skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're conflating two very different things. One is a growing bifurcation between rich and poor. The other is what you might call "sexual liberation", though it's much wider than that.

For instance, a higher divorce rate is not necessarily bad. Decades ago, women had fewer rights in marriage and there was a cultural expectation for marriages to stay together, no matter how unhealthy, unhappy, or sometimes even abusive the marriage happened to be. As recently as the 1970's, the law had no concept of spousal rape--in other words, it was perfectly legal for a husband to rape his wife. Today, not only can women escape from marriages that are bad for them, but married couples can mutually agree that the marriage is no longer serving their or their childrens' needs.

I also find little to complain about in a lower birthrate. The bifurcation by class is troubling, but the net trend is towards zero or negative population growth. This doesn't necessarily indicate the disappearance of family, but rather a slight adjustment from more of an r-selection strategy to more of a K-selection strategy.

Conflating these issues as a "syndrome" is a little too simplistic and tendentious towards an ill-founded social conservatism.
I think we ought to make a website named hackermartyrs.com that people can contribute stuff about hackers who were martyred by the legal system and have a category for hackers who were martyred by being forced into suicide. Then have an area for the organizations and lawyers involved to document how they contributed to their deaths. Then leave it open for comments for people to state their opinions on it for all to read.

If you register domain names in the name of the lawyers, you will end up being sued because you have domain names with their legal names in them. But hackermartyrs.com does not have their legal names in the domain name, so they cannot sue.

I am disabled and haven't programmed in a long time, and have writer's block, but this would be a good cause to come out of early retirement and code some PHP or learn enough Ruby on Rails to get something going. my email is orionblastar@gmail.com for anyone who wants to contact me on this issue.
A search function would be great, showing just the popular tags makes it hard to find new tricks.
Summer Down Under (Cyclone & Dust Storm Collide)
I agree with this essay, but I want to point one thing out.

> Any startup could design a system better than this
> for $10,000. (For a frame of reference, PlainSite,
> which is roughly as complex as PACER, has cost Think
> about $1,000 so far.

This is shortsighted. I think hosting a government website is quite complex. They have very strict security requirements and maintenance requirements, with very little economy of scale. $25M does seem a bit high, but I can easily see their costs above $1M.
Google's count of results is both not accurate for any useful human understanding of the word "accurate" and also neither predictive of any fact about material reality nor reflective of any sort of Internet-wide sentiment. You'd get similarly useful results by seeding a random number generator with those search strings and examining the output.
Why do you think the mistakes were added intentionally? This seems like a legit social hack for getting more forks, but what do you or the project have to gain from that if the only things people are fixing are trivial syntax mistakes?
Matt, I salute you for the courage to write this under your real name, and thank you for sharing your experience.

> The difference between internet porn and porn from the past is just the abundance of new material that there is. (...) At the basic level, it really is not much different from any other addiction. Old, offline porn is different in that it gets stale pretty quickly. There are only so many times you can look at a magazine or video without it getting boring.

I think this is the key point (and dopamine-related discussions only distract from it). I also came to the realization that the big part of the problem is the same thing that keeps many addicted to Hacker News or Reddit - it's that whenever you look, there's always fresh new content, so it never gets boring.
http://onlinetonegenerator.com/ has a nice hearing test using the audio API of Firefox.
Aaron was charged with a federal crime for what should have been a civil matter. He was charged with 35 years in prison and his legal defense would have cost him over $1MM.

That's wrong. I don't want to live in a society where that is acceptable.

Yes, this issue happens to resonate strongly with this particular community whereas the disenfranchisement of the poor and other issues do not.

That doesn't make what happened to Aaron any less wrong or invalidate the anger that this community feels.
For those involved in any government contracting work this is no surprise at all. The lowest bidder or the friend of a friend wins the contract who then skims off the top and then forwards work to sub and sub contractors and so on. In the end programmers with high school level of understanding end up writing the code, and layers and layers of intermediate L3, Lockheed, Mantech, Booz|Allen type contractors get rich and the government ends up with an overpriced piece of shit that doesn't work properly.

There is quite a bit of a business opportunity in there (at least in theory as it a slimy red tape mess) for small and agile teams to come in and clean up the crap left by the large botched up jobs like these.
Recoding the alphabet for input reminds me of this. Shame the page is always overloaded! https://mail.google.com/mail/help/promos/tap/index.html
I'd guess that other people watch porn exactly as long as they get "excited" enough to do something I don't describe here. After this is "done", there is no need to watch more of it for at least the length of the refractory period, but better for longer.

