skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there any precedent to bar certain types of criminal investigations due to civil liberty concerns?

The 2nd Amendment open-carry situation in many states comes to mind. Most (western) countries would hogtie three ways from Sunday for you walking around with a holster just-because.

While I'm not a big gun guy, I've long thought the online community could take a few lessons from the NRA in beating back government past a larger boundary. Case in point: online media distribution could be left as a business problem for copyright interests rather than getting the FBI involved (let alone the Secret Service).
Where do you draw the line? A police officer randomly walks up to you and asks your name (which I believe is the one question you are required to answer, and truthfully):

"How are you doing? Nice weather today, huh? What about that Bears game last night?"

Oh, look. It's a rare friendly neighborhood police officer!

"Mind telling me where you're headed?"

I'm not going to lawyer up yet. Remember, I'm actually innocent and have no idea where this is going.

"Very nice.. Say, do you live around here?" (knowing fully well you're standing in your own drive way)

Yes, officer. As a matter of fact, I do. (Wondering where this is going, but absolutely no reason to go hire a lawyer!)

"See anything suspicious last night?"

So far, so good. I'm not being accused of anything, will gladly answer. Clearly I'm being asked to help and am not a suspect!

"So you weren't home last night? Mind telling me where you were?"

Bells start ringing. Lawyer up or not at this point.

"Ah, so you don't have an alibi for last night and you are in possession of a 9mm weapon... How interesting"

Lawyer! (or silence)

DA to jury: "Ladies and gentlemen, we have here the sworn affidavit of Officer Riley and you can see how the accused clammed up once asked about the weapon, while being perfectly cooperative until that point, and answering all the questions we asked him. As you can see, he's clearly got something to hide. It's your duty as law-abiding patriotic citizens to see to it that he spends the rest of his life in prison."

(This is especially believable for me as someone not immediately recognizable as a minority living in a fairly affluent suburb. I have no reason to distrust the police, and in fact, come across friendly officers all the time!)
No, the word "alcohol" (like many English words starting with "al") is of Arabic origin.
May god be with you ... helping you through this rough time. Aaron was gifted and we're sad he left us.
I have no statistics, but I think the penalties in the States are much higher than in other countries. And my hunch is this is more of a historical/cultural thing, than any real cost/benefit analysis on what is best for society.
I'm not trying to justify. Just answer.
What was the password (in terms of what it contained)? Was the password more like 'baseball' or 'B@s3B41122984'? It's possible that someone has the copyright or convinced support they were you if the password is indeed complex. You can contact twitter support. https://twitter.com/crystal
b2b "growth hacker" @ 500friends (w2010)
"Attempting to make grammatically correct code that mimics a human language is a futile effort"

COBOL attempts this (the syntax is even written out in "sentences") and it suffers for it. Even if it wasn't a futile effort, is it worthwhile?

edit This post is not intended to suggest the language in the topic article in not worthwhile..
He was never convicted and the case was dropped after his death. What else is there to do?
We used to have a right to silence in England. Our current Miranda equivalent police caution says:

> You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.

We also tend not to have "loopholes" - someone not getting the correct caution will have to go through years of expensive law . Their case isn't won just because of a missing warning. (I think; I am not a lawyer.)

It's a shame. Right to silence may have started here:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning#England_and_Wa...)

But is being attacked here:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_silence_in_England_an...)
Yeah, I agree. I think a Facebook ad network is on the way.
I agree. I can't help but feel that MIT's brand is being terribly tarnished. It certainly wasn't worth it.
Excellent point. Classic favourite video on the topic if anyone is interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
TLDR: "So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now."

I agree with the author except with the markets calling the US's bluff. The FED is in every market worldwide with QE to eternity. Other nations follow the FED.
And the petition to remove Steve Heymann, the prosecutor on this case, only has 2k of the 25k signatures needed.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-...
Though IANAL, some notes about this article:

* Please keep in mind it's from 1979. Some things have changed considerably.

* The Schöffengericht (1 Judge, 2 Laymen) is only the lowest level of courts (Amtsgericht, probably a district court) and the higher levels are composed of professional judges only. Any crime that has an expected punishment of more than 4 years is judged by professional judges only.

* Some trials may skip the first step on the appeal ladder and go directly to the Landgericht.

* We have our own version of the plea bargain since 2009 (Verständigung im Strafverfahren). Arguments for the plea bargain are pretty much the same as in the USA: Some trials tend to get very complicated, especially cases with financial background where laws and regulations are complicated to understand for non-experts. Lately there have been discussions about wether to remove or modify the plea bargain, fueled after a series of appeals against plea bargains [1].

