skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was my understanding that R basically already does implement call-by-name - arguments to a function are passed by name and looking up in the calling environment until you first modify them. Is my understand incorrect, or do Algol 60's call-by-name semantics mean something different?
Unfortunately, the nature of classication is one where you need training data from both groups, those who are and are not people of interest. However, if you could use your skills to make sure we have less false positives, would you?

Spying is contentious and that's part of the reason I asked this question. The other part is, whether we choose to believe it or not, we might be able to keep the country better than randomly safe if someone statistically attempts to classify those who intend to do us harm vs. those who don't. And, like it or not, the amount of info that's required to attempt to do this well is large, personal and intrusive.

I don't disagree that someone could potentially SELECT * FROM DB WHERE NAME='CANDIDATE JOHN SMITH' AND MESSAGE_TO=(FEMALE != WIFE) AND COUNT >= 5

But, on the other hand, it could also find sleeper cells.

What say you?
I think this line "Copyright (C) 2004 Ramesh Nair ram@hiddentao.com and Nick Budden hello@nickbudden.com" should read "Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar". It is the copyright statement for the license text, not the program, so cannot be changed without changing the name of the license.
Now even tweets qualify for submissions to HN? hmmmm
Look at the bottom of this file: http://askthensa.com/js/bootstrap.js
My comment is plainly counterpartisan, a position which is only partisan to actual partisans.

Naturally it has been voted down to invisibility, presumably because HN does not provide such advanced discussion features as disemvowelment.
R core is generally motivated by ensuring that R continues to work as is, not by improving performance. You can argue whether or not this is a good idea, but in the absence of a comprehensive unit test suite, it's pretty hard to improve performance without breaking behaviour.
Ecuador has received asylum request from NSA leaker Snowden
I made a very recent decision to do this very thing, but not for any of the reasons the author outlines...

I use an OSX system, and run OSX in a vmware fusion VM, and do all of my work there. Nothing is done in the host OS. I revert to the initial, clean snapshot daily.

I do this for security and privacy. My web history is not wiped by the browser, but is reverted to a clean OS install. Any malware that might infect the VM is cleaned out almost immediately. Further, I can quickly wipe my "system" prior to travel, or other scenarios where I lose physical control of the system.

So at any given time, all I have is a virgin OSX system with vmware fusion on it, and a single, virgin OSX VM. Of course this implies that my work and my data all live remotely, but that has been the case for almost 15 years.
I'm trying git to get my feet wet with it but man this looks way complicated to me. I didn't even know about "git config" or even that there was a checkout command for git. I usually cd into the directory I want to turn into a repo and use "git init" then after changing files, run gitk or if in Eclipse I use EGit. I'm not even sure what happens in gitk when I do a commit, is it that long "push master origin" stuff? Does that mean master is my local repo and master origin is like the overall master? I guess with SVN it's clear even at the command line but with git there are just so _many_ options. Then there's custom scripts to make all this work? I'll stick with scp or rsync for distribution for now. The author might want to look into Hudson or Jenkins, they work wonders.
I had written a very similar article a while back which includes some django specific points and is also intended to be really simple to read thru:

http://thomaswilley.com/?p=9
I had exactly that problem, although use of text-indent in the css meant that every paragraph starts indented, so you just make each line of dialogue a new paragraph and it works out ok. So yes, it's not ideal, but it's still pretty good.
And then there's this, from May 1st this year: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/04/30/obama...
I doubt it. Snowden going to Iceland seems more like wishful thinking, especially by Europeans who wish to it to be a European country to be the one defying the United States. But the only evidence to support him going to Iceland is an indirect approach for asylum.

As a European myself, I understand the allure of him going to Iceland rather than a Latin American country. But Iceland cannot afford its political capital to defy the United States, as they still need support from the USA and Iceland lacks immediate allies in defying the USA, unlike either Ecuador and Venezuela.
If Snowden can fit into a suitcase he should be fine ;)
Ask HN: What did HN do to reduce load page times?
It seems that as of this weekend pages load much faster and the site is much more responsive.

Curious what, if anything, was done?
https://github.com/swanson/stringer

https://github.com/Athou/commafeed

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

https://github.com/socketubs/leselys

https://github.com/glynnbird/birdreader
Weren't those bans lifted?
Now even regular tweets without sources qualify for submissions to HN? hmmmm
What if I told you... That there are people who opposed these programs when they were first put in place, and continue to oppose them now.
Geographic isolation, first, so no more "globe-spanning" workforce on trillion-dollar projects. Then they can only work on a dedicated internal network on machines they leave in the office, which media-isolation limited to heavily controlled workstations so someone can't copy things over USB or burn it to disk or upload it via a VPN tunnel.

