skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've rarely read a more sensational and one-sided piece. At this point, the bending of facts to serve the idealization of Swartz and the demonization of Ortiz starts to seem like nothing more than throwing gasoline into the fire of an enraged lynch mob.
After six long years of accusations and demands that Nancy plead guilty to crimes she did not commit, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) out of Washington, D.C., went before a secret grand jury. Without any opportunity for Nancy or her attorneys to present evidence or cross-examine the prosecutor's witnesses, the DOJ attorneys obtained on January 4, 2012 an indictment charging Nancy with two felonies and two misdemeanors in the process of doing her research on orcas and operating a whale-watching boat.
Just anecdotal: what I see each morning as I walk past the London train. You are probably right, perhaps there is a bias on the sample.

I work in education. Middle managers entering data on an iPad is easier in a classroom with 30+ people milling around - no need to sit. They do email and access RDP on them as well. There was tablet use before from years ago for similar reasons.

I don't know what the people on the train are doing, but it looks like corporate applications. Not shopping or video. Some reading and annotating of PDFs. I don't want to start shoulder surfing!

The advice/late train people at the station now use iPads to display timetable info as well by the way. They move to where the slightly confused knot of passengers left by the train that broke down are, instead of getting them to queue up. Seems a sensible use of a tablet given the cost of a person.
Most Popular Commercial Fonts for Web Designers
The list of the most popular commercial fonts provided above represents some of the most popular and widely used premium fonts to be used by websites as well as in print.
Is their rewrite of everything else better? WebRTC itself is so young that a complete rewrite shouldn't be out of consideration if needed. Nobody wants to carry bad decisions over the years anymore.
What do you mean by "ok"?

Morally ok? That is subject to opinion. I don't have a problem with them now, and I never did.

Legally immune? They very well could be. Certainly any action against them is going to be much harder this time, if only because a bunch of people in New Zealand are still pissed about what happened last time without the revisions that were made. If their system works as they claim, and renders them unable to govern content, then how could they be considered culpable for content? If I start posting nasty stuff encrypted with PGP to HN, would HN be to blame for failing to recognize the nasty stuff and remove it?
Now it says
Infinity:NaN:NaN
regarding the estimated time to download. :)

And the file is just 4KB.
Development at Bentley Systems
For thousands of years the best way for a working class man to support his family had been to learn a trade, and set up his own business and if you had skill and worked hard you'd live a comfortable life.

And then within a generation or so this was pretty much swept away and the average man went from being his own boss living by his own skill, to being an employee working long hours (12-14hrs a day), for low wages (operating the machines was unskilled work), in horrible conditions (no health and safety laws), with the constant threat of unemployment if the factory owner decided he wasn't making enough profit (leaving the very real threat of starvation for you and your family).

So progress was taking their jobs and making their lives worse, and while from the 21st century point of view we can see it as inevitable economic change, and the march of progress as predicted by economic theory (and hey on the grand scale you're right), they were more interested in feeding their children.

Or to put it another way "short-sighted" depends on your point of view...
Furthermore, pornography weakens our tolerance for the kind of boredom which is vital to give our minds the space in which good ideas can emerge, the sort of creative boredom we experience in a bath or on a long train journey.

There are far more trivial things than pornography that seem to be having that effect, like e-mail, mobile phones, Twitter or Facebook (HN? ;-)).

Some people can't go more than a minute or two in a waiting room, train, or commercial break without hitting up their boredom reliever of choice. I have to work hard at that temptation myself. I'd stick Twitter way higher on my list than pornography on my list of things that have become time-wasting addictions.. and, indeed, seem to do my best brainstorming when walking, driving, or otherwise doing things where I can't lean on those crutches.