* In some circumstance a confession may be beneficial for the defendant, reducing the fine or prison time. This is especially true when the defendant supports the prosecution of other defendants in the same or a related trial (Kronzeugenregelung). This sometimes leads to pressure to confess a crime the defendant has not committed.

[1] German, sorry: http://beck-aktuell.beck.de/news/bverfg-uebt-deutliche-kriti...
The "man up" in the original comment wasn't said in reference to depression.
Study shows that even a 3-second distraction can double work errors
While insightful two aspects have to be noted. First, Germany doesn't have a common law system. German and UK / US / Commonwealth legal systems are mostly incompatible. Secondly, nowadays the German system has efficiency problems as well, which however are mostly due to inefficient organization that affects all of German public administration.

There is no such thing as plea bargaining or threatening the defendant with much more severe charges than those he'd actually have to expect when going to trial.

However, frequently bargains are made to expedite legal procedures. The defendant might for example be talked into making a full confession in exchange for a less severe sentence. While this is not as questionable a practice as plea bargaining it certainly leaves some space to bullying or coercing defendants as well.

Maybe, it'd be good to look at how the UK legal system works in that respect. It's mostly compatible with the US system but doesn't sport excessive plea bargaining.
And to drive the point home; let's suppose that you were out committing a victimless crime such as smoking marijuana. Your choice may be whether you admit to committing that crime or have your silence implicate you on this crime.
Aaron Swartz on Cult impressions of Less Wrong
... but that's the way I was taught to do it when I first got onto the Internet.
Gift freedom to your employees at work this year
For some reason that escapes me (or maybe just depresses me), the editors of The Atlantic have a strong interest in trolling upper class/professional women, and do it regularly. They are not particularly interested in the quality of the pieces.
Too much code will kill you (Queen cover)
20 years for 77 murders, equals 3 months for each life. That also excludes all the other crimes he committed. If he knew he would get 20 years per person would he have murdered anywhere near 77 people? Plus how do the families of victims feel if their lives are only worth 3 month each?
Until you have to get sstp-client, networkmanager-sstp versions that work on your particular API versions...

External dependency hell. Not in the repository, not invited.
The Obama administration is a failure and continues to increase the deficit of democracy. At least if you will not prosecute your owners on Wallstreet at least let tiny evidence show that you can act like you are not a fool.

If the true global public could be the judge than you would be recognized as a terrorist
All these books are great but they are theoretical in their approach. It's good to be knowledgeable about Golden Ration or Fitts Law but it wouldn't be of immediate help on your next project. The books for Hackers should be pragmatic in their approach and not very theoretical.

The books I recommend are:
Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams. It focuses on topics like Consistency, Alignment, Proximity, and Contrast. With these four rules, you can make 90% of your designs look good. It also explains briefly on what colors and typography to use. When you've firm grasp of the fundamentals, it would make sense to arm yourself with more theory.

Don't make me Think by Steve Krug. It teaches you to simplify and focus on the end-user.
It could hurt your case in a prisoners dilemma (they've got someone in the other room who's confessing and whoever does it faster gets a light sentence). But what do you gain by helping the police build a case against you? If anything, talk to your lawyer and have the lawyer do all the talking.
>It's not that JavaScript is a bad language, it's just easy to write bad code in JavaScript.

In my mind, that alone makes JavaScript a bad language.
Oh, please. What is this, a witch hunt? Or maybe some good old-fashioned lynching? Hang the prosecutor on one tree, and Ed in the other tree? Or maybe we should rename HN 4chan, because the general maturity level does not seem very different. How many of those valiant defenders of Aaron put a dime in his defense fund?

Clearly, plenty of people agreed with Ed at the time, enough that it was the highest-rating comment. Similarly, plenty of people (at least in the US) agree with tough-on-crime policies. Singling out people, name-and-shame, etc is something only relevant in so far that the actions of an individual deviate, in a bad way, from community norms. This is not the case here.
When I decided to bring Rails into my team recently, I decided we should produce some prototypes in Sinatra first.

With a single file it's easy to introduce some of the key concepts that are needed to understand Rails (especially for those coming from PHP).
I happened to catch a glimpse of the NBC news on TV today, and this was mentioned.

It seemed odd to me that they didn't include a comparison to the expected number of deaths from suicide in a civilian population of this size and demographic makeup.

I could easily see an article like this being generated by a small local newspaper or some random blog, but you'd think one of the major TV networks would have better quality control.

