skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> [...] there is no way Aaron would get 35 years.

I have no idea what is the basis of that statement. I think that if he didn't agree to a plea bargain, if found guilty he could have gotten more than 35 years if the prosecution got their way. In fact, the prosecution just upped their accusation count to 13 a short while before Aaron's suicide.
No it isn't. The sworn duty of the prosecutor is not to get a conviction, it's to get the truth. Trying to force someone to confess to a crime they didn't commit by threatening to lock them away for most of their adult life, is only a very small step away from torturing someone or threatening them with execution to obtain a confession.
And that's loading/storing to/from the zero page (the first 256 bytes of memory). Loading/storing from higher addresses requires 4 cycles.

But, "ADD ESI,EDX" is adding two registers isn't it? So I think you need to include the loading/storing of those registers back to memory for a more fair comparison.

I haven't touched 6502 assembly in over 20 years. Brings back memories. :-)
It is pretty - but it triggers a pet peeve of mine. I spend 30 seconds trying to get this page to "do something". It is just the photo and a blue bar a the bottom. No indication of "scroll down". I wonder how many people give up. I was close.
We're kind of arguing the same point - I mostly meant there should be less of a focus on language experience and more of a focus on passion (pet projects). It goes without saying if you try to hire someone who doesn't want to work for you or your projects, it's not going to work.

I really like C#, and I prefer to do most of my projects with it, but learning new languages interests me (a problem I want to work on) and is a challenge that I'm passionate enough about to do in my spare time.
The fact that the journals might be edited for free by grad students and professors doesn't mean the results should be freely available. Many journals are run by universities, and those fees go back into the universities that ultimately pay those grad students and professors.
Your personal "objective" opinion? Kinda shows your own way of thinking.
Excited to integrate SIP, PSTN and WebRTC. Any docs?
The best tribute to Aaron Swartz | KurzweilAI
Similarly, Kevin Mitnick did five years, and as far as I'm aware is able to earn a living. I'm guessing his crimes were a felony, but wikipedia doesn't say.
Great read. You can feel the pain he must have suffered.
Did you actually just post this? I'm assuming your a grown adult, so it's weird that I'm having to explain this:

Everyone else refers to the average person, or more so if you want to be technical, the average emotional response..
Simple launches Android app
This is great. If you enjoyed it, you'll probably really like the (oft recommended here) "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold.

http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/
I he meant this is a prisoner's dilemma type situation. It's great if no one takes a plea but if only you don't you are screwed.
Anyone want to create highlights for those of us with a short attention span?
I'm also getting this.
Equity Crowdfunding Rules Stalled at SEC
Huh? I am not saying I would commit suicide, nor that anybody should.

I am saying that plea bargains for absurd sentences are coercive and should not be considered "choice".
I would argue that a conviction on record in the "security field" is arguably more a PR boost and a boost to his cause than something that hinders your ability to either get a job or support yourself financially post jail time.

I reckon that if Aaron would have gone to trial, he would have most probably not done 35 years, more probably from one to four years - that is taking into account most high profile hacker convictions in the past ten years, with one exception of five years and change plus a screwed up supervised release which I can't remember the timespan of. Six years would have been even better than that.

Look at Kevin Mitnick (the exception to the rule mentioned above), Adrian Lamo, Mark Abene, Kevin Poulsen, etc, etc... They've all had successful careers either as Security Consultants, Technologists/Speakers, Journalists, et al. And you could easily argue that having served time has made them all notable figures in the technology and security scenes. Aaron Swartz could have pleaded guilty (he did steal the documents and trespass) and do his 6 months or go to trial and end up doing a couple of years - and come out a hero with a strengthened cause and higher profile. A Reddit cofounder and high profile activist doing some jail time for his cause is something that would not have been forgotten.

Don't get me wrong, I'm on Aaron's side. The charges where preposterous and the way he was treated was barbaric. I can definitely sympathize. That been said I would have taken the charges and 6 months of jail time as a badge of honor. I mean he did break the law and caused monetary damages to JSTOR. At the end of the day this man would probably have entered that elite group of "convicted computer criminals" who have been able to turn their convictions around to become successful entrepreneurs, public figures, and hell maybe even a Movie/TV personality. Hell Mark Abene even had his debut as an actor in some movie I can't remember.
Faced with a choice of 6 months or 30 years, the six months would be the pragmatic choice, but it is tantamount to extortion.
We don't do cultural interviews to determine if someone's a hacker, we do them to determine if they're a good fit for a team and if they'll be able to work in our company environment.

And passion comes in many forms - the fact that they were willing to teach the team alone speaks volumes. If someone didn't care about programming, they wouldn't want to spend the extra time teaching their peers about it.
Can Chinese Investment in Clean Tech Cut Through Record-breaking Smog?
Then why not use standardized tests for job interviews

Because the government said it was illegal. (I'm simplifying, but look up Griggs v Duke.)

