skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Aaron Swartz issue really reaffirms a hypothesis ive held for a long time about empathy. This is the first time I've seen HN in uproar, up in arms about the injustice against a man at the hands of the state for a crime which they cannot agree with. Yet there have been far greater travesties of justice, countless suicides by innocent people in Guantanamo bay or prison and not a bleep on the HN radar.

Obviously Aaron Swartz impact on the internet, his relevance to this community and obvious closeness to many people explains it. But take away who he is and the circumstances are sadly far from rare. Aaron Swartz' ordeal is being relieved right as we speak in numerous places around America and the world.

It's just unfortunate that for many it took this long to empathise or understand their plight.
My ultimate goal in my professional life is to create a system of virtual worlds that are more 'livable' than the real world. My obsession with this thought started when I read the Pendragon series years back, and it was reawakened by the anime series called Sword Art Online. All drama aside, I would love for people to be able to create their ideal world. Truthfully, if such a daunting task came to fruition someday, there would be a lot of problems to deal with.

The Oculus Rift project seems to be the closest (yet still incredibly behind) concept to my ideal MVP for what I would hope for this to be.

tl;dr Create a system of virtual worlds as portrayed in Sword Art Online
I focussed on a example with a happy flow. In Akka Futures you can handle only error conditions of the following type.

for example we have
future onSuccess
future onFailure

or we have onComplete,
future onComplete {
case Success(result) ⇒ doSomethingOnSuccess(result)
case Failure(failure) ⇒ doSomethingOnFailure(failure)
}

else you can follow what is mentioned by noelwalsh
I think it's fairly clear, based on his long held views of computer fraud laws, that the second part of this will conclude something like: the charges were fair and justified in law, but the proposed punishment (both its severity and scale) were disproportionate, as was the DOJ handling of the case.

Which I think is correct.
I remember reading Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad) as an adolescent in the early '90s, and a particular story stuck to me, that of a robot which was hungry for information, to the point that he/it literally gets drowned in all the paper that he can't stop reading because he wants to get more and more data, endlessly.
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Highlight:

"This is going to be a long post, so here’s the summary of my conclusion on the first question: I think the charges against Swartz were based on a fair reading of the law. None of the charges involved aggressive readings of the law or any apparent prosecutorial overreach. All of the charges were based on established caselaw. Indeed, once the decision to charge the case had been made, the charges brought here were pretty much what any good federal prosecutor would have charged. This is different from what a lot of people are hearing on the Internets, so I realize this post isn’t going to be popular."

(should have been in the title imo)
This is a very cynical viewpoint.

It speaks well of people when they are surprised by indifference and slavish obedience to the letter of the law. It also speaks well of people when they are outraged by things they think are wrong.

It's easy to call people who are surprised and outraged naive, but I would argue that without that naivete change is less likely to occur. Cynicism, in my experience, breeds apathy.
Well done Aaron Swartz, now rinse and repeat, if necessary.
Some deaths provide a lot of information to others.
Lets not hang upon death as some sort of bad turn of event >:)
(Slightly off-topic.)

> I'm a senior developer and I cost about that, at freelance rates.

For a month? Do you live in a place with really low cost of living?
Yith Library: an open source web password manager
Thanks noelwelsh couldn't agree more with you
thanks, now works like a charm!
In his office, during an hour-long interview, there was not a single interruption. No email or text pings. No ringing phones. His computer was closed. His cell phone was turned off, as it usually is. He sometimes works until 9 at night, but he doesn’t work at home. On weekends, he checks his email just once a day.

I've been getting increasingly concerned about the amount of time I spend staring at screens and generally getting distracted by crap, so I've been taking steps to reduce it. I now use a feature phone, I've totally ditched the iPad in favour of the Kindle, and I'm trying to reduce the amount of time I spend on the computer (that one with mixed success). It's been absolutely fantastic. I've definitely realised that the problem doesn't lie with the gadgets, it lies with me, and the only way to control myself is to restrict my access.

It's definitely been occasionally difficult living without a smartphone, but not impossible. My end-game plan is to replace all my laptops with a single iMac, and to have that in some room that is not my bedroom or my living room, that shuts with a door. We'll see how that one goes. This move has also coincided with me being on a leave of absence which led to me quitting my job, so when I'm back in the real world it will be interesting to see if I really need any of it. I'm betting not, although it will occasionally probably be frustrating.
I do want one of those displays, but not for movies. I want them for text!
He is more reckless than the author of the article. It does not benefit anyone that he revealed his identity, and it might affect him negatively.

