skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> An alternative would be for the state to pay a salary to every proxy in proportion to how many principal-votes he casts throughout the year

Seems pretty good, I'd be interested in ideas in how you could game this system.

> An even more intriguing possibility would be to allow any and all side payments and let the market determine compensation. Citizens could pay politicians directly for their services, or politicians could pay citizens to be allowed to represent them. Proxies could have a policy of negotiating a price for their votes and then distributing the proceeds to their principals

This strikes me as a horrible idea, especially allowing politicians to pay citizens to be allowed to represent them. Where do they get that money besides lobbyists? It couldn't be from their proportional salary or the payment would be too tiny for anyone to care. There are way too many people who would happily sell their votes to whoever payed the most. This is unfortunate but it's precisely the problem a republic is supposed to balance.

This is the same reason you wouldn't want citizens to pay politicians for their "services". Too many people wouldn't care about anything but paying nothing or as little as possible. A modern updated democracy should strive to be about giving citizens equal democratic power with no bias towards class.

One issue not really addressed here is that you can't invent a system like this as if all actors are rational and self interested. You have to assume that a large percentage are completely apathetic, will act against their own self interest and the interested and powerful use every manipulative and dishonest tactic possible to game the system.

Another is how you would stop political parties from dominating the landscape, which is likely closely tied to access to television airtime. You would need some system of free airtime (and no privately paid political advertising allowed) for politicians with a minimum percentage of public support (who else is singing the Bulworth rap in their head now?).

You still probably wouldn't stop big political parties from emerging and using a common brand to succeed, especially with apathetic voters.

And I'm fairly confident that too much proportional representation would quickly result in a tragedy of the commons effect for a lot of things. Taxation policy would get interesting really fast. Unpopular minority groups would be in constant danger without a very strong court system. You're entire society would be much much less stable.

Other than that the whole idea of using proxies to implement a republic where citizens can directly vote on those issues they care about and let a representative proxy vote for those they don't (or don't understand) is fascinating.

Then again, I also find systems where you elect only a local representative and those representatives elect the next level and those elect the next, etc. to also be fascinating and that's nearly the opposite of a system like this.
Javascript floats (all 64 bit floats actually) can store exact integers to 53 bits.

Which is enough for even the united states national budget, let alone more prosaic uses.
This is a terrible idea, because it allows voters to be coerced. Any voting system that exposes who voted for what has this problem, even if vote-buying is technically illegal. It happens on a small scale with absentee ballots, where dependents can be coerced by their spouses, parents, or children. It could happen on a much larger scale if the voting records were public. Think of the social implications from people's churches, their friends, or their employers if voting records were public.

Allowing votes to be explicitly sold would be even worse. It would lead to much more control by special interests and the powerful. For someone who is poor, selling their votes as a package deal for a chunk of change in the short term would seem like a great deal. In the long term, they've probably just made their future even worse. Who knows what the end-game would be in this system, but it's almost guaranteed to be miserable for almost everyone.
Interesting! The same themes have appeared on Lesswrong.com under different names: the "memetic immune system":

http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...

and "super-stimulus":

http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...
Here's the thing that we need to be aware of. I'm assuming that many of the readers of HN are programmers or have been programmers. The law is very literal, it is like code. But not everything in life is black and white.

Often I run into programmers who want want to think that all questions should have yes or no answers. Even if they don't, many of us have a deep sense that there is something right about seeing the world in terms of strict categorical statements.

Me? Well, as a programmer, citizen and human being, I'm suspicious of it. Deeply.
I have to say that Do Not Disturb is my favourite iOS 6 feature. As someone who has friends on most continents, it's not unusual for me to get messages in the middle of the night, which due to things I like to see during the day end up as notifications on my phone.

If you have an iOS 6 device, it's well worth looking into scheduling Do not Disturb time.
> genius

Maybe if swype and gesture typing didn't exist, and it was still 2010.

(Or do people think this because they are only familiar with the iOS keyboard?)
Should You Drink Coffee, The Academic Answer
A Guide to Inversion of control With Castle Windsor
Inversion of control can be described as the reversal of control in parts of a program. Another way of looking at it is a way of removing dependencies from the code you write. A good way to see what this means and how it works is to look at how we write code.
"Read in peace" is also an acknowledgment of Aaron's statement that he found talking, even to smart people, difficult, and that he preferred to read their works than converse with them.
Frittata a forma di cuore, secondi piatti sfiziosi
It is time to join a real political force to defend people like Aaron through democratic means: the Pirate Party
I'm sure many people in this comment thread would say that this is a terrible idea. But lets say we had a different type of structure in the UK and someone drew up the current system for the UK - no doubt it would look like a terrible idea.