About a month ago, someone on HN actually questioned my assertion that the US news media has a liberal bias...I wish I had the energy to dig through my comments, find that person, and reply to their comment with a link to this story :)
Trick question: why is it good to know about the Golden Ratio?
Off topic: refresh the page twice, and you get a paywall until you clear your cookies. Curious tactic... and somewhat ironic given the subject of the article.

On topic: Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. He said JSTOR signed off on it, but MIT would not.¶ “There were subsets of the MIT community who were profoundly in support of Aaron,” Weinberg said. That support did not override institutional interests.

I'm a little unclear about what MIT's "institutional interests" were in regards to Aaron's case... can anyone clarify?
t1's dead post:
What was the password (in terms of what it contained)? Was the password more like 'baseball' or 'B@s3B41122984'? It's possible that someone has the copyright or convinced support they were you if the password is indeed complex. You can contact twitter support. https://twitter.com/crystal
-----
Constness of pointer or reference parameters has no optimisation effect because it doesn't convey any reliable information. It doesn't indicate whether the thing is written to in the body of the function (the compiler already has that information). It doesn't indicate whether the thing can be written to through another pointer (const parameters may be aliased). And it doesn't indicate whether the thing is written to through the same pointer by a callee (because the language contains const_cast).

Since the very thing that const is supposed to indicate is "no writes", and it doesn't do that, const annotations provide zero information. Thus they add no scope for optimisation.

constexpr isn't relevant to this issue. Since sane programs don't spend any appreciable time calculating constants, it's also rather uninteresting for the purpose of making programs run fast. As far as I can see its only practical purpose is to expand the set of fixed terms allowed as template arguments.
Joe Biden Asks The Video Game Industry To Improve Its Image
Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will
Where does a web service come from - Legalesign
I am an outsider to both the US and the UK legal system, and living in Austria have grown up in a legal system very similar to the German one.

From this perspective your last sentence struck me as odd, since, for example, I distinctly remember the UK settling a very high profile corruption case with BAE [1]. Maybe it does not happen that often, but it still seems to be problematic in some cases.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bribe/2010/02/bae-...
Wait, I thought the idea is that the prosecutor represents The People and not The Victim? It's very confusing to me how JSTOR and MIT are involved and yet not involved.

I wonder if this will turn up in MIT's report.
I fail to understand your point. For any software, you can create a deb, rpm, ebuild that correctly models the dependencies and install it on the system. No package repo required. You can provide a package repo for any Linux system and install it from there, as for example the varnish people do. Both options provide full dependency resolution without a gatekeeper.
I worked with Aaron on the old watchdog.net. I found his technical judgment to be consistently superior to mine, which is something that I can say of very few other people. Tim Berners-Lee said Aaron was a mentor to him, rather than the other way around. One of the core Django team said Aaron started the whole magic-removal effort, and that Django was much better as a result. Aaron was also the first person I remember to point out that Bitcoin embeds a solution to Zooko's Triangle: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko and thus the first person to propose a practical solution to secure, decentralized, human-readable names, which we'd all thought was impossible for about a decade, even Dan Kaminsky. (Nick Szabo made a proposal some years back, but nobody has attempted to build it.)

I agree that programming was not as important as organizing people for the public good to him. But I think you should take the word of programmers who worked with him: he was a first-class programmer.

I also think it's selling him a bit short to call him a "dreamer". He stopped SOPA.
Very, very briefly: Substantive is the what, procedural is the how. In Aaron Swartz's case the substantive argument is that copying academic journal articles shouldn't be a prosecutable crime in the first place, but at worst a civil tort. The procedural argument is that Swartz went about his activities in a demonstrably illegal fashion and was arrested pursuant to a properly issued warrant. Is the law stupid? Maybe, but that's what it says and we're just following it as written. Now in a civil law country (where legislative text >> precedent) you'll often enjoy all sorts of substantive protections that you wouldn't have in the US, but if you did break a law then you probably won't be able to argue your way out on technicalities like whether the police search was legal or you were read your rights correctly.

The constitution doesn't give you a whole lot of rights, but rather imposes a variety of limitations upon the government. If someone in government can find a hole in those limitations, then there isn't a whole lot you can do about it, at least in the short term. Look at the drug laws; Congress certainly seems to be within its rights to ban possession of certain substances, and there's no substantive right to say you have jurisdiction over what you put in your own body. Another famous legal example is the Dredd Scott case; the Supreme Court of the day said that a law law which gave a slave called Dredd Scott his freedom was an unconstitutional infringement of his owner's property rights (procedural argument). Now we consider the whole notion of people being property invalid (substantive) so even the most logically watertight contract in which someone agrees to be the property of someone else is void and unenforceable. Now, contrast the familiar language of the US constitution with things like the UN declaration of human rights, which imposes very few strictures on how governments go about governing, but has a great deal to say about how people should be treated and is much more like the Declaration of Independence than the Constitution (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml).

