skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's hard to tease out how much of the value of WL/Lexis/BL is in comprehensive access to cases and documents vs. how much comes from the kind of value added products/services that you mention.

Providing comprehensive access to disparate publicly available information is itself a value-add. Should courts submit their opinions to some sort of centralized system instead of posting a link to the PDF on their website? Sure, you can make that argument. But it's hard to say that courts are remiss in not doing so, considering that they are dozens of independent entities. Moreover, someone has to pay to build that system. Categorizing information is not free--Google just makes us think it's free because it charges us by selling our privacy rather than simply asking for a fee. Now it's certainly something that could be done at the public expense, and maybe it should be. But until then, providing comprehensive access to these documents is a value-add.

> One could imagine dramatically better products (my thesis is that the right Silicon Valley startup can build them). If WL/Lexis/BL want to survive in the next 5-10 years, they are going to have to get away from publishing and push technology farther

I can imagine dramatically better products, but not in the next 5-10 years. If history tells us anything,[1] it's that AI is really hard and any technology that relies on advances in AI are further off than we imagine. Google's search engine, at the moment, can't even tell the difference between a real product review site and SEO-optimized, auto-generated garbage. It'll be a lot longer than 5-10 years before I trust some algorithm to tell me whether one case cites another in a positive or negative light.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
Hands on with Microsoft's Surface Pro, Available in US & Canada on February 9th
I can't code and listen to speech audio at the same time. I can do it if I'm only pattern-matching or doing something that is only visual and doesn't take much conscious thought. I used to listen to audiobooks at an old job whenever I had to do tedious work, digging through spreadsheets for anomalous data. And, I now listen to audiobooks while I'm riding my bike or exercising.

I figured that it was because coding, or writing something like this comment, uses the speech center of my brain, as does the incoming audio stream. Music doesn't have any adverse affects on my ability to code or write comments, since I don't really pay attention to any of the vocals that may be present.
HR isn't the concern. If it's public, anyone who gives a shit about that kind of stuff can find it, usually with just a simple focused Google search.

It used to be that you had to hire a private detective to find dirt on people... I get that Google is going to make that easier but we don't have to go out of our way to help that along. :)
Was trysqlinjection.com taken?
So what about when Joe's colleagues circulate his divorce case details around for a laugh or, worse, to character smear the guy to damage a promotion or gain political points in the workplace?
Someone looked it up in a previous thread a week or so ago. IIRC, the PACER system had ~80-90 million in revenues, and $25 million in costs last year. I remember the discussion mentioning that all of the extra cash goes towards making up for a lack of proper budget from Congress for running the court system. It's a complicated issue.

Edit:

Looked up the posts:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053611

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053483
I think you misread the parent. jahewson asked for a machine that is Fast and Cheap and Not Big.

More specifically they want to upgrade a weaker machine with an SSD instead of getting a high end machine with an SSD.
I called out the notion that anyone ought to be depending on the defaults in the first place

Regardless of whether you should depend on them, many many people do. Heck, many people don't even understand that there's a choice to be made: after all, everyone knows that Oracle is ACID compliant, right?

Yes, many don't support SERIALIZABLE. Didn't contradict that either.

Sorry, I was confused by the bit about "If your workload needs serializability, set it" since that's physically impossible on Oracle 11g.

Just because a DB has a replication package available (like MySQL) does not mean that it is a distributed system. And the file backed DBs (like Berkeley) are definitely not distributed. Sure, there are some extremely expensive massively parallel DBs in use (like Volt), but the number of deployments for those systems is a drop in the bucket compared with single-node MySQL/Postgres/Oracle/SQLServer/DB2 instances.
I used that as an example. Discrimination lawsuits might be feasible against big companies but smaller ones might look and not hire you by giving you a bogus reason, or no reason. Even if someone sues them 4 years later, your rent is due by the 5th of next month.

They are many other things one did 10-30 years ago that can stop someone from getting a job (minor criminal convictions, college pranks, marijuana arrests etc etc)
Do not take this article Seriously. This is garbage post and problem is with ASK and not Oracle here.
Microsoft claims MS would have saved Munich money, won't release study
Correct, they are not wrong.

Its like this in Germany (tax wise): (http://i.imgur.com/6oiGx5B.png) - the lower blue curve is the amount of tax you pay. The x-axis is the amount of money you get (on which you have to pay tax) and the y-axis is the tax percentage. This is for self-employed people only, regular employees will deduct 1000 Euros from the amount ("Arbeitnehmerpauschbetrag"). Other amounts such as the health insurance can also be deducted.