Democracy appears to be the least worst system we have, with varying implementations of it (as with Communism, varying implementations existed or exist each with their pros and cons).

If a system looks great on paper, chances are we've missed something.
Having porn before sex is probably a lot more instructive and useful to our sexual well being than an alternative world where your only contact with sex before having it is just private conversations about it with the few people you feel comfortable discussing it with. I'm very glad that I live in a post Kinsey Report world.
Cisco Linksys Remote Preauth 0day Root Exploit (UPCOMING)
I'm pretty sure that a lot of the government can be decentralized and automated with technology. Instead of lines and offices, people could do things online. Instead of publication requirements in newspapers, or requests for data by mail, things could be published online.

So what do we need government of cities, etc. to really do?

I guess I'm going to suggest more of a minarchist vision with government playing the role of fulfilling the minimum expectations of the people.

Suppose the entire population really needs something (clean water, education, medical insurance, housing etc.)

Then the government should be able to pay for the basic amount of it (primary education, basic nationalized health insurance, etc.) through a single payer system. By using their collective bargaining power, the country's consumers could form a monopsony to achieve really affordable prices for these basic goods and services for everyone.

But, this would only be subsidized up to a point. For example, the first $10k per year of education per child would HAVE to be bought by the government. If you wanted more, you could simply buy it on the private market.

In a sense, this is the basic welfare state which leverages the power of collective bargaining through a single payer. But everything is out in the open, including the budgets. Everything we value as a society would be openly budgeted and justified on the internet.

The other part of what government does is regulations. Here we have a question of whether they need to force businesses to not do something. For example, if a building is not built up to code, should the government just condemn it and not allow anyone to use it, or should it simply require the building to advertise its shortcomings and let people decide whether to use it anyway? If a workplace has unsafe conditions, should the government force a shutdown or force advertising of the unsafe conditions?

Any system we where we give power to the government to expand its powers on our behalf, use could be hijacked by swaying the majority of voters little by little -- which is different from the majority of the people, because not everyone votes. The problem for example if very few people vote to close a particular program, or are even aware of its existence, but many people can motivate the expansion of a program by giving it new things to do.

In a sense, it becomes more and more costly to operate a democratic government over time, and we don't have effective systems to scale it back.
I think the biggest problem with an "always on" system like this is that without well-defined election periods, people's tendency to be fickle would surface and wreak havoc on progress.

Imagine people vote to construct a bridge, and the vote passes by a narrow margin. Then, 3 months later when people first get hit with the tax that pays for it, many of them decide that's it's more money than they want to be spending, and they change their position on the matter. Now we have a partially constructed bridge that sits because the people who voted for it changed their mind.

Part of the reason that periodic voting works for us is that it allows a block of time for the new policies and projects to be executed without interruption. If voting happened continuously, no one would ever be able to develop a flow, and the system would feel a lot like an old man driving a car. jerk forward, stop, jerk forward, stop, jerk forward....
> "He neither promises nor tries to evaluate the legitimacy of the laws."

Which also implies that there is hardly any possibility for his analysis to be 'incorrect' because it is rooted to come out as correct within the provisions of existing laws.

Isn't that so?
Do you approve of all actions throughout history performed under color of law? Your constant refrain to "Yes, these aren't terribly good laws, but they are the laws and that's enough" are so utterly unconvincing in light of this that I find it difficult to imagine your answer to the preceding question could possibly be anything other than yes, but before we proceed down that path I just thought I'd verify that assumption with you.
Let me expand: there is nothing in the type system that will make you handle exceptions in Futures, in the way that Option or Either make you handle the failure case. It is easy for a Future to fail and you to never see a stack trace. E.g. this will silently fail:

Future { 1 / 0 }

An alternative is to encode the possibility of failure in the type system by using Future[Validation[E,A]] (replace Validation with Try or Either as the whim takes you). Then the type system will remind you to handle the failure case. See my link above for more (scroll down a bit to see the section on error handling).
How can spoofing IP/MAC addresses be considered "false pretenses" if these are considered, by nature of how computer networks and management thereof have evolved, to be transient or arbitrary in nature? Spoofing IP/MAC addresses does't even involve "pretenses", because it is a fallacious assumption (usually by the technically illiterate) that IP/MAC addresses correspond, or are even supposed to correspond, to a unique person/computer/entity in the first place. I can't say this is a good analysis by Kerr, given that he ignores extremely basic weaknesses such as this in the charges brought against Swartz.
Design Forms In Play2.0 using Scala and Mongodb
The play.api.data package contains several helpers to handle HTTP form data submission and validation.

