skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" played a role in the prosecution,

The fact that something Aaron wrote "played a role" in the prosecution does not mean it was politically motivated.

It's a fundamental principal in our legal system that intent matters. Of course if you are charged with a crime the prosecutors will use whatever evidence they can to try and back their claims of what your intent was.

The HuffPo article explicitly states that this is what is being discussed:

> The "Manifesto," Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz's malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.

So we're not talking about anything "political" here, they planned to use it as evidence. One can make a strong argument that it's lousy as evidence...but the fact that they planned to use it as evidence does not suggest any sort of political motivations (on it's own)...only that they are bad at selecting evidence for their case.

My comment should absolutely NOT be construed to say it wasn't politically motivated or that it was handled well....I'm strictly speaking about that one little line...you can't use that one line to support an assertion that it was politically motivated, because it's just not valid. Use other information to bolster the case instead.
> Why is everything in meters per second, then we jump to using feet all of the sudden?

Metric is easier to do calculations in, while imperial is used for the "layman terms". The intended audience is mainly american, and feet are more familiar to them than meters.
Yes, but only in the sense that Opera is evolving into a new brand of Chromium. Opera isn't a relevant factor in the technology discussion anymore.
Crown Management Jakarta Capital Asks
Can you imagine life without electricity? Or transportation or living without modernization? Years from now this scare might really come to as reality. We are running out of energy sources, what are the leading causes of today's energy shortages?
But I suspect the join must have been over an indexed column, so it did not touched 4bln rows, otherwise 2-3 seconds would be hard to believe. The group by query in the article must access all 3bln rows, which makes a huge difference.
I'm talking about a cache clear blowing out autocomplete history.
I don't think all of these examples involve embedding strings. Many people assume that they can use any ActiveRecord method, and as long as they don't embed strings, they'll be safe from sqli. Take this first example:

Order.calculate(:sum, params[:column])

I've just checked in Rails 3.2.12 and this is still possible, haven't checked against Rails 4.0. If I pass in: http://localhost:3000/adverts/1?column=id) FROM users WHERE name = 'Bob' SUM(id;

And do a simple sum in the controller:

sum = Advert.calculate(:sum, params[:column])
# or
sum = Advert.sum(params[:column])

I get:

SELECT SUM(id) FROM users WHERE name = 'Bob' SUM(id) FROM "adverts"

Which is not good as it is injecting sql - with judicious use of sql comments etc it could probably be made to execute any sql statement (apparently it does on sqlite with this particular test, but it fails in postgresql which I tested with). Other queries work with psql though [deleted example and reported]. I've reported this with a working example of sqli just in case it is an unreported problem.

Now the intended use of sum, count etc is to deal with symbols chosen by the programmer, but a naive implementation of say an admin form for summing some record attributes might use a param from a form, and pass that in to the sum method for column name, just as they might use params[:id] with find. I think Rails should deal with that.

Also the example given of User.exists? params[:id] is probably commonly used, but vulnerable to manipulation of results at the very least.

I'm not the original author of this page (which is already public and probably has been for some time), and am aware this is not an appropriate place to report bugs, but it would be reassuring if the Rails team looked at this link and fixed anything which is dangerous like the usage above.

IMHO all rails ActiveRecord methods should guard against sqli as much as possible, not just the commonly used ones, and if they don't currently it needs to be fixed.
The recidivism rate in the USA is almost 70%, which is outrageous.
This would go very well with Google Glass
Crown Management Jakarta Capital
I do not mean to be suspicious or anything but I admit I am a little bit of a skeptic. I would really love to see things their way but I couldn’t help myself but to think that they are not being honest. A “clean fuel” is there such a thing, if there is, it will be the coolest. So what does this mean, more gas and less coal?
Pretty impressive. But the +'s in the search annoy me a little bit.
It should be pointed out that unless the case went to the Supreme Court, a different circuit could yet come to a different conclusion

Sorry to pedant, but a case will typically not get to the Supreme Court at all unless two circuits come to different conclusions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_split
'Real customers. Real reviews.' (http://www.simplecharters.com/how-it-works)

featuring some real people http://bit.ly/Wo7h8T

stock photography has its place...but not beside this paragraph: "The idea of trusting a broker with your flight is crazy nowadays. Before you book your flight you can read real reviews from verified customers. Never again will you have to worry about whether or not you're getting a good deal, or will have an excellent flight!"
There's an interesting article that analyzes this topic from the perspective of growing a thriving civilization if you were a leader.

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/playing-god-for-fun-and-profit...
I often listen to Grooveshark or Youtube on an invisible tab.
What's worse than overpaying millions for a few routers? Overpaying billions.