Maybe the solution is not simply less pornography, but more of those baths and long train journeys ;-)
It is a highly educated guess. The point is that he didn't just pull the number out of his ass. Clearly nobody knows the future for certain, and there isn't any way to know exactly how much revenue they are going to have in 2013, but using company guidance and analyst estimates seems like a pretty good starting point.
Comparison (http://i.imgur.com/BZeGm1H.png)

Definitely a rip-off, and not a particularly well executed one.
It reads like a parody of journalism.
You're correct that your "rant-y" format does not exclude or prevent the flow of information, but what it does do is make people far less inclined to internalize or act on that information.

I assume your goal is to get people to say, "this is a problem that should be fixed, so I'm going to fix it". The tone and methods with which you're communicating in this discussion are much more likely to get people to say, "this is a problem that should be fixed, but the only people who care about it are assholes, so I see no reason to help them." You appear to be well-intentioned, and your anger is more than justified, but it's important to recognize when toning down your hostility (which, to be clear, doesn't necessarily mean masking your passion and ferver) is a necessary step towards enacting positive change.
Re: Facebook, as jbellis mentions in this comment thread, Facebook shards HBase, so it's not able to support what they need without some major additional complexity.

Re: eventual consistency. It's tunable to the need of the user. It's a trade-off. Tunable consistency becomes nice when you want a system to be always available. See the Amazon Dynamo paper, on which Cassandra is partially based.

I think many underestimate how many are using Cassandra in production. Spotify, eBay, Walmart, Netflix, Ooyala, NASA and others - one list is found here: http://www.datastax.com/cassandrausers.
Rather than wasting my time explaining to you why it is wrong...

As a matter of fact, explaining why someone is wrong is generally less of a waste of time than insulting them.

Consider the benefits: they might learn things they didn't know, you will have a better understanding of your own feelings, and you may both get some insight into a different point of view than your own. These are, in my opinion, more valuable things than the fleeting satisfaction one gets from telling someone off.

Suppose it takes five times as long to write a decent comment as it would an insult. Would you rather look back at some point in the future and say "I wrote 50 insults", or "I wrote 10 good comments"?
What I'm trying to say is that you can't make a point about accessibility by making the point (not fully but quite) inaccessible to most people. I agree that this is an issue, but you're not pointing it out in the best way possible. In fact, you're doing exactly what you're trying to get rid of.

What is needed is something like Dyslite[1] but free (and probably better). A browser plugin that overrides font-settings to use dyslexia-optimized fonts. Ranting about inline-styles doesn't help anyone. Clearly, one should be able to override even inline-styles for accessibility rather than forbidding web designers their use, even though I agree it's not exactly a good practice anyway.

Then again, I like to say that there's always a time and place for everything. Damnit even goto's have some valid use cases.

[1] http://dyslite.com
You might be able to start a geek business.

I was a military wife for a lot of years. I have lived near a few big universities. They tend to foster used book stores, certain kinds of hobby stores (comic stores, gaming stores, etc), museums and other "intellectual elite" things that you often cannot find in other towns of similar size or cannot find at all elsewhere or cannot find the same quality thus people will drive farther to go there.

I lived in Manhattan Kansas at one time. It was about 50k population with about 11k students and 5k faculty and staff. It was awesome. It had used book stores, two art stores at the mall (one of which sold the works of local artists so they could make a living), and two "children's museums" to give the kids an intellectually enriching alternative to Chuck E Cheese. People who lived in the state capital an hour away (a much larger city) would book birthday parties and the like at the children's museum. We also had a small zoo which was in many ways better than the larger zoo in the capital.