In This blog we would learn how to design forms in play2.0 using scala and how to communicate with database using mongodb.
> I am sure cars contribute

I doubt it. At the insane particulate levels they're discussing the air should be a lot cleaner coming out of the car than it was going in. Even if they don't have catalytic converters (anyone??) they've at least got _air filters_.
You might find this of interest:

http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/whitepapers/restassur...
Punishment could be being banned from the MIT network in future.

Punishment could be banned from computer use for x days.

Punishment could be a severe monetary punishment.
Seems to be down now.

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
Isn't this like asking "How is wearing a fake mustache in public a false pretense?" It isn't. But if I'm doing it with an obvious intent on deceiving someone about my identity, don't you think that context matters? Even if the fake-mustache seems ridiculous?
... and also making sure a certain percentage of innocent people end up in jail because they use the maximum sentence threat to squeeze out plea bargains from innocent people.

Their job is justice and the truth first, not prosecution at any cost and willfully ignorant of the facts or willfully uninterested in the facts. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way they started doing the latter erroneously equating with it being the correct path towards the former.
The cost-benefit ratio changes hugely depending upon the economic development of the country. In a country where individuals are highly-educated and produce a lot of economic value, sure, better health outcomes can be very prudent investments. In a country like China where educational levels are lower, economic value produced by individuals lower, then the numbers are completely different. Lives are unfortunately cheaper there.
Heart almost skipped a beat when first glanced at the welcome email, last two lines:

username: thomseddon
password: Your password

With the actual text "Your password", Phew!!
Not quite sure it's necessary to include this line, for the sake of your users cardiovascular health you may wish to consider removing it!

(Oh, do really like this site, started using it already as you can see!)
In reverse order: Google Scholar does not have district court decisions, but these decisions are not precedential. Some, but not all of these, are published in the Federal Supplement series by Thomson-West. Most circuit decisions (but not all) are published in the Federal Reporter. "DO NOT PUBLISH" opinions are subject to special rules in each circuit.

The decision of one district judge does not bind another district judge in the same district. In the Mariel Boatlift cases, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida sat en banc precisely to avoid the problem of inconsistent decisions.

The decisions of one federal appellate circuit are not binding on other federal circuits. There are frequently conflicts, even amongst panels of the same circuit. These are first resolved by the circuit court sitting en banc to resolve the conflict. If there are conflicts among the circuits, these are resolved by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is not obligated to take these cases and sometimes the conflict is resolved by Congress passing legislation adopting one circuit court's view over another.

These are ancillary and non-essential points to your main argument, but are easily corrected. Pacer can be made better, (criminal cases are generally not included; why?) but lawyers simply do not need Pacer to research substantive or procedural federal law.
uh, definitely not.

his analysis is about whether the charges the prosecutors levied against him were reasonable, based on case law. if he misinterpreted established case law or the charges levied against aaron, his analysis certainly could be incorrect.
The Conscience of a Hacker
Edit: removing Aaron's name from the title. In retrospect I don't feel it's respectful.
Facebook had implemented a way for people to vote on things, and didn't really even get 2% of people ever voting

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/21/facebook-site-governance-vo...

most people didn't know or didn't care
In that case, if he'd bought a new laptop instead of changing the MAC address, would he have been off the hook?
http://www.plainsite.org/issues/
His analysis can still be incorrect. For example, other legal experts may disagree with his interpretation of blah law. This is why I think more, not less, somewhat emotion-free evaluation would be helpful.

If we learn the laws are far overreaching, it requires a different set of actions to attempt to change than if we find that the charges don't align with the law.
They don't need a Death Star for the murdering children when drones seem to be doing a fine job.

I find it hard to be amused by a government's witty-japes-on-the-internet. People shouldn't be amused, they should be insulted. This is not humanity you're seeing. It's the thin veneer that gets scraped over bureaucracy and business-as-usual politics.
You can never completely separate the meta-argument about who should make rules & how from your feelings about the rules themselves. People's minds (unless specially trained and disciplined) just don't work like that.
That's the point, the spoofing of the IP/MAC addresses in themselves prove nothing, and yet Kerr is assessing it as such. The guy with a fake mustache could be a method actor preparing for his next role, and Swartz could have thought "MIT/JSTOR doesn't give a damn if I scrape these articles, but I don't care to ask for official resources to do it just to be told no."
To me, this is one of the founding texts of our sub-culture.

No, I didn't know or interact with Aaron Swartz, but his plight reminded me of this manifesto.
Decriminalise drugs, inquiry by cross-party peers says
Perhaps aptly, I just dumped my smartphone and am considerably happier.
When done deliberately to circumvent blocks, that has nothing to do with "how computer networks and management thereof have evolved, to be transient or arbitrary in nature".

