>For the last two decades, full-time workers with permanent jobs have had the right to take a six-month leave of absence to launch a company (or alternatively, to study or to look after a relative).
These are unpaid leaves, right?
I think it's a great idea, particularly for a business of a certain size. I know many of my peers leave their jobs because they are looking for an extended break. If they didn't have to leave, it could be a win for both employees and employers.
I only recently got engaged in HackerNews. The UI isn't beautiful. There are minimal features. It's my favorite content aggregator right now. Obviously, HN isn't a blogging platform, but it accomplishes many of the things medium is trying to.
I wonder if many more partners will give up on medium? Hackernoon is moving away because of a change to medium's advertising policy.
Hard disagree. It's barely acceptable on desktop, but on a mobile device it's awful. All the links and buttons are tiny, and they're all so crowded together I frequently end up doing dumb things like tapping "flag" when I meant to tap "discuss."
With just a little bit of work HN's UI could be so much better.
Seriously I get that they want the 'shit plain look to scare off normal people' schtick but it's also terrible for accessibility.
For being a company that beats the inclusive and equality drum they seem to go out of their way to make it impossible for people who don't have incredible dexterity or eyesight to use this site.
I love the simple layout but make it accessible to everyone.
I was going to disagree with you on the sites accessibility but after taking a closer look it is pretty bad, though for different reasons. Tables everywhere, missing alt tags, doc language missing, no form labels..
As far as aesthetics I actually like the current site. It serves its purpose well IMO. The real accessibility issues should be addressed per WCAG.
I've been using hn.premii.com for years now ... also available as apps across iOS, Android and Windows UWP. Gives me an optimal reading experience on all my devices, but I'm mostly a lurker so YMMV.
Sure it looks new and mobiley but all I really want (not OP btw) is the same site but with bigger buttons on mobile.
I have it set up on iOS to auto zoom and to raise the font size a couple clicks but the action buttons are still hard to click on and at least once a day I flag or downvote something I have to then undo.
Unless you have perfect eyesight and dexterity it’s a chore.
I might make what i seek actually. At least then I’ve scratched my own itch.
Most complaints seem to be focused on mobile. Eh, on mobile I only consume content, so I don't really care if it's hard to post a comment or vote on mobile. Desktop computing is my jam.
And any complaints about its appearance on desktop are easy to tune to user preferences using a userscript. I have a simple userscript that changes the color scheme to a dark theme I quickly concocted. (Part of why I don't even bother to contribute on mobile is because mobile platforms are so constrained that a quick and dirty userscript isn't particularly easy to use.)
I'm with medium, but I didn't start there until they allowed for you to use your own domain.
If I want to leave I can re-house my content somewhere else and write a script to have the URLs match medium's article identifiers so I don't lose (much) Google-juice.
Not ideal, and not a perfect escape plan, but better than leaving all my eggs in one pretentious basket.
>One interviewee, in response to a question about what advice he would give a potential whistle-blower, wrote, “[Can they] afford 5 years of their life in turmoil?” Another said, “Part of your ability to do anything about this is keeping yourself together,” and suggested that whistle-blowers find someone “like a minister or a shrink who’s confidentiality-protected,” because “this could go on for a while.” A high proportion of whistle-blowers reported divorces or other marital strain, family conflicts, and stress-related health issues including shingles, autoimmune disorders, panic attacks, insomnia, and migraines. Several of them said that the financial consequences were devastating.
More than anything, I didn't realize how long these cases seem to take. But I wonder: if there was a way to reduce the duration of the cases, would that reduce the impact on whistleblowers? Is that possible somehow? Retaliation is also a big concern, of course, as the article makes clear.
Also, I found this interesting:
>the first documented whistle-blowing case in the United States took place in 1777, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when a group of naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, witnessed their commanding officer torturing British prisoners of war. When they reported the misconduct to Congress, the commanding officer charged Shaw and Marven with libel, and both men were jailed. The following year, Congress passed a law protecting whistle-blowers, and Shaw and Marven were acquitted by a jury.
But I wonder: if there was a way to reduce the duration of the cases, would that reduce the impact on whistleblowers?
