skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These political discussions on HN are awkward, and I wish they'd stop.

It's not because political discussions aren't important, they are, but because I don't think this is a useful place to have them.

Counterarguments are self-censored, because any moderates calmly pointing out hyperboles tend to be downvoted by the more passionate participants in the discussion.

With the moderates bowing out, online voting systems quickly gel into two extremes, maybe a far right and a far left. That's not sustainable though, one side quickly gets bigger and wins. The losing side now is best off self-censoring, because why get downvoted when you can just comment on other topics? You eventually get a political monoculture representing one extreme, with no voices of opposition or moderation.*

No moderation system has yet promoted any useful political dialogue, because you can't convince the 5% of people who are most emotional to rate argument quality independently of personal beliefs.

That's why, in general, I'm opposed to the political pulpit of HN, even for positions I agree with. It's a bad medium for good discussions on issues of significant controversy.

* (What's admittedly tricky is sometimes a political monoculture is the correct result. If someone made arguments on behalf of the KKK, we don't need a full and fair debate providing a false equivalence between both sides. One side is just wrong. The problem is, with politics, everyone thinks they're arguing against someone else who is just wrong, just like the KKK. There's no objective way to determine whether or not both sides of a discussion hold merit worthy of a full debate, or whether we should just downvote one side out of the discussion before it leaves the gate.)
What you describe has been suggested as the outcome of implementing a Basic Income, there have been several threads on it here recently.
They were actively waging war against the US.

Anything to back that up? These are extensive extra-judicial killings, outside of 'war' by any meaningful definition, which in my book makes them wrong even in the (highly implausible) best case where every victim is a genuine evil-doer.

See e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/12/pakista...
The basic implementation methods are well-known and quasi-standard, but Cox did make some useful practical additions, in addition to writing up a clear and accessible exposition.

The classic DFA engines, like in Thompson's version of grep, provide a fairly minimal regex language (later standardized as POSIX regexes), not much fancier than the regular-language syntax used in textbooks. Perl-style regular expressions get such widespread usage even outside of Perl in part because they have a more full-featured syntax, which provides conveniences people find useful. Cox implemented a significant subset of this functionality as syntactic sugar on top of a classic automaton regex engine, so RE2, unlike POSIX regexes, supports named matches, named character classes like \d (plus Unicode character classes), non-greedy matches, etc. Basically everything that can be done without making the language nonregular, so excluding lookahead, lookbehind, and backreferences.

Since vim regexes (a custom dialect) support some of those supra-POSIX features, those implementation techniques were likely useful for them to look at. Indeed they link to Cox's article somewhere or other in the design docs.

Vim does have lookahead/lookbehind syntax, though; I wonder how they supported that. Fallback to the backtracking engine?
What Libbitcoin and SX are And Why They Matter
What are you using beyond Chrome? The Open Sans web fonts render much better on my Mac with Chrome Version 30.0.1588.0 dev.

Not that I'm a big fan of the font (too close to Arial, especially the 'R' for my antiquated tastes), but I would say it's a well-rendered font of a typeface I do not like. :-)
This is a great initiative. I hope this would be awesome for various framework developers. Kudos!
Oh man, that Nokia sound.

I remember in 2002 I was watching a movie in a London theater, and the lights went dark, and the movie was just about to start, and... that Nokia sound went off. The entire theater groaned, "AWWWWWW". And then, another went off, and another, and several more, until it was an absolute cacophony of Nokia sounds.

Then the Nokia logo came on screen, accompanied by the words, "Please silence your cell phones."

The groans turned into sincere chuckles.

