It does in fact share memoization. Easy shared state is a key strength of the single-threaded model. :)
Re: Node.js, you're right. The core of the debate is whether the single-threaded, evented model is a legitimate theoretical approach to concurrency. That programming style is the same across Node.js, Tornado-web, EventMachine, etc. It translates literally to Tornado-web because the idioms are the same.
It's good to see that in this day and age the government has still mastered the tried and true "print, sign, scan, email, then download via FTP" approach to file downloads.
As someone who downloaded the corpus I can tell you that's not how it works. What you are downloading from nist is a java twitter html crawler and a list of tweet ids that you have to download directly from twitter.
It took me a week or more to download the complete 16 million tweets.
Another problem with the corpus is the fact that (at the time I downloaded the tweets) around 2% of the tweets in the corpus were no longer available from twitter as users deleted their twitter account. The longer you wait, the more tweets are going to be unavailable.
It's a complicated issue. I actually kind of admire him, for his ability to take a politically incorrect side in an issue that's more complicated than people would like to believe. Even if it is just because he's a bit of a jerk.
That said, I'm afraid to touch GoDaddy due to the horror stories about their bait-and-switch tactics.
Cambridge, MA– Moments ago, Aaron Swartz, former executive director and founder of Demand Progress, was indicted by the US government. As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading said articles is actually felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison.
“This makes no sense,” said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal; “it’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”
“It’s even more strange because the alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,” Segal added.
James Jacobs, the Government Documents Librarian at Stanford University, also denounced the arrest: “Aaron’s prosecution undermines academic inquiry and democratic principles,” Jacobs said. “It’s incredible that the government would try to lock someone up for allegedly looking up articles at a library.”
Demand Progress is collecting statements of support for Aaron on its website at …URL…
“Aaron’s career has focused on serving the public interest by promoting ethics, open government, and democratic politics,” Segal said. “We hope to soon see him cleared of these bizarre charges.”
Demand Progress is a 500,000-member online activism group that advocates for civil liberties, civil rights, and other progressive causes.
About Aaron
Aaron Swartz is a former executive director and founder of Demand Progress, a nonprofit political action group with more than 500,000 members.
He is the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion. In conjunction with Shireen Barday, he downloaded and analyzed 441,170 law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the results were published in the Stanford Law Review. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.
He has also assisted many other researchers in collecting and analyzing large data sets with theinfo.org. His landmark analysis of Wikipedia, Who Writes Wikipedia?, has been widely cited. He helped develop standards and tutorials for Linked Open Data while serving on the W3C’s RDF Core Working Group and helped popularize them as Metadata Advisor to the nonprofit Creative Commons and coauthor of the RSS 1.0 specification.
In 2008, he created the nonprofit site watchdog.net, making it easier for people to find and access government data. He also served on the board of Change Congress, a good government nonprofit.
In 2007, he led the development of the nonprofit Open Library, an ambitious project to collect information about every book ever published. He also cofounded the online news site Reddit, where he released as free software the web framework he developed, web.py.
Press inquiries can be directed to demandprogressinfo@gmail.com or 571- 336- 2637
“This makes no sense,” said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal; “it’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”
No it's not. It's like sneaking into the library at night and making photocopies of all the books. Then, upon getting caught, the perpetrator sneaks back into the library in a different disguise and continues to photocopy more books. Repeat this action of getting caught and sneaking back in a few more times and combine this with the fact that his downloading of documents affected JSTOR performance for other legitimate users of the archive and you get a sense of what he's really done.
How is this excusable?
I'm completely onboard with those who claim that we need some reform in scientific publishing, but Aaron's actions smack of low ethical standards to me, not to mention extremely poor judgement on his part.
EDIT: Hi downvoter! Can you please explain why you think I'm wrong?
Not a downvoter, but the way governments are reacting to those demanding transparency is what I call draconian. This is no longer symmetric opposition, this is a way of terrorizing those who want a little more freedom. Faced with obstacles as the one Aaron faced, I would do the same. So sue me.
Disobedience is not the same as terrorism although they would like you to think so. Disproportionate punishments are what I term a terrorist act. Stop being such a conformist and stop using their language. Every time you test these boundaries and fight for it you will be fighting for your freedoms.
