skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect the same, else I wouldn't be looking forward to it.

But even though I expect the conclusion, I'll still be very interested to see how a legal expert makes the case persuasively, and manages to support it with objective examples.

However your comparison to the Gonzalez carding ring is highly unfair. We've been repeatedly warned about the difference between statutory maximums and actual penalties. Jail sentences are like college tuition, the actual amount you pay is not the official sticker price you're given.

How much less? According to http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/01/14/mit-hacking-case-... the plea bargain that Aaron was offered was that he had to plea guilty to all 13 counts, and spend 6 months in jail. That's a lot less than what the defendants in the Gonzalez carding ring got.

But that's a plea deal. If Aaron took it to trial and won some, lost the others, his likely sentence would be something greater than the plea bargain and significantly less than the maximum. The judge would have discretion, and would likely take everything you say into account in determining the penalty. So I'd still hope it would be less than what the defendants in the Gonzalez carding ringt got.

That said, being declared to be a felon is no picnic, as many can attest. Doubly so if, like Aaron, you have friends all over the world and would like to travel to conferences in other countries. And yes, you can sometimes get the felony officially expunged years later, but even that is imperfect. (As I learned sharing beers with Randal Schwartz...)
My uncle always used to say to me,

"Don't tell me what you're going to do. Show me what you've done."

This website feels like it's trying to get my email by reiterating an idea that was discussed on HN already.
Surprised this isn't getting more attention on HN.
The "three felonies a day" thing is based on the idea that through stretching of the law, prosecutors can target people for activity that ordinary people would consider harmless. My point is that tech people are falsely assuming that their characterization of Swartz's actions as harmless is universally shared. Without this characterization of harmlessness, the prosecutor's actions look very different.

To address some of your specific points:

> Now yes, if I say "JSTOR had no continued beef with Aaron"

What about MIT?

> Similarly, the response you will get from, say, your mother to "evading electronic attempts to stop him" is different from the response you will hear from many people who actually know and understand exactly what that entailed.

Do you think ordinary people draw an ethical distinction between changing a MAC address and more complex measures? Should they? Does that change the underlying intent?

> Why do you think that is? Blind loyalty to someone they probably never met?

How about cultural differences? My mother thinks that smoking marijuana is seriously wrong and a danger to society. Most people in say Berkeley, CA, do not. Until relatively recently, the former opinion was more prevalent. People who frequent Hacker News do not think it's a big deal to change your MAC address to get onto a network that MIT doesn't want you to be on. That sentiment isn't universal.

> Is it important that we point out that trespassing charges were dropped? I am inclined to think so.

Now whose being the lawyer? Does the fact that the trespassing charges were dropped change the fact that MIT didn't want people going into that closet?

All I'm trying to say is that there are two different things to you could rant about.

1) A prosecutor abusing her discretion to target someone for activity that people think are harmless.

2) Laws that don't recognize that certain kinds of network intrusions are more harmful than others.

Everyone on HN is going after (1), because they are steeped in a cultural context that considers what Swartz did no different than someone cutting across a private lawn. But that sentiment is not universal, and I'd argue that it's not even common. The correct answer here is (2).
Branch is basically a conversation platform. User A posts up a topic and then invites people who he/she feels is knowledgeable about the topic to answer it. The invited people can in turn invite others to the conversation as well. You can think of it as a private forum.
It would be really helpful to have some real world examples of changes going from C++ OOP to C++ functional and include the trade-offs.

By concrete I mean what changed in Id's code (or some other game or ui framework), and not just some text book example. What changed in GameObject or PhysicsSphereObject or RenderableSkinnedMesh or whatever things changed. What did the code used be like? What was changed? What benefits did the change provide? What problems did the change introduce?

Abstract talk is interesting but "show me the Money!" ;-)
It's interesting that you were so proud to judge a website by its slogan that you'd come here and tell all of us. It's one thing to have that reaction, it's another not to resist that urge and then announce to everyone that you judged the book by its cover.

> do not need another way to talk to each other, we're doing just fine

People are very poor judges in deciding whether they need something new before they actually see it. I have no idea if this is something we "need" but this is some bizarre anti-progress attitude. The world is in need of new and better ways of doing almost everything.
I seriously wonder why people still use haml over slim. Slim imho is the best templating language around. It should replace haml in this so called 'prime' stack.
Yammer's new digs -- this is what you want your next office to look like
MIT Does It Right [appointing Abelson to investigate]
Felony charges abate at death. Either side can file a document known as a "Suggestion of Death" to the court. The case is the dismissed by the court. The Government did not "drop the charges," though I don't doubt that they filed a motion trying to do so.
I don't believe there was a civil forfeiture but if there were they would move to substitute the Estate for the individual. This is not the case in criminal cases.
That's awesome and since Firefox and Chrome (and Opera?) are evergreen browsers they will presumably be able to phase those browser patches out quite rapidly on the 2.x branch.
India’s lust for gold
Great article; concise explanation of most of the points I would have expected to be there. Especially some of the more subtle things like backpressure everywhere, measure with percentiles, and the importance of being partially available.
Really looking forward to seeing Clef on more sites
> Aaron Swartz is what I wish I was.