That was one of the earliest pre-movie reminders, and still one of the best. And it only worked (full circle here), because that Nokia sound was so iconic.
Even accepting on its face the notion that Obama was preparing to look at reforms, how does that make what Snowden did less patriotic? I don't think anybody but Obama knew that he was preparing to look at reforms, and after 6 years of an Obama presidency where things were just getting more spy-happy how was Snowden supposed to assume anything but more of the same? According to Obama, Snowden and Obama agreed that the programs needed change, and they both chose to do something about it.
Can you or someone else explain to me why people seem to be more angry that a person was killed via a remote controlled vehicle that launched a missile? Why is that different than a vehicle doing the exact same thing with a pilot in it? Or, why is it worse than a cruise missile?

I just don't understand why people care that a drone launched the missile rather than an A-10 or an F-18?
Everyone at MIT, no matter what the major, has to do a term of multivariable calculus beyond the AP BC material, plus a term each of calculus based mechanics and E&M (physics). There are also less intense biology, chemistry and lab requirements, and a very serious "Communications"/writing set of requirements. See http://web.mit.edu/catalog/overv.chap3-gir.html for the gory details.

Last time I checked, which was decades ago, Harvard required proof that you can do algebra.

MIT is not, however, a flunk out school. It believes that every admit can do the work, and the pattern is that people who've chosen an appropriate major make As and Bs, unless they have personal problems, which of course are statistically inevitable. No legacy admits if they can't do the work (which means few in practice), every minority in the student body deserves to be there (at least in my personal experience).
Courts are made of people, not computers; and they care about the bottom line, not the reasoning behind the loophole. What you describe -- and every other thought experiment, like warrant canaries -- is a good way to spend the rest of your life in jail for contempt of court.

If you get an NSL, shut down your business and leave the country.
We declared war on Japan. We have not declared war on Yemen or Pakistan.
Nope, not going to register without knowing more about it.
Pragmatic response: If you can, put some way of contacting you in your HN profile. Conscientious HN readers will send you mail if you're posting thoughtful comments but are hellbanned. You can then contact the admins, and I've found they are typically amenable to restoring your account.
The premise of the article is ridiculous at base. Law is something that binds civilians and their government together. Law does not bind the military apparatus of one country against another. It is meaningless for Pakistanis to decry something as illegal when the actor in question is not bound by Pakistani law. If aliens came and started shooting at the white house, would we run to the courts?

The use of force abroad exists purely in the political, diplomatic, and military realms, not the legal realm. If Pakistanis want us to stop drone strikes in Pakistan, they'll have to resort to one of those avenues.
I was not drinking coffee until half a year ago. I completed my assignments, but it was slow process, i had trouble concentrating, got often distracted from the task. Staying awake during most of the days was the hardest "work". Then, after reading some articles on tea and coffee effects decided to try it out. The result was impressive. I was like 4x more productive, could solve complicated tasks and not get distracted by anything during whole day, only drinking 1 cup in the morning. Then I thought maybe I just got better, and tried it without coffee again. Result - similar performance as before coffee, except some improvements in the fields I was able to make while under the influence of coffee.
> anything you say to an officer of the law might be misremembered later and there is nothing you can do against that.

No.

Anything you say can and will be used against you in court. If you lie about anything, even something trivial, that is a federal offense and you can go to jail for that. And many people have.

It has nothing to do with mis-remembering. You have no idea why they're talking to you. It might be about someone else. It might be about you. But you can bet it's about someone or something. And something you say may incriminate either yourself or someone else.

> On the other hand, in cases like this, it would seem rude and disproportionate to not even meet these fine fellows from the FBI.

This is foolish. They're not there to pop in and say hello. They're doing their job and cooperating with that work is not in your self interest.

> How often is law enforcement confronted with people that don't talk to them on general principle?

Rarely. Most people are scared and don't shut up. However, when they do, it's almost always a lawyer and that assumption will work in your favor.

> Does that really make you suspicious or is it quite common?

It doesn't make you suspicious. See the above. Don't be rude or curt. Be kind, they are human after all. Just explain that you are exercising your rights and wish them a good day.
We use this same technique in Firefox to center images when viewing them standalone, inspect http://www.elizabethtownfamily.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/0... to see for yourself :)
Caffeine has been found to have beneficial effects in fighting diseases like Alzheimer's:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20182037

...and for Parkinson's:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23879665
I'd love to know why just using tables is wrong.