At the federal level, specifically to prevent such things from occurring, there's this huge byzantine procurement process. A process that is literally worth tens of billions of dollars to game.

So if you have product foo and want to see a zillion copies of it to the feds instead of some freeware or cheaper solution? 1) Convince somebody on the inside of the procurement system that yours is the best product, 2) they write up the specification so that no other products will qualify (many times just copying directly from your brochure) even though it's technically an "open" bid, and 3) have somebody with lots of procurement knowledge help guide the paperwork through the system. At the end of the day, it's all just paperwork, no matter how much money is involved.

And that's just what I've observed in IT. I'm guessing IT is the worst, since all the products somewhat look alike. But I'm not sure. Quite frankly, its way too depressing to think about much.

BTW, the best way to do #1 is simply hire people retiring out of the procurement system. Yep, there are laws against direct hires, so you hire somebody from DoD to help shepherd a Commerce Department contract, or a DHS procurement expert to help with a DoD job, and so forth. If you do this correctly, the poor schmucks left handling the paperwork will be so happy that you can offer extensive support in making sure everything is done correctly that this is another huge plus in favor of your getting the bid.
I believe that this behavior is just the same as effectively murdering him. Ortiz and Heymann should be convicted of whatever the US equivalent of "Murder with intent" is. Let them rot in hell forever.
Is this really ciscos fault though? They weren't being paid to tell the government what they needed in these schools.
What matters is how they are used! Computers used during first moon landing were less powerful than today's cellphone chip. :)
Waste in terms of inflated costs is more likely a function of size more than public/private dimension. 20k $ is literally not worth lowering down to get the money in some industries I have witnessed. I have yet seen obvious examples of corruption, and incompetence + incentive is the prevalent explanation: the bigger a project is, the better it is for the people at the top of it obviously, and enough bureaucracy to make it a local optimum.

One typical example I had is not receiving a replacement laptop when working for a bank because replacement hw is too expensive, so I could not work for essentially one month. My consulting rate would have paid for a top of the line laptop in 2 days. But those are of course two different cost centers, so it will never surface.
I don't think Steam was onerous compared to widely used game copy protection systems (SecuROM, SafeDisc, StarForce, SafeCast, ...) which installed kernel drivers and who knows what else on your system and had numerous other problems.
Google has been ignoring my requests for reinstatement of content removed as a result of a false DMCA request. They used to be very good about it (this has happened before) and would email to ask for clarification. It's been 2+ months and several "reinstatement requests" later, and still no go.
The affiliate programs for private jet travel can be $5k+ per referral. Seems like a good model.
HSR is much cheaper than metro: you don't have to dig and you don't have to deal with all the shit which is already in the ground under the city, or with the structural risks of the dig.

The french LGV Est, also rated for 350km/h, cost ~€4b (up from an original 3.125m estimate, excluding trains) for 300km[0], or ~€13m/km -> $~17m/km. Including all costs (trains &al) according to the 2007 SNCF report the line cost €5.5b, €18m/km, ~$24m/km.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Est
That's not actually as important as the key main difference.

Governments spend YOUR money, companies spend their own money.

On top of that, companies are subject to competition and, as cynwoody pointed out, they can go out of business. This means that the incentives for reducing fraud are greater in private business and companies that have high levels of fraud that are easily reigned in by obvious solutions will be at a huge competitive disadvantage and more likely to simply go away.
Twitter tweets show up quite often in search results
The discussion of the TOS kind of obscured the real question I was trying to ask, which is "What are users of this API allowed to do with the image data?"

The API provides a link to the image, which is probably perfectly legal, but the site that displays that image in, say, an ad for a product on a non-Amazon website may be infringing. I'd like more clarity on this particular aspect of this api.
Sorry, I was confused as to the vendor in this case, sounds like Cisco was at fault.
Like continue to use the denial card for publicity? I thought so.
Here's info on calc support: http://caniuse.com/calc

No support in Opera, requires -webkit prefix in prefix-encumbered browsers ;-)
Never thought of this, but I like the idea a lot. Are there any iOS apps that allow you to speed up the play speed of your music library?
I believe your answer, while correct as to matters of law, is actually missing the essential point. The fundamental issue is the morality of the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, not whether the legal team conducting the prosecution was following the rules of law. It is undoubtedly true that they were.

The reason people care so much about this issue is that many of us feel it shows that the current method of applying the rule of law produces bad and immoral consequences. Yes, it is true that Mr. Swartz's previous writings may establish intent in a way that is relevant to criminal prosecution. It is also true - and I believe an ultimately more significant matter - that this case demonstrates that "writing about what you believe" may indeed place you in greater criminal jeopardy, and that consequence of the "rule of law" as it was enforced in this case may cause more harm to society than the "evils" the laws were intended to prevent.

