.

Anyway part of that time was used looking at porn, more of it on on-line games and a bit of it learning interesting things. Other than turning into a geek, I don't really think I'm messed up in any special way.

We now have two data points running contrary from each other. I see no significant evidence to suggest porn is really the problem it's make it out to be.
Java update process on my 10.8 Mac:

1) Open Java Control Panel, see it says I have an update. Click "OK".

2) Reopen Java Control Panel because OK closes the window. This time click "Update Now"

3) After downloading 50MB another installer opens. Notice that it says 7u10 and not 7u11 (I was running 7u9).

4) Look back at Java Control Panel and see that it claims "Java Update was last run at 5:03 PM".

5) Reopen the JCP several times to try to force it to recognize that 7u11 is the latest, not 7u10.

6) Give up and install 7u10

7) Reopen JCP yet again. Success, 7u11 is available!

8) Click "Update Now" (not falling for your tricks again "OK" button)

9) http://d.pr/i/9UdC

10) Curse and post this.
Of course I do, that's the point.
I can't see how we can deal with things I fear.

(Because dealing with fear without treating harmful things being feared seems pointless)
Either that, or they don't have a blog. Pastebin is an easy way to share an e-mail or some other text if you don't have some other method of publication easily available.
Developers: help fix our convoluted patent system
There is an entire movement on reddit dedicated to this,

http://reddit.com/r/nofap

Actually their specific mission is to avoid masturbation. I don't think there is anything wrong with masturbation. In fact sometimes, particularly as a male, it helps to improve your focus if you release occasionally. For someone who isn't in a relationship or a position to have sex on a fairly regular basis (read: me, living in a basement, working every waking hour on a combination of vitamins and adderall) it helps every few days. Some argue, and to an extent I agree, that it also helps to avoid it. Your body builds more testosterone during a period of abstinence. Apparently only up until about 7 days, where that begins to trail off. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins won't let his band mates have sex before a show, so they let out their energy on stage.

That being said, porn definitely fucks with your head. Just stay away from it. I've never been one of these guys who watches it more and more and more and more. I can't even imagine being desensitized to sex or imagining porn during sex. That's a serious problem. Anyway, the nofap guys talk about this stuff a lot so I'd encourage anyone interested in this to head over there as there are lots of other interesting resources that point out why porn is bad and how it fucks with your brain. In the end it's purely chemical, where you become accustomed to the dopamine response that you receive from watching porn, so you need more and more and more. Like any other addiction or dependence. At some point what you have is not enough and you need more.
The US military frequently uses the abbreviation "BLUF" (Bottom Line Up Front) for the same purpose as TLDR at the beginning of an email. It's not like the idea of tldr is some perversion born of the Internet.
This isn't really what I expected when I saw "music theory". It would be more aptly titled something like "frequency visualizer of chords".
The answer to this question is contained within the article.
I'm not sure if involving USSS helps in apprehending someone if you can't identify him. They have legal powers (although, MIT once it started acting as agents of the federal government lost some of their ability to act on their own private infrastructure...), and can do wiretaps on other networks, subpoenas, search warrants, etc., but if the crime is going on in your own facility, and you own the network, you are probably in a better position to observe what is going on than the USSS is.

Once you identify a person, USSS is certainly more capable of investigating him and apprehending, but at the sage of network cat and mouse, I'd put a decent sysadmin above the SS.
Same here, not what I expected. Looks great, though!
Agreed. Plus, people are trained to ignore "wall of text" but will indeed read text labeled as tldr. It's communicating a summary. Due to the mixed bag of good writing on the Internet, we as readers cannot rely on the first sentence being an all encompassing summarization of the points.
It's actually the radio frequency itself that doesn't penetrate walls - it's not a bandwidth restriction, so it has nothing to do with theoretical throughput.
I don't think this is generally true. The purpose of long form writing is to make the reader draw a conclusion that they may not agree with at the beginning of the article. Studies have shown that once we form a conclusion, we're much less likely to change our minds, so if an article lead with a controversial point we'd internally say "no!" and stick to it rather than letting the article make its point. By not knowing exactly what an article is arguing, we're more receptive to things that could go against our intuition.