I personally interpreted this statement in abstract terms, rather than in concrete terms: to be a builder, to have the courage to voice our beliefs, and to put our beliefs into action.

These concepts are abstracted high enough from "the actual Aaron Swartz" that they are just general positive traits. Striving to embody these traits (rather than trying to mirror Aaron Swartz, for instance) is in my opinion, health (to a limit, of course).

In that sense, "Aaron Swartz" was a personification of these abstract virtues that perhaps many of us wish we could project more strongly in our own lives.
The 'several federal laws every day' angle is there to remind each and every one of us that we could be treated like Aaron Swartz, whether we think we're violating a law or not. The federal government prosecutes cases all the time against defendants who had no criminal intent whatsoever.

After telling your mother that story about Swartz, tell her a bunch of other stories about a bunch of other potential federal cases, and then tell her she has the resources to prosecute just a subset of them. Prosecutors are always complaining about not having enough resources, after all. See if she likes the feeling of arbitrarily choosing which of a whole bunch of people get a taste of federal justice, and which go free. Explore the rationale your mother uses to make her decisions. Do political considerations ever come into it? Does settling a grudge? The ability of the defendant to defend himself?

I don't get why you're bringing up 'information freedom' or other red herrings. I'm not particularly interested in that or the rest of Aaron's politics, which were rather far from my own. I'm not even trying to argue that Aaron's actions were harmless (although it's true I don't see any significant harm resulting from them). I'm just stating that the real problem is too many laws on the books, prosecuted selectively by people who don't have to justify why they pursue the cases they choose to pursue and ignore the cases they choose to ignore. Arbitrary power. Rule by man, not by law. Something that threatens every one of us, no matter what we think of Aaron's actions.
I don't read "the news" (meaning mainstream media, if you may) all that often, but when I do - I do like that they're "bad at filtering", or rather, their sheer broadness of topics. It reminds me that there is people with other views of life and that there's more topics out there - than what my more like minded sphere care to interest themselfs with.
If you are interested in publishing your own magazine on Newsstand, then we are definitely interested in getting in touch with you.

If you aren't, then we haven't got much use of it.

Let us know if you are.
I agree. We've been making movies about war since the dawn of film making. I mean sure, movies like Birth of a Nation and Saving Private Ryan depict it differently, but we've still been doing it in film forever. And in terms of art, for hundreds if not thousands of years. The only difference between, Saving Private Ryan and say Call of Duty 2 is that you are in control of a soldier who is shooting enemy soldiers, and I guess it's this difference that people are harping on, not that I agree with this idea.

People have said similar things regarding books, pictures, movies, etc. and this is nothing new and it's all been for the same reasons: when it's politically advantageous and so as not to blame bad parenting.
Funny coming from the guy who said he'd shut down Apple and return all the money to shareholders:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html

How's that Apple company doing anyway? :)
How do we know he is a lawyer? Because his profile says so? Maybe he's like so many folks who didn't know what to do with themselves but were pampered enough to get another four years of school dayz, got a law degree, then did something else? Sorry, but saying "I'm a lawyer" and debating people doesn't mean I have to respect your views on the law.
Exactly what Dell needs. The leadership & vision of private equity firms.
When I learned Rails, I was also learning Ruby. (This was 6 months ago.) (As a matter of fact I was learning what programming really was...)

Learning MiniTest/Test::Unit first I would say is a much better approach because you get to focus on the language, which is at the end of the day, the reason Rails is so special.

I read somewhere that someone decided to teach Rspec because it had "less" metaprogramming than a Test::Unit definition.

But in retrospect, it may have been really easy to begin grokking metaprogramming if we had explained that naming something:

class UserTest < TestUnit::TestCase

would end up looking for the User class because of the way it was written. (I believe Rspec does something like this as well but because it deviates from Ruby...it's harder to explain.)
A Personal Manifesto
I know, I know. We are not showing a full product here, or even a half one. We are getting in touch with the people who are interested in publishing a Newsstand Magazine.

We're gonna start with iOS and see where that takes us.
Would've been nice for them to "do it right" two years ago...
http://hackdesign.org
"Two-factor
...
These devices can be expensive ... "

This is not true at all (the expensive part). The hardware component for setting up two-factor auth for users is effectively free if your users have smart phones (i.e. Google Authenticator and equivalents). Honestly, users that don't probably have smart phones probably aren't going to use two-factor auth anyway.

Similarly the server software side isn't that complicated to implement either. In my experience with implementing it, most of the complexity is in handling emergency codes for resets as implementing the TOTP/HOTP parts are pretty straight forward.

