skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look, you might be right. Perhaps someone put this on Pres Hockfield's desk along with everything else and she said "We need to make an example of this kid, or the university donations will suffer." or "the university will look weak" or even "the university will look bad to the JSTOR community"

But when put next to: "Who are we going to squeeze for $100M dollars to get the latest bio building", or "How do we get more people interested in STEM at a young age?" usually that stuff is under the category of "What do I have to do to get this off my desk and never see it again?"

BTW: I agree with you that if the library gnomes (or their superiors) were the ones holding the grudge, they would not have the power to do anything, as I mentioned above.
CoffeeScript begat Coco. And Coco begat LiveScript.
So it's Brazilian bureaucracy the one stopping you right? I'm just curious
Really?

'Affiliation with MIT right now, even as a student, looks to me like affiliation with the Nazi youth.'

Not unreasonable?
Which needs to bring along with it some combination of an increase in the amount of resources the courts have to handle trials, decrease in the number of victimless "crimes", and better ways to reduce recidivism.
Otherwise, the system would collapse under the weight of all of the trials and prisoners.
You missed this part:

"Why don't you just register as an individual"
From the article:

"This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist."

So the Ortiz petition will be unaffected.
Thats a good point. But It all depends if you block your IP address or not. If it was a legal form a protest that people didn't have to worry about going to jail for you could easily make your information known. Problem is the government doesn't understand technology and will label you a hacker instead of non-violent protestor.
There are many benefits to being an LLC, and many reasons why one would want to publish as a company instead of as an individual.
I have also read before (can't find it now, though) that there are people who give more credibility to applications when they are published by a company rather than an individual.
I'm always sad when people treat open source as a dumping ground for abandoned/old/unprofitable projects. The rest of my sympathy went away when he misspelled 'substantial' and signed off with an all-caps 'GO TO HELL'. Classy.

I'm probably just a snob.
Unseating the Giant: Amazon, Inkling, and the rise of a new product model.
Thanks for catching that. I've removed the outdated paragraph and republished the docs. If you notice anything else amiss, please let me know.
I don't know if you can really blame congresspeople for being apathetic while Aaron was alive if even HN of all communities largely was as well.
Um. We didn't do anything much either before he killed himself. I think it's fantastic that they're on Aaron's side here - yes, it's unfortunate that it took his death to make them on his side, but that blame lies with all of us, not the lawmakers.

We made this a big deal after his death, consequently leading to the politicians making their claims now. Had we made a big deal before he died, perhaps the lawmakers would have done the same.

Our fault, not theirs. They really are representing us here.
>>I'm so glad to hear they had just the right environment for Aaron waiting to lovingly receive him.

However horrible that might have been, it would have been better than the alternative...
This sounds like its clarifying what the founding fathers really meant when they wrote the law way back in 2002.
The depressing lulziness if a sentence that scales with the number of documents downloaded is matched only by that of sentences that scale with the weight of the drugs carried.
Why? He could have sidestepped any plea bargaining if he wished. I'm not sure what you're suggesting they do.
And the important question: was jstor's tos the only mechanism used to deny Aaron access?
I know what scarmig means: I believe Hal would resign before putting out falsehoods or a whitewash.

Also, I don't consider it "them" so much as "us". I may have been a mere cog, but still love the place 15 years later.
You mean the alternative of him being set free?

You're arguing from a false dichotomy here, there are a lot more options than the ones that you see, and most of them are arguably a lot better than the ones you put forward.
Syria Dropped Hallucinogen Weapon on Rebels, Secret Cable Says
<3 just a joke my friend. in all seriousness if anyone is attacking MIT that's retarded.
NPM police for Node.js
I don't have that issue anymore, because I'm better able to tell when a girl is interested or not and when I get the slightest hint of that happening I gtfo of there. I've seen this happen to lots of other friends.
I agree that Stephen Heymann played a more direct role. However, Carmen Ortiz was his boss and therefore responsible for the work of her employees, and her firing will also have beneficial effects.

First, her sacking will make every other US Attorney in the country take a very close look at the actions of their subordinates. If Heymann goes but Ortiz stays, I'm not sure the rest of them will sweat nearly as much.

Second, Ortiz's firing should still sink Heymann's career as a prosecutor - if his actions get his boss sacked, I can't imagine the next political appointee to supervise him will give him much leash.

Well, may they both be fired.
> I believe Hal would resign before putting out falsehoods or a whitewash.

I believe so too. But that particular example wasn't very good.
We need to ensure that "Internet website" is replaced with "any computing device which intentionally uses electromagnetic radiation to communicate with other computing devices".

EDIT: OK, how about, "any device which intentionally communicates with other devices".
Is that better?
Prosecutors, in theory, are supposed to seek justice, not victories. (Defense lawyers, on the other hand, are supposed to give their client the best possible representation. If the defense gets a guilty guy off, that's the prosecution's fault.)

