4,185 karma · joined August 20, 2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...
He's just decided he doesn't want to enforce the law, at least for now.
When we tipped for table service at a restaurant, or a haircut, cab ride, etc, we already had received the service and could tip based on our level of appreciation, without fear of retaliation.
(credit for observation goes to Matt Glassman)
It does appear to matter in the law, and the day you show up in court (if you're foolish/stubborn enough to test it).
I definitely sympathize with the author. As a male, I would expect an even stronger reaction to hanging around watching kids with no clear intent. As others have pointed out, even if you're not committing a crime you can be in for an unpleasant response. It's sad that there are creeps out there. It's sad that as a result, certain innocent behaviors make others nervous (rationally or irrationally). It also gives me a small taste of what it's like to be judged by my category/appearance.
[1]https://www.losangelescriminallawyer.pro/california-penal-co...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-purifier...
I wonder what accounts for the difference in results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Drug_war_quote
I do believe the War on Drugs has been a terrible policy, doing disproportionate harm to Blacks and other marginalized people. I'm not convinced that was the intent by most of those who supported its creation and sustained it.
I think this shows an example of a big problem with StackOverflow compared to its initial vision. I remember listening to Jeff and Joel's podcast, and hearing the vision of applying the Wikipedia model to tech Q&A. The idea was that answers would continue to improve over time.
For the most part, they don't. I'm not quite sure if it's an issue of incentives or culture. Probably some of both. I think that having a person's name attached to their answer, along with a visible score really gives a sense of ownership. As a result, other people don't feel enabled to come along and tweak the answer to improve it.
Then, once an answer is listed at the top, it is given more opportunity for upvotes, so other improved answers don't seem to bubble up. This is a larger issue with most websites that sort by ratings. Generally they sort items based on the total number of votes, including hacker news itself. Instead, to measure the quality of an item, we should look at the number of votes, divided by the number of views. It may be tough to measure the number of views of an item, but we should be able to get a rough estimate based on the position on a page, for example.
If the top comment on a HN discussion is getting 100 views in a minute and 10 upvotes, but the 10th comment down gets 20 views and 5 upvotes, the 10th comment is likely a better quality comment. It should be sorted above the top ranked comment! There would still need to be some smoothing and promotion of new comments to get them enough views to measure their quality as well.
Such a policy on StackOverflow would also help newer, but better answers sort to the top.
On the other hand, the underlying law, the CFAA, is about more than just workplace issues like this issue. Interpreting it broadly could mean that violating some terms of use could be a criminal offense, and I am glad that the court avoided that interpretation. It's better having this law be more specific to the intent of criminalizing "hacking" and leaving other laws or policies to deal with how one might abuse computers or networks that one is otherwise entitled to access.
Now Van Buren is given a key to access the filing room for his duties, and then uses his key to go in and look up the file on some license plate in exchange for money.
Clearly, this is a terrible breach of trust and authority. It should be against policy. He should be fired. Likely there should also be criminal statutes about police or government employees selling or abusing government records.
But he's not guilty of breaking and entering. He was given access to that data, even if this is not what he was supposed to be going in there for.
As one of the justices noted, if merely misusing computer access that you were otherwise allowed to access were a criminal offense, then potentially "an employee sending a personal email or checking sports scores on a work device" could be criminal, rather than just breaking a company policy.
But that's just the surface reason. The deeper reason is because of HN's design which seems to weight flags much more heavily than up votes. This means that a non-trivial minority can successfully drag a story off the homepage, even if a majority believes it is important and worthy of discussion, and even if the comments are actually constructive.
Unfortunately we are not able to see what the count of flags are, and I don't know the scoring algorithm to see what portion of minority is needed to make a story disappear, or if it is even greater than a fixed portion (i.e. whether flag count may have a greater than linear effect, compared to linear support from up votes).
I have heard the rationale of attempting to avoid flame wars and heated discussion of controversial topics, but I'm not sure that it's the only way or worth the price of making things important to most of the community disappear. So far, follow up submissions seem to still be on the home page, but as I write this comment, I can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 already drop from the top position down to #6 and I wonder if it will disappear also.
I hope that HN may reconsider what options are available to keep discussion constructive and useful while still allowing important topics to be seen and discussed without being buried by a minority.
Edit - 2 additional notes a few minutes later:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 has now dropped more than halfway off the front page.
- Whoever downvoted this comment, please consider responding as well.
> As the recovery effort got under way, one executive suggested they call it Project Phoenix. Coviello immediately nixed the name. “Bullshit,” he remembers saying. “We're not rising from the ashes. We're going to call this project Apollo 13. We're going to land the ship without injury.”
This is the sort of response that would increase my trust to choose this company in the future. This is not easy. Our human instincts naturally kick in to minimize our faults and protect ourselves. Choosing to put the customer first at risk of your own reputation is hard, but the right choice, even for your reputation in the end.