I remember reading somewhere recently about the standard M.O for federal cases. They take a long time in order to build an extremely solid case. That's why federal conviction rates are so high.
Intuitively it makes sense. If you're gonna go after some naughty people for doing naughty things, you really don't want to rush the investigation and have the findings fall apart at trial.
This is totally incorrect. The high conviction rate is a result of extremely high maximum sentences. People who are 100% innocent often plead guilty after being threatened with a 30-year prison sentence that would be only 1 or 2 years under local law.
Many federal crimes are unconstitutional and deliberately vague, like "lying (not volunteering incriminating evidence) to an investigator" and "mail fraud" which is just a way to charge you in federal court where the odds are stacked against you.
The US federal judicialry is a kangaroo court. 99% of federal crimes should be repealed and maximum sentences reduced to be in line with state laws.
Federal jury selection is also suspect, especially in cases involving "national security".
> like "lying (not volunteering incriminating evidence) to an investigator"
This is literally the purpose of the 5th amendment. If you get asked a question where the answer would incriminate you, you are well within your rights to refuse to answer the question. Taking the path of deliberately attempt to mislead investigators is most certainly a crime and it should be.
In principle I agree with you. In practice however, the FBI just uses this to harrass people. Look at what happened to Marth Stewart. She was totally innocent, did not say anything factually incorrect, but the feds thought she exagerated in some of her answers. That level of subjectivity shouldn't be involved in determining a criminal offense.
He's probably being down-voted for saying erroneous things like
> The high conviction rate is a result of extremely high maximum sentences. People who are 100% innocent often plead guilty after being threatened with a 30-year prison sentence that would be only 1 or 2 years under local law.
That's erroneous because very few federal defendants actually face such long sentences, so those that do so pleading guilty is not a plausible explanation for high conviction rates.
Federal sentences for a particular instance of a crime are based on the class of the crime and on the details of the particular instance. The class sets an upper limit, which often is long, up to 20 years, but it is the details that determine how much you can actually get. To actually get anywhere near that 20 years you have to have a lot of the details against you. Typically this means you caused a lot of damages or harm, had multiple prior convictions for similar crimes, where doing it as part of organized crime, and similar things.
Swartz is a good example. A lot of reporting said he faced 30 years or 50 years or similar big numbers. Actually, he was looking at maybe 6 or 7 years if things went as favorably as possible for prosecutors.
The DOJ bears a lot of the blame for that bad reporting. They make no attempt in the press releases announcing indictments to actually compute the maximum sentence for the particular instance of the crime. They just give the maximum that it is possible for the worst possible instance of that crime committed by the worst possible defendant.
Here's a good article on federal sentence length [1].
When you say "he was looking at maybe 6 or 7 years if things went as favorably as possible for prosecutors"
Do you know this for a fact?
Because the way I understand it is, he was facing multiple decades in prison IF all charges stuck. And once you got to trial, all charges can stick. It has happened. So he was facing 35 years. So saying he wasn't is just wrong.
Your 6-7 years is 'probably'.
I think what your saying is: The federal government doesn't threaten you with 35 years, they threaten you with 10x3.5 years, and since it is possible that not all 10 will stick... it's not really a 35 year threat?
I mean, if I threaten to punch you 10 times but I might stop at 1,2,3 or any number and I probably won't get to 10, but we can negotiate before I start, is it not a 10 punch threat?
To me it seems like you are splitting hairs in order to defend the indefensible. The practice of tacking on as many charges to get people to plea bargain is unethical and fascist.
There's no way to know it as a fact because the judge is legally allowed to apply any sentence up to that maximum. His link shows that most judges follow the guidelines, and vary rarely go over them. Intelligent decisions are ones that are made after understanding probabilities. Unfortunately Aaron decided to take the guaranteed outcome of suicide over the small chance that he'd serve multiple decades. I think we all can agree that that was not the right choice.
We see this sort of "up to" crap all the time in our culture. It's still misleading. Accurate, but fundamentally misleading and wrong.
So you are saying: Judges never convict people to the maximum sentence? I'm sorry, your point isn't very clear. It's a bit muddled.