Prosecutors shouldn't bring a case unless both a) they think the guy did it, and b) they think they are likely to win. We can debate to what threshold of doubt each of those statements hold, but that's the general gist.
You probably just lack empathy.
It's not 'since the thought of...' it's just that 'since he is suicidal'. The fact that he was suicidal because of the thought of going to jail is irrelevant to the prosecutor, as it must be. They can't allow such emotional responses to weigh on their decision making or they wont be able to effectively do their job and they'll open themselves up to deceptive manipulation.
If you want a legislative response, now is the time to write to your representatives. The EFF has an easy tool to send the appropriate people a message:

https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KE...

The prefilled text is about the CFAA, but you can change it to say whatever you want before sending it. Don't feel apathetic, or think that you can't make a difference. One thing Aaron Swartz showed us is that Congress can be made to listen to the public, if we are loud enough.
Seriously, how does that even make sense? The idea of a sentence that is accelerated if it's your Nth offense makes sense. A sentence accelerated by malicious destruction (of any sort) makes sense. Accelerate if done for commercial gain. Accelerate for deliberately obstructing investigations. Accelerate for being the ringleader of a conspiracy.

But a sentencing structure that says "fuck it, all we have to go on is damages, so go make up a plausible story and we'll use that to figure out where on the X axis of this spreadsheet you figure out" --- and "plausible story" is exactly the term when you learn about the burden of proof here --- it makes no sense at all. The same mindset, intent, and actions can't generate radically different outcomes based on how many iterations a for() loop makes before you get caught.
Your app looks very cool. Best of luck to you.
His price for not admitting felony guilt was to face 13 felony counts and a potential of 35+ years in jail at trial. That's unconscionable.
1. Minimum plea bargain cannot be less than half of maximum? What about crimes where the sentencing guidelines are already spanning 2x? That would mean you could get a lighter sentence by going to trial than the minimum plea.
I found the JavaScript Jabber podcast [1] to be a great source of information on front-end JavaScript Frameworks, as well as some discussion with framewor authors that can help figure out how they differ.

Backbone: http://javascriptjabber.com/004-jsj-backbone-js-with-jeremy-...
Ember: http://javascriptjabber.com/034-jsj-ember-js/
Angular: http://javascriptjabber.com/032-jsj-angular-js/
Knockout: http://javascriptjabber.com/013-jsj-knockout-js-with-steven-...
enyo: http://javascriptjabber.com/033-jsj-enyo-js/

[1]http://javascriptjabber.com/
I don't get to finish reading a lot of books, but this one I was able to. Great insights about social engineering and how this - http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-hona... - could have been avoided if people just learned from Kevin's exploits.
When a legislator say they will "look" at something, it means they don't intend to actually do anything about it but are simply attempting to pacify their constituents by promising something.
Meaningless, insulting charade made more meaningless, insulting. Buzzfeed at 11.
I mean the alternative of him being dead.

Yes, there were other alternatives and jail certainly wasn't the best one. My point is simply that it would have been better than what ultimately happened, so given that, it's not so terrible the prosecutor suggested it.
By coincidence, I've been collecting just such a data set since Saturday afternoon. I suspect that in the case of the petition I'm interested in, the fact that it had almost no "earned media" before crossing the threshold is why the signing rate appeared to speed up once it had crossed the threshold.
Your understanding goes with mine (which may also be confused). Victims' opinions should matter to the prosecutor, but not be the end of the story. The prosecutor is representing the state, not the (alleged) victim.

Roman Polanski is the most obvious example.
Russia: First Borey Class Ballistic Missile Sub Commissioned
Agreed. The current system which, effectively, allows prosecutors to force pleas is not balanced in any manner.
France: PKK Co-Founder Murdered
That's extortion.
Just because this isn't a cure all magic bullet does not mean it isn't a step in the right direction. Progress no matter how small is still progress.

I encourage those of you who live in the United States to drop a quick line to your congressman and ask that they support this bill.

http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
I'd strike "computing" from your suggestion as well.
My understanding is that victims are generaly allowed to confer with prosecutors on plea bargains, but have no veto power of any kind (much as they might like to, cf. http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...). I'm not even aware that the victims get a hearing with a judge; at most a judge might ask a prosecutor about the outcome of a victim conference. I might be wrong about this, I haven't looked into the rules of criminal procedure in depth.
The origin of life and the future of computers
You are not a snob.

But, make no mistake, this is probably a profitable project. In fact, I was planning on making a living out it! I promise I'm not just dumping this

I misspell a lot, sorry, english is not my first language (not even second, actually). Normally I use a spell checker, somehow that passed.

