skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came across a USB thumb drive from when I was in highschool (freshmen), and I was embarrassed when I looked at it just recently...I was storing login credentials in a browser cookie, and not a session cookie, how insecure but I didn't know any better at the time...
I used to drink two cans of Mountain Dew per day. I was 100% dependent upon it -- without my Mountain Dew I couldn't function at all. Anyway, I recently took a few weeks off between jobs, and during that time, I decided to quit caffeine cold turkey as well. I feel great! Some benefits include:

-Sleeping better

-Being awake and functional in the morning, even before the caffeine kicks in

-Having a consistent energy level throughout the day

-24oz of soda/day is not healthy, so getting that out of my diet was definitely a good thing

The only downside is that the startup I work for now has a tab with a number of local coffee shops that I can't take advantage of :(
> At one point, one of the guys asked to use the bathroom. I showed him where it was and went back outside the house. I remember thinking he had been in there longer than was normal.

If you leave cops roaming around your house alone, you may need to consider your hardware compromised. Also, in such a situation, cops would have the opportunity to plant bugs or even "evidence".
On the first link, what's the red bar represent?
No it doesn't. You think the Chinese or Indians (or any of the people who still have some sense) care about my opinion of their policy?
As mentioned already in this thread, in my initial comment on this thread in fact, I had no idea this post was even going to end up on HackerNews. I write independently without Hacker News in mind. I write for myself. Why would I have read the comment guidelines on Hacker News before writing a blog post that I had no intention of putting up on Hacker News in the first place?

@chanux asked a question with regards to my blog post and I answered it with my justified opinion. It was hardly a mindless flamewar, in fact both of us ended up agreeing with each other as you can see by the comments and this tweet if you want further proof: https://twitter.com/chanux/status/366211657241862145. I was not going to ignore a user who had a question about my blog post.

I appreciate the Hacker News community's feedback and contributions but I do not feel that in this specific example I created an unhealthy discussion by mentioning Stallman. I have a lot of respect for his work as already stated and I accepted @chanux's constructive criticism wholeheartedly.
RegExpBuilder.js: readable, maintainable, and dynamic regular expressions
I have just started doing web programming in the last month after several years of applications programming.

It feels like to me, and someone please tell me why I'm wrong, that the amount of hackery that goes into making webpages look the way web designers want them to is astounding. I google for solutions to various problems and the top rated comment on StackOverflow says "...there isn't a good way to do this in CSS, but here is this hack...".

I feel like somewhere in the universal programming ether there exists a beautiful unification of HTML, CSS, and JS that doesn't rely on any ugly hackery, and it's just waiting to be found and start a brave new world of web programming...
A few drone strikes? An optional war in Libya. Continuing a failed war in Afghanistan. Continuing to operate Gitmo. Continuing and expanding the spying on US citizens and others. If anything, Obama has expanded warfare to anyplace in the world that can't stop drones. Peaceful isn't an adjective that should be used in conjunction with this President.
I am the iOS developer and doing most of the backend stuff,
no it means more like 15% or something around that,
two of the three are technical, we have a web app, ios app, and android and we need all three to be able to get paying customers,
Sarcasm, lazyjones. I was being sarcastic. I dream of a world where you can say what you want without getting persecuted for it, not the world represented in the following video:

"DOJ justifies searching Associated Press phone records"
http://youtu.be/5CguKdc21AU
I don't know what you're talking about - can you show me screenshots of before and after?
Very nice. When I actually stop to think about it, it's amazing to me that this is not immediately easy to do. Things like this give credence to Bret Victor's most recent talk.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/04/congres...
A couple more I noticed:

"its a terrible habit" -> it's

"thats been hand-picked by a human" -> that's
I'd say "switch to ECC", but the fact that the NSA are strong proponents of it rather makes one wonder why.
>I realize this seems abstruse, but the fact pattern is very important in common law judgments.

You're basically assuming they would have to redact everything. Just replacing names and addresses with tokens that don't identify the specific subjects would get you most of the way there unless the specific fact pattern is unique to the suspect, and then you can redact what is necessary to make it less specific.

In addition to that, once any given investigation is over the opinions and redactions that were held secret for the purposes of that investigation should be published, and it shouldn't be so easy to keep things secret for decades just by making a facile claim of national security.

>9/11 only involved boxcutters, but I'd say that it presented a rather significant national security problem when those turned out to be sufficient to hijack planes and fly them into high-value targets.

9/11 was not a national security problem. 9/11 was a mass murder. It was shocking but we have inflicted more damage on ourselves in our overreaction to it than the terrorists did in committing it. More have died avenging the victims of 9/11 than died on 9/11.