However, an employer can look at your college, and your college definitely can use your standardized test scores. So employers do use standardized tests, it just has to pass through a socially accepted filter first.
I don't think you should feel bad about that.

Though if you were using Postgres instead of MSSQL, you would probably consider JSON (or HSTORE) instead of XML since Postgres 9.2 has a built-in JSON column type.
But it wasn't just six months. It was six months and a felony on his record. In other words, to get that six months he would have had to plead guilty, something which he didn't think he was and wanted to fight. (Until he didn't want to fight, apparently)
My Apple IIGS could be "operational" pretty fast if all you were after was a BASIC prompt with no disk access. If you wanted a BASIC prompt with disk access, that took some seconds. If you want to actually load useful software, it took quite a while.
More here:

http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=adsbyisocket....
I live in the UK; I have insurance simply by being a citizen (though it can take months to get an appointment with a doctor).
This was more a correlation than causation (see Freakonomics for a description). Typically, families that can't afford books have other general issues that preclude their children from doing well (for example, they are poor, their parents typically work more than 1 job and can't spend much time with their children, etc).
Five years is almost certainly a felony.
yeah.. something funny with chrome..
OKC pictures can probably be a tad misleading since they are often taken with poor quality camera phones and people will deliberately try to take photos at more flattering angles.

Also a lot of men will just spam these sites and send a message to every woman within X distance of them.
Just order the lobster and steak and you'll be fine...
It's bad for data storage, but it's great for passing hierarchical parameters to stored procedures. It's also great for retrieval of hierarchical data.

Storing the XML in a column, that's just dumb. If I did that I would only ever treat it as a binary blob, same as any file. When you start using the db's XML query support to query that column, that's when you get into trouble and need to rethink your design.
I didn't get it for TechCrunch, but did for this: http://www.cultofmac.com/192350/how-apples-obsession-with-go...
Analyse of the sample "Red October"
And just to head off the inevitable shitstorm at the pass: No one is saying that assault or stalking cannot happen to men. It does happen, and is tragic.

However, women are more systematically threatened by such things in our society, and modify their behavior to avoid such things to a far greater extent than men do.
TechCrunch Malware Warning on Google Chrome
If that happens again, use one or more of these apps to find the offender:

Ad Network Detector

Addons Detector

AirPush Detector
> I actually feel sorry the Tom Dolan

You are perfectly free to do that, however, know that as a well off IBM executive he is the last person in the world in need of sympathy right now.
Here's a video on writing I got a lot out of. It also touches on opening sentences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLi7gXZ5aEc
Is illegally accessing MIT's network and downloading millions of copyrighted documents no worse than re-playing an NFL game to your buddies?

I think this is the heart of why people in the tech community can't make sense of what happened, and unfortunately probably why Swartz didn't realize what he was getting himself into.

I don't think it's just prosecutors or husbands of prosecutors who think illegally accessing the network of a key piece of the defense industrial complex (whatever else MIT might be, it is certainly that) is a bigger deal than putting together a March Madness pool.
No warning for me
Cheers... I'm over-posting to this thread. I feel fairly passionately about education. It's one of those things that I feel is grossly unjust to kids of all socioeconomic and aptitude levels. We spend so much money on education but entrenched interests use their louder megaphones to hold kids hostage.

A study comes out from the Gates Foundation that tries to tackle some of the education problems head on. It produces some statistically interesting results, but here on HN, I keep reading knee-jerk responses about "standardized testing" from people who apparently didn't even read the attached article.

How are we going to solve these problems if no one even bothers to understand our options?

Regarding your point - I agree. Any solution would need to account differences in what you referenced as a "variance in 'quality' of student".
I'm sure larger tech companies would love to do annual reports this way. If only reporting the number of pizza slices satisfied SEC mandated financial disclosure requirements...
I am only saying that my girls are growing up in an increasingly violent society and I want them to be ready to handle people that creep out of the shadows to attack them. I want my girls to be ready if someone deceives them and they find that they are in a very dangerous and unsafe situation.

I also want to educate them as to how to avoid dangerous environments, to be street-wise, to avoid frat parties, how to spot an abuser, how to know when a guy is manipulating them, et al. Education is my primary tool, self-defense and knowledge of how to use weapons is a secondary, but necessary, tool.
I imagine this will be very popular with people who just want to have casual sex and aren't too fussy about who it is with.

Not that this isn't necessarily a good a market, but IIRC something similar was tried with a straight version of the gay app "grindrr" and didn't go down so well.
I'll bet the other reason is he was asleep.
You might not need mentors or advisers as much as you might perceive.

