dreamweapon

This morning, as always, my son was up and dressed before the rest of the household; he likes time to play Minecraft before school starts. But he also cleaned the dirty glass on the woodstove, started the fire and brought wood into the house. Because he wants to.

The whole point is that they let him "slack off" sometimes because they've chosen to let him feel empowered to make his own decisions about how he spends his time generally. And they've seen that it pays off -- sometimes he plays minecraft, but most of the time he's on the ball, helping with chores and such. And (they say) he's doing it because he wants to, not because he's told to.

Here's a novel idea - don't let your kid play minecraft until he starts doing better in school.

Again, you're missing the main point of the article -- it's not that kid is failing school (and needs to be disciplined back into shape); it's that the school is failing the kid.

The user above may have meant it as sarcasm, but the funny part is, this is in fact pretty much what the cops were saying about her in the weeks after her murder.

The officers involved in the operation were suspended with pay, and the family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city.

Message to the officers, and to their brethren colleagues in the profession being, in so many words: "Aw shucks, it was just a little misunderstanding. After all, she didn't follow instructions, did she? Don't beat yourselves up over it."

By the time Rachel was twelve, she had been a ballerina, a Brownie, an equestrian, and a Weeki Wachee Springs Little Mermaid contestant; by eighteen, she had learned to play the flute and the piano, gone skydiving, and hiked the Grand Canyon. By twenty-three, she had completed an undergraduate degree in psychology, interned at a mental-health institute, and travelled internationally. She loved to cook—she’d prepare elaborate multicourse meals for friends and deliver homemade matzo-ball soup to an ailing classmate. She was given to hatching big plans: She had initially dreamed of going into counselling, but decided to apply to culinary school. She would invent a new form of therapy, she told her dad; perhaps troubled kids who hated talking to a therapist from an overstuffed couch would open up as she taught them how to bake cakes and make spaghetti carbonara.

That's not what the court found. Otherwise the charges wouldn't have been dropped.

It sounds like you're conflating the issue of whether he violated the "spirit" of the law (or whether he was, in your view, just plain morally culpable somehow) -- versus what the law actually had to say about his actions.

Like Rayiner said, in layman's terms, he got off on a technicality.

If you want to minimize any sense of exoneration or vindication the accused might want to derive from the court's decision, by saying he "got off on a technicality", that's fine.

But to claim that he "definitely violated" the law when the courts found that he definitely did not -- I'm just not sure I see the point in that.

As good a synopsis of the last 60 years of this country's foreign policy, as any.

On what basis, may we ask?

The only statements from the court that I'm aware of are those confirming that a significant amount of proprietary code (in comparison to the amount of OS code) was taken.

But not as to the "value" of the copied bits, or their potential to otherwise wreak havoc.

"Ambitious" is a bit charitable, in this context.

"Patently vacuous" -- to an extent that suggested, at the very least, a breakdown in the internal controls and safeguards (on the part of both the FBI and the prosecutor's office) designed to present precisely this kind of a fiasco from happening -- might be a better description.

Except that you're starting with a false premise: the offenses for which Aleynikov was initially charged -- theft of trade secrets, and transportation of stolen property in interstate commerce -- were in no way as clear cut as simply "taking a painting from a private gallery." As you are no doubt aware, from your detailed knowledge of the case.

you think the police should need a statement from a 3rd party art historian in order to make an arrest?

What the FBI (and the prosecution team) have primarily been faulted for has been their (by now obvious, if not admitted) failure to understand the basic nature of the charges against the accused -- to the extent that they missed the fact that his conduct would not even have constituted an offense against either statute.

In addition, yes, there's the matter of how much the "stolen" (or rather, copied) bits were actually "worth" (or whether they could, in fact, "be used to manipulate markets in unfair ways", per GS's initial complaint.) Should the FBI have waited to consult an outside authority to make an independent assessment of these claims before making an arrest? That I cannot say.

But that both the premier criminal investigative arm of the richest country in the world -- and the highest-profile prosecution office tasked with keeping us safe from white collar crime, in that same country -- should have known that the "value" of copied source code just might be a teensy, weensy bit trickier and more nuanced to assess than that of say, an Edvard Munch painting pilfered from a major gallery in broad daylight? Or that they should have like, you know, read the actual text of the statutes he was being prosecuted under before filing actual charges against him (and throwing him in the klink for a year as a protective measure)? We should hope so.