In other words, the significance of this case is that it shows our current methods of applying the laws may have negative consequences. Saying "the prosecution was applying the law correctly" is not relevant to the question: does this case show that we should change the laws, and how they are applied?
Multiple people have pointed out that Chrome has click-to-play for plugins. Great! But now that new HTML5 features (<video>/<audio>/Web Audio API) are widely available and ripe for abuse, will we have any options for disabling autoplay for those?
Firefox lazy-load is still better. Also, Ubuntu's future integration with audio-menu also (why wasn't it done on browser-level?).
Marco Arment’s digital magazine and the paywall vs. sharing problem
Europe’s startup accelerators - a complete overview
It allmost feels like in every week there is a another new startup accelerator getting started. The list below is my attempt to give you a complete overview of the accelerator programs in Europe.
I don't agree with the assumption that religion is obviously man-made. Another possibility is that religion is a response to something that is actually out there. Primitive societies' interaction with the spirits is usually fear of the spirits and/or trying to control/manipulate the spirits to get what they want which they are unable to provide themselves. One explanation is that they act out of ignorance. Another explanation is that they act out of some sort of knowledge that we have written off.

Furthermore, religions claim to have a revelation of truth not discoverable by the western, Enlightenment-based assumptions that the world consists of only the physical reality. There could actually be a spiritual reality, and one of the religions might actually be correct. For example, I personally think that the Christian worldview that we are all selfish (in opposition to God, who is giving, since he needs nothing) explains a lot of things: poverty, oppression, why we can't stop fighting among ourselves, why communes fail, among others.

Religion might just be made up; some certainly seem to be. But, it might also be that some are actually right, and if one of them is right, it might have profound implications on how we live our lives. For example, if there really is a God who loves us so much that he died so that we could eternally relate to him as a child deeply loved by a father, we do ourselves a disservice by assuming that it is just made up. Christianity might be wrong, some other truth claim might be right, but until we have established that religions do not reflect reality, we should at least remain open to that possibility.
thats the same question i asked me right now too :D

always these problems with width and 100% - i def. give it a try in the next project!!
Knight commits $9 million to civic technology and engagement
Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution [...] but Aaron actually didn't believe it was

Aaron was an idealist that had some idealistic misconceptions about reality. Being an intelligent and nationally famous activist, which he was well on his way to becoming, is not something you can do without ruffling the feathers of some very powerful people. He knew it [1], but his idealism stopped him from understanding what it meant for him, personally. I'll admit I don't know much about "how Washington really works", but I wouldn't be surprised if those with such power over senators have some sway with prosecutors, as well.

1. "You don't just introduce a bill on Monday and pass it unanimously a couple of days later [...] but this time, it was going to happene [...] somehow, and the kind of thing you never see in Washington, the senators had all managed to put their personal differences aside, and come together to support one bill they were persuaded they could all live with, a bill that would censor the internet, and when I saw this, I realized, whoever behind this was good [i.e. powerful]". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg#t=411s
Bypassing Google’s Two-Factor Authentication #security
I wouldn't say "lowering the rank" but Google does have special cases, white lists, etc. It'd be in everyones interest for them to factor out many Facebook entries except for Profiles, Pages, apps, and Facebook internal pages. Else, people would try to use FB posts to game the results. The same likely goes for tweets.
Welcome to our Wi-Fi: Devicescape reinvents landing page
got a bunch of snivelly equivocating about "intent" as a reply

As somebody that took time out of his evening to address your prior comment with what I felt was sincerity and (I hoped) clarity, I'm sorry it came across to you as "snivelly equivocating".

that is just invalid here

It may help you to understand the relevance of intent better if you look at what Taren writes in the footnote: "His lawyers instructed him very strictly that he should never talk about motive with anyone before the trial, as it could play a key role in the defense and they didn’t want the prosecution to get any hint of what line of argument might be used."

As I said in my prior comment: In law, intent (if it can be proven) can make an enormous difference in what you get charged with or convicted of. Far from being invalid here, the importance of someone's intentions in a case like this is exactly why prosecutors would look at Swartz's prior writings and why his lawyers would instruct him not to discuss it.
If what you want is a standardized language Scons has that and is a bit more established.
How do you pronounce "MYO"?
C# on GitHub
You make a good point, but how confident are you that the products that have lead to them being fantastically swamped with money didn't arise at least to some extent because of their culture?
All the columns were indexed.

I remember it well, because I was trying to explain why having tens of gigabytes of indexes wouldn't help them much if they only had 16Gb of RAM.