Focus on building product and talking to customers. I learned this from Paul Graham. If you hit a fork in the road, then you might.
A coworker of mine (25ish) had seen a lot of movies, but not Casablanca. So I loaned it to him. He said "my first reaction was 'this is so cliched' and then I realized that it rather was where many cliches came from"
Elezioni 2013: nei programmi, trascurata scuola e università
Being punished for willfully breaking the law, whatever your reasons, is not extortion.
Irrelevant. The study uses Value Added Modeling, which accounts for these factors.

Unless the student's parents started abusing them in the year the teacher is being evaluated, it is already accounted for. VAM measures deltas, not absolute levels.
The million fine is effectively an underestimate when the average cost of defending yourself is $1.5 million. And to avoid prejudicing the judge, Aaron was unable to say how bad his problems were, which made asking for assistance hard. Kind of makes a mockery of "the right to a lawyer".

Being a convicted felon is no walk in the park either. That shows up on every job application you submit, and makes it much harder to find jobs for the rest of your life. (Which is something Aaron would have faced, because he'd exhausted his financial resources.)
Facebook Tablet? Mobile Ad Network? What Is Facebook Going To Announce Today?
> The OP is right that mainframes aren't available to learn on.

We have a mainframe in our university (donated by IBM) which is used exclusively for teaching. As far as i know, this isn't the only one here in Germany.
Allthough the material isn't as omnipresent like tutorials for beautifull HTML pages, one can sure find some. It's probably that most of the material is hard to find and not really sexy.

In case you are interested (only in German, though):
http://jedi.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/de/access.html
This is all speculation, since the only person who can answer authoritatively is dead. I think that he honestly believed that it would be no big deal. If you read comments here on HN, you can see the same attitude - that since there was no real security, it wasn't a crime, since he didn't lie to anyone they couldn't claim he misrepresented himself to get access, etc. I think that Aaron honestly believed that what he was doing was "hacking the legal system" - accomplishing his goal by exploiting loopholes in the law rather than breaking it.

What he found out was that the people in the legal system do not take kindly to being "hacked". Rather than give a wry smile and say "You got us this time, Aaron Swartz!", the prosecutor grabbed on to the part that she thought she could make stick and went for it. The rest is, as they say, history. There are a lot of lessons in what happened, but one that I haven't seen get much mention here on HN is that the US legal system is comprised of people, with all the advantages and disadvantages that that entails. It's not something that should be "hacked" lightly or by the unprepared, because the consequences are not always as deterministic as you might think they should be.

On a side note, I think your comment about HN being "abusive" lately is spot-on. Some of the discussion has bordered on "internet lynch mob", and I can't say I'm very comfortable with that regardless of the circumstances.
Hopefully this is some small accident and will be fixed soon.

There will be a dip in their traffic stats today, though...
Ok a felony on his record... I'm sorry I don't think that, 6 month jail time, and a felony on his record === no option but suicide.

In contrast given the facts of the case, I honestly believe this is a fair deal. From what I've read of Aaron, and the case, I would assume this wouldn't of been his last fight of freeing information, if prosecuting I would also have wanted to try and deter Aaron from taking steps further on his next conquest, which I think the above deal does without ruining his life.

How many people here would not employ Aaron once out of jail? It was no where near the end of the road, or his only option, it was far from it. The man was quite clearly mentally ill, that's the main thing being clouded here by trying to scapegoat everyone.
Perhaps I should have clarified: when I said quick test program, I was referring to something I would write to convince myself of some minor detail (sometimes just checking compiler warts or algorithm performance) and that piece of code would never be seen or run by anyone but me. I know that the first argument will always be an integer, because I'm the only one who will pass it arguments! I'm also (kind of unreasonably) a const nazi. So given the option, where I can take a shortcut (I know, bad, bad programmer), but still do "proper" programming (consting everything by default is my SOP), I'll do it. And I'll never release that code (I'm starting to regret posting that snippet here . . .).

I will agree, though, option parsing libraries are a definite must for released software. I like Boost, but using even small parts of it tends to pull everything in, and at least for my current project, we are trying to minimize dependencies (it's a library). I had to fight for Boost::regex, and only got it as a fallback for compiler versions that don't have regex.
XML is fine if used where it fits.

Use the best tool for the job and all that.
I've had two cofounders. The first I met at Waterloo, but never worked on anything with him. Shut that startup down within a year, even though we had funding options on the table. Personalities didn't match, and this includes my own failings too.

Second cofounder I met at a Toronto Hacker News Night that I put together every year and a half or so. He emailed me after my previous startup shut down and was heartfelt about how much he knew it sucked. We ended up working together and did a small (low 7 digits) exit in under 8 months, four of which were just negotiating the sale.