A big university attracts people who will spend time and money on intellectual activities. This is a business opportunity if you want to take advantage of it.
You should look more closely at the history. RSS (at least, the branch of it that people use), CC, and Reddit would have exactly the same form they have today - exactly! - without Aaron's involvement.
Unless the university library it itself providing a unified accessible system to access a torrented (and somehow constantly up to date?) archive of JSTOR, then JSTOR will not be dropped. You are having serious tunnel vision if you think all grad students and professors want to spend their time fucking around with that, or even know how to do that.
Offline rendering of LaTeX in the browser without needing to download a full installation of LaTeX! I think that's pretty cool.
Copyright law can absolutely hinge on technical specifics. Look at network DVR services being forced to store a copy of a show per user in order to be found legal in the US.
The basic idea is that just as an audio signal can be decomposed into frequency components, an image can be decomposed into frequency components, but in two dimensions. (Imagine stripes of varying frequency and direction instead of sine waves of various frequencies.)

Sharp edges in an image have high frequency components, just like a sharp transition in an audio signal. Filtering the high frequencies will blur the image, while filtering low frequencies will enhance edges.

This is very oversimplified, but will hopefully give you a bit of an idea. I encourage people to learn more about Fourier theory, because it explains a lot.

One introductory page that you may find useful is: http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/fourier/fourier.html
This was written over a year ago. Do you know the resolution of this case?
I was referring to her strategy, and how she learned to make positive change.
There is no reason to suppose that this will be taken as a reason not to prosecute white people. The specific act and its context are clearly more important.
Sites like these rise and fall on two things: the delivery of the content, and the quality of the content. The delivery here is top notch, I found it very easy to navigate and get the information I wanted. I know your community is small right now, but the quality of the reviews I have read is excellent. I added a few reviews of my own and I hope that the quality stays high as your community grows. Good luck!
You NEED access to journals and conferences if you are silly enough to become a research student (like I did) or even sillier and become a professional researcher.

Also, there is no way on earth you can pay for it on a researcher's salary or stipend. Hence, the Universities and Laboratories are BLACKMAILED into paying for it on the researchers' behalf. (So the 50K/year thing applies to MIT, Harvard and a couple of other "customers".)

However, outside of that context, J. Random Hacker might quite like to read a paper - his taxes paid for it after all, and there are like 3 good papers in existence. But JRH would never pay 50K for it. He probably CAN'T; JRH might need to take out a mortgage to pay that much.

So if you want to pretend that the 50K multiplies by the potential readership as "loss due to copyright theft", you are committing a basic economic fallacy, which is normally debunked in Econ101.

So I advise you to drop the whole 50K/year argument.
Something completely off-toppic:

I don't like TeX. I use it and i like the output, but I have never realy understood the language and therefore I don't like it. The syntax for optional arguments([]) seems very odd to me, aswell as the separation between mouth and the rest. The support for named parameters is IMO very hacky.

Wouldn't be a Tcl based macro processor with the tex-Backend nice? Or is this silly?
So serious question, what prevents Aaron's family from suing the pants off of the DOJ parties responsible?
Criteria - Within 60 mins of SF, < 380k, 2br+, 1ba+

Granted they are pretty much all foreclosures, so you'll likely have to work to find one in good shape, but there are 1201 results. And this is obviously not downtown, up to an hour commute, but still. I think I'd rather have a large portion of these than a 180 sq ft studio. Oh well, to each his own.

http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/San_Francisco,CA/2p_beds/1p_b...
> The other thing we all can do, if we love the product of technical minds, is stop thinking it's magic. There is magic in computers, but the magic isn't in the programmer or the tech writer or the visionary -- it's in the whole thing. The miracle isn't any one person, rather it's that humanity can collaborate to create something much greater than any one of us.

If you consider the "whole thing" most computers still have proprietary programs put in place by profit-driven organizations to subjugate and control the users. That isn't magic its witchcraft. It would be a miracle if computer programs and all other forms of software were developed collaboratively rather then secretively.
a great blog with lots of pics, comments, and insights from her several trips to NorK is "at home in the wasteland": http://www.lindsayfincher.com/
I know that every university, there are multiple servers where students share terabytes of pirated movies, TV shows and music.

