skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dug into this on an unrelated debate on HN a few months back, and while drug charges do make up a large component of the prison population like you'd expect, violent crimes make up the majority. If you dig into local data, a lot of those violent crimes are domestic.

That gives some weight to the idea that the problem is long sentences, but admits some other ideas too, like that our prison population is less the product of criminal statutes or sentencing and more due to economic and educational inequalities. The US is large and diverse in a specific sort of way that may amplify this.
A couple of times a year my dad gives me a new book with a handwritten inscription in it. I will not get rid of even one of these as long as I live.
MIT has a pretty open unofficial policy when it comes to trespassing, as one would expect from any school with a dominant hacker culture. People used to go into network closets, pick locks, go into maintenance tunnels, etc. There's a very visible/popular student club on campus devoted to this.
there are some apps by which you can build some mock apps. You can show your mock apps to friends to get some ideas. If enough people say it's not that great, probably you can stop.
maybe, but there's a lot more to it than that.

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

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/hacker/
Martyrdom is a hell of a drug.
The twin ghosts of Alan Turing and Socrates would disagree with you. Of course you're now going to argue that they were in a different situation, but both were apparently unable to reconcile living with the injustices heaped upon them by society and there is parallel with Aaron there.
Defining the Internet as "a technology for moving bits around" is incredibly reductive and sterile, and does nothing to capture the reality of it. You may as well say that a brain is a "collection of cells that transmit electrical potentials". What are the politics of a neuron?

The Internet encompasses more than its hardware and algorithms. It was created and is operated by tens of thousands of people with real values, is used by many more, and freedom of information is a very important principle for many of them.
I enjoyed reading this, but then again - I recognize it as a humour piece.
You're definitely the same Jacques I remember. I haven't come around on this case; I have the same opinion of it I always had. Like Aaron's own lawyer, I was confident he was at no real risk of serving time --- first time offender, no commercial purpose, no co-conspirators, minimal attempt to hide, no damage. It was hard to fathom that he'd do worse than credit card thieves. Unlike his lawyer, who was privy to all sorts of facts neither you nor I had, I was unaware of the psychological games the prosecution was playing. Have you noticed how shocked everyone is at what happened? That's because what happened was shocking. I think what Aaron did was wrong, but like I said at the time, I was hoping he'd do well at trial.

I definitely don't think of myself as any classier than you; I think we occupy opposite poles of some deranged message board energy sphere. Or you're the heat miser and I'm the cold miser. Either way, I can spot a dumb argument as quickly as you can, and just because I'm imperfect doesn't mean I'm not going to point them out.
Unless somebody managed to prove/disprove the existence of God while I wasn't looking, being an atheist or theist requires you to make an assumption in the absence of hard data.

You claim that we operate under a strictly Boolean assumption that god either does exist or does not exist, with "I don't know" being incompatible for some reason. What is that reason? Do you have an argument supporting this claim?
At least the way I meant it, there's a difference between "highly functioning" (even "superbly functioning") and "intelligent" or "accomplished"--and in any case, Socrates was sentenced to death and chose to accept his sentence rather than escaping from prison, so there's that.
yes, it's probably the mostly widely used one though it had an outage last Sunday. Unless you want to invent your own, you should try bit.ly.
13 Steps to Get your startup Viable
Why Content Goes Viral: the Theory and Proof
All I can say is that some people aren't cut out for prison, and there was no indication that "nothing at all" was a possible outcome, save one's faith in the jury system.

However, my point was to note the contradiction in you saying that prosecutors can't be swayed by emotion, while they conduct themselves so as to sway their targets with same. If you don't think that the threat of a long prison sentence would spur emotion in the person receiving the threat, well, I don't know what to say.
How about Al Capone. They had a hard enough time putting him away, if he could have mobsters rotate through jail to do time for him they would have never kept him behind bars.
let me know if you want to put your assets on my site. thanks
I'm not surprised. That seems to be the MIT ethos since Stallman proclaimed the best account password for all users was the enter key.
Try the R programming language
Just missing the various insurance rackets that basically force you to gamble with a house that always wins, or else you're breaking the law...other than that, nice list!
Damn, only 10? Must…read…more…
This particular person was earlier caught hacking into computers at the DOD and NASA (as a minor). He was indicted around June or July and entered a plea in September for which he received six months of house arrest and probation until 18 (about a year). It's not a reasonable presumption that this was someone who was innocent who knew he was going to get railroaded "by the system." He was clearly someone who knew he had really fucked up this time and couldn't use his age as an excuse.
Show HN: Visualize your FourSquare trips
Ever since I had a trip a couple of years back I was wondering if there was a simple way to use my checkins to "tell the story" of my trip.