One side note: the link you have given also calculates health, pension and unemployment insurances. This might be confused with tax, but one should be make it clear that self-employed people don't have to have pension and unemployment insurance and health insurance is much higher than for regular employees. [But one can (in practice) get around paying for health insurance, but no sensible person will do that. - Nobody enforces that you have a health insurance if you are self employed.]
I can completely relate to this, it might be anecdotal, (Java isn't as popular for web development these days as it used to be), but server side analytics using Mixpanel in Java for example was pretty hard from a non Android app,
I ended up building something myself to circumvent the issue (https://github.com/eranation/mixpanel-java) but I have to give credit to mixpanel for responding to emails quickly, picking it up, creating their own Java API and kindly linking to mine and another mixpanel Scala based API from their support pages.
Still I wouldn't have had to even think doing it if I knew segment.io probably, nice job, will give it a go.
> I don't know anyone who uses it.

Apparently most people who use Java use the ask.com toolbar. </sarcasm off>
Edit: With the ask.com toolbar installed, it also changes your default search provider, and it is very hard to put it back in some cases. So I'm sure that's where they get their money to pay for the drive-by install.
Again, who's to say what's useful? They're not private matters by rule, it's all public record. I could think of a bunch of uses for the data.

I don't have any problem with public record actually being public (and I do have a problem with public records that aren't actually public). Medical records and school transcripts are not public records. 911 calls are public, but you have to know how to request them and that usually means they aren't released unless it's a newsworthy story and a local media outlet jumps through the hoop. Visitor logs should be public (like they are for the White House). You can request anyone's FBI file after they die, but that system could be quite a bit more efficient.
Yes entirely. I work in the financial sector and deal with ALL levels of management that you mention above. In fact, I regularly deal with an organisation that has 2500 managerial staff.

I've been on the end of management politics for 20 years as well so I know how it works. I've watched climbers and sinkers and the climbers are ruthless and have a statistically higher quantity of MBAs between them (it's amazing what you can suck out of linkedin).
> But cities do compete - London, NY, Boston, SF all are fairly viable competitors For attracting the best of global talent.

But they compete as governments, rather than as direct builders. That makes it really hard for it to work as a market.
You don't do that if you have video evidence of him entering, standing there for 15 seconds, and leaving.

There is a huge difference between catching someone in the act of breaking in, where it's reasonable to assume malicious intention, and noticing that someone entered and left, where you can see that they didn't do anything malicious.
If you're interested in MIDI and how it's been used in some really weird ways I'd recommend Adrian Belew's "History & Future of Guitar Noise". You can watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWfxQ4QFM4M
Can't you just pay 10 cents per page for this stuff right now? I don't think using a suboptimal non-google search should present that much of a hardship. I don't really see this being a game changer for someone who just wants to smear a particular person; only if you need a very large amount of documents (in other words, are using it for its intended purpose.)
My parents bought me a Yamaha PSR-230 on a whim for Christmas when I was probably 14 or 15 in the mid-90's. I had been playing drums for several years and they must have figured I needed to branch out! They had no idea what MIDI was and I was only familiar with it for the cheesy music files you could download off of AOL at the time.

I looked into MIDI more and realized you could hook the keyboard up to your computer for composing songs, granted I had no idea how to write music. Once I ordered the cables (over the phone from a catalog!) and received them, I soon realized that the cheesy sounding songs sounded less cheesy when I played them through the keyboard rather than the SoundBlaster 16. I also learned that I could set up the keyboard to examine specific MIDI-in channels and I could learn chords and melodies from downloaded MIDI files because the keyboard would have little LEDs above each key that would light up when the notes were played.

Fast forward about a decade. Over this time, I had learned more about playing keyboard, learned guitar, and had picked up some music theory and songwriting knowledge. Now, my stupid little PSR-230 could control just about any sound imaginable through the use of VSTi's. I could record music that sounded like the stuff on CD's on my computer using either real instruments or virtual ones controlled by the PSR!

To this day, even though I have another, more advanced MIDI controller, I'll often times still use the PSR when I'm working on song ideas.

So happy birthday, MIDI! You're certainly different than my first impressions of you and you've definitely made my life richer.
I had heard about how cool MIDI was, but wasn't blown away until I saw a demo of MAX back in 1992. MAX let you generate and re-wire MIDI signals in real time with a simple but powerful graphical interface (it's still around and now does real-time DSP audio and video processing too).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)

Later that year I got my hands on a synthesizer and a copy of MAX and it became the first 'real' programming that I did. The real-time feedback made it easy to learn and debug, while its graphical nature made it highly prone to actual 'spaghetti code' unless I properly modularized everything. I quickly learned that I was a better programmer than musician - so I set up MAX to 'cybernetically enhance' my own playing.

If it wasn't for MIDI's fairly simple protocol and MAX's powerful tools built around it, I might not even be a programmer today.
Full stack rails
Automaton - A Task Automation Tool Built In JavaScript, Node.js Compatible
AFAIK, it is not promoted in Europe.

