skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's an idea: prosecuting/sentencing based on 'damages' ought to be subject to a hard damages cap based on any civil damages/settlement reached.

After all, the standard of proof in a civil case is lower: "preponderance of the evidence". Negotiation between the affected parties can, at little cost to the government, come to a settlement more easily and fairly than involving the full force/ego/ambition of federal prosecutors.

Sure, criminal prosecutions almost always come first. (The aggrieved parties prefer to have the government take on much of the trial cost, and can use the conviction "beyond a reasonable doubt" to fast-track their later case/negotiations. And even failing a conviction, they can pursue the civil case later.) But it might make sense to reverse that usual ordering, perhaps even by involving some of the public resources in the civil case, as a way of testing the "minimum viable case" before going all-out.

And even if the criminal trial comes first, the full sentencing could be put on hold until civil claims are resolved. That'd lead to more realistic damages/sentencing and an important check on prosecutor discretion in dreaming up massive damage figures.
Prosecutors are supposed to zealously represent their client, which in this case is the state. The are required to seek "justice" but necessarily that is defined somewhat more narrowly than in common parlance. They are not supposed to substitute their sense of justice (one way or another) for the state's and the people's sense of justice.

Drug laws are really the best example of this. Prosecutors are not allowed to say "I won't prosecute this case because drug usage is a victimless crime." My mom thinks drug usage is contagious in social circles and a tremendous danger to the youth, votes accordingly, and until that changes it's not right for some unelected prosecutor to second guess her.
"Well-read" doesn't equate with "much read". It's a long list, but most of it is left of center contemporary analysis. The only notable right-wing book is "Seeing Like A State." But for a little Plato, there zero philosophy or political philosophy there. Had he gone on to read the entirety of "Republic", rather than Book One, he'd have seen an exercise in criticism, exploration of ultimate values, and theoretic construction -- if nothing else, a demonstration that Chomsky himself was following a model. There is no Rousseau, which might have hinted at where Chomsky started, and neither Locke nor Hobbes, which might have suggested an entirely different approach.

No Boethius, which later would have been a very apt touchstone for a person feeling the weight of persecution.

Nor is there much story on the list. No Shakespeare, no Milton, one Hemingway, no Faulkner. No poetry. Nothing about about what it is to be a man, to live in conflict with one's self and with others, or to live among contradictions.

Some of it is just a waste of time. "Secrets of the Temple" is at best a nothing book.

Perhaps he read more widely and deeply at some other time than 2009. But there is precious little on this to challenge a progressive-liberal viewpoint, or to provide a basis of fundamental criticism, or to suggest a perspective on politics generally. To read like this is neither healthy nor interesting. It certainly isn't "well read".
http://dev.bitly.com/

It is robust and well documented.
I'm in Canada and my DUNS application took about a week.

As far as I'm concerned it's just another business number that I need to apply for.

You won't get far in business if you don't have the patience to put up with all the stupid paperwork.
Careers 2.0 Launches
Recently i got an edition (12/2012) of the INFO Magazine and it has a interesting article about a Startups competition which happened in São Paulo a month or two ago.

Maybe worth looking into their site or go around and buy the magazine.
Not exactly. The statutory limit was that much. The prosecutor claimed to be planning to press for about 12-14x the plea offer.
AFAIK 36k/year is the cut-off for lower taxes, not a hard limit (for independent workers/RPA). You do get much lower taxes by doing business as a company though.
Yep. You're a corporation and you outsource labor to save money? Happy shareholders!

You're a citizen and you outsource labor to save time? NO SOUP FOR YOU.

I love this country.
GIS software?

Most data has a physical location associated with it (street address, lat-long, something mappable). "A picture is worth a thousand words". Mapping data can help you visualize and mentally process heavy data loads. And Excel is one of the database formats typically compatible with standard software so with a smidgeon of luck you can probably kind of plug and play.
Re: his actions in evading filtering and shutoffs on MIT's networks

Have you seen any halfway credible summary on what he did? I'll probably read the formal indictment eventually, but I'm not expecting a real balanced presentation. To be clear: just asking if anyone has a good hyperlink.

For example, I'd like to know what did he do on the Wifi other than change his MAC address?

It's said he "broke into" the wiring closet. Did he use an axe? Pick the lock? Was it unlocked? Once in, did he simply plug in to the Ethernet like any good network citizen would do (to avoid hogging the Wifi).

Once on the network, did he root boxes or simply request documents that the server was happy to give him?

EDIT: OK I found this http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartz... written by Alex Stamos, expert witness for Aaron's defense. Alex is well-respected. I know thing or two about network security and this piece certainly sounds like how I would view it.