Yep, the e-mail didn't end very well. My point was to try to convey rage to the reader (crazy guy punching computer). Just like people yelling at airline employees when something happens to their flights.
I really hope "better educated" and "looking at the total issue" isn't code for "agrees with me."
> I mean the alternative of him being dead.

I got what you meant, but what ultimately did happen is not relevant when you're speculating, what should have happened is and the prosecutors suggestion is moronic.

Part of the whole idea of having a justice system is that you do what's best for society. Putting otherwise superbly functioning human beings naked in a rubber room is such a spectacular waste of human potential that I really have a problem just contemplating such things, it is like having my head defiled.
Getting rid of plea bargaining doesn't make the problem better; it makes it worse by removing any compromise between walking away and the maximum sentence.

From my own experience: in mental committment proceedings, there is no halfway point between letting the defendant stay free and committing them to a mental hospital. Consequently, the prosecutor's office simply never negotiates; they take every case to trial.
It's a hack to make it easier to put major drug distributors, commercial piracy operations, etc, away for longer sentences on the assumption that if you're downloading a million documents, you must be engaged in some large criminal enterprise.

Really, no crime needs more than a few degrees (it's good enough for murder, after all). Even things like aggravating factors can be used pretty unfairly.
I saw an argument recently, that most of the problem has been caused by the fact that sentencing has been pulled out of the hands of the judiciary (though mandatory minimums etc). Judicial discretion in sentencing was once a check on this sort of thing.
What I want to know, are there any petitions at all to which the official response was essentially, "Hell, yes. Brilliant idea! We'll get right on it!".
It is one thing to know that the USA has a larger prison population than any other country in the world. It is another to see how the sausage is made - to see the process that actually puts people there.

In just a few days I've developed much more severe misgivings about the process that we use to put people in prison than I had before.
Which begs the question: why are people petitioning the White House to have their states secede from the Union? That's just stupid on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin.
Stanford Study Finds Companies Get Less Innovative Post IPO
Conspiracy theories about why your petition is always the X+1 petition.
Worse, according to Granick, this made-up number is laundered into a finding of fact that is given deference at appeal.
Hey, it never occurred to me that there are people here who don't know Mentor's last words but they too were on the front page recently.

It also never occurred to me that I'm almost 30. :(

Brings a damn tear to my eye seeing hacker culture get remembered by the newbs.
Lofgren's proposal appears to address the EFFs main concerns:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/aaron-swartz-fix-draco...

Legislating against what you term "prosecutorial misconduct" is far fetched. Can you imagine how you would word that legislation without hampering law enforcement efforts against the real bad guys? Do you really want that?

Having the law named after Aaron would be more than symbolic, it would be a perpetual reminder that overreach against programmers who in general want to make the world a better place can result in massive civil outcry, and to a large extent address your concerns too.
One of my favorite 2600 covers ever: http://www.2600.com/covers/sp981.gif

And does anyone else remember 2600's feature-length film "Freedom Downtime - The Story of Kevin Mitnick" [VIDEO] -- http://archive.org/details/FreedomDowntime-TheStoryOfKevinMi...
Arrival rate and dequeue/processing time are the keys here. Unbounded queues are easy.. Just limit the queue size. Of course this isn't what the user of the service wants and leads to a very bad experience
I think they call it 'plea bargaining' now for some reason.
D&B Brazil, yes.
That sounds an awful lot like the business model of IBM or Oracle...

He was able to coordinate $100's of thousands of dollars worth of outsourced work that his employers (more like 'customers' as the case may be) found to be top notch, essentially in what amounted to his spare time so they fired him. I'm sure they called it "stealing". I'd call that "management" and damn good management at that.
BLE / iOS Framework for App Developers
Bluetooth LE (BLE) is a great choice for low data rate communications where low power is also important. Newer Apple devices now support this protocol and there have been a lot of great products leveraging this capability. We decided to dig into it as well and have just completed development of an external accessory that uses BLE. The accessory implements a button interface and sends events to an app.

The goal we had set for ourselves in this development was to create a low power accessory that maintained responsiveness. The key to achieving low power is to keep your accessory in a low power state as much as possible. For responsiveness you need the accessory to wake-up quickly and get the message through without delay. We are pleased with the results.

Since we intend to leverage this development on several projects we have wrapped up our code into a custom iOS framework. This is our first accessory design and we have plans to add others to fulfill our own product roadmap.

We’re interested in knowing if other developers or companies may be interested in leveraging our development/framework for an existing or future app. If you want to learn more - please leave a comment and we’ll contact you.
Technically, this is a relaunch: it used to exist a few years ago. I'd assume the relaunch is an answer to Grouper?
That sounds like a problem with the sentences and not with the plea.

--> Current world: Defendants have a choice between accepting a certain jail term of Y or risking trial where they'll get in a range from 0-X (where X >> Y).

--> Your world: Defendants must risk trial where they'll get in a range from 0-X.