A national security threat is a nuclear bomb, or a plague, or a foreign government infiltrating high level government offices in preparation for some kind of Communist takeover. Something that would be a factor of 1000 worse than 9/11 and present an actual threat to the security of the entire nation. This watering down of "national security threat" to mean any jerk who might kill some people with an IED is just a ruse to rationalize the use of extremist measures against everyone rather than taking into account the proportionality of the threat.

>You're also ignoring the fact that many kinds of low-level terrorist activity aren't open to direct investigation by law enforcement. For example, suppose you pick up signals about a plot involving Mr X, who has not yet arrived in the US but whose phone number you have managed to identify. If he's in a country that's friendly to the US you might be able to get their law enforcement people to investigate him, but if not then it's logical to monitor who he communicates with for prophylactic purposes.

So get a warrant and conduct surveillance on him then. That's not the same thing as spying and collecting data on everyone "for prophylactic purposes" at all.
And yet, they talk up a storm telling us how careful they are when they authorize strikes, yet they didn't even know who they were shooting at? And they blew them up in a restaurant, with other people around!
Good to see the new regex engine is now shipped by default. It's been in development for quite a long time, held up mostly because of so many edge cases.

The initial work was done in a 2008 Summer of Code project: http://code.google.com/p/vim-soc2008-regexp/source/list

but there were lots of fiddly issues with character classes and Unicode handling, a need for exact equivalence to the old regex engine to avoid arbitrarily breaking existing scripts, and a need for a comprehensive test suite, all of which took a while for people to supply.
One common thing you notice among highly creative people is how they completely lock down certain aspects of their life. It is as if they want to conserve all their mental energies for their creative efforts without wasting anything on miscellenous tasks. Hence you find people working with a single type of pens, clothes, walking routines etc.

So, not sure about Woody Allen's diet preferences but it seems to me that just taking out the option of eating unhealthy dramatically cuts down on decisions making and mental energy. A single Frankfurter will not alter your health, but if you open up the possibility of eating them you need to wonder - Is one per day OK? what about one per week? If you eat a hamburger does that mean you can't eat a Frankfurter for two days etc. etc.. If Allen is half as neurotic as he seems you can imagine him spending a lot of time deciding what to eat and what not. Just nukeing the option -- will not eat frankfurters, period. -- seems to be a good mental hack.
Larry Wall does not have a CS degree.
my hat is off to you if you are able to sell all the 16 hours that you're awake every day to someone for 100$ each without dropping in productivity and maintaining mental well beeing.
You are totally incorrect. The most recent news about civilian deaths in drone strikes:

> At least 1 in 5 drone strike victims a confirmed civilian – leaked Pakistani records

http://rt.com/news/drone-strikes-pakistan-civilian-casualtie...
It's a silly thing to begin with. I think many people didn't realize that the Nobel Prize for physics is completely different beast from the Peace Prize.

For what it's worth, I suspect Obama would have declined the prize if it were possible to do so. It came at a really inconvenient time.
Thanks, I was missing the printf.
Be Subservient
This comment solidifies why HN is out of touch with reality. There is more to the Obama presidency than his (up until now lack of involvement with the NSA). Try and think outside the tech bubble for a few minutes on this issue and you will become enlightened.
They should have named it after a real pirate ship :
http://www.noblesandcourtiers.org/famous-pirate-ships.htm

Delivery sounds fine.
What evidence there is? When they were declared guilty by a court? When they were charged with a.crime.in first place?
And no longer have to support IE7 (if you're lucky).
Apple Samsung Patent Fight: Finally Bringing Some Clarity To The Law
> I still don't see the value.

The value is loose coupling and composability; each media-type is its own contract, and hypermedia provides a common mechanism for discovering the location of endpoints.

This allows different APIs (and their clients) to share common components rather than every large API being a special snowflake.

> To me it's like proposing that in SQL we replace 'EXEC' with 'HEAD', 'PUT', 'DELETE'...

A better SQL equivalent is proposing that you expose to each consumer an appropriate set of relations (likely views) as the application's interface to the database rather than stored procs (the data description of the view is the analog of the media type of the REST resource.)
I quit caffeine and ended up regretting it. I felt tired a lot more, even a year later. Staying awake after lunch became a real challenge for me. I'm just saying this to temper the confirmation bias here - I think people who quit caffeine and got nothing out of it probably don't feel any particular need to share their stories.
Five Golden Rules of Making a Rap BioPic
Islam gaffe candidate Banister quits Australia election
90% of webdesign is dealing with errant behaviour.

It's why it's so frustrating when people treat front-end design with disdain as something trivially easy. Of course, if you only decide to serve the newest version of Chrome and Safari, it can be easy to remember that there people out their who don't - or can't use them.
> Diffie-Hellman is based on discrete logarithms,
> but RSA is not.