In terms of group-by performance, it depends a lot on the kind of data and how it's stored. For example, taking a sum on a columnar store is quite amenable to parallel solutions and a lot of databases will do that way.
> It's a fundamental principal in our legal system that intent matters.

Context error.

If Bob dies by falling off a bridge while I am grabbing at him, my intent matters a lot. Was it completely an accident, Bob slipped and fell and I tried to pull him back? Or did I hate Bob and plot for months to kill him and was pushing him? From a distance the two things may look the same - it's important to figure out what I was thinking.

But let's say I dislike Bob and even once wrote a blog post about him and his annoying toenail clipping habits several years ago. Some people might even speculate I would not be unhappy if annoying old "Toenail Bob" was dead. I haven't actually done anything to Bob though. Charging me with murder at this point because it is speculated I am thinking about killing Bob and might do so in the future on account of my having complained years ago about his toenail clipping habits would be prosecuting a thought crime. Even if I happen to have bought an axe and rope recently. Or maybe I even stole the axe. What about that? So I could be prosecuted for stealing the axe, that's fair. But prosecute me for killing Toenail Bob because I once disliked his clipping protocols? Claiming that is reasonable to charge people with things they may or may not be thinking of doing but have not actually done because "It's a fundamental principal in our legal system that intent matters." just doesn't make sense. Especially when there's plenty of evidence the axe and rope were for some other purpose, such as I buy a new axe every winter, I need the rope for my spelunking hobby, or I have an established and documented history of downloading large datasets as a professional academic researcher in order to do statistical analysis on them.
Quite confident.

Multi-billion dollar game franchises have been created in other ways before and since the initial Cabal article was published.
It's more poetic than "30 cm per day" or "a third of a metre per day".
More like "the private office with a view and your selection of furnishings and gear, free food, unlimited and unquestioned requisitions policy, Friday sports, renting of whole movie theatres for teams to watch their favourite films, changing of schedules, embarrassing displays by senior executives for the amusement of staff etc etc etc will continue until morale improves".

Microsoft has, of course, changed. But in the 90s it was probably the best place in the industry to actually work, if the articles and books written about that period are even vaguely accurate.
I wonder if this is the best place to put it, but one of the better books I read on religion (named literally: Religion explained) did a multi-factor approach to religion and is one of the better books I've read on this subject.

Some of the reasons:

1) We're hard wired to remember and transmit some types of information - Want to remember the X different types of blood vessels? Hard problem. Want to remember a story about a mountain that eats people? Much Easier

2) Religion and religious structures provide order

3) Religious systems explain and help handle death

4) They provide a form of control against randomness (pray and your child will not die.)

5) Religious systems as social moderators and interaction protocols

6) Act as the super set for superstition and offer explanations and systems to handle unexplained events.

I may have missed or mixed a few points, (Its been a while.)

ALL these reasons combined, ensure that religion will be always be created, and it fills, or ends up filling, multiple key niches human beings encounter

And finally because of our internal wiring, we will always end up remembering and building on these traditions.

So as you say, religion for many reasons really is an emergent property of human existence.
It seems that no one has mentioned that the effect of relative wealth might be severe also from a rationality point of view. In a more primitive environment, if your neighbor becomes too powerful, he might enslave or even kill you, so better keep him in his place.

Similarly, if you take the $100 and are silent, and protect the killer, you risk severe punishment if you are caught. Even if I agree that the decision is made based on moral conscience for most people rather than economic calculation (which might be the case for sociopaths), there is a rational basis for this. Fundamentally, to make sure that I don't get murdered myself by the murderer later, I better not comply with him, as he is proven to be ruthless.
In addition, because other people are moral beings as well, $100 is a very small compensation for risking jail and being shunned for the rest of your life, a very bad economic decision.
India Takes A Bigger Bite Of Apple
Too, there seems to be a lower-than-expected paycap for people who work on games. I suspect this comes from the abundance of people who want to do it?
Configuration Management with SaltStack
Hosted on a $10/month DigitalOcean VPS.

Debian, Nginx W/SPDY patch, Percona, PHP-FPM, APC, WordPress, mysqltuner

WordPress Plugins: Quick Cache, Better WordPress Minify, Lazy Load, WP-HTML-Compression, WP-Optimize, Types, WP-Paginate, Google Analyticator, Formidable, Force Regenerate Thumbnails, WordPress SEO (Yoast)

Front-End Development: CodeKit (Sass, Compass), ImageOptim (raster image compressor), Scour (SVG image compressor)

I think those are the major infrastructural pieces & performance tools. Survived being on the front page of HN with the server 90% idle.