skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Repeating a comment from another thread:

Any time you read a story like "government attempts to liquidate real property to fund police department", your first thought should be "that's not the whole story", because (for the most part) that's not how the federal government operates. So, some issues with this story:

* This case is Sonya Rao, not Carmen Ortiz (though once again Ortiz oversees all the cases in her office).

* The hotel is, let's not sugarcoat it, a blighted flophouse. Don't take my word for it; here's TripAdvisor ("ROOMS BY THE HOUR: Hookers, drug addicts, drug dealers, need I say more") complete with picture: http://tinyurl.com/ta-caswell and here's Yelp ("Please don't bring your kids here.") http://tinyurl.com/y-caswell

* The owners of the hotel were warned repeatedly by local law enforcement and an intervention of local hotel owners; specific measures were suggested to minimize the problems at this place and weren't taken; the hotel had no security, and its drug countermeasures consisted of a list of persons not to rent to again.

* The hotel owners made no policy changes after a methamphetamine lab was discovered in one of their rooms.

* The hotel owners made no changes after the dead body of a heroin overdose victim was found in one of their rooms.

* Drug deals weren't simply occurring at the hotel; the Tewskbury PD repeatedly discovered drug dealers operating full-time out of rooms in the hotel.

* The owners of the hotel repeatedly admitted under oath that they had continuing knowledge of drug crimes occurring on their premises, and had no policies to investigate the use of their rooms.

There are places like this all over America and they're all neighborhood blights that need to be shut down (hey, by the way, still think there couldn't possibly be a difference between an apartment and a room up for temporary let on Airbnb?).

If all we're saying is that civil asset forfeiture is the wrong means to shut them down, I'm with you. But this case does not make my blood boil the way it does for some. Beyond that, I'm not sure HN is a great place to debate it.
Privacy and utility are mutually exclusive, privacy and utility are mutually exclusive.

This can't be said often enough.

I personally hate Facebook because of Zuckerberg's disregard for Steve Jobs's definition of privacy: to know what you've signed up for.

But there's definitely a lot of utility for those who willingly hand over their personal information. It's a trade-off, and I'm fine with it, as long as people knowingly, willingly accept that.
In Mega's case specifically, they will mirror your data in different data centers spread accross the globe (but not in America).
Interesting point but unfortunately you're off the mark - we use pay ladders for our team, very similar to those Joel Spolsky applies at FogCreek. We keep one eye on the .Net market to ensure our pay scales are aligned with market rates, so pay isn't the issue.
Is your passion a good career adviser?
How many other 20-somethings can you name who have impacted the world for the better as much as he has?
> It makes it very difficult for people to have nuanced debates about complex events

Yes! Thank you, I was trying to put in words why the initial downvote wave on my comment really bothered me, and this is exactly it.
The owner of this hotel was almost certainly turning a blind eye to keep the business.

The owners of the hotel aren't poor (the tenants obviously are, though).

Unlike many CAF cases, this one received a full hearing in front of a judge with evidence presented from both sides.
A couple of points:

- The article's intention is to illustrate languages the reader hasn't used before. The fact your favourite language isn't listed there is all the more reason to give it a read.

- At the language level, I wouldn't classify Go as advanced at all, in fact it's quite the opposite, and this is likely a large factor in why it appeals to you.
This quote made me stop:
“As he describes his job, he looks through the newspapers and looks at the Internet, looking for news stories of properties that might be forfeitable and brings them to the attention of the U.S. attorney,” Caswell’s attorney, Larry Salzman, said.

According to the agent’s sworn testimony, he then goes to the Registry of Deeds to determine the value of the targeted property. The DEA rejects anything with less than $50,000 equity."

Ouch. I knew about the US forfeiture laws but this still managed to surprise me. The agents seem to have left any connection with justice and are pretty open about their real goal: grabbing money.
All the other guys are doing it worse - that's the thing. I'm not saying they are suddenly perfect, but they are less worse than the others.
If the government doesn't like the way they're running their business, surely they should either charge them with an actual crime or buy them out.
It is a super generic icon in any case.
It is wonderful that these stories are coming up.

