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William Alsup, the coding judge who decides tech cases (theverge.com)
237 points by nkurz on Dec 2, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 42 comments



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.


His middle name is Haskell.


I thought you were just making a lame joke, but alas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Haskell_Alsup


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


> encoded LAME

Clever.


Depends on the bitrate.


Would any official ruling require the use of a Judge monad?


You'd do well to _curry_ favor with him. Wokka wokka wokka!


> 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.


I think there is additional important context which is that this is the opinion of the author not the judge. For such a good piece otherwise the author is a bit up their own ass stating this so matter of factly.

Alsup's words:

> I did not know this recursive feature of the definition. Once it was explained to me, I was like, ‘Okay, that’s kind of cute.'


Pfft, I think it’s cute, not embarrassing. (But to be clear for anyone reading, the first paragraph you quoted is the article author’s opinion, not a quote from Judge Alsup.)


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


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.


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.


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.


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?


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.


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.


An amateur extra ham radio operator as well, incredible.


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.


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.


> so Thank You Lord Jesus for judge Alsup

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


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.


Best HN comment I've ever read.


yes, at a certain point in the sophistication of the economy, there should be some system that leads us to have a few judges who have reasonable expertise in one area or industry (aside from bankruptcy and of course the law). I suspect that the hard part here is avoiding the same type of regulatory capture that you see with executive agencies. Both Wheeler and Pai worked in the telecom industry before leading the FCC. I suspect that the fact that judges are appointed for live/good behavior would help a bit with this.

I think this has happened by coincidence a few times actually. I know that back in the early 1800s, the District of Massachusetts handled a ton of fishing/whaling related cases.


At this point, I'll take what I can get.


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


We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15835430 and marked it off-topic.


It's funny... I've only ever seen processes get detached from their parents, not threads.


It's really too bad that the idea of a useful judiciary is off-topic on HN.


Ruling the wrong way in tech cases may otherwise have unintended side-effects.


Thankfully we don't have to worry about that. Just look at Oracle v. Google -- he considered the entire environment in which the code was written and didn't evaluate the case solely based on the arguments.


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


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


Yeah, contradictory rulings could seriously disrupt the normal order.


He will make some fine hypothetical judgements.


Judging from the downvotes on your comment, I think some fellow HN'ers have failed to make the correct inference as to its meaning (!)...


It's ok. I'm not Heyting them. I'll let them through the turnstile into my Church


Better then the current system that objectifies the working class.


We've come quite a long way though. At least it's not like back in the old days where saying the wrong thing could lead to your head getting detached.


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.


He should be impeached for such a transgression.




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