skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the end of the article: "A more sensible idea would be to require the state to provide the defence with all its evidence—particularly any exculpatory evidence—during the plea process, rather than simply during or before trial."

There are a lot of pro-and-con arguments about charge bargaining (determining by negotation before trial what charges will be filed) and plea bargaining (determining by negotiation before trial what charges will be pleaded guilty to, to minimize the uncertainty of BOTH sides about the result at trial). Yes, in general the defense bar would like a world in which fewer charges can be brought, because there are fewer crimes defined by statute, and pleas of guilty are less costly, because fewer charges result in severe sentences. The criminal prosecution bar would like a world in which charges and pleas reflect the general reality of who is causing societal harm (as society currently defines that) without massively burdensome trials. The general public just want to do what they feel is right, untroubled by people they think are wrong-doers (to them).

The Economist, a publication I generally like to read (I subscribe to the print edition) tends to take a position that "decriminalization" (their word choice is not usually "legalization") of many currently illegal drugs would be a helpful social policy around the world. That may be. Richard Branson's blog post "Time to end the war on drugs" from a little more than a year ago about Portugal

http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/time-to-end-the-w...

suggests that Portugal's policy of decriminalization with administratively mandatory treatment

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-m...

reduces drug use in Portugal while reducing burden on the criminal justice system.

Coming back to the submitted article's last suggestion, "A more sensible idea would be to require the state to provide the defence with all its evidence—particularly any exculpatory evidence—during the plea process, rather than simply during or before trial," it is mandatory in the United States for the prosecution to share its evidence with the defense before trial. Failure to do that can result in the reversal of a conviction. But a defendant like Aaron Swartz was able to lawyer up enough, and do enough pretrial investigation, to be quite aware of what exculpatory evidence was on his side. He had other channels for protesting about the issues that concerned him, and he had the choice before him of doing what Thoreau, Gandhi, and King did of protesting a law he thought was unjust by publicly accepting imprisonment for it after a trial. Even after criminal law reform, there are still going to be people who think that their approach to solving personal problems shouldn't be subject to criminal sanctions, with laws still being on the books against their overt behavior. This problem of many possible charges and a drive on both sides in the criminal justice system to bargain can be reduced, but it cannot be eliminated, maybe especially in cases like that of Aaron Swartz.
I blog about programming topics that I find interesting; mainly related to .NET, JQuery, and SQL - http://jwcooney.com
That's not what evangelist means.

Further, the reason people used Dwolla in the first place was because of their "no chargebacks" policy, which doesn't even exist anymore.

Actually, even when they had their "no chargebacks" policy, they started secretly processing chargebacks, and not even telling the people they were taking money from.

Google for the story about how Dwolla bankrupted the TradeHill exchange by stealing money from them, not showing any affadavits for the money they took from them, and then blocked them from even withdrawing their own funds.
This is why it's important to demand symmetric speeds from Internet providers in US. People are uploading a lot of stuff to the Internet these days. It's a much more 2-way medium today than it was in the past.
Are all these luggage tracker devices approved to be continually while the airplane is in-flight?
Are there like many of these floating around? It seems like We get a "Like Bootstrap" every week or so. Ink,

http://ink.sapo.pt/index.php

Didn't even got to frontpage two weeks ago. And possibly many others.
If you're referring to the Space Launch System --- the Congressionally mandated program to build another launch vehicle with the Saturn V's capacity --- Congress has mandated that that should instead try to reuse technology from the shuttle program. But at this point, the "reuse" is looking a lot more like "redesign" --- the solid boosters changed most of the key components (casings, seals, propellants), and it isn't yet clear how much the "cheap, expendable variant" of the Space Shuttle Main Engine will have in common with its original variant.

There's some grumbling in space activist circles that the mandate is, at least in part, designed to keep federal money flowing towards the contractors for the Shuttle propulsion systems.

(That said, building a new Saturn V isn't as easy as dusting off the blueprints. Some aspects of the design would have to change --- there are places where the originals used asbestos, for example. And the plant where the first stage was build has since been reconfigured so that it can no longer handle anything that diameter. But there's a lot less technical voodoo involved than for that SSME refit...)
Krugman is as "somewhat hyperbolic" as the GP. In fact, the GP qualifies his theories with "I think", Krugman states them as fact.
JavaScript is the new Punk Rock - Making Music with JS
I find this annoying - it's on search result pages that I am very likely to want to open lots of tabs. Ugh.
I tell all of my friends who program and sometimes talk about "oh, maybe I should do side project Y and.or learn technology X" and who happen to have young daughters - "Dude, you want an interesting challenge - I suggest teach your daughter how to code - use Squeak, Alice3D."

