skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you dont mind, could you share some of the gym websites you mention in your comment (especially the good one)? I'm a web developer and I happen to have a lot of clients in the health club business so I am very curious to see the sites you looked at (and hope none of the bad ones were me! :)
Are there really still notable security problems?
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Washington, D.C.'s Civil Forfeiture Racket
What is sort of weird is that Microsoft is the only company that is doing this with their own kernel. Everyone else (Google, Apple) have appropriated some other open source technolog for that (NetBSD for OS/X, Linux for Android) as if the kernel somehow wasn't a competitive advantage anymore.

I have no idea which approach is "better," this is just an interesting observation and might hint at the values of the companies involved.
A chapter from The Architecture of Open Source Applications. The complete text of which is available from here:

http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html

Looks interesting. No I haven't read it.
No need to be angry. None of this is going to remove food from your table or affect your life in any way whatsoever. Take it easy. I am just opening the topic for conversation. We can discuss things without pulling out semi-automatic weapons, right?

When someone publishes code and says something like "solved <problem> in <n lines> of <pick your language>" there generally is an implied "my language is better than yours" subliminal message that, for some strange reason, is based on line count.

Let's not debate the merit of line count as a measure of how good a language may or may not be. If we are going to go there I'll write the same solution in APL and we'll start counting characters instead. Again, line or character count, in my opinion, is not a measure of the "superiority" of a language.

The 28 line solution is not pure Python. How do we define pure Python. Let's just say that "solved <problem> in <n lines> of Python" to me means that you download and install Python:

http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7.3/

Install nothing else whatsoever and write code that solves <problem>.

OpenCV, which is what the author used for a couple of aspects of this code, is an extensive (and really cool) C++ library that is being accessed from Python. Here's the source:

https://github.com/Itseez/opencv

I'll leave it up to the reader to find the source for the Sobel method.

A much more honest title could have included something like "solving <problem> with <n> lines of Python using OpenCV".

As I said before, the intent of the article and what is being demonstrated are good, no, great. I just wish the title was a little more reflective of reality. That's all. No need to get worked-up. This is not that serious of an issue. Just a comment.
I find your argument to have zero constructive value. Aside from the gross exaggeration to attempt to attack the speaker instead of the idea, it is possible that some have a more "law and order" outlook on the world, while others have more of a "fear law and order" outlook. That this is repeatedly demonstrate should surprise no one, and your statement of it as if you've unearthed some grand conspiracy borders on obnoxious. You'll get the up-arrows by people so utterly desperate to be outraged by this story, but you deserve none.
Unless the test of "human-ness" is the ability to drag a slider, or whoever it is that you interact with the captcha, picking the least swirled of a set of images is solving the captcha because that is the test of human-ness. This seems fairly cut and dry to me.
Well I don't like their tone, I don't need to be told that my browser is "outdated", especially if it's not, it works perfectly fine for basically the rest of the internet, including web dev tasks. If there is a very specific use case for which it's not the best, they should have said so. They should have checked whether I'm using IE6, or the latest FF version, and adapt their speech accordingly. I feel like an angry nerd right now, but I'm the user this time so I'm right and they are wrong.
> If other motels are operating in the same manner as this one, they should be treated consistently.

So if there is a super bad area, where all motels have lots of crimes, the government should just nationalize everything? You don't think this methodology may create some perverse incentives?
Wow, I'm in an eerily similar situation. I'm also at the height of it I think. I am locked up all day working, spend almost every night, including weekends working until 2am -3am. I have trouble justifying spending time with anyone unless we are working on something. Also broke up with my girlfriend of 3 years a few months ago. I hired an assistant to help, which she does, but did not expect the amount of added stress having someone depending on you for income brings. Oddly, I thought it was all a good thing. I still do but am also factoring in this post and will need to re-evaluate.
My last point was an honest expression of bafflement. I don't know what you think is gained by trying to convince me I am wrong and then piss on me for trying to say I don't understand something you said. Anyone who thinks I am wrong can just answer the original question, which I am glad to see you also did in addition to feeling the need to crab at me.
From the answers to the first intermediate quiz:

// These are functions
// used as closures...

// This is good
(function() {
var foo = 'bar';
})();

This, to me, seems an odd use of the word closure. Since no value is "closed over" with a function in the internal scope and preserved, it is simply an anonymous function being immediately invoked.

That said, these quizzes are a good way to learn but man does JavaScript have a lot of traps.
My 3 year old niece is far more articulate than you. I'm serious, you're an embarrassment to this board.
"But I do think he was trying to destroy significant financial value"

Lock me up then, because I have been pushing people to abandon the academic publishing industry and share knowledge more freely for a while now. Since when should any of us care about what happens to those leeches?

