skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, because I'm good at what I do and in demand. I'm not going to say I can just pick where I want to work, I'm not that good, but I do have the luxury of being picky about the opportunities I am presented with.
Snark-free CES observations
The Dictator’s Practical Internet Guide to Power Retention
New method for determining guilt:

if (respectedOrganization(lawyer.getOrganization())) {
return INNOCENT;
} else {
return GUILTY;
}
"The prosecutor charged the maximum because it is a waste of time to take a guy to federal court over a $20k fine and a year of probation."

You know the prosecutor could have just not taken him to court at all, right?
"Do you want the rehearsed, canned response you have heard a hundred times already or a real answer that would immediately disqualify me in most interviewers eyes?"
It's perfectly possible to limit yourself to one kind of porn - just find the kind of porn you really enjoy and use it for when you can't do it in a bedroom.

There is a very fancy word for being addicted to being intoxicated, no matter with what (I forgot the word for now). Being addicted to all kinds of porn at once seems similar - and, frankly, equally rare.
Cache of above:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I agree but edw519 is a smart guy and I would give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he attempted to capture the essence of a "tl;dr" comment: short, vaguely corresponding to the material, and ultimately misleading.
So, EFF and ACLU defend you if you're not guilty and if they don't defend you you're guilty?

Do you realize that Aarons case had yet to go to trial? And that there is a good chance the EFF would have stepped in if it had? And that even if they didn't that would have said nothing about Aarons guilt or lack thereof?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz
I'm not taking style notes from anyone who uses the word "leverage" instead of "use"
You missed the point of the article entirely.

Let's say you knew of Aaron's plight. Would this news have changed your life for the better by you getting this knowledge the day it happened?
Interesting, I guess it depends on "how embedded" you are. For linux-based routers/gateways (edge of embedded really) the compile-flash-boot cycle can be rather long, but the standard workarounds (scp-after-build or NFS mount a work dir) work adequately.

That said, anything which reduces cycle times is good.
Attorney for Aaron Swartz: Prosecutors’ Arguments Were "Disingenuous"
You really believe participants on the TV shows aren't selected to maximize entertainment value and present anything except show producer's views on what entertains mass audience?
Came across this yesterday: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/porn-study-scrapped-.... I found it amusing.
I accept your point while submitting that everyone in this thread, yourself included, fails this stringent test:

> They were responding to a specific claim of the GGP, that porn is harmless.

Speaking of strawmen, it was Jacob who used the word harmless. Nicholas went so far as to draw an analogy with drugs concerning the effects of responsible versus irresponsible use. When he said porn wasn't bad, he clearly didn't mean that it is harmless in an absolute sense but was expressing a nuanced point of view.
Actually just ask what is your greatest strength, that will be your greatest weakness. Non-intuitive but happens to be true most of the time. First exposed to this at a religious program for 'finding your gifts' and again a couple of times at various executive off sites.

Nobody minds answering the question.
I found this article easy to fap to
Still down for me. (I can't access the website, my MIT email, or my box sitting on campus.) http://3down.mit.edu/ works but reports nothing.
While the Marquis de Sade had an unusual penchant for buggery (which was illegal at the time) and blasphemy (also illegal), he himself was certainly not "diseased of the mind".
You could consider him an early Libertarian, fighting for freedom above anything else. He was a humanist opposed to the death penalty (very much used at the time).
His writings are provocative, and his mind was certainly unusual, but you also have to consider that he wrote most of his work while imprisoned (32 years of his life!) and frustration certainly played a big part in the excesses that haunted him.

By the way, the word 'sadism' comes from his name, but he himself never actually physically hurt anyone.
He was very much perceived as a threat by the successive governments of the time as he had no respect for authority and didn't hesitate to put himself in danger for speaking his mind and denouncing the hypocrisy of the society he lived in.

He would be very much at home here today.
A larger than life hero.
I think it will lead to a fair report. MIT may or may not act.

I have independent access to most of the relevant information (but haven't looked, since it would make it harder to speak publicly without potentially disclosing sensitive information), so it'll be easy to tell if the report is fake. And I suspect there are a lot of people at MIT who have access to information, and would be more than likely to call it out. And Abelson is a particularly ethically-conscious individual, so the only way I'd really be concerned is if he resigns the position partway through.

If there's a report, it will be pretty clear if it's comprehensive. MIT may or may not act based on the report, but it will at least be obvious.
I tell them I dont have any greatest weakness. I say, I've been in this business long enough to develop strategies to deal with it.

Other times I say sales. That's why I'm in programming.

