skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The prosecution sentencing memo rebuts this argument, pointing out that Ulbricht's attempts to procure murder for hire were explicit factual components of one of the charges he faced.

The prosecution memo does not rebut this argument, it rebuts instead the clearly different but related argument that the murder-for-hire scheme was uncharged conduct which could therefore not be considered in sentencing. It was -- as they correctly point out -- charged, as it was one of the overt acts specifically laid out in the Count One narcotics trafficking conspiracy charge.

It is nevertheless inaccurate to say he was convicted of hiring a hitman, since a conspiracy conviction requires (as far as overt acts go) only a finding that the defendant committed at least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, there were several overt acts charged in that count, and the verdict form did not direct the jury to return separate findings of fact on each charged overt act.
The government seized Bitcoin worth many millions from him, so they're still ahead.
The thing that you need to take from this is the state re-asserting its primacy in the face of an incredibly disruptive* technology. I think that even if Ulbricht hadn't attempted to have people murdered the penalty would have been extreme. When challenged bureaucracy over compensates...through that lens the governments actions in several areas is explainable if not just.

* I'm sorry for using the word "disruptive".
The murder-for-hire scheme was "Overt Act" (b) for Count 1 of his "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy" charge.

Capone went away for tax evasion, right?
He wasn't being convicted of ordering hits on people since there isn't evidence that he was successful in killing anyone; however, I think the justice system operates here on the idea that he could have eventually been successful at ordering a hit, given all the effort he was putting into it.
Ah, I assumed you meant only the SMTP pipeline - my bad. But what you said was like saying setting up a Web site is hard because you need to deal with haproxy, nginx, hooking up recaptcha, implementing OAuth2 and so on. I don't think rewriting everything in Go is going to help.

I did work at an email service provider years ago though, so I concede I might be more familiar about email than most people.
Wouldn't the USPS/FedEx/UPS also be liable as a drug courrier?
If it did, they should be able to prove it with some data. SR shut down in 2013, did they see a cliff of less ODs / deaths in hospitals?

But yea, I believe it is ridiculous as well, but the court needed to voice their opinion with the sentence.
It's right there in the indictment. Count 1: Trafficking Conspiracy, Overt Acts, (b).
I see, is there an equivalent for robots? Like putting part of the algorithm in to hardware or something? Or is my "algorithm" still "there", I'm just not as aware that I'm following it?
FTA: "Judge Forrest told Mr. Urlbricht that “what you did in connection with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric.”"

Can't help but counter this claim by stating that buying drugs via Silk Road is probably not very destructive in any sane analysis, especially compared to street level drug dealing.

There's no corners to hold, no rivals to fight with territory over, no deals to go bad, no real access by minors, and no real impedance to the function of any tangible physical location or bystander.
I certainly admire your bravery in putting forward such an argument without a throwaway account.
Black markets exist because demand exists, whether we like it or not, whether we think it's good or bad. Black markets are self regulated and that is why you see so much violence in the illegal drug market. Restricting supply drives up prices and profit and increases incentives to increase supply. This is a vicious never ending cycle.

Ross was tempted by helping to increase supply. Maybe if we had a legal and regulated location where you could do any drugs but under the supervision of counselors we could help reduce demand and end the cycle.

I believe a church in the Netherlands did this in their basement. They provided discounted heroin that could only be used there and addicts reduced their consumption and had access to counselors.

I am not supporting what Ross did to give access to illegal drugs, I just believe because there is such demand trying to reduce supply is a losing battle where only law enforcement equipment supply companies win.
yay for sensible names like left[i] and right[i]!
Ironically, that definition of "rights" is subjective (most people would agree with you, but not all). And what you define as a "right" is also very subjective.
It looks like the lessons here are

1) Be careful how your promote your criminal enterprise (early bitcoin talk pages about silk road are from Ross)

2) Don't commit a crime to cover up a lesser crime (Covering up running silk road by trying to commit murder by hire)

3) regularaly check the IP of your service that is running a TOR site. Requests sent to that IP should have been blocked.
>> As a developer I wouldn't buy a car that would drive off the cliff.

What does being a developer have anything to do with it?
> Thanks for the informative reply. A CPU might not be functional as in Haskell with recursion and types, but it is a weaker kind of functional in the sense that given the same inputs it will return the same outputs - it has no state, and even memory access is just a function to set or read from an address and those functions never fail, never throw null pointer exceptions, etc. Do you disagree that a circuit is more an example of data-flow paradigm than an example of the state-machine paradigm?

This is all kinds of wrong. CPUs have tons of state. Registers, program counters, TLB, CPU mode, cache, etc. You're just abstracting all that state away as "input," Using this criteria, you can say that a C program with a global buffer is stateless because the global buffer is just an input for the functions.

