skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sovereign immunity is literally derived from the divine right of the King to be immune from prosecution and civil suit. It's an anachronism in the legal field, and one that most people don't realize exists, but is responsible for a lot of ills in our criminal justice system.

There are two types of sovereign immunity granted to law enforcement and prosecutors today. The first is investigative or "qualified immunity," which is the weaker of the two. This is the type of immunity detectives and police officers have in investigating crimes. Prosecutors can occasionally find themselves subject to the same level of immunity if they direct investigations e.g through specific instructions to county detectives or outright interviewing of witnesses not produced by the police.

The doctrine states that you cannot sue a person engaged in investigatory activities on behalf of the state unless you can show first that he or she violated a clearly established Constitutional right. So even if a police officer violates a Constitutional right, it must be clearly established.

Some states and circuit courts disagree on what "clearly established" means on a per-right basis, but basically if a police officer busts down your door without a warrant absent exigent circumstances, they've lost their immunity, and you can sue him or her for deprivation of civil rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.

Short of egregious actions, it's difficult to pierce this shield. Many states even have a "good faith" exception to this rule, where if the police officer was unaware that the right they were violating was clearly established, then qualified immunity applies. Which is a perfect example of the law gone haywire. If ignorance of the law isn't a defense for citizens, why should law enforcement officers be able to use it to claim immunity?

The second, and much more powerful, form of sovereign immunity is "judicial immunity." It applies not only to judges, who arguably actually should be immune from threats of prosecution, but also to prosecutors during preparation for grand jury and trial. The truly problematic part is that judicial immunity is absolute. It cannot be pierced for any reason, no matter how egregiously a prosecutor violates your Constitutional rights: hiding exculpatory evidence, deliberately keeping you in prison for long periods to force a plea, etc.

Of course there is recourse to the ethics committee of a state. However, in all but the most public and embarrassing cases, state ethics boards are toothless against prosecutors. Usually, a complaint has to be a approved by a regional reviewer, who is tied into the county legal system and has a strong incentive not to aggravate the prosecutor's office.

The only saving grace here is the "municipal person" theory. Essentially, if a state governmental agency, such as a county, has a policy or practice that actively encourages or directs its employees, whether investigators or prosecutors, to violate Constitutional rights, then one can sue the municipality which is not protected by investigative or judicial immunity under Section 1983.
This is awesome, I really love the execution. Shameless plug, I built an iPhone app some years ago with a similar concept https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/daft-touch/id308195972?mt=8
> Robert McDowell, a former Republican FCC commissioner, traveled to New York, where he met with hedge funds and Wall Street analysts to warn that the FCC's proposed rules could lead to the regulation of the prices that Internet providers charge consumers

This may curb the future profits of internet service providers, which could dissuade people from investing in ISPs. That said, it opens a lot of avenues for companies that do business over the internet, which will generate vastly more money for investors than the ISPs ever would have.

There have been many news stories about ISPs essentially extorting video service providers like Netflix and YouTube. Netflix and Google have deep enough pockets to pay the ransom, but many video-based or otherwise bandwidth-intensive startups don't.

I imagine tech companies will be pretty unified in campaigning for net neutrality. It'll be interesting to see which side the finance community falls on.
So, this is an acquihire?
Is the price undisclosed?
Suggest that if you are unemployed and in the US, you should look into retraining funds, around $6K, that are available from the government for qualifying degree or certificate programs. Or if not unemployed, get a job that you will get laid off from.

While in training, your unemployment benefits are also extended. Go to your local (state, maybe) unemployment office for information, because Google is way too polluted with scammy information on online degrees to be of any use here.
Yay math. But we're not changing. Were you around for us trying out the metric system?

If you really want to start, let's begin with QWERTY keyboards
This reads like Wired back when that was a good thing.
To be fair, the tobacco issue is due to the delivery method of smoking rather than the active ingredient (nicotine). On its own, nicotine is an addictive but relatively mild stimulant in normal doses. People desire it for the typical stimulant effects (energy, focus, wakefulness, appetite suppression) but as long as the predominant delivery method involves the repeated inhalation of carbon monoxide, lung-coating tars, particulates, and hundreds of other hazardous compounds, it comes with a terrible burden to health.

If everyone had been smoking coffee grounds to ingest caffeine all these years, I'd imagine there would be similar issues around caffeine. Thankfully, there are other delivery methods for nicotine which are more in line with those for caffeine but they are often prohibitively expensive (inhalers, gum, etc) or under a lot of pressure from tobacco companies and those who produce the gum, patches, and inhalers (nicotine vaporizers commonly referred to as "e-cigarettes").