Either answer usually gets them off that topic.
Maybe a Massachusetts jury would be better, but I would generally expect the alleged fact that Aaron hid his face from a camera with a bike helmet (sorry, can't remember where I read this) to be enough to convince most juries of ill intent, given that most people seem to equate "sneaky" with "wrong."
This case tells us that that spirit has in fact been lost to some degree. Any defense is an attempt at protecting what remains, but students and concerned members of the public now know that they have to second-guess their instincts contrary to the spirit you describe. The prosecution already occurred, there's no changing that.
United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said, “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.”

Ortiz is an idiot. Unfortunately she is also a US Attorney.
If I'm correct then the central assertion behind your comment is that in this case obfuscation of identity occurred because Aaron was aware he was performing some malicious activity and sought to distance himself from the "crime" in question. The problem with that is that it requires the following implicit leaps to be made;

Underlying Leap; People only obfuscate their identity whilst doing malicious activity.

Contextual Leap 1; Aaron was aware that what he was doing was a federal crime.

Contextual Leap 2; He hatched a plan to perform that activity in context of knowing that his actions were a criminal activity

Leap 1 is decidedly false as people obfuscate their identity for all sorts of reasons including anonymity. What if Aaron was simply trying to be anonymous?

Leap 2 and leap 3 follow on the basis of what was going on inside his mind, and that is something we are not aware of, so let's not comment.

That said, here's my counter to your assertions, if indeed Aaron was as brilliant as his track record suggests, then do you not think he would have hatched a better way to obfuscate his identity if he knew it would cost him his entire fortune and deprive him of his freedom? Do you not think that he would have come up with an alternate, more anonymous plan such as accessing JSTOR at another library under a fake ID? Or have the common sense to pay some homeless guy $100 to put the laptop in their instead of doing it himself?

Of course this assumes that intelligence in one specific field translates to better planning capabilities in other, that he had the will and the ability to do so. However it can be demonstrated, given his track record, this is not an unreasonable assumption to make and that he was indeed capable of such planning if he assigned importance to it.
Sorry but as far as i can tell from reading about this guy his main area of expertise seemed to be throwing away the opportunities that kept chasing him and i find it hard to see why he's held up as such a hero/martyr.

First, he didn't create the RSS single-handledly for us. He was part of a committee of about a dozen people that took over RSS from Netscape when they didn't support it anymore.
Admittedly that's impressive for a 14 year old to be involved in but the media narrative seems to be "we owe RSS to this guy".

Secondly in the Reddit case he wasn't actually a founder, although the articles insist he might as well have been one. Actually meaning another team was working on the Reddit project, and he was working on something different and they merged early on before Reddit was really popular. Which made him rich when the company was later sold. So we don't really owe Reddit to this guy either, which you might count in his favor, i guess..

Also he dropped out of high-school. Then he got accepted into university because he was so bright and dropped out again after one year because they weren't intellectual enough for him. Then he was made a Hardvard fellow until he hacked a computer network. Yeah.

And now let's look at his latest stunt that landed him in legal trouble.
From what i read about it, it went something like this. He used his laptop and the public Wifi + a spider to download academic documents in bulk in defiance of the ToS and brought the network to a halt. They detected him, banned his MAC address and didn't pursue it any further. He tried again after changing his MAC, and this time they cut him off for good. There was no question at this point that his access was unauthorized and he was well aware of it.
So what does he do ? He sneaks into the building and connects his laptop physically to a network router, and then tries to retrieve it the next day dressed like some kind of Batman and he gets arrested.

Anybody else who tried this kind of utterly incompetent intrusion thrice detected would've been prosecuted as a felon. It was only because this guy had academic and tech industry protectors who backed their precious manbaby that JSTOR and MIT were reluctant to pursue the issue themselves.

Obviously i don't think he deserved 50 years for this but that's because i don't think any crime but murder deserves 50 years. But he certainly deserved more than a slap on the wrist even if your only concern is deterrence and rehabilitation.
visual proof of how bad Beijing air is

http://ww1.sinaimg.cn/mw690/4aa0c35bjw1e0quzqeexrj.jpg

credit to the author on the watermark.
Comparing aarons twitter feed to cnn in this context; to me it actually would be more relevant.
All .mit.edu domains I've tried appear down (stellar, my fraternity, etc)
Schwarz downloaded documents illegally and should have been charged, but he is not the conspirator and traitor she made him out to be. In no case, should he have faced a possible 35 years in jail.

Ortiz, not Aaron, is an affront to liberalism and decency and does not deserve high office in this land.
author here.

<?php
$a = 1; /* global scope */

function test() { echo $a }

test();

in javascript, $a would be 1 but in PHP it is undefined and won't produce output,
If you ask the question you deserve all the patronizing answers anyone can come up with.
Being labeled as a felon, with the implications thereof regarding voting, employment, serving on a jury, etc. is hardly an option worth considering.
Paranoid. There are more chances of the one child policy being canceled than any eugenics program being completed any time soon.