The user gets what they want, the designer gets what they want, and the only people unhappy are some purists.

why? what about this is wrong?
n'th root of x = exp(log(x) / n)
Since the article is targeted at those wanting to get started with clojure, I recommend that newcomers avoid trying to learn a new editor and a new language at the same time.

There are clojure plugins for many popular editors these days. If you already have an editor/IDE you like, I'd recommend starting there and moving to something else in the future once you get used to it.
You can have multiple voting rounds, France does this.
Victims are different than targets.

(I'm not making a moral argument about drone strikes, but the fact that you bring up in no way refutes `rayiner's.)
Why the hell are people still stupid enough to talk to police without a lawyer present in this country?

Anything during that conversation could have been used against them in the future no matter how innocent it actually is. Or if they lied without meaning to, boom, you just lied to a law enforcement officer which is instant crime.

Guess what, no matter how friendly you are to them up front, they are still going to come and rip out all your equipment later and return it after years pass when it's all thrown out of court because nothing actually wrong was done.
Interestin categorizes your connections based on your interests and provides a clear distinction between private and public. This way you can browse both new and popular public posts and discover interesting content.
Web.de & GMX are truly some of the worst mail providers I have ever had to deal with. Web.de, I think, just recently upped the ante on provided mail storage to 1gb (up from very very little, I think it was 10mb or so, I don't remember, but my girlfriend used it like 2-3 years ago and I was shocked upon hearing that).

Their UI is awful. Gmail came out in 2005 (or so) and it took them 7 years to move to a more modern ajaxy interface that didn't like like coming from the 90s. And yet, they still have tons of awful advertising everywhere, in a way where Gmail feels like a blessing.

If you seriously want to move users onto the German soil, dear Telekom or German Government, please take some of the money that is being burned everyday on ideas like the above, and try to find a serious startup motivated to create a real Gmail competitor. Something that doesn't try to be what Gmail used to be 5 years ago, but something that tries to be what Gmail will be in 5 years. I hear Berlin is packed with people willing to startup every idea that can't run away fast enough or has been done in the US one year ago.

Now, I don't want to sound cynic, and I think it's great that there's some initiative for secure email and some understanding for privacy even at a level as high as telekom, but I'd be even better if they'd done something broader instead of teaming up with Germanies worst mail providers.
Peugeot 2008 Review
oops, meant taught instead of thought.
Can't comment at all on whether CMU has bad teaching and "gotcha" exams, but I can say it means rather a lot if a CS student graduates from it, MIT, UC Berkeley or Stanford. Any of those are significantly better than Harvard in this one field; I'm also quite uncertain if Harvard has any outstanding engineering departments. The latter has long been a sore point between Harvard and MIT, especially after Charles Eliot followed a stint of chemistry at MIT with reforming Harvard into the powerhouse it is today. Even caused a street riot in 1904 or 5 (seriously).
The wealthy would fight tooth and nail against this as it threatens their positions of power. If their needs are met, who would toil for them to earn meager amounts of money just so that they can eat and have a roof over their head? Capitalism depends on a class of people that only has one mean of survival: to under sell their labor and time to employers. Closing off of the commons and the privatization of public lands accomplished this a few centuries ago. Giving the common people a basic income rolls back the stronghold the capitalist has on society.

Check out Citigroup's leaked Plutonomy paper[1].
It's details, in disgustingly congratulatory terms, such a stronghold. It is also a literal dictionary definition of conspiracy to maintain a political, economical, and societal control of their financial position.

[1] http://mathbabe.org/2012/08/30/citigroups-plutonomy-memos/ - you will have to check some popular bittorrent sites to find the full paper.
What makes a federal marshal "screw-worthy"?