Well, sort of, but not entirely. Yes, the obvious way to break RSA is to factor the modulus, and then compute the private key from the public key.

But that's not the only thing.

You encrypt by raising the message M to the power of the public key e modulo the public modulus n.

E = M^e (mod n)

That means that

log_e(E) = M (mod n) [ This is wrong - see below ]

If you can compute logarithms base e modulo n then given the public information, you can recover M.

So unrestricted discrete logs let you break RSA.

Added in edit:

Sorry, I mis-spoke myself as I was (and still am) in a hurry. As benmmurphy correctly points out, this is wrong, but not in an unfixable way. In short:

(all done mod n)

E = M^e (mod n)
log(E) = e.log(M)
log(E)/e = log(M)
exp(log(E)/e) = exp(log(M)) = M

Again, unrestricted discrete log lets you break RSA.

PS: There's a non-zero chance I screwed up again - feel free to say so!
Show HN: Pile, A side-project app for scholarly papers
Well, I don't think it can be called a LISP, as in LISt Processing, which I pedantically use to describe the Lisps that came before it, because in addition to making those additional data structures first class syntactic citizens and their widespread use by programmers, it as dschiptsov notes modified some standard LISP syntax to use vectors where you have a list that'll never be modified, extended, etc.

E.g. (defn name [arg1 arg2] body). Lists are not the alpha and omega like they are in LISPs.

But I agree it has "every single characteristic that defines a lisp", even if it looks funny to experienced Lispers like myself.

Aesthetically I much prefer standard LISP syntax + indentation , but 100% support the use of literals for the non-list data structures. Many disagree on the syntax, and if no longer having a sea of pure parens brings more adaptation I'm willing to live with it. I got the impression the syntax changes were due to that reason vs. inspiration from ML, but I'm not at all sure about that. Still, Rich Hickey is an experienced Lisper with exquisite taste below the level of syntax, so I'm pretty sure he was aware of the implications of his syntax changes.
I am very disappointed with him.

Yup. My disappointment is tempered with the knowledge that we (The People) aren't doing our jobs very well either.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

-- Frederick Douglass

"I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it"

-- FDR

Politicians only respond to pressure. Period. From a game theoretic standpoint, it makes perfect sense: Why take a position today which could come back and bite them tomorrow? Better to take the safe route, the status quo.

I have modest experience with this, mostly disappointment. The small successes we had happened when we packed hearings with bodies.

If you can mobilize and won't go away, politicians will do anything to make you go away. It doesn't matter who's in the chair: Democrat, Republican, fruitcake, saint, elected, appointed, whatever. You make a stink, you get your way.

Sometimes you have to make a very big stink. And the personal costs are often very high.
I didn't know that the bar is makefiles... welcome to 1977.
That ascribes a lot of agency to nature, and I think will lead you to flawed conclusions.
Once you've been contacted the first time under an NSL letter, what stops you from choosing to broadcast the entire duration of the ordeal.

government: "Here's an NSL."
recipient: "Cool deal. I will respect it and not mention it to anyone, but be aware that from this point forward I will always have a device that will broadcast every interaction verbal or electronic that anyone has to me publicly live in real-time to the Internet. You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand? Anything you say may be used against you in the court of public opinion. Do you understand? If you wish to continue to communicate with me, be aware that any statement that you or anyone from your office makes to me will instantly and irreversibly become part of the public record."

On top of that you can hand them a special email address for their use only and you can delete your own personal email. You can also wear a shirt with friends and family that informs them in big bold letters that everything is a matter of the public record.

This would essentially serve to shield you entirely from secret communication by placing a "force field" of publicity around you. There might be some law somewhere that prohibits this tactic, I cannot imagine how they would counteract this tactic legally so long as you always greet them with disclosure that your are recording everything. I imagine that they could try to force you somehow to interact with them in a location that prohibits recording devices.
Purists will attack if you do this, but if you just want to get something done, using tables for layout often solves a lot of these headaches. Horizontal and vertical alignment of left, right, center, top, middle, bottom are quick and easy.

Edit: since you are a new developer, let me add that "ugly hackery" is what you quickly arrive at once you start doing anything of reasonable complexity (read: stuff that's actually useful). Handling the edge cases is what consumes most of the code in real production applications, and this is conveniently omitted from the beautifully clean code presented in tutorials and examples.
Cheers Gigablah!
But why should that have to be something that you accept? Every government loves power, and it is the job of the people and the press to restrict that love.