Why would one continue to watch it afterwards? One can't be addicted to porn under my definition, but just to doing "that". This can of course be addictive and negatively affect one's life. Also the stimulus surely can get weaker and weaker thus leading to "harder" porn each time which looks like a bad cycle
Sizzlepig – Resize multiple images (yes, entire folders) right before your eyes
It should tell you something that every lawyer on HN is defending Ortiz. It's because Ortiz isn't the problem--the system, and more specifically the laws, are the problem.

Nietzsche's justifications have no relevance here. Removing Ortiz wouldn't change anything because the next US Prosecutor would simply do the same thing given the same set of facts. Prosecutors overreach. They have to, given the way double jeopardy and the rest of the criminal justice system works.

We get that you and the other technerds are angry about what happened to Swartz, but if you don't redirect your misplaced anger where it properly belongs (i.e., the laws that gave rise to this situation in the first place), you won't accomplish anything, and then Swartz really will have died for nothing.

* The sad part, though, is that the one thing punishment will never achieve is to make Ortiz have a guilty conscience. She and people like you will never realize that she is a bad person and should feel bad.*

Lawyers have feelings, too. Ortiz almost certainly went into the prosecutor's office to do good, to see justice done and to protect the innocent. Do you really believe that Ortiz doesn't feel torn up that a young white collar defendant committed suicide because she pushed him too hard? Because if you really believe that, then you are the sociopath, not her. She will spend the rest of her career second guessing herself with every defendant--both the defendants like Swartz and the murderers and drug dealers that form the rest of her caseload.
It certainly increases the risk of addiction, which is a danger of sorts.
Presumably it was the incident that left a bruise in the govt's eye and they never forgot it. But that is speculation, we don't know of course (even as tax payers who bankroll this crap) what goes into decision and who decides how and to what level of fervor cases get prosecuted.
Aaron Swartz’s Politics
Rayiner's writings are some of the most informed writings on this topic that I've seen this week. They are all far more informed and intellectually honest than anything you've written.
The fact of the matter is that these sources (google, wikipedia, and others) exist not for your well being but to make information accessible. Are you proposing that google decide not to show/make sources available because it could be harmful to your or my welfare? I, for one, don't want someone else making the call of what I should or should not see because of what I might do with it. It isn't wikipedia's job to tell me my life is worth living.

That being said, I think google searches with the term 'suicide' should show a banner before any results that give hotline numbers and avenues for support.

Edit: That actually exists already. Problem solved!
I'm not sure why RECAP (https://www.recapthelaw.org/why-it-matters/) is not mentioned more prominently in TFA.

"What does RECAP do?
RECAP is an extension (or “add on”) for the Firefox web browser that improves the PACER experience while helping PACER users build a free and open repository of public court records. RECAP users automatically donate the documents they purchase from PACER into a public repository hosted by the Internet Archive. And RECAP saves users money by alerting them when a document they are searching for is already available from this repository. RECAP also makes other enhancements to the PACER experience, including more user-friendly file names."
The two images represent the same doorway- one taken in 2007, the other in World War II, when Amsterdam was under German occupation.
You cannot leave the USA while being instigated for a crime like that. They take away your passport, you are put on a no-fly list, and not allowed to leave the county.

You'd have to assume a fake name, get a fake passport, and hope that inspectors don't notice everything is fake. Either that or join some human smuggling ring and be shipped in cargo containers on ships with oxygen tanks or something, which is very risky and you could die.

Aaron Swartz was not about running away, he did fight it as best he could. He made the decision to die a free man, before they took his freedom away.

The Internet is a neutral zone, no one country controls it, but many do try. The Internet was designed to be free, and distribute free information and knowledge to encourage people to learn and grow. Now that it has become commercialized with paywalls, government monitoring, and making an 'example' out of someone who downloaded one too many articles and journals with a web robot (the same thing Google does but the government does not care about it) by legally railroading him in the legal system without a fair trial or one solid shred of evidence so The Internet is slowly becoming a prison, being locked down one site at a time, our rights, freedoms, and liberties are being taken away so private companies can profit from it. Information and knowledge that used to be free, now costs money, and if you want anything you'll have to pay for it as far as the government is concerned the free-ride is over.
Light Bechamel or (white sauce)
> Hopefully the kids growing up today realize this.

Martial arts - maybe. But if your never had sex and your only education on the topic is porn, then how could you know how it really looks like? And then you have your first, and second, and third time, and you feel a bit disappointed that it didn't feel or look like you expected, and even if you realize that porn is a caricature, you're still left wondering, how much of the difference between porn and real life is because of lack of realism in videos, and how much is because of your deficiencies.

It's a real problem and it's sad that the only sexual education kids usually get comes from porn.

EDIT

There was a TED talk about this topic once, [0]. While her site doesn't have much content and I don't recall the book being very insightful (though definitely an interesting read), she raises some good points so I recommend the video (it's 4 minutes).