How is the second one better? If you want to reduce X, then just reduce X. The same argument goes if you say that Y must be some fraction of X --- if I were a defendant, I'd want at least an option of a very small Y (and if X is too high, just reduce X).

In addition to all the efficiency arguments (jurors, court costs, etc), guilty pleas save victims and witnesses from having to show up in court, be aggressively cross-examined by defense counsel, and suffer again. Why is it beneficial for somebody who knows he's guilty and knows he'll be convicted to have to inflict pain on his victims again?

[Edit: replied to wrong post]
The first response on Chinese eugenics is extremely weird and confuses a couple of things, first of all:

>It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

BGI uses Illumina-technology! There is a difference between both companies (disclaimer: I sometimes work with BGI), Illumina just builds the machines and does little to no sequencing by themselves, BGI is a massive sequencing facility that is involved in the sequencing of myriad genomes right now, with only little focus on human genomics. BGI themselves don't build any sequencing technology (yet?), so this guy is comparing apples to oranges here, like someone comparing a weapons manufacturer to an army.

His implications about inheritance of IQ are flawed as well - just because there are alleles linked to some trait (IQ in this case) doesn't mean that these alleles are useful, you have especially in IQ studies massive confounding going on - for example, wealth might be a better predictor of IQ than certain alleles, just because right people have better access to knowledge than poor people. He completely ignores environment in this issue!

>partly to curtail China's population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants.

And what is that sentence supposed to mean? Peasants are "lowly" idiots with "bad" genes not worthy of having kids? This man does not understand genetics.
What about it do you find terrible? The declarative nature of the binding? Or just the fact that it isn't valid according to the HTML spec?
We are not allowed in this country to look across a landscape of lawfully operating organizations and businesses, choose the ones we dislike, and execute plans that abuse their computers to bring about their destruction. That is what Aaron was essentially charged with doing, and there was not NO evidence that that was his plan.

If you think educated people are upset about closed academic publishing, you should talk to the millions of Americans (I AM NOT ONE OF THEM) who are upset about abortion. Better yet, you should listen to their rhetoric, because they don't think they're liberating science and culture; they think they're standing athwart engines of mass murder. They too would like to abuse computer systems to hasten the demise of disfavored organizations, for instance by publishing patient lists stolen from computer systems.

No part of observing this means I have to accept that Aaron was handled reasonably by the prosecutors, that I believe Aaron should have been at any risk of serving prison time, or even that I think that justice demands he walk away with at least a felony conviction. Equivalently, it does not mean that 'tzs is an authoritarian.
Zoe Lofgren is my Congresswoman. Her office is across the street from where I live.

I think I'll visit her office tomorrow to thank her for this; it makes me proud.
The problem is the amount, it's the fact that it's wide-spread (i.e. horizontal) but when you examine deeply any one piece you find it to be quite weak, i.e. shallow.

It's a similar technique used by conspiracy theorists and Creationists.
To be fair it's doubtful that most of that would have actually held up in court. That woman who bullied that 13-year-old to committing suicide a couple of years ago was similarly charged under a very broad interpretation of wire fraud and was only ultimately convicted of a misdemeanor.

Though he gets bankrupted from legal costs either way for sure
Very glad that Jeff wrote this up and he deservers mad credit for documenting something that has been frustrating me for years. People don't realize how hard doing this right is and discount the hard work that goes into making large systems scale in a stable manner.

It isn't just load testing but more that the whole system should be considered suspect. If you don't act defensively at all steps you will be hosed by something you thought will never happen. Just had a good talk about this last weekend. Memory, TCP, and all other rock-solid things can and will have issues in large systems.
In case you didn't realize it, tax rates closer on par with other developed countries are a perfect solution to that problem.
Don't worry, that will come later.
Convincing people to buy
The easy answer if you want to march down the street is you tell city hall and get a parade permit. Did anybody tell MIT and apply for a packet storm permit?
the github project link: https://github.com/haiwen/seafile
Well, it's a problem with sentencing in general. If you have $2m and I steal $1m from your safe, it's judged a much worse crime than if you have $200 and I steal all of it, even though the outcome for you is a lot worse in the second case. Ideally the imposition would be quantified in terms of the marginal cost to the injured party, but then there's another economic theory that says we have to multiply that by the probability of capture in order to achieve deterrence by means of a criminal's indifference curve.

And at that, we're not even committed to any kind of intellectual theory of sentencing int eh first place - some lawmakers thinks sentencing is a punitive matter, some rehabilitative, and so on. Gestural politics are the norm in American criminal justice; which goes some way to explaining how we only recently had mandatory minimum sentences recognized as unconstitutional, and how the crack/cocaine disparity was addressed even more recently, despite its blatantly obvious unfairness.

I don't think legislation will go anywhere, since the house GOP will probably sink it in the name of personal responsibility.