I do agree that TL;DRs can be elided for articles that simply state facts or uncontroversial ideas.
Maybe it is a question of what one considers news. I found out through HN, which I don't consider to be "news" in the sense portrayed by the post.

I don't think that it's a matter of productivity. I don;t read news because it presents me with a bunch of inactionable information-- I can't -do- anything about any of the stories that I read in the news and so there's no use building up impotent rage about those things.
There's not always so much of a difference between those two things. If he did the things he was accused of doing that is a felony. There's little doubt that he did those things (the downloading and such) so he, in all likelihood, did commit a felony. Let's not focus too much on technicalities and semantics.
Nice idea. Question - Is there a way to "Storify" these archives? If not, you could make a UI which helps users to search through the data. Another idea would be to collect information on the PDFs linked.
Do you post such absurdities because you are guilty of similar bullying in your role as a state prosecutor, and this is what you convince yourself of in order to sleep at night?

On behalf of the public, I'll say that you don't serve our interests.
Okay, this link doesn't look like it does this justice. I found the Github page to be much better:

https://github.com/saebekassebil/teoria
She said "The e-mail that Defendant Swartz's supplemental memorandum (pdf) cites as paramount to his fifth motion to suppress [evidence against him] is relevant, but not nearly as important as he tries to make it out to be".

If the US gov't bullied Aaron to death, I doubt it was because of that statement. Surely, harsher words have been spoken to defendants.

I don't even understand how that thread reached the front-page of HN considering how devoid of substance it is.
Every journal database I have done bulk downloads from (sometimes constantly) over a week requires a cookie and sends you a polite message (via http no less) asking you to put in a few seconds pause between each request.

It would not have occurred to me that they haven't configured their servers to handle the load. Once again - Aaron did nothing that I, and tens of thousands of people like me, haven't done many times.
And the government was fully prepared to fight for them. So . . . the world is as it should be at least according to the parameters of your previous comment.

Also, "most probably" indicates a bias toward true, where maybe is more like 50-50. I did not say maybe, I said most probably. All degrees of likelihood are not the same for me, so please don't replace my words. If you did want to reword what I was saying, "not certainly" or "not definitely" would have been more appropriate.
As a former defense attorney, I would have loved it if jury nullification was intentionally designed into the system.

Unfortunately, it's not. It's just a great side effect of the right to a trial by jury.

In the American legal system, the modification of laws is left to the legislature. A jury can express its displeasure with a law by nullifying, but this has no legal import, since a different jury could easily convict. Thus, the primary method of expressing displeasure in a law...is to express displeasure in a law (by calling your local legislator).
> too bad it took Aaron killing himself for them to analyze their actions.

The art of understatement is alive and well I see.

The appointment of Hal Abelson is the first little bit of good news in two days, and the promise of being completely transparent with his findings the second.
I think it can be very helpful. MIT had no idea they were dealing with a single individual or if they were dealing with an entity who was only targeting them. Pooling information from other potential victims through law enforcement seems like an obvious win.

Moreover, once they discovered the hardware Swartz had left, law enforcement could be extremely helpful by running fingerprints; MIT does not have access to the FBI's fingerprint database.
What I don't understand is why he assumes everyone growing up during that time is in the same situation? Sounds like he has a sex / porn addiction.

I experimented with porn growing up, and certainly saw somethings I wish I hadn't, but I have never had trouble getting it up for a real girl either.
Today, I have this feeling again, the same I had when I heard about Micheal Jackson's death. He too struggled in a way from false accusations caused by reasons we all know. What I did learn today, which I did not knew earlier, was how while living, a man may not achieve something, but in death WHY exactly he would achieve even more. I do not in any way, justify the loss of life here, but instead that after what has already happened, what will we do? His ideas can no longer be ignored by me, us & those who caused this, and they must take a present stance, & retrospect for the good, that, what exactly were the things that went wrong and still are in the wrong, similarly to what Mr. Reif said. I feel, that even though I didn't knew who Aaron Swartz was until yesterday, I will know him for the rest of my life. What I can say today is, that yes, I have heard you, and if I can, I will try to make others hear the same. (Rest in Peace)