Last week I had a few free hours as I'm leaving my previous workplace, and decide just to throw in a quick PoC.. hope you like it and find it useful.
I think the effort put into securing computers is an inevitable dead-weight loss. Laws against pollution don't make everyone stop polluting; some polluters will just find creative ways to conceal what they're doing. Definitely doesn't mean I think pollution should be legal.
That's got nothing to do with how the prosecutor should respond to being told he is suicidal. I agree he shouldn't have been prosecuted.
Otherwise you can just use git submodules.

I would recommend against it. They become a real pain down the road.

I wish I had something to suggest as a replacement. We're still trying to figure that one out ourselves. We just know we won't use submodules again. For now, we're manually managing disjoint repositories.
There is definitely a need for another kind of business education.

At some point I left a cushy full-time position for a consulting (in another area, to boot). Classic MBA education is obviously too heavy weight for me. All the things that I needed to run my one-man business I learned from a mish-mash of other consultants' war stories, web forums, and few books.

I would say that Fred Wilson's MBA series (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/mba-mondays/) or courses like Entrepreneurship 101 (http://www.marsdd.com/event_series/entrepreneurship-101/) are getting pretty close to what I need, but sometimes I need to know things that are even more down to Earth. Sometimes they are just technicalities, but very important technicalities: nevertheless. E.g.: how to choose corporate structure, what documents to keep for audit, does CRA (or IRA) accept scanned images instead of paper receipts, basics of accounting to make sure I work more effectively with my accountant, templates for invoices and shareholder meeting minutes, etc. Moreover, it would be great if such education was split into courses or stages. E.g. once my business grows large enough, I will want to know about hiring people, choosing and using CRM, setting up basic IT infrastructure. It is not that (if and when I grow) I am going to do all that myself, but I need to understand at least certain things at certain stages to make informed decisions and give more or less informed "go aheads" to people I hire.

I would definitely subscribe for something like this.
My personal belief (which is significantly different from the law on the matter as I understand it) is that "unauthorized access" for computer crimes should require intentional, material deception. That means that they deceived someone (or their computer), that they did so intentionally, and that but-for that deception, access would not have been given.

I do believe that one could argue over whether changing one's MAC address (or IP) constituted that sort of deception. So in all honesty, it's possible that he would still be convicted by a standard like that, though I would like to think that he would not. Intention would seem to be hard to prove, though reasonable minds might differ.

Separately, I think that computer crimes have disproportionate penalties right now. I really don't see any reason why using a computer to steal money (or commit whatever other crime) should merit a greater sentence than stealing the same amount by other means. I am aware that it has been like this for some time, but hackers have had longstanding gripes with this state of affairs, dating back to Morris & Mitnick.
Perhaps less that it has amped up penalties and more that it has a careless and capricious standard for mapping alleged damages into sentencing categories. It's not necessarily that the CFAA on it's face is unreasonably harsh; it's that it's attached to a stupid scheme from which harshness is an emergent property.
Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?
> Once you're done

You can also rip out and burn each page as you go along, as a Spanish writer had his protagonist do habitually. I shuddered the first time I came across that, but it may have its advantages ...

(Detective Pepe Carvalho in books by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Only book-reading detective that comes to mind besides Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. Also cooks, if memory serves.)
That doesn't mean there aren't limits, and MIT clearly thought those limits were violated here.
I can't count how many times I've looked up Chomsky's views over the years, and every single time I've looked them up, it's become immediately clear that he is completely dishonest.

It would be interesting if you gave us a few examples of where you looked up his views, and found him to be completely dishonest.
if you try and fail at least you know. if you never try you'll always wonder if you could of done it
This wasn't sentencing it was prosecution and I disagree that the mental health of the defendant should be taken into consideration when the cause of the mental health breakdown was facing the punishment for his crimes. If it led to them committing the crime in the first place, perhaps, such as a schizophrenic assaulting somebody, but that isn't the case here. Aaron got depressed because he was caught and prosecuted. That should not warrant them going easy on him.