This is a complex philosophical issue at the heart of legal theory and hard to sketch out in only a few sentences. Think of the above as an impressionistic sketch rather than a systematic description.
Rather have code that looks like this:

toggleDropdown(field) {
if ...
}

toggleDropdown(_protected.fields[field]);

Also the external documentation wouldn't have anything like this in it. It would be pretty much:

UI Code is in XXX. It communicates with ZZZ using YYY.
Fields in the UI are changed between text and dropdowns
depending on the value in the database that comes
from ZZZ. etc.
They're certainly lobbying for more laws and stricter enforcement.
From the article: When a system is not able to handle the failures of another, it tends to emit failures to another system that depends on it
It seems a week doesn't get by without a post or two in Hacker News about GUI design or graphic design, often entitled something like "Design for Hackers" or "Design for Developers".

The trouble with all these posts is that they are trying to shortcut the methodology of design by various hacks, even something as lengthy as read 5 books is by-in-large a hack.

There is no substitute for practise, for looking and appreciating your world in a different way (this can be self-taught, I will discuss more below) and for in-depth thinking about what either comes down to communication or feedback problems.

Aesthetics largely is difficult to teach and learn and comes from confidence and a place in the brain that is hard to hack, but communication and interaction is learnt from early childhood by everyone - it just needs opening up and awareness of this as we mature.

By looking at the Design of Everyday Things (the book or the things around you) you begin to appreciate or notice the failures in signs, handles, buttons, phones, car controls, packaging and if you are tuned into this way of thinking it can be hard to stop considering the amount of interactions with “things” we have everyday.

Then taking this body of knowledge that is learnt one can then start objectively looking at one's own design and interaction problems, using the same tools that you have been using to analyse potential problems as they occur and working them out to find the best solution. But knowledge of the best solution will also come from practise of working with the constraints of whatever medium are working in (for example print, application, touch screen, architecture or furniture design).

This practise will mean mistakes - this is an important part of the learning process, just as it was when growing up, you will learn what works and doesn't work and in the future intuitively work with this in mind.
"But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you." -Valerie
It's a great book, well worth of a couple of reads
Show HN: Desktop version of Alta, Texas
> JSTOR's non-public-domain works are a different story, but the journals are the most to blame for that; JSTOR is just a licensee.

Indeed, every time I see a publisher offering me an article from the 1920s or 1930s as a digital download for a small fee of around, oh, say, $30, my heart is filled with contempt for this attempt of milking every last cent out of every paper.
You're not making any sense here. Why are the articles on paper, and why are people charging to access research produced with taxpayer money? Your logic is circular.
Link is to the free demo for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Versions for purchase are at:
http://nawegr.blogspot.com/2013/01/alta-texas-desktop-versio...
Tufte is a master of information design and data visualization. However, these concepts need embedding in a wider range of resources.
Steve Heymann is a murderer.
Coupling that Heymann was specifically warned about Swartz's mental state with his (Heymann's) previous prosecution of Jonathan James, leading to his suicide, has me seriously thinking this guy needs to see the other side of a defense table.

I'm sure there are laws protecting prosecutors from prosecution for actions carried out during the course of their duties, but those laws have to have limits. Having been forewarned that Aaron was a suicide risk, proceeding as the AUSA did reeks of criminal negligence, commonly defined as an act that is "careless, inattentive, neglectful, willfully blind, or in the case of gross negligence what would have been reckless in any other defendant." (emphasis added)
I'd spend it on self-enhancement - study and effective counseling - that would increase my earning potential.
In my experience if a client adds their own X-Forwarded-For header trying to spoof their IP, nginx simply prepends it to the X-Forwarded-For header like "1.2.3.4, 33.33.33.1", where 1.2.3.4 is the address the client supplied in their spoofing attempt, and 33.33.33.1 is the actual IP address forwarded by nginx.

So you can choose to trust only the rightmost one, if there are several entries in the list.
99.5% of accused are found guilty? That's totalitarian.
The Pirate Bay Documentary Trailer
> Are Norwegians ok with this?

I gather most of them are, but you're missing part of the sentence: he's been sentenced to "forvaring", aka "indeterminate penalty". This means a baseline 21 years (as 21 years is the maximum determinate penalty outside of crimes against humanity) but it can be extended indefinitely, 5 years at a time.