Or are you saying that his probably of being sentenced to the maximum was low? If so, how low? And when does it stop being 'intelligent' to consider a small probability with a horribly outcome? I mean, in your intelligent opinion.
I don't think they're saying never. If you look at the recommended guidelines[1], for a crime like Schwartz's the maximum could theoretically be many years, but the guidelines would suggest a sentence between 0 and a few years (he'd be in the first column assuming he didn't have any criminal history. Depending on what modifiers come into play his "offense level" could be as low as 6[2]. Maybe it would be more than that, but he certainly wouldn't hit level 40, which is what it would take to get a 30+ years sentence. Even though a judge can technically give a higher sentence than the guidelines, it's fairly rare— it happened less than 3% of the time in 2017.[3]
Remember the original comment only said that people plea because of the big threat. It is a big threat. And given the fact that you probably wouldn't take a 1:33 chance on Russian roulette, it seem it is a big threat to you.
But not when it is on others. Then it's fine 'because low probability'. In fact, many of the apologists for what happened go as far as to conflate in a single post low probability with no probability.
The 3% who were sentenced above the guideline amount were not chosen at random. They were people who had specific factors in their cases that allowed for an above guideline sentence.
These are factors such as causing a death, causing significant physical injury, causing extreme psychological harm to your victims beyond that one would expect from the crime, abducting people, causing property damage beyond what is taken into account by the guidelines, using weapons during the crime, or torture.
Swartz did not have any of the factors that could end one up in the 3%.
"lot of reporting said he faced 30 years... Actually, he was looking at maybe 6 or 7 years if things went as favorably as possible for prosecutors."
So let me ask again, last time you didn't answer: Is the chance of a 35 year sentence for Aaron 0%?
No? Then do the intellectually honest thing and admit you are wrong. Your correcting somebody by saying wrong things. And then doubling down on it.
Low probability is not 0%. Whatever the probability was, it was real that they could have given him 30 years. Unlikely? Yeah. But I'll bet you wouldn't play Russian roulette at those odds; whatever they may be.
>Low probability is not 0%. Whatever the probability was, it was real that they could have given him 30 years. Unlikely? Yeah. But I'll bet you wouldn't play Russian roulette at those odds; whatever they may be.
But that's the question. The probability is not 0%. It may be %0.01, or %0.001. Can either of us find any existing cases where a defendant with Aaron's background received a 33-level sentence increase? I would propose that that has never happened in cases with similar circumstances to Aaron's. If you can find one, I'd be interested in the citation.
In the absence of any examples, my argument is that the chance of a 35 year sentence is not functionally different from 0%, and Aaron (and any other defendant in this situation) should have made decisions based on the 99% of sentences they were actually likely to receive.
One last note: you mentioned playing Russian Roulette at those odds. Russian Roulette normally has a 16% chance of death. I wouldn't play RR at 16% odds. Would I play it a 0.001% odds? Probably, presuming the benefits of playing RR were of significant value to me.
Aaron's chance of a 35 year sentence was not 16%. It was also not 0.0%. It's somewhere in-between, and unless you have evidence that shows otherwise, I'd personally guess it was below 0.01%, and his choice of suicide remains a tragic one. YMMV.
Read the other apologists. They quote a 3% deviation from sentencing guidelines.
Sentencing guidelines for Aaron were 6-7 years. A single wire charge on max penalty could be 20. All you need is one judge who saw WarGames to want to make an example out of the kid.
I don't know what the probability is. You don't either. Likely no one did. But that probably has weight.
It's disturbing: the callous indifference to that weight by those who question the exact kilos from an arm chair expert point of view.
This whole thing has parallels to other situations:
A Powerful Group is responsible for a system that perpetrated an injustice.
Members of the powerful group are confronted with the injustice. Members have the following reactions:
Denial (high dissonance)
Disgust
Apologists
Apologists do the same thing: They minimize, deny, question and speculate.
What apologists of all kinds don't realize is that even if they are right, they are wrong.
The callous indifference shown, instead of the guttural understanding of something wrong being needed to be made right... is what is so hard to understand. Even if your argument that the official numbers are overblown by x%.