That seems fair, considering the magnitude of the expenditures and the nature of the work.
FTP still works. FTP isn't 'broken.' This 'replacement' adds huge unnecessary complexity and doesn't work on nearly as many servers as FTP does (which is all of the servers)

And yes, I have deployed with git, so i'm not speaking out of complete backwards ignorance. I can still see a use for both.
I'm not sure I like the approach of serving files from your repository. I'm not sure about how git works in detail, but are repository updates even atomic?

When I deploy my website, I use a different approach: My webroot is just a symlink. My deployment script exports the repository to a directory with a unique name for every commit. When the export succeeds, the symlink is updated to point to the new directory.

The advantage: Changing to the new version is instantaneous. If something should go wrong, I can immediately revert by changing the symlink back to the old dir.
I have serious concerns about Chavez policies, but accepting US media portrayals of Venezuela is about as naive as taking Chinese state owned media at face value: Their reports could be accurate, but you won't know without comparing it with alternatives.
Look at the bottom of this file http://askthensa.com/js/bootstrap.js you'll know what to type.
Check out the git book here: http://git-scm.com/book

Worth the read if you're interested.
Are handmade electrical devices generally a defense against homeowners' insurance payout?

Reference?
As far as I know, the majority of the speed improvements come from a proprietary on-disk data store, accompanied by high-performance statistical algorithms built on top of it. You need to use their packages to take most advantage of the speed.
Do you get paid to shill for the establishment or is it just for the lulz? Maybe you get a Junior G-Man badge and a code name?

The NSA has every incentive to spy on everyone -- that's their job. The only "oversite" they have is by a toothless committees that will rubber-stamp anything they do.

Do you really trust the government to always do the right thing? Even with historical evidence of continual abuses of such power?
I don't agree with you, but have given you an upvote as the downvoting was not justified. I wish people wouldn't use downvotes just because they disagree with a post or think it is false - it stifles discussion and leads to the tyranny of a loud majority, not to the debate on these issues which is so sorely needed.

BTW here's why I disagree - apart from the widespread domestic surveillance already admitted the NSA has used dragnet foreign surveillance from other five eyes nations like the UK to spy on American communications with no suspicion of wrongdoing, and has attempted dragnet surveillance in other nations like China (text messages). All of those things deserve debate - even on foreign surveillance the NSA should not have a free hand IMHO - they're supposed to target enemies of the US, not engage in blanket surveillance - that's a dangerous and massive expansion of their powers and in the hands of a president like Nixon would be truly terrifying. It also undermines the position of the US in the world and allows nations like China to indulge in cyberattacks with absolutely no moral high ground for the US.

Re where Snowdon goes, I think that has far more to do with pragmatism that his wish-list of most desired countries - from his own words I think he would have preferred to stay in the US and fight this if he felt he'd be given a fair trial, but that has been made impossible by the calls of traitor from the current administration (what they mean of course is traitor to the NSA and administration, not to the country, but those two are confounded).

The alternative interpretation of his actions is that a champion of human rights has been obliged to flee the US and seek refuge with enemies of the US, because he risks imprisonment without bail, torture and indefinite detention at home (all of those have been used in the war on terror in the last decade). It is quite credible that he wouldn't be allowed to state his case or argue his defence as Ellsberg did, and in fact Ellsberg agrees with him on that, and the treatment of Manning justifies his fears. So maybe champions of human rights do now flee the US?
According to some sources, his final destination could be Ecuador.
Seriously? So you're okay with the NSA spying -legally or not- on everyone, when the highest ranking people have denied this for years? Do you really think spying on Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft users as a whole constitute probable cause for a search?

I don't care about the consequences. If the US had apologized for this terrible mess and all the lies to its own people, Snowden wouldn't have had to do any of what had followed. Instead, it still refuses to corroborate his claims, making it seems likely that there's something incriminating here.

If this doesn't seem fishy on the US side, and if you think anyone wouldn't have thought about blowing the whistle on all these lies by our leaders, you're seriously delusional. Or a troll.
Isn't that what Reddit did to bootstrap its site?
It was not the US that told me they are not democratic. I don't base my news from US sources on Latin American countries. That being said, there is a lot of corruption abound in these countries, much so that affects their political systems and - yes - their election systems.

For instance, when Hugo Chávez first tried to change the constitution so he could be president for life, his change was struck down by the voters. He might have been popular, but he wasn't that popular. Unfortunately, Latin American countries have copied the presidential republic system a bit too much from the USA, and given the president quite a range of power, that probably gives them a flair of dictatorship.