Commendations should be made for his acknowledgement of the addiction, and making it public so others might realize too. I don't think identity has anything to do with this.
I remember being 13 and having this up on my wall... really good to be reminded of it again.
> 1.) We're reading TOS now? Is that against the law?

so is your comment a joke reply, or do you have a serious argument? has this ridiculous response indicates that you concede that it is against the terms of service?

> 2.) Irrelevant, could be a simple traffic reduction block.

if he thought it was that, why did he need a mask to retrieve his computer?

> 3.) Too flimsy to rest the entire charge on.

agree. except there's all the stuff above.
Part of the issue is that a "correct analysis of the law" is absolutely worthless if part of the problem includes the law. This notion of "if the law permits it, we're good to go" is a disease.
Innovative Game Concept (Done in Canvas/JS)
On my android phone I switch synchronization off, it has the same effect - no disctraction. The button is on the widget for wifi, bluetooth, gps, synchronization and display brightness. I placed the widget on the main screen.
Largely agree although I would insert the word 'probably' before illegal in your second paragraph. It hadn't come to trial yet and we don't have ALL the evidence (especially the defense evidence). I would say that I don't think that the concept of prosecuting him was inherently or clearly wrong.

I'm also very interested to read the second part. I hope it covers the number of counts of each charge brought. This seems to be something that racks up the potential penalty very fast and the individual offences aren't necessarily that distinct from each other
> Citizens could pay politicians directly for their services ... This strikes me as a horrible idea

It doesn't strike me as completely horrible. Lots of people all making small contributions is basically the kickstarter model. Prospective politicians could pitch thier platform on kickstarter or the like.

> Where do they get that money besides lobbyists?

But if politicians are perceived to be captured by lobbyists, they'll get fewer votes delegated to them, and then will be of less interest to these lobbyists. I don't see this as worse than the current, quite similar, lobbying setup. Maybe not much better though.

> how you would stop political parties from dominating the landscape

Maybe, but that doesn't make this proposal worse than the current setup where political parties dominate the landscape. Nor does it show that this is always something to be avoided.
Really? I think the hacker news community is more focused around node.js than it is around unauthorised access to computer systems. I do agree there is a common theme of the joy of discovery, but I find it hard to cheer on people breaking into computer systems.
Years ago I read the Allen Carr "Easy way to give up smoking" book and managed to change from having 30/day to 3 on a Sunday evening in the pub.

But if I didn't get to the pub on Sunday evening it ate me up inside - I NEEDED those 3 cigarettes and I couldn't cope without them.

It wasn't the quantity, it was how I dealt with being denied that was the issue.
Actually, New Zealand is a bad example. You've got an odd hybrid of winner-takes-all and PR.

In Australia we do it by having a bicameral Parliament. The Reps is winner-takes-all and the Senate is PR per-state.
The law is bullshit, with respect to computer crimes and copyright. You still need to accurately know what the current law is in order to change it, though. And unfortunately it will probably require legislative action to change it, which is going to go up against entrenched interests.

Boycott or other commercial actions against anyone who supports the copyright empire would be one way of getting the law changed.

Unfortunately people in the tech community are going to get distracted by other stuff (both stupid legislation like getting involved in gun control, and reasonable stuff like working on cool new technology), so mounting the sustained, multi-year effort to fix this is going to be very difficult.
I remember reading sexual advice for couples from the pre internet era, and they cover many of the 'issues' described in the article and how to turn it into a positive experience. The impression I am getting is that he's never felt comfortable discussing it before, because of the guilt situation, hence why he hasn't realised how normal it is.
A nice online gifting solution startup
The original party asked the Dept of Justice to drop the case. That sounds like a large amount of malice to me - they wanted to squeeze 35 years of the guy's life, even though the original "victim" decided not to go ahead with a complaint.
Yeah, I think we tend to forget our history (since tech evolves so fast).

For me, I originally had this on the BBS I hosted as a teenager. And it was something important to me as an out-of-place teenager at the end of the world in NZ - the thought that we live in a borderless community of like-minded people.

What's interesting to me is this disconnect between our world (borderless, egalitarian, where information wants to be free) and reality (legal jurisdiction, protective business models).
It was a problem then, it's a problem now, and future conflict is certain.
LinkedIn rival Viadeo acquires French startup Pealk
I agree, I also won't support people breaking into computer systems.
A more practical example was the court case that allowed female soldiers to serve with weapons in Germany.

It went all the way up to European level, and there they overturned German law.
The best refutation to this law professor's analysis is mostly within here: http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here-is...

The application of these federal penal statutes is wholly improper for this case. This case is a civil matter.
A lot of SGI's problems were self inflicted. They basically sucked for anything except awesome graphics cards on the mid to high end (I used to have a $200k Onyx in the group I undergrad-research-assistanted at media lab). The Indy and such were wretched.

