skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been watching the live streams since 25c3. First of all, it's a great thing there are so many volunteers make such a big conference possible. Since the 4 years the c3 was a highlight in the year for me. But I have to say I was a bit disappointed this time. I don't know why exactly, but it seems to shift focus. The 3rd talk about osmocom is not that exciting, so is the n-th about hacking outdated wireless smartcards. Yes, electro mechanical instruments are fun, but I haven't seen much new and not a single line of code.

Maybe it's me, maybe it's the congress.
50 Cent Party (price of Chinese pro-government blogger)
You underestimate Hal Abelson, he's not going to do a whitewash.

Mr. Abelson has a long and very distinguished history in including excellent standing in the field of ethics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Abelson
It's one of those things that can rapidly spiral, you start needing a bigger kick to keep it interesting. The problem being it is incredibly difficult to talk about, it's something parents will start needing to discuss with their kids straight up.

Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while, but it's the same way drugs aren't necessarily bad unless you start needing a bigger and bigger kick.
Is there no developing, competing standard that improves on current WiFi without these drawbacks?
Hacktivist's suicide intensifies criticism of U.S. attorney, MIT
MIT Chief Orders Review After Aaron Swartz Suicide
I know I saw it on the SA forums, where it may have originated. People would reply "too long; didn't read" to dismiss a post, which eventually was abbreviated to just "tl;dr". Anticipating this reply, authors of long posts would end their post with a "tl;dr" summary.
It would be great if researchers and scientists can search for every single published journal articles on Academia.edu. I used to be a chemist and my college had a great search system. After I graduated, I lost access to that database and have been looking for a tool that will allow me to look for articles.
> Look at it, it is Nazi in its self. Do and think as you are told.

Wow, what a silly take on it. The law's admonition is to not make a genocide out of a molehill. If that's Nazi and conformist, so is telling children not to fucking cry wolf. Nazis were bad, we get it. Not every policy you dislike can usefully be equated with the murder of millions of Jews and the subjugation of the European continent.

Particularly, this case of a prosecutor prosecuting someone under a lawfully passed rule bears scarcely more relation to the Nazis than to unicorns. That is why people bring it up when people Godwin a thread.

And, to be clear, no one here is telling anyone to stop talking about whether this was a prosecutorial abuse, or whether the law should be changed, or whether the situation was just.
> Finally, just because a network is open does not mean you have permission to use it.

If it looks like a store and the door's unlocked their are unsettling consequence when it is considered appropriate to charge trespassing when someone comes in expecting to shop around.

If it is common understanding that MIT's net work is open and is used/viewed as a public resource with out MIT making it know otherwise then their are unsettling consequences if it is considered appropriate to charge a user with digital trespassing.

Now there have been several reports that the MIT network often unpoliced/regulated on purpose, and there are many other universities that have similar polices though most not as liberal as MIT's, so in this light I have not been able to see any arguments for digital trespassing as a strong argument.
http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5059-en-scada_...

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5275-en-factha...

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5393-en-milkin...

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5319-en-certif...

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5152-en-hashfl...

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5219-en-how_i_...

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5256-en-the_fu...

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5206-en-the_et...
I believe this is a per se example of what potatolicious was referring to.

Lessig, Stamos, and Swartz are what is legally known as "biased" toward Aaron's case. Naturally, MIT, JSTOR, and various persons in the federal government have differing opinions.

Aaron wasn't the target of a witch hunt; that would imply that he wasn't guilty of anything. He was--he admits to what he did. His defense was an MLK/Ghandi defense (i.e., civil disobedience).

Lessig himself said that the government had effectively muzzled Swartz to prevent him from defending himself online or alerting others to the severity of his situation.

Which clearly isn't true, since HN, reddit, and the interweb in general has been discussing this case nearly non-stop since the charges were dropped.

that seeing a sitting US prosecutor forced to resign would not have the requisite "deterrent effect"

This is a fantasy, both in the likelihood of occuring and its desired effect. People outside of the tech world simply don't think that way.
Ubuntu's Foray into Mobile
Choose your own adventure to avoid the U.S. debt ceiling
I'm confused - this link seems to be for a petition that's several months old, already past the deadline, and already reached the threshold number of signatures?

And more confusingly, there's no response to it either. Am I missing something?
Aaron Swartz did not die "like a rockstar"
I think it does do more. It ads another degree of accountability to people with power. It might not be much, but it's something. One small anecdote; a development in a local suburb is hitting a brick wall because the media has revealed a relationship between the developer and the council. That development was going up on public land without proper oversight or tender.

Couple of bigger anecdotes;

- Watergate. A president's criminal behaviour was dug up by a newspaper, forcing him to resign.