The wiring closet he "broke into" wasn't even locked and "was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man"? This prosecution is a complete and total outrage.
Open-Sourcing the White House's Online Petitions System
> your solution would simply restrict plea bargains to not being any shorter than 1/2 of the maximum sentence (in Aaron's case, 16 years)

No, I phrased it the way I did for a reason. A prosecutor who does not think that the crime is serious enough to warrant 16 years can still offer a lower plea bargain. In Aaron's case, they may have offered 1 year in jail, making it so that by asserting his right to trial, he would be doubling his sentence to 2 years in the worst case.

> Your solution would either require them to choose which charges to pursue and which charges to drop forever. That's fine in cases like Aaron's, but that's not something you want when you're dealing with a rapist or a murderer.

Of course I know about double jeopardy. They have to choose which charges to pursue and which to drop forever sometime. The problem as it stands is that charges are piled on in a shotgun approach, making it very hard for the defendant to concentrate on what they're actually fighting, and ballooning court costs. And shouldn't rapists and murders be getting charged with rape and murder, respectively? We certainly don't want punishment of rapists and murderers to rely on whether they also happened to be disturbing the peace at the time. And yeah, I'll give you that all-or-nothing is a bit harsh, which is why I said something else about being acquitted on the majority of counts would result in complete acquittal. Create a mechanism so that the prosecution wants to make pretty sure you're guilty of something before accusing you of it.

> Most criminals are actually guilty; making the prosecution pay for every defense would increase the costs of the criminal justice system 1000fold

So then in the name of economics, guilty criminals don't actually have a right to a trial? It would still be in an obviously-guilty defendants interest to take a half-sentence plea bargain and avoid trial. I do see it being more palatable if it only applies to non-guilty outcomes, but with the following caveats: limits increased to 2x what the prosecution spends, and the money is loaned out by the government as the case progresses and is then owed by the defendant in the event of a guilty verdict. Sorry, as you should know, justice costs money.
Same here. I used D-U-N-S Profile Lookup[1] and entered the company's detail (Singapore company). An hour later, I received an email containing the D-U-N-S number from noreply-appledev@apple.com

[1]https://developer.apple.com/ios/enroll/dunsLookupForm.action
Our guidelines at work are: The more polymorphic a variables type, the shorter its name can be.
I proposed something like this at my day job. The idea was for every 2 developers stateside in the company, have 1 developer overseas that could work on things that we never had time to get to. I never got it pushed through, but I'd still like to try it. ;)
God is just.

Get in over your head, you fail.

Go to top school, get humbled.

God says...
weeps all-sufficient Glad injurable information furnishing
not_good fluctuates corrupted soon fresh building mortality
Dad sorts conveyedst condole applied There edition compound
emptied peculiarly corrigible calm solicited conventionally
assiduously thefts woe Donations decked spreading preachings
world husband quite years Shakespeare lusted itching definitely
relaxation pliant foreshower
Taking over programming position... found this code
Al Franken describes it best in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them:

"They don't get it. We love America just as much as they do, but in a differenct way. You see, they love America the way a four-year-old loves her mommy. [We] love America like grown-ups. To a four-year-old everything mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes mommy is bad. Grown-up love means understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow."
>Lofgren's proposal appears to address the EFFs main concerns

Does it? I don't see anything reducing the excessive penalties, just somewhat narrowing what qualifies for them.

Let me be clear, I think this bill is a good bill -- I don't see anything wrong with it except that it is incomplete. It solves only a small subset of the problems we need to solve here. Narrowing the definition of unauthorized access can only be a good thing, but I could reasonably argue that it is still too broad given the current penalties, and remains incredibly vague notwithstanding that this would explicitly exclude certain things. So either the penalties still need to come down significantly, or what qualifies needs to be further narrowed, or both. But it's a good first draft. A step in the right direction.
And your tuition money is so entirely different than tithing how?

Likewise, customers have social responsibility in their purchasing decisions, and transferring credits to another school isn't all that huge of a deal, either, so I'm kind of finding your take a little overblown. Obviously every student at MIT volunteered to come there, too.
Rep. Issa is the real deal, he's a special member of Congress. He's a California tech entrepreneur and also voted against the TARP bailouts.

http://issa.house.gov/about/about-darrell
> With most books, which are responsible for introducing someone to a new language/framework, I expect the resource to really sell the language/framework in the beginning, and ease into the more gritty details. However, this book tried to do this at some points of the book, but lacked order.

Perhaps the problem is with the book's many different authors, i.e. Dierk Koenig, Andrew Glover, Paul King and Guillaume Laforge. Maybe they wrote it in an uncoordinated fashion.

This book is now 6 years old. A 2nd edition has been in the works for years now, but hasn't yet arrived.
Elaborating a bit on DUNS:

My understanding is that DUNS was not always a requirement for companies publishing on the iOS App Store. It was added about a year and a half ago (?) and given the timing and what DUNS represents it seems reasonable to assume that it was added as a reaction to app spammers and scammers that would run fly by night operations, take people's money and run.