You're incorrect on your mental model of functional pureness anyway. Functional languages have state, it is just that the state is immutable.

> For a CPU to take the next step and decide what work to do at each clock cycle it needs only its inputs - it need not inspect the previous work it did in order to decide what to do next - it simply reads the next opcode the user wants to execute, and does it. That means it is referentially transparent. Which means it's tons more functional than C.

Incorrect. A modern CPU will often look at different stages in its pipeline in order for other stages to progress. This is one of the reasons you have instruction re-ordering. You can also hit a point where you have to flush the pipeline and start your operation over because you had a branch prediction miss.

In other words, CPUs are highly stateful. You are simply incorrect.
Since when has google followed that philosophy? I always thought they were the mad scientist of tech companies and that was more Apple's cup of tea.
Incredible. Fire a gun at a deer, get meat. Fire a gun at a baby, get life in prison.

Intransigent. Set a log on fire, keep warm. Set a house on fire, get convicted of insurance fraud and arson.
The murder for hire scheme was the second overt act charged in Count One (an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy is an element of conspiracy.) [0]

[0] see p. 5 of the indictment: http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-sdny/legacy/...
This.

Whether true or not, the intention behind drug laws is physical harm and addiction. Additional harms like risk of violence or overdoses due to impurities are secondary at best.

Unless there's judicial activism going on, making that admission is pretty much just handing the keys to freedom over. Why even bother with a trial? Should have done a plea bargain.
Capone was sentenced to eleven years for tax evasion, not more serious criminal offenses.
For an illustration of how this could work, see Manna by Marshall Brain.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Of course he is.

But I think the idea of natural rights is dumb. They're made up by humans. They're enforced by humans. Their exact nature is disagreed upon and debated by humans.

The idea that there is some set of core natural rights that comes from somewhere other than humans is a tactic used to avoid debate on which rights we should and should not have by people unwilling to actually support their ideas with facts or reasoning.

You might as well just say that god told us to do it that way.
I'm not anti-robot. I am pro entry-level job.

> There is very little opportunity to grow beyond the entranceway.

That was just an example. Nobody would show up to flip burgers for $0.25 an hour unless they saw a longer-term payoff down the road.

They might take a job doing menial work for little-to-nothing while they learn the ins and outs of a business and eventually apply for a more substantive role. We could call them 'apprentices'.
I'm certainly not saying he was convicted of hiring a hit man. He was convicted of a conspiracy to traffic narcotics, one overt act of which was the attempt to procure a murder for hire.

The argument I'm challenging is the notion that the factual claim of Ulbricht's attempt to hire a hitman wasn't subjected to scrutiny during the trial. It was a specifically introduced factual claim, which Ulbricht's counsel was required to rebut.
Most people don't take the time to find out about anything. Just because they were born with a vote doesn't mean they care. It's a failure of people who do care to inform the ones who don't. It may not be the "morally correct" failing, but you're never going to win that battle, whereas you might get a beachhead with proper outreach.
> It's like asking whether you should keep your homedir or Windows Roaming User folder around forever.

No it isn't. A Firefox profile is a folder full of a mishmash of data, the vast majority of which is inherently not data I want to keep.

I deliberately don't keep my entire home folder when I re-install/upgrade OS X. I get much better results taking a short time to re-set a few preferences than deal with the effects of a carried-over ~/Library folder.

That's exactly what the Firefox profile folder is like - it's not just user data from local storage, it's fucking cookies and crash dumps and shit. Why would I ever want to keep that stuff forever?

> it's the same way it works in native apps in reality

It just really isn't, and it's not surprising that you chose to ignore all the other issues I raised with this suggested "solution".
Credible Amelia Arehart radio signals were ignored as bogus
Anecdotally speaking most of my good IIT/NIT/BITs folks moved out of the country/went for MBAs after graduation.

The average ones got hired locally by multinationals like EBay / Amazon / Google etc..

So the ones who were actually applying to companies like Snapdeal etc.. were the 4 point someones who really have nothing but an "IIT degree" on their Resume.