We're encouraged to brush after each meal, though, using fluorinated toothpaste.
You are totally confused and making irrational arguments here! Oracle is the most dominant and top player in the software industries improving the lives of programmers and helping business become more efficient and save unnecessary trouble. Oracle's improvement on Java platform and MySQL are commendable!
My point was that PACER documents are not inherently useful to the public -- edited to make that more clear.

Several people have already pointed out that there are also malicious uses for this data that could negatively impact normal people. Do you want all your neighbors and potential employers to know you've filed for bankruptcy? And would you want to give them completely open access to all court filings in your name?
GMailUI - A GMail User Interface Library
The same goes for France and Belgium.
POP User Meetup in San Francisco
Additionally how could you express a solid sweep from C1 to C8? Not that you could or want to

The opening in "Rhapsody in Blue" is two and a half octaves, and that's jut the first thing that comes to mind. Also, I'm sure there have been some extensions that enable this, but I don't know for sure; the Yamaha DB50XG I had came with sitar, and while I don't recall exactly the demo song included, it seemed like a reasonable facsimile of Ravi Shankar.
Knowing the limits of my own knowledge, I was careful to say "appears".

But honestly, that only makes him even more dishonest. After all, he was saying that there was no real difference between banks involved in the subprime crisis and any homeowner "going long" with a bet on rising home prices. Except that there's a world of difference between placing a bet on a specific piece of tangible property in an open, regulated market, and placing bets of derivations from that market so far removed that they have no clear connection to reality. And he, of all people, should know it.

This refusal to see how cynically the inputs for financial models were being manipulated supports my view that many of the quants who played a key role in this mess had no idea who or what they were working with, that they were oblivious to the fraud and corruption engulfing the firms that employed them, and that they failed to register what would happen when things like fraudulent AAA ratings on securities found their way into a system. Among a broader class of market observers this blindness was attributed to a quasi-religious belief in efficient market theory, rejected the possibility of fraud out of hand.

The basic problem can be summarized as mistaking the map for the territory. In this case, the map was the Black-Scholes Equation. Or rather, the source of the maps was this formula. People who learned to model various risks to determine prices without properly understanding the equation's limits (there were many of both) ended up with catastrophically misguided decisions to their credit.

For a bit more background on all this, see here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/12/black-scholes-...

If there's one thing that 'Inside Job' makes clear, it's that the policy framework that governs markets is absolutely critical to their stability and value. In America, this framework was subverted by the rise of an ideological (again, quasi-religious) form of market theory that say deregulation as both a practical and moral virtue. This was deep tissue corruption, and as it found its way into the laws that governed market players (or failed to govern, as the case may be), it opened the door to a cascade of fraud - people deliberately describing X as Y.

Like a ever-growing fog (toxic cloud, really) this continued until none of the major players had any idea what positions their counterparties were in. Knowing how fraudulent their own positions were, they had every reason to fear the worst from others in the same game. And then, on one horrible day in September, the music finally stopped.

To put it in very crude terms, a system built around bullshit eventually choked on the stuff. I'm not surprised that a person who shared more responsibility than most for the resulting catastrophe would respond by entering a state of deep denial. But it's sad, nonetheless.
There are quite a few neighborhoods in NY that have a great sense of community, albeit mostly in the boroughs
TPC-VMS Benchmark To Compare Virtual Workloads
So what are your hunches that lead you to believe that a graphical programming language is the way to go? Not saying that it couldn't, but it hasn't really been a success so far.
I dunno. I keep thinking about going back to school to get a graduate degree, but it never happens. :P
If you're ever in the Bay Area, come have lunch with us at http://judicata.com :)
Good points on both sides. One thing I'll point out is that many clustering, HA, and multi-master replication solutions either rely on a single master (what I think Michael means when he says they're not distributed) or don't provide serializability.

Things get harder when you're distributed. For example, if you cluster with a sharded master-slave configuration, then, to serialize transactions that span shards/partitions, you'll need to do 2 phase commit or similar between masters for writes and, for most read/write transactions, make sure you don't read from slaves. If you cluster via master-master/active-active, then, for serializability, you'll need locking or some other concurrency control across masters for each shard/partition. Both setups are definitely do-able (if not highly available) but require non-trivial engineering.
I actually think setting up those tools in the tutorial video is great. It's nice to see how a real django dev builds a production app. This stuff is rarely covered in other more simplified tutorials.
This may seem weird but the government can't do it for free either. Do you think PACER (or something like it) would run itself with no resource investment whatsoever?

If the government pays for it, it comes via taxes (which are very difficult to adjust as needed), debt (which is undesirable in general), or by levying duties on those affected (which is essentially the PACER model).