There are plenty of valid reasons the prosecutor here should be fired and laws changed, but Aaron's emotional response to being prosecuted is not one of them.
Yeah, well, people who aren't Aaron are kind of mad at MIT right now.

That said, MIT has some smart people, surely they can put their noggins together to figure out a way to stem the attack. Maybe once and for all, and for the good of the internet, they can contribute this tool for unilaterally turning off DDOSes to the public.
Do we know for sure what his intent was?

Anyway, yes we can argue about the distinctions here, but I suspect we agree that for prosecutors rigidly to refuse to consider any of them at all ("theft is theft") was abusive.
> I haven't come around on this case; I have the same opinion of it I always had.

I'll take your word for it but I'm getting a different impression.

Aaron was fairly clearly being made an example out of, and I think that after the expansion of the indictment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528083, a thread in which you commented, and which came before the thread about Aarons friends setting up a defence fund) that would have been pretty obvious even to those not already of that opinion.

Maybe I'm slightly more sensitive to this stuff because of some of the things that happened in the wake of reocities.com but let's just say that if Aaron had charges worth a few decades thrown at him for TOS violations and unauthorized access I should probably be in jail for at least several decades because of that little gig.

I know everybody is shocked at what happened, but I'm far more shocked at Aarons' suicide than at the travesty of justice perpetrated there, there are lots more examples of such things happening on a daily basis.
Well, assuming that would be treated the equivalent of armed bank robbery (robbery of a... data bank? ;)... a maximum of 25 years. Knock off 5 years if you don't bring a gun.
I have an MBA (from a top school), and teach a class there now too.

My advice to you:

Do your MBA in a city you want to stay in. You will start businesses and get job referrals from your classmates that remain in the town.

Go out of your way to impress a few influential profs. Employers ask for the best students. Profs will get you gigs.
Looks like it's objdump built for all-architectures.
I made a disassembler

It's mostly just a binary search through the opcodes. The trick is ordering them.

http://www.sparrowos.com/Wb/Compiler/Unassembler.html

Yes, I typed all this shit by hand. It's not complete.

http://www.sparrowos.com/Wb/Compiler/OpCodes.html
Agreed. If iOS actually had a sane declarative language like Android's xml layouts then I'd do everything in code but since layouts coded in Obj-C are excruciatingly painful to read and edit you're better off with a WYSIWYG tool, even if (IMO) WYSIWYG is fundamentally the wrong approach for UI development.

I actually consider this a big liability for Apple going forward. The explosion of "phablets" and other form factors spells the end of their pixel-perfect design approach and their tools and APIs for managing dynamic, variable layouts are stone age compared to Android's.
San Jose State to offer ground-breaking low-cost, for-credit online courses
Thanks - as it happens I'm about 3 months in to learning Objective-c and iOS development. This is super helpful, as many of the tutorials online are dated. Right now I'm working through the Ray Wenderlich stuff which is really good, at least as far as I can tell.

w/r/t using the visual XIB/Storyboard interface vs. coding the views, I've found early on that while the nibs and storyboards make it easy to prototype and visually hook stuff up, looking at some of the apps I admire (apps like Clear, Rise, etc.), makes it pretty clear that I will need to code these views up myself to achieve some of those interactions. Unless I'm missing something (which of course I am, I'm a NOOB) I don't see how most of those can be done right from the nibs.

edit: also, if anyone has any other recommended links/resources, I'd love any recommendations. Thanks.
Why not a top 6 school? These articles are rarely very useful.
Or, it's like so many things in life and it is what you make of it.
I think my mentality about the law is different enough from the one that prevails on HN that I appear much more conservative or authoritarian than I am. I say something anti-authoritarian and I sound like I've done a 180.

We should stop talking about us, or at least, about me. This isn't about me/us.
What are the politics of a neuron? There aren't any. It's mechanism. You're free to give your neurons whatever policy you wish.

There are people who created the internet who believe in freedom of information. There are people who were just working on a defense contract at a major defense contractor. There are people who operate it now who believes lots of different things, and even those that believe in "freedom of information" in some sense have all sorts of definitions for what they think it means.