Any law enforcement you didn't call seems to all be pretty bad.
Wow. Actual .patch files. In 2013.

This is ridiculous.
Is there a PPA for Ubuntu users (et al.)?
Apple wins Samsung again
NSA is really two organizations in one. One side of the house is tasked with Information Assurance (IA), i.e., protecting the U.S. government's information. The other side of the house is tasked with interception. Cryptanalysis folks at NSA straddle both activities, necessarily.
I quit Coffee/Caffeine around twice a year for the amount of around 3 - 5 weeks for some sort of cleaning of the system. It is always awful, I get bad headaches, I feel tired, I can't concentrate, I basically loose 1-2 days of productivity. However, after that, I start slowly, only with one espresso per day, and then gradually move back up until I hit the 5 cups a day again, and that's when I quit cold turkey again.

I do agree that my body feels great when I'm not drinking coffee, however I like the taste of it so much, that I always have to fall back to it. Still going cold turkey twice a year feels good.
It's not hard to see that US, China and India are big players -> they bully others. If you are little and bullied -> you just have to care even if you don't want to.
Contribute to Lavabit's Legal Defense Fund
We can already see the Ladar knows how to use publicity. Every time he ends a communication, it's some unsupported, wild accusation that gets everyone talking. I feel like everyone is throwing away good scientific skepticism to jump on the anti-NSA bandwagon. There is a legal and logical reason for the NSA to have some secrets. Ladar should be more forthcoming however. He has yet to say anything substantial, imho. There is plenty he could be saying but the press loves this shit; they will do fine without actual content in their releases.

The thing is, no NSL is keeping Ladar Levison from telling us what he knows about email in general. NSLs are specific to the information being sequestered, everything else if fair game. Yet he says "if you knew what I knew." That's just immature posturing. Tell us what you know or say nothing. Waving around your supposed "big secret" in the press like some celeb for gossip? It's not what honest engineers do. Every time I hear a word from the mouth of this Ladar character, I trust him less.

This idea of "Using a force field of publicity" is completely illogical because all it does it serve to fuel wild speculations and distractions! Where are the FACTS?
I think you got downvoted because your comment didn't add value, but I suspect there is something behind it, so I'd be interested in learning more without reading that entire book.
I've noticed a large number of US TV shows (many of which involve the police) constantly feature people instantly and without hesitation assisting the police in their enquiries. I don't want to say it's brainwashing, but it's not far off.
A few things:

If you can't secure it by downloading over SSL, couldn't you add a hash verification to the installation steps?

Having homepage & issues listed as 'github.com' for most repos isn't very helpful-- maybe show more of the URL?

Thanks for all your hard work, Package Control is a joy to use!
Well, I was trying to reply to his refutation of "the use of drones to indiscriminately kill civilians", but I suppose if he was merely contesting the word "indiscriminately" he might have a point.

That is, if we believe the U.S. is making a good enough attempt to avoid civilian casualties in drone strikes, which is questionable.
On the same crowdfunding site as the Ubuntu Edge we have this
The video is more unbelievable than the text
They're managed (or can be) using Bram Moolenaar's own system, Aap: http://www.a-a-p.org/
> if a Federal Marshall wants to talk, you are screwed

What's the difference here? Marshalls aren't required to allow you to get a lawyer? They skip straight to waterboarding? Talk your ears literally off?
I'm no purist but I am in the mindset, "you wouldn't use a fork to eat soup".

I do agree though that it is a pain when something is easily achievable in tables but doesn't work in normal CSS. Vertical alignment being one of them.

What does annoy me is when you see people creating "CSS table" systems. I'm not being funny but that is just plain stupid. I saw a whole project dedicated to replicating the behaviour of a table.

I started developing when tables were fine to use for all layouts and I feel CSS was adopted as a layout too early without some very basic things being answered.
> Killing in military actions does not require a judicial determination of guilt.

