skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not actually the case at all companies. My employer has no problem with me waltzing in to work at 1:00 PM and leaving at 5:30, as long as I get my work done. (Granted, I'm still at work and it's 10:00 PM, so maybe it doesn't work that way. Some days of the week, though.) Conversely, if I don't get the work done, I'll be fired, even if I put in my 8 hours - I have one friend that this happens to.
I think there is a strong grain of truth to what you say. My politics are fairly lawyerly,[1] and I find the anti-democratic sentiment on here disquieting, especially the constant attempts to discredit the democratic process at every turn by unsubstantiated hand waving about how the system is "bought."

[1] I think the chicken came before the egg. The profession attracts people who have a strong sense of order and continuity, it doesn't make them that way. Though I think it's incorrect to juxtapose "innovation" so starkly with a love of order. "Cowboy engineering" isn't universal even among technical people. Lots of wonderful things are pyramids--created by armies of order-loving engineers. 787's aren't built by rule breakers.
Integration with things like MyFitnessPal and Fitbit would be great. i've found that the less data i have to manually enter the better i do. i've had a fitbit one and aria for about a month now and thats what i have found. i'm having a hard time imagining a scale the size of a bluetooth headset would work. it seems like something the size of a deck of playing card would be good. i dont know enough about the mechanics of a digital scale but i could see the utility of building it into an iphone case
I have a feeling that, in the end, this incident will have little to no change in the way our justice system operates. I certainly hope that it does, but I'm not holding my breath.
If you are forced to pay for it, you should be allowed to read it. Better not to be forced in the first place, of course.
> I've seen lots of people called "shills" for the US Atty's office or the DOJ.

I don't think you were just called a shill for either of those organizations, but rather a shill for one or more of the individuals involved.
We'd love to do that. We just lack the manpower. There are a couple of possible approaches ... one is a compiler backend similar to our C backend. Another is to try out emscripten.

If you're interested in helping out, would love to chat. We're on #dylan on freenode.
Putting the patent in the public domain or invalidating it would be a good penalty for frivolous patent suits.
The fundamental idea of granting a time-limited monopoly (via a patent) to the inventor/assignee to use the invention is to encourage research and development expenses by the company. These expenses are now like an investment/return in exchange for benefits to the entire society after the patent expires. If use of a patent in a product gives the company competitive advantage, they may recover their R&D expense with it.

An interesting / novel way to curb the issues with the patent system would be to cap the maximum monetary benefit a company may get out of a patent based on the R&D expense involved in coming up with the patent. For example, if the expenses involved in coming up with invention is X (including filing fees?), the patent may be set to expire once the company makes say 10X out of it. If it takes $2 to come up with an idea, then the maximum worth of that patent under this example would be $20, which would still be a good return on the investment.

Of course, tracking this would be painful, but so is the current state of the patent system! On the very least, this may be applied to limit awarded damages during litigation.
For products that I'm choosing to purchase/use, I do.
> I strongly disagree with the grandparent comment, for what it's worth.

I'd be interested to hear why, if you haven't burned out on the subject... which presumably you haven't, since you just commented on it.
If she hadn't, would the complaint be, "why didn't anyone propose this change early enough to actually help?"

I suppose one could focus on retribution for this particular event, or recognize that the CFAA allows for many other unknown people to spend lengthy jail sentences with few people caring about them.

If the legislation is flawed, it should be changed, so that even people without celebrity are protected. Prosecutorial discretion has its place, but the idea of prosecutors selectively applying laws that are on the books with considerations about how popular suspects are in a poor model for a legal system.
There are a thousand apps doing the same thing you're doing without asking for cash before I can play an advanced grid.
A Daring Fireball would you say?
You know what you do when you want the prices to go down? Don't buy it.

In-flight internet is a new product. They are establishing what an acceptable price point is.
Are you trying to argue that AAPL is more diversified than MSFT?

http://blogs.technet.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/commu...
Except it's not REAL news. First of all it's not even news, since it's a rehash of similar reports that were first reported back in December, only this time it's display instead of other parts. Secondly there is absolutely no source or anything credible that states the reason of the cut. The cut is real (albeit old news), but reporting it as if iPhone 5's demand being weak was a matter of fact (it wasn't) is downright irresponsible.

Also the initial report suggested the cut was from 65 million units, which means even at half of that it would have been a record non-holiday quarter, but that number was soon removed from the WSJ report because it may not have supported their fear-mongering.

Something is fishy here.
>Are the laws right? Probably not.

Hence the trouble.

I've said before that I don't think these prosecutors probably did anything out of the ordinary. But that's the problem. The problem is that this is somehow ordinary. That needs to stop. And making an example out of a high profile situation can be one step to making it stop.