I interviewed a couple of those for our startup. Honestly speaking, we found more interesting people via Employee referrals - even if they didn't graduate from these universities.
Thanks for the feedback. I've updated the template to include the source.
Indeed. This is an exemplary jail sentence: in theory it should be possible to create a perfect dark market, and there is nothing that the FBI can do about it, so they have to implant fear to try to reduce the amount of people who are willing to create the next SR...
I agree. In all likelihood, he'll be found guilty on the murder for hire, which is yet to be tried: give him 20 on the drug marketplace, since he'll likely get life on the murder for hire.
On top of that many modern defenses are based on IP reputation, or black lists. There are several companies that track the reputation of all 4 billion IPv4 addresses. Scores are updated every 5 minutes. With several quadrillion IPv6 addresses this will be a lot harder to do.
If you want data about damage to society, just look at basically any statistic related to the war on drugs.
By "site-based URL handler", do you mean https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web-based_protocol_...?
How Do You Get the Maximum Return on Your Advertising Budget
No, he'd have been a shitty competitor to eBay no one would have ever heard of. Illegality is/was the whole point.
You may be aware already, but the LowRISC people are planning on putting tagged memory into their chip. Yay!
That's why I said proportional.
Hey, this is pretty cool!

A few suggestions; feel free to take or leave them:

-The playing area zooming towards the ball was really distracting and made playing difficult

-Create a ball speed setting or easy/med/hard

-Add mouse control. The CL/CCL arrows can be counter intuitive

-Give each player a different colored/textured paddle. I lost track of mine a few times.

Other than that, well done!
no, it's a really contrived point.
Sarah Haider: Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique
Please let's all agree that scroll-jacking must die.
EFF Battles Abuse of Site-Blocking Court Orders
There is a huge legal difference between getting caught doing drugs vs facilitating the trafficking of mass quantities of controlled substances. I don't think casual marijuana smokers should get all up in arms like "hey man they are just going after everybody now!", do they offer the same support to heroin cartels?

Even if you're against the war on drugs I don't think you should really take it as a personal slight when someone operating on this scale gets arrested. Unless you really 100% believe that distribution of heavy narcotics doesn't damage society.
Why do you assume you must take on an inferior person just because you need someone (11b really sounds crazy to me)? I don't live in the middle east but I am sure there are plenty of intelligent and capable people either as marketers, developers, designers etc. I just don't buy the fact that your problem is so unique or tough that you couldn't find someone smart to work on it with you in some capacity. I will agree though that finding the right person can be tough and may take longer then you have. As for how to find people, networking is the best way still.

So a few options.

1. Say this isn't for you and forge off on your own, chances of success are directly related to your ability and determination.

2. Find an employee, if only temporary to help meet the minimum requirement to get you through the process. Educate and have this employee be your marketer, designer, product research and all around take care of things guy.

3. Still go forward while searching for a 2nd person, if you find one great, if not make sure you have superior product demo and focus your efforts on convincing them why you are worth backing. Have proof you are working to find another person, and have an answer for the question that seems reasonable. Rules are made to be broken, at least that is a saying here in the US, and fairly well lived/proven, but that doesn't mean everyone that wants to, gets the opportunity.
Mistaking some delusional world of zero crime doesn't do any good for people living in reality. That 'moral dealer' who hands out clean needles would be doing good. I guess the moral high-ground is ignoring the number of users who die or contract diseases from dirty needles? That's a pretty fucked perspective.

I see an issue with treating drug users (esp. recreational drug users) as somehow "less than human" because of their choices. If a heroin user dies or contracts disease from using a dirty needle, that is a sad thing and I would applaud a dealer who hands out clean needles to his clients to prevent it. Regardless of my stance on drugs and drug users.
The fact that he explicitly paid for the murder and torture of former employees and their roommates is enough for me to feel like life in prison is fair. Yes, an actual murder is a worse outcome than a murder-for-hire that never materialized, but if you're a rich and sophisticated drug-kingpin attempting to commission torture and murder to secure your criminal enterprise, the punishment should be the most severe. Murder is always a heinous crime, but in my view, it is more heinous to direct an organization that systematically orchestrates torture and murder for profit.
That's very unlikely to work, now what?
> I'm sorry for using the word "disruptive".

I have the same amount of guilt you do when I use that word. But in this case I think it was probably the best word. Annoying when normal words get reclassed into buzzwords.
Isn't it funny how the people who appeal to rationalism are the ones who happen to not manage it themselves? I mean, I'm not saying I'm rational, but I'm also not fronting about it.

What "rational", of course, usually means, is "agreeing with me", and so there are so very many false Scotsmen in attendance.
Uber will begin tracking your location while running in the background
Definitions are boringly pedantic and beside the point. I'm saying the bigger issue is the lack of output on a national level due to undertraining, underemployment, etc.

I'd like to point out that my assertion that has been basically ignored in favor of less interesting semantic arguments.
> our foundering fathers

Accurate slip of the keyboard, given the eroding Constitution.
My son used to watch lots of TV at 4, but by 5 he basically stopped in favour of Youtube - mostly things like gameplay videos (Minecraft...). Now he's 6 and I actually can't remember the last time he watched a TV channel..
Sorry, but an idea, no money, no experience, no connections, does not a 'rare, once in a lifetime opportunity, up for grabbing' make.