Is JSTOR's archive valuable for society? Not anymore because we have a much better way to spread human knowledge: peer to peer networking on the Internet. We do not need a centralized service that charges money for access in an age of widely available high-speed connections. JSTOR's search service may be valuable, but Aaron did nothing to threaten that service and I suspect that it would take a half dozen HN readers a few weeks to develop something just as useful that every university could run on its own servers or anyone else who wished to do so. We could probably make a distributed search system if we really put our minds to it; what holds us back is the copyright system itself and the publishers who will only allow JSTOR to access the articles at grossly inflated prices.

We are not talking about something debatable, like whether or not the RIAA and MPAA should continue to have their business models protected by copyright. Journal publishers and JSTOR could vanish and research would continue to happen, scholarly articles would continue to be written, and human knowledge would be more accessible than ever before. Journal publishers do nothing at all to continue the expansion of human knowledge: they do not pay the authors of articles, they do not pay the reviewers, and many do not even pay the editors of the journals. We stopped needing them when the world wide web was invented (and probably even before that -- once global computer networks became a real thing, academic publishing became obsolete, and it has been propped up by the copyright system ever since).

Rather than being charged with a crime, Aaron Swartz should have been asked to advise the President on how to improve our access to education and to knowledge in general.
The amount SpaceX is taking from government contracts is a small percentage of Boeing's business.
The reason Apple is stingy is not because of this antitrust case. Apple pays (relatively) poorly because they don't want people to work there for the money. As I'm sure you know, Apple employees are fanatics about the company's products. Apple wants those people, not the "WTF? You're only giving me $100K and no free food? What is this shit?" people, even it it means losing a couple good engineers. Many other Silicon Valley companies are content giving their employees ridiculous salaries and perks, and don't really care whether engineers are evangelical about their products. For mostly cultural reasons, Apple hires people who wouldn't turn around for a slight raise. In fact, back when Palm was still a company developing WebOS, the standing offer for iOS engineers was to DOUBLE Apple's salary. Think about that - not enough employees were leaving for anything less than a 100% raise. Even at Apple's low salary levels, I think that says something about employee loyalty.
Ha, any particular reason for the name change?

Thanks for the feedback though, look forward to hearing your thoughts/questions
Do you think backroom meth labs and street-level prostitution would exist if professionalized alternatives were available? How many people have died from tainted homemade liquor purchased in speakaeasies since that type of prohibition ended?

That's the problem with your argument. This isn't a story of a negligent businessman allowing riff-raff to fester. It's a story of a social problem caused entirely by the government, being used to take property from a private business who didn't do enough to help them enforce their destructive laws.
anything published after the archive was amassed would still motivate a subscription

For many journals, JSTOR doesn't have recent content available anyway; Universities typically subscribe to publishers to get electronic access to recent content while relying on JSTOR for access to older content.

Why should we care if JSTOR goes out of business because an archive is published?

It doesn't matter whether you care or not. But the law cares. Prosecutors care. Judges care.

human knowledge should not be restricted by copyrights.

You've decided that? Good for you! Do prosecutors and judges have to agree with that statement? What happens when they don't?

Copyright is the law. You don't like that. I get it. But prosecutors and judges have to enforce the law as it is, not the law as some hackers on HN fervently wish it were.

we have this thing called the Internet that is vastly more efficient and costs far less.

This internet thing, that I've never heard of before (thanks for telling me about it!), does it make scanning and digitzing old paper journals free also? Does it make it so that data entry techs typing in metadata describing old paper journals don't have to paid?

we should let them and all the leeches whose publications they sell subscriptions to die quickly

How are we going to do that exactly? By not enforcing copyright laws or the CFAA, just for them? So, copyright laws will be enforced when it comes to stealing proprietary source code, but not for old journals?

what exactly can they claim to be contributing to human knowledge

I'm not sure I get your argument here. Is it that copyright law shouldn't be enforced because you've decided journal publishers are rapacious parasites (I think they are too actually)? Or that copyright law should only get enforced for entities that contribute something to human knowledge?
Your problem is that you don't want to deal with reality or are just trolling.

Office is still dominant whether you like it or not. SQL Server as well as Windows servers are still huge.

Dotnet is still huge and probably growing as Java remains stagnant.

You guys can keep on pretending, but the rest of us will deal with reality.
> I did say that if I had to chose between "federal crime" or prank that I'd chose prank.

Sure, but that's a false dichotomy. The author was under no such constraint, so it was sensationalist and misleading for him to keep referring to it as a prank.

And when I say that, I'm not casting judgement here. The Boston Tea Party and the Rosa Parks protest weren't pranks either.
Note:

- 15 crimes over 14 years in which he rented 200,000 rooms, and

- he runs the risk of discrimination accusations if he refuses to rent a room.