Usually - they are like "The IT industry is doomed.. or I don't want my daughter to be a coder.. or she doesn't want to learn how to code.. or (worse) my wife would never want that(!egads!)".

And I retort (as nicely as possible): "Even if they don't become coders, they will learn how to problem solve, how to better think, how to analyze. Make a game together! Don't even start with code, start with pieces of paper"

The goal is not for them to be coders but to bond with them and teach them a useful skill that isn't necessarily about a livelihood (like fathers teaching sons fishing)"
I love to watch Frontline, but as they've reported on areas where I know a bit more, it's become obvious how often they trade on outrage rather than detailed information.

For example, in order to really report on why prosecutions did not happen, you would think they would take some time to explain how federal law defines certain crimes. But, they never did that at all--instead they ask people for a sort of gut reaction as to whether something seemed fraudulent. But of course the word "fraud" has a number of very specific legal definitions in a number of different laws.

One could argue that that is ok, because the real point is that the language of the laws themselves allow people to get away with fraud (in a gut-check sense). But again, to make that point they would have had to get specific about what the law does and does not say.

So while I found this episode entertaining and interesting as always, I did not find it illuminating.

edit: forgot a word
Terrible journalism on this issue makes me really angry.

First sentence:

> AARON SWARTZ , who committed suicide two weeks ago, had been arrested for illegally downloading millions of articles from JSTOR, an archive of academic journals.

Dead wrong.
I vaguely remember the Google Toolbar and OpenOffice being shovelware'd with the Java installer pre-Oracle; the choice of bundles has changed but the practice hasn't.
You should try http://hipmunk.com if you like Google Flights.
> Also, am I the only person who gets seriously bothered by profession-looking websites or applications that list the dollar sign after a price?

It's common practice in some other countries to place the currency sign after the amount.

(http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/22574/where-to-place-c...)
> PolySci 101. It ain't that difficult. Do I really need to GTFY on HN?

Best just to flag all political articles and rid them from the site, as they pretty much inevitably end up with discussions like this.
There's a difference between ringing alarm bells over economic trends and government actions that are fully public and extensively analyzed by the public, and ringing alarm bells about unacknowledged criminal behavior inside a public corporation that endangers the clients, investors, and economy. My only beef with these whistle-blowers is that they didn't contact law enforcement (at least per the article).
From their Wikipedia page:

"Before the 2008 collapse and the general financial crisis, RBS Group was very briefly the largest bank in the world and for some time was the second largest bank in the UK and Europe"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Royal_Bank_of_Scotland_Grou...

Of course, it depends how you decide on the size of a bank... Also they had been on an insane binge of acquisitions, including the ABN Amro deal which was possibly the worst acquisition in history (paying tens of billions with one ring folder of information for due diligence - what could possibly go wrong!).
this has kicked my butt so many times. You would think I'd have learned by now.
Evangelist? Someone who tries to / ends up converting others to using the service?

These people may no longer be the evangelists because they're pissed, however they were to begin with.

Interesting re: TradeHill - I will look at it.
I agree. Game design has come a long way since 1998. I remember playing Perfect Dark when it came out in 2000, and it was the epitome of FPS perfection. I still love it just as much today, but I can't pretend that other people are going to feel the same way. It's nostalgia, and if you don't have those fond memories of the game, you're going to notice that it is very clearly a 3D game from a decade and a half ago.
Yeah the gh-pages website has too many grids and codemirror instances opened up at once. The examples really need to load lazily on mobile. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
At Amicus, we're actually changing the world for the better. Join us
Unless you're one of those that need to run Java applets, I don't see the issue. I used to have issues with the Android SDK and 64-bit Java on Windows, but those seem to be resolved lately.
Gandhi called his fellow nonviolent activists a Shanti Sena, or Peace Army.
This DNA Gun Will Tag Felons for Weeks
And where are the files stored? If I create a 'Sync'ed file, switch off the computer and start the laptop, the file needs to be stored somewhere. And if this somewhere is the torrent swarm, then I would expect an interesting discussion on cryptography and (perhaps) fountain codes etc. ( Unfortunately the blog post [1] is even less detailed than OP's submission.)

[1] http://blog.bittorrent.com/2013/01/24/test-bittorrent-sync-p...
I tell you what I would be useful (as a tangentially similar idea).

At my daughter's school you quite often find that the girls' have grabbed another girl's coat, hat, P.E kit etc (they have to wear a school uniform).