I think that as long as people derive a benefit from nicotine (like caffeine) there should be a lot more support for these more novel delivery methods that don't involve the inhalation of burning leaves. You can argue that anything habit-forming is negative and undesirable but as with coffee or tea, people often find it worth the tradeoff of potential blood pressure issues common to stimulants.
Why do people like me make your life a living hell? I don't hate programming by the way - I hate programming for money. I love programming things that I want to make, just don't care to deal with companies, clients, dev teams, office politics, meetings, crunch time, nerf fights, etc. etc. etc.
No, you'd written this:

> They're not part of the metric system, simply based on it. The 1:sqrt(2) ratio used is extremely convenient as it scales up and down nicely

TM thought those two sentences were related. Ve thought you were saying that the factor of sqrt(2) was what made it metric. Ve was correcting something that you hadn't actually said, but which would have been wrong if you had said it.

And then your reply to ver made the same mistake, and you do not get to feel superior about this.

("You appear to not understand" isn't literally calling someone dumb, but that's pretty much what it boils down to.)

I'm not going to make another of the same mistakes you did: I'm tapping out here.
> 3) [...] the ANSI paper sizes simply have two aspect ratios alternating as one increases paper size.

In relatively big jumps (of the same proportion), though. Not enough in-between sizes (of the same proportion).
Improved password-based authentication in MongoDB 3.0: SCRAM Explained (Part 2)
Granted. In that case, this seems fairly easy for the folks who own the repos: Strip the university's IP from their code and re-release. It's a bit obnoxious because it'll gut the git history, but they have a clear path forward.
Unfortunately, it seems there are no 4K dumb TVs :-(
There should be a karaoke bar when playing the instrumental. Also, high seems to be low for me?
The question there is "Why?"

Are the "smart" tee vee makers counting on a stream of ad revenue? Or having crapware/shovelware on it like mass market PCs?
just, sigh
Which ethical rules exactly did they violate?

Here is the Honor Code from the university[1]

I don't see any mentions of the words "share", "distribute", "post", "online", "github", etc.

What I do see, is a lot of talk about plagiarizing other student's work and passing it off as your own.

The github repos did not do this -- other students did this. You punish the students who commit the act of plagiarism -- not the source. You don't ban a book because somebody plagiarized it.

[1] http://cs.illinois.edu/current-students/undergraduates/polic...
It can only run from inside the IDE and requires extensive use of the mouse and GUIs. This is wasting precious screen space and the mouse is often slower than just typing and composing commands.

Also, since everything is tightly integrated, when something crashes the whole goes down. This can be frustrating when your project takes almost a full minute to load in VS (it's mostly VisualAssistX being busy parsing files and the perforce plugin syncing up).
MOOC Tracker
A friend of mine, who is a lawyer, explained to me that Italian law holds itself to be complete and applicable to any circumstance faultlessly, at any given point in time. He agreed that this is logically absurd on its face, since Italian law is amended all the time, same as in every other country. I thanked him profusely for freeing me from bothering to follow it.

I obey American law because I gave my word that I would, upon entering the country as an adult. I do not obey Italian law because the Italian state never asked me to, and even managed to fail to to secure my consent despite me offering. Due to the the aforementioned bit of utter idiocy, I consider Italian law impossible to follow, so why bother trying?

If code is law, law is code, and this one is one of those things that keeps dumping a stack trace at you and clogging the logs (also, I hate debugging Android apps).
Might want to reconsider that last part. My Vizio had an update a week or so ago that seemingly broke optical audio out. In the future, I'm leaning towards the "if it ain't broke, don't let it patch itself" mantra.
I didn't need an account to see this. Odd!
Sharing of previous semester code (or quizzes, exams, etc) should enhance the learning process, not hinder it.

This is a bad and lazy policy for a school. Instructors should be creating assignments that cover the same material but are sufficiently different from one semester to the next that cheating isn't a problem.

When I was in school 15+ years ago, we had officially sanctioned ways of sharing materials from previous semesters of coursework. Is that uncommon?
In the interest of accuracy: it is possible to plagiarize yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism
HN doesn't support Markdown. You'll need to prefix each line with >= 2 spaces for it to be treated as code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
HTML to PDF converter with custom resolutions for presentations and screenshots
No, I'm not, and you're putting words in my mouth.

This:

> I have tried in the past to explain how awesome the ratio is, but it didn't go well because of dumb people.

Does not mean the same thing as this:

> I've tried in the past to explain how awesome the sqrt(2) ratio used as the basis of DIN/ISO page sizes is, but there are some very dumb people on HN.
> Ever since it became trendy to be security conscious, companies have come out of the woodwork peddling snake oil. These are the same companies that try to market things like “crowdsourced security” as a way to get security professionals for a bargain.