As if everyone hasn't been stealing from everyone else's UX, like, all the time, since the public internet became a thing.

Nor is it widely adhered to, in colloquial usage.

No. Both "who" and "that" may be used to anchor relative clauses with human antecedents. To quote [1]:

Most writers use 'that' and 'which' as the relative pronouns for inanimate objects, and who as the relative pronoun for humans. This widespread habit has led to the mistaken belief that using that in reference to humans is an error. In fact, while most editors prefer who for people, there is no rule saying we can’t use that, and that has been widely used in reference to people for many centuries.

In other words, my original sentence was perfectly grammatical, and in regard to the original commenter's presentation skills -- and their correlation to his employability and salary potential -- I was simply stating the obvious. But this being HN, I've been downvoted and/or flamed at least 8 times for it.

[1] http://grammarist.com/usage/that-who/

The kind that use proper spelling and punctuation, perhaps?

They might work "more", but that doesn't mean that their actual output is any better than that of their family-raising peers.

So if the ousted dilettante[1] head of a struggling division of some fading megacorp says it, it must be true?

[1] See, for example, his positions on patent trolling, and his quack cures for global warming.

Specifics? Evidence?

I think you're missing a major point: unless FB has something like a CDN physically located inside of Turkey -- or has some other corporate presence there -- then it is under no legal obligation to comply with its laws (or court orders) whatsoever. The reality is that FB is complying with the Turkish government's requests for no other reason than that it chooses to, because it considers the (perceived) business advantages to be more important than the social and human costs of doing so.

Sounds like a blanket rationalization that can be applied to virtually any kind of corporate-powered environmental or human rights abuse at the hands of despotic regimes everywhere:

"Abusive practice X is the responsibility of government Y, not hapless company Z, which would surely perish if it did it did not bend over and fulfill government Y's every whim and fancy."

GitHub does the same.

GitHub doesn't put out puffy and patently false statements about being "committed to building an environment where you can speak freely without fear of violence."

Before that? Every other weekend or so. I don't own a smartphone, and I make a point of staying offline most weekends unless I have a major email backlog to deal with, or something specific to look up.

Even when working on personal coding projects I prefer to stay offline during weekends whenever possible. Very, very useful strategy for maintaining sanity generally, I find, and for making time available for more useful + deserving sources of interaction and stimulation -- like books, music, movies, paintings, architecture, natural scenery, animals, and people.

Apparently yes, sadly.

Even so, I can't imagine this app could possible be worth the time (let alone the cost). Especially when simply lying to people (who aren't close friends anyway), as needed -- or in the case of a good chunk of my direct family, explicitly firewalling ("Look, over the years I've been having various relationships with various people. If any of them become important enough for you to know about, I'll let you know, eventually") to be easy enough, and to work perfectly fine for all concerned.

The bottom line is that intimacy is a gift, and at no point are you obligated to provide it to anyone you don't really consider to be that important in your life -- or in situations that make you uncomfortable.

This also sounds like a major bummer -- aside from the fact that does smacks (way too heavily) of bro culture, it's incredibly off-putting to anyone who doesn't drink (or who does, but thinks drinking in the office -- or drinking heavily in the afternoon on any kind of a regular basis -- is basically pretty stupid).

Precious.

And of course, an entirely different take could be made from your response -- precisely because you do have a solid grounding in CS, you've probably chosen to spend your time with languages with (for want of a better term) more "powerful", and arguably more standard constructions than what Python affords for this kind of a logical switch -- namely, a ternary operator -- which if Python had it, would probably look a lot like this:

    x = y ? 100 : 0

So if you were interviewing for a senior-level, Python-specific position I can see why they'd expect you to know the if-then-else trick. But if it's a secondary language for you, then the feedback that interviewer gave you definitely seems more than a bit off-base.

(DISCLAIMER: No, I don't think Python is a flawed language because it doesn't have a ternary op, or that it should have "stronger CS fundamentals" or any of that. It's just a side aspect or a different, larger point I was making).

Which is precisely the point.