The current solution is to sew name tags into the clothes, which is helpful at finding the wrong clothes after the fact.

What I thought would be cool would be is if you could sew an RFID name tag into your child's clothes, and then wave a "wand" over them as you collect them, and it beeps if they have someone else's coat (for example) on.

This may well be a bit of an over-engineered solution :-)
Not sure what's so completely wrong about that statement. Though I learned in journalism school that you should always say "allegedly" after the phrase "arrested for"...I figured the Economist, based in London, would be even more uptight about that given their libel laws.
There's lot of these out there now and I guess at first glance, it seems like it makes sense. But as someone whose had his luggage "lost" (delayed etc.) about 6 times now, and every time, eventually reunited with it, I'm not sure what this app would do that the usual tracking provided by the airline's baggage service can't do for you. OK, so you can track your luggage and see it's still in JFK and it didn't make your connection to London - so what? The airline knows this too, and they're the ones fetching it for you and making sure it gets to you. This app doesn't reduce the time this process takes or in any way remove the middle man.

Maybe it's buying you a little piece of mind?
It seems I doubly-misunderstood the situation.

If Steam can still trivially get its third-party-bought programs onto the metro-styled start screen, the popular reporting on that situation was off.

And I can't even find a story where Gabe himself actually expresses an opinion on, or concern about, the MS App Store. His comments seem to entirely revolve around Metro being bad for desktop usability and Windows 8 not selling. So the popular reporting that Gabe was specifically upset about the store (via it's limitations) seems to have all been bullshit/editorial.

Upon digging deeper, it seems his concerns about Windows 8 aren't materially different than his comments about Vista (via complaints about DX10 being Vista-only, as Vista wasn't selling).
Yes we do that as well. All java processes are given a single local user account. They have their own JDK installation as well.

We even go as far as creating a new user account, deploying a JVM to it and wiping down during our build process so we get a consistent environment every time.
Coding in your 50's - an American Success Story
My point is that life expectancy is a useless metric in this context as here we're interested in average life span of a person that survived childhood.
It seems like the tooltips are pointing at nonrelevant locations. http://screencast.com/t/oCGgYh9ytwMx

Is this a flaw in the tool or this implementation? It doesn't seem to work well with different viewport sizes.
Arabic programming language قلب opens the world
I'm not sure whether it was possible for the private companies contracted by the space program to patent their publicly-funded work.

Interesting to see what happens now that private enterprise is running its own programs alongside the government. I believe there will be a distinct chilling of relations between the main private players in a few years, once their main competition becomes each other rather than the government.
Cue the starter pistol hack: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/expensive_came...
Please give more specific reasons than "it's bad." What's wrong with pointing out UI elements to new users? For what it's worth Facebook does this routinely with UI changes.
Also:

You'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar

and:

Always marry a woman with small hands.
what advantages does this offer in comparison to matplotlib?

Are the points they describe (easy faceting, bulk application of aesthetic and visual parameters across categorical variables, pleasing default color palettes for categorical data, etc.) really that much of a pain point with matplotlib?

I used it for two or three projects but not really extensively and especially not for complex statistical plotting, thats why I ask.
Web apps can now register handlers for protocols like mailto: in recent browsers (Gmail does in Chrome for ex.).
For the record, I approve and upvoted. I had half-written a comeback but decided I was not actually clever and that I deserve to be mocked. "Pendant" indeed.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
I'm sort of embarrassed that I even replied to it.

Edit: The comment I mean. OP's article isn't overtly political in any way. It was incredibly interesting. Even just for the insight regarding the mechanisms of QA on a purely physical level. I never imagined underwriters jetting around the nation, going into box filled hotel rooms to get busy underwriting. Learn something new every day.
I know! I am a twelve year old boy again; had a great morning reading up on this.

(There is a downside to being a child again: I have a strong urge to cheapen this by saying something like, "That's almost enough to lift your momma off the couch.")
I often feel like this is where web analytics needs to go. Ultimately, no matter how many pretty charts your product displays and fancy map reduce jobs transform the data into "intelligence", unless someone can immediately take action based on what decision the analytics tells them they need to make, it's not really "intelligence" in the thinking sense, but "intelligence" in the military sense.

In my day job, I develop software to fit a big data + intelligence niche market. No matter how many pretty charts I've been forced to make (to better sell the software to CEOs), the people who make the decisions based on the data we provide don't care about visualizations AT ALL. They want our software to tell them what to do. Period. And if the software tells them to make a bad decision that costs them money it's our fault (unless they can't execute the decision due to safety laws, which happens), no matter how many charts they could have double checked to see if the decision was sane.