But is there a wiki somewhere that is tracking these so that when people go and look at Ortiz in more detail, we've got a quick way of educating them?
I pinged Romero, I hope he see my message...

He is a game history activist and probably would love to archive that stuff.
What did you classify him as? What is your classification of white?
Judging by his history I would say it is not meant ironically but "super mega awesome gangsta kool".
That's exactly what the government is doing: they're suing the property because it's the instrument of serious crimes. The owners of the property are defending it in court.

There's a whole weird history of civil asset forfeiture being abused, such as when the one black guy in a rural Ohio town is pulled over on his way to buy a new truck with cash, and the cops seize the cash under CAF rules on suspicion that the guy's a drug dealer. I AM NOT ARGUING THAT CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE IS OK. But you'd want to be careful (not "agree with me", just, careful) being knee-jerk about this stuff.
I think PlainSite is probably the closest thing. It lets you tag cases (if you sign up) and search by attorney or legal entity.

http://www.plainsite.org
OP describes me perfectly!

I like to make a different screen name on each online service I use, and be sure as much as I can that they aren't connected to each other or to my real identity.

For me, it started with growing up when the Internet was still new, and with all the Bad Things everyone was saying would happen because minors were on the Internet (the law that makes every visitor to every US website swear they're at least 13 years old was passed in this time frame). It sort of became ingrained that I should be sure not to use my real name for anything online.
@tptacek

Out of morbid curiosity, does the government ever do anything wrong? Whenever you comment on a story involving government, I know, without fail, that you are going to somehow take the "pro-goverment" line.

You've done it here. You did it with Aaron Swartz. I've seen you do it on other threads where civil libertarians are outraged about one thing or another.

So: do you ever actually side with the people? Or is it just all government, all the time with you? I ask because I'm starting to tune you out, and you make such insightful comments on other topics.
How did you build your search for this?
It's pretty rare..
The article says "one of the greatest" which isn't inaccurate; we're all among the greatest 7 billion people on the planet.
Startup Using Tiny Antennas to Show the Oscars on an iPhone
Huh? Where are you reading that I'm OK with what happened to Aaron Swartz? I am the opposite of OK with what happened to Aaron Swartz.

Just because I don't use the exact same reasoning as you do to arrive at the same conclusion does not mean I am in a bucket with "people who think Swartz got what he deserved".

What I'm guessing happened is this: you think what happened to Aaron was terrible because the conduct outlawed under CFAA shouldn't be criminal. I think what happened to Aaron was terrible because the sentencing mechanisms under CFAA are insane and scale trivial offenses to multi-year sentences by having them track "damages". Both of us arrive at the same conclusion, that Aaron was maltreated by prosecutors, but by different means.

This way of thinking, where anyone who disagrees with a specific point about Aaron Swartz must somehow be on the side of the government, is a pox on the whole site.
That doesn't mean you can't use it like a Dropbox service with more free space, surely? Dropbox also doesn't encrypt your data to any meaningful degree AFAIK.
Most here would prefer that they take home a lesson not to throw the book at people who are trying to make things better.

I think it's been pointed out that he's popular (and thus, has "powerful friends") because they sided with him in trying to do good and improve things. This is a far cry from someone using their celebrity status to flout the law for personal gain, which is the sort of thing one usually condemns.

> I'd be surprised if he'd have wanted his legacy to be people that look like him getting a pass while everyone else suffers the same as before.

Well, that's why Reason magazine (among others) has endorsed Aaron's law to at least fix one part of this. We can't change the system all at once. But we should make whatever progress we can, one law at a time. Perhaps eventually we will go to something like the German system, which dispenses efficient justice without any use of plea bargains. HN was discussing that the other day as well.
Very interesting post up top--I didn't know that.