I don't know how much I really care if they get removed or not, and I don't really expect them to, though I certainly wouldn't cry for them if they did. As I see it, it's more a step on the road to fixing the general problem than anything to do with them as individuals. And certainly the problem is bigger than them and doing only that would be wholly inadequate.

>We would all like a reason, something that we can point to and change so something like this never happens again. But it's not that simple.

I think it's more accurate to say that it's not that easy. Because it is pretty simple: We need to change the law so the large majority of existing felonies that don't involve violence, physical injury or personal financial gain cease to be felonies, so that the justice system can stop being a prison factory that inherently requires coercive plea bargains in the overwhelming majority of cases merely in order to stop the system from collapsing under its own weight. That is not a trivial undertaking, but it's entirely solvable if we have the will and the numbers to make it happen.
A patent is granted for an "invention", whether it is visible or not. I do not see why a visible invention is not an invention.

See my separate comment for more on this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5071287
I think it will take me a day or two to properly digest this article. That is a good thing. Here are a few gut responses in semi-random order.

1. I absolutely agree that the whole process of plea bargains, threats, etc is unethical, immoral, etc. And we should object to it in all cases, not just when it happens to someone like Aaron Swartz.

2. I absolutely disagree that Aaron's actions would seriously threaten the revenues for journals. Once a journal has been delivered, it has been paid for. Retroactive access to past journals does not lessen the desire for libraries to proactively gain access to future ones. The fact that journals are willing to let articles onto JSTOR where they are often available for a nominal (and in many cases a nonexistent) fee says very clearly that the marginal value that Aaron would have taken would be miniscule.

3. I strongly disagree that the process by which the USA acquires more laws at this point can be fairly described as "democratic". There is a minimum facade of democratic input, and in rare cases (eg SOPA) this can redirect the system. But on the whole the system is not democratic, and describing it as such tends to give people a false sense of complacency.

4. That said, I agree with the general principle under which Orrin would have recommended sentencing. But I emphatically disagree with the specific conclusions there. We have ample evidence from, for instance, the ease with which JSTOR got Aaron to back down and return materials before the prosecutors arrived that he actually could be deterred. There was every reason to believe that he found jail to be a very threatening prospect, and the plea bargain suggested by his lawyer would have, in fact, deterred him from future action. Given that, there was no need to seek large punishment.

5. The specific suggestions on reforming the CFAA seem very good to me. If we're optimistic that the Supreme Court will set precedent interpreting the CFAA in a very good way, then we don't want Congress muddying the waters with a provision that can confuse future courts about whether they should follow the reasoning in precedent or guess at the intent of worse recent statutory law. The ease of elevating crimes to a felony strikes me as a very clear problem.

I could go on, but as I say it will take me some time to digest this article.
So your app that just got released and has 100 downloads should appear before an app that has been out for a longer period of time and has more downloads? I don't really think this makes sense from a user perspective, maybe fiddling with the search results once or twice to show recent apps, but it doesn't make sense to permanently move an app like yours up the list. Sorry if this comes off as harsh.
I think you misread the UI. It currently has ~270 signatures, and needs the remaining 99730 to reach the threshold.
The problem with this article (and nearly every attempt at analogous argumentation by anybody, ever) is that the writer cannot construct a homologous argument, which ultimately relegates the entire attempt to, at best, being mildly entertaining, but otherwise unhelpful. I've attempted many times to draw analogies in argument, but when your audience by and large shares the experience, they're useless. When attempting to dispute a point, or bring notice to something that you'd like to see changed, it's better to stick with homologous arguments and eschew analogies. Otherwise, you're just going to get mired down in quibbling over how the analogy doesn't hold, and completely sidetrack any attempts to discuss what you're really wanting to discuss.
No, the flaw of democracy is that people can't vote to end democracy.
No free/open-source editor fits the particular bills I want as good as Sublime Text.

(And I'm saying it as a long time Vim user, from the Sun O.S/fvwm days of lore as well as a heavy Eclipse user in the early to mid '00s).

When those free/open-source editors come into the 21th century with regards to native integration/UI I might reconsider.
In what way are Carmen Ortiz's political ambitions now "over"? Has something specific happened?

I signed the petition, and I hope it has a good effect ... but this article seems to be overstating some things unless there's some news I didn't hear about.
He's against irresponsible drinking to the point where it will cause harm to oneself and others, but for responsible drinking to the degree that it will confer benefits.