The laws themselves can be found online (Gov't Printing Office, the Library of Congress's THOMAS, even the House of Representative has a legal code lookup website).

If you're referring to case law, there's already not a lot you can do without having a lawyer interpret what it means for you in your specific situation, and your lawyer should already have access to the case law.

I feel I should have the right to be able to drive my car as long as I prove I know the driving laws, but the government sure as shit made me pay for my updated driver's license last year. I pay for road maintenance every time I fill up my tank, but that gets washed into the whole transaction and so there's comparatively little outrage.
Python's Lesser Known Loop Control
URI.js - URLs in Javascript
But that leaves my question unanswered; The question on whats is the goal. Is the goal that the copyright holders should be compensated, or that violators get punished? I law can only be in one of those two camps.
When you're getting ready to do massive runs, yes, you want to make sure your ICs are common, have pin-equivalent drop in replacements, and can be sourced from a reliable distributor. But that's not the point since such a run would take weeks or months anyway, more than enough time to properly source everything.

However, there's still no "3d printer equivalent" for electronics prototyping especially when using BGAs.

I've paid way more than $65 for overnight shipping from Digikey, Mouser, Arrow NAC, etc. Especially when ordering from multiple distributors (for some reason it always seems that my kits end up being a 90:10 split between Digikey:Mouser).
And yet, let's take a look at the market. A one-bedroom Manhattan condo costs more than twice what a two-story house almost anywhere else does. There's no lack of demand.

Building more housing in a city is hard. You have to buy out all units in the existing building, and the current residents may be quite reluctant. And actually extending a city is even harder.
Yes that is the reason. It's an easy ride once you get here.

Yet, although I think the EU would rather like us to be.
Yahoo Poised to Acquire Content Curation Site Snip.it
Please link me to your suppliers. I've never had less than 3 day quotes for assembly (400+ parts per board with BGAs, 3-5 boards) and they usually cost $3k+ just for the setup of the Pick n places.
Sadly, the Windows store is only for Don't-Call-it-Metro apps that can run on the tablet version. So it really doesn't offer anything to help desktop users - for the most part they're still stuck with the same old Windows Installer quagmire.
My point was 3rd parties could provide the same service cheaper. The gov could continue to run PACER as it currently is too.
My favorite reconstruction of an ancient astronomical phenomena is http://www.mysterium.com/chinese.html.

The same conjunction is apparently also referred to in the Illiad.
> PACER is a system for accessing court dockets, not a repository of case law.

This is becoming more true than it was a few years ago, but traditionally PACER has served both functions: it's the primary federal repository for publishing court dockets, including actual decisions, injunctions, and written opinions. That function has been slowly diminishing as public access through other avenues improves, but I believe some district court decisions are still available only via PACER. Some of these newer public-facing websites are actually implemented as some kind of no-login wrapper on top of PACER, e.g.: http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/opinion.htm

The court system does seem to have realized that public access to court opinions vs attorney access to court dockets are two fairly different use cases, and there are moves to either free up or even offload the opinion-repository function of PACER. Since 2002, all final written opinions are free of page charges when retrieved via PACER, and there is a special opinion-search function that doesn't charge you for the search results either. But you do still need an account and to give them a credit card, so it's easy to get charged for something else if you run the wrong kind of search, or click on the wrong document. On the other hand, wrappers like that 4th-district one above make some PACER documents accessible without an actual PACER account.

Recognizing that that's still rather suboptimal, the courts seem to be moving to using a new service of the Government Printing Office, FDSys, as the conduit for public access to opinions, so non-lawyers won't have to rely on PACER for opinions anymore: http://www.uscourts.gov/news/newsView/11-05-04/New_Pilot_Pro...
Not to mention PD, its free cousin:

http://puredata.info/
Which big-data startup does Mike Moritz think is about to blow up?
For sure. To that end, I spend a lot of time reviewing issues and contributing as best I can. From what I've seen, though, I'm not sure if it's even capable of being finished in a way that makes sense.
While others are complaining about all the up front set up; this is actually something I like. Base tutorials always seem to be missing that 'something' that takes what you've learned and turns it into a real world application.

Even if its not step one, I would prefer more tutorials to have a full fledged 'Getting Set Up' section; even if it becomes arbitrary. It makes sure everyone can get on the same page no matter where they come from.
I'm looking for a good Django tutorial that includes examples of developing with BDD and TDD. The way I learned Rails included RSpec and Cucumber, and that made a huge difference.
Federal Department Bans Portable Drives - Solution?
Don't blame yourself. Aaron and his associates were the closest to the case and it was incumbent upon them to do the PR necessary to raise the outcry. However, according to recent accounts, Aaron felt barred from fully presenting his cause. It was a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation for Aaron, which is a damned tragedy.
Alice's Adventures in Programming Language Theory Wonderland