DUNS may not have been the best solution and like other areas of the submission/approval process it seems there are some obvious quality of life improvements Apple should implement but in the big picture what is the alternative to DUNS?

(1) Go back to scammer friendly system. Yeah I don't see that happening.

(2) Apple holds the money for longer. I don't see people lining up for this option.

(3) Everyone has to buy insurance. Spoilers: insurer asks for DUNS number.

(4) A better partner than D&B. Is there one? The US government appears to be looking for alternatives as well[1] but it doesn't look like there is a good replacement.

[1] http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-715R

GSA has been conducting an analysis of alternatives for the use of Dun & Bradstreet's DUNS entity unique identifier and is expected to complete its analysis by March 30, 2013.
It's more like ignoring that your father raped someone or tolerating it or telling him it's fine instead of getting him help or reporting it.
He also fought his case to the end, and even appealed. He did not take a plea deal. His sentence was relatively light because a judge said that the punishment did not fit the crime.

Honestly, Morris got extremely lucky. I'd be curious how he funded his defense, because that case seems to have gone on longer than this one.
This is a garbage article, which is no surprise as it's from The Register. The real article is linked in the middle there, and it's a case study from Verizon, available at http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2013/01/14/case-stud...

Bob wasn't even the programmer's name. It was just a pseudonym given by Verizon for the purposes of the case study.
As a first guess, MIT students are very unlikely to react to someone causing them trouble by become more sympathetic with the people causing them trouble.

That was my general reaction to protests on campus when I was a student there. I often saw the same general pattern I see here: protests would be highly visible and inconvenient to the people who couldn't do anything to address the issue, and would have no impact at all on the people who could.
Interesting, I wonder how many people would start using this as there only search engine.
A only slightly more complicated regex can look for Foo on the left-hand side.
It's best that you give up now. The app submission and approval process also requires patience. As do all the stupid users with their stupid questions and stupid one star reviews because they don't understand how it works.

And the paperwork around income statements, balance sheets, depreciation, and taxes is horrible. Business licenses, legal documents, blah blah blah.

Like I said, it's best that you quit before you even get to the really frustrating stuff.
This is an incredibly poor article. It shows little understanding of the facts of the case, and is simply a collection of quotes from other people.

I'd have thought NPR would have better quality control than this.
The question was why you'd need a company account instead of an individual one - I see you have already answered that elsewhere.

The second link (.de) seems to offer registration for Brazil, though I haven't done that myself.
I am unclear on how your "fundamental problem" is a problem. I was not aware that when making arguments that offering hope was a prerequisite for validity or truth. Because if that is not the case, then offering no hope is not a fundamental problem.
This legislative proposal is too narrowly tailored to address prosecutorial overreach in general, and I'm not sure it would have even made much difference in this case.
“We’ve lost a fighter”: Hundreds gather to mourn Aaron Swartz
Not really, probably the US has a limit of how much you can sell without being a company too.
As I understand it, this was the only 'ongoing' access control. However MIT individually blocked his MAC address, so he then changed it to get back on the network. But I'm not sure where the need to plug his laptop into a cupboard came in, so I must be missing something.
I am not a lawyer. Or even close.

However the fact that he had to commit physical trespass in order to place his laptop giving him access to the network tells me that he was not merely in violation of the terms of use, and therefore he actually was unauthorized under the terms of the amended act. Thus it would not have helped Aaron.

But it would help others. It is a step in the right direction. I support it.
Unlike whoever offers the next airbnb for dogs.

Hmm. I've actually heard of dumber ideas than that. Dog owners would prefer not to board their pets with commercial kennels, because you always get your dog back with some bug or another. A service that hooks up vacationing dog owners with local families who agree to take care of small numbers of other peoples' dogs might make some sense.
It's also lying to his employer(s), and that alone is worth the firing. Not to mention the fact that, while the code the Chinese firm submitted was apparently good quality, there was presumably no security vetting at all done to make sure that it was safe to give them access to the internal network of a "US critical infrastructure company".
Who should blame the administration instead of the DDOS'ers.
I read some statistic somewhere that our prison population is more due to the ridiculous sentence lengths than simply putting more people in prison.
Still, merely raising the vote threshold seems a poor solution. Unfortunately, I can't think of a better one.
How can an intelligent person support a organisation by being part in it, then take no responsibility for what it does.

Being a student at MIT (or an alum) does not automatically imply support for everything MIT does. That said, I expect many MIT students and alumni to be paying very close attention (as I am) to the investigation that Prof. Abelson is conducting, and what follows from it. And I expect that MIT's administration knows that. But I seriously doubt that this DDoS attack will make any students pay attention who weren't paying attention already.
To be fair, what you work on is almost always confidential and thus protected by signed agreements.