[0] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV8n_E_6Tpc
In some countries they do (take a guess), but not in the West.
Why have applets not been deprecated? Nobody uses Java in the browser for anything. Also before anyone gets too high on their anti-oracle rant. Java is maintained by fewer than 5 people.
The E-Government Act of 2002 amended the notes, not the statute itself, as the essay describes.
My thought was that if you kept it small, you could keep a better handle on whether to trust the person that was gathering the information for you. It's more difficult to scale this sort of solution without running into the same trust issues brought up. But there's not reason that a ton of small groups like this could dot the landscape.
10 years of prison is a long time, but it's hardly the end of life, especially when you're in your 20s to begin with. Yes your aspirations and career will take a massive setback but still, sitting it out is more rational option than suicide.

EDIT: I'm curious as to reason for downvoting, aside from sheer disagreement.
People focus on these because they are usually exploitable through applets; as such they pose a direct threat to users. The recent issues have been mostly irrelevant to "enterprise systems" since so few use Java's sandboxing, and it's typically easy and quick for developers to respond.

If Python was runnable in browsers and widely installed I suspect it would be treated differently in media.
If you call more trick plays, you're less likely to trick people with them ...
According to one commentator, that's not the only error in the article;

There are a couple of factual errors in this post:

"When you further consider that in the course of prosecuting one's own court case, one must refer to many, many other cases because of the nature of legal precedent, legal research can suddenly cost thousands of dollars—and that's without even hiring an overpriced lawyer."

Aaron misunderstands the nature of legal research. Legal research is done at the appellate level. In the course of prosecuting a case, legal research is necessary, but you won't be conducting legal research with PACER--it's not that kind of system. District court cases are not precedential with respect to other district court cases and it is rare that there is a usable opinion deciding the case. At the appellate level things are different, and there are both free and paywalled systems containing those precedents, such as Google Scholar (free) and Lexis/Nexis (paywall).

Putting aside legal research, it is not impossible to follow a case from court to court. Upon filing a notice of appeal, a district court case will be given an appellate court number which can then be followed on the appellate court's version of PACER.
Start here:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/

You still have to learn Buddhist terms, but they cut out the political BS and other crap.

Basically suffering is caused by desire and attachment, remove the desire and attachment and you remove suffering. Replace the suffering with compassion and empathy for all living things and you are on your way to mindfulness and Nirvana.
Reddit reportedly seeks investors with influence
Managed bug-bounty service launched
Regarding legal costs, Lessig has made up the $1MM figure apparently based on nothing, or (at best) his intuition. He also didn't say the defense would cost $1MM. He said Aaron could have feared it would cost that much.

As for sentencing, in cases like this, the sentences for the different charges would almost always run concurrently. We're talking a few years of imprisonment upon actual conviction, and reportedly the government offered to settle. Aaron could very likely have gotten a suspended sentence ("probation") upon settling. The judge in the case is known for harsh sentencing and favoring the government, but even then, it's hard to predict what he'd have gotten even if he had been convicted. My best guess, as a techie lawyer, is 12-18 months. The rhetoric here is all just Lessig's attempt to get people like us riled up, and I'm tired of that.

Not that I'm defending the government either. I don't like the law here. I'm asking only for some perspective. A rich or at least middle-class white kid knowingly and purposely engaged in an act of civil disobedience and got caught. If he'd looked different, the state trespassing charge probably wouldn't even have been dropped.
JS Implementation Of WebCrypt, funded by the US Department of Homeland Security
50% Of Airbnb's NYC Listings Are Illegal: Airbnb's Fault Or The Law's?
Speaking of internet addictions, posts worth reading:
http://mindhacks.com/2007/08/20/why-there-is-no-such-thing-a...
http://mindhacks.com/2008/03/19/internet-addiction-nonsense-...
Obviously, it would make sense to pass an instance of the object as the first argument to every callback.

A mocked class stands in for the original class. All the methods are stubs. Sometimes you need to provide functionality for the stub methods. Isn't it most logical to use a function to provide a stub method's body?

It's my opinion that all the stuff PHPUnit unit does with mocks (and JUnit as it's based on) is because Java didn't have anonymous functions. So you had to call methods to essentially construct code for the stub method body. But if you can provide actual code than all that API is unnecessary.
Image compression idea
CSS Prettifer and Minifer : Beautiful CSS for beautiful websites.
The parent (hah) is exactly why I should read child comments before thinking too hard. I spent a few moments trying to figure out what was said there, or what language it might've been, before I read this comment. Glad to hear you're starting them on HN early!
How about stopping being compassionate to nonsense?
They were incorrect on a side detail "shot of dopamine equals pleasure". That is not the main crux of the comment and latching onto that side detail and throwing "Fuck this and fuck that" around is is insulting the person and doesn't add anything to the discussion. Even after the original author politely answered and noticed the correction the insults continued with "this is not acceptable" .