I remember hearing that single purpose two-factor hardware token (i.e. something like those RSA SecurID keychains) are on the order of $5-10 per user (was a couple years ago, price is probably lower now). If you're dealing with less sophisticated users but the cost of compromising a user's account is high (ex: you're a financial institution) then I think that price is well worth it.
If economists agree on something, the public tends to think differently
We've allowed specific customers to run Tor but made it very clear that all activity would fall under our AUP/TOS.

Unfortunately it has generated a bit of abuse so we are considering revising our AUP to no longer allow Tor traffic.
Depending on the spectrum of the phone camera's flash LED, you might be able to get away with just putting a diffraction grating in front of the camera. I recall, from reading a TI app note about pulse oximeters a while back, that these work by comparing the relative intensity of IR and a visible-red light transmitted through the finger (and that there was also some way to do it with reflected light). I wonder if there is a clever way to calibrate the grating without any extra hardware?
>That action would have seriously harmed JSTOR.

I think we could reasonably argue about that; the entire database is freely available to anyone who goes into a major university library, etc., and unless posting the articles resulted in universities ceasing to subscribe to JSTOR (which seems unlikely) then they lose no significant revenue. But this is going off on a tangent.

Even if I concede that JSTOR would be financially harmed, it still shouldn't be a felony. Let them sue him for copyright infringement.
I actually did it with helpful intent. The slogan is so bad that it needs to be changed as soon as possible. Most people who see that slogan and not like it would not provide feedback about it.
Wouldn't say `let` is so much better than `def setup` as a newcomer. `def setup` is simple and powerful enough and after a while you begin to wonder whether something like `let` exists.
You have a small typo on pricing page "Anayltics".
Oh, I get the concept. I've just been doing this for a while and see it fall part constantly. The problem is always that what is clear to you isn't clear to everyone else, including yourself somewhere down the road. And decomposing everything to atoms tends to lead to a mess of indirection.

Clarity can usually be addressed with longer variable or method names, but there's a strong culture against that in nearly ever programming community.
Definitely! The theme I'm noticing, however, is that it is miraculous when a large organization ever does anything that isn't intended to enrich executives and screw over all the little people. Maybe we'll get a miracle in this case, but I won't hold my breath.
I was reading '21st Century C' (I strongly recommend it for anyone writing C on a regular basis), and the author also argued against declaring all the variables up front. I don't quite know why, but I had a very strong reaction against it. As far as best practices go, I would try to keep every function small enough that you can find all the stack variables easily. If the function gets too hairy, refactor it so you can follow where the variables are going.
Aaron Swartz, Who Helped Free Information, Is Dead by Glenn Feishman
One of the most shameful moments of my career happened on the Saturday night before WWDC in 2010. I'd never worked on a system with more than one component or more than 20,000 lines of code. Drunk, I managed to stumble from Jeff's hot-tub to his roof and told him that Twitter's scaling problems were "stupid" and that "there were no good reasons why Twitter should go down".

I've apologized to him before, but after having worked on Minefold for the last 2 years, I feel like I need to apologize again. The work that Jeff and the others at Twitter have done has been amazing. I was also a massive cock.
Real-time QA: staying confident with code
Dell reportedly in talks to take the company private
I upvoted you, so I think you had some good points. I don't think, however, that our society denigrates sex. I think that what has happened was a cultural response to STDs, and the problem of rearing children. People (in my opinion) naturally pursue what makes them feel good, and sex is our number one feel-good activity. So we've been struggling with how to control it. You see the problems of unrestrained sex now with AIDS, herpes, new antibiotic resistant strains of clap, the rise of single-parent families, etc.
He's mentioned before that he's toyed with the idea of switching to Haskell.

That wasn't for functional programming though. It was instead for the built-in static code analysis the Haskell type system and compiler provides.
It's worth noting that rspec gives you lots of options.

@micropost.should respond_to(:content)

is perfectly valid, and IMO, much cleaner.
I think you should have had some demo or something ready before you published it to HN. I really like the graphics and style, can't wait to see how your program works!
Since most of these seem to be about user accounts, I'll add: Don't require a user to have an account unless it's actually necessary for the feature.

Also, although I understand many folks have philosophical problems with this, you should support one-click log in with at least one of Facebook, Google, or Twitter. I almost certainly do not want to make a password for your site.
Ask HN: A good resource to learn the REST API basics.
Hy HN:

I am looking for some resources that explain the standards and best practices of RESTFUL architecture in general, and for Django in particular.
Interview with Sahil Lavingia: A Look At What Gumroad Has Planned
Founder of McAfee ... says money makes ‘you end up like Bill Gates’
It does seem a bit fishy.
The man speaks the truth, but I do get a warning

2.0^(40.0/1.5)
Runtime warning (func=(main), adr=18): non-zero scale in exponent
67108864.00000000000000000000

Apparently the ^ function only works with integer powers. The exponential and natural log functions work as expected

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/07/14/bc-math-library/

keith@xeon4:~$ bc -l
e(l(2)*(40.0/1.5))
106528681.30999083085437360438

nice example.
I had no idea either. And then I clicked on "What do you like about Reddit?" and it said it ended in August 2012 which had me even more confused.