- Vietnam war coverage forced the US to reconsider their attitudes to weapons with high collateral damage, conscription and large scale land wars in general.
This reads more of a commentary of how sex, masturbation, and porn are viewed in our culture as something that is shameful and wrong. While you can't go anywhere without seeing violence glorified, but also discussed in our custure. Guys skull getting blown off in a movie - acceptable, tolerated, laughed at. Guy with a penis in a movie - wrong, disgraceful, embarrassing, and no one talks about it, especially families.

What's the solution? I don't know, but I think tackling the problem from an early age is important. Adventure Time is the best example of a kids cartoon I can think of that deals with girlfriends, kissing, etc.. while still containing the stereotypical violence of a childrens cartoon.

Aside, porn to me is like violence in media. It's enjoyable, but at the same time absurd. And for most people (I hope) it's an easy distinction that how people in porn and movies act is different from real life.
Neat! I've been reading up and playing around with this stuff the past few weeks, from both the waveform synthesis side and the music theory side. I don't think I've quite wrapped my head around the basic concepts yet. (i.e.: Why have non-chromatic scales that skip semitones? Why do some sets of notes sound good and not others? What parts of sound quality derive from innate psychoacoustics, and what parts are my bias from growing up in the Western world?) I'll definitely be taking a closer look at saebekassebil's Javascript code, which seems to be an attempt to organize these concepts.

It's strange how once you get interested in a topic, you start seeing stuff about it everywhere. First the Clojure-based Overtone project, and now this...
Yes, but porn can sometimes be the worst drug. Sometimes I find the analogy between porn and drugs to add more obfuscation to my thoughts than clarity.
>> Would you register and log on to your competitors' site as a customer to check out their features?

Yes, if it is possible, I have done so and will do so again.

>> Or have you found out your competitors registering on yours as customer to check out your features?

Yes. This is a common practice with any company that has competition.

I don't see how it's different than Apple buying up Androids or vice versa. Blindness doesn't help your business nor does it help your industry as a whole.

>> Would you use a real name?

No.

>> Is it immoral?

Morality is relative. If you have personal objections to doing this, that is one thing, but when you consider that:

a) everyone is spying on everyone

b) you are looking out for a company interest and not your own

... your personal ethics should be separated from the work you do, within reason.

It would be immoral if you managed to log in and sabotage their business. For example, you can place an order of 1,000 widgets and then "change your mind" a week later after the company, in good faith, placed the product on hold, preventing them from filling the order with a legitimate customer. Seeing what your competition does, signing up for mailing lists, or ordering a product catalog, or similar non-destructive behavior is fine in my book.
I signed this when it was open; IIRC I found out about back then via a link here on HN. Not sure of the reason for re-posting it now.
That is correct, and many people are upset about the lack of response https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/290503781093871616
No one yet knows if the geology is suitable for extracting the gas. Testing is just beginning. Just because there is gas does not mean it is economic right now. Fracking technology is very new.
> Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while

Logically speaking, that doesn't mean it's not a bad thing.

EDIT: Porn is indeed almost a staple of Western society, but note that Western culture is also very image-focused and has high rates of divorce and eating disorders among women.
Well, I see that they offer to "Install the Ask toolbar" by default. I don't remember Sun doing this.

http://www.java.com/en/download/faq/ask_toolbar.xml
We're working on the search implementation. It will be available soon.
I'm sure there are people who have never watched porn that don't particularly enjoy sex either. This sounds like all other articles that generalize one anecdote to data.
It means "too long; don't read." I'm not sure why the past tense variation sticks; but it's a label/post-it/card/sign/placard/billboard/sign-post/warning/caute!/message not to read the identified text for concern of irrelevance.

It's like a voting system. The ";" functions as the hash tag: "#tldnr", "#tldr", etc.
I find this a pretty weak argument against the tl;dr. "tl;dr" has become a noun, that means one-line / extremely short summary. Language sometimes grows like that.

A better argument against the tl;dr would be that the piece you're writing it for becomes redundant, provided it's an accurate tl;dr. The term tl;dr wouldn't be needed then, because the tl;dr itself becomes your piece.

If it isn't an accurate tl;dr, there's no reason for providing it in the first place, except maybe for giving a rough idea of what your piece is about. OP rightly points out, though, that conventions already exist for just that. A descriptive title or an introduction clearly distinguishable from the rest of your piece, for example.
If a great injustice really was being committed, the EFF and the ACLU would have fallen over themselves to represent Aaron pro bnono (for free). The fact they did not suggests otherwise.
They're very similar in some respects, both trigger pleasure and reward centres creating a similar level of craving. Not a wholy physical dependency, but certainly a mental one over time.
> Fully statically typed languages put these concerns right in your face and make you think about them.

That depends slightly - if your compiler uses Damas-Milner type inference, it's possible that the compiler will assign the most general type signature possible to your function, which will not prevent this type of error, as operations such as addition work on either integral or floating point numbers.