I don't see a fallacy here.
I agree. I can't recount one serious thing that has come out of this petitions site. The only thing concrete to come out of this site is that they are not going to build a Death Star. Great. I can't believe they wasted money to answer that question. That being said, the Death Star question showed everyone that this site is a joke and likely won't result in any useful change.
Regardless of your feelings on the topic, this is preaching to the choir -- porn for the HN croud. There's nothing new, interesting, or even concrete in this linkbait.
I should start a petition to end petition posts petitioning to end petitions.
aaron's mindset really is different from kerr's, and kerr's thinks his is "better" (i'm not really sure which side to take on this point). but regardless of that point, how should we expect the law to respond to someone like aaron? should we expect that people who intentionally break laws and practice civil disobedience not be punished? if so, why bother even having laws?
It would be good to add sources in this wiki!
People decide which philosophies are extreme. As individuals (for themselves) and as groups (for their society, group, company, neighbourhood, etc).

Are you of the "anything goes" thinking? I for one, find that attitude TOO extreme. I don't wish to accept (or even tolerate) "anything" just because someone else finds it OK.
Fair enough, but I don't see how the last bit about gun nuts has anything to do with the article. A politician lost popular support, and the media let us hear about all the details. The system worked today (assuming her career really is over) and no guns could have helped either way.

Civil war might be justified if we lose all privacy or control of the media/communications, but unless that happens then put the damn guns away and work with society
(This will be my last post on this thread because I think I've now gotten into a mode where everyone's just downvoting whatever I say.)

I would just like to point out that I said more than once that I am not trying to justify the behavior described in the original article. Maybe I just didn't make myself clear enough, or people really just disagree. But all I've been trying to say that this illegal behavior does not run under the heading "theft".

The reasoning is similar to why illegal file sharing is not theft - it is copyright infringement.

It is also not relevant whether a paying customer will have less bandwidth to their disposal if someone accesses the internet service on a plane for free because the paying customer would also lose the same bandwidth if another /paying/ customer would use it. Thus the paying customer would not be able to sue the one who accesses the internet illegally.

The access provider could, but not for theft.
I prefer to use the term 'anti-life' for the other side.
I really appreciate these types of articles. I learn a lot from them. I actually also discovered the google thing on Gogo the last time I was on their network. But I never made the connection that the author did. I found that insight to be very educational. Not to mention, now I have some reading to do about TCP over DNS, IMCP, etc...
Someone should implement CoffeeScript as macros. That would get everyone's attention.
> The value in Ortiz "paying" is to show other prosecutors what can happen when they get over zealous

what i got from the article is that Ortiz was not overzealous. she was doing what most prosecutors do all the time. why should we single her out? if we wanted to fire all prosecutors that used her tactics, we'd probably have to fire the majority of federal prosecutors.
how do you judge what the cost of development was? it is a very manipulatable number - looking at what holywood movie studios do already tells me that this method can't possibly work due to many who would game the system.
I am happy we can isolate a point of upstream difference here, as many times people argue about downstream things unproductively.

Regarding "cowboy engineering", granted. I would argue that respect for engineering practices/stability comes after that blistering innovation that builds the system in the first place. And in some cases at least, many lawyers seem to endorse anti-democratic measures (e.g. having federal prosecutors immune from election, or having the federal government enforce civil rights measures that were vastly unpopular in the states of enforcement). So it is more complex than pro/anti-democratic on the lawyer side too.

But ultimately even more than "democracy", it may just be whether you explicitly believe the ends justify the means. If your bold stratagem ends in failure, then even more scrutiny is placed on your extralegal or envelope-pushing means (see Napster). If it ends in success, you often have much more popularity/influence than you did before and the envelope-pushing is forgotten or romanticized (see Jobs' early phone-phreaking, or Youtube). So whether or not people verbally agree that the ends justify the means, they usually practically agree, in that one or more of their heros was a nonconformist who did change the system.

Indeed, often the kind of hero responsible for creating the legal system that they're implementing. The guys on the dollar bills, like Washington and Lincoln, led a revolution and suspended habeas corpus respectively; they did what it took to win, and let history be the judge of whether it was right. So from this vantage point, those who simply execute the law without concern for higher morality are respecting the hackers/revolutionaries of times gone by (because they won) while blocking those of the present day (because they haven't won...yet).
We've been using Clustrix in production for two years at TheLadders. Very satisfied with performance, wide feature set, low maintenance cost. Saved money on: not doing sharding; eliminating a full-time DBA position; repurposing hardware used for MySQL slave farm and storage. Clustrix support is excellent.
>First it's obvious (but hardly anyone ever cares about it) that that such trivial things are still issues just show how much our diff tools are still in the stone age (for a start they should be able to figure out that the two source file: one with the ending and the other without are semantically identical).

As long as you (or anyone else) doesn't write any new cooler diffs (though part of what you ask already exists), what they "should do" doesn't matter and doesn't change the fact at all.