But let's not kid ourselves, Hugo Chávez was hardly a nice man and I seen little evidence that things have gotten better in Venezuela since he took power 14 years ago.
That tweet is by the Ecuadorian minister who granted asylum to Julian Assange.
Down votes? Hard to hear the truth...
Any info on what this does to the battery life? It is a cool idea but I can imagine it totally kills the battery if it's always recording.
Wouldn't this method, especially with a switching power supply, introduce a lot of interference in the cabling?

Any pickup or noise in the power supply and router would be inductively/capacitavely coupled to the signal cabling inside the cable's shield, right?
Snowden asks Ecuador for asylum
I'm choosing not to give him the benefit of the doubt since his intermediaries so far have been HK (a free society, but still under the clutches of PRC and not totally free) and Russia (need not say more about its trampling of human rights).
This appears to be a prettier version of William Beaty's work at http://trafficwaves.org/ which is well worth the read. I send this link out multiple times a year to friends, because it advocates (and shows some proof for) some simple driving changes that can substantially reduce traffic: Leave space ahead of you, and let folks cut in if they want. Given the chaotic pattern of traffic and drivers, these simple habits appear to reduce (but never eliminate) traffic jams.
That is also an exceedingly rare crime. It would have been acceptable to let the robbers get away, and then catch them later (if at all). Our cities are not war zones (thankfully).

To put it another way, this is no different from saying that the police should be armed with anti-aircraft missiles, because of the 9/11 attacks.
Counterclockwise standalone Clojure IDE release candidate
I'm one of them. I just don't think that it's all Obama's to own. All the recent presidents should be blamed collectively.
It seems to take an American or a European to be so paranoid that even this can be cast as a sinister activity.

They know their history. The possibility that their governments would do something as underhanded as hide a person with ulterior motive inside a humanitarian organization is not irrational.
This is a very bad idea from a system architect point of view. You would probably get another cable in there in the same amount of time, while having a much higher test coverage for your parts.

Physical connectors are there for the same purpose as type enforcement in strongly typed languages. They make things "just work".

Plus, what if you are ill and you want someone else fix an issue? What if you want to scale up the network later and need all wires?

If you don't hack you will need no docs.
Cursed statue in british museum moves on its own
That's irrelevant -- accepting donations isn't providing money transmission services to the public.
Overclock iMac G3 Bus
They may show no restraint, but there's also a number of these countries that are experienced at countering the CIA after decades of interference and that now have governments that are either openly anti-US or extremely wary of US interference.
In the Drupal community, we're all stumbling over each other to find the best Git deployment strategy. I'm surprised that Git deployment would still be news for anyone. I don't know who this article can reach that's not already competent enough to be using Git (at least for dev).

On the other hand, if your site is just static (HTML/JS) files, I think it makes great sense to use Git to deploy, as there is no configuration to worry about.
Part of my reasoning is that rsync is specifically made for this kind of thing, whereas git is specifically made to synchronize coding among multiple developers. So my argument is partly theoretical and less practical.

But for an argument based in pragmatism, rsync has tools such as the --delay-updates flag, which allows your entire deployment procedure to become a pass-or-fail atomic operation. This kind of assurance slows my hair loss as a systems administrator. AFAIK git has no such tools, but I'm certainly open to being corrected.
The NSA secured an order from the FISC directing Verizon to turn over metadata on all calls made within the US, which includes data about the location of their customers' mobile phones. The Supreme Court has ruled that long-term tracking requires a warrant. The decision was unanimous, but split as to reasoning. The majority held that such tracking without a warrant violates the 4th amendment. It is quite likely that obtaining phone records for the purpose of tracking location has the same legal status.
> To take advantage of both multi-core machines and distributed programming, concurrency quickly becomes the de-facto standard way of doing things.

Parallelism is the way to achieve better compute performance. I assume stackless still has a GIL and can only take advantage of one core? Does it provide any inter-process communication that would help with parallelism?
we voted for the policy makers, so despite being friendly, its our fault.
There are gigabit PoE injectors, you can find cheap ones on ebay :)

IEEE 802.3at uses phantom power, all 4 pairs can transmit data.
Democracy means the right of the people to informed consent about the actions of their government.

With that in mind, this is hardly the story you should be using to project the United States as champion of democracy. Not only because the American people have been kept ignorant of what is being done in their name for no good reason (and those who try to stop this seem to end up either char-grilled or jailed), but because part of the fallout from Snowden's allegations has been the surfacing of direct evidence that the United States security apparatus is actively engaged in anti-democratic propaganda campaigns worldwide.