I would suggest that you seek out seed money before looking for developers. Alternatively, you could take three months or so to go through one of the many development bootcamps, and pick up the skills you need to build your own demos and also the technical knowledge you'll need to vet candidates. It's also a great place to find hungry, scrappy folks who like to code.

Also, drop the NDA. At this point, it just shows how inexperienced you are. If the idea is so powerful that you are afraid it will be easy for someone to run with, don't share it with anyone - make it yourself, and keep the success for yourself :)

Good luck.
Once you had digital mastering and digital manipulation, the loudness wars would have happened no matter what the output medium.

What I don't understand is how this appeals to the bean counters. Were any of the best-selling albums of all time noticeably louder than their peers?
The person Ross hired as a hitman was an undercover agent who had been befriending Ross online for over a year.
> Yes, they do, you just don't understand rights.

No, I think you're the one who doesn't seem to understand them.

> Rights are the things that we would all agree should be legally protected if we were all rational about it.

We, as a society, have a system in place to work out this sort of thing. That system has already decided that we don't have this right. If you were in fact able to convince enough people that your position is the most rational then your available rights can be changed. Your argument is valid but your conclusion is wrong based on the available facts.
Love this.

The post mentions using the blockchain for unique username registration and mapping to public key hashes, and as it turns out there's a project I and others have been working on that does exactly this called Blockstore.

Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out: https://github.com/namesystem/blockstore

The way it works is there's a mapping between a unique name and a hash in the blockchain, and then there's a mapping in a DHT from the hash to the data to be associated (which can be a plain old public key and can also be a JSON file that references a public key and other identity information).
Deep Sensorimotor Learning
Not at all. I used to read the SR forums, and a common concern was dealing with packages getting inspected (without opening them - presumably drug sniffing dogs or some other drug detection mechanism) and then getting a letter/visit from the police. It was rare enough (and you had plausible deniability since anyone could have sent that package) that it wasn't a huge concern, though.
This was a fantastic find--thank you for the trip down memory lane; I literally want to binge watch all of this movies RIGHT NOW.
So alleged hearsay is now enough to raise the sentence to a life in prison in US? O.o
I would choose to go solo, but don't hitch everything on this single incubator. Build your prototype and cast your net wider. A lot of the top US accelerators are accepting plenty of foreign entrepreneurs into their programs.

Good luck!
You could take a programmer with different and perhaps lesser skills and have them work on tasks that require different and perhaps lesser skills. Working with and managing people with different and perhaps lesser skills is going to be necessary if your startup is to grow, and gaining experience doing so will be of value to you throughout your career.

Treating people with different and perhaps lesser skills with respect is a valuable character trait in and of itself and worth developing in and of its own right.

Good luck.
> many even see the cyclic regeneration of the entire population as a net benefit to humanity

Is life a team sport, where we're all just trying to get as many points as possible for "team human"?

The flaw in your argument is that at some point, you're going to have to pick a maximum allowable age. How old is "too old"? At what age should we set mandatory executions? And, on a side note, have you seen Logan's Run?
Ask HN: What are some useful little js methods?
Actual little bits of js you've written/used over the years to do useful things. Example: convert an rgb color to hex equivalent. Not looking for libraries. Just ideas of little helper methods we've written or utilized time and again.
So a murder is hidden under a less serious offence? Just search for the phrase murder in the document you linked. How many hits? Zero
Build something awesome. Arbitrary rules vanish when people believe they can make more money with you (than from those that followed the rules).
> it's hard to understand why it should be replaced with neverending calligraphy practice in spaceships.

Those people are free to kill themselves. That's not just a flippant response- nobody is talking about forced immortality.
Let's ignore supply and demand for the moment. What would be a fair wage? I argue it would be fair to get paid as much as you invest, an hour of work is an hour of work, in first approximation no matter what you do. Pretending to work obviously doesn't count, you really have to work as good as you can. If you do a hard job, say risking your health in a mine, you should get paid better because of that. There should also be some gradient to account for skill and experience compared with others doing the same or similar work. And if you spend several years at university to obtain the skills required for the job this is an upfront investment that has to be paid back by the wage or their might be a lack of incentives to go down this road.

In essence it really boils down to you invest an hour of your lifetime - working or upfront to get prepared for the job - and you get paid for that hour, what exactly you do does not matter much modulo some adjustments for especially risky or unpleasant jobs.
"an artificial neural network for machine vision (whatever that is)" -- I think you should probably get your news/insights elsewhere...
Yea, the counterexample is pretty much all of their products. Gmail, Translate, pretty much every product was either acquired or created through internal experimentation afaik.