> Just because there is debate does not mean that there is not a clearly correct answer.

The correct answer in this case doesn't really matter for the main point if we are talking about the dopamine. Which, from what I see is the clearly factually incorrect statement. Latching unnecessarily unto inconsequential details and derailing the conversion is also called trolling and bullying and will get the message downvoted or flagged.
I think you're right in that some people can do both. But how good the product is, well, depends a lot on the problem at hand.

I spent 8 years at uni doing both visual arts and IT, majoring in programming. I've spent most of my professional career doing a combination of design and programming and I actually believe that the knowledge you gain from one thing influences the other.

But both fields are massive, and I believe I could spend my entire career being good at either. Or I could spend my career being mediocre are both.

For what it's worth I do a lot of ops work at the moment too, and it's the same kind of thing, but ops + programming is even closer than design + programming. Every good ops guy i've ever met is good at programming, and every good programmer i've ever met is good at ops.
Minor detail: that's TEDx talk, not TED talk. And there were concerned posts recently about the quality of TEDx talks.
Not to mention I just saw a timely political cartoon about the hot issue of gun reform - from 1881. I don't think it's going to get resolved.
If you can articulate a specific reason why e.g. "identity theft with a computer" requires different treatment than "identity theft" then we can discuss making an appropriate amendment to the laws against identity theft. But that is no excuse for the CFAA continuing to exist as written.

What I would be interested to hear is a valid argument for why "unauthorized access to a computer" (whatever that actually means) should be a felony or even a crime in cases when it doesn't occur in furtherance of any otherwise illegal act.

People talk about computers like they're property, but if you're accessing them then they're really like agents. Prohibiting "unauthorized access to a computer" isn't like prohibiting trespassing, it's like prohibiting talking to someone's agent without authorization. Which is silly. If your agent is stupid and someone convinces it to hop around on one foot or do some other such harmless thing, there is no reason for that to be illegal, you just train your agent to not do that if you don't want it to. If your agent is stupid and supplies foreign spies with copies of all your classified documents when they lie to it in the right way, anyone who does that is (or should be) guilty of espionage, and there is no utility in a separate law against "unauthorized access to an agent."

But there is great harm in prohibiting it, especially if the penalties are nontrivial, because depending on what "unauthorized" and "access" mean, we all arguably do it on a regular basis without even realizing it, and it makes us all subject to felony charges. So I'm waiting for someone to provide any good justification for why we shouldn't just repeal it.
Another important point is that the VAST majority of software is not pretty consumer iphone and Rails apps. Some of the products I've worked on have been ugly as sin, but no company truly cares about that vs. the value gained. Imagine two scenarios:
1) A beautiful designed piece of software that increases company revenues by 10%.
2) An ugly (but same ease of use) piece of software that increases company revenues by 10.1%.

Which would you rather use at your company?

Do I think design is important? Sure. But to say that "designers are eating engineers" because it's easier now to make a twiiter/instagram mash up is ignoring the multi million line code bases that account for most of the "valuable" software.
Aaron's Full Archive of Blog Posts
I'm happy to make corrections, but I'm not sure of your source of information. Aside from PlainSite, both the GPO (official) and Cornell's LII (unofficial) show that the note still stands:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2008-title28/html/USCODE...

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1913
It's like what MS Access did to databases years ago. People still need databases, it's just the low hanging fruit is covered (poorly) by Access, and then after the badly designer database has been in production for a few years and grown, some sorry DBA/dev gets to charge a crap load to fix it.
What if Java 8 dropped 'extends'?
Here's what I wrote:

Dear Representative Polis,

Two days ago, as I'm sure you are aware, brilliant programmer, writer, and activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide. At the time of his death, he was being threatened with a 35-year federal prison sentence and millions of dollars in fines for allegedly downloading academic articles with the plan to distribute them freely to scholars everywhere.

Even though the alleged victim, JSTOR, did not wish to press any charges, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann pressed forward aggressively, treating Mr. Swartz the same as a bank robber, phishing artist, or hacker of military secrets. Mr. Swartz's family believes that this overzealous and unreasonable prosecution contributed to his suicide.

Rep. Polis, as an Internet entrepreneur and investor, you understand the issues at hand better than most. And as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, you are well positioned to investigate the circumstances of this prosecution, and revisit the decades-old laws that made it possible.

I never knew Aaron Swartz, but like many others, I was a great admirer of his work and felt his loss deeply. I beg you to look into this case.

Thank you,

[my name]
Why? Why is it more rational?
The harsh truth about HTML5′s structural semantics (part 2)