Nobody who isn't blinded by groupthink or hero worship can deny that Swartz was guilty of a number of crimes. You can debate whether the prosecution was inappropriately heavy-handed given the nature of the crimes, or even whether some or all of those crimes should in fact be crimes, but not that he did commit them.
While the Future abstraction in Scala is very nice, it is unfortunately not very good in a multi-threaded context. The implementation of Futures contains a lock that, IIRC, locks the outermost object they are contained in. For us, this led to lots of serialization of code that should and could run in parallel. We've unforunately had to remove all our use of Futures until the implementation matches the expected behaviour.
It's your analysis that's incorrect.
he did buy a new laptop. its in the article.
Actually SGI were more or less destroyed by Linux too. I remember being in a meeting with them at the height of the dot com boom where we were told that they were embracing Linux for mid-range to replace lower-end IRIX systems. My colleagues and I came out of the meeting unable to understand why people would opt for x86 SGI hardware running Linux to run web servers at two to three times the cost of equivalent off the shelf x86 hardware running Linux to run web servers.

Sun could've learned a lot from SGI's demise but didn't, due to poor leadership (IMHO). I still remember Sun charging 5 times multiples of COTS x86 hardware for general web servers, and telling them that they were competing with x86 on price.

To be fair, Sun hardware was (again IMHO) very reliable and I did love it to bits.
Anonymous hacks two MIT website as a tribute for Aaron Swartz
I agree; that and being able to tag and comment on aliases. Some way of posting alternatives for the same task would be great too.
That was completely unnerving. Without even realising I had done it I completely skipped over the block of text to the TL;DR and only after did I realise it was just Lorem Ipsum nonsense.

I totally agree with TL;DR usage, it's a modern device for modern internet communication. People continue to use it because it's useful and works, not because they have an agenda to ruin the english language or are semi-illiterate. Possibly my favourite thing about it though is its lack of pronounceability. Its entirely invented and used as a written construct and is actually quite cumbersome to try to say out loud.
We need a public education campaign on the difference between copying and stealing. All the media lobbying has tainted the terms.
Please realize that Kerr is tackling one issue at a time, in fact, I think he is promising a second post.

This first post is to show how the charges fit the existing law...This is to tackle the first question of, Is what Aaron Swartz did illegal?

This is a wholly different question than whether the prosecution was justified in its aggression, which will be the topic of his second post.

But whether something was illegal or not, yes, generally, we want that question to be based on existing laws. You do not want to go to court, either as a defender or prosecutor, on the grounds that your case will be decided on what's made up during trial.

---

Someone noted that many HN readers are programmers and seem to have problems with seeing the world as too black and white...I'm surprised at how hard it is for professionals whose work is heavily governed by the concept of orthogonality not being able to understand why people like Kerr can dissect this controversy into two separate components. Both components, related as they are, are worth considering and involve different arguments and evidence.
>When done deliberately to circumvent blocks

The blocks weren't necessarily to prevent fraud. Swartz's actions took place in the "open" culture of MIT, and that context matters and should be taken into account before you accuse Swartz of wire fraud.

>Nobody who isn't blinded by groupthink or hero worship can deny that Swartz was guilty of a number of crimes.

That is a legitimate area of debate.
The abstract is academia's TLDR.
The "read in peace" line was the final line of the EFF's tribute -> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz
"Discovery is the new Cocaine"

http://www.slideshare.net/mingyeow/discovery-is-the-new-coca...
You're being deliberately obtuse, or accusing Aaron of being.
An interview with Mendeley's API dev
I don't believe that's the answer. we need to be able to cope with this influx of new information and distractions - thru better filtering. by just abandoning smartphones altogether you're missing out on one of the biggest technological advancements.
Free Traffic Insights On Competitor Websites With 1 Click.
While I think the talk articulates very well what the issues are with the wide spreading of online porn, the problem is not that this isn't known -- it's how to cope with realising that your own desires are preventing you from enjoying anything other than some of the examples the speaker highlights.
The witch hunt was inevitable due to the sheer emotion we all felt during this tragic event. It is correct to step back and not look at getting one or two attorneys fired - but rather look at the law itself, and reflect on the absolute absurdity of how it can be applied. If the law is the law, and the law says that someone downloading academic papers carries the same punishment as a murderer or rapist, then the law needs to be changed. A fundamental shift needs to take place.

We can take a page from:
"Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works"

And follow with:
"Dear Attorneys, It's No Longer OK To Not Know All Hacking Isn't Terrorism"