PS: 26 years, is too short of a life, you deserved much more than this. For the least, I will try on my part, to not let something similar to happen to even a enemy.
It'd make more sense to go broader and teach that due to how our brains work, all pleasure becomes diluted the more we have. Therefore, it is desirable to avoid living in unrestricted excess, be it with drugs, sex, food, or what have you. One should have control over their pleasures, not the other way around.
I like TLDR for being able to cmd+F to it quickly. In a well written article with an abstract or a good first sentence, I still have to find the first sentence. With a TLDR, I can jump to that section quickly. I know this sounds like the height of being lazy, but I assure you, it's not.
TLDR is a pragmatic device; it's a written discourse marker. Calling it "unnecessary" is just like saying that "well...", "y'know", "so...", "like" and all those other little "filler words" that your high school English teacher doesn't like are "unnecessary". In formal prose, where all that's supposed to matter is textual semantics, sure, they're not necessary, and I wouldn't use them there. But in informal discourse, they're essential; not for conveying propositional information, but for negotiating social discourse information.
I think it's important to look at some events as they unfold, vs. in retrospect, even if only to train yourself.

Pick a historical event (say, the assassination which kicked off WW1). Read news in chronological order, as it came out. See how different things seem at any point in time vs. how they look retrospectively a century later.
Right, and because I could buy reference books as a kid without any problems that means that the web has not enabled me to learn more subjects in more depth in less time and meant that I don't spend more time learning than I did before?

Are you really making this argument on HN of all places? That behaviour doesn't have the ability to fluctuate wildly with only small differences in friction (not a pun!)?
I think the attitude that the Stack Exchange folks are trying to foster with the edits is to not have a lot of ego involved. It's not a place for ee cummings to demonstrate his personal preference of punctuation. It's more wiki-like. You need to gain a substantial amount of rep before you can edit other people's answers, which one would think filters most of the less tasteful edits. (I'd say edits on answers are actually pretty rare. Edits on questions are more common because lots of unclear questions are asked by people with poor English skills and people who aren't yet familiar with the conventions on the site.)

I won't say that everything the Stack Exchange people have done is perfect or well thought out but the editing of other people's content is certainly interesting and I think it's rare that it's used poorly or offensively.
That was actually a pretty fast response, considering the behemoth Java is and that the team is fractured since the acquisition. Things will get better, the websites are not even fully transitioned yet.

Wish people would cut Oracle a little slack here, although they really need to improve the Java update process. They could and should learn something from Flash (as depressing as that is to say!)
Yup, composition on the Internet is different from composition for print in which "good writing" used to mean 1) intro, 2) body, 3) conclusion. Now it means: "get to teh point!!!" and maybe, if you have time, elaborate so people can follow your train of thought. When people are used to affording only 140 characters of attention, you wind up skipping all the formalities. TL;DR is a sigil. Sometimes people put it at the bottom (jerks), but at least it's easy to spot.
Maybe opinion pieces do. The news, I'm not so sure.
I think the problem is our society's denigration of sex. We see it as consisting inherently of that mix of thrill and shame - when you're a teenager growing up in America, you're told to feel that way about any nudity, never mind penetration. So you come to associate arousal with this guilt - you never experience the one without the other - and then when you're looking for something to turn you on you're already feeling guilty, and there's a part of you that wants to. So you step a little deeper into the pool of fetishes, find something a little stronger (and I'm pleased that the author's actually given some realistic examples here), something that makes you feel guilty and ashamed and is all the more erotic for it. But the interest half-life for porn is tiny; what was dangerous boundary-pushing last week is pedestrian today. It's a feedback loop, one that can only possibly end somewhere unpleasant.

The author's already found the solution - we need to separate sexuality from guilt and shame, to be able to feel aroused and wholesome at the same time. But it's hard to do that after you've already fallen down the spiral. We need to make our children's first experiences of arousal feel natural and wholesome - which means more openness, more embracing of sexuality in artforms that are going to portray it positively. But that's a hard sell to middle America.