IRIX was actually worse than HP-UX; on par with AIX.
The article refers to Davies's "seizing on what he saw as uncharted territory with a vast potential for profits." This is damning if true: California dispensaries are required to be non-profit.

If Davies really did seek "large profits from the cultivation and sale of marijuana", as the prosecuting attorney alleges, then he is in violation of both state and federal law. If he did not seek such profits, then he may indeed be in compliance with state law.
Not the point. You had claimed he wasn't associated with the DoJ.

He got the GW Law gig, in part, because of his prosecutorial duties at DoJ. So his salary does somewhat depend on his not understanding that the problem was the DoJ, not Aaron.
I like the Australian approach. We almost always form a government quickly with the Senate acting as a reasonable check on legislative adventurism. The poms have it better with the House of Lords, but I don't think a similar institution can be engineered ab initio, it's an evolved body. The Canadians tried, I understand they don't regard it highly.

I'd fiddle with the Senate formula to allow more minority parties into the mix (for the past few decades it's settled into a stable tripartite pattern, 2 majors and a minor).
Project management office failures
Free travel guide Wikivoyage comes out of beta and is already kicking ass
Humor: the_coding_love
ReSpeller: A Spell-Checking Plugin for ReSharper
> By using their collective bargaining power, the country's consumers could form a monopsony to achieve really affordable prices for these basic goods and services for everyone.

Australia has managed to get a monopsony for many pharmaceuticals via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. It costs the taxpayer an enormous amount of money, but it's cheaper in terms of percentage of GDP spent on pharmaceuticals.
At which point you might as well have a feature phone and some extra cash for that meal.
> Actually I think you are wrong. The problem is then replaced with filter maintenance. If you've ever witnessed a seasoned outlook email hoarder, you will see this is just as bad.

Outlook is a bad example, because its filters are too dumb.

GMail does a pretty good job of maintaining its built-in filters automatically. So filters might be a compromise worth going for.

Going without a smartphone might be better in the long run. But that will be a harder sell to people than good filters.
"What the fuck? This is the dumbest thing I've read in a while."

From the guidelines for this forum:

"That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Could we keep marijuana politics discussions elsewhere, please? This is one of those hotbutton issues that starts to dull the focus and quality of a site like this.
It could be worse. The US Congress has 2-year terms for their lower house. There's never a moment when the next election is out of view.

Most Australian states have 4-year terms, some of them are fixed by legislation. Whether or not it improves matters is obscured by the problem that anybody with talent is trying to get into the Commonwealth Parliament. Our State governments are traditionally fantastically inept and frequently corrupt, regardless of party.
Also The Economist is frequently not totally clueless about computer technology.
Try "thinking machine" instead. They do look amazing.
Fair enough. Imagining myself as an investor I would be concerned that it would be hard to get traction as an additional social network and it sounds too tightly tied to Google (Earth and Youtube) so I would struggle to see exit options apart from sale to Google and incorporation in G+. Given that I would be doubtful that a large exit would be possible as there is only likely to be one buyer so no bidding war.

Now you may have plans to migrate away from Google dependency as you grow and actual VCs may have different views on these issues than me, I've been known to be wrong in the past ;). Instagram got $1BN while heavily tied to Facebook and Apple although they were launching their Android app at the time.
> At work, the Do not disturb mode that both GNOME3 and OS X have is a good start.

A good start against a silly tendency. OS X 10.7 and before simply didn't have notifications; most app supported Growl, but it was easy just not to install it and have a silent Mac. (Skype being the noisy exception.)

Now OS X has a DND mode that resets itself automatically and cannot be scheduled, and every app can post notifications by default. Both are worse than iOS and every OS X before.

One problem is that all high-profile reviews are written by "power user" tech bloggers who cannot get enough of multitasking and notifications, reflecting maybe a busy manager's lifestyle but not the average user.
You over-estimate people's appetite for change. Dropping DST is feasible and I agree with it. Converting to global UTC - not going to happen unless there is a compelling reason for your average folks, 99% of whom need to consider time zones a few times a year.

Besides, personally I think it would be much more difficult to deal with global UTC for most human activities and scheduling. It doesn't actually solve any problem. It makes some things easier and some things harder. Perhaps there would be a net benefit for some, but negative for others.
Muppets Creator Jim Henson's Never-Before-Seen Journals and Sketches
Reminded me too.