Dashboards and charts are all well and good, but ultimately a simple display that unambiguously tells you what to do (like the bicycle barometer) is much more powerful.
Interaction in data visualization - Ernesto Olivares Visual Information
Why you should wear a bow tie.
I think OP might feel better if they knew about inflation protected securities.
When people say that CPI doesn't show true inflation, what measure do they prefer to use instead?
I have questions on how this would even work. Engineers played a large role in spreading the word and getting people out to vote via technological innovations.

But how would we apply technology to government? What would we do, technologically, to curb the massive addiction and homelessness problem in the city, and how would you use technology to bust unions down to size?

There are a lot of places technology fits in the world, but this particular one is purely political.
My reaction while reading most of this was "Why didn't any of you try harder to let someone know? Why didn't you email everyone? Why didn't you call all the people you emailed? Wasn't there ANYONE important who would listen!?"

After reading the whole thing, I was a little shocked to realize the answer is "No, there was no one important who would listen." The accountant who essentially documented the impending collapse of Citigroup in less than 2 pages was interviewed by the SEC and then never heard from them again. Then there's this guy:

> The congressional responses were, “Thank you for your letter, and thank you for your interest.” And, “We’ll look into this,” basically.

> I also wrote letters to just about every television journalist, and network journalist that I could get my hands on. Sent as e-mail with attachments and never received any response. [I wrote to] CNN and Fox News. ABC News, NBC News, CBS. My daughter was working at that time with one of the network affiliates in Phoenix, and she knew how upset I was about this whole thing. So she put me in contact with their consumer reporter, who does the consumer complaints and that sort of thing. He came out to my house and interviewed me for about 45 minutes. And I gave him documentation, and tried to as best I could to explain the situation to someone that was basically ignorant of the mortgage industry. Never heard another word. …

> During the mortgage meltdown, [Fox News host] Bill O’Reilly was having a temper tantrum on his show where he was going off about, “Why didn’t I hear about this? Why didn’t somebody tell me about all this that was going on?” And I almost threw my shoe through the television set. Ask my wife — I was screaming and yelling, “I did try to let you know.” ‘Cause he had been one of the ones that I had sent e-mails and attachments with all of this stuff. …

What the hell are these people supposed to do? Start posting their warnings all over the internet and hope it goes viral? What are the chances that would work vs. the chances they'd all be dismissed as conspiracy theorist crackpots?

It's easy to think "If I were in any of their positions, I would've gotten the entire country's attention", but it seems people at every level are determined to be ignorant as long as it's profitable.
Yes, nothing has changed here. Economies are always based on trust and confidence.
Two central flaws in US-China policy that promise big problems for America
Every odd day I redesign my car's "automatic" aircon logic (i.e feedback loop on a cabin temp sensor, and a user set reference temperature) to behave in some smarter manner, based on the following premises:

- if it's 35°C outside, I sure as hell don't want a/c to loop on 20°C

- if it's -15°C outside, I sure as hell don't want a/c to loop on 20°C

So basically what I want is:

- 16°C minimum (below produces too much condensation on the windshield, and is not comfortable on long-ish commutes
)
- from 16°C at -10°C to 20°C at 20°C, maybe linear, maybe log, I don't know.

- and cap at 20°C max inside...

- ...but have a maximum negative delta of -5°C with the outside temperature (i.e 29°C outside means 24°C inside)

- yet with a true absolute maximum of 28°C inside

It's really not that hard and I could probably come up with a hack (has anyone plugged an Arduino into a CAN bus?) reading the inside and outside sensors, and controlling the temperature knob while reading its current setting from what the display shows, but damn, where is my car's SDK! Oh, the first world problems I have.
Here are my rules for using the phone in the car.

1. As little as I reasonably can. (Ah, but what is reasonable?)

2. When I need to, as short as I can. If you call me, my usual response is, "I'm driving, can I call back later?"

3. If I have a choice, in a place where driving is as safe as possible. (Freeway driving requires much less active attention than city streets, as long as you can see what is going on waaay ahead.)

4. The road always comes first. If I catch myself failing to have done regular scans of mirrors and location of nearby cars, this phone call is over.

All of that said, I still feel a minor twinge of guilt every time I call home to give an ETA for when I'll get there. But not much, because it would be more dangerous for me to take the time to get off the road, park, make my call, then get back on the interstate.
Ng-grid - Angular Data Grid
How Has Fire Fighting Equipment Improved?
Since fire fighters first came about, many improvements have been made to the way they have to work and the equipment they use
2013 Work Plans - Tab Completion