I am not sure who exactly in the United States gave informed consent to this, but perhaps you can hold off on denigrating other countries until your government stops trying to actively undermine their rights to open democratic debate and honest self-governance.
This C&D demonstrates a rather alarming ignorance about Bitcoin, and an even more alarming tendency of modern enforcement agencies to halt any activity they don't understand. It is an embarrassment to Paul T. Crayton and the State of California, and this "default deny" stance on innovation has just as much chilling effect as patent trolls.
> English grammar is not simple. It has what (12?) tenses. (on the contrary Russian has basically 3 tenses) And it's full of exceptions. Why 'I see', but I'm looking at you. There's simply no reason. It's an exception. Thousands of them.

This is actually not such a great example. Yes, English can express 12 tenses, but it doesn't have them in the sense that Russian, Italian or Czech do with affixes and declensions and what have you.

> Let's just take 2 sounds. etc

In this, of course you're right, but I didn't dispute this fact: English is a Germanic language and as such has a much larger number of phonemes than most other languages in the world (though it has far fewer than other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian, which have an - by global standards - insane number of vowels). Like I said, English isn't ideal, but it could have been worse. German, Polish or French (which has the added bonus of written French and spoken French being essentially two entirely different languages)would have been much worse. Indonesian/Malay, Tok Pisin or Swahili would have been much better in this regard, but alas, we have English.

> "In general, English spelling does not reflect* the sound changes in the pronunciation of the language that have occurred since the late fifteenth century."

Right. The ortography of English is atrocious and difficult to learn, even for native speakers. So there's that. It's definitely a point against English and it's a matter of taste whether this detracts significantly from its good points.

> Artificial != bad. We have tons of artificial things in our life that are awesome!

This, I think, is our true bone of contention. My argument is Esperanto brings very little to the table an organically developed Western European creole doesn't already have. You're free to disagree, of course, which brings me to:

> Esperanto is several times faster to learn than English for anybody (given similar conditions). Linguists say it and I second that based on experience.

Do you have sources for this? I'd be very interested to see the research on this. I would think the chief difficulty in learning a language that is wildly different from your native language is the fact that it's, well, wildly different from your native language, but I am very much open to evidence that learning a language from an entirely different language family than your own becomes easier if that language is rigorously structured and cleaned up instead of being merely an example of a worse is better organic jumble.
Please don't drag that tired old conspiracy theory into this. If you start with just 500 people and kill them off at ~0.8%/year (roughly the annual US death rate), at the end of ten years close to 40 of them should be dead, and there are a lot more than 500 people "associated" with the Clintons.
This is the best solution, because you never know how large the text will be when rendered by the user's software. For example, this is how it rendered on my iPad:

http://cl.ly/Pp7I

It looks terrible, and I didn't read it, effectively falsifying the article.
The best argument in favor of the C&D I can think of is that the Bitcoin Foundation pays a salary to the lead developer of the reference client and daemon.
Does the letter advance any evidence that the Foundation is acting as a money transmitter?
Pretty sure that Reddit is out of its bootstrap phase.
Convicted U.S. spy Christopher Boyce: 'Snowden is doomed'
Ecuador receives asylum request from Edward Snowden
Reddit astroturfed their own site with fake users. These guys are 1) astroturfing other people's sites, 2) practicing unethetical tactics by down-voting links to competing websites with automated bots.
Its a giant red flag that he fears the US more than any of these countries -- which, as Americans, would assume would happily interrogate him for years to get the valuable intelligence he allegedly holds. Watching very closely.
Looks pretty cool! Side note, I just learned about X-Frame-Options as a result of entering http://google.com in the form box using Safari

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP/X-Frame-Option...
Algorithmic voting bans are extremely dangerous because a false positive could be devastating for both the parent site and the linked domain. Manual intervention for such an important policy decision is crucial.
The future, what happens next, I must know!
I do appreciate your response. Thanks.

On your first point, I barely disagree with you at all.

The second point is where I feel like no one is paying much attention: For me personally, the irony of criticizing the US on unethical activities from the patronage of countries that routinely and violently trample the human rights of their citizens completely destroys and legitimacy of the broader point he's trying to make.

And your third point is also disturbing and true. I don't disagree.

Edit: BTW, my above post all day long has been hovering between +5 upvotes to -5 votes. It's the wildest ride I've seen on an HN thread ever :)
What kind of idiot made the owner of quickmeme.com a moderator of the subreddit that contained presumably most of its posts?
He leaked a classified warrant ordering Verizon to turn over data on all their customers in the U.S., which is obviously without any probable cause.

He leaked a Justice Department document signed by Eric Holder detailing all the exceptions where they can spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant.
one must ask, why does the US have enemies?
Donate to WikiLeaks
Why is it not a fair comparison? Someone claimed travellers in the EU were subject to similar surveillance as in the US. As far as I understand, you need to show an ID even for domestic flights in the US.
> His countries of aid so far (China, Russia, possibly Cuba) have a similarly poor record.

How poor is their record (including foreign policy) compared with the US?