If your technical specs and docs were passed along to an outside party, you probably wouldn't be happy either.
I think you meant "if a sentence that...", right?

This goes even further: if one was to carry drugs in a ziplock bag (or whatever else they're carried in, I am probably one of the few people on HN who doesn't know), when calculating the charges, it's not uncommon for the weight of a ziplock bag to be added to the weight of whatever is in it. God help someone who decides to stash the drugs away inside their spare wheel in their car.

Angry nerds is a force we can use for good -- reforming CFAA os probably useful on its own merits (I fully support this legislation), but majority of people being judicially bullied into unreasonable plea bargains (or worse, manifestation of physical or mental illness such as suicide and heart attacks) are not being charged under CFAA.
I called up D&B and got my companies DUNS number over the phone right then here in New Zealand, apparently they get a feed from the companies office here and just allocate them whenever a new company is incorporated - which happens quite a lot, given how lax our company incorporation rules are.
See also http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674051751
Getting Started with Raspberry Pi: Installing Raspbian
I looked quickly at the reddit comment thread that someone else linked to, and it appears that Lawrence Lessig has responded to a related question:

"would your proposed 'Aaron's law' prevent the situation by which Aaron was refused a plea deal that did not include jail time?" --alexwilhelm

"If "Aaron's Law" had been law, Aaron would not have been charged with a felony, and so there would not have been jail time to refuse." --lessig

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/16njr9/im_rep_zo...

edit: context
What qualities would you say make someone a good Android engineer?
I think you're right. Ortiz position is based on her reputation, while Heymann reputation is based on his position. Meaning for the greatest effect you would remove Ortiz reputation (i.e. stopping any attempt for a political campaign) and get Heymann removed from his position (i.e. demoted).
No, it's like selling non-inspected meat as FDA inspected meat. The customer is paying for one product (American developer with certain security profile), and getting another (access by Chinese programs into a sensitive system).
I don't think so. When people form LLC's it's for liability reasons, not because the government complains if they make too much money under their own name.
The Scanning Brigade Comes Home (Join me in NY)
And suppose they do. What then? MIT has already said an investigation will be conducted. Is the DDoS going to continue until it's finished? How does that help anyone? Or should the students demand heads immediately, without waiting for the full facts? How does that help?
If Postman strikes your fancy, another good one is "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America" by Daniel Boorstin.

http://amzn.com/0679741801
On the contrary, prosecutors should allow themselves to be influenced by emotional pleas. I think your social responsibility to respond to these emotional signals increases as you have more power over others, not the other way around like you seem to suggest...
Well, okay, that one has pretty bad grammar. But no, that seems like a sensible analogy to describe a way a person feels right now.
> Also, if DDoS is "destructive" then copying a file is stealing.

How does that follow?
If "Bob" was smart enough to pull off a stunt like this for as long as he did ("quarter after quarter"), you'd think he would've been smart enough to have his subcontractors proxy their traffic through a US-based host...
It is amazing that only now, after he is dead, do we find out the truth. If he had kept living, none of this behavior would have come to light.
Chomsky does round up a lot of criticisms and put them in one place. I'm not sure what 'ideology' you are referring to, unless you view 'reason' as an 'ideology'. But perhaps I am missing some over arching agenda Chomsky has... ?

They ARE strawmen arguments because they present partially related items as reasons for chomsky being wrong. If Chomsky is cherry picking, then the way to respond is to bring ALL the information to light, and show that Chomsky is misrepresenting it... Not to cherry pick something else...

I don't really understand your "Good vs Ignorance" reference, who are you referring to? and why are they unable to self-examine? which ideology are we talking about?
I think you misunderstood my comment. I wasn't speaking just about having a TL;DR or not but instead more about the difference between long essays and short passages.

Characterizing my opinion of writing as either something you 'win' or 'lose' is itself narrow (and frankly, almost insulting). I have to feel that you coming off this way is a byproduct of the Internet. I'm not trying to chastise you here. I understand that what I wrote initially might come off in a way I didn't intend, but you have to meet me halfway by assuming I'm not a total jerk.

Writing isn't about winning or losing, it's about sharing ideas. And yes, there are better ways and worse ways to share ideas. A conversation around a dinner table is probably better than an essay ever will be - but you can still try to get there. You can either hear this fact and say "aha, I should try to be more clear in sharing my ideas" or you can say "that's fatalistic, and writing isn't a game." I can't fault you for choosing the latter, but I do ask that when I choose the former you remember that I do it just because I want to be understood.
Did they just plagiarize Andrew Valentine's article on the verizon business site?