Actually it reminds me of the "sufficiently smart compiler": http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler
would you mind submitting it to my ex-prj.com? hopefully people interested in your prj can contact you.
> It's being targeted by the hateful vengeance of an Internet crowd that is so convinced of the truth of its accusations and that it knows all the relevant facts, that it doesn't even give her a chance to defend herself before casting the judgement over here.

Versus being targeted by the full weight of the US attorney's office that is so convinced of the truth of its accusations and that it knows all the relevant facts that it piles on trumped up charges to force someone to not defend himself in court?

When the internet crowd has the ability to have her imprisoned against her will, you can compare the situations.
The implication is that she's a political liability. Any opponent with any sense would bring this incident up to discredit her. I can see the ads now: "If your son was wrongfully accused of a crime, would you trust her as governor/senator/etc?"
Not retaining key personnel is why Java is getting buggier
Not quite. This makes ACH more accessible than it was before, which makes it that much easier to commit ACH fraud. Also, it is possible to layer a secure layer on top of ACH, but Dwolla didn't do that. They either chose not to, or they don't know how. They just exposed the ACH functionality directly.
Moving or simply paving over cemeteries may be more common than you think.
Yes, the reasoning for his situation is totally legit.
Giant iPhone 5 memorial stone to Steve Jobs in St. Petersburg
OK, here's some substantiation: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/opinion/how-bankers-help-d...

HSBC has admitted that it is for all practical purposes a criminal enterprise masquerading as a bank. This is not a paperwork mistake or a lapse of oversight, it's their business model. Nobody will be prosecuted. The people performing these admitted criminal acts will be allowed to keep their paychecks, their bonuses, and in many cases, their jobs. No jail time, no criminal records, not even 40 hours of picking up trash in a park.
I understand your point, but I think those ads would do poorly because the percentage of the population aware of Aaron's passing is likely closer to zero percent than it is to one percent.
Only if I were more clever.
So someone publicly links it who guessed it and a bunch of other people start linking it. Are all of the secondary people ok?
You can always refute it. Whether you'll get your money back or not is an entirely different matter. The consumer protections on ACH are much weaker than credit cards, so it's pretty much up to the discretion of your bank.
To a center-left lawyer like me, this piece sparks the same concerns and the same dismissiveness that I feel when I read Tea Party rants.
you're right, it is from my own script where I do it different with more sanity checks and my own errors, I just applied it to the line above.

I'm also in that habit for anything fired at startup or in cron so you don't pollute logs.
You know which site I check when I want to read about politics?

Hacker News.
I read the whole docket today, and most everything was signed by Stephen Heymann and, less frequently, Scott Garland.
law professor orin kerr on aaron's law:

> A lot of people have wondered how to amend the computer crime laws in response to the Swartz tragedy. So far I have seen a lot of interest in this, but not a lot of sensible proposals. Already, Rep. Lofgren stepped forward with “Aaron’s Law,” , text here, which would amend the statutory definition of “exceeds authorized access.” This isn’t new text: It’s just the definition of “exceeds authorized access” that was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year to try to stop Lori Drew-like prosecutions. This amendment is well meaning, no doubt, but I think it is a bad idea for two reasons. First, it is weirdly disconnected from the Swartz case. Swartz would still have faced exactly the same criminal liability under “Aaron’s Law” that he did without it.

the rest here (in section IV): http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
Or perhaps, after the initial generation, nobody in the democracy voted to have democracy in the first place. We are slaves to the whims of men long dead.
Yes, but then they go and hire a used car salesman.
Ask HN: Do real hackers use Unity 3D?
So the "real hackers" phrase is an attempt to draw attention, but I think it's a good (if sensational) simplification of my question:

I have a project coming up and it looks like the production company wants to go Unity.

My fear of Unity is that it looks like WYSIWYG for games -- that it will do too much for me when I'm increasingly interested in building an engine and rendering system (or at least interacting with one more directly, in code). I love OpenGL, though I only have six months experience with it.

I'm afraid that whereas I've spent the last six months gaining significant development experience (objective-c, opengl, linear algebra, a sprinkling of c++) which will benefit me in any language and on any platform, if I start using Unity, my experience will be locked up in a more proprietary platform that will have limited application outside of Unity game development, and that the experience will be comprised more of clicking little gui buttons than writing code.

I'm definitely impressed with the games Unity can create, so it's not an issue of whether or not I think the product will be good -- the question is, will I be able to continue to learn and grow as a developer?

This is where I'm hoping to get some input from other developers who have used Unity. I'm vaguely familiar with the Unity scripting process, but is it likely that my general programming skills will come into use day-in, day-out? I'm hoping that my first impression is wrong, and I would be very grateful for any developers willing to enlighten me with their experience.