Another reason that this is paranoid is that under the current circumstances there's a significantly higher chance that the United States and Europe will crumble on their own than being attacked by eugenically enhanced Chinese soldiers.

Third, the interest that the Chinese show for gene sequencing are only a symptom of the greater Asian traditions of match-making and ultimately disease prevention (just as everyone else is interested in preventing genetically transmissible diseases).

Fourth, people like her: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2XAWcs7HbM
Both his parents were psychologists.* Any psych major knows the old saw that you probably got bad stuff like this from your parents. Some of the psych majors I have personally known struck me as folks who had no clue how humans work and were hoping to get a clue by majoring in it. When I went to GIS school, this observation was reinforced by a classmate who had a Master's in Psychology and was looking to change careers because of the lunacy of the people around her.

Supposedly, Kinsey's wife said something like "I never see my husband since he took such an interest in sex". In other words, he spent so much time studying sex in an intellectual, analytical way that he stopped bothering to make time for actual sex and relating with his wife. People interested in studying human psychology frequently strike me as seriously hung up. Therapy was useful to me for a time in trying to get over my own hang ups. More useful was spending time with men who liked having actual sex with actual women rather than talking about it in some abstract, analytical fashion.

"Forever" is a really long time. Sexual preferences can change. Pavlovian response is learned behavior. If you don't like the stimulus that makes you drool currently, you can retrain yourself. I am glad the author is actually trying to do that instead of merely blaming his issue on porn/the internet as I have seen other articles do.

* (Not intending to slam all psychologists or psych majors. My observation is anecdotal and admits to bias.)
Someone or something has taken MIT off the Internet.

This is pretty amazing. I've always been able to ping them, any time, any where, any reason.
There are few arguments that I have more disdain for than the one that somehow because our brains (or bodies) haven't experienced something before, they aren't built to cope with it. It's not like we are, or have ever been, built for a single temperature, type of sex, kind of food, etc. Our bodies and minds are adaptable, and while we can try to logically reason about how our minds and bodies adapt to certain stimuli, we are still guessing at best.

To address the particular hogwash in that editorial, glimpse a tribesperson across the savannah? Human beings were living in groups with topless women tens of millenia ago. So it doesn't even stand on those grounds.
Blocked all of MIT? I thought they just blocked the single /24 he was using. MIT has a /8.
Remind HN: It's 2013. Time to update that "&copy 2012" in your footers...
its still down and so is w3.org
Still down here (accessing from the UK in case that matters).
I lived this situation when I was around 14. My father was an executive in a firm that was being investigated for fraud. Most of my father's peers (using the term lightly) went to jail (and rightfully so), but the prosecution could never find anything on my father.

Despite that fact, our family had to endure 6 years of constant threats, extortion attempts and harassment for crimes that were never committed- I've had a few heart to heart conversations with my father and am convinced that he never committed a crime. As a result, the situation put my father into a depression and just destroyed his spirit, something I'm still trying to help him restore 20 years later. The (us attorney) prosecution was responsible for the attacks, but it was always at the behest of the share holders.

I believe the MIT owns the lion's share of the responsibility in the situation. The burden of these charges can be completely overwhelming. I just wish that Aaron understood the situation he was getting himself into. Some people seemingly handle these situations well (Julian Assange?), but most of us would buckle under the constant pressure. I think he may have felt that MIT would eventually come to their senses and have some compassion for his plight.
It's expensive because the journals are leaches sucking money and IP out of the system. The research was funded by the people, so why should the journals get the rights? The same institutions that are paying big bugs are also the ones contributing all the content. All the reviewing is even done by researchers who end up paying for the journal and contribut to it. It's sickening how the scientific community and the public at large get exploited by those leaches!
Designer Eats Engineer
Balancing Value Creation and Capture
porn — especially the porn I was watching — just had to be taboo.

The author's fetish is with the anxiety of getting caught. He's making anxiety porn by watching something so extreme that it's guaranteed to offend anyone who catches him. The author has connected the anxiety of being caught with sexual desires in his head. It's actually a very common fetish.
They are starting to use a membership fee system as of this month (January 2013).