Taken form "The Need for Open Research in Software Security"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9032956
What is wrong with revealing juror names? I don't want juries to be anonymous. I want them to be subject to public scrutiny. They occasionally make huge, society-shifting decisions.
The A size formats are based around A0 being 1m² in area, the B size formats are based around the short edge of B0 being 1m long. The aspect ratio of both A & B sizes are √2.
From that link:

"As described in the Student Code, aiding someone else's cheating also constitutes cheating. Leaving your program in plain sight or leaving a computer without logging out, thereby leaving your programs open to copying, may constitute cheating depending upon the circumstances. Consequently, you should always take care to prevent others from copying your programs, as it certainly leaves you open to accusations of cheating."
Deployer: Simplest automatic deployment tool ever
This seems reasonable to me. Pretty much every academic code of conduct requires students not to publish solutions to homework problems. This doesn't prevent the use of git, just git public repositories.

Rather than just issue DMCA takedown notices, it might be useful for the University of Illinois to provide students with access to private git repositories. Of course, I suspect many students have drank the "github is your resume" kool-aid and would be less likely to use private repositories.
Smartphone theft drops as anti-theft 'kill switches' installed
Why Spaceflight Will Never Be as Safe as Modern Aviation
What I Do as a Data Scientist
It would be incredibly enlightening to see what languages people are moving to/from. (like this for but for programming languages - https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/coordin...). I'd like to know what people are switching to from Ruby.
Well, we can't see the code that is taken down here, but if assignment had a lot of set up code, and the assignment was to fill in some functions, there can be a copyright violation. If these repositories only included student made code, then I agree that there is a problem.
How much you want to bet the average "smart" TV will start popping up "network error" dialog boxes every minute in that situation?
I was just thinking about a similar type of exchange/broker for individuals to contact companies who may not be happy with responsible disclosure (ie, you're using their service and it is your only option, but if you disclose something they cut off your account).

There are so many stories on HN of people doing their version of 'responsible disclosure', there's no hard/fast rules and can be intimidating if you don't know how the other party will react.
This will probably be about as responsive as this can get without a low latency audio driver.

At least on Windows, this is similar to the latency when using a MIDI keyboard and a DAW with non-ASIO/WaveRT audio drivers. I think for Linux the analogue would be higher-latency with PulseAudio than with JACK.
The software on my 2011 Samsung "smart" TV has always sucked and is unusable. My initial reaction was that they went cheap on the processor (the network connection is hard-wired). It's just too slow to be usable and Youtube never played properly. I just want more HDMI ports at this point. I don't mind the external devices. With the revelation of the ad delivery, I have no interest in doing a software upgrade.
What's worse is when you do not think that the Smart TV registered your button press and you send another after a second or two. Then you'll get two keypresses queued up and fire at once and then you have exited your app/screen/etc. Yay. DirecTV's apps (even on their latest Genie DVR) are the worst - you hit the right button and wait about 8 seconds for the apps to load. Why even bother? Someone surely tests these things and sees the laggish behavior and just say, "Fuck it! Good enough! Ship it and never update it!"
Why does everyone seem to assume all HN readers are smart, highly motivated and undoubtedly will be successful?
http://www.samygo.tv/
I don't doubt your anectodes, but the idea that Linus uses OS X on his macbook air is hilarious (according to what he's said, he's a Fedora user, and has retired his MBA in favor of a Pixel).
> thereby leaving your programs open to copying, may constitute cheating depending upon the circumstances

Did the university contact each student and request to have the student remove the repo? Unlikely given the sheer volume of repos in the takedown request.

Irregardless, the University should have measures to deal with this internally if they felt so strongly about this cheating rule.
TLDR; I've done what you've done on a massive scale.

Most things end up depressing me if I follow them, knowing people are willingly participating in such an absence of brain activity. I had to stop myself from constantly scrolling down on facebook when I was bored (I realized I don't even actually read what people post most of the time because I'm looking for something interesting, but I still subconsciously notice what people are doing somehow.) I'm not against this by any means, so don't take this as me complaining. I don't know what's popular right now, I don't know what is trending on twitter. What's left is my little bubble where I have what I need to explore what I'm interested in. I can find interesting articles, I can find new music, and I can talk to people who actually are interesting to talk to. I've completely cut off any noise and am completely left with pure signal.

I'm completely out of touch with most everybody, and I've never felt better. I guess this goes hand in hand with being super introverted, I couldn't imagine actually holding a conversation with anybody around me with the information I know that wasn't super technical or completely shallow. I've lived with this obvious gap between me and other people my entire life though so it doesn't even feel lonely anymore when I can just find whatever I need to keep myself occupied when I'm bored.

The beauty of the internet.
> Graham killed the thread, saying that it violated the
> site’s guideline to “not use posts to ask us questions,”
> but he also wrote, “I think they shouldn’t have done
> it, and that they compounded the problem by not taking
> the initial complaints seriously enough.”