What you're really after is a strongly typed language that also has explicit type declarations (or a programmer that's reliable enough always to include them even when they are optional).
The Department of Justice has a Twitter account.
I think this is the point I agree with the most on the topic. Though some - not "all"! - news may not be relevant to the reader (it's sheer impossibility to claim that absolutely nothing is relevant), I find it's important to apply analytical skills to situations which have widely local impact.
True, I should have been clearer, I don't believe it is a bad thing by nature, and it's been part of society for long enough that we've not all become degenerates.
For me, 'restart' is generally the most used operation during debug. The vast majority of the time I want to rerun through the init code to clear out the registers and any previous transactions. If I've set something up incorrectly, I can always set a breakpoint and adjust.

So I'm not seeing an immediate benefit to direct modification for my normal workflow. There may be good use cases when writing code that isn't HW dependent or if the compile/flash cycle takes a long time, but those aren't problems I've had very often over the last ~10 years.
The acquisition officially completed almost 3 years ago. Oracle had plenty of time and money to sue Google in the meantime. They are not poor and can do things quickly and competently when they want to; their customers and other Java users shouldn't have to "cut them a little slack" on such bugs.
Kristen, please ignore jacquesm, he is a known troll.

Public interest lawyers are far more valuable contributors to HN, and especially to this discussion, then the histrionics and hyperbole of him and his ilk.
This I am genuinely annoyed with. I am going to start a petition to Oracle for these points, the Java community is extremely large and valuable and it's a disgrace to treat the platform this way.
Asst US Attorney Stephen P Heymann (US vs. Swartz) DOX http://pastebin.com/DUgS0QTw
Ironically you have just named the two plugins that have been disabled in my mainstream browser for over a year. Both of those plugins are examples of what not to do with regards to security, and the first thing I do with new users is train them to surf the web with them off, and switch to a different browser than their main one if they specifically need that functionality. I.e. browse the web with safari (all plugins/java disabled), switch to chrome to watch flash videos (and pray that their sandbox protects you) and switch to Firefox to run your corporate java plugin VPN.

Ideally java/flash plugins will die quickly, and we can replace them with browser native technology that we can hold the browser manufacturers accountable for.
The status quo would seem to agree with you, and would like to keep it that way:

http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2012/04_...
> So either plead guilty to a felon and get a slap on the wrist, or due to some concept of 'wasting time' the prosecutor goes after the maximum of 30 years in jail?

I don't know the right answer to this question. On the one hand, it does seem wrong to send someone to jail when you were willing to give them probation if they bargained with you. On the other hand, if the bargain deal and the worst case outcome of a trial are identical, then why would anyone ever bargain? And therefore the justice system becomes even more expensive to maintain, etc. So I'm of two minds.

It is also entirely possible that the prosecution had no intention of asking for the maximum, but when you consider a trial as a negotiation-game, revealing that is also not something that you can do.
Chinese eugenics
Looks like the author was accurate in how uncomfortable we are as a society to talk about the role of porn in our lives.

I think the article speaks more to the issue with recovery and the issues surrounding "getting back to neutral."

This problem exists. He explains in laymen's terms a simple Pavlovian response that requires more and more brain stimulation to achieve the same level of dopamine needed for ejaculation.

I'm not a neuroscientist, but I bet someone out there can explain it better than I can.
As someone who's suffered under at least one megalomaniac's attempt to be the next whatever, I would caution any future CEO reading this article and dreaming about following its advice to be careful that you're not building a fantasy brand that exists in your own mind. It's very easy to get blinded by your own bullshit - trust in yourself, but verify that others trust you as well.
Didn't tl;dr start as an insult? What the article is describing is a response to the insult that is tl;dr.
I took a quick look at the Javascript code on saebekassebil's GitHub, and it does seem to be the start of some sort of music theory library. The waveform visualizer demo just doesn't seem to be very revealing of what the library is about.
it is common understanding that MIT's net work is open and is used/viewed as a public resource

IT IS NOT. I'm an MIT alum. MIT is crystal clear that their network is private and people can only use it while following their rules. Seriously, does http://ist.mit.edu/mitnet sound like a free for all network where anyone can do anything to you?
Muting is heavy-handed and only half of the issue. When you mute you often block out content that you do want to see. The other half is promoting the content that interests you so it rises above the rest.

Once you've defined what you like and dislike in a nuanced way, you can adjust your signal-to-noise ratio on the fly. See also: http://signaltonoi.se/ (disclaimer: my app, and not yet available.)
It hasn't been responded to. I'm under the impression that more signatures might increase the probability of response? If not, should we start a new one?

If we start a new petition, I will delete this submission.
You're not exaggerating: http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/

Not just the number of suicides, but also the contexts (Elizabeth Shin's story is particularly chilling - that one stuck with me because I used to live with her former roommate's brother).
Browser native functionality wouldn't be cross-platform or even standardized between browsers.