You're right--even though I think civil forfeiture is wrong, I can see how this would not be a sympathetic case in front of a judge.
While any one given human decision may well be explicable, and directed, the sum of them all isn't.
The difference is, if Dropbox is down tomorrow, I still have all my data backed up on my computer(s).
Fluentd: A Very Quick Intro With Apache
This story is outrageous. Outrageous. 14 crimes have occurred there in 15 years... And the government just wants to seize $1.5 million worth of property and keep the proceeds. That is itself a crime.

It's not the hotel owners job to do the job of the police. I don't want to check into a hotel and have them check my police record, ask if I am planning to have visitors, scan my luggage in a metal detector to see if I am carrying anything suspicious or illegal. Not their job.

If they see a crime occurring or something suspicious, call it in. Fine. But to hold private business owners responsible for the conduct of their customers? Ridiculous.
Support EFF: Move Your Domain Day on Namecheap (1/22)
There's also the potential for harder-to-measure future damage. For example, when an organization like JSTOR approaches a publisher and tries to work out a deal that will allow university patrons access to one of their collections, a major factor in whether the publisher agrees is whether their data will be safe from scraping. When someone does scrape a large portion of it through just one of these arrangements, the publishers get spooked and less likely to make them in the future, and the end result is that the general public ends up with less access to knowledge than they had at the start.
I still think it is impossible because nobody can be an expert in everything, and furthermore, it is something I personally don't want to do. I have other interests than politics.
I didn't mean to imply that you thought Aaron "got what he deserved."

Just that you took the most pro-government position I've seen anyone on HN take, both recently and in that (regrettable) thread six months ago.

Perhaps you don't see yourself as pro-government, and it's just been a string of articles where you think the people are in the wrong, not government. That's fine, I'm just trying to understand why you comment the way you do.

UPDATE: I think I see now what my issue is. Whenever the goverment does something wrong, you tend to do two things:

1. You write many, many lines where you point out how great the government is, what a good job they're doing, etc. It's all very "pro-government" and mostly, actually, off topic.

2. You then, at the end, or frequently in some later comment, claim you disagree (sometimes even in ALL CAPS) with the thing the government actually did that was wrong that everyone else is talking about.

So, when people are upset with the government for, say, civil forfeiture, you don't talk about that. Instead, you talk about everything else you can come up with to make the government (or in this case, Ortiz) look good.

I guess that's why I see you as "pro-government" with your comments. Perhaps others do too, and that might be good enough reason to consider toning back the gov-love?
Should show ratings in the movie directory pages, instead of just on the movie details pages.
That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the link - that's given me a much better intuitive understanding. I'll have a dig around some of the other transformations mentioned now.
> The secular world has no problems with bikinis and sexual provocation of all kinds because, among other reasons, it does not believe that sexuality and beauty have the potential to exert a momentous power over us.

Or maybe the secular world has no problem with those things because it believes that we are strong enough to overcome the power they hold over us, without a priest hiding those things away behind a curtain.
Thieves dig hi-tech tunnel to bank vault
Thanks! I built it because I often use recipes from blogs but changes little things, and inevitably I forget what I changed the last time.

I've been trying to convince a friend to help with the design, but he's been pretty busy lately. So if you know anyone whose interested I'm open :).
@kheruc I know it's a side project, but I own sfmdb.com - was going to use it for something totally different that will probably never happen now, but it's not a bad name for your site - happy to give it to you if interested?
The USA has an incredible economy, and the tech scene is amazing in the SF region. it doing business requires incredible hoops due to multi layered complexity, there are homeless on the streets and other signs of a society that fails to look after the less lucky, it has an amazingly poor political system in practise and lousy food, unless you live in the Bay or have lots of money. But foreigners are most scared and worried about being pulled into the quagmires of the US justice system or the US health care systems.
PostgreSQL intervals are smarter than just number of seconds between two datetimes. They can represent "1 month" or "1 year" which can't be represented as a number of seconds. Also, intervals can be used between dates or times, not just datetimes.
I'm definitely more pro-government than most people on HN.