> Read the other apologists. They quote a 3% deviation from sentencing guidelines
In any given year, around 4% of women in the US will get pregnant. Suppose Alice is a sexually active woman in the US who uses the pill religiously, and who requires her sex partners to wear condoms.
Do you think that because 4% of women will get pregnant this year, and Alice is a women, Alice has a 4% chance of getting pregnant?
That's the kind of reasoning you are using with the 3% figure for upward deviations in sentencing. You are assuming that because 3% of sentences are above guidelines, everyone who is sentenced is equally at risk for an above guideline sentence.
> Sentencing guidelines for Aaron were 6-7 years. A single wire charge on max penalty could be 20. All you need is one judge who saw WarGames to want to make an example out of the kid.
A judge cannot just arbitrarily exceed the guidelines like that. There are specific factors and considerations that a judge must cite to justify an upward deviation, and they are not applicable in Swartz's case. A judge who just arbitrarily decided to apply his own criteria to come up with 20 years would have that quickly overturned on appeal as an abuse of discretion.
You want to know what happens to someone in Swartz's situation if he gets a judge that wants to throw the book at him? He gets 7 years. That's the result of a hard line judge accepting an exaggerated damages claim and not applying any of the factors that would allow lowering the sentence. That's why his lawyers, the prosecutors, and outside lawyers all said he would probably actually get at most a few months--the 7 year number is the "judge who saw WarGames to want to make an example out of the kid" number.
I literally said the exact opposite of what you claim I said. Sometimes when I get riled up online it's helpful to take some deep breaths and come back to it later.
We know his own lawyer said that he was unlikely to get more than a couple years, and was plausibly looking at a non-custodial sentence even if convicted.
We also know that the absurd sentences you're referring to would be departures from the federal sentencing guidelines, which spell out where in the range of possible sentences each specific case lands.
Suppose I toss a brick through the window of a government office overnight when no one is inside, causing $101 worth of damage. I could be charged with felony destruction of government property, a crime with the statute says has a maximum sentence of 10 years and a $250k find.
Am I facing 10 years in prison? No! That's because the way sentencing works under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines is that the sentence range is looked up in a table whose rows range from short sentences up to the maximum (10 years in this case). The biggest factor in that lookup is how much monetary damage I caused. At $101 I'm going go get a row with a sentencing range that is something like up to a year or so.
To push it up to where my sentencing row actually includes 10 years I'd have to have done a lot more damage, such as blown up the building.
(There are other factors that also go into picking the row, such as if I have prior convictions for similar crimes).
When I'm indicted, though, the DOJ press release will tout that I've been charged with a crime with up to 10 years and $250k fines as penalties. They'd say the same thing when indicting someone who blew up the whole building. Their press releases make no attempt to convey the sentence the person is actually facing based on the facts the DOJ is alleging about that person's alleged crime.
In the case of someone charged with multiple crimes there is another factor that leads to inflated numbers. The same underlying acts can often support more than one charge. Similar crimes are grouped together for sentencing under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, and if you are charged with and convicted of more than one crime from the same group based on the same underlying acts, you are only sentenced for one of them.
Unfortunately, this grouping is often ignored in press releases and reporting about potential sentencing.
In most cases, those multi-decade numbers you see people talk are due to one or both of the aforementioned issues: (1) not taking into account what the person is actually alleged to have done, and (2) ignoring grouping if the person is charged with more than one thing.
Here is a detailed analysis of Swartz's possible sentencing [1]. The earlier article by the same author looking at what he was charged with is also interesting [2].
Your 6-7 years is 'probably'. PEOPLE DO GET MAXIMUM. It happens. Therefore you saying it doesn't won't change anything. Your equating low probability with no probability. This is a false equation.
Have some intellectual honesty and admit you were wrong.
Did you read the link? See popehat [0] as well. The prosecutors said he should get the 6 or 7 years. And, if the judge went crazy and ignored the guidelines, this is what appeals are for. You seem to be the one lacking intellectual honesty here!
People are risk averse. The maximum sentences exist to scare people into irrationally pleading guilty when they are innocent. Federal maximum sentences are out of line with state sentencing because the federal government is less local and less accountable. Many federal crimes exist solely to trump up this maximum possible sentence. Politically connected people use this system to protect themselves against whistleblowers and political activists like Swartz and Snowden. I dont think you have addressed any of these points.
