
William Alsup, the coding judge who decides tech cases - nkurz
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-google-judge-william-alsup-interview-waymo-uber?
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matt4077
I you can, read some of the transcripts of Alsup's oral arguments. He is
incredibly witty, he doesn't take any bullshit, yet always seems to remain
fair.

Especially on HN, I often see (a) cynicism, and (b) the idea that a judge
cannot have and show emotions, or that it's somehow "unprofessional" to make a
joke. Alsup is the perfect counterexample how judges (should ideally) behave.

One remarkable passage was in one of the early Waymo vs Uber transcripts,
where he makes an impressive case for the proceedings to be public. There is
nothing he personally gains from public access to these arguments and
documents–he simply believes it to be important for the rule of law.

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jstewartmobile
A) Our megacorps horribly abuse the legal system, and I wrote that from bitter
experience, so _Thank You Lord Jesus for judge Alsup_.

B) Somebody needs to hook homeboy up with DOSBox.

~~~
praptak
> so Thank You Lord Jesus for judge Alsup

Isn't the system fucked if it needs a divine intervention/a hero to function
properly?

~~~
unit91
Theologians distinguish between God's decretive will and God's permissive
will. The decretive will is God's decree that something come about, the
permissive will is His allowing something to come about in the created order.

Thanking God doesn't indicate _how_ something came about (decree or
permission), only that God could have brought about something different and
chose not to. Thus, any blessing, supernatural or natural, flows from the hand
of God.

~~~
jstewartmobile
Best HN comment I've ever read.

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throwaway613834
His middle name is Haskell.

~~~
nkurz
I thought you were just making a lame joke, but alas:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Haskell_Alsup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Haskell_Alsup)

~~~
throwaway613834
The thing about my comments is that you can never quite tell if I've encoded
LAME jokes in them.

~~~
thanatropism
> encoded LAME

Clever.

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jancsika
> These are bad inside jokes, embarrassing markers of an insular culture that
> never anticipated having to explain itself in a court of law.

I love this sentence.

Edit: context-- lawyer talking about GNU, judge asks what GNU stands for,
lawyer tells him, judge responds, "That doesn't make sense." A judge who
himself codes.

~~~
__s
Because all the doublethink acronyms like PATRIOT & SPEECH act are so much
more meaningful

~~~
jancsika
Those are bad acronyms because they hide poorly written law which-- at least
with the PATRIOT act-- time has shown has been abused to extend well past what
its original (conservative) author intended or imagined.

GNU is a bad acronym IMO because it is anti-social to use an inside joke for
the name of an operating system whose raison d'être is to be shared with the
public.

"Hello, I'm Neu. What's your name?"

"My name is This-is-not-my-name."

I feel like Neu should just move on and socialize with other folks, but maybe
that's just me.

~~~
smsm42
I think you put too much importance into the name. Yahoo is not exactly
superior name, neither is Google wich sounds like baby-speak. Amazon is kinda
unrefined too - ih, you called your company "amazing" and added a clever pun,
how cute. And FaceBook? Eugh. Etc etc. Turns out nobody cares.

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cm2187
First article I read in a long time where Basic is mentioned but not followed
by pejorative comments.

This article is a prime example of the need for simple and non intimidating
languages that are accessible to beginners. The sort of languages that should
be taught in schools, exactly for the benefit mentioned in the article: not to
make a generation of programmers but for programming to be part of the common
general culture like electricity or calculus.

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avs733
I'm surprised to see the broader point not being discussed. In the
technological age in which we life, this conceptual understanding of a
different decision by a judicial court is differentiating in how the law is
managed. Alsup is able to execute his job to a more accurate and seemingly
better results because he, rare amongst jurists, has some technical knowledge
of the field at the heart of these cases.

Without such knowledge, courts and those in power seem to more commonly turn
to analogies provided by each side. What makes an analogy is not its accuracy
but how much relatedness the person hearing it feels, especially when we rely
on an adversarial courts system wherein each side is expected to 'explain' how
technology works.

While the complexity of our laws obviously bears some responsibility here, it
would seem that the education and capacity necessary to understanding the
technical arguments is critical. We aren't in the 1700's anymore...if the
judges do not have the ability to understand when they are being misled about
technology what do we do? Are their resources for them to turn to that are
unbiased? Do they have a budget and time to do so? Or do they just rely on
each sides paid expert witness and we role the dice on which argument of how
technology works the judge finds more compelling?