"Lingering Effects of DOJ Snooping on Media"
http://youtu.be/QOFLLDih9fw
Hey chjj, thank you so much for tty.js! You definitely deserve the credit for doing all the hard work :).
I was using the sync everything approach as well and it was painful. I did not know about the package settings file. Should be a great timesaver.
It’s not syntax highlighting, but it needs a recent version of Vim: http://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/ ?
> I think if you answered politely and explained why you're unwilling to talk to them about their issue it wouldn't be as easy to misconstrue as suspicious.

If they are talking to you given the time management the job requires, you are already suspicious.

If there is one thing I learned from growing up on a reservation is that the only response to the FBI is "I will not talk unless my lawyer is present and s/he advises me to talk".

// if a Federal Marshall wants to talk, you are screwed
Cool! Realtime terminal hacking... now that's something I can use.
Right. To those who support the policies they make total sense. Without them there'd be unknown chaos. Good add.
Are you kidding me? Emacs makes my head asplode and vim gets me by when I can't or don't want to use sublime. Horses for courses...
Is there a plugin to remove or modify specific request headers? The bits of unique information could easily be removed, couldn't it?
Sorry, I meant completion. That's the one, thanks!
The Dangers of Philoso-(en)gineering
A bit like BAD sausage - leaves a gross taste in your mouth whether you know how the factory operates or not.
Talk to them if that's all they want to do.

Be polite, truthful (without over-sharing) and record the meeting.

Often times, I forget to turn off my digital voice recorder after lectures. I find recording and typing notes later to be easier than frantically jotting down notes; also even I can't read my own handwriting. If someone were to bump into me and have a chat, that's on the recording as well.

Some time ago, I got a visit from two gentlemen from the FBI. They were very polite and respectful, even though my mom was very scared, they reassured her that this was just an exploratory meeting. They also prefixed my name with "Mr." which was a bit of a delight for me because I was still a teenager back then and used to "hey you".

I think I probably still have their cards somewhere.

Nothing really happened. They got an anonymous phone call regarding something I may have said in school and wanted to see if there was something to it. Turns out it was a panicked busybody (and this was after 9/11) and they weren't even that clear on what was said. It wasn't anything even remotely requiring a lawyer's presence.
Crimes are domestic constructs for internal policing. Waging war on the US from tribal lands in Yemen is not a crime, its in the nature of a military action. Killing in military actions does not require a judicial determination of guilt. Did we get a court to tell us the 50,000 Japanese we incinerated at Hiroshima were guilty?
You mean amazingly.bad right?
We're working on solving these problems with new tools (flexbox in this particular case), but it takes time for those tools to become widely usable. You can look at e.g. Google's Polymer project for a glimpse at the vision for web programming in the future.
With winner takes all politics, there is no third party. Duverger's Law: to get 51% of the vote, everyone tries to form the smallest winning coalition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

If you want to build a viable third party, start with local elections, build your farm team. It takes decades to be viable. Then at some point, one of the dominate coalitions will pivot and subsume the new platform.

It's happened many times in the USA.
Is Employer-Based Health Insurance A Barrier To Entrepreneurship? (2010)
I am not drawing any conclusion. Just proposing a counter point. Nature has no plans for humanity ofcourse.
Some would argue that whole doing the web with markup and stylesheets thing is completely wrong (Bret Victor comes to mind). And I tend to agree. CSS is a hack, heck, HTML itself is a hack.

Some material:

http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why-css-...

http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html
Google listened, and Instead of having one more engine that bolsters open web, we also had to lose one because Opera changed as well.
In short, a hell-ban means things look normal to you, but everything you do is effectively ignored by the site. You can see if you're hell-banned by posting a comment, logging out, and seeing if the comment is visible. If not, you're probably hell-banned.

The merits and otherwise are discussed extensively elsewhere. Some will maintain that it's an effective method of fighting trolls. If they know they're banned they just abandon the account, re-register, and continue trolling. Others say that the price is too high, and that everything should be completely transparent - there just must be some other way of dealing with trolls.

The triggers for being hell-banned here on HN are not public, but are probably related to getting a large number of flags in a short time. Flags should only be used for material that doesn't belong here, so getting lots of them can trigger a blanket ban. There is no information about how automated the process is, but given that PG is a hacker at heart, and given the number of registered users on HN, I'd be surprised if it's not mostly, if not entirely, automated.

If you think you are inappropriately hell-banned, email pg and ask to be reinstated. My experience of similar issues is that very short emails get swift replies.
If the more optimistic predictions regarding the upcoming generation of non-volatile memory are true, then we may see store and main memory merging. I think that would be a window of opportunity for new OSes, though I don't doubt that Linux could be made to run under that model too, somehow.
this doesn't look like log to me. i think the function you want is e'th root.