... or they know about the time a woman in Pennsylvania was able to seek justice by getting her murder-attempting neighbor on mail fraud when the local cops wouldn't do anything.
Or Wen Ho Lee - charged with 59 counts of espionage (stealing nuclear secrets). Eventually was convicted/plead to one count of mishandling data and went on to get a $1mil settlement.
Agreed. This feels like a classic causation v correlation problem.
Of course when a substitute improves, some people will switch. However, the root cause is the declining quality and lack of improvements to the system that even gives a substitute the chance to compete.
I honestly don't understand how 100 years ago nyc was able to build an expansive subway system and today it takes decades to add a new station. I know it's a combination of land costs, labor costs, corruption, regulation, underground congestion (and that the original lines were built by private companies) but I still don't really understand the situation.
My general impression is that worker safety was pretty much disregarded compared to modern standards.
A quick search turned up this piece[1] on 16 deaths around 1904 during construction of a NYC subway line. There are famous pictures such as this one of construction of high rises in New York[2] without any safety equipment whatsoever. But it was built in 14 months! All that safety gear is expensive and slows down construction. In climbing, we often joke 'no belay, no delay', because of how fast you can climb when you don't take the time to fix your ropes, etc. [3]
Agreed. I feel like a barely flinch at these headlines anymore. My guess is most people also are getting desensitized, which means the PR costs of a hack are decreasing.
We need some mechanism to increase costs (or fundamentally change the way data ownership works)
I think part of the problem is that the impact for individuals is also decreasing. Right now, if you want to know my email, my address, my SSN and the name of my family members, you can find it in some torrent file somewhere on the internet. There just isn't a whole lot about me that isn't already available through the bazillion previous data breaches. Only people who were not part of those are impacted by the new ones.
So my credit is already frozen, I already monitor my reports, I already know that most emails I get with personal information is fishing... one more literally doesn't do anything.
We can only think about the future generations at this point, who aren't yet impacted. People are really bad at that though (see: global warming).
Great and infuriating article. There's also issues with eyewitnesses testimony and lineups that have been well documented, meaning the rate of wrongful conviction may be quite high.
"The National Registry of Exonerations has documented 553 cases since 1989 in which someone was convicted on false or misleading forensic evidence and later cleared. The growing list of exonerations includes a Texas man whose 1987 murder conviction, based on bite-mark evidence, was thrown out in December, and an Illinois man declared innocent in January in the retrial of a murder case that hinged on dubious ballistics evidence.
But the exonerations likely represent only a fraction of the cases in which faulty forensics sent innocent people to prison, researchers say."
Is there any research estimating how many wrongly convicted people may be incarcerated? How could that even be estimated?
Not without enough people willing to enter the related forensic science labor pools, to make a point.
Even after you’ve filtered for all the cases you could want, you’re probably going to end up with a large number. Rechecking all of the evidence in each case to either reaffirm or exonerate the people in prison because of that evidence is a labor intensive task.
Just a note that eyewitnesses testimony can be very helpful in most investigations, it just has to be handled very careful. However it often isn't. As you say, lineups can be particularly tricky.
I mention this because often on this topics people say "eyewitnesses testimony is always unreliable!" when actually it's a bit more complicated than that.
Saying that something is always unreliable isn't the same as saying it is never correct. Eyewitness testimony is an important part of any prosecution, but it should never be relied on, and juries need to be informed of the unreliability.
How were they conspiring to limit labor competition?
Completely agree constant vigilance is important. It also shouldn't matter that many employees can switch jobs. All employees cannot (personal circumstances, visas, etc). It also doesn't waive the company of its responsibility for fair pay.
This lawsuit[1] should be better well known in tech circles. I think it is one of the reasons salaries have been going sky-high at to top tech companies over the last five years. It is really too bad the class action lawyers settled for a relatively small amount and did not go to trial for a larger settlement and to expose more info on what they did.
Also, why do you need an android version at first? Author says the app is useless without it but I don't understand why