There is an entire generation of adults that grew up when the internet wasn't as friendly and layered as it is today, when forums and IRC reigned supreme.
> The problem with "mainstream" news media is not just that they're bad at reporting; they're also bad at filtering, because their filter criterion is what will sell papers/get more viewers,

Here we filter for karma..
Living in Belgium makes me disagree with you. I think that First Past The Post is better then Proportional Representation.
Dev Bootcamp Comes to Chicago
Violating a private entity's TOS is not a federal crime. He did not mask anything: MIT has an open network, and apparently unlocked wiring closets (trespassing was not charged). Rotating your IP address on an already open network to circumvent said TOS does not constitute a statutory violation either. You can sue him, that's about it.
Honestly I have absolutely no faith in any sort of change coming to the system in-channel. I think we should focus our efforts on developing systems that allow the population to circumvent and would make prosecution prohibitively expensive.

In the future, in any likely reality that I can foresee, the laws are going to remain more or less the same and prosecutors are going to still be using scorched earth tactics. To change the system you need lawyers, but lawyers have a love-affair with the system and knee-jerk in defense of one-another. Ethics and the law are too intertwined for them, any effort to change the system to be more ethical will only continue to be met with cries of "But it's already legal!". I've seen it dozens of times today, and I don't see any light at the end of that tunnel.

If others are going to follow in Aaron's footsteps, they will have to make one particular change: be better at remaining unidentified.
I guess that the HN crowd easily identifies with Aaron, or at least relates to what he stands for.

Like OP, I'm surprised to be so upset about someone I didn't know about a few days ago, but I keep reading everything by or about him, and man ! What a loss...
The President could, and should, say that the law is unconstitutionally broad. It would be a much more conservative reading of the constitution to say that Congress does not have the power to arbitrarily outlaw substances within any and all states. This is why it required a constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol. Given a traditional legal precedent and a strict-interpretation court the President has both the grounds to deem certain provisions of the law unconstitutional and the belief that that would be upheld by the court. Those are the only two tests he needs to pass to refuse to enforce a portion or all of the law.

Responsibility to enforce the laws of congress:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_State...

Right to refuse to enforce un-constitutional provisions: http://www.justice.gov/olc/nonexcut.htm

History of the commerce clause (Or "FDR, how we miss your court packing"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
aaaannnnnd we're back at Palm Graffiti style input
That was written 2 years before I was born.

Hard to tell how to judge that text if you didn't experience that time.

If someone wrote that today, I'd think that he'd be a hypocrite. But I am sure the situation was different in 1986.
IP reconnaissance tools with geolocation, Nmap, WHOIS, Visual Traceroute
It seems like you have what we call "optional preferential" in Australia. In practice such systems devolve to FPTP anyway.

Mind you, I don't think any electoral system can paper over such an intransigent cultural division in a country. It'd be like trying to build an electoral system for a combined Israel / Iran government.
Can be a timing issue or on rare occasions a compiler/interpreter bug either. There are probably other potential causes too.
A PDF extractor could be used first, to get the content to be in the same standard as required, and then your tool could make it scroll this way.

This would be quite useful to me as a PDF reader.
Is the concept to get me stuck in the first second? Because it's working, I can't get past the crates, and clicking does nothing!
Yes, that is true. I think most of the people here do not condone breaking into other people's systems and harming them. Rather the community inspires curiosity and seek of knowledge. But the manifesto is very relevant to the case of Aaron.

"We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals." "Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for."
Yes. Employee-owned companies and cooperatives can be run as direct democracies.

In practice, management is a sufficiently specific and tedious job that it gets delegated. Indeed the concept of share ownership creates such a division by default.
Guantanamo is different. There are a lot of people there (fewer now) who don't belong there, but others I'd have to try hard not to murder, myself.

The problem with Guantanamo is the lack of legal process, and the way some people were swept up who shouldn't have been (which mostly got resolved in 2005-2006), not that many of them aren't horrible criminals. I'd be fine with prosecuting them all in federal civilian court with fair trials.
$10000 a month is a very good salary in Europe
Makes you wonder what Hacker News has to do with any of these words well said.
I'm using the same widget, but the downside to that is that without synchronization I won't have my email automatically available for offline reading.
Clicking does do things. I got to level 3 very quickly. Keep trying!
We switched to Node.js: the good and the not so good
Most of the USA and AUSA that I hate were actually appointed by Obama.
Stay classy, Orin Kerr.
How is it relevant to the article being discussed?
I guess the more profound tragedy, as I feel it, is that I always believed Aaron would be one of the best people to lead the fight against these problems (or at least, what causes them), and that the JSTOR trial was just a new, if difficult front.
Unrelated to this, but does anybody else wonder whether the prosecutors would have gone after him when others decided not to if it wasn't for his activism? SOPA being stopped surely annoyed a few powerful people.

What better way to move up in the establishment than by taking out bright activists...
I actually found the voice of the speaker, especially her accent, quite fascinating :)