Creators of technology don't get to decide what politics will be attached to that technology. RMS doesn't like Android, which contains GPL-ed software. Does it matter? Of course not.
You completely miss the point of the Socrates reference. I'll be lazy and quote wikipedia at you: "According to Xenophon's story, Socrates purposefully gave a defiant defense to the jury because "he believed he would be better off dead". Xenophon goes on to describe a defense by Socrates that explains the rigors of old age, and how Socrates would be glad to circumvent them by being sentenced to death. It is also understood that Socrates also wished to die because he "actually believed the right time had come for him to die."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates
To put this in perspective, the people who have received similar sentences to what Aaron was facing were folks such as John Rigas (Adelphia), Bernard Ebbers (WorldCom), Ken Lay (Enron), or Michael Milken. Folks who maliciously defrauded thousands of people out of totals of billions of dollars, for their own financial benefit.
Finger happy lawyers? How to deal when left and right hands do not talk
We have couple of situations of this happening, but this was the first time both me (aka CEO) and our legal counsel received Fedexed Take down notices alleging us of benefiting from IP when in fact the company and its representatives used our service, and our role was limited to providing a solution. http://blog.edocr.com/2013/01/14/ensure-you-have-permission-from-clients-before-uploading-documents/
I am totally satisfied with Uncrustify, and this is my Uncrustify's config for Objective C, in case you find it useful (Allman style): https://gist.github.com/940977
Totally agree. I tore through this book. It was a great read, really easy, and hilarious.
#8 is an opinion/partisan analysis and has no place with the rest of the list. This list is valuable because it otherwise lists encyclopedic facts which are eye-opening in nature; putting in op/eds tarnishes the credibility of the rest, and should go.
Well, spending tons of cash that does not belong to you (but to the taxpayers) to favor certain interests and not others can hardly be called democratic. Only free markets are democratic, hence you will see that stimulus are largely employed in authoritarian regims rather than actual democraties.
I like the graffiti on the right wall in the first picture. Gives off some serious vibes of "secured room".
> I say something anti-authoritarian and I sound like I've done a 180.

That's probably it. I couldn't help but notice.

> This isn't about me/us.

Agreed.
From my and few other people's I trust (totally unscientific) observations: not only MBA does not help you with starting your own business, it actually lowers your chances.

MBAs come out of schools with a set of skills geared towards big businesses. That is what MBA was created for. But the real killer: after so many courses and case studies, for any idea or execution plan you know exactly why it is not going to work. Because this "was tried before and did not work", or "it works sometimes, but we do not have enough capital".

Why entrepreneurs that make it big are usually young? It is not just pure energy and stamina. It is also because they do not "know" that things will not work. And they don't, 95% of the time. But 5% of the cases when they do, against all odds, bring real innovation and wealth creation.

MBA adds too much years of this kind of knowledge on your shoulders.
I am not familiar that much with that specific case. I was referring more to the grandparent's general assertion that "innocent people don't kill themselves" and my point was that they only don't kill themselves if they are sure to face fair and unbiased judicial system.
It's feasible (perhaps easier than it should really be) to legally buy a handgun in California: take a test (written test and basic handling of the firearm), pass a background check, 10-day waiting period, and a limit of one per month.

Far more difficult in New York: I've heard "must wait six months", "need to document a specific reason", and both... The overall message being "don't bother."
A passive aggressive approach to customer relations
We have some evidence, because he wrote a manifesto.
Yes, it does. Things that make you seem like you are being a criminal hurt. The hard thing is that sometimes either option looks bad.

For instance, IIRC, Weev deleted the download script that pulled data from AT&T and the data itself, once publicity had been gotten. That was construed at trial as deleting evidence.

But part of the prosecutors' case was that Weev et. al. planned to exploit the data. In that case, keeping the data would have been used against them as well.
This might be more than you asked for but here goes:

Cellular networks still have to interop with SS7. On most major large Cellular networks this is accomplished with a protocol called IMS. Integrated Multimedia Subsystem provides wrappers for non-IP transactions to allow IP controls over analog equipment. Put simply: stuff that isn't IP gets broken up and wrapped in IP before it can go on the network.

Because of this, and other factors, making a picture messaging system that operates over this structure is difficult. So difficult that virtually all of the MMSC (MMS Gateways) are proprietary and prohibitively expensive.

Why doesn't anyone support MMS? Because it costs too much.
When do you know if you've gone far enough?