What we really need is some kind of native virtual machine that can run cross-platform bytecode in the browser.

Someone should make a plugin for this that works with all browsers, it would be genius!

</sarcasm>
The coding love // a Tumblr for the dev team
Carmen Ortiz has blood on her hands for causing the death of Aaron Swartz.
This just simply isn't true. It does mean "too long, didn't read" as in, "this wall of text is too long. I didn't read it."
There's a part of the paleo subculture that avoids porn as an unnatural superstimulus. See http://yourbrainonporn.com/ or http://www.reddit.com/r/nofap

Anecdotally, I find their arguments compelling.
A little OT, but seeing his posts end with "You should follow me on twitter here" makes me very sad. It's a constant reminder of what we'll miss.
How best should I extract the audio so I can listen to these as a podcast on my mp3 player? More specifically, I have an iPod with 20 GB of space, of which 4 is free. This is enough for a couple of videos, but it doesn't want to play the .mp4 file, and I would rather have a dozen audio recordings than one video one.

For those cases where I need to see the video in order to better understand the talk, I'll watch it on my lap/desktop.
From a UI/UX perspective: "TL;DR" improves scannability.

As a reader, prefacing that first line/paragraph with "TL;DR" means that all I'll have to read is just that part. This is useful because not everyone uses their first paragraph or sentence to outline the general idea of the article. For example, there might be an anecdote, or a quote, or whatever else to start the article.
You've downloaded millions of articles from JSTOR? Or how MIT put it: "more than 100 times the number of legitimate JSTOR downloads at MIT during that time period"
I can easily see Android brains built into every monitor and TV. TVs already have reasonable brains and most of them run Linux. From that to running Android (and bringing a whole app ecosystem along) is a small step (some extra DRAM, some extra flash).

When every monitor runs a full Android environment, you may just log on to your monitor and have your Google-hosted data and applications ready.

For Microsoft, this is not only a nightmare scenario. It's a doomsday scenario.
Hiring your first sales rep: 10 tips and common mistakes
If you really need a TL;DR, you failed to fulfill your promise to the reader. Writing should be concise, accurate, and to the point, and we as writers should always strive live by the wisdom of Strunk: "Use less words."

When someone opens your webpage, they are entering into an implied agreement with you. They are seeking information and you are supplying it to them. If they are unwilling to uphold their end of the bargain by demanding a TL;DR from me without giving me the chance to read my words, I don't feel any obligation to satisfy them.

The other half of this implied bargain is that I simply offer what they came to find, and if I fail them in that regard, then I should be required to post a TL;DR because all 2000 to 3000 words I blathered out should be in 50 words or less. If I was able to offer a 50-word summary, then I would have simply tacked on an extra 25 words and eschewed the TL;DR.

If you don't like my attitude, that is fine. You probably aren't my target audience, and this is fine. The World Wide Web is a very large place.
I agree it could help at that stage, and if this had been a sensitive private network, I'd err on the side of overkill. A university network, especially one as historically open as MIT, is different. Nothing he did was that out of the range of normal user behavior -- changing your dhcp reg, manually assigning an IP in the right range, etc. are all things people do when airport/hotel/etc. networks don't work. Leaving a hidden laptop plugged in is actually something I did a couple times (as a student) to download linux ISOs, mailing list archives, etc. (since we only had a T1 at the house, and the on-campus network was faster).

I'll wait until Abelson's report, though.
A lot of people won't even read an email unless it as a BLUF
How to answer 'what is your greatest weakness?' in an interview
There are some great parallels with the FR here -- more and more mob unrest, little education as to why and how the political system works the way it does, an overpowering debt that resists easy solutions, endless negotiations and patchwork fixes,etc.
On a similar note to this, I had great fun writing the keyboard and stave search input for for http://www.folktunefinder.com in JavaScript (you'll find keyboard-xxx.js file in there if you look).

(For bonus points the search engine is written in Go).
I think a useful way to look at it is, "well, it certainly didn't help."
Yep, that's the problem. You start seeing a bunch of articles like this for a few months, and then someone in power will say "This is such a terrible problem, why don't we put some sensible restrictions on porn. For the children."
>and it shapes your understanding of culture and circumstances outside your social bubble

This isn't really an argument against Aaron's position, because it is Aaron's position. News shapes your perception of culture and The World, which is a negative because it does so in a harmful way.
Is there any research that proves your claim: "Porn isn't good for you if you want to enjoy sex."? Porn has only made sex better for me.
How does your contention that Aaron's suicide was a "direct result of his mental illness", discounting any external factors as relevant, square with your assertion that the discussion of this event might encourage others to take their life? Either external factors are relevant in a suicide or they are not.

P.S. Putting scare-quotes around the word hacker isn't likely to endear you to many in this place.