What specific policies would you implement if you were managing this hotel that would have avoided 15 crimes in 200,000 room rentals? You're so confident this guy is negligent, show us how easy it is to avoid these problems.
> I would also like to point out these are also all very simple operations, which would only take a few lines of Python/C/whatever to do.

Yikes! They are not. That's a lot of code. I've done a ton of image processing work in both hardware (FPGA) and software (various languages). Swirling, gray-scaling, Sobel filtering and summation collectively are far from "a few lines of Python/C/whatever to do"

> Python just happens to have a pre-written libraries to save reinventing the wheel

That's not true. OpenCV is NOT a Python library, it's nearly 100% C++ as far as I can tell:

https://github.com/Itseez/opencv

That was, in many ways, my point. This is not a solution in 23 lines of Python. Go install Python from Python.org --and NOTHING ELSE-- and solve the problem. Let's see how many lines of Python it takes.

There's nothing wrong with the intent of the author in terms of showing how one can break these CAPTCHA's using edge-length evaluation. I never put any thought into this myself so, yes, I learned something of value from his post. I just wish the title was more genuine, that's all.
Burma was never really clamped down like NK, heck, even Cuba isn't really clamped down. NK is probably the harshest state in the world with respect to freedom, and that alone probably makes it an interesting and unique visit. Ya, you are giving Kim Jong Un some money, but...if it would be an eye opening experience neh? If NK ever opens up, you won't have the oppurtunity every again!
Wow, I never would have thought of CES as a good place for a startup, but it looks like it worked great for you.
I meant no insult with "cheap" and thought it positive.

The business model Boeing is operating under is different. You can disparage it, but it is a fact of live for any defense contractor or airplane manufacture in the last 50 years of the 1900's. Boeing wants to build stuff too, and its engineers are very good.

SpaceX didn't grow up under these conditions. It will be interesting if they have to change after a few trips to DC.
I'm afraid I don't fully understand your idea. Do you have a mockup or wireframe that you can share?
Motivation can be used during sentencing but it can also be used to figure out what crime someone's committed. If the police find a guy in my house, he might be trespassing or he might be a burgler: it depends on whether he's freezing and homeless or whether he lockpicks and a receipt indicating I bought a safe.
You make a good case that this fits within the bounds of an enemy target as far as the classic drug war goes.

I think we'd agree though that sans rundown hotel the drugs still would have been made, the people would have died, the cops would have had to arrest people.

Like it or not, the marginal people in the world need places to sleep, go to work, shout at aliens and watch law and order like everyone else. If the meth lab wasn't there then maybe the suburban rental down the street, or the dead junkie could have been in the room next to yours at the quality in that didn't have a huge warning on yelp that let you avoid it.

It's a decent part of the reason that a lot of cities have relatively well know open air drug markets in bad parts of town that don't get much static, or that the oakland pd mostly looked the other way at the large mostly illegal mega grows in the warehouse districts 10 years ago because they knew the alternative would just push them into residential neighborhoods and cause a lot more problems.

Minus the moral outrage and necessity of retribution, the guy was probably doing the rest of the hotels and the town a favor.

I mean that is unless you're arguing to generate enough new revenue so that we can spend drug war size money on top notch medical, pyschiatric, housing and supervision for a large chunk of marginalized people in this country.
That can't be the whole story. If Megaupload gives you access to the ciphertext encrypted with a key that neither you nor Megaupload has access to, that is useless.
I don't take his side in making money off of intellectual property that doesn't belong to him.

Torrent sharing is one thing. Selling access to downloadable material that doesn't belong to you quite another.
I'm getting "This webpage is not available"
To be honest, it doesn't appear to be Photoshopped - at least to my eye. Snow is tough to photograph in general (all that bright, reflecting light!) - this just looks like a camera exposing for the foreground and blowing out the rest.
The benefit of exposing both sides to one another, in my experience, greatly outweighs the very minor benefits of trade accruing to the regime.

Particularly when we get a travelogue such as Sophie Schmit wrote here.
You went to a web page that you wanted to read, and it didn't let you override the font choice as it should have for good accessibility. You got mad.

I'd suggest a different approach. Take a deep breath, have that cigarette you need.

I'm might start out by sending a polite comment or email to Dave. "I was wanting to read your post, but your pages don't do this...."

Dave actually wrote the whole stack of software that manages his writing. Some of it is quite amazing, and some of it is probably older than you are, so it might have some issues ;-). He is actually someone who could fix valid problems. He's a good guy. So treat him that way. Be polite. You can see your current "get mad" approach isn't getting a good reception here, or probably anywhere else. If you want to change the world, you need to learn to communicate, not shout.
It's strange that when you cite a tweet, MLA wants you to include the tweet contents, whereas for every other citation, they want you to embed just enough info to form a pointer to the actual content. Tweet citations are closer to footnotes than to citations.