~~~
fnordprefect
A few points:

1\. At least in Australia, where I work, most judges are appointed in their
50s and 60s, meaning those currently on the bench likely went to law school in
the 70s at the latest. Computer classes were relatively rare, and most lawyers
back then did their degrees in Arts and Law. Science/Law degrees did not
become popular (relatively speaking; they're still a distinct minority of
lawyers) until the late 90s. That cohort has not yet been appointed to the
bench.

2\. Judges do have associates or tipstaffs (in the U.S. they're called
"clerks"), and there are a decent number who have STEM degrees. They can, to
some extent, assist the judges in understanding the issues so as to work out
what questions they need to ask to educate themselves and to bring out the
issues in the case.

3\. Managing STEM issues in cases (and this is not just confined to software
but includes science generally, as many cases involve chemistry, biology and
physics) is generally done by lawyers who have relevant degrees. Generally
speaking, we know enough to stop it going off the rails, and we try to pick
experts who know and can explain the concepts to non-technical judges. We try
to educate them, and de-jargonify the issues where appropriate. This is not
that different from picking lawyers with shipping expertise in shipping cases,
insurance expertise in insurance cases, etc.

4\. Thankfully, we don't have juries for civil trials other than sometimes in
defamation cases. Frankly, the use of juries in civil litigation in American
courts is an anachronism that is pretty astonishing to non-US lawyers. (It's
up there with electing some judges.) I think this is the real problem at the
level of fact-finding. Testimony has to be aimed not at intelligent, well-
educated judges who have an open mind and are trying to learn issues about
coding (or the function of mRNA, or stereochemistry, or hydrostatic forces, or
any other specialist area like forensic accounting, or how banks do their
daily reconciliations with each other etc), but at the people who were unable
to dodge jury duty. The idea that a case of any significance is left to a jury
is unfathomable to me.

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zerocrates
It's a real shame there were some patent claims rolled up into the original
Oracle v. Google case. The Federal Circuit does enough damage in its home base
of patent law without getting into major copyright decisions too.

Of course, you could see it as a benefit too, since its limited in the degree
that it binds other courts.

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vvanders
An amateur extra ham radio operator as well, incredible.

~~~
dbcurtis
Love the photo of him with the radio. I was trying to identify the radios, but
can't quite. I'm going to hazard a guess that the transmitter is a
Hallicrafter's HT-44, crystal-controlled, morse-code only transmitter, about
50 Watts out. It looks like the matching receiver stacked on top of it, but
I'm not familiar with that receiver. That would have been a pretty common, and
fairly nice, beginner's rig in those days.

Somewhere in the family archives is a similarly nostalgic photo of me, circa
1972. My radios were not quite as spiffy. For the most part, each crop of
beginners bought the hand-me-down radios from the guys a couple years ahead of
us, and handed them off the same way to the next crop. Fond memories. There is
something about the smell of a hot, dusty, vacuum tube warming up on a winter
evening that is unforgettably sweet.

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labster
We need more judges like him to make the judiciary functional.

~~~
throwaway613834
Indeed. Getting more judges like him at the bench may well be our greatest
imperative.

~~~
thesmallestcat
We can only hope that he has read through the applicative rulings.

~~~
throwaway613834
Yeah, contradictory rulings could seriously disrupt the normal order.

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rocqua
The nine lines:

    
    
        private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex {
             if (fromIndex > toIndex)
                  throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                       ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
             if (fromIndex < 0) 
                  throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
             if (toIndex > arrayLen) 
                  throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
        }
    

That spacing around the final + in the third line is horrendous.

~~~
waivek
He should be impeached for such a transgression.

