I appreciate the HN desire to link to the source, but as I reader I'd really appreciate submitters link to a good summary/analysis for dense subject matter such as court documents or scientific papers. Ideally they'd chose a summary that itself links to the source.
The document isn't dense. I found it pretty straight-forward, actually. It isn't short, but unless you are a member of the "tl;dr" contingent, the gist is pretty easy to discern.
The trick is that things like "Count one charged Auernheimer with conspiracy to violate CFAA § 1030(a)(2)(C) and (c)(2)(B)(ii)" translate to "Count one charged Auernheimer for breaking a law" and things like "See Perez, 280 F.3d at 329; see also Rodriguez-Moreno, 526 U.S. at 281-82 (citing Hyde, 225 U.S. at 356-67)" are references that you don't need to resolve in order to understand.
It also helps if you can translate things like "It is far from clear that this Court has ever “adopted” this test. We have mentioned it only once." into "oh no you didn't".
By "tl;dr" I refer to the attitude that rejects reading something solely based on its length. That is not a good survival skill, any more than rejecting all but candy is a good survival skill in an age of calorie surplus.
There's a difference in that analogy, though. You don't want to overconsume calories; you do want to consume as much information as possible. If we were trying to maximize calorie intake over time, corn syrup would probably be the winning route.
That's an interesting observation. I don't agree with it though. You suggest that one should consume information up to one's limits. When then does one create information? Even if that information already exists - quoting Westheimer, 'A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.' - the process of creating the knowledge is good practice for when one needs to create new knowledge, and for evaluating the validity of existing knowledge.
I do think your second sentence is apropos, but in a different way than you intended. Corn syrup, while calorie rich, provides neither protein nor necessary vitamins and minerals. For that matter, reading summaries is often information poor, compared to the underlying material.
Heavens no! I'd much rather have a good summary than dive into documents written for domain specialists by other domain specialists.
For legal documents, research studies, academic papers and the like the cognitive load associated with wading through the original usually by far outweighs the marginal return.
The caveat is, of course, that one must be careful with one's choice of summariser.
Did you find this court judgment "dense"? I didn't. I even found the judgment's summary of the case against weev to be clear and informative, and others here agree.
I encourage you to read court decisions, research studies, and academic papers. Many are clear, insightful, and educational. It's also true that many are not, but I'm astonished by the number of people who don't even try.
At the very least, it's hard to judge the summarizer without sometimes comparing summaries to the primary literature.
I don't even know who weev is, much less that he was convicted for something, when this happened and why. A tl;dr would be much preferable to reading the court documents with no context.
I think it's fair to say that if you don't know who weev is, then very little about the case would interest you, including a summary of the legal decision.
Similarly, there's a posting now titled "Finally, usable GCM cipher suites in SChannel" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7574678 ). I don't know what a GCM cipher suite is, nor what SChannel is, nor why it's a relief that this has happened. The link itself is not insightful. While it expands GCM as "Galois/counter mode", that's meaningless to me.
BTW, in this case, 'weev' matches some 63 other HN posts, though several provide no more summarized context than this link text. (Eg, a couple of other posts directly to other legal documents, a story about visiting weev in prison, and a letter from weev while in prison.) A Google, Yahoo, and Bing search all return http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev as the first hit. Perhaps one of those can provide the background you're looking for?
Well I'll go ahead and agree that for the most part many legal decisions are fairly straightforward. And even their length is usually due to dumping in tons of citations and systematically examining the various components of whatever legal test they're talking about. It's written to convince higher courts and other judges in a way that can withstand their scrutiny.
But as long as you're willing to hit the "I believe" button a few times while reading a legal decision they actually don't take too long to get the gist of.
Along the lines of the "I believe button"; I've found after reading several legal briefs and opinions, I'm able to quickly determine based on a section's heading whether it's interesting contentful content or just legal cruft. I'm 95% convinced (though without evidence) that everyone in the legal profession does the same, though obviously they must have a broader concept of what's interesting content. The rest is just citation copypasta, and that's okay.
The opinion came out very recently (within the past hour), so there is not likely a good summary or analysis available yet. Seems reasonable for OP to want to spread the news without waiting for a news story.
As a reader, I far prefer this to any kind of summary. This was well written, thoughtful, and thorough. I can't imagine any value that any summary would have added to this, unless I were just hoping to skim it over my lunch break. And I greatly prefer to read one well written, thoughtful, thorough article in a day, then a dozen summaries which inflame the senses without providing any particularly useful information.