Doesn't type check.
Life is full of tough choices though. Unless the end game for all time is supposed to be meth labs in every fourth room something had to change.

I would ask if the owner bothered to get the police involved but I suspect people will just tell me that the government is evil, why would he call the police, and other such statements. :P
But that's part of the problem. US Citizens have a right to a trial by jury. It's one of the basic rights. If the prosecutor is abusing their power to deny that right there is something fundamentally wrong. Trying to throw every possible crime at someone no matter how tenuous in order to extort a plea bargain or get just one to stick to improve your prosecution record is an obvious distortion of the original intent of the system. Also, bankrupting the defendant and/or freezing/seizing assets in cases where the crime is not related to the assets being frozen is also extortionous.

Avoiding trials altogether because of the structure of the legal system is the wrong approach. Improving the expediency by which the legal system can provide justice is the right approach. I can't believe people are willing to sanction and even justify means that avoid justice. The fact that we have one of the greatest rates of incarceration that we have a failed justice system.
Roughly speaking I agree with you, but where do you draw the line? If I download a movie illegally right now then chances are Google and Firefox are immediately benefiting from it, and then even further away are Microsoft (OS), hardware manufacturers, etc. who profited off enabling me to do this.

Is the line about intent rather than technicality? For example how driving a bus that a drug dealer is on is not illegal, but driving the getaway car from a robbery is? If it is, then how does one prove that Dotcom wants to support copyright violation, rather than his official stance of just believing that there is a level past which he can not be expected to police his customers?
Citing a tweet without including its globally unique ID seems terrible. Usernames an be easily changed. Copying the entire contents of the tweet into the citing seems odd as well.
I don't think the question is so much whether the remedy should exist, but where the line is drawn. How much of what kind of behavior will get your property taken by the state, and does it depend on what kind and how large a company you are?
I assume you are no t familiar with MLA formatting - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_MLA_Style_Manual.

It is a style format for written works (newspapers, academic papers, books etc).

This is apparently an accepted form of citing a tweet in an official document. A link does not do anything, as it can be deleted.
> The thing they were really trying to do was not have the trial, which is something I would expect them to do given the structure of the legal system.

So basically, charge someone with something ridiculous, and then be offer a sweet sweet deal, such as "only 6 months jail time and confess to 15 felonies. Oh and if you want to go trial it will cost you and your family years of drama, all your savings, and risk 50 years in prison". How nice of them! Let's suppose someone offers you this deal. Does it even matter if you're innocent? Your life is going to be messed up either way. Maybe you cave under pressure and take the deal. How is that furthering the cause of justice?

Oh, and in theory, there's this little thing in the US called the Sixth Amendment:

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence"
For some odd reason (I think it was cited in a Wikipedia article or something) I happened to be reading Carmack's .plan file from 1998 this week: http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_1998.pdf

In it, he mentioned that he was getting rid of the last of id's NeXT hardware that year. Seemed to me like pretty late to be doing that, but hey, I can also see not wanting to let go of them.

His old writings were definitely an interesting time capsule. He writes about Windows NT being, ironically, the best platform to write OpenGL at the time. He writes about Apple's Rhapsody (first impressions: he liked the NeXTiness but was skeptical of Carbon/Classic; then later, he writes that he's more satisfied with it after a deeper look). He writes in passing about trips to Apple and talking up OpenGL to Steve Jobs.
This changes everything on that scripting.com page to Comic Sans for me:

* { font-family: "Comic Sans MS" !important; }

I'm using Stylish 1.0 on Chrome 23.0.blahblah and 1.3.something in Firefox 18. (Amusingly, that line causes the MENUS in Firefox to be rendered in Comic Sans!)

Are you sure that your CSS override is correctly worded? Are you using a different version of Stylish?
Who Can Name the Biggest Number?
<audio> and <video> pretty much work fine AFAIK. We're now talking about putting a P2P/VoIP/videoconferencing stack into the browser which is a bit more complex.
Governments tried something similar with various housing project initiatives throughout the later part of the twentieth century.

It was an unmitigated disaster, and public policy has now shifted 180 degrees (with the biggest change in policy coming from the passing of the Public Housing Reform Act in 1998).

Even DC, where I live, has been working to undo fifty years of bad housing policy, with the shuttering and redevelopment of projects.

While serving on a homicide grand jury, ~20 of the 100 or so homicides we heard occurred at Sursom Corda, one of the last projects in the city, which was finally closed down.