Just a few choice quotes:

"The annual budget for arXiv is $400,000 for 2010." [1]

Total operating costs for 2013 are projected to be $837,000.[2]

"It has been announced that, beginning in September 2011, Cornell will completely take responsibility for the operation of the project, without the further participation of Ginsparg, who is quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education as saying it "was supposed to be a three-hour tour, not a life sentence".[10]" [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arxiv

[2] https://confluence.cornell.edu/download/attachments/12711648...
Fees != costs. If all the work of preparing research for publication (getting it in the proper format, adding proper metadata, etc.) is done by the researcher, I don't see how it would cost that much to host it. Server/electricity/admin costs, of course, but given that scientific papers aren't exactly most high-traffic website on the planet, and marketing/etc. is not needed I don't see it as unmanageable costs. US government and various departments run hundreds of websites by now, getting one more there wouldn't be that great marginal cost.
Do people still do that manually? I doubt there's anyone on HN who does that.
Every country that needs more energy will turn to the same proven sources of energy the 1st world used, until a cheaper energy generation solution is available that has the same reliability as coal and oil. This is going to happen in Africa as their energy needs pick up. Solar and wind are not currently the replacements (otherwise China would use them instead).
The author said he went cold-turkey for months at a time to little effect. I'm sure that approach helps some people, but I'd wager there are a lot of variables here.
Looks like a DNS attack? Lack of name resolution vs. server response?
Similar sentiments from a brother several thousand years ago:

"...I start up out of dreams and am disturbed, trembling at every message, with my own peace of mind depending upon letters not my own. Someone has arrived from Rome. 'If only there is no bad news!' But how can anything bad for you happen in a place, if you are not there? Someone arrives from Greece. 'If only there is no bad news!' In this way for you every place can cause misfortune. Isn't it enough for you to be miserable where you are? Must you needs be miserable even beyond the seas, and by letter?"
I've always wished I could quote Trainspotting:

The truth -- well, the truth is that I've had a long-standing problem with heroin addiction. I've been know to sniff it, smoke it, swallow it, stick it up my arse and inject it into my veins. I've been trying to combat this addiction, but unless you count social security scams and shoplifting, I haven't had a regular job in years. I feel it's important to mention this.
They want you to be perfectly honest, forthright, and to candidly tell them exactly what they want to hear.
Lexical Scope and Statistical Computing (2000) [pdf]
Related to mit.edu Anon takedown?
Does anyone have any news on W3.org and mit.edu? I'm currently left assuming it's an attack after Aaron Swartz's death, which is pretty saddening.
It was hard to find up to the minute data, but the Guardian has a slick infographic and list of quick facts using 2009 data:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/31/world-ca...

I'm surprised that India emits so much less than China, since the Kyoto discussions made it sound like China's per capita pollution was absolutely necessary for development.

Also shocked that Gibraltar produces 158 tons per capita (for comparison, the US is the highest per capita emitter among large economies with 18 tpc). Gibraltar is mediterranean, I wouldn't expect they'd need much heating and cooling. Maybe they're making a lot of extra power for export?
Cry me a river !
This is how we do it in Ubuntu land http://www.wikihow.com/Upgrade-Oracle-Java-on-Ubuntu-Linux.
Over 90% of the HN front page was aaronsw stuff. It seemed a little excessive.
It's definitely a mediocre question, but I don't see why so many people get defensive about it. Is it really that hard to think of one or two personality traits that keep you from steamrolling through your day?

My answers may very well be different in 5 or 10 years, but for now:

1) If someone asks me for a time estimate, I always try to immediately come up with a rough number, which never takes into account "the last 20% takes 80% of the work." I'm trying to get better at not committing before having a spec, but I still have that habit.

2) I tend to get lightly emotionally invested in the code I'm currently writing. If I've spent two or three days working on something and find out that the requirements have changed, or that I need to architect my solution a different way, I usually need to work on something different for a day before I go back to it - otherwise, I stress out about having just wasted that effort.

Any interviewer that finds these answers unacceptable either shouldn't be asking the question, or is representing a company that I absolutely would not want to work for.
You might want to take a look at what the expert witness says. http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here-is...
that property is unprotected or poorly protected makes it less "trespassing."

You know that booking someone for trespassing is pretty difficult, right? They have to be depriving you of the use of your property AND refuse to leave. So if I set up camp on your front lawn, and you ask me to leave, and I do, I was not trespassing. I don't think AS was depriving anyone of the use of their property here, was he? So the analogy does not really hold.
If I had openly admitted the facts and several reliable parties had corroborated them? Feel free to call me a child molester before my conviction in that case. Don't throw me in jail before proving it, of course, but you needn't qualify every single thing you say with "alleged."

If the facts aren't pretty well established, then of course it is wise to be more judicious.
That may or may not be the case, but despite that he has followers and fans and supporters in the hundreds if not more, and that's an accomplishment that many others do not have. Regardless of his accomplishments whether they be in full or partial, he stood for something and in the end suffered because of it. And this is why so many are moved by what has happened.
Some of these are nice; though it's pretty interesting that the most popular theme right now is a clone of the Ubuntu home screen.
You're right that Nicholas's comment was more nuanced than I gave him credit for. However, he paints the picture that porn has been with our society forever and that its effects are known and tolerable. I would argue that its widespread availability is an extremely novel phenomena and that its effects are unknown and likely harmful.

I've had some first hand experience on that count, though not as extreme as the linked article.