What happened to Aaron was a travesty. In fact, it's even more a travesty from my vantage point, because it strikes directly at the credibility of the criminal justice system.

The only reason the operators of a flophouse hotel that concealed meth labs and multiple retail heroin dealing operations could possibly appear sympathetic on HN is because the US Attorney's office in Boston poisoned their reputation by threatening Aaron Swartz with a multi-year sentence and 13 felony convictions.

[later]

I reject entirely the idea that the comment to which you're responding is "pro-government". My comment is anti-flophouse. That's not remotely the same thing.
> The owners of the hotel repeatedly admitted under oath that they had continuing knowledge of drug crimes occurring on their premises, and had no policies to investigate the use of their rooms.

Your entire comment essentially boils down to this. I reject the notion that there is something wrong with using drugs ... but even if you don't, do you really think the hotel owners should be Drug War warriors, enforcing the law, and turning their own customers in to the authorities?
Bunnie here says he feels safer from government abuses in Singapore, which has no trial by jury, a single-party government, and the highest execution rate in the world, where all public gatherings of five or more people require a police permit, than in the US.

Does that mean the US has failed?
It seems like a nice read, but the weird layout distracted me and prevented me from going past the first 3 or 4 paragraphs: I got lost in a mix of two vs one column paragraphs. I tried different browsers with no luck.

In any case, I have planned to go to North Korea at some point :)
"Uses" people by creating products other people are willing to pay for. Just like your local pig farm "uses" the animals to provide you food you are willing to pay for.

Mega is just being a midleman here. What's so wrong about it, really? If an industry goes down because it can't compete with "free", then maybe it should go down because technology makes the business model unprofitable? Big players go down and small ones come to rule the game, it's not like people stop caring about entertainment. But of course this all whining about piracy is exactly about securing people's own position and ability to survive in the competitive market. After all, an industry-wide collapse could very well mean loss of a job(not for a single person, but also for co-workers etc) or at least huge cut in income.

In the end it's just everyone playing for themselves. Hopefully in a few decades we have machines creating superior content for us(at least to some degree), so we can finally start getting rid of the publishing/content providing industries which hinder technological progress and start to focus on consuming whatever we find most suitable for us, without legal or ethical barriers. Everyone wins if we don't let bullshit legislation hinder the progress.
More importantly, viewing the source from the Google cached version:

src='.../wp-content/...'

Surprised?
"Information is as real as money."

Certainly, however, information can be "held"/known by an arbitrary number of people at any single point in time, whereas money can only ever be held by a single person at a single point in time. That changes the nature of that reality. Value, and therefore damages, are simply not as concrete as is implied by the property analogy.

"On an actual damages basis this tort is huge."

That's for the courts to decide, and the public to rightly question as well.
Stealth Wear: new clothing for counter surveillance.
Yeah, it is a crappy hotel in a crappy area of town. You can't run a quality institution in that kind of neighborhood. As evidence of this, look at the hotel's claim that the Motel 6, Walmart and Home Depot up the street have similar crime rates.

As for your specific statements, I find it hard to reconcile your claim that owners "...were warned repeatedly by local law enforcement and an intervention of local hotel owners; specific measures were suggested to minimize the problems at this place and weren't taken..." with the article's claim that sworn testimony by local law enforcement that, "the Tewksbury Police testified they never communicated with Caswell about what he could do to reduce drug crimes."