And every university already has a unified accessible non-JSTOR system for reading old journal articles: its called the journal stacks in the library basement + interlibrary loan. Everyone already knows how to deal with that: its just less convenient.
I had to go make sure that it was you and not me: it was "demonization", not "demonetization".
In Kenya mobile money has become central to the country's economy
Enraged lynch mobs are why you have democracy and justice systems and human rights rather than the Diktat of the King, which is what we used to have before enraged lynch mobs.
so come back.
Another possibility would be to post a blog/article which references and links all of the design practices you take offence with, and then diatribe so as not to clutter HN threads of discussion on the subject matter and not the design aspects of the site.

Submit this, then, to HN.
Only a matter of time before such a service sprung up. Nice to see News Scientist take this up though "The Dating Lab" seems to be behind the implementation [0].

[0] http://www.thedatinglab.com/
No I just copy pasted what he said, and it appears he corrected his mistake. So I'll do the same.
The press will never get everything 100% accurate, but let's look on the bright side. A week ago, many lawyers (example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052339) were assuring us that seeing any accountability for Ortiz and Heymann would be a "fantasy", that this wasn't the way things worked, that hackers had to wise up and embrace their impotence.

That wasn't the way things played out. With this (as with the movement against SOPA/PIPA), we can see an embryonic new power arising in the Internet, a power which can drive mainstream media coverage which in turn drives political decision-making.

This week, at least, the lawyers' worldview was proven wrong and the hackers' worldview was proven right, in both the empirical and moral senses of the terms. Let's hope that continues.
[built for IE6]
Both these pieces - one from Quinn Norton and now on Taren just breaks my heart. :-(
That is a fascinating account of some events related to the "investigation" of Aaron. I'm not sure whether they amount to attempted revenge and harassment or are the result of incompetence on the part of those leading the attack. Either way, the net effect appears to be an abuse of power that would have tormented anyone.

Related: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/01/14/what-kind-of-fishing-tr...

And: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/01/19/the-six-week-delay-in-t...
What was 'the real problem' with the collapse, in your view?
Reuse is better than recycling.
Yes exactly.

key = f(data);

upload(encrypt(data, key));

store_key(filename, key);

Which is to say that every file has a globally 1-to-1 mapping to its encrypted version. I'm not sure how they are storing the (User, [(Filename,Key)]) data, but this is ideally encrypted on a per user basis, making any sort of per-user lookup attacks moot.
FB Search and Systemic Distribution
Hey there ! Congrats for getting it done. I'm sure you've probably thought about this already - but have you considered wiring it up to google talk or a few other IMs ? That way people can play it a bit more easily on their phone etc etc.
A rule (called prosecutorial immunity) without which it would be almost impossible for the criminal law to function. Would you prosecute Bernie Madoff knowing he could tie you up in court, personally, with millions of dollars' worth of lawyers?

Even without that rule, a tort law claim against Ortiz or Heymann would probably not succeed, absent some proof that their intent was to torment him emotionally. Lessig and bizarre bloggers like Danah Boyd seem to occasionally accuse them of that, but it all seems rather groundless.
Left the US to travel abroad. With grandparents now.
AI, Language theory and metaprogramming
A CS french researcher student's technical blog.
I'm looking for an internship.
Perhaps, a much simpler possibility than the other proposed in this thread, is that, in addition to uploading the encrypted file, the service uploads hashes of chunks of plaintext data. That way the service can just compares hashes of data, just like a regular dedup implementation.
As with all proposals to limit the freedom of speech:

1) It's not just the right of the people who speaks to be heard. Your own right to hear and be exposed is as much at stake. Every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own actions.

2) Who's going to determine what speech is harmful? Who determines what uncomfortable things you might read, see, hear? Who is eloquent enough to decide for you? Who relieves you from the responsibility of being exposed to minority viewpoints?