That is a convenient and often used response. And also a great way to cap controversies from getting out of hand: just censor them!! Good thing YC owns this forum.
DDoS Attack Brings Down Dutch National Government Websites
Network Breaking and Entering: Ars Tests the Pwn Plug R3
Traction Channels? That's a pretty terrible piece of phrasing.

Here's the list:
1. Viral Marketing
2. Public Relations (PR)
3. Unconventional Public Relations
4. Search Engine Marketing
5. Social and Display Ads
6. Offline Advertising
7. Search Engine Optimization
8. Content Marketing
9. Email Marketing
10. Engineering as Marketing
11. Targeting Blogs
12. Business Development
13. Sales
14. Affiliate Programs
15. Existing Platforms
16. Trade Shows
17. Offline Events
18. Speaking Engagements
19. Community Building

I'd like to point out that under "Targeting Blogs" the first sentence begins with, "While it could fall under PR..."

A lot of these 19 items overlap with each other, so if you're going to do that, at least make it an even 20 ok? And you don't get to use the word traction, you're going to ruin it.

Now get off my lawn grumble grumble
IoT Operator Sigfox Raises +$100m from NTT Docomo, Telefonica, Eutelsat
Step 1: Buy a projector.
Step 2: Buy a roku box, or a used laptop.
Step 3: Buy a decent pair of speakers.
Step 4: Set it all up.
Step 5: Enjoy a large screen that is also portable, and that probably cost significantly less than the same-size TV would have.
You know what I'm curious about? Why so many people rail against GPL for business use, claiming it makes it more difficult to monetize a product, but then companies like Samsung and Google turn around and use GNU/Linux and other GPL code on a project and then lock it down with proprietary blobs and DRM.

Doesn't seem to really be hurting them at all, but it is certainly hurting consumers that linux is being used to abuse peoples rights.

If I buy a TV with a quad core processor in it, there is no reason I should not, if I so choose (and potentially void warranty) that I shouldn't be able to install whatever I want to on that. The only technical limitations to rooting a Samsung smart tv are artificially placed there by Samesung, and with recent updates they made it so trying to root can brick your TV!

I would love to buy a completely FOSS smart tv, but it infuriates me to know I have linux but can't do anything with it on mine.

Contrary to popular opinion, I'm increasingly convinced that RMS was just a man ahead of his time and the principles of the GPL are more important than ever to uphold.
>Most things end up depressing me if I follow them, knowing people are willingly participating in such an absence of brain activity.

What does this mean?
> "The occidental mindset is heavily geared against advertising."

As opposed to the oriental mindset? Speaking as one, I'll still take no ads, thanks. IMO it's a mistake to look at East Asian cities (and the assault of advertising it presents) as some kind of preference for advertising - in the same way you can't look at LA and come away with the conclusion "wow, people really love being stuck in traffic!".
I think this has to do more with changing definitions/perceptions than anything else. To a lot of users less familiar with the history of online services, the Web is "the internet" and Facebook is Facebook.
It exposes jurors to the risk of harassment, intimidation and violence, both during and after the case, from people who don't like their verdict. And there will always be one side who does not like their verdict.

It puts them in the position where they have to consider their personal safety when they make a verdict, rather than just the evidence presented. A juror shouldn't be thinking "which verdict is less likely to get me killed?" when they're making a decision.
It's not really that the alcohol is a factor, rather it's that the wort is boiled and the process of boiling kills the pathogens. As long as the beer isn't contaminated after boiling it's fine to drink.
"We were told to surf the web, but in the end, the web serf’d us". Funny and sad at the same time.
Thing is, they are probably working together already. Witness the samsung-phone-only video inputs that started appearing on TVs and monitors for the last few years.
Along those lines, this article about Malcolm McLean (often called the father of containerization) is a great read.

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5026.html
The largest monitor I am aware of is the one in the Dallas Cowboy's stadium, which is 72 feet by 160 feet and 1920 x 1080 resolution.

The largest one a normal person can afford is of course a different question.
Did you mean palatable? :)
I get your point, and I don't feel superior about it.

My emphasis didn't appear to get through. This is what I'd meant to emphasise.

> You just have to apply the proper factor (which is a decimal, but a terminating one --- unlike the sqrt(2) business).

That's where the "You appear to not understand" comment came from, because they didn't understand it.

I literally have no idea how I could've phrased that better.

I'm also tapping out: I'm in work, and didn't expect to spend so much time at this.
GoJS: Interactive Diagrams for the Web
What about Tcl?
Maybe it would be also interesting to try limiting yourself to music that is older than 100 years for a while.
OK, yes that makes more sense.

I guess students should then learn to only upload parts coded by them? ;)
> The way you phrase that suggests that user experience is more important than security

Of course it is. Steve Yegge put it best:

> But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

Ha ha. You can always layer security around how use use Docker, but without any usability what do you have? Chop the network cable and you get the tradeoff you are looking for.
How Your Travels Around the Internet Expose the Way You Think