Fair enough. I agree with most of what you're saying here. I definitely believe that any punishment involving more than a fine and/or some community service would be disproportionate to the crime here.
What I didn't like was the statement portraying him as some kind of hero. I'm just pointing out that he's not. He didn't have a legal right to be using the documents, he shouldn't have been trying to download the documents using a guest account at MIT obtained by submitting false information, and he certainly shouldn't have tried to get back into the network after being banned multiple times.
If his goal was to put a lot of scientific papers into the public domain, I can think of many other ways he could have achieved this. So I'm also a bit puzzled by his approach here.
Stop being such a conformist and stop using their language.
This attack seems rather uncalled for.
Every time you test these boundaries and fight for it you will be fighting for your freedoms.
I can see where you're coming from on this, but I'm not entirely convinced that you're right.
Real-time clickstreams are one of Clicky's most popular features. This is definitely an attempt to win over customers that might otherwise choose the competition.
As far as the creepiness goes... unless you think request logging should be totally disabled, anyone can simply tail their web server's logfile to see real time click data. How is it more of a privacy violation, just because it's easier to read? In fact, the anonymization Mixpanel is doing does more to protect privacy than a simple tail would do.
I could trudge around in my databases to read direct user to user messages. Should I? Should I sell a tool to facilitate doing so?
edit: re: downvotes, Yes I was using argumentum ad absurdum, but I was trying to show that just because you have data doesn't mean analysis of it isn't intrusive.
Why so much backpedaling? You didn't say anything wrong. The article of the author is being an extremist baby, so you decided to be extreme in your response. Seems fair to me.
Agreed. The author is clearly a delusional moron. You could've been a bit more polite about calling him on it, I guess, but sometimes you call a spade a spade.
I certainly stand behind the substance of what I said, but I definitely could have packaged it a bit different. I agree with pg that HN's comment quality has been deteriorating, and to that end I'd rather be part of the solution than the problem.
He doesn't seem to understand the difference between being an employee for a company that was hired by Google and being a Google employee and instead concocts this story about class warfare and injustice.
He doesn't seem to understand the difference between being an employee for a company that was hired by Google and being a Google employee
He differentiated between being a red badge contractor and getting many of the on-site perquisites, versus being a yellow badge, who gets no (visible) benefits whatsoever.
He also clearly states that Google leaned on his employer to fire him, not that Google fired him.
He implied that google leaned on his employer to fire him. He never himself got in touch with google, so we don't know if this is true, do we? For all we know, his managers felt that he was being an unnecessary troublemaker and not wanting to jeopardize the company's relationship with google, decided to fire him on their own.
Well, actually, he said that his employer implied that google leaned on him, but I agree that this doesn't actually tell us much. When firing someone, it's much easier to play the good guy and claim that the individual is getting fired for reasons beyond your control.
Well then he doesn't seem to understand that contracts vary from one employer to another and that temp/contract workers are there to be fired and be hired again by someone else, it's the nature of the job.
As far as most people see it whether these people are contractors, subcontractors, part-time employees doesn't matter. This story is becoming an issue because most people don't care. This is how it looks and this is how people react.
<sarcasm> For some reason, some have an aversion to situations where a group of different race ends up having to wear a different color badge and start work at 4am and get less benefits than those of another race ... </sarcasm>
They way Google reacted and the way it looks is what makes the story interesting. Classification based on badges, surprisingly matches well with a race-based classification as well. Isn't that interesting? These employees work in a separate building, get to work at 4am! Isn't that interesting to at least talk to them? Mention it to your friend? At least I found it interesting even without any class or culture overtones mixed in. Even with a class critique attached onto this, one can at least make another tired comment on the lack of education and job prospects for minorities in California and Google is just one example.
I think the author wanted to do just that. The way Google reacted to it, they pretty much guaranteed for this to become an issue. It is akin to someone who does something that is slightly shameful and a little wrong, and then there is an ambiguous reference made to whatever they are doing, but then they start overreacting, thus betraying that they know they are doing something that not quite right. They could have just acted cool and got away with it. But it is the reaction that in this case betrays the guilty corporate conscience.