But after clicking around I worked it out. It was an elitist (and far less useful) version of Quora. Or was it simply a polished discussion board. Then I clicked the About Branch button and realised it was more about the Twitter integration than anything.

IMHO: Try and clarify what this is on the home page. "A new way to talk to each other." is contrived, meaningless and simply not true. It's not new, it's better.
Many companies still charge $50/user/year for two-factor authentication (Wells Fargo wanted to charge me $180/year for it) and even programs that use smartphones can be expensive. What you're suggesting is that companies do it in-house, which is possible with a sophisticated IT department, but still takes significant time (cost) to implement and manage.

You're right that this technology is getting much better, but cost is still a barrier to entry for this space.
Nope, not even close to rational on your part. You can't say that people talking can be responsible for some more suicides, and in the same breath say other people talking (aka the justice department accusing someone and threatening with severe punishment) can't be responsible for an action.

You are simply stating "I don't like to think this way, so I'm going to talk a bunch of illogical circles until it's too confusing to notice the cognitive dissonance".

Further, you are setting up a false dilemma based on "choice of death".

Further still, you are making a slippery slope argument about "how will this affect all the other activists".

Oh and the post to health department recommendations is an appeal to authority.

Finally, in the hypotheticals I give, 2 involve death stemming from a choice to partake in risky behavior.
What if there isn't causality, but something more systemic, a vicious circle, a negative feedback loop?
Now, using this new technique, attempt to solve this problem

4x + 2x^2 + 5 = 100

:)
We know the prosecution felt a 6-7 year outcome was reasonable for the offenses Swartz committed. We know that outcome is worse than that obtained by members of a carding ring. I agree with you: the carders plead out, and the prosecutors were offering a much more lenient sentence to Swartz for pleading out.

The whole thing is a tragic game of chicken. Both players seem to have been dysfunctional in different ways. But the prosecution wielded far more power. If what we know about the case is the whole story, then any reasonable person looking at this case should have been able to see that a 6 year sentence was an unjust outcome. Unlike most HN'ers, I actually have no problem with plea deals and stern prosecutions for people who go to trial; the system has to work that way unless we fund it differently. But the stern prosecutions need to be hemmed in by reason and fairness and logic. Here, it doesn't seem to have been.
I guess Carmack would be a big fan of Rust which essentially borrows lots from Haskell, OCaml, C++ and Erlang while being native, safe and on-par in terms of speed with idiomatic C++.
> I don't see how the lines method is any easier than long multiplication

You probably learned multiplication using something similar to the lines method. If you had 3 x 4, you'd draw out 3 circles and then put 4 more circles inside and count up all the small ones. This is just a logical extension of that.
Dell Shares Surge After Report of Possible Buyout
I should mention that in our 3-course program, we teach Ruby first. See http://www.gotealeaf.com
Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago
IBM records 6,478 patents in 2012 (more than 17/day)
Prostaatkanker? Laat je zeker niet te vlug opereren
The most parsimonious way is also a most uninformative one.
For example, you can figure out that being rich and healthy is better than being poor and sick.

Also: you say "divorce is bad for children" when a good share of those children were born by mothers who aren't in a marriage and never were (at least not with the father).

What about those cases? "divorce" is not applicable to those.
You might be right. I'll keep that in mind for next time.

Hit us with an email and we'll keep you in the loop.
I think the 'agent' trick comes from an adversarial relationship between the caller and the IVR. Properly implemented (this is rare), an IVR should help to collect structured data and save time on the call. If all the users know how to circumvent the IVR, because they think it's a waste of time, you start getting counter-measures to force the user through the expected workflow. Even if it was a well-done IVR, you probably hate IVRs so much that you never want to use one.

It's sort of like if you walked in a McDonalds and started yelling 'Big Mac'. You would eventually get a hamburger, but there's a system in place to get your product to you in a way that is theoretically a good balance between you and the business. If the system is working properly, queuing and ordering will be faster than screaming until you get what you want.
Artist of Unreal Pokémon Center Describes His Work
Things you can do to really support Open Access
The caret is not the greatest choice for footnote annotation, btw. I'd suggest [1] or something. :P
Been having some great conversations about design recently; great to see Branch open to all.

http://branch.com/g/design-startups
That's 4 days late.
Redundancy is a funny issue, though. Replacing one engine with multiple engines means you can survive one failure, but you then have a multiple of the things that can fail.