Skill is important, but kindness is much better.
A felony conviction is not necessarily such a big deal and in some cases is even a "good" thing to advance your career if you plan on staying on the "security field". I made a post[1] in this same thread referring to this, but in short: A lot of convicted computer criminals have made very successful careers in the technology/security business out of having been convicted of computer crimes. You might even argue that their success is owed to the controversy, social support, and PR created because of their convictions.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5061071
More like four years ago.

I used it back then, twice, getting two dates out of it. The first was reasonably fun but we probably weren't really right for each other and we didn't do a second date. The second resulted in a three month or so relationship. (Oh, and both I and my dates were hovering somewhere right around 30).

So my experience, from admittedly few data points, is that it was at LEAST as successful as normal internet dating, maybe much more successful.

I think that it matched me well on one fairly crucial axis: women who were interested in actually going out and seeing what you thought of a person. I found that a big killer of potential meetings on OKC proper was this death-slog of trying to assure perfect compatibility prior to a face-to-face meeting.

All this said, I eventually found my fiancee through non-internet means.
Ignore the competition (2006)
In which case, maybe the title should have been "Design Books Everybody Should Read"?
If that happens, their choice of names sure is going to seem regrettable.
If you think one pithy remark opens a thoughtful debate, I'm not missing anything. Sorry.
I needed to post this here because we solve the problem in the article.

The problem is deceptive software. That we're funded by YC (or that InstallMonetizer is) is a red herring. But it sure does get some clicks!

On a perfect version of HN the top comments would be about solving the problems in posts, not elaborating on them.

Not to dump on HN though. This is a bug in human nature.

Glad to hear you like Ninite and that we saved you time, thanks for using it!
> How so? I don't see this as reflective of his employer.

Easy: they hired a "Social Business Development" executive who doesn't understand social media in the first place (i.e. when an internet mob is out, you ain't gonna stop it with one puny twitter account).

Also, we now know that they hired the husband of a well-connected US Attorney prosecutor with political ambitions. Of course they did it because of his qualifications, nobody is saying otherwise, but y'know, people talk and stuff.
Nobody thinks he didn't commit the crimes he was charged with. He clearly accessed MIT's network without permission, and he clearly downloaded copyrighted documents with intent to distribute. The debate isn't about whether he did those things, it's about whether those actions should be crimes at all and even if they should be, whether the associated penalties were reasonable.
Wow, I don't know how I'd react if I was led on by some gay guy and thought I was meeting a woman... Not because I'm homophobic but because I know that these types of people exist. When I was in college I used craigslist one drunken night and something similar happened and it creeped me out hardcore...
But you're either astroturfing and not part of the community or you created a new account to post this... Why?

I'm from Europe and, honestly, I can something deeply rotten in the american legal system (not that the ones in Europe are perfect, far from it).

The person committed an act of civil disobedience. OK, fair enough. But was the law fair to qualify such an act as civil disobedience in the first place?

35 years or "recognize you're guilty and get 'only' 6-months" for a victimless crime?

And crazy high lawyers fee bringing you and potentially your family to bankruptcy.

Add to that a prosecutor obviously having long teeth and wanting to advance in her "career" and you have something which looks ugly.

There's one word in the dictionary to describe what this whole issue feels like.

UNJUST.

It's unjust because the whole point of the legal system should be to bring justice and, in this case, it brought death.

Death in the name of insane lawyer fees. Death in the name of careerism. Death in the name of unjust laws, created under pressure of powerful lobbies abusing the golden law (the one who has the gold makes the law) over and over again.

That's why this "community" --and many other communities-- are very very upset.

That's why the white house shall have to respond to tens of thousands of people who wants one thing: a legal system that is just.
Your "personal objective opinion" isn't objective (and your use of the word "objective" over and over again in contexts where you are clearly stating your opinion rather than "objective facts" to dismiss those who disagree with you is contrary to a productive discussion), and it's missing the point of all of these discussions (the law is wrong, and the prosecutor used the law to bully a brilliant kid past his breaking point). Your dismissive tone, in general, is annoying and generally not welcome in this community.

I also find it interesting that your account is 27 minutes old, and was created specifically for this discussion. Your concerns about "how un-objective this community is" seem self-serving...it seems pretty clear you aren't of this community, and exhibit few signs of understanding what makes this community tick. Also, as a nerd who values clear, concise, and accurate language, your misunderstanding of the word "objective" really bugs me. And that's my "personal objective opinion".
Active vs. passive, perhaps (although admittedly that distinction has shrunken substantially).

That is, "in the good old days", facebook or google really only tracked what you did, on facebook or google, while crapware could track everything you did on the computer.

Now, of course, as more and more of our lives are based around our browsers, and google and facebook track more of what you do anywhere on the web, not just on their sites, so I suppose it's not that different.
What's the virtualization technology (Xen, KVM, OpenVZ, etc.)?
Are the boxes running ECC RAM?
Can we install and run our own kernel?