There's a pernicious sexism that runs through this entire article. Do women not have sexual thoughts? Why is "man enough" used to mean "strong enough"?
Careful here. Any time you read a story like "government attempts to liquidate real property to fund police department", your first thought should be "that's not the whole story", because (for the most part) that's not how the federal government operates. So, some issues with this story:

* This case is Sonya Rao, not Carmen Ortiz (though once again Ortiz oversees all the cases in her office).

* The hotel is, let's not sugarcoat it, a blighted flophouse. Don't take my word for it; here's TripAdvisor ("ROOMS BY THE HOUR: Hookers, drug addicts, drug dealers, need I say more") complete with picture: http://tinyurl.com/ta-caswell and here's Yelp ("Please don't bring your kids here.") http://tinyurl.com/y-caswell

* The owners of the hotel were warned repeatedly by local law enforcement and an intervention of local hotel owners; specific measures were suggested to minimize the problems at this place and weren't taken; the hotel had no security, and its drug countermeasures consisted of a list of persons not to rent to again.

* The hotel owners made no policy changes after a methamphetamine lab was discovered in one of their rooms.

* The hotel owners made no changes after the dead body of a heroin overdose victim was found in one of their rooms.

* Drug deals weren't simply occurring at the hotel; the Tewskbury PD repeatedly discovered drug dealers operating full-time out of rooms in the hotel.

* The owners of the hotel repeatedly admitted under oath that they had continuing knowledge of drug crimes occurring on their premises, and had no policies to investigate the use of their rooms.

There are places like this all over America and they're all neighborhood blights that need to be shut down (hey, by the way, still think there couldn't possibly be a difference between an apartment and a room up for temporary let on Airbnb?).

If all we're saying is that civil asset forfeiture is the wrong means to shut them down, I'm with you. But this case does not make my blood boil the way it does for you.
Were you making that point in the abstract, or were you, I don't know, in a thread of comments on an article about Aaron Swartz?
Awesome. I spend a lot of time camping and the books I use to discover new places are often out of date with directions that only the seasoned explorer could follow.
But when someone uploads the same file with a different password, if they want to de-duplicate on content alone, they need to be able to put that new encrypted file hash alongside the original.

One solution to that would be to have two hashes of the file, and to use one as the key and one as the index.
Installing hub Extension for Git on Windows to Work With GitHub Efficiently
Interns are Leading the Way
Start your stop list today to improve performance of your team
@lazywalker I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I'm a dime out of a dozen who is actually at least talking about this issue.

I'm happy if it is a rocky start. But I side with Wittgenstein: "My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression."
One could argue that Carmack's request was relevant more than a decade ago, and maybe it would be fine with Carmack if the person who inherited the drives released the data in 20 or 50 years (for historical purposes).
You NEED access to journals and conferences

And you have them, in dead tree form at every big university. Universities functioned long before JSTOR.

BLACKMAILED

If you think this is blackmail, you don't know much.

if you want to pretend that the 50K multiplies by the potential readership as "loss due to copyright theft"

I don't believe that at all. My point was just that the archive has serious commercial value. If you can license access to an archive for $50K/year, then saying it has "little or no commercial value" is obviously wrong, right?

J. Random Hacker might quite like to read a paper

He can always go to his nearest university library and go spelunking in the archival stacks looking for it.

his taxes paid for it after all

His taxes paid for JSTOR to dig up the paper journal, scan the articles, and pay data entry folk to type in metadata? Really? I don't think so.

But JRH would never pay 50K for it.

$50K/year is not the only price point being offered. You could always pay for individual paper downloads or you can get them free now.
It crashes my Opera also. And this is a funny comment, Safari actually beats Firefox in most tests.
Swartz never intended to destroy JSTOR. He wanted to provide access to the articles (many of them, I'm sure, public financed and should be publicly accessible anyway) to people that do not have 50K/year to pay to JSTOR. That would by no way destroy JSTOR, but if the access to the storage could be provided much cheaper - in theory, if it would be possible to do all the functions of JSTOR without JSTOR - I see no reason why JSTOR should be sacred.