But be that as it may, if you care about civil liberties it is a fact that you'll mostly wind up defending unpopular actions by unpopular people who are unpopular for a reason. Because that is mostly who prosecutors are going to throw the book at, and go out of their way to target with every tool, ethical or not, that they can.
Not speaking for tptacek, but in my opinion the civil libertarians online, even on HN, get worked up on some pretty misinformed bases. It's slightly more sophisticated than the e-mails your grandma forwards you claiming Obama is a muslim, but not by much.
Yes, I think that business owners shouldn't be allowed to knowingly profit from having their property used as a staging ground for armed crack and heroin dealers, street-level prostitution, and methamphetamine manufacturing. I think that because all of those activities create externalities that impose terrible costs on neighbors and on the whole township.
Who pays (and why) is hardly immaterial when it has a defining effect on how the site is actually used. There's a good reason as to why Google and Dropbox can easily claim legitimacy while Mega has to struggle.
I used to rock a cube with a NeXTDimension board. That was glorious.
It looks fine to me ?! Flash is not used at all and the design shows some taste.
I lived in San Jose and Palo Alto from 2002-2005. Moved to NYC and have been there since. Two things I would add:
-SF (vs say NYC,Boston,Chicago) is a one industry town and is therefore a boom and bust town. When I moved there right after the bubble burst the guy who sold me my car was a former dev. Many of you only know the good times, and it won't be like this forever. That's not to say its a great place and I don't miss it.
- The cost of housing on the peninsula and to some extent the east bay is almost as bad as SF. When you are reqdy to have a family, at least in NYC you can live in a nice house in Westchester or NJ. Or a really nice modern condo for half the price of NY. You can't get a nice place with a good school district by going further away from SF, it's like prices get even worse the further south you go until you are way past San Jose.
As soon as a file goes public and anybody can get it, then it seems to me irrelevant that its encrypted on mega servers. They'll have to respond to takedown requests because the contents are known.

And if mega is de-duping content then that could technically eliminate "whack a mole" for the copyright holders (except for people re-encoding the file and re-uploading). I had heard in the past that mega would only take down one link.
Aaron Swartz suicide has U.S. lawmakers scrutinizing prosecutors
It seems to have sprung up a while ago. I found a profile there which was last modified in 2007.
That's because my claims come from the docket and the ones you cite come from a news article.

For the fourth time today: it is not my position that civil asset forfeiture reform isn't direly needed. But if you look at the process that actually occurred in this case, you'll find that this is very much not the textbook case of CAF abuse. This property was a real, practical problem for the community. The US Attorney's office used, in effect, a civil suit to resolve the problem after multiple local law enforcement interventions failed. That suit is receiving a full and fair hearing in front of an impartial judge.

Let me ask you directly: why do you think it should be illegal for the US Attorney's office to file a civil suit against the owners of a property that appears to be instrumental in the narcotics and vice trade of a whole township? If I slip and fall on your walkway, I can sue you. Why can't the government, here? They aren't threatening to imprison the owners. They're saying, "hey, owners, your operation of this business is so negligent and creates so many costs to the neighborhood that after multiple interventions with local law enforcement we're finally forced to sue".
There are other messages that one can draw. For example, the most obvious to me is this one:

Change happens, so be adaptable. (Other strategies haven't fared so well.)
Payphone Hack Day NYC at ITP on January 26 - 27
These breakpoints seem chosen somewhat arbitrarily. I'd enjoy a longer post elaborating on why you chose them!

The seminal Boston Globe design chose 5 breakpoints based on rough hardware buckets, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshclark/6200745034/ (via https://twitter.com/globalmoxie/status/120157487797243905 ).
:O You're just going to give away a five-letter .com domain?
Digital video and audio is nothing new. At all. It's like decades old.

Getting images in browsers was never a problem.

Why is it STILL a problem to get audio and video in browsers?
Using Web Workers to Speed-Up Your JavaScript Applications
Cornell professor driven to convey beauty of mathematics
Of course. And have people use it legitimately is essential to them. People also used megaupload legitimately too.
even 256 bytes block is big enough to make collisions so rare that it's not even worth.

not to mention metadata associated with such a small block would be probably more than the size of the block itself.