To which I respond:

> We have not declared war on Yemen or Pakistan.

Which means that our military actions in Yemen or Pakistan are illegal. This is still ignoring other obvious questionable points about drone strikes, such as issues regarding proportionality.
If it solves your problem there is nothing wrong with it. However, tables are considered problematic because they encode the layout of the page in the HTML. Ideally, you would semantically structure your page using HTML and add style and layout using CSS. This way of working would allow for maximum flexibility - you can restyle your page without ever touching the HTML. If you use tables it becomes much more difficult because the table already adds a certain fixed layout.

Unfortunately the real world hardly ever works like this.
The future of mobile storage
What is performance loss/gain compared to Javascript solution of this problem?
"The kinds of commercial organizations that take in raw recruits generally turn out extremely mediocre J2EE and .NET developers"

Maybe the NSA is different but from my experience, the big contractors that do programming for government programs are exactly the same. Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc- they have lots of mediocre .NET and J2EE devs.

Those types of developers you can attract with money. But the truly bright and intelligent people just aren't interested.
Snoop Lion is selling a $100 Spliff you can't smoke
>And I bet most people who are concerned by tacking online and impressive demos like this are still using their real IP address online,

How would one use a 'fake' IP address and expect traffic to make it back to him/her?
He's not really an African-American in the strongest sense of this term, he doesn't have black American ancestors who lived through slavery, or even the civil rights movement.
The beginning of making Android apps without coding
Script to assemble last vim from source under Debian/Ubuntu: https://gist.github.com/liverlin/5274228
> I like the taste of it so much, that I always have to fall back to it

I find decaf actually helps with this. I like both the taste and the ritual of coffee, but don't like the jitters it gives me if I have more than one or two cups a day. So I typically switch to decaf after the first cup, and still enjoy the rest.

Unfortunately this was easier to do before I moved from California to Denmark. Here it's easier to find nonalcoholic beer (every supermarket carries it) than decaf coffee (fewer than half do), and it seems to be regarded with a degree of cultural suspicion.
We should be worried if you have a place called Homes for Hackers with 1Gb fiber and purchased uranium and DIDN'T get a visit or at least an inquiry from the FBI, right?

There are a TON of organizations and crazy individuals who are out to harm innocents and cause destruction, it's the FBI's job to prevent that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States

Edit: Wtf, so everyone here just prefers anarchy?
Placecreature - a creature agnostic image placeholder service
I wish Google would focus some effort on curtailing searches for "cracks, serial key, activation code" and other nonsense that is killing my software sales.
Tables are for tabular data--designing with HTML/CSS isn't perfect, but using tables for layout is an even less-elegant solution. It leads to a markup soup of nested tags and tables and difficult-to-maintain codebase. Good design and good markup go hand-in-hand and often you need to strike a balance between flashy visual design and solid underlying structure. This is also why visual designers should understand how their designs get implemented in HTML and CSS--it will create a restraint and limit the amount of "hacks" you have to do to make a design work.

Also remember that not everyone views the web in a browser. Having well structured markup helps those that use screen readers or alternate methods of browsing the web.
He did share the problem with us. The problem is that he's not allowed to say exactly why he had to shut down 10 years of work. That's not speculation---it's his account of the facts. Presumably we give him credibility because of the history of Lavabit. I know I do.
I'm extremely disappointed in him as well (without buying into the hope hype). We do have to take into consideration that the opposing party has declared that their number one priority was to limit him to a single term and had been entirely obstructionist.

Also, as President he is in theory limited in what he can actually do. Case in point: he promised to close Gitmo but is unable to do so because it requires Congress to make it happen and they are not cooperating.
I agree, I have no intention of giving out my e-mail without an example.
I came here to say that I wanted to try it but it prompted me to login when I clicked on one of the pre-made hacks, so I bailed.
Is it any good? It looks good, but stuff sometimes disappoint.